The Aaron Renn Show

This month's newsletter is a look at what post-familialism hath wrought in South Korea: toxic gender relations, roiled politics, and an emerging conflict between those with kids and without.

Dr. Nicholas Ellis was raised and home schooled on the mission field in Brazil. He then went to England, where he obtained his doctorate at Oxford. Now back in the United States, he has launched Christian Halls, an effort to reimagine Christian higher education in America through creating self-governing microcampuses providing a fully accredited education in every county in America.

Check out Christian Halls International at: https://christianhalls.org/

Clear Speech for a Confused Age Event in Cincinnati: https://www.kings-domain.com/events

Recent events such as the school shooting in Nashville, the indictment of President Trump, and the conviction of Douglas Mackey shouldn't surprise us, or cause us to give into despair or hate. But it should cause us to change the way we view the American rulership structure that exists today. Like the Roman Empire, it has many positive attributes, but is built on and suffused with pervasive and systematic injustices.

An article in the Guardian argues that online influencers will be more important to conservative discourse in the US going forward in America. This is in part because of technological change, but also from the failure of the establishment class. At the same time, the influencer model has key weaknesses that need to be shored up to make that model healthier.

The Guardian: ‘It’s all about trolling’: how far-right influencers are shaping Republican narrative - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/26/jack-posobiec-digital-influencers-far-right-republicans-trolling

Washington Post: Indicted Chinese exile controls Gettr social media site - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/26/gettr-guo-wengui-social-media/

The standard self-improvement advice is to say No more often. That's frequently good advice. A lot of times we want to say No but are just too scared to do it. Sometimes other people are taking advantage of us. Or maybe we just neglect our own affairs to say No when we shouldn't.

But there's a case for saying Yes too. Yes has much more optionality than No. Saying yes to opportunities, even when they don't seem like they can amount to much, often has payoffs much bigger than we can imaging. Managing for positive optionality and opportunity is a key part of becoming antifragile and positioning ourselves to capture the upside from events.

Michael Foster tweet thread on saying No: https://twitter.com/thisisfoster/status/1636016109617856513

People involved in the arts, literature, or other creative fields are generally politically left wing - even far left. It’s much rarer to see someone who is explicitly and openly to the right, though it does happen occasionally.

But there’s another way to look at it. Our ideas of left and right in politics descend from the French Revolution. But what if we defined them differently than we currently do?

My preferred definition of the right, properly understood, is discerning and aligning oneself and the world around him with the truth. Thus, because great art often expresses Truth, that art is implicitly right wing regardless of the politics of its creator. The best art, journalism, etc. often overflows the intentions of its creator.

But many of those who have the greatest insights about today’s world are not Christian at all. Sometimes this makes their work offensive to American Christian readers. But those who pay careful attention will often find incredible truth, particularly about the deformed nature of contemporary society, hiding in plain sight. Today I want to give some examples of this in the form of three contemporary European literary figures: Hanne Orstavik, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Michel Houellebecq.

We see any articles about the so-called shortage of good men. That is, we've seen many articles in the major media about how women are delaying or foregoing marriage because they can't find the right man to marry. If that's true, what are the implications for men? It means that if they do have their act together, then they are a hot commodity in the marketplace, and need to internalize that understanding.

The estate of Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), has engaged so-called "sensitivity readers" to re-write portions of the text to be compliant with today's ideologies. I discuss this trend, the idea of editing old books in general, and a practical response we can take to mitigate against this trend. 

It's a free country and people are entitled to live however they want. But it's important to put forth and advocate for general patterns of life that are mostly likely to lead to flourishing - particularly when we've been following them ourselves. In that light, this month's newsletter contains ten of these theses about marriage and family.

In the mid-century era from World War II (or even before that) to around 1990, America had a mass market common consumer culture. With the fragmentation of that culture accelerating post-1990s, the upper middle class and middle class began to develop distinct cultures and folkways. Even removing race and politics as factors of division would not address this, because even among whites, the upper middle class and middle class now have different and incompatible definitions of the good life. This creates local political dissension and perverse incentives in areas like land use.