Taboos are a Zero Sum Game

In 2015, Stephen Fry was famously accused of breaking Ireland’s blasphemy laws when he expressed his disgust at God. This led to a minor media frenzy at the time, with advocates of freedom of speech protesting against Ireland’s use of old, outdated laws that had no place in the real world. Probably most surprising to most people was that such laws were still in the books, as once Catholic bulwark Ireland had famously became heavily secular in record time, and shed its historical legacy in a similar way as Canada in the 1960’s.

In Michigan, a man named Timothy Boomer (great name) shouted a string profanity after his canoe tipped over next to a family with young kids. The office gave him a misdemeanor under a late 1800’s law. They argued the law was unconstitutional because it inhibited his freedom of speech (though one wonders what kind of speech repeatedly saying “f*ck” is). The ruling was overturned by the Michigan Court of Appeals and the law was scrubbed from the books.

In Sweden, a man was convicted of burning a Koran under the guise of inciting hatred.

This year, a man named Sam Melia was arrested in Leeds for posting stickers that lawmakers alleged were hateful to minorities. The courts agreed that nothing was illegal about the stickers, but threw him in jail anyway.

Reading arguments from past decades regarding free speech feels quaint, as Human Rights advocates exclaimed how freedom to express your opinions against the viewpoint of the majority is critical to a healthy society, and you can’t suppress speech just because someone’s feelings got hurt.

Now, for some reason, those same people don’t make arguments like that anymore. Almost like it was a cynical ploy at pleading based on the old morality they wanted to replace.

There are a multitude of arguments to be made against the freedom maximizing mindset, whether it be the sheer unwieldiness of the non-aggression principle, how to deal with bad actors, and arguments about how far property rights actually go. The core issue with freedom as the highest good mindsets is that it has no way to enforce a tangible moral code on a society, nor give a tangible idea of even what freedom means.

They dreamed of a society where taboo’s were nonexistent, and everyone would do their own thing and people would just tolerate it. The problem is that one person’s freedom is another person’s oppression. Neighborhoods with lots of kids don’t want to have to worry about the heavy cocaine user down the street, and black people want to be able to live without racial epithets being thrown at them. They don’t care about your freedom, they care about their well-being.

Taboos as Crime-Stop

The only way a regime can maintain moral legitimacy is to use its power to enforce their morals on the population. There is no such thing, and there has never been such thing, as a value-neutral government. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the most value-neutral governments wouldn’t even attempt to maintain its moral legitimacy, but rule by pure force.

Moral codes are enforced by a complicated network of institutions that give social penalties for non-compliance, all the way up to direct laws to enforce their codes. Once the codes are instituted, the next step is to ruthlessly suppress any dissent to the new moral order. If the State had to maintain the same amount of energy all the time to crush dissenters, it would collapse. Luckily for the State, a strong show of force for about ten years is sufficient for the new moral code to take root, and the masses enforce the law themselves through suppressing the thought inside their own mind. Some obvious examples are:

• The Civil Rights era regarding racial discrimination for any reason

• The Post-Obergefell Era making gays a protected class

• The anti-smoking campaign making any social smoking frowned upon

• The George Floyd era, creating the anti-White DEI regime

Most people who were adults twenty years ago were against Gay Marriage, and it’s silly to maintain they changed their minds through facts and logic. The truth is they were softened by a media blitz that made anti-homosexual opinions low-status and often socially unacceptable, and the ridiculous display of force to support gays, under the guise of hate-crime laws, turned their opinions from revulsion to acceptance. Likely, many of these same people are now showing their support of the new regime with enthusiasm that would make North Koreans blush, going so far as trying to destroy dissenters of the new order. A reasonable opinion at one time has, within a decade, become Taboo.

In every society, there are always going to be people at the edges, disagreeable types, who want to chip away at the foundation of taboos, whether for their own shot at a new moral code or just because they feel suffocated by the culture they are forced to endure in. This is true both for socially valuable taboos and socially dysgenic ones.

Out With the Old Taboos, In With the New

It’s no coincidence that older taboos have to be swept away before the newer taboos can take hold. Taboos are, after all, an instrument of institutional power, and that power can only be wielded in so many directions. As the power of the Church in Ireland waned as the power of the Irish Government and secular NGO's ascended. The idea of keeping Taboos that helped political rivals in nonsensical. The point of taboos is to enforce one's own moral framework, not protect everyone’s. They're the final victory of a culturally victorious institution.

It is not a coincidence smut became mainstream at the same time it became low-status to talk about religion outside a contained private sphere. It's no coincidence crude speech became more mainstream at the same time ethnic jokes became unacceptable. Even if the taboos are innocuous, neither helping nor hurting the ruling power, there are only so many taboos that can be maintained before they become unmanageable.

This is implicitly understood by the dissident right, which is why so much effort is made in breaking cultural taboos such as talking about IQ, racial slurs against non-whites, beating up on the idol of democracy, and anti-egalitarianism. As these ideas permeate in a population, the crime-stop mechanisms that usually make a people refuse to ponder a dissident line of thought to stop themselves from breaking a taboo gets short-circuited. As the dissident thoughts reach a critical mass, institutional power has to spend an enormous amount of resources to regain control. Worse, any failure to stamp out braking a taboo when their resources are employed come across as weakness, and the strong horse becomes to look lame, crippled, and ready to be brought to the back of the barn. Whether they are Trad-Caths, Neo-Pagans, or Techno-optimists, dissidents know the power of these social technologies, and how to break them.

This is why, as tasteless as I find slurs to be, as obnoxious as the Mustache Man memes are at times, there's no point in counter-signaling them. Those memes are designed to break strong conditioning that enslaves a population to only think in the highly regulated sandbox they are allowed to. Every time a normal guy sees a holocaust joke or a 13/50 meme, a small part of his worldview gets shattered, as a lot of his thought process is not through reason and logic, but submitting to power, enforced consensus. As the myths of institutions in power get mocked and subverted, so does the stranglehold they have on the average person's mind.

Playing to Win

We could point at hypocrisy until their voice grows hoarse, shouting how certain groups used cynical appeals to liberal values they themselves had no intention of holding, but we would be wasting our breath. The truth is there will always be blasphemy laws, written or unwritten, in every society, and the only worry one should have is that ours are on top.

This has been true since the founding of the United States, and is a necessity for every community to function. There always needs to be taboos against showing kids smut, or ensuring thoughts of other sexual depravity don’t become mainstream. There’s a reason why sexual taboos are the strongest in almost every society, and we’re seeing first-hand what happens when they go away.

I imagine a world where the thought of using canola oil has the same repugnance as drinking motor oil, where every billboard is wholesome chungus to the extent that a woman showing too much leg is a scandal, where smoking pot is seen as disgusting and only done in the dregs of town, while businessmen smoke cigars during lunch break. I dream of a world where healthy, socially productive mindsets of both work and leisure are the air people breathe.

This won’t make the freedom maximalists happy, but it’s not our job to make them happy. It’s our job to create a world that not only encourages our own well-being, but those of our descendants.