The celebration of all things genderfluid and all varieties of sodomy tends to emanate from the American university system. Because professors tend to work feminism, queer theory, and gender theory into as many subjects as they can, genuflecting before these theories is a requirement for graduation. Failing to show sufficient respect to sodomites, cross-dressers, and self-mutilators is grounds for expulsion.
This selects for people who are at least able to demonstrate tolerance for these strange minorities. The people who can tolerate identity politics gain favored access to government work, corporate jobs, and other functions that reward them with money and social status. Through this process, believing in queer theory becomes high status, because its believers have status.
It’s impossible, then, to attempt to make those beliefs low status, because they are beliefs held by high status people. The way to change the status structure is to displace the people who hold those beliefs from their position of status.
Anything else confuses cause with effect. The cause of the belief being high status is the power and status held by the people who hold the belief. The belief is just a convenient cudgel to use against challengers. It’s not an entirely arbitrary cudgel, though, because it also causes major negative side-effects to the culture which elects to elevate it.
One of the reasons why we have seen such growth in the influence of these boring, convoluted, and disgusting academic theories is because of this selection effect. As universities have grown their enrollments and inflated their tuition fees, the value systems that they espouse have become more influential and resonant within corporate and state power structures.
Advertisers respond to this phenomenon — they are pursuing the affluent and powerful demographic. That same affluent, influential, and powerful demographic has been preselected to be at least tolerant if not fanatical about cultural Marxism. The creatives are not conspiring to teach the word of Adorno to an innocent population — they went to college, learned queer theory, and are trying to reach the affluent part of the population who have also been initiated into the high status culture of ugliness.
If they did not at least learn to conceal their disgust, they were probably not able to make it through university, and that puts substantial barriers in front of anyone seeking white collar employment.
Similarly, the TV script writers are not bringing plots of tween boys kissing to a population that believes it to be sinful. They’re bringing it to the relatively wealthy people who already believe that it’s a higher expression of love than problematic heterosexual romance.
Cultural conservatives tend to fight on the wrong terms, believing that superior arguments and tradition can win out over raw power.
Power determines which values can be enforced by violence and social sanction. It’s not the other way around. To change the value structure, you need to weaken the people and the institutions that they control.
The funny things is, cultural Marxists made their strategy completely explicit. March through the institutions, occupy positions of high status with believers. The right still doesn’t get it. Tradcons keep worshipping positions occupied by their enemies.
Not to mention funneling their their life savings and children over to their enemies. They’re special like that.
1. A number (presumably) competent rightists assume either a) the system simply has to collapse under its own psychopathy at some point, or b) there are structural flaws so deep and pervasive that the system simply has to collapse under the weight of reality.
2. This leads those rightists to seek exit from (or even non-entry into) the system, on a spectrum from full-Last-Redoubt-in-the-mountains mode to make-lots-of-money-keep-head-down-get-out-quick mode.
3. Do we therefore need to argue that collapse is not imminent to persuade rightists to enter & subvert system? CAN we argue that collapse is not imminent?
4. This of course sets aside the argument that secession/exit of rightists into red states will be the inevitable (or at least preferred) outcome, and assumes that a singular powerful Cathedral entity will continue to matter greatly for quite some time.
My best estimate is that “soft” collapse will lead to (4) and that the queers will not allow that, without a fight. People whose very identity depends on forcing others to “celebrate” their perversions will not consent to a Velvet Divorce without guns pointed at them, and probably not even then.
For many men, death will be preferable to seeing too deeply into their own soul.
More importantly with respect to #3, CAN rightists enter and subvert the system? It’s far from clear that they can: the credentialing watchdogs are too good. At the moment the most successful strategy seems to be to build alternate sources of power which are free from prog credentialing, and use those to displace the current power centers. We have some movement in that direction already, in the form of Silicon Valley generating wealth and the internet generating facts which don’t have to pass through the official channels.
They aren’t that good. They are good at catching honest people.
Perhaps I’m over-generalizing from my own experience, since I didn’t want to stay in academia any longer than I had to.
I still doubt that this is possible, though. The Cathedral holds together well precisely because it’s not a conspiracy, but an alignment of interests. I don’t think any rightist organization could infiltrate without achieving a similar alignment, which is difficult to say the least.
I generally agree. This is a point most conservatives have trouble getting, even when they’re economically focused. Incentives matter, and you’re not likely to convince people to act counter to their incentives.
Absolutely. Culture is imposed from the top. It’s not the other way around. The elite and powerful are not imposing their culture on the public because the public demands it, as we often hear. It’s not what people want. They will get the queer culture whether they want it or not.
Most people are passive consumers. They simply consume what is put before them, and very rarely grumble about it.
And most people make moral choices based on what is deemed acceptable by others. This includes what they hear in music or watch on TV and movies.
Conservatives just react. They don’t own any TV or movie studios and never did.
“To change the value structure, you need to weaken the people and the institutions that they control.”
Conservatives believe that what we have here is an argument, when what we have is a war, a low-intensity conflict right now, but escalating all the time.
Yes, post-sexual-revolution the conservatives, having successfully detected some quarrelsome nonconformists, have been patiently waiting for the debate to begin.
The smartest thing progressives ever did was to embark on war, without declaring it.
Surely what you are outlining, Henry, is the liberal adherence to that old Marxist doctrine of Antonio Gramsci, using cultural hegemony enforced by institutions to shift the entire culture.
It would seem to me however, morbidly, from a study of history that rightists are largely incapable of injecting themselves into positions of cultural power. Occasionally, a conservative can, but never a true rightist, never a reactionary. He bangs his head against the glass but he’ll never enter the light bulb. The only examples of rightists influencing such institutions of cultural power seems to be when the liberals are physically extricated from those positions by force.
Infiltration seems simple in places like Russia where liberalism is relatively weak, but right here in fortress America, sane people are permanently barred from holding positions of power.
Not so much in modernity, but we had a rightist culture in Europe for about 1,000 years. So, not impossible. Conservatives want to slow the decline. Reactionaries want to make leftism unutterable for another 1,000 years.
“Cultural conservatives tend to fight on the wrong terms, believing that superior arguments and tradition can win out over raw power.”
Considering how much people resort to “emotional” appeals to make rather startling conclusions and judgement, we might as well throw the rest of Aristotle out and join the herd.
Maybe you misunderstood the appeal. Arguments don’t defeat a power, but they can muster something else which can.
True, but it appears that the people who can be persuaded by actual logic are in the vast minority compared to those who can be influenced through emotional clickbait.
I noticed this with SJWs and radical feminists in particular. It doesn’t matter how logical your points are – emotion trumps everything.
Only takes the right few.