There is No Winning the Culture War

Dear reader,

I interrupted my regular publishing schedule to spend a couple weeks building my first real software product (with friend and Other Life reader Andrew Hitchcock).

It’s a work in progress but we launched and I’m stoked! I’m using it myself every day: Pro Writing Tools: The most careful AI toolkit for the most authentic writers.

Finally, for readers in Los Angeles: Other Life is co-hosting a public meetup with Cost of Glory in one week on Friday afternoon. HIT REPLY to join us!

I hope to return to my regular publishing cadence next week.

Until then, a quick thought on why I’m so extremely optimistic about the United States!

It’s widely believed that the Left is “winning” because they’re overrepresented at the top of many prestigious institutions.

But the Left is not winning.

They are climbing to the top of a sinking ship faster than right-wingers, but that's hardly "winning."

Let them have the utterly corrupted and technologically obsolesced institutions! Let them have everything in the city of man, from the universities down to the last halloween candy bowl!

They will end up with nothing at all, for a race to the bottom can only end in Hell—though at any time, every person is completely welcome to rejoin the straight and narrow, where there will always be bearers of civilization.

That's where I try to live, that's where I spend time with people, that's where I read, and write, and talk, and build my business, and build my family, and collaborate with others building their own business and families. I really don’t see any Right or Left in my own daily life.

American institutions are already being replaced by private, imperceptible networks of incredible people building and enforcing their own freedoms, seeking truth, oriented toward virtue. That's all America ever was!

Visible America is already being fixed by a subterranean America, as I write this—it's just illegible to the current media culture. There is a ton of capital, a ton of talent, and a ton of spiritual discipline building tremendous value in autonomous and private networks of capital, technology, and intellect. People just don't know about it yet.

In 100 years, America will still be the richest and most powerful country in the world, where good people will enjoy lives of great wealth, knowledge, security, and peace. The rule of law and sound money will be perfected and self-enforcing via matured blockchain technology. Privacy and security will be perfected via mature zero-knowledge technologies. Most reigning falsehoods and suppressed truths will be rectified by the continuing acceleration of intelligence and the increasing speed and power advantages of those who wield more truth than others. Truthful, virtuous, intelligent, productive people will be wealthy and secure beyond your wildest imagination, while the people who cling to lies and stupidity and bad behavior will rapidly exit the gene pool (fertility is a problem, I admit, but survival will be a much bigger problem for dependents of collapsed institutions). I don't say this with any pleasure.

It means nothing that our technologically obsolesced institutions are controlled by silly or evil people. All capital, all technology, even weapons power, everything will escape the control of these institutions. It's obviously already happening, if you can detach from the society of the spectacle for even a moment.

They will increasingly find themselves drowning and climbing into the thousands of lifeboats currently being constructed, and the ones already floating. Trying to take over a sinking ship is the most absurd goal I can possibly imagine and it boggles my mind that this is the focal point of the "dissident" right, which I expected to be a little sharper than this.

The future is so bright that it’s blinding.

Don’t worry about winning some grand macro-social game. Exit the institutions and build something wild from scratch. That’s how you win the macro-social game. That’s how America did it the first time, and that’s how we’ll do it the second time.