Anonymous asked:
it was actually a fairly dramatic deconversion: happened one night in a several-hour-long conversation.
before that I’d been somewhat of a “women are better suited to being homemakers and rearing children than doing Careers” trad and I was basically convinced that that was cope for being afraid of failure: at the very least, regardless of whatever is true in the aggregate I am better at my career than almost all men would be, there are ways in which I suck but also there are ways in which men suck, and the trad case for “I, personally, am better suited to focus on marriage/kids/domesticity than having a career” is weak
I was also somewhat of a “the sexual revolution was a mistake” trad and I think I’ve moved away from that a bit though less dramatically
I think the story there is basically: there is a modern strain of thought that says, people should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it’s not hurting anyone, obviously. And in my youth I saw the obvious problem with this: that people don’t just “want” things in a vacuum, their desires and expectations are deeply influenced by social norms, and people’s actions in aggregate here do affect others, so people are just naturally going to try to create social norms and punish violators.
And I don’t not endorse this, I guess I’ve just gotten older and chilled out a bit. Like yes, giving away the milk for free is clearly bad game–but if that dooms your relationship, it probably wasn’t that promising to begin with, and who really has the time or energy to worry about this stuff, idk.
I guess overall I still feel very conscious of the process of cultural evolution, and I think it is worth noting and missed by a lot of people that it does select for beneficial cultural adaptations (in a given environment, of course).
But also like, I don’t really think you can just decide to retvrn when like … retvrn to what? Does whatever it is still work in today’s world, with today’s technology? Do you have the societal structures and deep cultural learning that sustained whatever you’re retvrning to? Probably not.
So I think politically, I’ve become a bit more agnostic on culture/society; they’re important, but they’re also the result of these highly optimized selection processes in a way that makes it hard to just bend them to our will. And personally, I’ve become a bit more optimistic: that I don’t need to think of myself as at the mercy of these powerful forces, and that I can just try to figure out what I want and go for it, rather than chaining myself to the mast of a trad worldview.