rooshvforum.network is a fully functional forum: you can search, register, post new threads etc...
Old accounts are inaccessible: register a new one, or recover it when possible. x


Politics is mostly a means to a cultural end
#1

Politics is mostly a means to a cultural end

Lawrence Meyers argues in Breitbart that "politics is downstream from culture." If you're the type of politician who follows public opinion rather than trying to mold it, then sure. But in many cases, politics seems more upstream from culture, as what the politicians say and do reverberates through our whole society. (As Roosh said, "If the President can say it then you can say it".) It wouldn't surprise me if, say, Barron ends up being a more common baby name, for instance.

Back when I was a cannabis policy reform activist, I always used to run into the argument, "We can't legalize medical pot, because that will send the wrong message to young people. How are we supposed to make teenagers understand that pot can harm their academic performance, if people are going around saying that it's medicine?" I always thought, "Can't people tell the difference between saying something should be legalized, and saying it's a good idea to go out and do it?" But people conflate the two, knowing that there are some who look to the law as guidance about what they should or shouldn't do (as opposed to merely what they may or may not do). One could argue, though, that the drug war was never really about actually stopping drug use, but was intended more to stigmatize certain racial and cultural groups, such as blacks and hippies, and also erode expectations of personal freedom and privacy. So in other words, it was part of the culture war.

I also noticed that a lot of elections are decided based on issues other than policy. In 2006, George Allen lost his U.S. Senate race because he called one of his opponent's volunteers a "macaca". In 2008, Obama got elected in large part because people wanted a black President. In Virginia, this year's governor's race might be decided based on the question of whether a Confederate statue should be removed from a park in Charlottesville. From a policy perspective, those all seem like trivial issues to be basing one's vote on.

People got way more upset that Bill Clinton got his dick sucked by an intern, than about NAFTA or his nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, because they were worried about the effect his behavior would have on our culture. Likewise, they got more upset about Trump's pussy-grabbing comment than about any actual antifeminist statement in his platform. The way politicians dress, their mannerisms, their choices of words, etc. all have an outsized effect on whether they get elected.

What I've come to realize, is that political battles are mostly a struggle to shape our culture. The issues that people get most excited about are symbolic, rather than substantive. The politicians use elections, legislative debates, etc. as venues for pushing an agenda that is primarily about values and norms rather than laws.

I think the reason for this is that the rule of law is in many respects illusory. Whatever the laws are, if the culture opposes the law, then the culture will tend to win, because there are so many opportunities to get around the law. The people in charge of enforcing and applying the law have opportunities to let their own cultural biases influence their decisions, in violation of the written code.

For example, if you're the same race as the cop who pulls you over, he might very well cut you some slack, compared to if he pulled over someone of a race that he doesn't like. If asked about it later, he could always chalk it up to your cooperative attitude, or your violation not having been all that serious, etc. Because cops are so few and far between, if the culture condones a certain behavior, like smoking pot, then you can probably get away with it even if it's illegal. At the Supreme Court level, we see all the time that rulings are made in violation of the Constitution, because the public condones the cultural agenda that is being pushed by the Court (e.g. by forcing the legalization of gay marriage nationwide) and therefore allows them to get away with it, and even expects it. (If there were to be a public outcry, the Justices might worry about their power getting curtailed, e.g. by the appointment of new Justices with a more textualist philosophy.)

Sometimes the system is specifically set up to allow the rule of law to be defeated. For example, Obama, as a retiring President, had untrammeled power to commute Chelsea Manning's sentence based on transgender status or whatever other factor he wanted. If you serve on a jury, you are free to vote for acquittal or conviction based on whether you like the defendant, as long as you claim that your verdict is based on a sincerely-held opinion as to whether the prosecution proved its case. In the Philippines, divorce is illegal, but because the culture to some degree tolerates breaking up a marriage, rich people are able to get around that prohibition by abusing the annulment system.

Sometimes people say, "I can't get married in the west, because of the divorce laws." The problem isn't so much the laws, but rather the culture. A major factor in whether men get frivorce-raped is whether, because of their blue pill conditioning, they chose the wrong woman to marry. The culture also influences whether woman will take advantage of the opportunity the laws offer for frivorce, because most women who are thinking of leaving their husband will first consult with friends and family. If their social circle opposes their decision to divorce, they're more likely to change their plan and stay in the marriage. On the other hand, even if divorce were illegal, women might still leave their husbands, given enough social support for doing so.

I used to think, "We need men to run for office on an antifeminist, pro-patriarchy platform." That can be done, but as always in politics, the issues that will be fought over in such a campaign will be mostly symbolic. For example, if you advocate abolishing women's right to vote, the furor over that will be not so much because women's suffrage is such an important issue in and of itself, but because abolishing their suffrage suggests that it's not women's role to participate in elections, which in turn says something about their ability to make good decisions about politics and to play a leadership role. (In practice, the direct effect of women's suffrage on American politics is limited by the facts that women tend to follow men's lead anyway, and that women are not a politically homogenous group.)

Part of the problem with an antifeminist political campaign is that usually male dominance is supposed to be implicit rather than explicit. You don't usually say to a woman, "I'm going to be the one to escalate kino and try to initiate sex, because I know that women prefer that men take the lead," or "I'm now going to attempt to spike your emotions using the push/pull technique, in hopes that this will give you vaginal tingles," or "I'll drive, since men are statistically better drivers than women, and it's manly for me to take on the responsibility." You just do it, because you just get it. But in a political campaign, policies and the reasons for them are stated explicitly, which women tend to react to in the same way that they react in other situations in which principles of game or the red pill are laid out explicitly.

In feminist-influenced society, women prefer to get their feminine need for male leadership met in a way that maintains plausible deniability about what they're doing. E.g., if a woman gets pregnant after hooking up at a party with a tattooed drug dealer, it's because he was such a smooth-talking psychopath, not because she's attracted to bad boys. If you say, "Patriarchy is a way in which women could get their needs met in a more family-friendly way that doesn't require lying about what they're doing," people will look around and see everyone else is aghast at this suggestion, and follow suit in order to fit in.

Given that feminism is a shit test on a massive scale, if you get involved in politics and try to challenge feminism, you'll tend to get hit with a larger-scale shit test than what you'd usually encounter. The individual man can try to pass it by standing firm, but it gets more challenging when the white knights and manginas (some of whom may be blue pill alphas) get involved, because then it's not so much men vs. women (a fight that men could easily win), but society vs. a small group of dissidents. Even if YOU stand firm, men, taken as a collective, are still at this point failing the society-wide shit test by continuing to give women what they say they want rather than what they actually want.

Where patriarchy is practiced successfully, it is usually because the sexes influence each other to practice it. When men act masculine, women tend to act more feminine; and when women act feminine, men tend to respond by playing a manly role. Therefore, it's mostly through "soft power," i.e. showing dominance by being strong and taking the lead without actually forcibly overcome women's will, that patriarchy will be implemented. Where hard power is used, it's mostly for symbolic effect (analogous to those scenes you see in the old movies where a man slaps a hysterical woman because she wants/needs him to take charge and force her to get hold of herself.)
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)