I am continuing to develop my idea of the left as a Great Reaction, a movement against the radical Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that seeks to return to the good old days of exploitation and oppression.
Because what else can you call a movement that stands against a culture that has increased per-capita income from $1-3 per day in today's dollars to the current $150 per day in the US? Why would anyone argue, except in the details, against a phenomenon that has transformed the world from hunger to abundance?
To me, the key thing about the Great Enrichment is that its cultural carriers, the businessmen and middle class of the modern era, are not that interested in power.
But our lefty friends very definitely are interested in power. And they naturally assume that everybody else is interested in power as well. For them, the transformation from the present hellhole of racism, sexism, and homophobia to the sunny upland of liberation and emancipation can only by midwifed by political power. The result is that, wherever leftism has been tried, in small utopian communities or the campuses of government universities or actual governments, it has implemented old-style tyranny, in the manner of Genghis Khan and other historical notables, where the government rules by intimidation and oppression, and you keep your head down and get with the program if you want to know what is good for you.
So the Great Reaction is a movement of neo-tyranny. It believes that tyranny, top-down political force, is necessary to implement its vision of a better world.
Let us give our lefty friends their due. At first look, it would seem that only overwhelming force would be equal to the task of rooting out oppression, exploitation, othering, slavery, serfdom, marginalization, and subordination in human society. And indeed there is something in every man that is tempted by the Last Temptation of Christ, where Satan tempts Christ with dominion over all the kingdoms of the world, to do evil that good would come.
And I have conceded that in hunter-gatherer society the need for defense of the tribal territory against the neighboring tribes is elemental. Without the means and the will to defend the territory there is no tribe and no community. Every hunter-gatherer tribe must be armed and ready against its neighbors.
And the agricultural community also requires particular protection by armed force, else the Mongols or the Vikings or the pirates of the Spanish Main will descend and rape and pillage.
So it stands to reason that force is needed in the world to protect the innocent from the spoilation of the guilty.
But how much force is needed? And against whom? Who whom: That is the eternal question.
The left is unequivocal. Force is needed, transformative political power, in order to battle against the forces of evil. What's more, it makes sense that as humans have developed greater and greater material powers, using the energy in chemical combustion and perhaps nuclear reactions to multiply the material force of human and animal power, then it would be necessary for the right people to apply extreme preventative force to keep the new powers from bursting their banks and destroying everything in their path like a flood.
The list of potential evils that leftist thinkers and activists have identified, against which they judged political power was necessary and against which they mobilized in ideological war, is long.
First there were the absolute monarchs, the target of the French Revolution. Their unjust rule had to be destroyed and everything associated with it. Of course, in the event the French aristocracy had been defanged by the absolute monarchs centuries before, according to Tocqueville in his Old Regime and the French Revolution. And the regime of Louis XVI was mild and progressive compared to what came after it. Plus, it was broke. Of course, no regime goes out into the good night without encouragement. Nevertheless, the French Revolution unleashed the monsters of the Terror, and several coups and revolutions throughout the 19th century. Maybe the evils of the absolute monarchs were not so deep as to require the neo-tyranny of regicide and the wholesale slaughter of the old aristocracy and the bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
Then there were the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, the target of the Communist Manifesto. It was obvious to any young head full of mush in the 1840s that the rising bourgeoisie and its Dark Satanic Mills were embarked upon a massive power project that would enslave the workers and make feudalism look like a walk in the park. These exploiters had to be stopped before they immiserated the entire working class and the petite bourgeoisie. In the event, the bourgeoisie did not oppress the world, because it was not that interested in power. The great capitalists, whether they liked it or not, were mewed into a system that rewarded them for actions that created products and services for the consumer. And the capitalist market exchange system put such a large premium on trust and faithful performance of promises that the capitalists probably could not have brought themselves to dominate the world with force, even if they had wanted to. Instead, the inventors of machine textiles clothed the world, the inventors of steam power gave ordinary people the means to travel the world. The ones that suffered were those eclipsed by the latest technical and market revolution that marginalized their once proud "buggy-whip" industry. It must be said that the prophesies of Marx and Engels represent the most utterly failed prediction in human history and the followers of their vision have unleashed unimaginable horrors upon ordinary people with deaths in the millions in the mania to stop the exploiters before they strike again with a new technological revolution, some invention to make, say, the smartphone look like the Ford Edsel. Maybe the neo-tyranny of a government-owned economy directed by political activists is not the solution to the hypothetical danger of worker immiseration.
The world is still unwinding the horrors perpetrated upon the human race by the dedicated followers of Marx. But every political elite with half a brain now knows that, whatever its appetite for power, it cannot strut upon the world stage unless it fosters a vibrant market economy at home. But the idea of well-born political activists deciding that all the world's a stage and that the rest of the world is the captive audience for its activist struts and frets, its peaceful protests and its non-negotiable demands against the depredations of the monster du jour, has gone from strength to strength. The notion of a class of helpless victims, not so much of capitalism, but of patriarchy, or racism, or homophobia, cowering in cold fright waiting for the noble band of activists to liberate them into emancipation, has proved to be irresistible to a certain class of well-born youth. But each of these activist movements is a mere neo-tyranny, franchised by noble intentions with the right to dominate and humiliate the objects of their righteous rage.
I stumbled across a piece on discrimination today that belies the lefty assumption that all monsters are evil. Ben Shapiro writes:
The Great Reaction is a movement primed by the faith that the average human deplorable must be humiliated before he strikes again. And in the service of this witchhunt the movement has dug deep into the arsenal of pre-modern cultures that it likes to stigmatize as ignorant and superstitious. So we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-sacrifice of the environmental movement, and the neo-guilt of the modern Torquemadas.
And behind it all is the great temptation of neo-tyranny, the use of force to force the world to be good.
I don't think so.
Because what else can you call a movement that stands against a culture that has increased per-capita income from $1-3 per day in today's dollars to the current $150 per day in the US? Why would anyone argue, except in the details, against a phenomenon that has transformed the world from hunger to abundance?
To me, the key thing about the Great Enrichment is that its cultural carriers, the businessmen and middle class of the modern era, are not that interested in power.
But our lefty friends very definitely are interested in power. And they naturally assume that everybody else is interested in power as well. For them, the transformation from the present hellhole of racism, sexism, and homophobia to the sunny upland of liberation and emancipation can only by midwifed by political power. The result is that, wherever leftism has been tried, in small utopian communities or the campuses of government universities or actual governments, it has implemented old-style tyranny, in the manner of Genghis Khan and other historical notables, where the government rules by intimidation and oppression, and you keep your head down and get with the program if you want to know what is good for you.
So the Great Reaction is a movement of neo-tyranny. It believes that tyranny, top-down political force, is necessary to implement its vision of a better world.
Let us give our lefty friends their due. At first look, it would seem that only overwhelming force would be equal to the task of rooting out oppression, exploitation, othering, slavery, serfdom, marginalization, and subordination in human society. And indeed there is something in every man that is tempted by the Last Temptation of Christ, where Satan tempts Christ with dominion over all the kingdoms of the world, to do evil that good would come.
And I have conceded that in hunter-gatherer society the need for defense of the tribal territory against the neighboring tribes is elemental. Without the means and the will to defend the territory there is no tribe and no community. Every hunter-gatherer tribe must be armed and ready against its neighbors.
And the agricultural community also requires particular protection by armed force, else the Mongols or the Vikings or the pirates of the Spanish Main will descend and rape and pillage.
So it stands to reason that force is needed in the world to protect the innocent from the spoilation of the guilty.
But how much force is needed? And against whom? Who whom: That is the eternal question.
The left is unequivocal. Force is needed, transformative political power, in order to battle against the forces of evil. What's more, it makes sense that as humans have developed greater and greater material powers, using the energy in chemical combustion and perhaps nuclear reactions to multiply the material force of human and animal power, then it would be necessary for the right people to apply extreme preventative force to keep the new powers from bursting their banks and destroying everything in their path like a flood.
The list of potential evils that leftist thinkers and activists have identified, against which they judged political power was necessary and against which they mobilized in ideological war, is long.
First there were the absolute monarchs, the target of the French Revolution. Their unjust rule had to be destroyed and everything associated with it. Of course, in the event the French aristocracy had been defanged by the absolute monarchs centuries before, according to Tocqueville in his Old Regime and the French Revolution. And the regime of Louis XVI was mild and progressive compared to what came after it. Plus, it was broke. Of course, no regime goes out into the good night without encouragement. Nevertheless, the French Revolution unleashed the monsters of the Terror, and several coups and revolutions throughout the 19th century. Maybe the evils of the absolute monarchs were not so deep as to require the neo-tyranny of regicide and the wholesale slaughter of the old aristocracy and the bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
Then there were the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, the target of the Communist Manifesto. It was obvious to any young head full of mush in the 1840s that the rising bourgeoisie and its Dark Satanic Mills were embarked upon a massive power project that would enslave the workers and make feudalism look like a walk in the park. These exploiters had to be stopped before they immiserated the entire working class and the petite bourgeoisie. In the event, the bourgeoisie did not oppress the world, because it was not that interested in power. The great capitalists, whether they liked it or not, were mewed into a system that rewarded them for actions that created products and services for the consumer. And the capitalist market exchange system put such a large premium on trust and faithful performance of promises that the capitalists probably could not have brought themselves to dominate the world with force, even if they had wanted to. Instead, the inventors of machine textiles clothed the world, the inventors of steam power gave ordinary people the means to travel the world. The ones that suffered were those eclipsed by the latest technical and market revolution that marginalized their once proud "buggy-whip" industry. It must be said that the prophesies of Marx and Engels represent the most utterly failed prediction in human history and the followers of their vision have unleashed unimaginable horrors upon ordinary people with deaths in the millions in the mania to stop the exploiters before they strike again with a new technological revolution, some invention to make, say, the smartphone look like the Ford Edsel. Maybe the neo-tyranny of a government-owned economy directed by political activists is not the solution to the hypothetical danger of worker immiseration.
The world is still unwinding the horrors perpetrated upon the human race by the dedicated followers of Marx. But every political elite with half a brain now knows that, whatever its appetite for power, it cannot strut upon the world stage unless it fosters a vibrant market economy at home. But the idea of well-born political activists deciding that all the world's a stage and that the rest of the world is the captive audience for its activist struts and frets, its peaceful protests and its non-negotiable demands against the depredations of the monster du jour, has gone from strength to strength. The notion of a class of helpless victims, not so much of capitalism, but of patriarchy, or racism, or homophobia, cowering in cold fright waiting for the noble band of activists to liberate them into emancipation, has proved to be irresistible to a certain class of well-born youth. But each of these activist movements is a mere neo-tyranny, franchised by noble intentions with the right to dominate and humiliate the objects of their righteous rage.
I stumbled across a piece on discrimination today that belies the lefty assumption that all monsters are evil. Ben Shapiro writes:
Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute is fond of citing a 1934 study about discrimination against Chinese-Americans. The study followed a Chinese couple as they visited hotels and restaurants across the country. They were denied service a grand total of one time. Then, study author Richard LaPiere sent questionnaires to the various establishments asking whether they'd serve a Chinese couple. All but one that responded said no.You can see that's why the South needed Jim Crow laws to make sure that people discriminated in proper fashion. Otherwise those Southrons might have proved to be way too soft-hearted to administer the tough and necessary agenda of their leaders.
The Great Reaction is a movement primed by the faith that the average human deplorable must be humiliated before he strikes again. And in the service of this witchhunt the movement has dug deep into the arsenal of pre-modern cultures that it likes to stigmatize as ignorant and superstitious. So we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-sacrifice of the environmental movement, and the neo-guilt of the modern Torquemadas.
And behind it all is the great temptation of neo-tyranny, the use of force to force the world to be good.
I don't think so.
cool story bro
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