I have been developing the notion that the left movement is a Great Reaction against the market-economy-limited-government cultural turn of the last 200 years.
And because it is a religious movement that believes in its prophecy that politics leads to justice, every one of its revolutions ends in disappointment. Crane Brinton in Anatomy of Revolution traces the arc of all the modern revolutions from their origin in existential hope to the Reign of Terror when the prophetic hopes are dashed to the eventual return to normal in the Thermidorean Reaction.
But Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion argues that Lenin didn't go through this process. He believed in terror from the outset.
Hey, at least our woke lefties today only cancel people when they have foolishly shown their heads above the parapet. But Lenin arrested people on principle. So,
But Lenin decided to turn that upside down.
Now I believe that the salient point of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is the discovery of a new reason to limit and reduce the use of force. The market economy is built upon the simple notion that you trust people that act trustworthy and you maintain those trust relationships by making those relationships as permanent as you can.
This is why I call the left the Great Reaction. Because the left is a return to force; it says that to get to the perfect society of peace and justice we need more force, to hammer humans into shape, as though we were a block of marble. And then that perfect human marble statue will stand for a thousand years.
Sorry lefties, but you are wrong, dead wrong, for a simple reason. Every day, every moment, the world changes, and so we humans have to adapt to that change. The change could be anything: a change in women's shopping tastes; a change in the weather; a technological invention. Every single change in the world ripples through the economy, courtesy of price discovery, and it changes the world forever.
The whole philosophy of the left is that heroic intellectuals, revolutiinaries, or activists can imagine a perfect world and then implement it using politics. But they are wrong, dead wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. In the real world, things are changing all the time and we humans have to adapt. In the real world we construct hierarchies and relationships that are mutually beneficial and reduce or eliminate the need for force.
Do you see how the Leninist philosophy is worse than a crime, it's a blunder? Lenin is saying: forget about the lobsters; forget about the human extension of lobster hierarchy into community and into the mutual advantages of market relationships. Lenin says that force is the answer.
Force? To force people into executing the ruler's plan? But suppose some guy, some nobody, has a better plan. How would we know? How would that guy, that nobody, get to the Vlad the Ruler and say: Hey Vlad, your idea stinks. Here's a better idea. Yeah, like that's going to go down well, because the way politics works, the leader that changes his plan shows weakness and the whole point of leadership in politics is to demonstrate strength.
Do you see the issue here? The point about political leadership is to lead the people in an existential struggle against some enemy. For that you need leadership, strength, courage, marching towards the sound of the guns, willingness to die defending your homeland. And the cost of that is fearful, in blood and treasure and young men dead before their time.
But everyday life is not like the Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae. It is people working with other people, people doing things for other people, people living in natural hierarchies and going with the flow unless there is some big reason not to.
And yet our lefties say the answer is force.
Well, I would have thought that Lenin would have settled the issue for us. Economists talk a lot about the difficulty of testing economic theories, because of the moral problem of testing the ideas out on human guinea pigs. But Lenin did the whole thing for us. He applied maximum force and arrested and tortured and killed and put people into slave labor camps. And then Stalin went one better on him. We still don't really know the bottom line of the full butcher's bill and hunger bill and just general impoverishment. Because the Soviets didn't publish properly audited accounts the way that corporations have to do. But we know that Lenin's plan was the biggest disaster in modern history -- after the double disasters of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
I mean: our lefties are proposing Lenin-lite: that's what AOC's Green New Deal and Just Society are all about. And the lefty cancel culture is Mao-lite; it's a cultural revolution complete with naming and shaming. Just not actual executions and sending people to the collective farms to teach them a lesson.
And as I say, it's worse that a crime -- which it is. It's a blunder. We know, from the experience of the Great Enrichment, that the market economy and limited government are the ways to go, the way to fill the lives of ordinary people with unimaginable riches. Force is not the answer, not in the economy, not in the culture.
Tell that to a lefty.
And because it is a religious movement that believes in its prophecy that politics leads to justice, every one of its revolutions ends in disappointment. Crane Brinton in Anatomy of Revolution traces the arc of all the modern revolutions from their origin in existential hope to the Reign of Terror when the prophetic hopes are dashed to the eventual return to normal in the Thermidorean Reaction.
But Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion argues that Lenin didn't go through this process. He believed in terror from the outset.
An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.In other words, Lenin didn't wait to get disappointed that his revolution wasn't turning out the way he hoped. He went for out-and-out force from the outset. Unlike the Nazis, for instance.
Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe.But guess what. When people are terrorized by arbitrary arrest then they are going to bunker down and do nothing with their lives. As the Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
Hey, at least our woke lefties today only cancel people when they have foolishly shown their heads above the parapet. But Lenin arrested people on principle. So,
as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”Now I think that one of the central contributions of Jordan B. Peterson is his story of the lobster, that male lobsters are programmed not to fight every time there is a question of hierarchy. In other words, even way down the evolutionary hierarchy we see this primitive species adopting a behavior that limits the use of force. And this notion applies throughout the animal kingdom. Animal interactions are designed to minimize the use of force.
But Lenin decided to turn that upside down.
Now I believe that the salient point of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is the discovery of a new reason to limit and reduce the use of force. The market economy is built upon the simple notion that you trust people that act trustworthy and you maintain those trust relationships by making those relationships as permanent as you can.
This is why I call the left the Great Reaction. Because the left is a return to force; it says that to get to the perfect society of peace and justice we need more force, to hammer humans into shape, as though we were a block of marble. And then that perfect human marble statue will stand for a thousand years.
Sorry lefties, but you are wrong, dead wrong, for a simple reason. Every day, every moment, the world changes, and so we humans have to adapt to that change. The change could be anything: a change in women's shopping tastes; a change in the weather; a technological invention. Every single change in the world ripples through the economy, courtesy of price discovery, and it changes the world forever.
The whole philosophy of the left is that heroic intellectuals, revolutiinaries, or activists can imagine a perfect world and then implement it using politics. But they are wrong, dead wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. In the real world, things are changing all the time and we humans have to adapt. In the real world we construct hierarchies and relationships that are mutually beneficial and reduce or eliminate the need for force.
Do you see how the Leninist philosophy is worse than a crime, it's a blunder? Lenin is saying: forget about the lobsters; forget about the human extension of lobster hierarchy into community and into the mutual advantages of market relationships. Lenin says that force is the answer.
Force? To force people into executing the ruler's plan? But suppose some guy, some nobody, has a better plan. How would we know? How would that guy, that nobody, get to the Vlad the Ruler and say: Hey Vlad, your idea stinks. Here's a better idea. Yeah, like that's going to go down well, because the way politics works, the leader that changes his plan shows weakness and the whole point of leadership in politics is to demonstrate strength.
Do you see the issue here? The point about political leadership is to lead the people in an existential struggle against some enemy. For that you need leadership, strength, courage, marching towards the sound of the guns, willingness to die defending your homeland. And the cost of that is fearful, in blood and treasure and young men dead before their time.
But everyday life is not like the Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae. It is people working with other people, people doing things for other people, people living in natural hierarchies and going with the flow unless there is some big reason not to.
And yet our lefties say the answer is force.
Well, I would have thought that Lenin would have settled the issue for us. Economists talk a lot about the difficulty of testing economic theories, because of the moral problem of testing the ideas out on human guinea pigs. But Lenin did the whole thing for us. He applied maximum force and arrested and tortured and killed and put people into slave labor camps. And then Stalin went one better on him. We still don't really know the bottom line of the full butcher's bill and hunger bill and just general impoverishment. Because the Soviets didn't publish properly audited accounts the way that corporations have to do. But we know that Lenin's plan was the biggest disaster in modern history -- after the double disasters of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
I mean: our lefties are proposing Lenin-lite: that's what AOC's Green New Deal and Just Society are all about. And the lefty cancel culture is Mao-lite; it's a cultural revolution complete with naming and shaming. Just not actual executions and sending people to the collective farms to teach them a lesson.
And as I say, it's worse that a crime -- which it is. It's a blunder. We know, from the experience of the Great Enrichment, that the market economy and limited government are the ways to go, the way to fill the lives of ordinary people with unimaginable riches. Force is not the answer, not in the economy, not in the culture.
Tell that to a lefty.
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