Culture Wars

The real culture war isn’t left vs right, urban vs rural, capitalism vs communism, etc.

The real culture war is between people who want to win (a more prosperous country) vs people who want to win the argument (more status even if it means less prosperity).

Positive-sum vs negative-sum people.

Who won the elections?

If you look within a country, it’s easy to see who won the elections. It’s either this or that party.

However, if you look from outside the country, things are different. It’s possible everyone lost the elections. That’s what happens when incompetent candidates get elected.

It’s also possible that everyone won the elections. Everyone’s better off when competent candidates get elected. Competence brings prosperity, and prosperity brings more rights – that’s why conservative, prosperous countries often have better social rights than progressive but mismanaged countries (though, obviously, this phenomenon requires a few years to play out).

Who creates environmental change?

If you look at a problem such as climate change with a short time horizon, it’s an awareness problem. The only way we can improve the environment this year is if everyone changes their habits.

However, if you look at the same problem over longer time horizons, decades, it’s a technological problem. I have a lower environmental footprint than my father, even if he was more environmentally conscious than me (the air quality in my town is much better than it was forty years ago because factories, cars, and heating pollute so much less).

Hence, the cultural war in this context isn’t who’s willing to make sacrifices for the environment vs who doesn’t, but who’s willing to improve our technology vs who doesn’t.

Who wants a solution vs who wants to be the solution.

The path forward

There have always been, and there will always be, people who want to win the argument more than they want to win full stop. People who care more about status than prosperity. More about status than the environment. More about status than everything else.

That’s this excessive ego that leads them to do so much evil. They might begin with good intentions, but then they repeatedly deliberately and malevolently ignore any shred of evidence that their actions might cause harm.

The solution is to call them out, over and over.

Every time they focus on intentions over outcomes.

Every time they focus on performance over substance.

Every time they focus on zero-sum over positive-sum solutions.

Every time they focus on winning the argument over winning full stop.