The shame machine has created a disequillibrium, and personally I won't miss it when societies correct. More gravely, I think there is a coming generation of young men who will also wake up one day and say, "I don't need your redemption, it has no value." And like that, they will no longer avoid or deny shame, or be governed by it because redemption is a hustle, the carrot to shame's stick.
When they see that they have been raised and kept in an extended nursery of deceptions produced by subtly fabricated narratives, designed to subjugate their identities and replace the cognitive tools they have for experiencing and understanding themselves with constructions of a simulation, they will also likely discover the power of force. Iterating down that timeline gets really grim, really fast.
We've accumulated a reality-debt, suspended by academia and tech, leaking into appendent institutions like media and government, and the most interesting problem now is how ot unwind it without triggering a chain reaction, imo.
> they will also likely discover the power of force
That is one possibility. Another is wu wei, passive denial of benefits, malicious compliance, lying flat.
The householder role stops working? Practice renunciation and take the monastic path instead. People will be upset that you have made yourself useless to them, but you're completely within your rights.
(This is not really spiritually good, since it comes from a place of contempt, of course. But it's where, "fine, fuckit" gets you.)
Multiplied across a whole society, however, this does of course lead to sagging GDP and reduced living standards.
It's a little like the West's approach to Russia or Iran. Force is off the table? Ok: "You will no longer receive any gains from trade. We'll see who can last longer."
This is roughly where heterosexuality was in 2020, I fear sometimes. But, with everyone finally emerging from their houses now, I think they may appreciate other people more now. We'll see if it lasts.
Thanks. To zeroeth order I understand it as "the power of inaction", but clearly the connotations are supposed to be much more positive than in my earlier usage.
Whether what I'm describing is nihilism I'm not sure, but it might be. ("No True Nihilist"?)
Certainly what it is is passive.
It seems easy for renunciation to go bad, to become a degenerate, contemptuous, and self-indulgent thing.
Maybe the idea from Hinduism (as I understand it, and translate coarsely) is better: Always put yourself out there, and do care about your execution, but don't be attached to the results. That might be a better way to avoid suffering without encouraging depressive (passive, inactive) behaviors?
The conservative would struggle with: How does one "go with the flow", if the flow goes over the falls? How does one go with the flow and with Nature, if, in the short term (where we have to live), the flow seems to be against Nature?
And how do you deal with all the nasty game-theoretics of it while keeping your decency? Do you really just keep turning the other cheek, or do you need some proportionate response strategy from Repeated Games?
I'm really not sure.
I think part of the answer has to be wanting less, materially. Maybe that's a thing that a couple can do, together, because they get something more valuable in return, e.g. a family.
But I'm just thinking aloud.
I think this is why I like Ecclesiastes so much. "You're not alone: This guy in the Bronze Age had the same struggle, and wrote it all down, honestly." (He didn't reach all the conclusions that the Buddhists did, of course.)
> I think there is a coming generation of young men who will also wake up one day and say, "I don't need your redemption, it has no value." And like that, they will no longer avoid or deny shame
This "coming generation" you refer towards is already present and is otherwise known as "the status quo of maleness for basically all of recorded human history".
Indeed. It's very easy to get young men to do stupid and dangerous things to avoid the threat of shame, especially if that shame is related to being "unmanly".
When they see that they have been raised and kept in an extended nursery of deceptions produced by subtly fabricated narratives, designed to subjugate their identities and replace the cognitive tools they have for experiencing and understanding themselves with constructions of a simulation, they will also likely discover the power of force. Iterating down that timeline gets really grim, really fast.
We've accumulated a reality-debt, suspended by academia and tech, leaking into appendent institutions like media and government, and the most interesting problem now is how ot unwind it without triggering a chain reaction, imo.