Metanarratives As Content Complete

"why conservative christian capitalism and progressive atheist socialism? Why not conservative christian socialism or progressive atheist capitalism?"

Preface

I recently got some feedback from a fren that I should cut it out with the “that’s all for now” “I’m bored of this” “I can’t remember where I was going with this” endings to my writing (I do it even more in twitter threads) because it takes away from the reader’s ability to themselves ponder the questions I get stuck on. Leaving the conclusion open ended affords more opportunity to spark new interesting insights, while trying to close it off about my emotional state just makes it about me, which detracts from experience.

I agree with this. Looking back, I do this in an attempt to deflect criticism from nitpickers who seek to shame me for not having all the answers. Is this PTSD from years of arguing on the internet? I probably deserve it. I am very aggressive in my own head and I can come off very hostile in my writing when you can’t see my cheeky smile. Anyway, I effectively trying to say “I could come up with the answer if I tried, but I am tired/bored”. It’s probably true but it’s still a copout. There will always be more questions.

And my gift is not in coming up with answers anyway. My gift is in moving the ball forward just enough to ask new, insightful, and interesting questions and then immediately getting bored. This has always been really the only thing I’m good at. Which sucks because it means I never get to be one of those cool guys I read and admire who are sure about stuff and have all the answers. The high conviction guys with all the answers are the ones who get all the respect, money, and credibility while the low conviction guys who just endlessly ask questions either don’t exist or we never see them because they are losers so who cares. But I tried to fake being a high conviction answer guy for a long time and I hated it and sucked at it so I guess I’ll just have to authentically be a loser and you’ll just have to deal with it.

Speaking of unfinished ideas: I’ve wanted to write for a few days, but I haven’t had anything to write about. Or, more precisely, I haven’t had anything fleshed out enough to where I could actually make a compelling case worthy of a whole post that I think would make people feel impressed with me.

The truth is: I have plenty of things to write about. It’s just that none of it fits in a model that I think people would want to read. And to avoid criticism (seems like there’s a theme here) I only feel comfortable doing things that I’ve seen others do before. Because it allows me to see what it looks like from the outside which allows to preemptively figure out … how to avoid criticism... hmmm …

But as my good friend Egg Report says “the thing I wanted to say about writing advice is don’t try to say what you think people want to hear” and also “writing should feel humiliating at every step of the process.”

We aren’t actually friends. I just read his poasts and heart react them. and for internet autists that’s basically BFF status.

But he’s still right. Or at least might be. So let’s try something that I’ve never seen anyone do, which sounds fun, and will be at least marginally humiliating:

I’m just going to throw out a bunch of interesting idea’s I’ve thought of recently—but haven’t had the time/interest/care/intelligence/background knowledge to fully flesh out in to a really cool respectable and compelling poast that is critic-proof—and just extract as much juice from them as I can and then if I still have more cognitive energy, will grab another one and do the same.

(note: The first lemon of today had a lot more in it that I expected so we will squeeze another one later).

Conservative Christian Capitalism and Progressive Secular Socialism Are Complete Packages

This idea came to me yesterday while reading the Sovereign Individual—a book that is quickly becoming one of my favorite. I now understand why all the very smart and rich secret-or-not-so-secret reactionaries like Tim Ferris, Bajajis Srinivasan, and Peter Thiel constantly shill it. My idea is mostly just a merging of its chapter on the Medieval church and my probably favorite Yarvin idea: How Dawkins Got Pwned.

As Yarvin makes the case for in HDGP, Progressivism is just a new secular denomination of Protestantism. They hold basically all the same beliefs and values, they use all the same tactics, and mostly all that really happened is they deleted the God part. In the last few decades it has become the dominant sect because while the old sect had greater selective advantage in the nationalist capitalist epoch, the progressive sect clearly has a selective advantage in the globalist capitalist epoch. Jordan Peterson, who likely has never read Yarvin, also makes this case from another angle in one of his debates with Sam Harris about how all the atheists keep all the Christian values and delete God without realizing that all the values have no basis without God (Sorry, can’t remember which one, but you should watch all three anyway).

I don’t really know anything about religious denominations. I went to a gay non denominational mega church until I was 14 and then stopped going then became a turbo anti-theist at 20 and only started to understand why this was wrong in my mid-twenties due to JBP lectures mostly. So defer to Yarvin for more details. However I do understand that all ideas (memes) are subject to natural selection in the same way that genes are, and that religion, like every Lindy belief set (cultural, religious, ideological, or otherwise), is simply a mind virus that increased the selective fitness of the humans or tribes who believed in it, which is why it persists. And the shift from “Christianity” to “Progressivism” is not a loss of religiosity but simply the inevitable evolution to a new sect that only looks like a difference in kind because we are all stupid.   

To expand on Yarvin’s take:

It’s not just new religion vs old religion. Religion and ideology and even culture are all subcomponents of one thing which is a person’s or group’s meta narrative which is basically just the cognitive framework or mental model that guide their psychology (morals, values, behavior, etc).

(I have watched every JBP video on Youtube so not really sure what a good primer on this would be but probably just read Maps of Meaning if you’re a book fag. Wait But Why’s The Story of Us is also good.)

Religion is just the spiritual component of this meta narrative. Ideology is the materialistic component. Culture is the social component. Or something like that.

Secular meta narratives simply delete this spiritual component while attempting to fill the gap with the other two legs of the table. Ironically, progressivism, social justice, critical race theory, etc are all the inevitable consequence of and the logical conclusion to Enlightenment rationalism. Nazi Germany and Communist Russia and even just both world wars in general were the ultimate manifestations of the Enlightenment/Modernist worldview, which is why Post Modernism came to be (“Hey we were really sure about everything and then we killed everyone oops maybe we were wrong.” Also post modernism is actually cool and most of the right, particularly the IDW, conflates the new modernist views of SJW’s with post modernism which is dumb and gay.).

Enlightenment rationalism didn’t lead to rationality it just led to hubris and certainty and the deletion of any implicit knowledge structures that couldn’t easily and immediately be reasoned for (implicit knowledge is knowledge that evolved unconsciously simply by being iterated on for millenia and the “correct” beliefs were simply the ones that survived the test of time, even though none of them were “rationally” or “scientifically” derived ie religion, culture, etc). We stopped eating fruits and vegetables and started eating synthetic canned preservatives because they were “scientific” and “modern” and it took us decades to figure out that that was not a good idea (this actually literally happened with food but is also a good analogy for what happened with modernity in general).

Religion is the protein. Ideology is the fiber/vegetables. Social norms/culture is the fat. You can be a metanarrative vegan (ie believe in a materialistic “ideology” like communism or progressivism instead of a  spiritual “religion” like Christianity or Islam), and you will be nutrient deficient (existential emptiness of modern globohomo progressive world) and probably go crazy and maybe commit (very legal and very cool) genocides in the end. But, in the short term, your vegan diet will just seem like it has all the benefits of the old normie diet without all the bad evil bits of being big fat meany’s to nice mumu’s.   

Taking this less abstract: Conservative Christian capitalism and Progressive secular socialism are complete packages, they are each their own “religion” (or, to use my terminology, as religion is only one leg of the table, “complete metanarrative packages”).

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the “red team” is overwhelmingly Christian (~80%) while the “blue team” is overwhelmingly secular (almost 3x as many "religiously unaffiliated” identify as democrats vs Republicans). And while ~50% of the blue team grug normies still report being Christian, none of their leaders reference anything Christian (I cannot recall the last time I heard a democratic politican say the word God), and they house over 70% of atheists ( only 1% of atheists identify as republican while the remaining 29% identify as “independent” aka grey tribe).

Some other interest factoids: Only 17% of democrats are protestant compared to 48% of Republicans and Atheists are the most politically active group in the US (who could have guessed this?).

I mean really, do you know any very Christian SJWs? I’m not talking white boomer lady who occasionally goes to church and also supports “marginalized peoples” I’m talking someone who is devoted to both. I’m sure they exist but I’ve never met one and they are certainly a rarity.

Do you know any atheist, degenerate capitalists or nationalists? To this I actually answer yes as many of our little club of weird post-libertarian reactionaries is made of them. But we are more grey tribe and we certainly aren’t capitalist or nationalist in the same way that boomer normie cons are. Our capitalism is generally transitory and debatable, and anyone who spends more than a few years in the “edgey libertarian capitalist atheist phase” without evolving into some kind of reactionary is probably a fuckin’ retard anyway so who cares.

So What is it about being a progressive that makes you an atheist? Or is it the being an atheist that makes you progressive? And what is it about being Christian that makes you a capitalist? Or is it the being a capitalist that makes you a Christian?

Why is no one asking this question?

I think I know the answer but I probably couldn’t articulate it yet and I certainly don’t care to try at the moment (The TLDR is that garlic goes very good with Pasta and very poorly with ice cream; its about how they complement eachother to make a complete meta narrative “dish”).

But it is obviously the case that there is something about these components that fit well together when combined in certain ways, and not so well when combined in other ways.

M41 (Yarvin’s term for the previous dominant metanarrative of Conservative Christian Captialism) is a whole package, as is M42 (Yarvin’s term for the current dominant metanarrative of Progressive Secular Socialism).

Sure, there are lots of little experiments where they try swapping the linguini with some rigatoni, or Chicken with beef, but ultimately the dish that becomes a staple like Spaghetti and Meatballs or Mac and Cheese or Fettuccini Alfredo  is collapsed upon, and becomes dominant and defaulted to (Sure, pasta doesn’t have network effects but this fact should probably be considered a war crime anyway so kick rocks nerd).

Of course, to really stretch this analogy, technology (metaphorically) changes our tastebuds and it also changes what can be produced and at what cost. With the invention of globalism, mass communication, birth control, and all the other insane crazy shit that happened in the 20th century that broke everything old, the selective advantage of one of the weirdo experiments (progressivism) got massively boosted. And now that weirdo crazy weirdo experiment has not only matched the former dominant metanarrative, but has surpassed in and become the new king. This is literally how all new meta narratives form, and it’s even the same type of people who do the experimenting—40 felt the same way about M41 as M41 feels about M42, I can assure you.

So what does this mean? well for one, it certainly means that fighting progressivism directly is fighting evolution. It is fighting selective advantage. And thus it is a complete waste of time. You cant fight evolution by whining on the internet. You can’t fight evolution unless you’re going to kill off all the memes and genes that are outperforming your memes and genes. and even if you could do this outside of Minecraft, all you’d end up doing is selecting for something else far worse (((perhaps leading too a small, rootless tribe of high IQ, cunning, charismatic, international peoples who are experts in subversion?))).

That was mostly a joke but actually kinda ironically valid: The degree to which Jews fit the antisemitic stereotype only increases as antisemtisim increases, because all the “evil jew traits” are highly selected for in a population when that population is being persecuted. So if you are mad that “evil jews” run everything and are mean guys, you can actually thank generations of the persecution of semites for making them that way. Also theoretically if whites get persecuted in the way that the White Genocide folks believe will happen, these traits will similarly be selected for in whites which you gotta admit is would be doubly ironic and funny.

Anyway, if you think M42 (progressivism) is bad and evil:

1. You’re probably wrong and just mad you’re a loser in M42 and imagine you’d be a winner in M41 (you wouldn’t have been. Success still selects for all the same traits as it did in M41 and you are just a romantic caught up golden age thinking trying to avoid how much your life sucks)

2. You’re so conditioned into M41 (Conservative Christian Modernism) that you think M41 is objectively correct (its arguably slightly more correct but it certainly isn’t the truth), rather than understanding that worldviews are just thought viruses and humans will evolve to believe whatever is effective.

3. It doesn’t really matter because you’re fucking losing so cry moar.

For real though: If you think Progressivism is bad (and it certainly is, but is it worse than M41? Debatable) the only way to “defeat” it is by changing the environment in which it grows so that it no longer has selective advantage. If you think we are going to revive Hitler or Cheeto Hitler (I voted for Trump, relax) and he is going to re-educate all the libs, you’re dumber than you look.

If you want to win, you have to re-engineer the environment so that it selects for pro-social and virtuous behavior (whatever that means to you). If you think this sounds hard to the point of being near impossible, you’re right.

But everything else is just a gay ass LARP pretending to be a solution anyway. And you wouldn’t want to be just like the libs who only care about fake solutions that make them feel like they matter, do you anon?