culture – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Will Islam still be a major world religion in 100 years?

This question has been on my mind recently, as we watch the escalating protests in Iran, many of which appear to be directed against the religion just as much as they are against the regime. Yes, Iran is Shia, while most of the rest of the Islamic world is Sunni, but I’ve heard quite a few rumblings of religious discontent in the Sunni world as well, which don’t show up on the front pages since Sunni Islam doesn’t typically have a central religious authority the way most Shia sects do (it’s kind of like the difference between the Catholics and the Protestants in that regard).

But this goes beyond just the news of the day. The more I look into this, the more it seems evident that Islam is deeply threatened by the rise of the Internet, and is probably falling into terminal decline because of it. Historically, Islam depends on controlled speech and fear of other Muslims to keep its adherents from leaving the faith. The Internet breaks down both of those things: it provides a medium where people can share their ideas freely and anonymously, and it allows the formation of niche interest communities independent from the mainstream.

From what I understand, most of the statistics that count the global Muslim population do not make a distinction between true believers and people who do not practice the faith, but still identify as Muslim. Which means that there is probably a large percentage—perhaps even a majority—of self-identifying Muslims who don’t actually believe the religion. I forgot where I saw this, but there was a survey of Iranians that provided some evidence that this is the case in that country, at least.

It’s crazy to think that a major world religion might collapse in the next hundred years, but this has happened before. Two thousand years ago, the majority of the world was pagan, but you’d be hard pressed to find a true-believing worshipper of Zeus/Jupiter anywhere in the world today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrianism was a major world religion, but now there are less than a million adherents.

Things generally change less than people expect in the short term, but more than people expect in the long term. One of the more interesting ways that I think the world could change in the next hundred years is with the collapse of Islam as a major world religion. I can’t prove it, of course, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds of the argument, but since I do occasionally write stories that take place in the near future, this sort of thing interests me. And one thing I think we all can agree on is that with all of the turmoil of our current age, it’s going to be a very different world 100 years from now.

Fantasy from A to Z: Z is for Zeitgeist

What is the future of fantasy literature? Where is the genre headed, based on current cultural trends?

For a long time, epic fantasy was basically Tolkien-light. There were exceptions, of course, but most readers wanted something that felt a lot like Lord of the Rings, and the most successful writers were the ones who gave it to them. There was a little bit of innovation, probably culminating in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but if you picked up a random epic fantasy off the shelf, you could have a pretty good idea of what you were getting into.

Then, in the 90s and 00s, fantasy started to get dark and gritty, with writers like Joe Abercrombie and George R.R. Martin setting the tone. This new subgenre or flavor of fantasy, called grimdark, really came to dominate during this time, to the point where some were calling Martin an “American Tolkien” (though all that talk more or less died with the terrible finale of the show). Grimdark is still quite dominant, though an increasing number of readers are turning to “cozy” fantasy or slice-of-life in subgenres like litRPG. And of course, romantasy is taking off like crazy, though as we’ve already discussed, most romantasy is basically just porn.

So where are we going from here?

Our culture tends to pass through a cycle of seasonal turnings, where each season is the length of a generation, and the cycle itself is the length of a long human life. Reduced to its simplest form, the cycle follows a pattern like this:

Strong men create good times (first turning).

Good times create weak men (second turning).

Weak men create hard times (third turning).

Hard times create strong men (fourth turning).

We are currently living in a fourth turning, which is the period when all of the major wars and catastrophes tend to happen. In other words, the fourth turning is basically a grimdark world—or rather, when the full consequences of a grimdark world become manifest. But the grimdark subgenre really took off in the third turning, when dark and grim fantasy worlds resonated with the “hard times” that we all were starting to live through. This is also why dystopian YA became so popular in the 90s and 00s.

(As a side note, I have to say that I find it both perplexing and hilarious how so many zoomers think of the 90s as a simple and wholesome time, to the point where they think they experience nostalgia for it. Those of us who lived through the 90s remember it very differently, as an era of school shootings, political scandals, collapsing churches, teenage pregnancies, and ever-escalating culture wars. There’s a reason why Smells Like Teen Spirit was the decade’s anthem. Though in all fairness, I suppose that if someone from the middle ages were to visit our own time, they would find the nostalgic yearning on which the whole fantasy genre is based to be just as perplexing and hilarious.)

I believe we are on the cusp of a major cultural wave that is going to change everything, to the point of making our world almost unrecognizable to those who lived through the 90s and 00s. And just as the grimdark authors like Martin and Abercrombie rose to prominence by riding the wave in their part of the generational cycle, there are a lot of noblebright authors who stand to benefit from riding this next wave, which is only now beginning to break.

After all, there is another way to formulate the generational cycles. It looks something like this:

Complacent men create a spiritually dead culture (first turning).

A spiritually dead culture creates awakened men (second turning).

Awakened men create a spiritually vibrant culture (third turning).

A spiritually vibrant culture creates complacent men (fourth turning).

In the summer of 2024, I think we passed through a critical fork in the current timeline. If the generational cycle had followed its usual course, then our current crisis period would have ended with a period of unification under a new order, based upon the spiritual foundations that were laid during the 60s and 70s. In other words, the woke left would have won, and we’d be living under the sort of regime that would enforce woke values. Dissent would not be tolerated, because dissent is never tolerated in a first-turning world.

The second most likely outcome would have been a complete shattering of the generational cycles. In other words, we would have fallen into some sort of national divorce or hot civil war, with the United States splitting apart and the Western world completing its cultural suicide, which has been ongoing for several decades now. There has never been a time when such a major cultural rift has been accomplished by peaceful means. It is always accompanied by a terrible, bloody war.

But when President Trump survived the assassin’s bullet at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that’s the point where I think our timeline diverged—and it followed the least likely path, which has only ever happened once in the history of modern generational cycles. We skipped from a fourth-turning straight into a second-turning, skipping straight from crisis to revival.

The last time this happened was with the US civil war. Usually, after a culture survives an existential crisis, you get a period of national unity, which often results in a brief golden age (or at least, an age that is remembered as such, often by those who did not live through it). But after the civil war, there was no national unity. Instead, we skipped right to the second turning, which is typically characterized by a major spiritual awakening.

Whatever your opinions of President Trump, the fact that he survived the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and went on to win the 2024 election in a landslide means that we have (for the moment) avoided the first two scenarios. At this point, it’s difficult to imagine the woke left taking back the culture and leading us into a first-turning world in their own image. And though the US may yet fall into a hot civil war, from where I’m standing in flyover country that no longer seems quite so imminent.

Don’t get me wrong, though. We are not about to enter a period of national unity anytime soon. Certainly not a period of national unity whose foundations were laid by the previous spiritual awakening, which is what the generational cycle requires. At the same time, because President Trump survived the Butler assassination attempt (thank God), I think we avoided a hot civil war.

Because of all this, I think that we are about to experience a major cultural upheaval, the likes of which have never been seen in living memory. We will not get a period of unification. We will not experience a golden age period of material prosperity (though there may be a few years of plenty before the years of famine begin in earnest). But we will experience a cultural and spiritual revival that will burn through our culture until it has utterly demolished the woke worldview and values laid down during the 60s and 70s, and built something entirely new in its place.

What will that look like? And how will it affect the trajectory of fantasy literature?

Culturally, it will be a period of incredible dynamism. We will see an explosion of creative expression in every field, including in literature. Books and movies and games that are cultural mainstays now will be totally forgotten within a couple of decades, and everything that is popular now will feel dated and out of touch in the space of just a few years.

The authors and artists who will do the most to shape this new culture are today almost completely unknown, but they will become household names in surprisingly short order. Others will take decades to become known, but they will write their most important works in just the next few years.

The country will hold together. There will be no civil war, though there may be a global one. And there will almost certainly be an economic collapse, like the Great Depression, except much deeper and much longer. But all of this will only serve to fuel the spiritual revival, and the revival in turn will fuel the cultural dynamism, until the country and ultimately the world have been entirely transformed.

In more practical terms, I think we are going to see a lot of publishing houses fold, and a lot of popular authors fall out of favor. Many of them will keep their core group of fans, but they won’t be nearly as culturally relevant moving forward. New authors will rise from unexpected places to replace them, especially as the old institutions (publishers, conventions, magazines, review sites) collapse.

Romantasy will ultimately be recognized as the pornography that it is, though not until after it’s done great damage to the fantasy genre as a whole. The damage will be healed by a return to the genre’s spiritual roots. Grimdark will fade, and noblebright will rise, though it will ultimately take a different name and be recognized for other characteristics. It all depends on which of the thousand blooming flowers get picked.

LitRPG will mature into a long-term stable subgenre, and capture most of the innovation in the field. It may spin off into multiple long-term stable subgenres. Meanwhile, epic fantasy will return to its roots and grow as the spiritual revival takes hold. But instead of getting Tolkien clones, we’re going to see a lot of original and innovative work.

That’s the zeitgeist as I see it. The next few years are going to be a wild ride. Are you up for it? I hope that I am.

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Fantasy from A to Z: Y is for Yearning

What kind of fantasy books do you hope to see more of in the next few years? What direction do you hope the genre goes next?

Personally, I would like to see the genre return to its roots. But that probably isn’t a surprise, if you’ve read the other blog posts in this series. I’ve invoked Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien in almost all of them. Those two men are the grandfathers of modern fantasy: Howard from the sword & sorcery side, and Tolkien from the epic fantasy side. Until just the last few years, most fantasy authors stood on the shoulders of those great authors.

I’m not opposed to rules-based magic on principle. I do think that it can be done quite well, such as with Brandon Sanderson’s earlier work. But I would like to see a revival of more traditional fantasy magic systems, which aren’t really “systems” at all, but mysterious forces of nature rooted in folklore and mythology. With its overemphasis on game-like dynamics and quirky rules-based magic systems, much of modern fantasy seems to have lost sight of the ancient archetypes that gave the works of Tolkien and Howard their staying power.

As the modern world drifts further from its roots, forgetting all the stories that were handed down to us from countless generations past, so too has our fantasy lost sight of its roots, thinning out to the point where it’s little more than an aesthetic—a bundle of tropes and caricatures that evoke a nostalgia not of our pre-modern past, but of other popular fantasy stories. Thus, with each new work in this vein, the genre is diluted just a little bit more, becoming a pale shadow of what it once was.

That is why I would like to see fantasy return to its roots. I would like to see more fantasy that draws deeply from the well of history and mythology, not just to create an aesthetic, but to embed those themes and archetypes deeply into the story itself. I don’t care whether that mythology is European or not (though as a pan-European mutt, that is the culture that resonates most with me), but I do want to read books that do more than file the serial numbers off of another culture and wear it like a skin suit.

It’s not so much that I’m worried about “cultural appropriation”—hell, as the son of medieval vikings, cultural appropriation is my culture—but if that’s what you’re going to do, you should damn right do it well. There’s a reason why we all got sick and tired of all the Tolkien clones. If we’re going to take fantasy back to its roots, we’ve got to do more than copy all the greats who came before us. We’ve got to understand, in a deep and visceral way, just what exactly they were trying to build, and then build upon it with something new.

Fantasy and science fiction are all about evoking that sense of wonder. Science fiction evokes that wonder by looking to the future; fantasy evokes that wonder by looking to the past. Our modern world has forgotten far too much of its cultural heritage. I want to see more fantasy that brings it back.

Fantasy from A to Z: X is for eXpectations

What sort of books are fantasy readers looking for today? What are the expectations that readers have for the genre?

Overall, the fantasy genre is growing. Sales are up, both in traditional and indie publishing, and the big names in the field (like Brandon Sanderson) are doing quite well. It’s clear that the fantasy genre as a whole is robust and healthy.

When you break it down by publishers and subgenres, however, things start to look a little different. Romantasy is dominating the traditional publishing world, but most of it is little more than pornography for women, dressed up with fantasy trappings. And because of how traditional publishing now relies on a few big blockbusters to make most of their earnings, romantasy is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, making it much more difficult for debut and midlist authors in the other fantasy subgenres.

In the world of indie publishing, litRPG has begun to demonstrate some staying power. It was the new hot thing back in the early 2020s, but it’s attracted enough attention and developed enough of a following that it has become a major subgenre that is likely to endure for some time. I could be wrong about that, but from what I see, that’s where most of the innovative authors and whale readers (ie >1 book per week) are focusing their attention these days.

But because of the way that the algorithms tend to govern the indie publishing cycle (and the way that indie publishing has unfortunately turned into a zero-sum, pay-to-play game with online advertising), the rise of litRPG in the indie publishing world may very well be sucking all of the oxygen out of the room in the same way that romantasy is sucking it out of the traditional publishing world.

Both subgenres are also very gender-biased, with women gravitating toward romantasy and men gravitating toward litRPG. This reflects the broader social and political trend of men and women going separate ways, across a whole host of different metrics. So as the gender divide continues to widen in society generally, that will probably reinforce the divide between romantasy and litRPG, creating a positive feedback loop (or death spiral, depending on how you look at it).

Sword and sorcery continues to do okay, and has probably been given a boost by the recent release of Conan the Barbarian into the public domain. But most of sword and sorcery got siphoned off into grimdark back in the 00s—in fact, you could say that sword and sorcery reinvented itself as grimdark. And while grimdark has resisted the feminization of literature, standing as one of the few remaining bastions where male readers continue to feel at home, I think grimdark has already passed its peak. In a post-pandemic, post-Trump world, I think most readers are hungry for books that are less nihilistic and more uplifting.

Which brings us to epic fantasy. While Brandon Sanderson continues to dominate this subgenre, with his massive kickstarters and huge book releases, it’s debatable whether his readers are hungry for more epic fantasy, or just for more Brandon Sanderson. He’s kind of a subgenre all to himself. Recent streaming adaptations like Wheel of Time and Rings of Power have failed miserably, and Game of Thrones has fallen almost totally out of cultural significance, with George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish the last book (and Patrick Rothfuss’s failure to finish his own series) becoming something of a meme.

In fact, the failure of these two big-name authors to finish writing their books may have struck epic fantasy a mortal wound. Because of how they have been burned, a large number of epic fantasy readers are now unwilling to commit to a series until after it is complete. But very few authors can afford to write a truly epic series and release the whole thing at once. It takes several years to write a series like that—and what are authors supposed to do if the first one flops?

In other words, debut epic fantasy authors are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they release the first book by itself, it will probably sink into obscurity before they can write and release the next book. And if by some measure of hard work and tenacity they manage to write a whole series and hold back from publishing until they’re ready to release it all at once, if the first book still fails to sell, they’re SOL and all that hard work was for nothing.

This is also why traditional publishers are so unwilling to publish a new epic fantasy series from a debut or a midlist author. A bestseller like Larry Correia might be able to dip his feet in that pond (and do quite well—I highly recommend his Sons of the Black Sword series), they won’t do that for anyone else. Which is fine, except that indie publishing epic fantasy is just as hard—arguably more so.

For these reasons, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin have done more to kill epic fantasy than they have to grow it.

But this may actually have created an opportunity for those authors who are willing to drive into the smoke. After all, there’s much less competition if you can manage to break in and build a decent following. But how much hunger is there for epic fantasy, compared to other fantasy subgenres? And how can a newer/midlist author reach them, without a big push from a publisher or the algorithms?

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Fantasy from A to Z: P is for Prayer

What would fantasy be without religion? Probably much the same as us, when we don’t have religion: aimless, drifting, and lost.

Religion is more than just a useful aspect of worldbuilding. It’s something that lies at the very core of what makes us human—and thus, it’s something that any story needs to at least touch on if it is to be meaningful or important. Most likely, it won’t be meaningful at all unless the religious aspect is incorporated deeply within its bones.

But what is religion? For our purposes, religion is how we, as humans, relate to the powers that are higher than ourselves. It’s not about painting a cross on your cover, or a star of David, or a crescent, or an omh, or whatever else. It’s about how we act in regards to the cosmic and the transcendent. It’s about how we understand how to orient ourselves in this vast and terrifying universe, and find our own place within it.

I grew up in a time when religion was one of those taboo subjects that you never brought up in polite society. Politics, religion, and sex were all taboo like that. Granted, those taboos were already beginning to fray by the time I was old enough to hold an uninformed opinion on any of that, but even in the 90s, the post-war liberal consensus still held.

What was the post-war liberal consensus? It was the set of rules and norms that we all (or those of us in polite society, at least) agreed to live by, after the tumultuous catastrophe of the World Wars. From 1914 to 1945, more than a hundred Europeans died from political causes—and that was just in Europe. For thirty long years, the whole world was drowned in blood.

The wars ended with the invention of the world’s most devastating superweapon, which for the first time in the history of this planet gave us the power to literally annihilate our own species. So at the end of all that, our grandparents felt a very strong need to keep those weapons from ever being used again. Hence, they developed the post-war liberal consensus.

The greatest value of the post-war liberal consensus was tolerance—but they didn’t think of that as a value in itself. The idea was that instead of elevating the values of any one group over another, they would create a world where everyone tolerated each other. Everyone could keep their own culture and religion, along with their own unique (and often contradictory) cultural and religious values, so long as they didn’t try to impose those values on anyone else.

The trouble with that, of course, is that tolerance itself is a value. Which means that in order to maintain the post-war consensus, they had to be intolerant toward any culture or religion that threatened it. Which meant that they had to push their globalism and multiculturalism on everyone, superseding all of their own cultural and religious values. This gave rise to the global urban monoculture, which ultimately gave us the clown world we now live in. Which is currently falling apart.

Religion should not be off-limits, especially for good storytelling. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that stories should bash you over the head and try to convert you to whatever church the author happens to belong to. Indeed, some of the most religious stories aren’t about any particular church or creed at all.

An example of this is Epic: The Musical. Beyond the old Greek mythology that runs through the story, the religious view is that the universe is utterly unpredictable, the gods (or higher powers) are arbitrary and capricious, and that the ends (getting home to Penelope) always justify the means. Indeed, any means that aren’t justified by the ends are immoral and wrong. Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves. How do we sleep? Next to our wives.

Those aren’t the religious views that I subscribe to, but those are deeply religious views. How? Because they show us how we stand in relation to powers that are higher than ourselves. In the 19th century, it became fashionable to throw out religion, and reverence man himself as the highest power in the universe. Where did that get us? It gave us the 31 years that killed 100 million Europeans and drowned the whole world in blood.

G.K. Chesterton said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Now, more than ever, the world needs religion.

Of course, one of the nice things about writing fiction is that you can explore all sorts of religious ideas that may or may not have a direct counterpart in our world. Indeed, that’s part of what makes fantasy so rich. Tolkien created a whole race (the elves) that is bound by magic and immortality to this earth, contrasting with us humans, who are “strangers in a strange land.” In fact, Tolkien’s entire oeuvre is rich with religious elements, not just in the worldbuilding and the mythology, but in the Christian symbology—and he does it so subtly and so deeply that it draws you into his world, rather than kicking you out. It’s all in service to the story.

There’s a reason why the best stories in the world are in the Bible (and most of those are in the Book of Genesis). Which is one of the reasons why I’m drawing on the life of King David for the fantasy epic that I’m currently writing (The Soulbound King). But I’m also drawing on symbology and mythology as well, to make sure the religious elements aren’t just skin-deep. There is so much fascinating tree-related symbolism within the Jewish/Christian tradition. So much rich and wonderful stuff to draw on for creating a fantasy world.

Don’t be afraid to play with religion in your own fantasy stories. After all, on the deepest level, creativity itself is something of a religious act.

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What is coming

I think we are in the opening phase of a massive Christian revival, the likes of which we haven’t seen for more than a hundred years. It is going to sweep the entire country and catch a lot of people by surprise. After it has completed its course two or three decades from now, the culture we had from the 1960s through the 2010s will seem as strange and as alien to us as the culture of pre-Civil War America seems to us today.

This revival is going to be the thing that ultimately holds our country together. It will not unite all Americans, though, and many will feel like they don’t have a place in it. Conservatism will dominate our politics and our culture for the next generation, but it will take a hybrid form unlike anything that it has had before. It will blend some things that feel conservative to us now and other things that don’t seem conservative at all.

We will not get a period of unity or prosperity after this crisis period. Wars will expand, economies will collapse, natural disasters will devastate millions more lives. At least one more global pandemic will bring us to our knees. But even after these crises run their course, we will not come together for a new golden age, though one will always seem to be just over the horizon.

We will not experience a first turning of the next secular cycle, but will skip right past it into the second turning, just as we did after the Civil War. It’s going to be messy—so messy, in fact, that our grandchildren won’t even consider 2020 to be a historically significant year. But the United States will hold together, even if she never experiences the same level of prosperity again. And the utter collapse of her money and her economy will only serve to fan the flames of revival that will sweep her land.

Culturally, it will be a period of incredible dynamism. After the arts are no longer enthralled to postmodernism and cultural Marxism, we will see an explosion of creative expression in every field, including in literature. It’s going to be a wild ride. Things that are cultural mainstays now will be totally forgotten within a couple of decades, and things that are popular now will feel dated and out of touch in the space of just a few years.

The country will hold together. There will be no civil war, though there may be a global one. And there will almost certainly be an economic collapse, like the Great Depression, except much deeper and much longer. But all of this will only serve to fuel the religious revival, and the revival in turn will fuel the cultural dynamism, until the country and ultimately the world have been entirely transformed.

A fascinating take on cultural trends from a fashion CEO

I was not expecting to get as much out of this podcast as I did. Triggernometry is a fantastic long-form podcast, and the guest for this one is the guy who made the suits for Jordan Peterson, among other people. He has some fascinating insights into our current culture and where, from his view, it appears to be heading.

Why I no longer consider myself to be a libertarian

I’ve been going back and forth on this post for almost a year now, wondering how exactly to express my thoughts. Some of the positive reviews on my fiction have expressed that I write “libertarian fiction,” and in some ways, I think that’s accurate: certainly, I value liberty very strongly, and support those government policies that are designed to safeguard our liberties while opposing those that seek to destroy it. That has not changed. But my views of libertarianism more generally have, perhaps in some ways that might surprise my longtime readers.

First, a little bit of my personal history. I grew up in one of the most liberal parts of the country, Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts, and considered myself a conservative while I lived there. Then, after serving a two-year mission for my church in Silicon Valley, California—what is probably the most progressive, leftist part of the country—I went to college at Brigham Young University, in the most Republican county of the most Republican state in the United States. At that point, I considered myself to be a sort of left-leaning classical liberal. When Dick Cheney spoke at BYU’s commencement, I blogged about the protests and attended the alternate commencement where Ralph Nader spoke.

I graduated in 2010, in the middle of the Great Recession, and made the fateful decision not to go to grad school at that time. To this day, I count that as the single best decision I ever made in my life (right up there with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts). Not only did this force me to learn how to navigate the real world, but it also got me out of the indoctrination factory that the national university system has become, even to a degree at my alma mater, BYU.

About five years after I graduated, I got red-pilled and started listening to right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. I also looked seriously into Ron Paul and the libertarian movement, and became something of a libertarian. As fractitious as libertarianism is as a political philosophy, it seemed like the most logically coherent and intellectually honest way of understanding the world, whereas leftism and conservatism were both riddled with internal contradictions.

But then I got married and started a family. That experience has changed me in a lot of ways, perhaps even more than all the rest of my life experiences combined. But politically, the biggest thing it has caused me to rethink is this question:

What is the fundamental unit of society?

I’d always played lip service to the belief that the family is the fundamental unit of society, but starting a family of my own has made that real for me—indeed, has made me realize—in a way that simple bumper-sticker slogans never could. Before, I was living for myself. Now, I live for my children. Before, I was the hero of my own story, and that story was a single volume. Now, my story is just a single volume in an ongoing saga, a link in the chain of the generations that came before and will go on after me.

Libertarians believe that they stand in opposition to authoritarians of all stripes, be they communists, fascists, socialists, etc. But both libertarians and authoritarians operate on the unspoken assumption that the individual, not the family, is the fundamental unit of society. Leftists want to destroy the family and put the state in charge of raising and educating children, in order to make them obedient to government authority. Libertarians, on the other hand, romanticize this idea of the atomized individual who follows his own path and eschews all forms of collectivism, including the family. Ayn Rand’s books are populated by ubermensch who seem like they’ve sprung forth from the head of Zeus, and the children in her novels are basically just adults in miniature.

Allow me to put it this way: Margaret Thatcher had a brilliant quote about socialism that libertarians love to repeat. And from a purely economic standpoint, I believe that the libertarians are correct. But change that quote just a little, and you get this:

The problem with ~~socialism~~ libertarianism is that you eventually run out of other people’s ~~money~~ families.

Families don’t just happen. They take a lot of work to build and to maintain, and unless they are planted in a culture that nourishes them, they will wither and die. Libertarianism does not foster that kind of a culture, yet it depends on families in order to raise the kind of people who can make a libertarian society work. People from broken families often lack the mental and emotional maturity to take upon themselves the personal responsibilities that come with personal liberty—in other words, they lack the capacity for personal independence which libertarianism depends on. Growing up in a healthy family isn’t the only way to develop that sort of independence, but a society of broken families will invariably fail to produce such a people.

This is why libertarianism ultimately leads to authoritarianism. We aren’t all characters in an Ayn Rand novel: we aren’t all ubermensch all of the time, reshaping the world by the strength of our will. And when we inevitable fail, where can we turn to for help? If society is nothing more than a group of individuals, then ultimately the only place to turn to is the state. Perhaps there may be churches, companies, or other private civic organizations to which a person may turn, but any form of libertarianism that rejects altruism as a moral good will fail to foster these organizations as well. So, in the absense of anywhere else to turn, individuals will, over time, turn increasingly to the state, trading their libertarian freedoms for economic and social security. A society that exalts the individual at the expense of the family will always, in the end, devolve into a statist tyranny.

If you want to create a stable society that recognizes individual freedom, you have to recognize the family as the fundamental unit of that society, and you have to proactively enact policies that will foster a culture of strong families. Not only does this give you a social safety net that is totally apart from the state, but it also ensures that your society will be self-perpetuating, since one of the central purposes of the family is to create and raise children.

In fact, the family is perhaps the best antidote to government power creeping into every facet of society, which also makes it the best way to push back against woke leftism, ESG, and the Great Reset. Hence why everything about leftist progressivism is calculated to destroy the family. Parents concerned about CRT in their schools? Domestic terrorists. Kids who say that they’re transgender? Transition them without telling the parents, and take them away from their families if the parents object.

But it’s not just a partisan issue. If the family is the fundamental unit of society and needs to be strengthened, then there are things on both the left and the right that need to change. For example, poverty is a huge issue for families, since poor families are much more likely to break up due to the stress. But conservatives often ignore the issue of income inequality, mouthing platitudes about the free market while giving us socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And the libertarians are little better, what with how they push for the legalization of drugs, prostitution, abortion, and pornography. Few things have done more to destroy the family than widespread substance abuse and the hypersexualization of our society.

This is why I’ve mostly given up on reading Heinlein anymore. He’s a brilliant writer with a fascinating take on some of science fiction’s most fundamental tropes, but whenever he writes about sex or sexuality, all I can think of is “the problem with libertarianism is that you eventually run out of other people’s families.” Heinlein and his boomer readership took the family for granted, neglected their own, and gave us a world of widespread sexual promiscuity, where society is falling apart.

So that’s why I don’t consider myself a libertarian anymore, even though there are many tenets of libertarianism that I still admire and believe, especially on the economic side. I suppose you say that I’m a conservative, but that isn’t really accurate either, because most strains of conservatism in 2024 really seem more about conserving the leftism of two or three generations ago. So I guess that means I’m politically homeless—just like most of my fellow Americans these days.

Thoughts on the 2023 Hugo Awards

This video gives a pretty good recap of the endless fountain of scandals surrounding the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon and Hugo Awards. Larry Correia also gives an interesting take on it on his blog, and in his writing podcast.

My initial thoughts:

Schadenfreude is one hell of a drug.
Accusation = confession = projection, no exceptions.
This scandal vindicates the Sad Puppies 110%. Remember how they called us the racists? How they said we were the ones manipulating the system? …yeah.
Wow, schadenfreude is one hell of a drug.

Laying aside all of the knee-jerk internet outrage (and schadenfreude), though, I do find it tragic that there doesn’t seem to be a way to recognize excellence in the SF&F genres that isn’t totally given over to in-group politics and petty fannish controversies. At the end of the day, I think that’s really what the Sad/Rabid Puppies was all about: a small and exclusive group of insiders (aka “true fans”) refusing to give any space to outsiders who also wanted to be part of the awards process. The fact that most of these outsiders happened to be politically conservative was incidental; we might as well have been Chinese, for how the in-group treated us.

With all of that said, though, I don’t necessarily think that the best solution is to burn the Hugos to the ground. For all the scandals, and how terribly woke the Hugos have swung in the last few years, the system itself is still pretty good. I mean, can you imagine how much different things would be if our national elections were decided by ranked-choice voting, with “none of the above” as an available option? As much as I have a problem with the people who organize and run the Hugo Awards—the people who are rightly being slammed for arbitrarily discounting hundreds of Chinese ballots and arbitrarily disqualifying several titles from the final ballot—the system itself is actually a pretty good one.

A couple of years ago, I read every Hugo and Nebula award-winning book. It was an enlightening exercise, to say the least. Since then, I’ve dabbled with doing something similar with other wards, like Goodreads Choice, but I’ve never really made the plunge, since most of these other awards are either too young to really give a comprehensive overview of the genre, or too narrow or cliquish. Many of them are thinly-veiled popularity contests, where the author with the most rabid fanbase wins.

Is it possible to have an award that recognizes true excellence that doesn’t devolve into a thinly-veiled popularity contest on the one hand, or else isn’t taken over by a small and snobbish group of elites on the other? I can see how these sorts of concerns might have driven many of the concerns about “slate voting” during the Sad Puppies controversy in 2015. Unfortunately, they clearly took it to the opposite exteme, turning the Hugos into their own exclusive club, un-personing conservative and Chinese fans alike.

In the end, it probably comes down to who we are as a people more than what systems have been put in place. If fandom really was the kind of place where people could come together over their shared love of science fiction and fantasy, regardless of politics, religion, nationality, or anything else, then perhaps the Hugos actually would be a marker of excellence, and not just identification with a very small (and snobbish) in-group. And I do think there have been times in the past where that has been the case.

So, in a funny way, this whole controversy around the 2023 Hugo Awards actually makes me want to go back and read a bunch of the older Hugo-nominated books from previous years, to see how I would have voted (and how my own vote differs from the votes that were actually cast). I think it could be a useful exercise, not so much in determining how useful or authoritative the Hugos ought to be (I figured that out a couple of years ago), but in determining my own reading tastes, and how they may or may not have fit in with previous generations of Hugo-award voting fans.

One of the most difficult things I’ve recently had to wrestle with is the realization that my own tastes and values run almost completely contrary to the culture in which I live. I don’t think the Hugo Awards have ever represented mainstream culture, but it is still an interesting bellweather of a subculture that I love, plagued as it might be by in-group politics and petty infighting. And I do think there were periods where my own tastes and values aligned pretty well. I’m curious to see which periods those are.

All of this is to say that I’ve been going through all of the old Hugo nominations for Best Novel, reading through them to see how I would have voted for each year. I’m mostly just doing it for myself, but I may post it here if you guys are interested, since it probably would make for some good blogging content.

In response to “A Crippling Realization”

I got a lot of feedback on my last blog post, and rather than respond to it one at a time, I thought it would be better to just write another blog post and respond to it here.

First of all, thanks for all of the support. I really appreciate it. I’m not going through a particularly hard time right now, and I’m not thinking seriously about giving up writing either, so I’m sorry if my last post gave that impression. I’m definitely going to keep writing, since this is the path that I feel I’ve been called to, and the vocation that I should pursue.

This isn’t a question of “should I give up writing, or should I sell out to the woke agenda?” Rather, it’s a question of “should I go off and become a voice in the wilderness, or should I focus on building my career?” It may be possible to do both things at once, but when I look at where the culture is today, it looks more and more like a very difficult needle to thread.

Or maybe not. Maybe what we call “the culture” is mostly just a bunch of bullies, sock puppets, and trolls conspiring with Big Tech and the corporate media to drown out all other voices. Perhaps the true culture has actually bifurcated, and what looks like “the wilderness” is actually where the most people really are. Perhaps it really is just a small number of people going crazy, and because of all the gaslighting, everyone else only thinks that they are the last sane man or woman in this world.

The other thing I ought to keep in mind is that crying out against our modern culture isn’t actually removing yourself from the cultural conversation. On the contrary, it’s one of the most outspoken ways to be a part of it, even if you do end up in the wilderness. Hardly anything from the culture of the Old Testament has survived, but we still have the words of their prophets today.

It is frustrating, though, because the culture really isn’t producing any of the kinds of stories that made me fall in love with science fiction and fantasy in the first place. Brandon Sanderson is kind of an exception to that, but in some ways even he seems to be bending before the cultural winds. Do I need to bend as well? There may be some wisdom in that: after all, the grass can endure the storm that takes down the mighty oak.

So you see, it’s a much more nuanced question than “do I bend the knee or give up writing?” Rather, it’s a question of where to bend, and where to stand firm. I doubt my Zedekiah Wight stuff is going to amass much of a following, though I’d love to be proven wrong. But I’ve still got to find ways to stay true to my inner voice, even if that drives me out into the cultural wilderness.

Anyways, these are just some of the questions I’ve been pondering lately. I’m not depressed, and I’m not going to give up writing, so don’t worry about that, though thanks for your concern.