Traditional Values Are Self-Evidently Correct

Revealed preferences don't lie

I have noticed that whenever there is any kind of conflict between “trads” and “seculars,” there seems to be an implicit assumption that the values propagated by the “trads” are all arbitrary results of religious dogma; that the only reason they believe the things that they believe is simply “God said so.” As with abortion, I am on the “trad” side and believe that their (I guess technically our) values are correct, but it seems to me that they often lean into this attitude and erroneously allow the discussion to center around religion.

This is not putting their best foot forward at all. Just the same as with abortion, if one really believes in these values, it is absolutely essential to make a strong defense of them with zero references to God, religion, the Bible, or anything else like that. If you rely on religious dogma to defend your values, people are now completely justified in characterizing you as an unthinking zealot. This is one of the greatest unforced errors made by previous generations of religious folk and other tradcons. My attitude towards God’s will is the reverse of “It’s bad because God said so”; I believe that God told us not to do certain things because they are bad for us.

This means that there are specific and easily observed reasons why the forbidden behaviors have been deemed as sinful, reasons which can be understood by a secular person just as well as anyone else. After all, if God really were just handing us arbitrary conditions that were contrary to our well-being for no particular reason, atheism might start to look very reasonable at that point. Continuing with the comparison to abortion: Every person is against child murder (or so one would hope), regardless of religious belief, and every pro-life person believes that abortion is child murder. This is the core issue, and once it is properly understood, any talk of God or religion becomes superfluous.

So what is the case for why “traditional values” really are just better for you? For that we of course need to define traditional values. I will attempt to do this briefly here, identifying some of the most common friction points with atheists:

1.      The value of children, child-bearing, child-rearing, family. If I had to name a single fundamental issue that divides religious from secular, this would probably be it. Everything else that I am going to talk about can be related back to this one. Trads usually view children and family as ultimate life goals, while seculars are more likely to view them as optional, something that is to be taken or left based on personal whimsy.

2.      Sexual promiscuity. This one also outranks almost everything else, I think. This covers a wide range of behaviors—casual sex, pornography, views on “sex work,” etc. I will include in this category any alternative relationship arrangements to the traditional one-man one-woman marriage, such as polyamory, polygamy, “serial monogamy” with no marriage, whatever it might be. This also includes all forms of LGBT anything, which define themselves specifically by their fundamental incompatibility with traditional marriage.

3.      Drug use. This ranks below the first two as many deeply religious people remain quite open to some amount of drug use, in moderation, usually alcohol. However, the trad view will always be that such substances are a vice to be held in check. Seculars are more likely to accept chronic use as permissible and unproblematic. Likewise, trads will tend to oppose drug legalization, and seculars will tend to view it more favorably.

4.      The value of work and self-sufficiency. This one I rank lowest as the peculiarities of the modern economy make it a bit more of a complex topic, as I discussed in a previous post. It is also the topic on which trads and seculars are most likely to agree IME, as there are certainly many secular people who value work and self-sufficiency. However, among those who do feel that there is nothing wrong with, for instance, subsisting on welfare payments or the charity of one’s parents, I feel confident in saying that these people are almost always more likely to be secular, and that as someone’s worldview becomes more “trad,” the probability that they will view parasitic lifestyles as morally acceptable quickly declines down to zero.

I may be able to come up with some more specific things if I tried, but I believe this covers the big ones that I am primarily concerned with discussing here. #1 and #2 are doing a lot of heavy lifting, as I’m wrapping up a lot of smaller, more specific considerations into them. This is appropriate as I do think it’s fairly apparent that, if you put aside churchgoing and other explicitly religious activity, differences in sexual morality are often the biggest differences in how a religious lifestyle actually differs from a secular one.

Taking all of the above into account, we can get a pretty stereotypical image of where a tradperson wants to end up in life: In a stable marriage, with well-loved children, maintained by one’s own labor, relatively free of vices. The alternative view of where a secular person wants to end up is not clear at all. We can probably say that they don’t want to end up as the complete opposite of this, but the specifics of where they want to deviate vary widely from one atheist to the next. Secular worldviews are therefore defined not by their adherence to a different ideal altogether, rather they are defined by a willingness to modify some aspect or another of the traditional ideal.

But the failure of secular worldviews to coalesce around any coherent alternative speaks to the value of this ideal as representing the correct end goals in life that people, by default, should aim for. Ceteris paribus, this is the broad-strokes ideal future that most everyone wants, and any condition or circumstance that prevents you from attaining some aspect of this outcome is almost universally recognized as an unfortunate disadvantage to have in life, or as a character defect if it’s something that was under your control.

No one criticizes these things as worthy goals, not even secular people—they simply portray the goals as unattainable or too costly to achieve. When somebody does say that they don’t want to get married, or that they don’t want to have children, what are the sort of reasons that they give for that attitude? The objections are almost certain to be along the lines of: “Divorce is just too risky, dating is too hard, it’s too expensive, I’ll lose too much sleep, pregnancy is too scary,” etc. Pretty much no one will respond by making the assertion that marriage or children are inherently bad things and that pursuing them makes you a bad person.

We can demonstrate this with a quick thought experiment about which of these things you would rather have or not have if all the inconvenient strings that life attaches to them could be magically cut away. Suppose that you are 80 years old, nearing your death, and are looking back at your life. Everything is said and done at this point, there is no more anxiety about the future for you, only considerations of what has already come to pass.

At that stage, would you rather look back at your life as having had a successful marriage, with your spouse still by your side if nature hasn’t claimed them yet, or look back at a life spent single for 80 years never having married? Would you rather look back at your life and see children who are now grown and possibly even having children of their own, or would you rather look back and see that your genetic line ends with you?

Almost everybody is going to go with the marriage and kids, not with dying alone and childless. Even if one feels that there are good reasons why people end up dying alone and childless, if they had a magic button which would simply cause them to be one or the other, no strings attached, which way would they go? There are other ways of re-framing this same exercise—for instance, imagining what kind of life you would wish your children to live, if you were made to choose for them—but the outcome remains rather obvious.

The self-evident worthiness of these goals is such that even those who define themselves by their opposition to the traditional vision of it—the “LGBT Community”—still end up trying to emulate it via “gay marriage” and now the rising practice of “gay adoption” or the attempt to have “gay children” via surrogates. Why would they do this if marriage and children were truly optional in the sense that people who reject them are truly equal to those that don’t? As revealed preferences demonstrate, the social proof that they bring is undeniable.

Another big set of revealed preferences lie in the lifestyles of the elite. Rich people today get married at greater rates than the poor, a trend that has been underway for some time now. Likewise, the relationship between income and childbearing is now shifting to match this trend. This data does not quite represent what we are trying to get at here, because it is difficult to find survey data on the correlation between income and wanting to have children, which would be more precise for our purposes than the number of children actually produced.

However, we do have data on how many children women say they want vs how many they actually produce, and the result is in line with what one would predict based on our discussion so far—women generally say they are having fewer children than they would like, not more. This suggests that rising childlessness is likely to be driven more by obstacles to childbearing rather than a desire not to have kids under any circumstances.

All of this is to say that marriage and children remain the only serious game in town when it comes to doing something with your life. If we put aside religion and devotion to God, what else is the average atheist looking to do with themselves? Get high and goon to porn all day? Perhaps, but no one would pretend that that is an achievement in life.

If you ask someone what do they want to achieve with their life, as in accomplish something that they could be proud of, the only other answer you are likely to get is something career related, such as becoming a famous writer or a high-ranking politician. But career success and marriage is hardly an either/or choice—much the opposite, as mentioned above, they tend to go together with one another. From an evolutionary perspective, men are hardwired to try and succeed at a career (i.e. gain status and resources) specifically because doing so typically leads to reproductive success.

It bears repeating here that “gay marriage” was mainstreamed by disguising itself as identical to actual marriage, simply with two men or two women instead. The common libtard understanding of LGBT is that they “are just like us” with this one small change and essentially want the same things in life. The actual alternative sexual behaviors engaged in by the “LGBT Community” not only never gained mainstream acceptance, they’re so toxic that you’re likely to be accused of “homophobia” if you point them out, in much the same way that it is “racist” to point out black crime rates.

Think about how ass backwards that is if childlessness and non-marriage were to be legitimate alternative lifestyle choices, equal in prestige to proper reproductive marriages. Shouldn’t gay men then be proudly proclaiming how happy they are to be childfree, how great their unmarried lives are, how wonderful it is to have promiscuous sex with whoever they want? Yet that is not what has happened. Those things are not said in polite company; instead we are treated to the spectacle of a “married” gay couple having a “family” via an interracial “adoption” on a popular network sitcom, and notable real-life gays such as Dave Rubin and Mayor Pete having “children” with their “spouses.”

Seeing The Gays bend the knee to traditional norms of children and family demonstrates just how deep and unmovable those norms ultimately are. The fact that things turn out this way suggests that no amount of coping can overcome the fundamental intuition that this is what Good People do—they get married and they have a family, even if they’re literal faggots. It also suggests that any attempts at formal alternatives—polycules, harems, or whatever—are going absolutely nowhere. If the alphabet people couldn’t pull it off, what chance do you have?

Meanwhile, those who genuinely dislike the idea of children are relegated to irrelevant Internet ghettoes where they can be safely ignored by normies, much like we wrongthinkers sitting here on Substack talking to each other about dissident ideas. And on the flip side, many secular people are beginning to come around as talk of “the fertility crisis” goes mainstream and pro-natalism is picked up by atheist effective altruists. It’s good to have some of these people back on board, of course, but the takeaway is that the trads were right on this one. We were here from the start and, unlike many atheists, we never wandered astray on this question.

I’ve now spent the entire post talking about marriage, family, and kids, even though at the beginning of the post, I had two other points in addition to these—drug use and work/self-sufficiency. The reason for this is that the value of traditional norms on these latter two points is closely related to the first two. The basic trope that a man works to support his family is one of the most deeply ingrained life scripts out there. The ability to earn decent money is usually a prerequisite to family formation, as women aren’t likely to give you the time of day if you’re still living in mommy’s basement.

Likewise, it’s one thing to be addicted to drugs when you’re single and childless, or perhaps even in a relationship with a fellow druggie—but again, without children. Sure, we can recognize your behavior as irresponsible, but ultimately you’re only hurting yourself, right? What if you have kids to take care of, though? Now the calculus changes completely. The idea of doing hard drugs when you’ve got kids in the house is universally indefensible, even lolbertarians will squirm at that. Alcohol consumption also needs to be strictly controlled when you have children to care for, you don’t have anywhere near the same kind of freedom to sit around getting wasted that a childless person might have.

I’ll be discussing some of these issues a bit further in a follow-up post where I make the case that traditional morals are the best strategy for achieving the ideal life outcomes I’ve argued for in this piece. I actually started off by writing about that, but I realized that the immediate line of counter would be for people to say that ackchyually there’s no reason to get married or have kids in the first place, so I decided to start off by tackling that particular question first.

I’ll close with one final point in favor of marriage and kids: Yes, it’s hard. Much of the modern person’s reluctance to get married and have kids boils down to this point. To a large extent they are correct. Getting married, staying married, having kids, and being good parents to those kids, is really hard. That is also precisely why we afford status to those who successfully pull it off, why it is such a worthy endeavor for those who want to make something out of themselves. After all, it definitely takes much less effort to be an incel NEET living in your parents’ basement!

In any other avenue of life, it is readily understood that people deserve respect for doing hard things—when you see someone who is a true master of their craft doing something you could never do, you recognize their skill and dedication as worthy of praise. Parenting is also like this except even more so, because while many activities that people seek to master such as rock-climbing or guitar-playing are ultimately superfluous even if you’re really good at them, reproducing the species is not.

Unless you think that humans should literally go extinct, something which I’ve observed even anti-natalists as hesitant to seriously advocate, someone has to have kids! I mean, I guess you could go with the position I proposed in my vitalism parody, and say that perhaps it should be completely given over to the state to take care of on our behalf. But this is also a position that is so flat-out bizarre and extreme that it’s a complete non-starter; I’d never heard anyone ever bring it up except for myself in a piece of satire.

This means that if you refuse to get married and have kids because it is simply “too hard,” you are pushing that “burden” off onto other people and trusting them to do it instead. The society that cares for you in old age will only be there and continue to exist because other people took it upon themselves to do what you could not; they stepped up to the plate and claimed that mantle of responsibility. This means that, as long as they did a reasonable job and weren’t complete deadbeats or something, they deserve your respect and gratitude for their efforts.