This argument is a speedrun of how the right lost the culture war for three decades and almost destroyed western civilization by so doing.
The right became infected with two terrible assumptions.
1. That childishness is bad.
2. That play is for children.
Both of these assumptions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, how humans work, and why humans are the dominant species on Earth.
The difference between a human and a great ape is a special kind of genetic adaptation called neoteny.
It means the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.
To a large degree, humans became humans by retaining the traits of baby apes in adult apes. Not just the facial physiology, but the curiosity, neural plasticity, and, yes, the tendency to play.
To understand why this helped humans, you have to understand what play IS, beyond the knee-jerk common-sense reaction of "frivolous things children do to entertain themselves".
But that's not an explanation of what play is. Because why does play entertain children? Why are they evolved to like it?
Because play, games, and stories are training for adult responsibilities.
Kittens pounce on string, chase each other, and wrestle because pouncing, chasing, and wrestling are the responsibilities of an adult cat.
If two little boys find two sticks, they will sword fight with them. Hell, if give a little boy a fucking pop-tart, he will bite it into the shape of a pistol, and run around yelling "bang".
But what about adults?
Most adult animals don't play much compared to when they were kids, and don't learn much, either, because there isn't a whole left to learn that they are actually capable of learning... at least not compared to the volume and rate of learning that they experienced as children.
But humans, the galaxy-brained geniuses of the animal kingdom, have the capacity to learn at a high rate throughout life.
And neotenously retaining childhood traits equips us with the urges to match that capability.
Human beings not only can and do play throughout life, they must, or their learning abilities stagnate and atrophy, and their emotional health suffers.
If you teach an adult that play, fun, games, and stories are childish things that he should "put away" when he becomes a man, after a decade or so you have a dullard, fit only for manual labor or routine and repeated application of rote processes.
Is
@ItIsHoeMath
such a person?
Of course not. He has risen to internet fame by playing... by drawing anime and telling stories. His actions demonstrate an innate understanding that cartoons and stories and simple things that explain by removing complexity are not frivolous activities at all... they are vital.
But his contempt for leftists, their arrested development, and the way they hide from responsibility, has caused him to fall into the same error that came within a hair's breadth of destroying Western civilization.
The right abandoned culture. Conservatives stopped making stories and games that expressed their worldview, because they decided games were for nerds, and stories were for manchildren who were too lazy to spend their evenings reading car repair manuals and the Wall Street Journal.
By deciding that play was for queers and commies, the right ceded the creation of art, of stories, of games entirely to, well... commies and queers.
Of course you lose the culture war if you don't show up and fight it, genius. Fiction and games are the DNA of civilization, and thus they are the battleground on which the culture war is fought.
If you don't make games, toys, and stories that express your worldview, people (both children and adults) are going to play with toys created to express other worldviews.
And play is learning.
So what do you think they are going to learn?
You cannot hunt, fish, and baseball your way to cultural relevance. Because anyone with a brain that isn't half-dead from underuse is going to read fiction, play games, or watch cartoons, and maybe all of these things.
Why you think the entire tech industry became left-coded?
Leftism has no nothing to do with tech, but video games, legos, and science fiction do. Engineers couldn't give less of a shit about baseball.
Active, curious, playful minds design the future, whether you like that or not. The Wright brothers played with bicycles and kites, and now you can fly to Paris overnight. Elon Musk read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress with a flashlight under the covers, and now we can catch returning rocket boosters with giant mecha-chopsticks.
Unless your cultural faction participates in what these people are interested in, you will not recruit them, and they will design a future that doesn't include you.
Frankly, sometimes I think the conservatives are still taking their cultural marching orders from a pack of humorless, soulless dullards who would still be losing as hard as ever if the theater kids hadn't pissed off Elon Musk.
