A video blog post reminded me of this subject; I'll get to the details of that starting point. An example related to Trump also raises the same broad themes. To be up front about that I don't see the Trump Presidency as a positive thing, and it's worrisome to me that 40% of the people in the US do.
I don't think the US necessarily is experiencing cultural and moral decay. It's interesting to consider to what extent that might be the case, and the specific example offered in that video as evidence. I'm much more concerned about the economic health of the US, even in the very short term. I expect a severe economic down-turn related to the next recession cycle. But that's not the point here, really, even though I do get back to saying more about that. I'll cover what I mean towards the end, since it's relevant, if perhaps a bit less connected.
It works to use the two examples as a starting point and intro.
Two examples of cultural decay
The first relates to Roosh V, a minor cultural figure best known for starting an online forum related to hook-up culture, and for writing books on the subject. That's exactly what you would expect, advice and discussion about how to have sex with women you don't know. We have Tinder for that now, but he was exploring methodologies before that became what it currently is. Of course that activity isn't regarded positively by many, and there are misogyny oriented aspects to what he said and what gets discussed. He has since "found religion," and is touring the US giving talks about whatever it is he thinks is appropriate to share, spiritual guidance, or cultural commentary.
What I mean by "hook-up culture," and why that portrayal seems negative may not be clear. Roosh himself devised a system, described as a game (or "the Game," really), as a developed set of approaches and practices designed to lead to success in having sex with random women.
This video covers the point I'll discuss further. That point: the US is experiencing cultural decay, with ultra-left liberal perspectives the main sign of that shift, which takes the form of economic decay as well (eg. the homeless issue). It seems best to unpack all that further after introducing the other starting point.
Trump just removed troops from one part of Syria, enabling Turkey and Russia to invade that area and drive away or kill off a lot of the former Kurdish US allies that helped defeat ISIS there (a radical terrorist Islamic movement). In this most recent comment on the move, which was criticized by both liberals and conservatives (which is rare for any position Trump takes up), he likened what is probably better categorized as genocide as a playground fight:
"Like two kids in a lot, you have got to let them fight and then you pull them apart," he told a rally in Texas...
...The Turkish leader's aim is to push Kurdish fighters - regarded by Turkey as terrorists - away from northernmost Syria and create a "safe zone" for resettling up to two million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.
Between 160,000 and 300,000 people were reported to have fled their homes since the fighting started, and there were fears that the Turkish operation may lead to the ethnic cleansing of the local Kurdish population...
In this related story and quote Trump says that the Kurds have a lot of sand to play with.
It's beside the point why Trump did what he did, or any of that background. My take on this, and how it relates here, is that at this point the US government is behaving erratically, "turning on" recent allies, and randomly applying trade sanctions, and shifting internal policies. A lot of it can be fairly assessed as highly unethical behavior: rejecting climate change, rolling back environmental protections, adjusting taxation to favor the wealthy, restricting prior health care support for the poor (which wasn't completely successful), confining potential immigrants in internment camps that are not really different than concentration camps, and so on.
The ideas will connect, but the linkage could be tighter. Let's start with exploring the first point in more detail.
Roosh V's observations
The context matters: Roosh V is touring the US on a very small-scale speaking event tour. He's admittedly burned out by that endeavor, which is probably coloring his observations to be more negative. He best introduces himself on his website:
...Six years into my career, and a little over two years after I started DC Bachelor, I quit my job and finished my first book called Bang, a textbook for picking up girls and getting laid. Afterwards I spent six rough months in South America, which I detailed in my second book called A Dead Bat In Paraguay...
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| credit Youtube channel image |
And it continued from there. The rest of that bio starts in on how that practice evolved to include a personal philosophy:
6. Elimination of traditional sex roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation.
7. Socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism aim to destroy the family unit, decrease the fertility rate, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements.
I'm not really sympathetic to any of those concerns or that perspective, to be clear. It's interesting to see what I can make of points that I don't agree with, in this case, to break down observations and see which seem accurate, and to work back to a better understanding of root causes than he seems to have arrived at.
Roosh himself abandoned a core part of his own lifestyle in "finding religion," but has retained some of the aspects of his earlier perspective. It's an odd starting point. This is his statement of what he is now trying to share with others:
I’m conducting private events in 23 American cities during the second half of 2019 where I will share stories that have revealed the truth to me up to turning 40 years of age.
I hope that my stories, which concern masculinity, relationships, work, human nature, grief, and spirituality, will allow you to find wisdom, contentment, and peacefulness during these difficult days of clown world.
The most obvious initial take is: how did it come to this, that people are looking for life advice from a guy who wrote books on how to have sex with strangers? Wouldn't that be like someone drawing on experience as a career criminal or long term drug addict to give out guidance for living? People with such background might explain why one particular approach turned out to not be positive, but those experiences alone wouldn't be good grounds for teaching others to do better.
That whole "incel" movement is interesting to me, that people can gather together around something as strange as shared lack of success in relationships with the opposite sex. There must be quite a bit of overlap with that theme and this context. Is society broken because a subset of its members are failing in certain ways though? There have always been poor people and disenfranchised in the US, in any society. It's beyond the scope of writing out some thoughts here to try and figure out if that sort of problem is getting worse. It seems to be, but impressions don't always match reality, even commonly held ones.
His most specific point in the last video, mentioned earlier, was that in places where liberal values take hold (like California, or Austin, Texas), where technology industries thrive, homelessness, poverty, and decay of values also occurs. He didn't explain the connection. As he crossed the Southwest (I just ran across a video based on an online mention--I don't follow this guy online) he also pointed out how other places had darker aspects, so that's the main shared theme, that different places have bad sides. I think most of the smaller areas would've been quite conservative, and that seemed to resonate better with him; he sees himself as a modern anti-liberal.
That brings up another odd broad trend in modern US culture: people defining themselves as what they're not, what they're the opposite of, instead of what they are, or in terms of views and perspective of their own. I don't think he sees himself as any sort of conservative either. What is he telling people then, what core message does he convey? That society is breaking, in the ways he describes, or so it seems. Since he has now taken up religion (an orthodox Christian form of one) it's implied that he now sees some resolution as possible through personal reform.
How could he even have an audience, recommending unrestrained sex tourism, and then traditional religion, after an abrupt shift? That's an interesting part. Apparently the two things are a lot more continuous than they might first seem. He didn't lose his earlier audience, although some of them must have been turned off by the shift.
I don't think it's really possible to completely untangle the moral, cultural, and economic threads, which he skips past even trying to do. His evidence that society is breaking down is most evident through homelessness, for example, which can't easily be connected to liberal perspective. Conventional morality is an odd ground for him to take any stand on, but then the framing here seems to be that he has returned as a saint-like figure reborn out of the experience of vice. Embracing immoral behavior is set up as his own personal path to finding a truer calling. Who knows; maybe that works. Maybe a career criminals or long-term drug addicts are good people to offer opinions on morality.
On the whole it seems not to work, really. He sounds wistful and deep for speaking slowly and making interestingly framed points that don't necessarily connect. He is at least partly broken, for sure, which he himself openly admits, but interpreting society as broken could as easily stem from that as from any unusual insight.
I think considering the ideas he is proposing is of considerable value, and his observations aren't flawed enough to not serve well as a very promising starting point. It just seems best to try to isolate aspects in observations from his interpretations, to take a broad view of all of it, and initially set aside defining what it all means.
This seems a good place to switch over to the other example.
Trump abandons Syrian Kurds to Turkish and Russian conquest
Why did Trump do this? This article explore why, but can't really conclude any one reason. This quote covers the general theme, it was in his nature to do so:
The Kurds were a mere afterthought to Donald Trump. Turkey’s Erdoğan is the type of authoritarian leader who can easily manipulate the president. Erdoğan wanted something done, and Trump was willing to do it.
A year ago, President Trump was praising the Kurds as “great” allies, vowing to protect them. “They fought with us. They died with us,” Trump said. “We have not forgotten.” But just a few days ago, he dismissed the Kurds this way: “They didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”
President Trump doesn’t interpret his abandonment of America’s faithful and intrepid Kurdish ally as betrayal because he can’t even understand why betrayal is a vice. It’s like trying to explain color to a person born with no eyesight...
It turns out after closer review that the Kurds did take part in World War 2 supporting the allies, and Turkey didn't, the exact opposite of what Trump said, but that's not the point. That article does summarize the point:
“We should expect our current president to betray anyone or any principle or any norm or any ally whenever he has the impulse to do so,” a friend of mine who is a psychologist told me via email.
Trump is impulsive, and what he does next isn't well thought-out. If a decision relates to promoting his own business interests or the long-term national interest of the US he would probably fail to even notice the latter. Fast-takes and knee-jerk reactions are like that; biases carry weight but analysis doesn't.
It doesn't seem like these ideas connect beyond the broad strokes, does it, a reformed hook-up advocate saying the US is morally bankrupt, and a US President exemplifying that? The finer details don't match, the specific contexts. Roosh sees problems within the normal experience of gender relations, and patterns of self-definition, along the lines of rejecting extreme forms of feminism. Trump serves himself more than the US. They are not similar things. But the ideas do connect.
Somehow the very fabric of reality in the US seems to not be a shared experience now. Maybe it never was, and there being a white, relatively conservative, middle class largest group maintained the illusion of that. Now that's somewhat lost, to the extent it ever did even occur. It seems like integrating the full range of other perspectives and experience may be an underlying problem.
That doesn't explain Trump's continued support from his base; nothing does. It seems like he has tapped into the insecurity over this underlying issue, and regardless of what he does he still represents an ability to hold onto how things had been in the past to his supporters. Nothing he does related to foreigners (like Kurdish allies), or foreign trade partners, or to immigrants can change that. Slighting or limiting the rights of relatively large groups like homosexuals also doesn't matter, except maybe to members of that group.
This is where things get unusual. Trump can even target women's issues, in whatever fashion he wants to, and in spite of that negatively affecting half the citizens of the US it wouldn't necessarily conflict with those "traditional value" themes, no matter what he did, or what position he supported. He would have to find a way to advocate rights of minorities (immigrants, minority "races," sexual preference groups, etc.) over those of white, straight, middle class Americans to oppose his base. Even supporting Russian and Turkish interests over those of the US could simply be reframed.
An odd twist: giving the wealthiest Americans a tax cut wasn't regarded as a problem by his lower and middle class supporters. No matter what actions Trump takes, since the assumed conclusion is that he is working for the greater good of his base, "average Americans," there doesn't really even need to be a plausible connection to why any one step isn't doing that. The opposite needs to happen instead, for a clear opposition of these goals to be a problem. Since so few things are clear in modern political and cultural society Trump is always in the clear. Maybe until the next recession happens, but then there is no common understanding of the business cycle, and repeating patterns of those, so with a bit of shifting around of blame maybe even that wouldn't be a problem.
In the end nothing Trump could do can change his supporters' impression of him. Being removed from office for multiple clear violations of US law might not even serve as an exception. It's funny how all that works out. This has nothing to do with current societal trends and everything to do with how biases are carried forward, as I see it. It's an "us and them" issue, related only to people supporting their own team. Those people should probably be a bit more broad-viewed and open-minded, but I'm not certain that's any different than how people have always been.
How I see cultural transition
This is complicated, but it seems helpful to go there. I can't completely make sense of the current ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative themes, but anyone can guess about those.
It's a time of extreme perspectives; it seems normal for that to happen. Maybe on a broad cycle, or maybe not, perhaps only related to causes and conditions repeating in complex ways. That obviously happened in the late 60's through the 70's, and then dissipated through the 90's and beyond. At a guess the perspective shift is occurring because a real change in how people define themselves is underway in the US.
It seems to help to look at what changed in the US in that earlier 60's-70's time period. I've ran across a good set of video references for that, talks on the subject by subject experts and others, in this Youtube documentary channel, that of David Hoffman, a documentary producer. Parts of the values and self-image of people did shift in that time, but the extreme forms of perspective and lifestyle changes went way beyond what "stuck" in the end. Something similar will probably happen, or rather is probably happening now. Parts of what is now considered ultra-liberal perspective will be retained as ordinary, shared perspective, and most of the rest will be all but completely discarded. As to which parts are which who knows.
It could be that only the exact same themes experienced in that earlier time period will be extended slightly further. That would seem a little anti-climactic, but not unlikely. Women and minority rights, integration of these "groups" as more fully equal members of society, could be extended. Electing a black (half-black) President and then a racist one, more or less as a response, would fit with all that, as natural later steps.
One read is that most of the cultural extremes we experience now are mostly noise, as commune living was in the 60s and 70s. Maybe "overshoot" describes that better; trends and perspective extends further than is practical, only later to be retracted to where that will eventually reset.
Of course there is no narrow, well-defined, prior set of cultural values to get back to, the dream on the conservative side. And the extremes on the liberal side are also illusions, the idea that people in the US might be given free health care by society at large, or even a universal basic income, that needing to work to support yourself might drop out as a requirement. Complete self-definition is also impractical, the idea that someone could pick their own new, previously unheard of version of a gender, and then change that as frequently as they change clothing styles, or even outfits. In the end maybe only greater equality of everyone will emerge as a practical, normal outcome.
What would be decaying, if anything really is? My guess: the economic base.
Gloom and doom for the US economy
For context, I'm from "the Rust Belt," from the Industrial Northeast and Mid-West that experienced a relatively complete economic collapse over the last 40 years or so. It's easy for me to accept that the sky is falling, on the broader economic scale. But maybe it is, and maybe it's not. I'm an industrial engineer; I can say for sure that not much manufacturing is going on in the US, or will ever be again.
My concerns about the US economy doesn't even relate to all that. I think factors like ignoring the US National Debt sets up conditions that could lead to the eventual collapse of the US economy. It's my opinion that the US government essentially supporting the broadening unequal distribution of wealth in the US is also potentially problematic. It's hard to say why that's a problem, unless you are living out being at the bottom of the economic scale, the lowest 1/4th versus the highest 1 %. Then it's easy to say why it is: because your life sucks, and it's no small feat to change that.
Maybe I worry too much. England experienced a relatively complete economic contraction when they lost their Empire back around the WW 2 time-frame, and they didn't completely fail as a country.
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| By Firebrace - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php |
Officially the UK economy didn't even really contract; that's a pattern of continued expansion, with downturns in four places since the huge shift as a result of that major war. Then again I'm not sure to what extent that accurately accounts for inflation.
A negative pattern of growth rate, like this, would probably feel a bit like decline, but in a real sense it's not. Let's take a quick scan of how something like that might be playing out in the US:
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| https://seekingalpha.com/article/4193310-june-2018-median-household-income |
This probably shows as clearly as any graph image why a lot of Americans feel that things aren't necessarily improving, or staying as positive as they had been. Graph after graph would seem to all tell different stories, but the mid-point family income just took a number of years to climb to around where it had been at the turn of the century 20 years ago, which was no improvement over that 20 years prior, and the next periodic recession down-turn will surely erase any gains. Staying even isn't so bad, but surely not everyone is doing that well.
These seem like different subjects, don't they, economic issues and then moral and cultural concerns? Am I not just repeating what I said didn't work in Roosh's observations here? Maybe.
It seems like economic potential and improvement bring health to a society, and decline brings malaise, so they can't be completely uncoupled, even though they are essentially different subjects.
My home area is a good example of the results of long-term down-turn. I'm from near enough to Oil City, PA, one of the next small villages over, which works better as a place description given the images it brings up. It was the original center for processing (refining) oil in both the US and in the world. Oil was first intentionally extracted by well in nearby Titusville, PA. All of the other local industry and that one are gone, leaving behind a shell of a small town in a state of perpetual decline. Steel production left the general area, and manufacturing; it's not as if that one commodity was an isolated case.
People don't lose morality quickly; it's not as if everyone immediately turned to drugs and crime. Those have become much more of an issue since I graduated high school in 1986 there, which was really a decade into the main form of the decline, a decade prior to it being complete. My sister raised children back there since then, and they're fine, normal, happy, positive individuals. Maybe their worldview is slightly stagnant, never refreshed by any forms of positive changes, no outside input from economic renewal or social group transitions. But they're fine.
Roosh wouldn't see it that way, if he visited there. Crumbling infrastructure, vacant lots, and shabby looking buildings would be a sure sign of economic catastrophe, a decline into non-existence. That wouldn't be completely wrong.
Looked at the other way though, other communities are thriving now (just not so much in that region), so it's more a pattern of change. Things must have always been like that. There are ghost-towns in different places where entire communities had existed and now don't, completely vanished. It's a sad thing to be there for the decline, to ride it out, but from the perspective of society as a whole it's just normal.
It reminds me of Reagan visiting Detroit (I think it was), and people asking him about how to renew the economy in that area, since job opportunities were increasing in the South but in sharp decline there. He recommended moving to the South. He wasn't joking, and it's not an impractical suggestion. It's heartless, on one level, but only practical on another. Government pushing against economic forces is typically a bad idea.
Conclusion
It's not tidy enough, is it, all these picked-up and abandoned threads? There are plenty of threads I could've picked up but didn't. I live in Bangkok now; it would be easy to sweep in why that is, and what it means to me individually and related to societal changes. The short version: any one individual life example doesn't mean anything, necessarily; the broad patterns are something else.
I think the US is just changing, and it may make sense to describe some of that as decay, as negative transition, but if one looks deeper it works better to just see changes instead, to keep that less broad and more value-neutral. No one can clearly pin down what the individual cultural shifts mean, I don't think. In retrospect that goes a lot better; things are much clearer looking back. "Hindsight is 20-20," my Dad used to say.
Guessing about all that doesn't hurt. Turning to people who you all but completely disagree with for input, as I have done here, can be interesting. I think this is being lost now, open-minded review of these patterns and perspectives. So it probably always went. Back in the late 60s through early 70s there were probably few enough people in between the hippies and conservatives seeing things for what they were. Probably almost no one knows exactly what Brexit really means now, in terms of societal shifts and economic factors, or where that's headed over the next 20 years or so.
It has been interesting talking to friends in China, Japan, Russia, India, and other places about how they see shifts in their societies. More of that will help people place these trends as their own countries experience them. Of course I'm much more familiar with how things go in Thailand now, having been here for 12 years, but living abroad naturally brings up international themes and foreign perspectives.
I'm an optimist; I think it will all be fine. Except maybe for the US economy, but even then I think catastrophic decline might be fine. I think people grow through challenges and set-backs, both as individuals and societies, and the US might emerge stronger for experiencing next-level set-backs. The country might stop repeating the same mistakes, and gain a collective broader view of things, or fix some things that really are broken.
It's nice being an optimist, seeing light even within darkness. No other perspective is quite as practical.
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