The Increasing Complexity of Everything is good for liberalism (government should be vital, large, demand and bestow much) and not conservatism (government should be smaller, less powerful, less demanding of the treasure and liberty of the citizenry). When everything is a big complicated morass, regular normal people, voters, constituents, become intellectually disheartened. They can also lose sight of core principles. A leftist who is Machiavellian in his impulses just might look at the lay of the land and think, Good, snow ‘em under, they’ll get confused. Keep hitting them with new issues and they’ll start to make mistakes. They may stop us on gun control, but while they’re busy fighting that we’ll get Congress to mandate limits on CEO pay.

One feels as a voter not argued into agreement or persuaded into support but complicated into submission.

It may not be much, but such glimmerings of an appreciation in the pages of the Wall Street Journal is something worthy of note, nonetheless.

Our culture is broken; we know it’s broken. We can feel it in our bones. We don’t know how to live. We search in vain for some indication of that knowledge. We always look outside ourselves for it, because we know that we don’t know how to live anymore

I don’t usually engage in the bandwidth-wasting practice of replying to a post with “wow, that’s really great,” but I’m driven to break that rule here. Jason, although we may differ on details, you express many of my beliefs–even those I’m not aware of yet–with great eloquence and grace, summed up well in the post I quoted. Liberal angst and conservative indignation are indeed, just nibbles at the edges of a much larger problem, and I’m grateful that you can respond to arguments from either side with such equanimity. At heart it is civilization that disconnects us from our primal selves, and we deserve something better.

At this point with so many serious issues on the horizon, many “issues” have little meaning to me anymore.

Living my life vigorously, spending more time with my loved ones, and working to simplify my lifestyle, learn new survival skills, and of course throwing a bit of hummor/imagination into the mix to ward off perseverating upon the “change” that will likely occur in my lifetime.

If you saw how I dress when not at work, you may want to send the fashion police after me…I buy stuff if it doesn’t fit right, I self-alter it with scissors to make it bigger, or just cut off the cuffs etc. to have it fit my arms. I’m practicing my seamstress skills, but I use my spyderco for most of the alterations.

And there’s nothing wrong with some good flannel. I likes me my flannels. But that’s probably just the Scot in me.

But you did use the word “flaming” in reference to Chuck, that is probably innapropriate.

Remember gays are one of the main destructive forces in civilization…according the Chuck.
They do tend to focus on wordly things such as fashion, and Home remodeling! Rather than wearing ancienct flannels like me, and decorating the home with pictures of barb wire & machine guns…

I wish people would realize its not one group, but the system itself that is inherently corrupt/unworkable for humans to have peace of mind & any real freedom.

Chuck, I can say this for your response: at least you haven’t eased away the knot in your stomach or just learned to ignore it and accept the way things are as inevitable. That puts you ahead of most of us. For those who still retain their basic intuition that something is wrong here, there’s a basic tactic to derail them and keep them powerless: send them off on tangents.

For liberals, there are tangents like feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, and so forth. For conservatives, the tangents are things like abortion, gay marriage, the “culture wars,” sexual promiscuity and so forth.* All heads on a hyrda. You can whack at them all you like; they are merely the symptoms of a more basic problem.

Though I now disagree with much he’s written, Daniel Quinn’s initial challenge in Ishmael still sticks with me. Our culture is broken; we know it’s broken. We can feel it in our bones. We don’t know how to live. We search in vain for some indication of that knowledge. We always look outside ourselves for it, because we know that we don’t know how to live anymore. We look to gods, and then are dismayed to find other who fail to appreciate the unblemished truth our gods gave to us. We fantasize about aliens that can come and teach us how to live. But what shock would there be, if we found out that there really are people who know how to live, right here on Earth? People who have been living, without our penchant for self-destruction, for a million years and more? That’s precisely what we have here. We intuit that something is wrong, that our culture is broken, precisely because on some level, we know that it wasn’t always like this.

I used to pursue the same tangents you’re on, Chuck. Then I looked up and realized that this isn’t the only culture on the planet–that there are cultures that have been living quite happily and healthily, the way the gods made them (if you believe in that sort of thing–I happen to), for millions of years.

You might find it distressing at first. For instance, they think nothing of aborton; hell, they embrace infanticide. They’re promiscuous, they allow gay marriage, their ideas of kinship and sexuality are often the polar opposites of the attitudes we were raised with. They’re not immediately allies of liberal dreams, either. Liberal or conservative, they’re just hacking at different hydra’s heads, preoccupied with tangents, and left utterly powerless in the face of that nebulous form that leaves that knot in their stomachs and leaves them with that still, small voice in their mind screaming, something is wrong! You might not like them, but I can say this for them: they’re not destroying the world, they’re not destroying themsleves, and they don’t complain about that knot like we do.

* The “moral decay” argument of collapse is one that Tainter doesn’t even dignify with an assessment in Collapse of Complex Societies. He discusses the origins of the idea, but since it’s essentially irrational, he never bothers to address it. Personally, I find it somewhat absurd: what could be more immoral than the origins of any civilization?

Ah! You just reminded me. This might be a good time to e-mail my lesbian minister and tell her about the ideas Jason and I have settled on for our pantheist wedding ceremony. But I think I’ll wait for him to come home to the apartment we’ve shared for almost two years before our legal wedding. Toodles!

Seems like you have a laundry list of things you don’t like. The good news for you, is all these perhipheral concerns won’t matter much in the future…Hollywood, abortion, political correctness, and all these other issues you mention are primarily aspects of civlizization, and in particular 1st world nations, alah the “entertainment culture”.

There is No winning the so called “culture war”, that has been amped up in the US in particular. But continues to play out across the globe, as it has in many forms throughout human history.

I suppose God will be Fixing things soon in your opinion?? If so no worries, may as well spend your final years lamenting civilization/US culture. You won’t find many fans of it here, even if many do not share your particular political views.

“Roe Vs. Wade deeply wounded our country” This is neither here nor there, Won’t God just judge us anyway…no need for christian’s to Fill in for the deity. Abortion being the Deep wound to the country seems irrational to me, at best maybe you can add it to the list of Deep wounds. The main one being that no Country that bases its economy on perpetual growth & runs itself on the back of finite resources can hope to survive forever.

You list many symptoms of civilization, but seem to want to blame it on particular groups, rather than realizing itself innately part of the system.

According the bible ‘the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one’, no truly holy nations left…Republicans have tried to promote America as the Christian nation, but no such thing exits in reality. For a nation that is 80% christian denomination—why is there so many of the ILLS that you mention?? Likely because most of those folks are active participants, and servants to the new RELIGION of ECONOMIC PROSPERITY/WORK vs. the simple life & family & friends over the collection of STUFF.