https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0e26LRcjqig
Hello, coming to you from on the road again. And I just wanted to go over a definition that maybe is helpful to you to understand what’s going on in the world. And so I want to propose a different definition for the term culture war. So that’s what I want to go into today, a better way of conceiving of this. And it’s going to be my definition, right? So if you like it, use it. If you don’t throw it away. I’ll never know either way. Or better yet, modify it for your own use. When people are talking about culture war, what are they talking about? What are they on about? And I think this is an important thing to think about because the term is everywhere. People are really ramping up on this idea of culture war. And then they’re trying to put it in a political frame, left versus right. Left has a culture and the right has a culture. And there’s a war between them. They’re fighting. And I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t think that’s accurate. I don’t think it’s useful. Political framing, again, I think, you know, political framing is bad framing, right? I’ve talked about that before. I don’t think it’s useful to think about the world in political terms and left and right. It’s a binary. I’ve got a video on binary thinking, right? So we should avoid that. And I think we can. In the case of culture war, what we’re really talking about is not one culture fighting another culture. What we’re really talking about is the concept of culture as such, whether or not we’re going to be unified, right? Or whether or not we’re not going to be unified. And I think that this is one of the big fights with diversity. You can be diversified or you can be unified. You can’t be both, right? You can be diversified or you can be equal. You can’t be both. It can be equal and diverse. That doesn’t make any sense. And so when they talk about culture war, they’re talking about the fight to have a culture versus not having a culture. They can tear everything down, right? We could tear everything down. institutions, all our ways of relating, all of our commonalities, we could do that. But I don’t think we should. And so the war is for the culture or for a shared culture or no shared culture. And that’s really, if you look at it, that’s what you’re seeing. And then the way that plays out is because in order to do stuff, you need to get along with other people, especially lots of other people, right? The more people you have, the more likely you are to be able to manifest something interesting and important in the world. So what ends up happening is they don’t just fight institutions. They don’t just deny that culture exists. The people who are against culture try to manifest something that looks a lot like culture, but is more like a cult. And so what that looks like is those things end up playing out what I call the religious patterns. I have a video on that, the patterns of religion. And I think that’s important to realize is that that’s what’s going to play out is as these things sort of emerge, they’re going to splinter, right? And more of these are going to emerge. Why? Because they don’t want to play nice at a global scale. They want to have what they want. And so we’ve got a bunch of individuals saying, well, I want this and I want that. But they don’t want the same thing because they’re individuals and, you know, different people have different priorities. And so there’s a fight for the attention of other people. But it’s not a fight for a different culture. It’s a fight against the existing culture that is tyrannical in some sense because you were born into it. You had no choice. And so I think it’s important to understand that what people are really fighting is submission to what we have, to what they were born into. Submission to the fact of their birth and that there were things here before they were born that constrain what they can and cannot do. Now we can make arguments over whether or not whether those constraints are good or bad, but they exist and you can’t just remove them because you don’t know what you’re removing. And that’s Chester’s defense problem, right? Roughly speaking. But again, I think the binaries are bad. So there’s ways in which the left and the right agree that there’s corruption. And sometimes they just disagree about what to do about it. The left thinks, oh, there’s corruption, therefore we must get rid of the whole system so that we can manifest our own system. But they don’t have a system. And that’s part of the problem with infinite diversity. And that’s not all the people on the left, but it’s probably most of them. And there are a few people on the right that are like that. Bring down the justice system because it’s failing. Fair enough. And maybe that’s the right answer for some things, right? But it’s not the right answer for everything. You have to do things carefully because you can’t just deconstruct them or blow them up or destroy them and expect good results because destruction begets more destruction. It does not beget more construction. Construction might be inevitable because we need to cooperate, right? It’s not like you can do without culture. Culture will emerge or at least some form of it will try to emerge. But you have to be careful what emerges. And you have to recognize that there are limitations. And you have to be able to operate within those limitations. And if you’re just denying limitations or denying the utility of limitations or casting arbitrary limitations on things, then you’re going to run into the problems that we see today. And so what does that really lead to? Like, sure, you know, what are the implications of this really? The implications are that if you wage a culture war, if you wage a war against the culture, where there’s one side trying to protect the culture, roughly speaking, right, and you’ve got one side that’s sort of trying to destroy everything that made up the culture, then you get chaos, right? Because you’re effectively, the culture is a structure. And so they’re trying to destroy structure. And when you destroy structure, right, you destroy the idea of order itself, or the ability to be ordered. And that’s chaos. That’s what chaos is. And so that’s very much what you’re seeing. And so when you’re looking at the world and you’re trying to project what’s going on, what’s really going on, right, that’s where you’re getting conspiracy theory territory, right? And of course, as with many things, like I have a video on conspiracy theories, I have a couple of them, but this is a good one to start with. So the other thing that can happen is that you can believe that it’s all hopeless, like there’s no, the structure is corrupt, and therefore there’s nothing we can do. And so we’re doomed, right? And that leads to nihilism. And you don’t want to go down that path either. And so this is what we’re battling. We’re battling for the utility of submission to something greater than yourself, just so that you can cooperate with other people. And that’s what you need to realize. That’s the best way to conceive of the culture war. So it’s not that there aren’t little wars going on between the little factions that will say aren’t part of the culture or want different types of changes in the culture. But they are all against culture as such. They’re all against the current order. They’re all against the current structures. And that’s where the real war is, because we need those structures to cooperate. We need those structures to get along. We need those structures to help us stay out of nihilism and to help us build something bigger than ourselves. And you can see the way in which you’re cooperating by watching my videos. And so you’re submitted, right, to my presentation. You’re submitted to my articulation, right? You’re submitting your time, energy, and attention to watching the videos. That is the thing that I value the most. And so thank you very much for watching.