BIOLOGICAL LENINISM
BIOLOGICAL LENINISM
It's 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It's been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days. People are still praising or damning the revolution. As if it mattered anymore. As if it were something more than history. As if the left and right of today had remotely anything in common with the left and right of Lenin's day.
I won't praise Lenin, an evil man. But great men are often quite evil. I'm not very interested in Lenin, the man; but I'm very interested in Leninism. Lenin is very dead (if not yet buried, I wonder what Putin is waiting for); but Leninism is quite alive. And the Western press has just realized that China, the second power in the world, in place to become the first in a few years, is a Leninist state. It's taken 5 years of Xi Jinping shouting every day about the Leninist orthodoxy of the Communist Party of China for people to realize. Now the West is scared.
The West is scared because Leninism is effective. Yes, sure, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; but lasting 74 years is no mean feat. And at any rate, the very establishment of the Soviet Union was a superhuman feat. It was something amazing, and amazed was the whole intelligentsia of the Western world for many decades. The kind of people who read my blog might not realize this, but Marxism was huge. Still is, really. Marxism completely captured the intellectual classes of the whole world for over a century. In China it's still the official orthodoxy, taught in schools. In the West it's still with us, if in the morphed form of Cultural Marxism.
It's a staple of the right to speculate about why intellectuals hate capitalism. Reagan had a lot of quips about it. As usual, the right was good at cracking jokes, but it just never understood the problem. Which is why it lost, and keeps losing, and now we have gay marriage and black transexuals running for office.
To understand Marxism you have to understand the world Marx lived in. 1848. The Liberal Revolutions. Europe had gone a long way since feudalism, through the absolutist wars of the 17th century, the rise of the modern state, and then the series of liberal revolutions starting in France in 1789 all up to 1848. A common thread on all this history is the rise of the bureaucratic state. Feudalism is a very natural form of government. It's basically transposing the hierarchy of a conquering army into peacetime. China started like that, 1046 BC. The German tribes that conquered Western Rome also run like that. The king at war becomes the king at peace. The generals become counts. The colonels become earls. Everyone gets a piece of land, a set of rules of behavior, a set of duties of fealty.
It works pretty well at keeping loyalty. It's not perfect, of course, after generations pass, the original ties of loyalty between army buddies aren't quite the same. But it worked reasonably well. Feudalism in both China and Europe lasted about 1,000 years. The problem with feudalism is that it's really hard to get anything done. It's hard to raise taxes, it's hard to get anything built. Everybody is very zealous about their inherited status and they won't tolerate the smallest change. Then the most centralized and obedient Ottomans come in and the most free and decentralized Kingdom of Hungary is slaughtered at Mohacs.
A state, like any organization but even more so, wants to get things done. It wants to grow, expand its power and influence. And so feudalism led to absolutism. And absolutism led to liberalism. Liberal states were strong, had armies of bureaucrats and tax revenues that feudal states could only dream of. But while they were effective, they were a mess. Feudalism is good at generating loyalty. Liberalism is awful at that. And loyalty is very important. The fundamental problem of politics is the distinction between friend and foe, said Schmitt. A friend is someone who is loyal.
The 19th century, which destroyed the Ancien Regime in Europe, was an economic and scientific golden era, but politically it was a mess. A revolution every decade, governments which lasted months, huge scandals every week. Elections were a violent and chaotic affair. If anything got done at all it was because the political chaos gave way to economic freedom, and the private sector got things done. A lot of things done. But the intellectuals weren't cool with that. Intellectuals are always the reserve army of the bureaucracy. They want the government to get things done.
With all the scientific advances of the last centuries, the 18th and 19th century intellectuals were just brimming with excitement with all the things they could get done. All those plans of social engineering. Utopia on earth! It just seemed so feasible. And yet they could never pull it off through the political process. They just couldn't pull it off. The politicians and bureaucrats just weren't loyal enough. Constant factionalism and infighting made any real reform impossible.
Until Leninism, that is. Now Leninism is most likely mislabeled. Lenin did indeed found the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But Lenin died in 1924. And the Soviet Union was still a huge mess in 1924. It was Stalin, general secretary of the CPSU since 1922 who, through the means we all know, really built the Communist Party and stabilized the Soviet government. Stalinism is used to refer to his brutal purges and his approach to criminal justice, but it would be more accurate to use Stalinism to refer to what we today call Leninism; the structure of rule of single-party Communist regimes.
Say what you will about the Soviet Union: the Communist Party was loyal. They got things done. Every crazy and stupid thing that the Politburo approved got done. Yes, it took a while to achieve that result. Stalin had to kill a lot of people. But it wasn't through sheer terror and cruelty that the Communist Party worked. The Communist Party had a system. Which worked. It still works today in China. You might have noticed how people in the West today talk about China in these same terms. China gets things done, it does them fast and cheap. China got the world's biggest high-speed rail system in the time that it takes to dig a tunnel in Boston. And for not that much more money. That's not a coincidence. That's Leninism at work.
Any country has a ruling class. What I call "loyalty" you could also call asabiya; the coherence of the ruling class as such. Their ability to stick with each other and gang up, keeping the structure of rule stable. Feudalism got that; the nobility was the ruling class, they formed a society very much separate from that of the peasants, and they took much care that their rule was never contested. The destruction of that world by enlightened liberals resulted in a ruling class which was orders of magnitude less cohesive and orderly. You might be a libertarian and think that is a good thing, and you may have a point. But any organization wants to fight entropy and ensure its stability and reproduction. Liberalism historically has shown itself incapable of that. Leninism was the first solution to that problem.
Leninism is, of course, applied socialism. Socialism was huge before Leninism was even a thing, and that Marxism was and is still popular is not due only to Soviet patronage. Socialism works by hacking the Social Calculus Module that humans have in our brains. Remember, humans care deeply about status. Status is what drives human behavior. Everybody works to achieve more status, and to avoid losing status. Socialism of course sells egalitarianism. It tells people with low status that they can get some more. The Industrial Revolution had forced millions of peasants into the cities, and they all felt they had lost status in the process. Economists will tell you that the standard of living of industrial workers (according to some measures) had actually improved. And that may be so, but the workers didn't think so, and they were pissed.
So these socialists come by and tell them they have this plan to make them gain status, big time. That was huge. Yes, sure, Christianity had also started promising the meek that they were morally higher than rich people; they'd all go to heaven unlike those perfid rich guys. But that didn't translate into actual, real-world status. Socialism was promising actual goods. And so it became huge. It's still huge. It's pretty much catnip for humans. It's instant check-mate.
Socialism works not only because it promises higher status to a lot of people. Socialism is catnip because it promises status to people who, deep down, know they shouldn't have it. There is such a thing as natural law, the natural state of any normally functioning human society. Basic biology tells us people are different. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more crafty and popular. Everybody knows, deep in their lizard brains, how human mating works: women are attracted to the top dogs. Being generous, all human societies default to a Pareto distribution where 20% of people are high-status, and everyone else just has to put up with their inferiority for life. That's just how it works.
Socialism though promised to change that, and Marx showed they had a good plan. Lenin then put that plan to work in practice. What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party with little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families. The same happened in China, where e.g. the 5 provinces which formed the southern Mongolian steppe were joined up into "Inner Mongolia autonomous region", what Sailer calls "consolidate and surrender".
In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn't get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That's why they can't be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they'd rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dregs of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.
Ethnics were tricky though, because they always had a gambit which could increase their status even further: independence. Which is why both Russia and China soon after consolidating the regime started to crack down on ethnics. Stalin famously purged Jews from the Politburo, used WW2 to restore most of the Tsar's territory, and run such a Russia-centered state that to this day people in Kyrgyzstan speak Russian. The same in China, a little known fact of the Cultural Revolution was the huge, bloody purge in Mongolia and the destruction of many temples in Tibet. After that was done with, the Communist party became this strong, stable and smooth machine. The Soviet economy of course worked like shit, and that eventually resulted in the collapse of the system. But as China has shown, central planning is orthogonal to Leninist politics. China, of course, had to know. It had been running a centralized bureaucracy for thousands of years. Leninism was just completing the system.
So again, the genius of Leninism was in building a ruling class from scratch and making it cohesive by explicitly choosing people from low-status groups, ensuring they would be loyal to the party given they had much to lose. It worked so well it was the marvel of the intellectual classes of the whole world for a hundred years.
Meanwhile, what was the West doing? The West, that diehard enemy of worldwide Communism, led by the United States. What has been the American response to Leninism? Look around you. Read Vox. Put on TV. Ok, that's enough. Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. There's even movements propping up disabled and fat people. What Progressivism is running is hyper Leninism. Biological Leninism.
When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. "Never forget class-struggle", Mao liked to say. "Never forget you used to be a serf and you're not one now thanks to me", he meant.
In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn't work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one's talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class.
Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin's direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That's the nature of the Cathedral.
If you live in a free society, and your status is determined by your natural performance; then it follows that to build a cohesive Leninist ruling class you need to recruit those who have natural low-status. In any society, men have higher performance than women. They are stronger, they work harder, they have a higher variance, which means a fatter right tail in all traits (more geniuses); and they have the incentive to perform what the natural mating market provides. That's the patriarchy for you. Now I don't want to overstress the biology part here. It's not the fact that all men are better workers than women. In a patriarchy there's plenty of unearned status for men. But that's how it works: the core of society is the natural performance of men; those men will naturally build a society which benefits them as men; some men free-ride on that, some women get a bad deal. Lots of structural inertia there. But the core is real.
To get to the point: in 1960 we had a white men patriarchy. That was perfectly natural. Every society with a substantial proportion of white men will end up being ruled by a cabal of white men. Much of it is biology; part of it is also social capital, good cultural practices accumulated since the 15th century. White men just run stuff better. They are natural high-status. But again, nature makes for messy politics. There is no social value on acknowledging truth: everybody can see that. The signaling value is in lies. In the unnatural. As Moldbug put it:
in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
Or as the Chinese put it, point deer, make horse.
The point again is, that you can't run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don't need to be loyal. They'll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn't have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they're gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It's worse than that really. It's the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It's the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.
There's a reason why there's so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn't want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don't even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left's patronage. There's a devil's bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what's behind Larry Auster's First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.
This is also why the Left today is the same Left that was in Soviet Communism back in the day. What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it's all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it's gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin's Russia, America now has access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.
If you think it can't get worse than transexuals or pedophiles, you're really not understanding how this works. Look at this NYT article: a black woman, ex-con, convicted of murdering her own 4 year old son. She served 20 years in prison, which she spent studying sociology or something. After leaving prison, she applied to study a PhD at Harvard, which rejected her. Progressives were up in arms. How could you!
Go to the link, and look at that woman. Look at that face. She never expressed any remorse over killing her child. She lied about it in the PhD application. She disposed of the body and never told the cops where her son's corpse was! This is utter and complete psycho. Nobody in their right mind would want anything to do with this woman. But that's precisely the point. In most human societies before 1900 she would have been killed, legally or extralegally. But precisely this kind of person, someone who should in all justice be the lowest status person on earth; that's exactly the people that the Left wants on its team. You can count on her extreme loyalty to any progressive idea that the party transmits to her. And so, yes, of course, she finally got her PhD, at New York University. And unlike 97% of PhD students out there, you can bet on her getting a full tenured professorship very soon.
Yes, it's all madness, but it works. It really works like a charm. The richest parts of America, California and New York, are now a one-party state. America has legislation which forces every private enterprise of size to have a proportion of women, of black people and sexual deviants; who of course know they don't belong there, and thus are extremely faithful political commissars. More faithful than the actual official political commissars that Communist China has also in their private companies.
And Biological Leninism is extremely powerful overseas too. The same way that Soviet Communism all had natural fifth-columns across the world, with industrial workers forming parties and all doing Moscow's bidding across the West; American Biological Leninism is also an extremely strong means of agitation all over the world.
The United States has been the only superpower on earth since 1991. But that's changing of late, with China's growth into almost economic parity with the US, and Russia growing a pair, plenty of countries are now not following USG's line. Southeast Asia is now pretty much China's backyard. So now the United States is running an agitation campaign all over the world trying to undermine Chinese and Russian influence. As I'm most familiar with China, it's very obvious what the USG line is. Appealing to women and homosexuals to become their fifth column. And it's working. Every single article you see out there by a Chinese writing about how China should be more progressive (i.e. more American) is written by either a woman or a homosexual.
I read this article a while ago, which is infuriating. It's about a particle accelerator that China is building. A Chinese-American writer interviews the head scientist there: and all she does is undermine his project, saying how Communist censorship means the whole project is tainted. The guy doesn't get it. Why are you doing this to me, aren't you a fellow Chinese?
No, she's not. You know what she is? An ugly woman in her thirties. I know China well and ugly women in their thirties are very much not high-status in China today. Unlike in the West, where they're the voluntary thought police, and you can't even look at them. So of course any Chinese, or Russian, or Saudi, or Indonesian ugly woman in her thirties is, to the extent that she's given access to US propaganda, going to become a fifth column against her country's independence. And of course the same goes for ethnic minorities, the dumber the better. You want to get funding as a China expert in Western academia? You better be researching about Uyghurs or Tibetans. Those dumb and hostile minorities. So much more important than the oldest civilization on earth.
The question of course is how Biological Leninism is going to evolve. Both Soviet and Chinese Leninism changed a lot during their tenure. Stalin purged the party very hard, and after some decades, when all the memories of the pre-Soviet era were gone, and their power was secure, the CPSU started promoting high-performing (by the requirements of a political party, not a rocket science department, that is) Russian males. Which didn't care much when the whole Soviet state collapsed. I guess they're doing quite ok right now. Same in China: today the CPC is by no means a peasants and workers party. It's a best-guy-of-the-class party. Loyalty is not ensured by the threat of landowners coming back to enserf them and their children; it's ensured with a next-gen surveillance and propaganda apparatus. Note that both Russia and China kept class-struggle as the official ideology which everybody was (and is) forced to parrot incessantly to keep their jobs.
But exactly that is what makes it vulnerable to progressive attacks. I just blogged about how women and minorities have even less power than before in China. Let alone sexual deviants. No gay politicians in China. That alone makes a huge constituency, hundreds of million strong, of people in China that would prefer a Progressive government. That's the people who America is now addressing, unlike the previous strategy of selling democracy and its free economy to the Chinese middle class. Those don't look so good right now that the Chinese middle class arguably has a better standard of living than America's. Certainly less stressful.
Let's assume (hope) that America's Coalition of the Fringes doesn't succeed in destabilizing foreign countries. How is it going to evolve though? Again as I said, Russia and China both stopped their peasant kakistocracies after a few decades. But they already had a nominal single party dictatorship, and centuries of tradition of autocracy to feed upon. America is still 20 years away (if not 10) from a single party regime; and it has a tradition of adversarial democracy which makes it very hard to stop the ratchet. Even if it stopped, the ideology is already there. In the best-case scenario where a Democratic single-party regime gets its Stalin to purge the country of agitators and stabilize the regime, you still get 2020 rhetoric frozen as the state religion: women are sacred, can't even joke about them, Islam is peace, transexuals get to retroactively change their birth certificates. It's not okay to be white. White men get to run the country but they must parrot all this stuff 5 times a day while facing the Great Zimbabwe.
Or Brazilification collapses the economy and everything goes to hell. Yeah, that's more likely.
Source: Bloody Shovel 3
BIOLOGICAL LENINISM
Bronze Age warfare used to be about great lords going around in their chariots, shooting arrows here and there, then getting on foot and engaging in Single Combat. Early Samurais also did that. They'd go around on their horses, shouting who they were, their house, their pedigree.
But eventually somebody figured out that winning a war is really profitable. So they'd just raise a big army of common people, give them cheap weapons, a cheap shield, drill them into having rock-tight discipline. And they'd win. A disciplined team always wins against the most talented man.
The theory of democracy was that rich people, with the leisure to educate themselves about public policy, and a financial interest in the government of the nation, would run for individual office, represent their constituency, be reelected if they did their job well, replaced if they didn't. But laws are passed by majority vote. Soon somebody realized that getting a majority vote was very profitable; so the money was in finding a way to reliably organize half the parliament. So we got political parties.
A political party is a very different beast from an individual politician. A political party has no use for rich people. Well their money is welcome: but rich people tend to not be very loyal. They can afford to have a personality. As a political leader, politicians are your employees. You don't need staff who's very skilled or competent. They just need to be loyal, obedient, and have some ability to get elected. It helps if they can talk. Look good on TV. But that's about it.
You want people who are loyal, who will vote how you want them to vote. As Roissy would tell you, a man, or a woman, is only as loyal as his options. So the ideal politician is the man who doesn't have anything else going on for him. Someone for whom being a politician is the best thing that ever happened to him. Somebody who positively knows that if he ever leaves the party his status would drop. Marco Rubio, say. He'll play ball. He better.
Any system ruled by political parties will always move to the left. Their business model is based on getting low status people to work for them. Obviously they must give them something in exchange. And they must motivate voters to vote for them. Their promise is simple: You, low status people, help us out, vote for us, obey our commands, and we will give you high status. Don't vote for us, disobey us, let the right win, and you will remain low status.
Once the left wins, which it always does, because they are better organized, better able to form majorities in comparison to rich pricks who have no good reason to coordinate. High status people have been on the losing side in politics for 300 years. So what? They're still rich. Life is good. Yeah taxes are higher. And women are incomparably more annoying. But they put out better now, so there's that. Anyway, who cares. The Son also Rises.
The left always wins. But once they win they become higher status. Come on, they got power. They try, very hard, to convince everyone that they're not really in power. No, the forces of reaction are lurking everywhere! We must keep on the struggle! 80% of the Left's energy is in producing propaganda about how the Right really runs everything. When the Left had 90% tax rates, they still talked as if they were in Charles Dickens world. After 60 years of feminism, affirmative action, and Jews in all resorts of power, the Left of 2017 is obsessed with "systemic racism", "toxic masculinity" and "anti-semitism". Right.
But of course the Left has been in power for 200 years now. Once they got power, they enjoyed their hardly fought high status. Naturally they lost discipline, until a party further Left appeared, and then won. And so on and so forth. Cthulhu always swims left. That's where power is.
First they captured the electoral system. Arguably it's the easiest. But power is not only in parliament. Separation of powers is, or at least was, real. A Parliament can pass a law. The Executive could delay or outright ignore its execution. A judge could find or make up some flaw in the law and block it. It is of no use to have a legislative majority, having the ability to pass laws at will, if you can't effectively put them into practice. Power is absolute power or it is no power at all.
But where there's a will, there's a way. And there is always someone with a will to power. Eventually the Left found a way. Well, two ways. Stay tuned.
Source: Bloody Shovel 3
BIOLOGICAL LENINISM
Happy New Year everyone. I left a bit of a cliffhanger on my last post, which I intended to resolve in a few days, but I've been pretty busy, not really in the mood to write long form.
I am sorry about that, but do note, this blog is a free service, so I hope you understand it doesn't quite take the priority of my time. Again, there's a Bitcoin address at the sidebar, so if you want me to write more, I'm sure we can arrange something.
2017 has been quite an eventful year. I guess the overall mood was disappointment. Trump didn't get anything done. Doesn't seem like he'll ever get anything done. Europe slowed down the refugee invasion but not by much. And China has realized that AI makes state control so much easier. It's showing the way in censorship and crowd control. All China is doing will be done on the West in a few years, with the aggravating factor that Western states will use Orwellian tools to jack up Bioleninism.
Speaking of which, I gotta continue my last post. So we left with the early evolution of Western liberal parliamentary system. In economics there's this great concept called the "invisible hand". In a free environment, if there is money to be made, someone will find a way to make it. Works the same in politics: in a free political environment, if there is power to be grabbed, someone will find a way to grab it. Economics and politics are really quite similar.
There's this aspect of economic theory called "the theory of the firm". Why do corporations exist? Why can't we all be self-employed? That's kinda how it worked during medieval guild days. Why are we all slaves of huge corporations now?
There's many ideas thrown around, but the standard theory is that firms are built because of "transaction costs". Basically in a free market, individual economic actors don't quite trust each other, for good reason. Too many people around, can't really know who's good and who isn't. A hierarchical firm fixes social relations and sets up a structure of trust and responsibility that makes economic action more predictable and safe.
The standard liberal theory of politics had it so that all political actors were self-employed. But, surprise surprise, political firms, i.e. political parties, turned out to be way more effective at political action than isolated individuals. And the same way that corporations tend to look for a certain kind of man, not quite the same as the old individual craftsman, political parties too select for a certain kind of person. One who obeys, who can be trusted. That was the seed of Leninism; and oh boy did that seed grow.
The thing about firms, or any organization really, is that there are no fixed limits in how large they can grow, and how many things they can make. A state is but a gang of dudes who then grows into an army, then conquers a territory. As a gang the dudes did little more than drink beer and the odd assault on trading caravans. But eventually they grew into a state which does pretty much everything. Plenty of examples of that in Chinese history. For something closer to home, the East India Company. Started trading spices. Then ended up ruling over 400 million people. Why? There was marginally more money to be made in every step of the process.
So happened when political parties started to form in the 19th century. Parties formed in order to secure power in parliament. But once you have a machine to grab power, why stop there? There's a lot of power out there outside of parliament too, whatever the constitution says. There's the executive and the judiciary too, for starters. There's the press, the power to shape opinion. There's education, the power to shape the minds of children and their social relations as they grow. There are lots and lots of social groups around, and they all have power dynamics in them. Why not eat them up too? If there is power to be grabbed, someone will grab it. And the liberal revolutions were all about putting power out there in the open, up for grabs.
Well, surprise surprise, people started moving to grab it. And as in the magical invisible hand, which builds up an efficient economy if you only let it do its job; the invisible hand of politics also did its job. Economic firms are built around the pursuit of profit, and they grew through the joint-stock corporation. Political parties are built around the recruitment of low-status, or compromised (i.e. potentially low-status) people, and the promise of delivering high-status to followers and voters after power is grabbed.
We all know how efficient and sophisticated profit-pursuing mechanisms have evolved. Liberal politics were also this primordial soup where power-grabbing mechanisms were to evolve. And it didn't take too long for a strong, stable and hugely contagious mechanism to evolve. Socialism. It was always around, but Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, a year that the liberal revolutions were killing off all the monarchies across Europe.
Socialism refined liberal politics, the same way that double-entry bookkeeping refined business accounting. The base of electoral politics was to promise high status to low status people. Marx, starting this tradition where semi-assimilated Jews didn't get the latent hypocrisy of the host society, didn't quite get the joke of liberal egalitarianism, and just took it to its logical conclusion. You're not supposed to do that, kids. You're supposed to get the joke. But he didn't. Liberty and Equality? Ok, let's abolish private property then. Hey wait a little there. Are you serious? Abolish private property?
He couldn't have been serious. I mean, come on. Private property. It's not only the basis of civilization. Even pre-farming tribes have private property. Even monkeys like to own stuff. How insane have you to be to say that private property has to be abolished? Who the hell is going to join that movement? Well, a lot of people. You see, capitalism was a big deal. It changed how the whole society worked. In more concrete terms, it changed what kind of person was high status and who wasn't. Under capitalism, the merchants ruled. And that made a lot of people unhappy.
Hey, some people just aren't capable of being successful at capitalism. It ain't that easy. And, you know, people are different. It's not their fault if suddenly some shtetl Jew who can't even speak properly is pretty good at making money and so is suddenly now 1000x more high status than he is; when just 100 years ago he would have been some decent member of feudal society and the shtetl Jew would have been widely scorned and hated. Not being good at something sucks. So yeah, people were resentful. And socialism catered exactly to that resentment.
Of course socialism didn't have to outright call for the abolition of private property. Feudal society had private property. They could have just called for progressive taxes, widespread welfare, usury laws, that stuff. But why be reasonable when it doesn't really matter? A political party doesn't have to deliver on its promises. Least of all a leftist one! A Leftist party is by definition fighting against the establishment; if they can't deliver on their promises they can always blame the powers that be. And people will believe them, because, well the powers that be have power. Or used to. And inertia is a real thing. People's memories can be inaccurate, especially if they have a good incentive to not update.
A political party can get away with lying; a political movement, i.e. a vague and embryonic version of a political party, can get away with murder. They don't need to deliver on anything. They don't have to be reasonable. They don't even have to make sense. They just need to be able to recruit committed people. And guess what? Being unreasonable gets you more loyal followers than being reasonable. Why? Again, because reasonable, well-adjusted, normal people just have a wider range of options available for them. They don't need to commit to some crazy plan. They can just get a job and live a normal life. For an unreasonable, maladjusted, weird person, your options in life are much more limited. Joining a crazy political party which proposes the abolition of the very thing that makes society possible is, very likely, the best shot they'll ever get at achieving high status in their lives. So yeah, why not. Communism!
Again, there's many versions of unreasonable and maladjusted. Some people are genuinely just not very good at dealing with capitalist society. Born like that, to no fault of their own. Writers, journalists, middling lawyers. Rivers of ink have been spilled writing about how intellectuals are always overwhelmingly leftist. Which is odd given that communism didn't turn out to be very nice to intellectuals. But capitalism gives high status to precisely the opposite kind of person, the merchant, and intellectuals hate that. They are natural socialists. Very eager socialists.
An easy heuristic would be to see the natural constituency of any political movement as the people who, in the grand zero-sum game of human social status, would rise in status if that political movement were to gain power. But it’s not quite like that, if anything because you just can’t know what’s going to happen. Early socialists had no idea what was going to happen if socialism took power. They said they knew, but nobody knows the future. Uncertainty is the constant in human life. Any claims to the contrary are bullshit, or in scientific speech, signaling.
What is real is the present. And so the natural constituency of any dissenting political movement are the people who actually, very actually, in this very present, are losing out in the grand zero-sum game of human social status. These people are pissed and resentful, and they will do what they can to mess with society as it presently works. For good reason. Life is quite short, and you only get one. Nobody wants to lose out in status. The consequences of that are pretty bad. Losing out in the pecking order means, in general zoological terms, access to worst-quality mates, or no mates at all. So you bet all those intellectuals were pissed, and wanting to jump in to whatever movement promised them that they would crush capitalism and those evil fat cats. Even if it took away everything that’s good in life in the process. Who cares, that only made the process more engaging.
Again, the perception of losing out is subjective. Some people just are unreasonable and maladjusted and are not content unless they have absolute power and a harem with two thousand women. Political movements tend to house a disproportionate amount of those, alongside people who are really losing out to no fault of their own. A lot of people are losing out due to bad choices they made earlier in life, say, studied puppetry instead of something useful. So they are losing out, and it’s their own fault, but they can’t do anything about it either, and so they join the ranks of the opposition.
The point here is not who forms the ranks of the opposition. The point here is that in a democracy the opposition has an actual shot at grabbing power. They have the freedom to do so. They are encouraged to do so. And so any smart political agent is going to find a way to organize these people. The same way any smart commercial agent is going to find a way to make money. There is always someone. An evolutionary process will produce it.
And the resentful will win, because upward mobility is a very strong motivator. Hope really does trump fear. People with a shot at gaining status are always going to outcompete people who are just trying to keep what they have. There are plenty of pathways, but the writing is on the wall. In a “free society”, the politics will always move to the left. Always.
Of course the degree to which they move to the left depends on the degree of freedom in the political process. The first part to move left is the legislature, which is the part which is most open. Again as I was saying there are other parts to a power structure. The bureaucrats, the lawyers. The press, which provides conversation topics to all of them. The education system, which raises them and their children. It’s fairly obvious that if any political agent is to take absolute power, he has to grab not only the parliament; he has to grab all these too. And those are trickier than just MPs. Again we saw the process by which politicians move to the left: a political party needs loyal people who follow orders; the lowest status people are more likely to be loyal, given their lack of options. But bureaucrats or judges are harder to control. For one they tend to be smarter. They have to be smarter, they need to do an actual job. States tend to try to hire smart people to work as bureaucrats or judges. China hired them (China had governors double as judges, didn’t and doesn’t believe in separating the executive from the judiciary) through a famously hard exam system. In most places bureaucrats are still hired through exams. Let alone judges and lawyers. They have to pass the bar.
So how do you control these people? You can’t do it overtly, like you do with politicians. You can’t organize them through a formal political party. That’s against the rules. This is a very important point. How do you make sure the unelected parts of the power structure are in harmony with the elected parts? Here’s where the Leftist Power Machine divided into two paths. I call it the branching of leftism between Formal Leninism and Distributed Leninism, which then for historical reasons became classical Leninism and Biological Leninism. Historically this maps very well into what Moldbug called the Anglo-Soviet split.
Leftism in Russia had been advancing, slowly but steadily, for a very long time. Russia was formally an absolutist autocracy ruled by the Tsar. But during the 19th century the country opened up quite a bit, and as capitalism advanced, leftism grew in the same proportion among the people who weren’t doing so well under capitalism. The Dostoyesvky types, of which Russia had no lack of. I’d say Russia had a disproportionate amount of leftists because instead of capitalism growing organically as in say, the Netherlands, it came out of the blue into a very traditional and pious society. So of course all those people who had been conditioned over centuries to be loyal subjects and good Christians weren’t enjoying all that freedom to build factories and make money. And so they hated the whole thing. Russia produced lots of leftists of the craziest sort before it even had electoral politics.
So then comes Lenin and stages a coup and actually grabs power as a formal communist. And what did Lenin do? He wanted absolute power, like everyone else, but he actually had the guts and the will to pull it off. Lenin’s way of achieving power was to do what I just said you couldn’t do. Integrate all the ruling class into his political party. The judges, the bureaucrats, the teachers, the press. Everything into the party. The Communist Party. Political parties, remember, appeared as a way of ensuring discipline and organization in electoral politics. Lenin just extended the idea to every single organ of power in Russia. And it worked. It worked like a charm. It wasn’t easy, by no means. It took a long and bloody war. Then long and bloody purges. Then some more. Then the complete terrorizing of society. Then some more purges. But after 20 years or so Stalin had it more or less set up. He had achieved absolute power. He controlled the party. And the party controlled everything.
That’s Classical Leninism. There’s plenty of literature about it, if you want to know more. And there’s China right now, where the same principle still applies. Moreso these days after Xi Jinping tightened screws back on some areas of power which the Chinese Communist Party had let loose some decades ago. The point about Leninism is that after absolute power is achieved, the leftist ratchet stops. The country stops moving left. No new ideas. No new catering to low-status people and using them to topple the government. No, none of that. The ever advancing leftist movement was just a means to an end. The end was power. Once power is achieved, leftism dissolves. It doesn’t disappear; it leaves some residue, in that states always try to have ideological consistency with what they said during their founding. Chinese dynasties framed that as filial piety of emperors following the ideas of grandpa the founder; but it’s mostly just inertia.
This is not how things turned out in Western Europe and North America. No leftist party as such ever achieved absolute power in the West. It just didn’t happen. And not for lack of trying. But it didn’t pan out. As for why, well there’s my theory back then. Countries which developed capitalism slowly tended to produce less resentful losers than agrarian empires who were thrown suddenly into modernity. That’s not quite my original theory, I’ve read it somewhere else, maybe someone can remind me who first said it. At any rate the success of Leninism in Russia and China has plenty of chance in it. Lenin could very easily not have taken power, he could have lost the civil war, he could have not had that precious Wall Street Jewish money to keep him afloat. No Soviet Russia, no Communist China either. But anyway, it did happen, and socialism was very strong in those places with or without actual takeover.
So what happened in the West, anyway? There’s one guy who thought about it very deeply. For a long, long time. Mostly because he was in jail so he had plenty of time to study the problem. I’m talking about Antonio Gramsci. He was a communist agitator in Italy who got caught by Mussolini, and was sentenced to rot in prison. During that time he thought a very reasonable problem. Why am I here? Why did I lose? Fucking Lenin did a coup d’etat and he won, now he has power. Now look at me, rotting in prison. What went wrong?
His idea, which was hugely influential, and for good reason, was that the power structure wanted to keep being the power structure and you couldn’t just throw it away and replace it with your boys. You can try your chance in electoral politics, but there’s only so many resentful fucks who are willing to vote for the abolition of the very foundation of social life (property), at least in moderately prosperous Western countries. In these kind of places, if you want to take absolute power, you have to colonize the power structure very slowly. You have to influence their minds. You have to change the culture. This sounds very esoteric and spiritual but it’s not. Basically Gramsci argues that you gotta grab the press and the education system, and slowly but steadily do in every institution with some power what you do in a political party. Political parties work by hiring loyal people by preying on their low-status. Well, find a way into HR of every school, every newspaper, every government department, every judicial board. And to the very same thing. Run a distributed covert Leninist party. Until you run everything.
Sounds easy, huh? No, it sounds complicated like hell. And it was. But not so much; after all there’s fairly obvious economies of scale to influence peddling. A guy knows a guy who knows a guy. The great discovery of the 20th century wasn’t atomic power. It was the power of cliques. A few people in positions of power sticking with each other is the most powerful force in the universe. They can make lies become truth. They can make toilets be sold as art, they can make women be combat soldiers. They can do anything. It was quite easy for socialists to get their hand in the media; after all journalists are all natural socialists. Smart-ish guys good at writing with no talent for making money. And the same goes for teachers. Teaching doesn’t pay very well. And it’s exhausting. Why would anyone want to be a teacher? Well, but for the greater glory of socialism, that is.
So once socialists colonized the education system, the Gramscian distributed Leninist party got most of the job done. After all the schools are exactly where all the different power centers intersect. Montesquieu must have thought himself very smart saying that Legislators, Bureaucrats and Judges should be independent and in constant conflict. Well yeah, but where do they send their kids to school? To the very same places. And pray tell, cher Marquis, how do you plan on having those judges and bureaucrats and legislators and teachers and journalists and bankers and industrialists, who have all grown up together, shared a secluded life as a unified ruling class; how the hell are you gonna make them check and balance each other? That can’t work. And it isn’t working. They marry each other and send their kids to the same schools. Yeah, they’ll do some show and play politics theater, or Kabuki as the American like to say for some reason (as if only Kabuki was fake and other theaters were real), but in the end they are an endogamic ruling class and they know it.
Gramsci’s program was also called the Long March into the Institutions. A slow but steady Cultural Revolution. It was complete in most Western countries by the 1960s. And then we know what happened. I guess Gramsci’s original plan was to then grab power in a classical Leninist way, a dictatorship of the proletariat of a sort. But that ship had sailed in Western Europe. The workers were rich. They could afford cars and houses and vacations to Florida or Spain. You couldn’t motivate them with calls for hanging the capitalists and redistributing their property among the masses.
So the party was up and running. By the 1960s socialists cliques, more or less loosely associated with formal socialist parties, were running most schools and most newspapers and most government agencies and most courthouses and most parliaments. But you had to keep them together, keep them loyal and obedient. The early, classical way was to get the losers of capitalism, i.e. workers and bureaucrat-inclined people, and promise them high status come the revolution. That had worked pretty well from 1848 to 1948. Hell they conquered half the world and were really close to capturing power in much of the West too. But by 1960 in the West they needed a new ideology to get people motivated and loyal.
So again, what they did was stick to the structure: promise high status to low status people. But change the content, adapt to the times. Western 1960 society was very much not 1860 society. It was much richer, much more equal, and much more pleasant. People worked 8 hours a day, they had cars and TVs, girls put out pretty easily and there was always a party to go to. Absolutely no point in running a communist revolution. Well there was the 1968 “revolution”, with the anti-Vietnam stuff and all that. But that was just a big ass outdoor party, not a real revolution. It just sounded cool to call it that. The teens from 1968 are now all in positions of power and they haven’t abolished private property.
But again, the leftist ratchet isn’t a particular set of people. It’s a memeplex with a life of its own. A virus evolved to concentrate power, adopting ideas that help in the project, and discarding those that do not. Economic socialism, organizing the poor wasn’t working out in the West anymore. But the principle is sound; they just needed to find whoever was low status then. And there is always someone, status is zero sum. There’s always someone on top, someone on the bottom. Even in egalitarian societies. Socialism had really pressured Western society into becoming a quite egalitarian and pleasant society by 1960. But even in the best of worlds, there’s always low status people. Even if you re-engineer society so that there’s complete equality of opportunity, even if you run a revolution and you dissolve every existing hierarchy and start anew. There will always be low status people.
Because there’s always biology. Some people are tall, some people are short. Some look good, some are pretty ugly. Some are thin and some are fat. Some are pleasant some are annoying. Some are cool and some are awkward. Some are smart and some are dumb. Some make good choices some make bad choices. Some are law-abiding and some are criminally inclined. The latter of each pair is going to be low status anywhere on earth. Even in Soviet Communism under commander Trotsky. Some people just suck. That’s the way genes work.
And so thankfully for Leftism, even after achieving affluence, even after the working class disappeared as a thing, there was still plenty of material to work with to advance the cause of complete control. And so Leftist groups started agitating status for people of African descent. For Jews. For single women. For drug junkies. For sluts. For fat people. For homos. For lesbians. For aggressive Muslims. For the disabled. For the retarded. For the mentally insane. For the trannies. All people who were low status in Western society. And who would be low status in any society. Because they suck. They just aren’t very productive. For no fault of their own. Some people are born tall, some short. Some smart, some dumb. Some empathic, some psychopathic. Some content with their lot, some greedy with powerlust. That’s how it is.
And so the Long March through the Institutions that Gramsci first envisioned as a way of having the Italian Communist Party do what Lenin had done, ended up producing a different kind of Leninist system, one distributed and informal, instead of Lenin’s unified and formal, and one which morphed into promotion of the dregs of society instead of the promotion of Marx’s idea of the wrongly oppressed proletariat. Marx was not a good man, but at least he tried to dress his ideas in a way that made sense. Das Kapital took some real work to write. But that was just some contingent accident of his time. Leftism doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to get the job done.
Or at least marginally. Because the very fact that we have Biological Leninism as the organizing principle of all centers of power in the West, and that it keeps getting worse all the time, is because it’s not quite getting the job done. The job is concentration of power. It’s achieving absolute control. What Lenin did. What once Lenin did that, or more precisely Stalin did that, the ideological content of the Left stabilized. Cthulhu stopped swimming left. But here in the Atlantic Cthulhu has been swimming for centuries, getting crazier every day. Because there’s no one to stop him. We have a Cathedral, yes, an informal distributed Leninist party, ensuring very efficiently that only their people get in positions of power and influence. But there is no Stalin. No Xi Jinping. Not even a lousy Putin even.
As for why, is a good question. The unwritten constitution of English politics is just very robust. English liberty. Only Oliver Cromwell ever tamed that beast, and not for very long, and that was quite a while ago. The West is the US vassal empire, and the US just doesn’t do absolutism very well. But it’ll get there, it’s getting close; the returns are just too great. If there’s a way to grab power somebody will grab it. All he, or more likely she at this rate, has to do is say: give me power, or else, all of you, all those evil fat women with a make-work office job, all those foreigners living off the public purse, all those just plain unpleasant people with unhealthy lifestyles; all of you, give me power, or if you don’t, we’ll go back to 1959, it’ll be ok to be white, and all of you will have to make your bed, clean up your room, and do actual work. You’ll be on your own.
How long will it take? Can’t be that much longer.
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