Biological Leninism; Spandrell. (article)

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Highlights

From [[2022-12-08]]❌

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.

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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 it, 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

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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

https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol4-dr-johnsons-hypothesis.html

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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

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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!

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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

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So how do you control these people [lawyers, judges, educators, media, bureaucrats. smart people who aren’t low-status and easy to entice with higher status]? 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

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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

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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

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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

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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. […] 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.

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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.

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