I have always seen some social conservatives, despite their clear understanding of the pitfalls of a centrally planned economy, take arrogant and thoughtless confidence in their efforts to centrally plan culture. I’ve been intrigued by it.
“According to each ability, according to each need”
This was my first understanding of socialism. Even as a child, I rebelled. In the past I have said that I was born a libertarian and will die a libertarian. But the wisdom of adulthood gives us a deeper perspective. In a profound and important way that I already knew to be true, on a level that I could not at the time comprehend or articulate, the world and I understood the nature of my needs and abilities. Have a fundamental disagreement and almost certainly want mine.
i still feel this way. Perhaps such a system can be centrally planned. But what would be the cost if human prosperity could not be centrally planned? A system that categorically allowed the fruits of labor to be cut off from the fruits of the soul seemed to me plainly immoral. I think I am not going to sacrifice those who are demanding to do less than what is most beneficial to society.
Later on, I learned a more technical definition of sharing/regulating means of production. Honestly, this remained my working definition until the age of social media. Then I started to understand that people use this word to refer to so many different concepts. For some, it basically means redistributing wealth in the direction of the working class. Others mean something like a European-style social democracy with broad safety nets and less crony capitalism.
Guys, yield semantics as much as possible.
The point here is that “from each according to their ability” is a fair encapsulation of how the more authoritarian social conservatives want to run their culture. and they themselves are the central planners. This is, in essence, the foundation of the culture wars.
That’s what’s behind the historical theories around “happy holidays.” The emergence of blanket greetings meant that they had lost control.They were no longer the central planners of culture. To them, then and now, it felt like no one was running the show and everyone was doing something wrong.
Well, it’s capitalism, baby. Participants in a laissez-faire culture spew blanket holiday greetings onto the idea market, completely unregulated, and no one can stop it.
Think of them as Howard Roark.
The sense that we have lost our place as the central planners of culture is also what lies behind the recent “don’t say gay” laws. They lost their army and retreated to school. If LGBTQ+ people can exist openly, especially in schools, without being publicly stigmatized, it will be normalized. Then you have to explain to the children. They have to teach their children to be polite to “them”. Show children that “those people” exist and teach them to be polite to “those people”. Hmm.
That’s not how you run a centrally planned culture.
In centrally planned cultures, wise elders (often leaders of faith, mostly male, usually white males) are Figure out how each person can best contribute to a goal (also forbidden by wise leaders). , again based on goals they derived unilaterally from the community’s subjective interpretation of Scripture. In return for going along, all others are promised a fair place in the culture and protected from human and natural dangers. To see if it works, all we need to do is investigate sexual scandals in interfaith communities.
I believe many of these people genuinely believe that they have everyone’s best interests at heart. Some people are too gay/transgender/whatever to make conformity work. They will claim that they don’t actually want it.
They just don’t want to put ideas in their kids’ heads.
They want to strongly encourage newer generations to stay away from such choices. On those rare occasions when public approval is inevitable, they want it to be whispered disapprovingly and explained to their children in brooding and concerned tones. According to future planners, that’s the best way for these misfits to consider their own needs and serve the interests of the whole.
All the reason why some on the right have increasingly embraced authoritarianism is that unless they harness the power of government, they have no chance of regaining their role as central planners of culture. This is because
My question to them is how can they clearly understand (as they understand) the mental harm of economic socialism and continue to be willing to deny the mental harm of central planning culture? about it. Is it not so bad because it is communism of mind and culture, not of economy?
We keep talking about adjacent objects, not the object itself. I doubt there is a fundamental disagreement about whether good parents should have any involvement in their children’s curriculum. It is adjacent to objects. The thing itself is a deeply existential debate about the relationship between the individual and society, the trade-offs between individualism and community, how much nonconformity culture should tolerate, how it embraces cultural minorities, etc. .
These terms should be questioned and discussed within this framework. If we know we can’t centrally plan people’s work, why should we try to centrally plan their gender or their lover or the type of life they find most satisfying? do you think?
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