Why the right and the left are both stupid
Their moral codes are hopelessly inadequate for the 21st century. Plus, bored housewives, collapsing birthrates, teenagers who can't socialize, and how to save Western civilization.
CONTENT WARNING: In this article I get POLITICAL!!!
This isn’t a “my side is good and your side is evil” article. I’m gonna try and be rational and explain things from both sides’ perspectives. That means I’m going to criticize the right and the left.
Some people can’t handle that — they watch news that says that one side is good and the other side is evil. Then they make “democrat” or “republican” part of their personal identity. Then they get mad at anybody who criticizes their party, because it feels like a personal attack!
If that’s you, I’d stop reading now, and go for a walk in the park instead.
If you’re going to read this article anyways, then be careful. If you notice yourself getting angry, take a deep breath.
Then, close your eyes, and focus the energy in your brain back to your prefrontal cortex (the smart, human part) and away from your amygdala (the dumb angry lizard part).
I’ll forgive you for getting angry — I get angry sometimes, too. We’re all human. But I won’t forgive you if you don’t even TRY to stop your anger from preventing you from thinking clearly.
Understand that if I say something you disagree with, I’m not attacking YOU — I’m attacking an idea. I’m not trying to insult anyone. I’m just trying to get to the truth.
Then, try to put yourself in my shoes. Why do I believe what I believe?
I might be wrong — in which case, you’re welcome to correct me in the comments. If you do, stay level-headed and rational, and I might actually learn something from you. But if you just go on an angry tirade or quote me some bullshit CNN or Fox News talking point, I’m gonna ignore you (or make fun of you).
Anyways, let’s get to the article:
In the year 0, a pretty important guy was born. His name was Jesus, and whether you follow him or not, you can’t deny that his ideas have totally changed the past 2,024 years.
About a hundred years after Jesus got crucified, people realized that the Christian moral code was better than the Pagan moral code. It was good to Love Thy Neighbor and Turn The Other Cheek. So Jesus’s radical ideas about right and wrong spread like wildfire.
Eventually, Christianity became Rome’s dominant religion. Pretty soon the Roman Emperor was a Christian. And they literally built the seat of the Catholic Church in Rome.
Christianity in America
2,000 years later, another big religious shift is taking place in the world’s #1 empire.
People are deciding en masse that the Christian moral code just doesn’t make sense anymore. And they’re replacing Christianity with a humanist religion, based off stuff like human rights and tolerance of other cultures.
Some people aren’t happy about this, and they’re fighting back. If you haven’t noticed, Americans kind of hate each other right now. There’s a culture war going on. The Right and the Left both have their own ideas — not just about the best way to run the country, but about what’s right and wrong. (The same thing is going on in Europe, too, to a lesser extent.)
At its core, the culture war is a religious war. Just as Christians fought Pagans in Ancient Rome, and just as Catholics fought Protestants in 17th century Europe, today liberals and conservatives fight each other.
The Old Morality Vs. The New Morality
Here’s the thing you need to understand to make sense of this article. Morals aren’t objective universal truths. They’re just rules that everybody agrees to so that society can work.
This is how most cultures in the world see morality. Go to China and they’ll tell you that you follow morals to help the group succeed. For some reason Westerners think that you follow morals for their own sake, even when they hurt the group.
Since morals are about making the group work, every group has to decide which morals to follow. They have to figure out which moral code is gonna give them the best society.
For the past 2 centuries, the West has followed the Christian moral code. But some people think that the Christian moral code doesn’t make a ton of sense today.
That’s because the world has changed a ton in the past 200 years. We have advanced technology, and we have global cooperation, and we have enough wealth that we don’t have to break our backs working. So we need a new moral code for the new times. (Old-school sexual mores and stoning gay people probably aren’t good in the 21st century.)
The modern left has its own moral code. The modern right says we should mostly sick with the Christian moral code.
But the problem is, both moral codes — the old one and the new one — have some pretty severe flaws.
The flaws in right-wing morality
Right-wing morality worked for the past 2,000 years — but it’s a little out of touch with the modern world.
When surviving was pretty hard, we had to evolve a bunch of social codes that kept people focused on their work. But today surviving is pretty easy, and we have a bunch of new technologies to do most of our work for us.
Here are the ways that right wing morality falls short:
Unnecessary cruelty
Today, people tell you to “live your best life” — pursue your dreams and make yourself happy.
For most of human history, if you tried to “live their best life” at the expense of the group, then you could’ve killed your whole group.
Why does “living your best life” work today? Because we have the technology to let people kinda do what they want with their lives. That means we don’t need to have so many oppressive rules.
I’m writing this article from Bangkok, Thailand. I’m 10,000 miles away from my family. A hundred years ago, if I had gone to Asia, my family would’ve been short a healthy young man to work and bring in income, which could have made the difference between us surviving and us dying. But today, my family has a comfortable middle class life. If I spend my 20’s travelling and fucking around, they’ll be fine.
Some people haven’t really gotten the memo. For example, listen to this clip where Matt Walsh struggles to explain to Joe Rogan why gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married:
Human beings evolved to be a little bit homophobic, because if you can shame your gay son into pretending he’s straight, you get more grandchildren. That’s why nearly every culture in history has been mean to gay people to some degree.
Once upon a time, that made sense: it was better to get grandkids than to let your son or daughter marry who they wanted. But it’s not really necessary today. It’s better to just let gay people do their own thing and leave them alone.
Same thing with pretty much every form of ultra-collectivism. It had a purpose when life was hard. Now that life is easy, it’s outdated.
Plus, people are more creative when they can do their own thing instead of doing what their family/society tells them to do. And the world today doesn’t need hard work, it needs creativity.
Today, it’s good to let people leave the nest on their terms and find their own path in life.
Bored housewives
In the 1950’s, doctors would often prescribe speed to housewives.
Why? They were bored. They had nothing to do all day.
That didn’t work, so housewives did something else: they went out and got jobs.
Christian morality expects the woman to be the homemaker and the man to be the breadwinner. Taking care of kids and keeping the house clean was a full-time job, and somebody had to do it. Having the man go out and get a job while the woman kept things in order at home.
For most of history, keeping the house in order and raising children was a full time job. Either the husband or the wife had to do it. Usually it was the wife.
However, today, machines do a good chunk of the work that housewives used to do. We have dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and a whole lot more stuff that makes homemaking a whole lot easier. That means women don’t need to spend all day as homemakers anymore, because for the most part, the home makes itself.
For a decade or so, housewives just sat around the house all day doing nothing. (If you’ve ever sat around at home doing nothing for an extended period of time, you know how boring and depressing it is.)
That’s around the time that the women’s liberation movement happened. What a coincidence!
A lot of socially conservative people want to return to a world where women are mostly full-time housewives. But that isn’t gonna work. If you ask women to go back to simply raising kids all day, they’re gonna get bored.
Plus, the world is probably a better place when women are in leadership. Men have a lot of weaknesses: for instance, most of us have fragile egos, and many of us get angry too easily. We need some women in power to balance this stuff out.
Case in point: in Rwanda there was a huge genocide and a bunch of the men died, so women had to take over in leadership roles. Today Rwanda is one of the most successful countries in Africa.
Similarly, Queen Elizabeth is considered to be one of the greatest and wisest world leaders in history.
Also, giving women more power encourages men to be better. One of the huge reasons why it’s so hard for young men to get girlfriends is that today’s women are smarter and more successful than women in the past. Women don’t want to date men who are dumber or less successful than they are. By giving women more power and status, you encourage men to work harder so they get more power and status.
Suspicion of outsiders
When humans were evolving on the plains of Africa, we had to be suspicious of outsiders to survive. Outsiders were dangerous! Outsiders wanted to take our land, rape our wives, and slaughter our children.
If somebody didn’t look like you, didn’t talk like you, didn’t dress like you, or didn’t think like you, they were probably an outsider. So we learned to be suspicious of everyone who didn’t look like us, talk like us, dress like us, or think like us.
Today that suspicion of outsiders still exists. It manifests itself as racism, nationalism, and xenophobia.
It’s especially prominent in America because America is a nation of immigrants. Most of the people in the United States are here because their ancestors got on a boat and came here. That means a lot of us don’t look, talk, dress, or think like each other.
In many ways our diversity is our strength. If you don’t believe me, go to your mall’s food court and check out all the different options you have available: you can get tacos, pizza, hamburgers, Kung Pao chicken, shawarma, sushi, arepas, chicken tandoori, pad Thai, et cetera.
America does that with basically everything. We take the best of many different cultures and merge them together to create something really cool.
At the same time, America has always had trouble incorporating ethnic minorities. Because the human brain evolved to be a little racist.
When people are hostile and suspicious of their neighbors, it’s bad for everyone. America is poorer today than if we had never had slavery. That’s because if you want to have slavery, you have to create a culture of fear and oppression, and that culture of fear and oppression was bad for everybody — not just the slaves.
(If you don’t believe me, consider that the North is richer than the South. In fact, the South had the living standard of a third world country before the Civil Rights Movement.)
If we want to fight our inherent suspicion of each other then we need some liberalism. We need to create a new moral code that says that people from other cultures are good, so long as they assimilate into our culture well enough to be productive members of American society.
One thing to note: immigration isn’t always good. If you don’t believe me, look at Europe. Muslim immigrants to Europe usually don’t make a huge effort to assimilate into their home country’s culture, so many of them don’t share the values that made the West successful. Plus, European countries usually can’t afford to employ all their immigrants. Plus, a small chunk of these immigrants turn out to be terrorists. In Europe immigration is probably a net negative.
But in America, immigration is mostly a net positive. People who come to America usually buy into the American system, and after a few years they’re proud to be Americans. Then they work and make the country better for almost everybody else.
Insane Costs Of Living
My friend lives in Los Angeles, and he pays $2,400 a month for a 2-bedroom apartment. The apartment isn’t super pretty, it’s not in a convenient location, and it’s not that big. I went to see him in January and he told me that he has trouble paying his bills.
How did this happen? We let capitalism get out of control.
Once upon a time, you could tell somebody “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”. Then they’d go get a job at a factory, buy a house, marry a pretty wife, build a picket fence, and have 2.2 children.
But this is almost impossible in modern day America, because most jobs suck, because tons of people are buried in student loan debt, and because in most major cities you have to pay an arm and a leg just to live.
The problems with capitalism also somewhat apply to the environment. We’ve made a lot of cool shit because of capitalism, and we have technology that makes our lives way easier, but we might be fucking up the Earth.
Capitalism is generally good (I’ll get to this later) but needs to be reformed so that people can afford to pay their rent and so we don’t fuck up the environment.
No flexibility
Imagine that in 2019, Donald Trump got on TV and announced that in 2020, all Americans would be locked inside their homes for at least 2 months. How do you think people would have reacted?
Then, in 2020 there was a pandemic — and we had to lock ourselves in our homes otherwise people were gonna die. (Or at least we thought so at the time.)
Our moral code is basically the set of rules that work best for our society. The problem with that is, our society changes. The morals that worked well for yesterday’s society might not work well today.
This is especially important today, because technology is changing so quickly. Alcohol is generally good, but addictive and bad when used in excess, and it’s thousands of years old. We have social norms for dealing with it. The internet is generally good, but addictive and bad when used in excess, and it’s 30 years old — and we have no social norms for dealing with it.
The point is, the world today changes pretty quickly, and we have to come up with new moral codes on the fly. That means we can’t rely on 2,000-year-old books to guide us for everything. We can look in those books for wisdom, sure — but we have to adapt that wisdom to today’s world.
It’s just not competitive anymore
Most right-wing morals can still work in the 21st century. The Amish are pretty happy, and most Amish people choose to remain Amish, even after going on “Rumspringa.”
Same with the Mormons — Utah is one of the happiest, most productive places to live in the Western world.
The problem is, people just don’t want to buy into the whole “temperance and discipline” thing.
Imagine you’re 18 years old. You have to choose which moral code to buy into. One moral code tells you that sex before marriage is a sin, that all drugs are evil, and that hard work is the only way to be happy. The other moral code tells you it’s okay to have lots of consensual sex, do whatever drugs you want, spend all night partying, and goof off with your friends to your heart’s content. Who are you gonna listen to?
I work in marketing. One of the golden rules of marketing is that you have to promise people that using your product is easy. People don’t want to work very hard. If you market your product as “work really hard for a month and lose weight,” and the other guy markets his product as “do this 10 minute exercise and lose weight”, then you will make no money and the other guy will make a shitload of money.
In other words, people don’t want to do the “hard thing”.
In our world the “hard thing” is working hard, making sacrifices, and forgoing stuff like sex and brownies and drugs. The easy thing is playing video games all day and smoke pot and hook up and not work that hard. If we try to force people to do the hard thing, most of them won’t listen.
It would be way better if we taught people to use vices in moderation, and to come up with strategies to have fun responsibly without neglecting the stuff they have to do or wrecking their personal lives.
The flaws in left-wing morality
Most of the problems in right-wing morality are because it’s too old: it’s not adapted for modern times.
Most of the problems with left-wing morality are because it’s too young: it’s untested and we still haven’t seen the long-term consequences.
Most liberals I talk to don’t really get this. They don’t get that the world lasts longer than their lifetime. They don’t get that some things take 100+ years to play out. They don’t get that a cultural change in 1960 can make life awesome in 2010 and make life a living hell in 2060.
Sometimes they do get it if I mention Japan. If I tell them that Japan went through the same moral shift around the same time and is now having massive problems with birth rates, anxiety, depression, too many old people, etc, then they say, ohhhhh, I get it. Sometimes they even go one step further and realize that the exact same thing is gonna happen in America and Europe. (To some extent that stuff is already happening in America and Europe.)
We can already start to detect some of the long-term problems are bubbling up beneath the surface, partially by studying Japan, partially by studying history, and partially by looking really closely at what’s going on in our world today. There are probably gonna be more that we can’t anticipate now. Here are the ones we can anticipate now:
Collapsing birth rates
Most Western countries are headed for the same fate as Japan. In Europe most countries aren’t having enough children to replace their current populations.
The left likes to say that we’re in danger of overpopulating the planet. To some extent this is true. Earth can only handle so many people.
But right now a much bigger risk is not having enough kids. When you don’t have enough kids, you get a society with tons of retirees and not many young people. The young people have to do more work to support the retirees. It’s terrible.
Why are birth rates going down? A few reasons. Partially it’s because human beings are more “domesticated” than we used to be.
When you put animals in a zoo, they don’t breed as much. Some animals refuse to breed at all. Humans work the same way: when everybody lives in cities, they lose their motivation to do a lot of things, including have kids.
It’s also partially because our moral structure has changed. Having kids is really hard and requires a ton of sacrifice. Once upon a time, people felt like it was their job to make those kinds of sacrifices. But today we like to only do stuff that “feels good”.
If your whole moral system is about not putting people through hardship and helping them feel good, then guess what? They’re not gonna have as many kids.
Softness
In the 50’s, a bunch of researchers did an experiment called “Mouse Utopia”. They got a bunch of mice and put them in a “utopia” where they had all the food they wanted. They never had to work — they could just dick around all day.
The mice ended up incredibly unhappy. They got depressed and lost the will to live.
This is kind of what it’s like to live in a city. Today, we are 100x wealthier than our ancestors were. We can get food delivered to our house by pressing a few buttons. We spend 8 hours a day working on our computers instead of 16 hours a day working in coal mines. If you’re young, your probability of dying on any given day is basically zero. Et cetera.
Meanwhile, there’s a mental health crisis going on. Tons of people are depressed.
We also don’t know how to deal with the real world. When I was in college a whole bunch of my fellow students told me that they were afraid to go into the real world. They wanted to stay in college forever. Getting a job sounded like hell to them. 100 years ago, when life was a lot harder, nobody thought this way.
I’m gonna say something that’s gonna be really controversial, but that every single one of you reading this knows is true. (Yes, even you.) The current generation of American kids is soft. We haven’t been through enough hardship in our lives, so we don’t know how to deal with hardship.
Social justice morality is a big part of the reason why. It doesn’t teach people how to deal with the real world. Today’s schools don’t teach kids how to face challenges — instead, they try to remove as many real challenges as possible so that kids never feel any negative emotions.
Of course, when you don’t have to solve problems growing up, you’re incapable of solving problems as an adult. The more you coddle kids, the weaker and stupider they get
Anti-Capitalism
Humans are envious creatures. We have a deep seated emotional desire to hurt people who are more successful than us.
One of the reasons why America became successful is because we tamed our envy. For a long time, Americans respected the entrepreneurs who drove us towards greatness. Americans saw rich people as role models, not enemies.
This worked out for America. In exchange for letting rich people do their thing, we got railroads, indoor plumbing, electricity, skyscrapers, cheap energy, affordable cars, discount supermarkets, social media platforms, and free 2-day shipping.
People hate to admit it but Ayn Rand was right. Most good things are invented and popularized by a small number of risk takers, who become very wealthy for their work. If you want to have a prosperous society then you have to let capitalists do their thing, instead of getting angry at them.
(If you don’t believe me, try naming a single important consumer invention that came out of Soviet Russia, or out of Europe after World War II. You can’t do it. Every important 20th century technology was invented in America. Also, consider that in the decades where the top income tax bracket was 90% or 70%, America had very few meaningful technological innovations.)
If you want to be a rich country, you have to tame your envy. But some countries don’t do a great job of taming their envy. Especially Latin American countries — whenever a Latin American country becomes wealthy, you can be pretty confident it will turn socialist soon. And then bad things will happen.
Case in point: Cuba was one of the richest countries in Latin America before Castro took over. Venezuela was one of the richest countries in Latin America before Hugo Chavez took over. Chile is one of the richest countries in Latin America today, and 5 years ago left-wing protestors rioted in the streets demanding reforms. Colombia had a miraculous economic turnaround over the past 20 years and became a popular tourist destination; then 2 years ago it elected a left-wing terrorist as its president. Et cetera.
The same thing is happening in America today. Partially because of real problems in the economy — rent is really expensive and it’s hard for young people to live a good lifestyle without mooching off their parents. And partially because the social justice moral framework tells you that it’s okay to give in to your nasty emotions like envy, instead of trying to suppress them.
This is why Bernie Sanders shot to popularity. The same way that Trump got popular by telling laid-off coal miners that Mexicans were causing their problems, Bernie got popular by telling young kids who can’t pay their rent that billionaires were causing their problems. (Really, both groups’ problems are caused by a mix of market forces towards globalization and incompetent leadership at home.)
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The problem with this is that markets are the engine of prosperity. Long-term economic growth is pretty much impossible when you don’t have capitalism. That is why there’s a huge correlation between a country’s economic freedom index and how wealthy it is. So if we give up capitalism, we’re doomed.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a social safety net — we can be compassionate towards the poor without hating the rich. Negative income taxes and well-managed welfare programs are a net good. Unions are sometimes a net good. But absurdly high minimum wages and high taxes on the rich are counterproductive, and ultimately end up hurting poor people more in the long run.
Incels
Remember what I said earlier about how women don’t want to date men who are dumber/less successful than they are? Well, turns out when you create a society that lifts up women and demonizes men, you get tons and tons of incels — men who give up on life because they can’t get a girlfriend.
Right now the social justice movement is telling young men that they should be ashamed of their masculinity. As a result young men aren’t turning out so great. (Imagine how you would turn out if a bunch of people had shamed you for being who you are during your childhood.)
And sure, social justice people don’t usually say that masculinity is bad overtly, but… that’s the message that young boys get. Maybe “male privilege” isn’t intended as an accusation, but it sure feels like one.
There are other reasons why it’s hard for men to date today — for example, our social skills suck because we grew up texting instead of talking face to face. But part of the problem is that public school teachers have been indoctrinating young men into dumb left wing ideologies for the past 15 years instead of teaching them to be good, honorable people. So now that those men are grown up, they don’t know how to use their masculinity properly.
The incel problem is exacerbated by the fact that our school system teaches people to sit down and follow directions. Girls are better at sitting down and following directions than boys, so they tend to get better grades. That means that girls end up going to college more often, getting into better colleges, getting better jobs out of college, and becoming more successful than their male peers.
It’s a good thing that women are getting more freedom to be who they want. But that can’t come at the expense of men being successful. Otherwise you end up with a huge class full of loser men with nothing to live for — which hurts both men and women.
Loser men with nothing to live for are dangerous. Pretty much every single school shooter is a loser man with nothing to live for. Plus, historically, every time a society has had a huge class of loser men with nothing to live for, a civil war or revolution happens. (Loser men with nothing to live for will believe insane ideologies and follow insane leaders.)
Young men need to be encouraged to take risks and improve themselves. Instead, modern America tries to emasculate its young men and tell them they’re evil. That sucks and it’s gonna lead to negative consequences down the road.
No Community
The summer after my freshman year of college, I worked with a bunch of Mormons. They were the nicest people I’ve ever met. They would give you the shirt off their backs if you needed it. They took a genuine interest in your life. It was easy to make friends with them.
Then I went back to school at Vassar College, where it was not easy for me to make friends. The other kids there were “fake nice” — they acted like they were your friend but they weren’t really your friend. It was almost impossible for me to find genuine human connection there. I never felt like I fit in.
Today we are unhappier and more socially isolated than ever before in human history. Especially in wealthy places and especially in big cities.
There are a bunch of reasons for that. One of the reasons is that we got rid of stuff like church and bowling leagues and replaced them with online communities and TV. Another reason is that social justice morals tell people to be fake nice instead of real nice.
Today most people in big cities don’t know their neighbors. (I talked to a Russian guy in my apartment building a few weeks ago, and he told me I was the first person he talked to in 3 months.)
This is horrible because humans are a social species. If we’re gonna be happy then we need to have friends.
Online communities are a terrible substitute for a bunch of reasons. Online communities are anonymous and you can leave anytime you want, meaning online communities can’t really hold people accountable that well. It’s hard to make good friends in online communities. Online communities can easily turn into echo chambers or hate-fueled circlejerks. Et cetera.
The Christian moral framework never had a problem with this, because in Christianity you’re supposed to go to church every Sunday. Maybe the whole “God” thing is a scam, but church still plays an important role in community building. When you see everyone in your town every Sunday, you know them better and you make better friends with them. (Plus, church is a great place to meet your future spouse, which people are struggling to do today.)
We need to create some sort of way we can connect with each other. Otherwise we’re gonna be lonely forever.
Walking The Tightrope
When you talk to most people in the West, they’re strongly in favor of one of the two moral codes. Either they’re staunchly liberal or they’re staunchly conservative.
That’s a major problem, because neither moral code can really work on its own. The best societies of the 21st century are gonna find a way to balance the 2 moral codes.
Asia does a great job of that — especially Singapore. Lee Kwan Yew, essentially the “founder” of modern Singapore, built Singapore into a first world city largely by studying what successful countries did and copying it. He didn’t subscribe to any ideology; he just did whatever worked.
Today, conservatives and liberals look at each other as enemies. They each see the other as a group they have to vanquish in order to win. It’s to the point where people are seriously saying that America could have another civil war.
Most liberals I’ve talked to don’t really understand conservatives at all, even if they think they do. And most conservatives are so pissed off at liberals for making dumb changes that they can’t see that some things do need fixing.
But liberals and conservatives need each other, and Western society would fail miserably if either group became too powerful.
If you’re extreme one way or the other in your political views, I’m gonna encourage you to take a step back and ask yourself if maybe the other side makes some good points sometimes. Chances are, if you spent 6 months living with people who disagreed with you, and actually getting to know them as people, your views would change pretty radically.
It’s pretty important that we do this, because we need to work out some sort of balance between these 2 moral frameworks. We need to “walk the tightrope” between progressivism and tradition, so we can fix what’s broken without fucking up what isn’t broken. If we don’t, we’re gonna destroy each other.
Hey! Thanks for reading.
If this is your first time reading one of my articles, welcome! My name’s Theo and I write an article every Monday about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually that’s related to social sciences and long-term trends in the world.
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