very tired and demoralized at work so heres something ive been thinking about an interesting thing that may have happened in the 20th century is that deliberately or not people got really good at wrecking norms
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4. Related to (2) and (3), norm violation as a subcultural norm itself. Curiously . . .
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. . .in the Before Time, left-leaning groups were the main practitioners of norm violation as a tool or lifestyle, while conservatives (almost by definition) were custodians of existing norms. I see this situation as reversed today.
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The cultural left seems mostly focused on establishing and reinforcing novel norms. This is perhaps an unexpected turn of events, but perhaps less-so when you look at what has happened in the past after successful cultural revolutions. Meanwhile,
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cultural conservatives are left without many norms to defend, all of them being effectively undermined by novel physical and social technologies and those old equilibria stomped out. Trying to revive dead norms really probably is best called reaction rather than conservation.
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Trying to defend fraying "liberal" norms against concentrated social attacks from the left is probably the only remaining exercise for conservatives, as defined in this framework.
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My hunch is all of this is especially unpleasant for many of my older readers I imagine a disproportionate number of you, like me, are repulsed by ideological norms enforced by social . . . well, force, and so probably didn't think much of conservatives in the old days
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So, you know, explicitly countercultural forces had a certain appeal And it's reaaaaally uncomfortable watching the counterculture rapidly shifting gears away from undermining old dumb norms to undermining them indiscriminately while inventing new ones at a ferocious pace. end
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#2 is something I’ve thought about a lot, but in terms of learned behaviors that lost their adaptive context. Things that worked ok for previous generations, like getting married around ~20 years of age, became unhelpful as society restructured...
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...and whole ecosystems of tradition and habit that once served as useful heuristics for shaping your life are suddenly worse than useless. We can’t crib of the previous generation’s game plan anymore because the playing field shifts too quickly.
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