What Will You Sacrifice for Your Culture?

Photo by Юлія Дубина on Unsplash

“If your culture can convince you to harm your own children, what can't it convince you to do?”

This question was posed in a comment thread some time ago by friend-of-the-substack Dolly of The 21st Century Salon.

There's a widely used phrase for swallowing lies from spurious authorities: “drinking the Kool-aid.”

It's a reference to the Jonestown massacre of 1978, led by Jim Jones of the People's Temple. The charismatic cult leader, who had migrated his 900+ American followers to a remote South American settlement, convinced them to drink cyanide-laced punch in a mass “revolutionary suicide” meant to protest capitalism and thwart interference by “fascist” outsiders.

The situation was more complicated than “drinking the Kool-aid” has come to suggest. Not only did Jones infuse his vat of poison with off-brand beverage mix Flavor Aid, but followers lined up for their swig under the duress of armed guards, and may have been unwittingly sedated—to say nothing of their geographical isolation. They'd joined the congregation for its socialist philosophy, its “progressive and activist ideals,” and its commitment to “racial equality” at a time of significant racism and segregation. With its anti-fascism, its fixation on oppression, and its forays into queer nonmonogamy, today's youth would clamor to join. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, historian Hannah Arendt finds that historically, it's not the raging bigot (my words) who's most vulnerable to rule by dictator. It's the “disenfranchised.”

Jones' stroke of genius in coaxing those showing a “reluctance to die” was sending the children to the front of the line. Who wants to live with dead kids on their conscience? I recommend survivor Catherine Thrash's memoir The Onliest One Alive for the insider story.

I've thought a lot about the harm incurred by children from society's recent policy of fashioning their chests and genitals to match their toy preferences. I've thought less about what such practices say about our gullibility and the fate of our species. There's much more at stake than canaries as we test this coal mine, as detransitioners prove. Another widely-used phrase comes to mind, this one from Shakespeare: these young people have “paid with a pound of flesh.”

Indeed, what greater evil can, and will, we swallow?

The evils disseminated from above already concern me. It no longer feels like hyperbole to suggest impending totalitarian rule, a new reign of evil, the fall of civilization itself. Not because of any particular conspiracy theory in circulation, but because of a confluence of interrelated cultural factors whose destruction is already manifest (as the competence crisis and other horrors): postmodernism, the decline of meritocracy, the elevation of victimhood, the cultural morality crisis, the normalization of sexual violence, technology's mediation of all things, and the resulting assault on our focus—a focus we desperately need to address these problems.

Some of these are luxury beliefs, others bad habits borne of those beliefs (and exacerbated by affluence and laziness). As Voltaire intuited over two hundred years ago: those “who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Like a ouija board everyone's only leaning on a little, the continued application of bad ideas will bring us to bad ends. “Don't practice what you don't want to become,” as Jordan Peterson warns.

Via Wikimedia Commons

We need to sit with these words: “If your culture can convince you to harm your own children, what can't it convince you to do?