Newsletter #84: Why You Need a Positive Vision

Building an identity on opposition makes that identity a product of the very thing you say you oppose.

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A positive identity is one built around a vision of who you are and what you want to be, achieve, or create - personally or collectively.

A negative identity is one built around opposition to something or someone, often, but not always, around a grievance.

If you want to be happy, healthy, and successful, build a positive identity or vision, not a negative one. It’s okay to oppose things. In fact, we all should. But you have to be careful not to create an identity around what it is you don’t like.

A positive identity is no guarantee something won’t go badly wrong. Many utopian type movements ended badly. Many positive identities are actually bad. But things are almost certain to go wrong with a negative identity.

Modern postwar American conservatism was originally heavily defined by negative identities. They opposed the New Deal and they opposed communism. Two of the three legs of the conservative stool were oppositional. The third leg of conservatism, traditionalism, was more animated by positive identity.

To this day, conservatism is mostly an oppositional movement without a positive vision for society. Ronald Reagan’s line about the nine most terrifying words in the English language being, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” gets at this idea. What conservatives want is for the government to not do things to them, to leave the outcome to the free market and the private sector and the individual. As for what those things will end up creating, they basically take little position on it but take it as a given that it will be good.

So you end up with Republican positions like not wanting to pay taxes, not wanting socialized medicine, not wanting the government to take your guns, etc.

Again, there’s a lot to be said for some of this. When the Soviet Union collapsed, anti-communism morphed into a positive vision of the neoconservative imperial project of spreading “our democracy” to the globe — at the barrel of a gun if necessary. That hasn’t worked out well for many of the countries we got involved with.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think bombing countries like Libya is “who we are” - or at least it shouldn’t be. This shows the danger of positive visions as well.

You Can’t Just Play Defense

But when you embrace a negative identity, you put yourself into an asymmetric scenario in which you are vulnerable to someone with an expansionary, positive vision they want to create.

Darren Beattie of Revolver News says “silence is violence” beats “don’t tread on me” every day. Don’t tread on me is a negative vision. It says that all you want is to be left alone. Silence is violence is underpinned by an imperialist moral vision that will relentlessly attempt to impose itself on other people and society. Which is more likely to ultimately win out?

Or consider a more tangible example I continue to return to: what’s the Republican plan for health care? There isn’t one. Republicans oppose socialized medicine. They opposed Hillarycare and opposed Obamacare. But they have few ideas of their own.

Democrats want socialized medicine, accomplished through increasing government involvement with the health care system over time. Republicans are opposed to that. But what that means practically is that Republicans have to win 100% of the time, whereas the Democrats only have to win once. That’s not a good place to be if you are on the right. Indeed, we’ve seen the gradual expansion of the government’s role in the health care system. I believe today the government actually pays for over half of national healthcare spending, in addition to micro-regulating every aspect of the system.

Republicans promised to “repeal and replace Obamacare.” But replace it with what? Because they have no idea about what to do with health care, they didn’t replace it when they had the chance. Probably they were never serious about this anyway, but assuming they were, they’d have to have some idea of a better system to replace it with. But they don’t. The GOP’s vision of health care is mostly limited to opposing things, with only a few minor ideas like health savings accounts on the positive side of the ledger.

Because most Americans are unsatisfied with our health care system and their medical bills, the clamor for more government intervention will only grow. It will be hard for Republicans to fend this off in the absence of any specific ideas about how to improve things.

Having a negative vision means that are you are going to perpetually be playing defense. This puts you in a position where you are likely to lose longer term even if you gain in the short to medium term.

Don’t Become Defined by What You Oppose

An even worse outcome of a negative or oppositional identity is that you come to be defined by the very thing you oppose. Indeed, you are co-dependent on it because you only meaningfully exist in opposition to it.

An interesting thread on X about propaganda by the user Kruptos explains how this happens:

Many think that propaganda is about getting people to believe lies. Because of this, they think that defeating propaganda is about countering government lies with the truth. This is COMPLETELY wrong.

Propaganda is not about getting people to believe lies, rather, propaganda is about shaping the truth. Propaganda is about controlling the narrative, the story by which people understand their lives. The point of propaganda is always to be dictating the terms of the narrative, the thing people think about and the information they act upon.

Even if that action is only to feel what they want you to feel or hate whom they want you to hate, once the propagandist makes you do what he wants (put on a mask, for example), he has you. You think, “I have to counter his message, his lies.”

This is the exact wrong way to think about propaganda. When you react to the propagandist and are giving counter-messaging or trying to correct his “lies” with the “truth” you are actually helping the propagandist win. Why? Because by reacting to the propagandist you are legitimating his narrative as the narrative which must be responded to. By trying to counter his “lies” with the truth you are strengthening the position of regime propaganda, not weakening it.

If you are reactive to the messaging and narrative of the regime, you are losing the propaganda battle, you are strengthening the regime by saying that this is the narrative that must be discussed.

This thread emphasizes the counter-productive nature of being defined in opposition to societal narratives, but it also illustrates that those narratives are the ultimate base upon which your own identity is built. You are defined by what you oppose.

We see this sort of thing in various liberationist or “anti-colonial” movements. Indeed, the “decolonization” movement I see today seems less based on any positive ideas about the future of American Indians, Palestinians, or whomever else they purport to care about than it is hatred of the West, America, white people, etc.

These movements literally can’t exist outside of the West itself (or without a connection to and support from the West). They are in fact something of a shadow of Western society.

I have thought about this problem a lot in terms of my own work. Obviously, I am often critical of various ideas or movements. However, I want to be working towards a positive vision. That’s one reason I adopted a guiding principle from the get-go of “build up, don’t just tear down.”

I don’t always have a specific, concrete vision of the future of the evangelical church or 21st century American masculinity, but I’m trying to point in that direction.

You’ll note especially that I am not running an anti-feminist publication. In fact, I rarely interact with feminism at all. I don’t want to be opposed to things. I want to be in favor of things. I don’t want to be reacting to other people’s agendas. I want them to be reacting to mine.

We can see the problem of oppositional identity in the evangelical complementarian gender theology. It is undeniable that the Bible is complementarian in some way in terms of its view of gender. (That is, men and women are not the same, and have differing but complementary roles in creation). However, I have been critical of the contemporary evangelical gender theology that calls itself complementarianism.

Why is that? In part it is because complementarianism defined itself in opposition to feminist egalitarian theology. It’s notable that complementarian pioneer Wayne Grudem got his start in the area by trying to rebut feminist claims that the Greek word kephalē, typically translated as “head,” really means “source” as in the headwaters of a river. From the start, it was reactive.

The complementarian system ultimately became largely a series of reactions to evangelical feminism. The main book outlining this theology, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, is literally subtitled “A Response to Evangelical Feminism.”

The feminists wanted female pastors, complementarians opposed it. The feminists wanted functional equivalence of husband and wife, and complained that women were oppressed. Complementarians denied functional equivalence formally, but redefined it into what sociologist James Davison Hunter called “an administrative technicality” and created a new theology of the “servant leader.” The project seems to have been to affirm a limited number of scriptural passages that speak to gender complementarity, and otherwise adopting many feminist positions in order to blunt its attractiveness. Ultimately, feminism ended up defining the parameters of complementarianism.

No wonder that this system has little appeal to today’s young men, who find that it fails to speak to the reality of their condition today. Much of the reality of our lives as men and women in the modern world are not spoken to at all by this system. Hence we see young men turn tinstead to online influencers for guidance.

It’s similar for the “anti-woke” discourse. It is entirely about what it opposes. I have never heard a positive, substantive vision of Christianity and race emanating from an anti-woke person. (“I don’t see color” doesn’t count).

Their critiques aren’t wrong. I’ve yet to see any contemporary progressive social justice evangelicals who evince any substantive knowledge of race in America apart from the talking points that got downloaded into their heads. And their ideas are essentially all of secular origin. It’s amazing how we’ve gone backwards from, for example, the vision developed by John Perkins and Wayne Gordon, which you can read in Making Neighborhoods Whole. Whatever the defects or failures of their Christian community development movement, at least they were trying to positively apply a gospel ethic to real world problems, and had bigtime skin in the game.

But again, if the wokesters are wrong, then what’s right? The anti-woke movement again is entirely negative, and could not even exist but for the people they oppose.

Race is the area where I see the need for the most new scholarship and development work in the evangelical church. There’s a ton of work on Protestant political theory today. There’s interesting stuff being done on gender. But I’m still searching for something compelling on race (although I’m surely missing some things).

I think a lot of “culture war” Christianity is overly negative in its sense of identity. They’ve built an identity out of fighting with people and against things. And it’s a mode they can’t escape.

Building Positive Identity

Who has positive visions and identities? In the religious world, it might be sects like the Amish or Hasidic Jews. Though undoubtedly they need some types of oppositional stances to resist the intrusions of the modern world, they seem to be mostly animated by a positive vision for how they and their community want to live.

Of course, becoming part of a separatist sect is not realistic for most of us. But the Mormons seem to have something of this as well, and they are fully integrated into the modern world. There’s a sort of “Mormon way” or life script that seems to be basically healthy and pro-social, and which has produced extremely good outcomes in Mormon heavy areas like Utah.

Doug Wilson and the Moscow, Idaho community have built a strong sense of community identity and positive community building. However, they’ve also built part of their identity and community around fighting with people. Their member organization is literally called “Fight, Laugh, Feast.” Note that “fight” comes first. It would be interesting to see if they could transition out of an identity rooted in the high-conflict, oppositional side of their community in favor of the positive vision they have also been building for decades. So they are an interesting case.

In the broader world, Elon Musk has a positive vision of humanity as an interplanetary species. Even his opposition to things like censorship and wokeness seems to be driven by how he perceives them as threatening his project to colonize Mars.

The transhumanists — people who want to figure out how to extend human life indefinitely, or merge human consciousness with machines - also have a positive idea of what they want to accomplish. So does the Andrew Tate style “get laid, get paid” segment of the manosphere. These are both bad visions, and ultimately hoaxes as well. But they are compelling to people who don’t know any better.

On the dissident right, Charles Haywood’s Foundationalism idea is a positive vision for society. So was Curtis Yarvin’s original concept of microstates structured as sovereign corporations. These might be sci-fi type futures, but they are ideas that transcend pure opposition to leftism.

The various “tradwife” or homestead influencers also have their own sense of identity and vision of a better way of life. Some of these folks are basically actors or actresses, but undoubtedly many people are turning to a rural homesteading type existence. This is something positioned in opposition to modern industrial society. But if you look at their content, it’s mostly about what they are doing, not about what modern society is up to that they don’t like.

Part of our challenge is to put forth a compelling vision of who we are, how we want to live, and what we want our community and our nation to be in the future. And one that isn’t rooted in being an oddball sect, adopting a niche lifestyle, or far future sci-fi type scenario but is realistic for 21st century America.

• What should a healthy modern masculinity look like?

• How should our families live today?

• What kind of community should our churches embody?

• What kind of town and nation do we want to live in?

• What kind of identity and values should we and our communities have?

These are some of the things we should be thinking about. Although there’s plenty to oppose in our society, we can’t build an identity or vision of the future based only around the things we don’t like. We need a positive sense of identity and values, and a positive vision for life.

Coda

We delude ourselves if we think that desegregation can only be a win-win experience for all. There are costs involved, and some may be substantial. If we require, as we should, the Section 8 and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit programs to facilitate movement of low-income African American families into middle-class communities, those communities may experience an increase in crime. It is more likely to be petty than violent crime, and it won’t approach the violence visited upon African Americans to enforce their segregation. Nonetheless, pretending that integration can be cost-free dooms it to backlash when residents of middle-class communities realize they were duped. Integration cannot wait until every African American youth becomes a model citizen. Affluent suburbs may experience a decline in property values after integration, because racial and economic snobbery is now part of their appeal to buyers….Remedying de jure segregation will be neither win-win nor neat.

- Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America