Amerika

Conservatives can be divided into two groups: political conservatives and social conservatives.

Political conservatives believe a conservative approach is the best way to run a government and an economy. For them, conservatism is a management style and theory of resource use.

Social conservatives believe that a society is happiest when its customs, rules, and values are conservative. They may also be political conservatives, but not necessarily. For them, conservatism is a way of life.

Of the two, social conservatism is the most taboo because it places restrictions on the individual (as do all political systems, including anarchy, but less visibly). People like the idea that they can do whatever they want to whenever and wherever, with no consequences, and that we’ll still be forced by a rule on a piece of paper to tolerate them.

However, there are reasons for it. Notice how this article starts:

“Houston has a huge commercial sex industry and there’s some quotes that say that there’s more SOBs, which is sexually-oriented businesses, in Houston per square mile than there are in Las Vegas.”

Steven Goff is the project director for Houston Rescue and Restore Coalition. He says what many people don’t realize is the women working in those establishments are often there against their will.

“A lot of people think that trafficking just occurs in seedy places, you know in dark alleys or something like that. And while it does, it also occurs in plain sight. There are places that people in Houston pass by on a daily basis where there’s possibly human trafficking — modern-day slaves — inside those places, that are housed there for two to three weeks at a time and then rotated somewhere else.” – KUHF

So we know that modern slavery is a trade in young women sold as prostitutes, and that it happens in businesses right before our eyes, because apparently the community accepts them.

Well, why not?

If sex has no sacred role, and if sex is just another pleasurable sensation, why shouldn’t the selling of it be legal — just like selling a massage, or an ice cream cone, or other pleasurable sensations?

If we’re mature modern materialists we can recognize that sex just has a function in reproduction, and that it’s fun only to make us rut like animals, so we might as well deconstruct its role in marriage and family, and make it like getting a drink at a bar.

Since we’re revolutionary moderns, we know that the only people who oppose this idea are immature and afraid of mortality, because they don’t want to accept this notion of sex as having zero significance outside of a few moments of pleasure.

Of course, as revolutionary moderns, we are forced to recognize that if sex is for sale, it’s soon going to put a price tag on every set of genitals, and that people will be imported from the poorest regions to provide this service. Our only suggestion will be more cops and more bureaucrats to try to solve the problem, which has not worked for the last three hundred years or so.

Saner people will point out the obvious: if you sexualize a culture, and deconstruct sex from a sacred role, you’ve created an addiction to sex and a culture of permissiveness where rape and slavery soon get normed:

“We really need to end the demand for this. Guys in our city, guys in our state, thinking that this is a normal thing — that it’s normal to go to a sex club, it’s normal to call an escort service. Those are the things that really prompt a lot of this demand for children, for young prostituted girls — it’s this demand that we perceive as normal in the city of Houston that really is not normal.”

That’s from the same article. His point is simple: you don’t have sex slavery unless you have a city of sex-crazed people who don’t care where they get the sex from.

But I thought that we had deconstructed sex from any kind of role, like being a crazed obsession, and made it into something liberated and free?

The problem is that we didn’t separate it from its role; we only reversed it. In the social conservative view, sex is a means to an end like love, marriage and family. You don’t have sex to have love; you have love, and then you have sex. In other words, the sex isn’t a symbol of love, but something that happens as a consequence of love.

But when we reversed — sorry, deconstructed — that, we ended up with a contextless and entropic view of sex. It exists by itself. But it’s supposed to be fun. We like fun, right? So we pursue it, and soon it becomes a surrogate for love. We don’t have love, but we can get sex. And the more loveless our lives, the meaner we are when we buy it, which makes us casually not care if we’re raping at 12-year-old from Guatemala.

The ancient form of slavery meant that you took war captives and used them as labor, then sent them home after a certain number of years.

The modern form of slavery is people being treated as a product, in part because the rest of us treat ourselves as products. Sex is not a means to an end for us. Sex is like a signal we send to the world, saying that we’re having a good life and we’re having fun and we’re not losers, damnit.

Neil Postman, in his path-breaking book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” saw the handwriting — or rather the images — on the wall. He lamented the demise of print under the onslaught of the visual, thanks largely to television. Like McLuhan, Postman felt that print culture helped create thought that was rational, ordered and engaging, and he blamed TV for making us mindless. Print not only welcomed ideas, it was essential to them. Television not only repelled ideas, it was inimical to them.

…

The seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short communication is not one that is likely to convey, let alone work out, ideas, great or not. Facebook, Twitter, Habbo, MyLife and just about every other social networking site pare everything down to noun and verb and not much more. The sites, and the information on them, billboard our personal blathering, the effluvium of our lives, and they wind up not expanding the world but shrinking it to our own dimensions. You could call this a metaphor for modern life, increasingly narcissistic and trivial, except that the sites and the posts are modern life for hundreds of millions of people.

Which is where the revolutionary aspect comes in. Gutenberg’s Revolution transformed the world by broadening it, by proliferating ideas. Zuckerberg’s Revolution also may change consciousness, only this time by razing what Gutenberg had helped erect. The more we text and Twitter and “friend,” abiding by the haiku-like demands of social networking, the less likely we are to have the habit of mind or the means of expressing ourselves in interesting and complex ways.

That makes Zuckerberg the anti-Gutenberg. He has facilitated a typography in which complexity is all but impossible and meaninglessness reigns supreme. To the extent that ideas matter, we are no longer amusing ourselves to death. We are texting ourselves to death. – LAT

We’ve done the same thing with communication as sex. Where we used to communicate to spread an idea, now we communicate so that people can see us communicating. We have made it meaningless and yet obsessive, addictive like modern sex.

Maybe those social conservatives were onto something when they suggested that sex, or words, should be a means to an end and not an end in and of themselves.

Could it be that our modern thinking is wrong, and that social conservatives are right not just on a practical level, but a philosophical and mathematical one?

Did we reverse our thinking somehow, and now our assumptions make us insane?

How could this all have started with… with chastity, for ungod’s sake! That’s just ludicrous. Although reproduction does seem to be the most basic goal of a species, and with animals that nurture their young, the nurturing part is as important as the insemination.

The tail is wagging the dog. Instead of thinking from cause to effect, and setting up that cause as our goal, we’re thinking about effects only. We are then baffled when they, needing a corresponding cause, make it themselves. This is the nature of a virus or any other parasite: it acts like it works toward a purpose you need, but really, it serves itself.

The number of very poor countries has doubled in the last 30 to 40 years, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has also grown two-fold, a UN think-tank warned Thursday.

In its annual report on the 49 least developed countries (LDCs) in the world, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said that the model of development that has prevailed to date for these countries has failed and should be re-assessed.

“The traditional models that have been applied to LDCs that tend to move the LDCs in the direction of trade-related growth seem not to have done very well,” said Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary general of UNCTAD. – Raw Story

No kidding. Are you for real? We thought that if we just brought them our style of society, they’d become us.

But evolution branched. They didn’t evolve our kind of society not because as Jared Diamond disingenously suggests in Guns, Germs and Steel they did not have the resources, but because they were not ready.

So instead of developing, they become our modern slaves.

This is popular in the West, because it lets us raise up yesterday’s white peasants to new levels of wealth and middle class comfort. We outsourced all the peasant jobs, so now our peasants get to drive SUVs, live in 3000 square foot homes, and make good salaries doing make-work jobs. Shuffling paper, being salesmen, maybe even designing some web pages (that somehow look like all other web pages).

What could go wrong is that in doing so, we detach ourselves from the actual point of a society. We as individuals are means to an end, which is perpetuation of a culture, an idea, and a civilization in which good people get rewarded and bad people get spanked down.

In our hurry to deconstruct wealth from merit and sex from love, we have reversed our thinking, so now the tail wags the dog, and all the wrong people are getting into power. All the wrong behaviors are being rewarded. And that makes us pathological.

In the end, it will make us all slaves. The social conservatives were right: chastity is better than free love, even if free love sounds good to our ears for the first four decades.