Is liberalism doomed?

[DrYouth]

I don't want to just roll back the clock. We'd still just end up in the same place. I want to undo the damage and forge a new path.

How do you propose undoing the damage?

[Speaker to Animals]

I don't want to just roll back the clock. We'd still just end up in the same place. I want to undo the damage and forge a new path.

How do you propose undoing the damage?

I don't really know at this point. We might just have to let the liberals destroy civilization again and start over.

What concerns me about a collapse now is the rise of technology and it's impact on a coming dark age.

[DrYouth]

We might just have to let the liberals destroy civilization again and start over.

That's an awfully passive solution...

Liberals might take a long time slowly strangling the life out of civilization.

[Speaker to Animals]

We might just have to let the liberals destroy civilization again and start over.

That's an awfully passive solution...

Liberals might take a long time slowly strangling the life out of civilization.

Doubtful.

I mean.. we could outlaw degeneracy and exterminate the shitlibs. That's what the Alt-Right would do. But do they have a good vision for what comes next? Probably not.

[DrYouth]

You equate liberalism with degeneracy...

Liberalism is an increasing allowance for individual differences in belief and expression, and the acceptance of pluralism in society.

It developed lockstep with the emergence of Protestantism... and probably was a compromise position after the wars of religion.

What alternative is there to "degeneracy" other than theological purism?
And how to police that?

This is where Bjorn finds parallels with your ideas and fundamentalist Islam - the idea of moral utopia...

[Speaker to Animals]

You equate liberalism with degeneracy...

Liberalism is an increasing allowance for individual differences in belief and expression, and the acceptance of pluralism in society.

It developed lockstep with the emergence of Protestantism... and probably was a compromise position after the wars of religion.

What alternative is there to "degeneracy" other than theological purism?
And how to police that?

This is where Bjorn finds parallels with your ideas and fundamentalist Islam - the idea of moral utopia...

No alternative to degeneracy. That literally is where liberalism comes from. When whites in particular mass into urban areas for some number of generations, the city creates selection pressures for specific traits. Those traits are what liberals try to codify in terms of "tolerance", and amiability, etc. But they actually are the loss of kin and group bonds. Liberalism,in part, is the loss of the genetic behaviors relating to social bonds.

Also, every civilization is characterized by the behavioral adaptations of the group of people who form it. Degeneracy in this more relative context implies behaviors that run contrary to the character of the civilization.

In western civilization, this cancer has risen several times as a result of urbanization. You will see the same kinds of behavior in the people caught up in the Roman Dionysian cult, which the Roman authorities correctly identified as a degenerate threat to Roman civilization, and exterminated the members forthwith.

As far as Bjorn's childlike musings, of course he compares me to Islam. He's a liberal who defends degeneracy. Any group that opposes degeneracy is the same to him. Liberalism is not really an ideology, but a manifestation of our tendency to want to abolish the moral foundation of civilization and topple it. He'd likely compare me to Nazis or even the Dalai Lama if he took the time to see what that guy is actually about.

The Muslims are wrong in thinking degeneracy is something you can just convince or coerce people out of. It's partly genetic. If you have many generations of urban dwellers in your family tree, you likely have those urban adaptations.

These values that liberals espouse, such as tolerance, are nothing of the sort as they claim. To the liberal, tolerance means you accept some immoral behavior. It's the opposite of actual tolerance. The underlying motive is the undermining of the foundation of society - moral, philosophical, cultural, and whatever else.

[BjornP]

I don't see how education solves the problem of social connection though...

Reassuring the populace that their communities will be sufficiently protected from intrusion and disruption while preserving individual liberties all in the face of economic volatility, technological change and "creative destruction" is not a task that can be achieved by education alone no matter how good that education is... and it's hard to argue that it has been anything but propaganda and weaksauce in most parts.

Well, the point about education was in response to this:

If we could roll back western liberalism... where to.... and what would be the cost/benefit trade off.

However, knowledge about your own society. How politics work, your country's history, how it developed, why some aspects of your country exist and why others don't. That's part of what creates a shared identity, as opposed by internalized (dunno if that's the right word, tbh), self-reflective identity. Lack of historical knowledge leads either to the romanticism and glorification of a non-existing history or glorification of a tiny segment of history taken out of context, or it leads to the myths of the "evil white man", a victim-offender perspective of history which is... again, taken out of context and everyone historical dismissed as persons to be ignored because they were part of the patriarchy/were white/ate meat/whatever. You can't put yourself and your... community/tribe/group, or even know who you feel a kinship (not neccesarily a biological kinship) with if you have no past, no shared memory, no shared values in common. Like a tree with no roots, or a book where the first quarter of the book has been cut away. How can you relate to the characters then?

But no, it's not education alonethat can solve that. No social change in history has ever been accomplished by any one given factor alone, after all. While propaganda is considered a dirty, bad word to most people, I don't consider propaganda bad word at all. Propaganda is good if it propagandizes the ideas I sympathize with and - of course - if it's effective, it's as simple as that. Commercials are propaganda, too. There are bad commercials and good commercials. Funny memes that make fun of say, Kathy Newman's Jordan Peterson interview is good, efficient propaganda against a dishonest interview technique. Propaganda is useful for broad distribution, but at the end of the day, you of course need people who are capable of holding their own against the more extreme aspects of liberalism, like progressives and libertarians.

But you also need, as you say, to understand those people. Have to understand why they believe as they do. If you can't convince them, you also can't expect to be able to convince those they try to convince. For example, progressives often use the fallacy of "appeal to novelty"* when they try and win an argument. Comes with their beliefs that certain things are examples of "progress", rather than simply change. And they often tend to treat family values, tradition, nation, tribe as "backwards" and out-dated ways - as the British woman in the program also alluded to.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_novelty

[DrYouth]

No alternative to degeneracy. That literally is where liberalism comes from. When whites in particular mass into urban areas for some number of generations, the city creates selection pressures for specific traits. Those traits are what liberals try to codify in terms of "tolerance", and amiability, etc. But they actually are the loss of kin and group bonds. Liberalism,in part, is the loss of the genetic behaviors relating to social bonds.

Also, every civilization is characterized by the behavioral adaptations of the group of people who form it. Degeneracy in this more relative context implies behaviors that run contrary to the character of the civilization.

In western civilization, this cancer has risen several times as a result of urbanization. You will see the same kinds of behavior in the people caught up in the Roman Dionysian cult, which the Roman authorities correctly identified as a degenerate threat to Roman civilization, and exterminated the members forthwith.

As far as Bjorn's childlike musings, of course he compares me to Islam. He's a liberal who defends degeneracy. Any group that opposes degeneracy is the same to him. Liberalism is not really an ideology, but a manifestation of our tendency to want to abolish the moral foundation of civilization and topple it. He'd likely compare me to Nazis or even the Dalai Lama if he took the time to see what that guy is actually about.

The Muslims are wrong in thinking degeneracy is something you can just convince or coerce people out of. It's partly genetic. If you have many generations of urban dwellers in your family tree, you likely have those urban adaptations.

These values that liberals espouse, such as tolerance, are nothing of the sort as they claim. To the liberal, tolerance means you accept some immoral behavior. It's the opposite of actual tolerance. The underlying motive is the undermining of the foundation of society - moral, philosophical, cultural, and whatever else.

The problem is that civilization on a greater scale than the tribe demands a loosening of social bonds of kin. This is Fukuyama's entire premise in the Origins of Political Order. You are quite right that this has tended to occur in areas with large concentrations of people... i.e. urban areas. I will defer genetic speculation here... because it is purely speculation and does not add to the discussion imo.

The dionysian cult is a perfect example of this. The dionysian cult was an example of political and social order being turned on its head. This has occurred over and over in rigid social hierarchies and appears to be a phenomenon of human nature allowing cooperation across social stratification that can be very threatening to political stability but often are incorporated into celebrations, dance, rituals and can have social stabilizing functions as well. (See Barbara Ehrenreich, "Dancing in the Streets")

As you probably know... there have been many parallels with Christianity and the cult of Dionysus... the theory being that these movements transcended rigid social structures and the tribal social order... and in the case of Christianity ultimately allowed a transcendent form of social organization beyond the tribal lines of the social order that came before.

From the perspective of the previous social order all of these reorganizations can be considered "degenerate"... but, of course, this depends on your moral view of the new development and is not an empirical evaluation, but a moral one.

If you consider the anti-authority meme that christianity (or dionysus) injected into the social order it is entirely plausible to see an "unravelling" in social order that has continued like a thread through the entire arc of western social history... with the rejection of emperor, pope, monarch, capitalist and ultimately all political authority to the extremes of "no leaders" libertarianism... so perhaps one could invoke a form of "degeneracy" to this extreme liberal movement.

[BjornP]

The check and balance for ideological excesses of all kinds, is ideally society. Not the State, not laws, but society/community. The notion that a free people will automaticaly throw away their traditions, their values, their faith, their way of life because they are free to choose, is a notion built from an insecurity about one's own society and one's own place in it. Not everything that is legal, is considered good behavior. It's legal to mock the poor and disabled, legal to laugh at children falling down and getting a bloody nose. You'd be a massive asshole and everyone would treat you as such, but your behavior would be legal. The freedom to be a dick, doesn't mean you can act like a dick without consequences.

[DrYouth]

The check and balance for ideological excesses of all kinds, is ideally society. Not the State, not laws, but society/community. The notion that a free people will automaticaly throw away their traditions, their values, their faith, their way of life because they are free to choose, is a notion built from an insecurity about one's own society and one's own place in it. Not everything that is legal, is considered good behavior. It's legal to mock the poor and disabled, legal to laugh at children falling down and getting a bloody nose. You'd be a massive asshole and everyone would treat you as such, but your behavior would be legal. The freedom to be a dick, doesn't mean you can act like a dick without consequences.

Well this is exactly what liberalism is up against.
The idea of courts upholding human rights cases against people "discriminating"... is what is angering large sections of society.
Employers feel they have a right to discriminate... and really why shouldn't they hire exactly who they want to hire.
Progressives want to push this ideological agenda and have somehow coloured liberalism with this brush.

I suppose the idea of not "serving" certain kinds of people is a tougher nut to crack.
I don't know too many who want to go back to apartheid...
I suppose this was the first version of "being an asshole" that was made illegal.