Dissident creators’ invisibility to the movers and shakers in Conservative circles has hobbled right-wing advances in the culture war for decades. “Culture War” is frankly inaccurate, since a war presumes more than one side fighting. The wholesale capture of Western institutions by the Death Cult has been a cultural rout.
Conservatives’ hidebound overreliance on using facts and logic against an enemy that wholly embraces rhetoric and propaganda – increasingly to the exclusion of reason – has ceded all legacy institutions to delusional fanatics.
Have a look at the code of conduct adopted adopted by one of the Cult’s yearly conclaves. It’s a mad tea party in a gulag. That anyone is expected to think a gathering of sane human beings could be governed by such nebulous, arbitrary, contradictory, and paranoid dictates is a humiliation ritual in itself.
Therein lies a fascinating paradox at the heart of the Death Cult. Their rejection of truth makes them quite good at infiltrating and subverting organizations. Relying entirely on emotional appeals lets them attack the Right’s blind spot.
The Cult’s problem is that reason is how you make sure your beliefs jibe with reality. The same fanaticism that enables their conquest also ensures their utter incompetence at running the institutions they conquer.
This is why every company, brand, club, and school co-opted by the Death Cult is rapidly reduced to a hollowed-out mockery of its former glory. A convention where Boomers with poor hygiene used to get together and talk about Heinlein has now been warped into a convocation of Thulsa Doom’s snake cult. Common-sense rules about leaving an area like you found it and not letting arguments about FTL travel devolve into fistfights have given way to esoteric, amoeba-like precepts intelligible only to Cult insiders.
Functional, cohesive organizations have no need of such granular micromanaging. Here’s the web site for Comiket, Japan’s largest anime convention. They’ve got lots of Covid precautions this year, which is understandable. But what you won’t find on their site is a draconian code of conduct meant to anticipate and regulate attendees’ every thought. That is how a rational society with shared understandings operates.
That’s the Left’s blind spot. They’re so laser-focused on the present that they never stop to think about the second order effects of their actions. In fact, they don’t stop to think at all. Not to let Conservatives off the hook. Losing to overgrown toddlers for fifty years hardly recommends them. In terms of cultural dominance, blindness to art is worse than blindness to logic.
The blindness to art among Conservative influencers and money men is a curse the Right will have to break to have any hope of steering civilization away from the cliff. #1 bestselling author and comics creator Jon Del Arroz discussed this problem, and many other pop culture subjects, on his live stream last night.
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Brian
The 'conservative's disdain for culture is an Anglosphere phenomenon. I d on't quite see this didsin in Europe or Latin America or in many parts of Asia.
I suspect the economistic mindset needs to be shattered before rightvwingers can reonquer culture
xavier
American Conservatives inherited their distrust of art from iconoclastic Puritans.
My understanding is the Puritans actively rejected art for the sake of rejecting art itself in their pursuit of a kind of universal monasticism. Really that's just a shading on Brian's meaning I suppose.
And IMO the disdain for culture and art in modern conservatism is recent. Really recent, to say it would have seemed foreign and repugnant before perhaps the 1920s. My conjecture is that it is rooted in a rejection of pop-culture both by the high (Anglican and Catholic) culture as being boorish and fake, and by the low (Puritan) culture as being dangerously immoral… although then I am not sure it is Puritanism so much as the Conservatives adopting and then severely defending the mistakes of Socialism.
Was it Chesterton who said progressives exist to make new inventive mistakes, and Conservatives to ensure those mistakes are never thereafter corrected? Because the timing and character of the "conservative" rejection of pop culture is suspiciously correlated to the rise of finger-wagging hyper-moral Socialism in the Anglosphere and Germanic polities.
Not entirely sure I agree with "blindness to art". One would have to consider the postmodern trash that the academy has propped up for nearly a century as "art". I thought the whole point of Dada was to destroy "art" itself? Conservatives have built culture, lasting culture, it is there in museums, in cathedrals, in structures that last thousands of years. All the 20th century pomo art has offered is commodity meant to be used up and disposed for the next hot thing.
So I slightly disagree that conservatives distrust art, when in reality, they may not consider it art (and they are right in that respect).
Dada was rejection of existence, a cry for help. The conservative response was to laugh about it as their opponents gained more power and slipped further into madness.
None of those things are going to be lasting art when the death cult deigns to burn and level it all down. And we know no one will stop them when it happens. Why should they when we can wag our fingers and promote book cruises instead?
The guys who built the cathedrals weren't Conservatives. They would have definite and serious disagreements with many tenets of Conservatism.
Nor has Conservatism been around for thousands of years. It's a relatively new child of the Enlightenment.
It seems the best way to build a beautiful building – and more to the point, a church that looks like a church – is to pretend it was designed hundreds of years ago, before the "enlightenment" and the "age of reason" robbed the West of its sanity. Perhaps that should told us conservatives something.
“They’re good people but they’re simply misguided” or “we just believe differently is all but we both want what’s best” are perhaps two of the wrongest statements bandied about by neocon boomers not realizing what demonic forces they’re up against and the gravity of the danger we’re in
Polls show that Liberals think of Conservatives as a threat to their lives, while Conservatives think of Liberals as a threat to their convenience.
As usual, the exact opposite is true.
Brian, can you critique this, speaking of rules and culture?
Freedom is practically defined as the congruence of the individual's expectations to those of his society.
Since freedom implies non-coercion of one's behavior on the part of society, I think your definition is sound.
Yeah that's what I felt. It's something I thought of years ago just at an intellectual level and didn't really give much more thought to, but it seems that it's going to be a live issue for all of us now. Not claiming it as original or profound, but I suspect it's irreducible.
The thing about codes of conduct in general is how much of an energy suck they are. Once you start on that road, more and more resources have to be devoted to as misconduct keeps getting redefined. Pretty soon, that's all your organization is doing.
Well if your God is Progress, you have to be be ever More Better or join the ranks of the Damned; if your moral lodestone is Sensitivity you are morally compelled to find and react to ever smaller infractions.
The badly written code consumes available resources until all processes halt…. so to speak.