The Four Quadrants of Conformism

This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many improvements have no disadvantage. More efficient photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in pressurized spray cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron, ...

> But innovation isn't good per se.

This is a thing that is known to most people since the end of WWII, with it's genocides – in fact what you describe is a very modernist view of the world: societies are continuously progressing into the direction of the light, with technology making things better all the time. In this world view the arrow of time has a clear direction and it is forward, while the roles of the protagonists is equally clear cut.

Many people don't really get what the postmodernists wanted: they were sick of precisely that lie. In their eyes things are not always getting better and more rational while knowledge and wisdom increases. Things get forgotten and vanish, good things get replaced by cheap things, confusion happens, intelligent people make immoral decisions while dumb people become heros etc.

It is this "dirt of reality" where things aren't as clear cut as many thinkers like them to be. This is not a problem per se, unless they try to make the reality match their ideas instead of the other way around.

Agree. in this case he entirely misses that the aggressively conventional are serving a purpose that’s incredible important. This is classic stuff going back to the Tower of Babel, and theories about conservatives vs liberals functions in society (ie disruptives and preservationists).

After reading The Righteous Mind (best book of the decade, IMO) and generally gaining an appreciation for how blind we are to how good we have it (the aggressively independent types moreso, they are chronically unsatisfied and in a way pessimistic about progress, blind to the incredible luxury we live in now), I find myself really understanding the role and purpose of the conventionistas in society and I’m glad for them! They are the buffer between the woke mobs, they fight to keep the system from moving around too wildly. They are wrong of course (heresy is a good example), but so are the unsatisfied independents as well.

Not that these map perfectly. There are many conservative independents and vice versa, but your main thrust on pg generally:

1. Defining things so they create categories for people, usually framing it for some self-serving purpose

2. Putting himself in the good category and spending very little time thinking over why the “bad” one may not be so bad.

Really hits home.

Side note: I found his last essay on Orthodoxy Privilege to be a real stinker. That he felt the need to write about “privilege” of which he is gluttonous, and use it as a chance to redefine privilege to his ends, was an impressive level of dissonance.

As a passive independently minded, I can say that we also see natural fluctuation from epochs of independently minded reason to social conformity and back. These are good and necessarily healthy cycles because the independently minded, left unchecked, inevitably will achieve the freedom for certain individuals within that sector to explore avenues of thought and action that doom civilization and degrade reason and safety. The conservatively minded, left unchecked, will inevitably lead to total stagnation and the destruction of personal freedoms. It's a cycle, and the truly reasonable people, the truly intelligent, will see through it.

I see your fear, and I understand it is about the rise of radical social conformity, as I personally think was adequetly heralded by ted krazinski and george lincoln rockwell, two very independently minded, aggressive, and destructive individuals. It is scary to witness, and to experience leading into this wave, but understand all things come to an end.

Conservatism, Feminism, Neoliberalism and the Patriarchy are out. Political correctness and xenomania are on the way out and will be out of vogue within 10 years. The youngest generation to arrive on the world stage is repulsed ad nauseum with what they rightfully view as political posturing for virtual life achievement points by all sides of the now universally static social instrument, whose only purpose, inside and outside of the statehouse, is to carry out token activities that defend the ambitions of entrenched opponents; opponents whose true motives are inerrently selfserving, oblivious to the ground level truth, and dismissive of the long term consequences of their missions.

It is nearly the hour for the true star children to take their place. The first to arrive are even now approaching the zenith of power and influence, and the waves that have come since are growing in intensity. We are actively uninvested in the television and the mock battles being carried out behind it. Our life prospects and probability of reproduction have been seized from us, to serve the needs of those who profit from stasis. We are drones in a steady state, wealth maintaining, species killing industrial grade dystopia. It won't last much longer. The majority of the shifts that will come and precipitate our total revolution across all points of the spectrum that dismisses every single piece of the political machine enslaving us will take place within a decade. They wont be heralded by shifts in thought or reason, because it is the decline of systemic thinking itself which must necessarily decline for to coexist unincorporated as equals and as stakeholders in a commonwealth destiny.

This is not anarchy, in practice it could look like a lot of things. It could, ideally, wind up vaguely resembling some kind of mutualistic, agrarian society with vast quantities of independent small communities consisting of large, interconnected families subsiding on self-sustaining garden estates. These communities could be organized into democratic representational regions that are governed by a futuristic constitution which, to prevent the entrenchment of conventional systemic thinking, requires the government model to be decentralized and assembling on an as needed basis, with temporary, as opposed to permenant, and internally selected, as opposed to independently appointed, individuals nominated to national councils and bodies of state, for the purpose of making nationwide decisions.

There will be war, even in such an era, over resource conflicts. People will, out of necessity, die. Pray you are not among them. But do not pray for the bloodshed to come to an end. Conflict is a necessary part of growth, and growth is requisite for freedom, and freedom is requisite for independent inquiry. The boil must be allowed for the world to return to a peaceful and generously cool condition, otherwise, it will always be in a state of continual repression.

You probably don't know this word, but you're literally advocating for ochlocracy, which is the very thing I was talking about in the upstream comments.

The mob has an infinite well of issues, the mob will never be satisfied. That's exactly how it transitions into totalitarianism. Pandering to the mob just adds more fuel to the fire.

Police brutality etc. are issues that should certainly be addressed, and there's countless other societal issues that need to be looked at. But dealing with those and pandering to the mob are orthogonal issues. We have a democracy, the rule of law, and a government structure specifically to define a process for addressing such issues. These are the mechanisms that differentiate the western world from the soviet nightmare my parents escaped. It's so bizarre and terrifying to watch people openly advocating for discarding them and embracing mob rule. Americans have fought and died to uphold these values, and now a pocket of their own citizenry wants to demolish them.

> You have to tackle issues which cause them to be aggressive towards racists to begin with

Pretty heavily loaded language there. Anyone mob targets = racist? There's far too much evidence of the mob targeting non-racists to even pretend that this is what motivates them at this stage. 'Racist', or rather the newspeak co-opted 'Bigot', is now just the current incarnation of 'Communist', 'Kulak', 'Witch' and whatever other generic labels for the enemy of the mob. The mob never runs out of enemies, the mob never runs out of issues to get angry about. It's Lord of the Flies at a national scale.