Betting on the Lindy Effect
What is the essence of the Social Justice movement? Here’s the secret – there isn’t a single essence, as there isn’t a single ‘Social Justice’ movement. It is a wide societal trend we notice in contemporary Western countries. The Social Justice activists do not ‘want’ a single thing, and even if they thought they wanted it, one might argue their unconscious drives do not coincide with their stated goals.
From a progressive perspective, the social justice activists want a more humane world, one in which ‘neoliberalism’, with its inequalities, gives way to a civilisation in which health, social equity and overall flourishing are encouraged. This is the stated goal.
Jordan Peterson notices the shadow – resentiment lies at the core of the activists’ motivation. Haidt notices the myopic, autistic moral lens of the WEIRD (Western educated industrialised rich and democratic lifestyle), rooted exclusively in the individualistic intuitions of ‘care / do no harm’ and ‘fairness’. Dutton completes the picture by arguing that the worldview of the WEIRD destroyed group selection, promoting spiteful mutations that tear down the cohesion of every group of individuals – if they are not overcome by genetic or lifestyle-related sickness first. Patrick Deneen demonstrates that progressive liberalism not only fails to stabilise classical liberal societies, it accentuates their demise through an inflation of manufactured rights, through its insistent push to lower the threshold between cultures, eroding and downgrading them into transitory fashion and turning all citizens into placeless, timeless consumers who feel miserable and cannot achieve anything of lasting value.
Zlajzloj Zlizlek, as a freudian materialist dialectician, fails to comprehend some of these aspects, and concludes that the AKSHUAL unstated goal of the social justice movement is to relegate protected minorities to a status of endangered natural reserves, while the activists themselves turn the curse of being the culture-less, nature-less offspring of colonial empires into a great opportunity to re-colonise the world once again, move around freely, accumulate capital and use the oppressed as a protective shield. There is some truth to this, except for the fact that the Marxist base-superstructure schema gets things wrong all the time. SocJus warriors are desperate to re-culture and re-environmentalise themselves; the guilt is real and so is the human need for belonging and rootedness.
Progressivism is a rot that will permeate the entire Western World. It already IS the new religion. The only safe havens will be the other two geopolitical spheres of influence, who will most likely be dealing with their own problems. To focus on my field of work, activists have managed to corrupt every national union of architects, urbanists and landscape designers. Planning permissions and building certifications are conditioned by the integration of woke ideology into every single aspect of their projects. You must prove that your development promotes health and social equity, otherwise it will be rejected. As a result, virtually every architecture studio in this country, starting with the RIBA, is hiring komissars and becoming woke at an alarming speed. If anyone is so clueless as to still not recognise the weasel words ‘equity’, ‘social justice’, ‘inclusion’, ‘change’, they’re wasting their time here.
The tide cannot be turned. The only tragic knights still fighting against the windmills are classical liberals (the so-caled mainstream conservatives) and libertarians. In the field of architecture, the lolbertarian Patrick Schumacher is the only fool who refuses to sign the cancerous ‘Architects Declare’. Classical liberals, with their insistence on pure enlightenment values, secularism, euphoric atheism, seeing only individuals instead of groups, insisting that pure economic pursuits are virtuous in themselves and anyone claiming otherwise is ‘illiberal’ – pose as the new left’s ideal foe. And they are constantly losing, because their cause is not ‘Lindy’.
“The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.[1] Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time” – Wiki.
Rabid consumer culture coupled with secularism will continue to atomise society until it crumbles. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. Res idiotica, the mere pursuit of individual interest will Balcanise the West. As a bonus, if you’re a classical liberal you’ll get shunned by everyone woke; they will point their fingers at you, ruining your enterprise and gaining virtue points by doing so. You will be regarded as a soulless fascist or social darwinian, and you will not even die on the right hill. You MUST discover the grace of God; there is more to life than profit, and religion and culture are worth fighting for.
On the other hand, progressivism isn’t Lindy either. If Deneen hasn’t convinced you, at least pay attention to dr. Dutton’s purely biological observations. Western peoplekind have lost their desire to perpetuate themselves at all levels, starting from the biological. The groups that take advantage of the ‘public health and social equity’ rhetoric are centrifugal; they are a force of erosion, invoking exceptional status in order to receive unearned resources. The more groups take advantage of these levers, the more corrupt and sclerotic power becomes; governments eventually crumble and when this happens, the unelected institutions that constantly benefited from power leakage will become sovereign officially. But in the absence of the sclerotic oligarchy that made sure the chain of production paid tribute or ‘reparations’ to all these lobby groups, they will be unable to sustain themselves and will most likely get a taste of their own medicine.
The only groups that will remain Lindy are the ones at the periphery of the power leakage chain; the more these groups live off the land, off grid, while forming real life communities with skin in the game, the better they will adapt to a post-liberal world. Localism and homogeneous phenotypes are Lindy too, but preferably without being elevated as ideologies. First, such an act would be suicidal on the short term, while the komissars of wellbeing and social equity are still able to cancel you. Second, post-fallout, it is better to choose binding factors that allow forming ties with outside groups regardless of superficial differences. As long as their core principles are Lindy and they do not threaten your own community, there’s no reason why yo cannot be in a mutually beneficial relationship.
The winning strategy is, therefore, to ride the wave of wokeness somewhat passively. Do NOT do what Patrick Schumacher is doing; stop fighting for your failed brand of Universalism and Enlightenment left brain autism. Or if you do it for profit, like Pinker or [hope to God not] Peterson, don’t expect anything but contempt from all sides of the spectrum. Don’t fuel the culture war. Don’t focus on SocJus lunacy as a catalyst for lucrative outrage. Build your Benedictine priory, find Christ, live a content and happy life with your real family and friends, building trust and trading with those whom you know personally.
On the political front, your only goal should be to achieve protected status as a minority, while keeping the ideological infiltration of your community at bay. Pressure them to treat you like the Amish, the Mormons or the Orthodox Jews. No one dares to call these people Patriarchal or Fascist. Or if some pink haired crazies venture so far as to do it, they are promptly punished by the social media outposts of these religious groups. THIS is what you should spend your time lobbying for; not attempting to ban Social Justice from the curriculum. There is no telling when the lunacy will end; the new regulations could either prolong or quicken its demise; there are signs of both types of action on the radical left; it remains to be seen which one will tilt our world.