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I’m a big Nietzsche guy which is ironic given I’m a hardcore neoliberal globalist, which he would have certainly scoffed at.

But I think his critique of morality and his theory of the death of God is the most relevant framework for understanding the culture war gripping the western world in these volatile times.

Pervasive undeniable secularism, and the untenability and erosion of the most basic values of previous eras and generations, from fashions, to conventions, to science, combined with the increasing misery and genuine madness with the mental health issues increasing, I see it as a crisis of values leading to mass hysterical paroxysms of despair because uncreative people can’t handle the value-loss nor create their own values, leaving elites like us who look at MAGA or woke from afar just aghast at the fact that people seem like they don’t even know how to exist anymore. As AI picks up, I’m afraid a Herbert Spencer sort of dynamic will really begin tragically to take shape where people who can’t face the modern world will react violently from a failure to adapt, and I don’t worry for my own sanity, but what keeps me up at night is wondering whether our institutions can hold up against the coming madness breaking out from within our acceleratingly neurotic culture.

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The hubris of it really aggravates me, just looking at ur woke antifan’s comments--they’re hard to read.

Woke people have this deluded Marxist-post-structuralist view of history which is that ethnic and sexual identities are interlocked in some perpetual struggle, which u can only hope to escape by making the dubious moral claim that for u it is ur personal ethical imperative whoever u are to revolt against the historical oppressor in arbitrary marxian terms, white straight men but then... what? And then doesn’t that make u an oppressor? Didn’t we already try that in russia in 1917? They never explain where to go from there after u kill all the bourgeois men. But even say we don’t use direct action--after u give every oppressed identity blandly a privileged role in every hollywood movie, and plant them in every administrative agency and corporate board by fiat, and sterilize every children’s book, then what? And who would want to live in this suffocatingly PC world? You have only to be a tasteless and joyless self-righteous dunce, to desire that. But the woke are only the same people who were in the temperance league that led to prohibition. All they care about in life, they have such inferiority complexes is to please their woke friends and feel moral.

They also way back were once the puritans who burned witches. Nathanial hawthorne’s scarlet letter is all about wokeness, if moby dick is a good metaphor for MAGA.

We classical liberals need to be the morally courageous Huck Finns though, and defy the proliferation of collectivist tribal identitarian morals in the digital age.

Not unless we’re all created equal and unless we want to disdain to believe the noble lie of natural law, underpinning liberalism, underpinning equal rights, underpinning american jurisprudence: then anything goes, I think and humanity democracy and the market cease to be worth defending in a zerosum psychopathic struggle for nothing over nothing, or rather your Identity (ego) when the individual retreats as a universal ideal.

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