A couple posts here touch on what I feel is the root of it all.
(start autism)
First, the bit about morality serving an evolutionary purpose. Morality (and its flipside, shame) are what fosters cooperation. It's the glue that holds a tribe together. If you violate the code of conduct of the tribe, you get shunned and/or cast out. The reason you get cast out is that the tribe at that time needed to be a well-oiled machine. Each part needed to function in unison. A while back I visited "Plimoth Plantation" and you can see this up close and personal. The crew of a small ship formed a miniscule fledgling colony. For all of the necessities of life to be provided, there needed to be very careful division of labor. In a way you can think of it like a commune. Regular freemarket capitalism and rampant individualism simply DOES NOT WORK at that scale. Everyone needs to sort of know their place. If there's only one guy who knows how to be a blacksmith, he can't just stop blacksmithing and take up pottery to follow his bliss. The colony is counting on him to do what he does, and hopefully to train others for when he's no longer able to do it, otherwise there won't be nails and horseshoes and so on.
I don't watch a lot of reality TV but all those Lord of the Flies style Survival shows are compelling because they take people who have no concept of any of the above and thrust them into a situation where they have to relearn them. This is also why normies watch that sort of shit. Because it provides a window into a way of living that has become so foreign. We are fascinated by it, but at the same time, we don't really want to go back to it, because we see that sort of lifestyle as confining and too demanding.
So rules and morality and social mores are sort of like the operating system of a society. They put up guardrails meant to protect society's ability to function.
As society urbanizes and becomes more and more technological, the need for social cohesion atrophies. Decadence has been an overused epithet but it's still a thing. Decadence at the end of Rome, decadence during the Weimar Republic, and creeping decadence in the US.
SJWs perceive decadence as social evolution because they only see improvements in areas of individual rights. The proverbial blacksmith need no longer be a blacksmith. These are luxuries brought on by technology and prosperity. Take them away (ala Survivor) and older forms of community will naturally rush in to take their place. Worst case scenario would be Mad Max or Conan style warlordism.
Notice how much entertainment continues to flirt with these extremes. There's so much apocalyptic fiction out there that you wonder why modern man is either afraid of apocalypse or in some repressed way, looking forward to it.
The point I'm trying to make is that biologically speaking, we really are not adapted to live 21st century lifestyles. We live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance about our instinct. This is especially acute with women. The proverbial hamster, like the other thread here about the woman who agreed to the gangbang and then cried foul later. But there are countless stories of men climbing up the corporate ladder only to realize that traditional success does not bring them the satisfaction society promised them.
Modern life is therefore lopsided in the sense that we're overloaded with creature comfort and cheap amusement and (for the beautiful, sex on tap). But what it lacks is a greater sense of purpose. We strive to feel useful to a "tribe". Individualism doesn't give us that.
How do people fill those gaps? Through hashtag movements, of course.
SJWs and hashtag movements are the closest thing to a tribe. Since we're not fighting a hot war or staving off a famine, people seek out something to crusade. That I think explains the rise of SJWs and the oversensitization of society to ever more trivial forms of social friction. Humans are at heart never truly satisfied. We're the equivalent of someone trying to cut a perfect circle by hand into a piece of construction paper until the circle is reduced to a tiny dot. The only way to stop that feedback loop is to introduce some huge shock to the system. A great depression, war, environmental collapse, etc... You'd be surprised how little an SJW will think about Captain Marvel wearing makeup in the Endgame trailer if she's standing over the smoldering ruins of her home that just burned down or by the side of the road after a car accident that just claimed her daughter. Prosperity destroys our ability to discern the truly important things in life.
So I think the problem is too often we attempt to try to scapegoat these problems when the reality is the way things are is, as I've explained above, a product of our environment.
The Amish live the way they do because they have artificially handicapped themselves to a primitive level of technology. Give the Amish all the creature comforts of modernity and it would be impossible for those values to persist. Life would be too easy. But since the Amish exist as a sandbox within greater society, there is a constant exodus of those who are aware of what life is like outside of their community and think the grass is greener.
History has proven that people are at heart lazy, hedonistic, and gluttonous. This is because we evolved in an environment of scarcity. So during any brief spike of prosperity we evolved to gobble it all down furiously. No different from most animals, really. We're not smart enough to know the downside of excess. We are all addicts or potential addicts.
Hate to sounds so misanthropic, but that's what life has taught me so far.
(start autism)
First, the bit about morality serving an evolutionary purpose. Morality (and its flipside, shame) are what fosters cooperation. It's the glue that holds a tribe together. If you violate the code of conduct of the tribe, you get shunned and/or cast out. The reason you get cast out is that the tribe at that time needed to be a well-oiled machine. Each part needed to function in unison. A while back I visited "Plimoth Plantation" and you can see this up close and personal. The crew of a small ship formed a miniscule fledgling colony. For all of the necessities of life to be provided, there needed to be very careful division of labor. In a way you can think of it like a commune. Regular freemarket capitalism and rampant individualism simply DOES NOT WORK at that scale. Everyone needs to sort of know their place. If there's only one guy who knows how to be a blacksmith, he can't just stop blacksmithing and take up pottery to follow his bliss. The colony is counting on him to do what he does, and hopefully to train others for when he's no longer able to do it, otherwise there won't be nails and horseshoes and so on.
I don't watch a lot of reality TV but all those Lord of the Flies style Survival shows are compelling because they take people who have no concept of any of the above and thrust them into a situation where they have to relearn them. This is also why normies watch that sort of shit. Because it provides a window into a way of living that has become so foreign. We are fascinated by it, but at the same time, we don't really want to go back to it, because we see that sort of lifestyle as confining and too demanding.
So rules and morality and social mores are sort of like the operating system of a society. They put up guardrails meant to protect society's ability to function.
As society urbanizes and becomes more and more technological, the need for social cohesion atrophies. Decadence has been an overused epithet but it's still a thing. Decadence at the end of Rome, decadence during the Weimar Republic, and creeping decadence in the US.
SJWs perceive decadence as social evolution because they only see improvements in areas of individual rights. The proverbial blacksmith need no longer be a blacksmith. These are luxuries brought on by technology and prosperity. Take them away (ala Survivor) and older forms of community will naturally rush in to take their place. Worst case scenario would be Mad Max or Conan style warlordism.
Notice how much entertainment continues to flirt with these extremes. There's so much apocalyptic fiction out there that you wonder why modern man is either afraid of apocalypse or in some repressed way, looking forward to it.
The point I'm trying to make is that biologically speaking, we really are not adapted to live 21st century lifestyles. We live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance about our instinct. This is especially acute with women. The proverbial hamster, like the other thread here about the woman who agreed to the gangbang and then cried foul later. But there are countless stories of men climbing up the corporate ladder only to realize that traditional success does not bring them the satisfaction society promised them.
Modern life is therefore lopsided in the sense that we're overloaded with creature comfort and cheap amusement and (for the beautiful, sex on tap). But what it lacks is a greater sense of purpose. We strive to feel useful to a "tribe". Individualism doesn't give us that.
How do people fill those gaps? Through hashtag movements, of course.
SJWs and hashtag movements are the closest thing to a tribe. Since we're not fighting a hot war or staving off a famine, people seek out something to crusade. That I think explains the rise of SJWs and the oversensitization of society to ever more trivial forms of social friction. Humans are at heart never truly satisfied. We're the equivalent of someone trying to cut a perfect circle by hand into a piece of construction paper until the circle is reduced to a tiny dot. The only way to stop that feedback loop is to introduce some huge shock to the system. A great depression, war, environmental collapse, etc... You'd be surprised how little an SJW will think about Captain Marvel wearing makeup in the Endgame trailer if she's standing over the smoldering ruins of her home that just burned down or by the side of the road after a car accident that just claimed her daughter. Prosperity destroys our ability to discern the truly important things in life.
So I think the problem is too often we attempt to try to scapegoat these problems when the reality is the way things are is, as I've explained above, a product of our environment.
The Amish live the way they do because they have artificially handicapped themselves to a primitive level of technology. Give the Amish all the creature comforts of modernity and it would be impossible for those values to persist. Life would be too easy. But since the Amish exist as a sandbox within greater society, there is a constant exodus of those who are aware of what life is like outside of their community and think the grass is greener.
History has proven that people are at heart lazy, hedonistic, and gluttonous. This is because we evolved in an environment of scarcity. So during any brief spike of prosperity we evolved to gobble it all down furiously. No different from most animals, really. We're not smart enough to know the downside of excess. We are all addicts or potential addicts.
Hate to sounds so misanthropic, but that's what life has taught me so far.