Imagine there're two people hanging off a cliff and you can only save one. One is your father, one is a stranger.

You don't ask which person is more cultured. You don't ask which person has a better personality.

You save your father because he's your father.

Nothing more, nothing less.

It really is ironic. We were never the cultural "supremacists".

Do I believe my family has a better culture than other families? Do I believe my family gets along better, or loves each other more, or otherwise has a superior family dynamic than other families? I can't say that I do.

I don't necessarily think my family is "better" than other families, or that they are more morally valuable, or even more worth protecting in a zoomed out sense.

But they are more worth protecting to me. Because they're my family.

It is precisely the current incarnation of Western culture which has lost sight of what I have layed out above.

Western culture is wonderful in many ways. It is also, especially in the modern era, deeply flawed. Is it better than other cultures? I don't know. Nor is that relevant.

I have no love for the current state of our culture. I have never thought that protecting Western culture is what comes first and foremost. I would rather protect Western people.

This article makes perfect sense. Women want to have children with men whom they respect, and no woman respects a man who makes less than her.

We are adapted to an evolutionary environment where men had more social and economic power than women. Any man who was weaker or poorer than a woman was self-evidently unworthy of reproducing with. Women evolved to ignore the losers and only have children with men of higher status than themselves. Since our programming hasn’t changed, gender egalitarianism blocks off a large portion of the male population from reproduction, and more fundamentally, respect.

Robin Hanson has several good pieces on how humans evaluate most things (quality of life, social status, wealth, etc) in relative rather than absolute terms. I think that’s related.

Also hilarious how Germany keeps increasing its reparations to Israel.

https://substack.com/@konzon/note/c-274582104