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Devon Eriksen can be counted on to write some thought provoking and challenging ideas.
This is the socialist worldview in a nutshell.
Socialists believe the following:
1. All progress is social. This means that all human problems are solved by rearranging collective human behavior.
2. How to rearrange human behavior to solve problems is already known.
3. Problems therefore exist because there are people who don’t want to behave in this known fashion.
4. Therefore, problems exist because certain people are in the way of progress. Socialist politicians may be grifters who believe in nothing, but their (living) voters, the socialist true believers, hate you, and this is why.
They believe you, your existence, your non-compliance with their plans, is all that stands between humanity and paradise. This is why they will always murder you if they have power. This is why unchecked socialism always leads to the censor, the secret policeman tapping your phone, the neighbors dragged away in the night, the torture chamber, the gulag, the mass grave. Because if you think that nothing stands between you and paradise but stubborn people, then you think you can murder your way to paradise.
When a socialist demands socialism, you either comply or you do not. If you do not comply, he wants to murder you. If you do not comply, then the socialist policy he enacts not only fails to bring about paradise, it makes things worse, so he demands a further socialist policy. If you do not comply, he wants to murder you. If you repeatedly comply, then eventually things get very bad indeed, and the socialist casts about for someone to blame. Surely there must be some non-compliant person around here somewhere. Some counter-revolutionary. He must be found and murdered, and then paradise will be attained.
This isn’t about religion. “Religion” is merely the label they paste on your non-compliance. If you were an atheist, they’d just use another label. That giant finger in the drawing isn’t your beliefs. It’s you. They think you are evil. Not wrong, evil. And they want to kill you. Not all of them think they do, of course. There’s a group called “democratic socialists”, who append the word “democratic” to the front, to mean “I don’t want to kill you, I only want to use the political process to force you to comply.” But when they do, your society enters the same downward spiral described above.
So they eventually decide to kill you.
They will always, eventually, reach the point where they decide to kill someone. Because they always think their utopian plans will work if they kill just one more person, and their utopian plans will never actually work no matter how many people they kill.
What actually works isn’t socialism, it’s technology. Here’s how:
1. All progress is technological. This means that all human problems are solved by figuring out a better understanding of the universe, and creating a piece of technology based on that understanding.
2. Creating new science and technology is hard, and requires a lot time, money, and effort.
3. Problems therefore exist because not enough time, money, and effort has yet been invested to produce the necessary technological breakthrough.
4. Therefore, there is absolutely, positively, 100% no way to solve all human problems right now by acting differently. But we can optimize society for technological progress.
In other words, the “star trek future” isn’t waiting for us to become atheists, because atheism doesn’t produce technology faster or better than any religion that isn’t anti-technology. That “star trek future” is instead waiting on us to invent warp drives, teleporters, and matter nanoassemblers. And every single piece of progress that humanity has achieved came not from social activism, but from technological advancement. The 40 hour work week was merely demanded by unions. It was actually enabled by industrial technology.
Democracy, republicanism, and other forms of populist government were merely demanded by revolutions and philosophies. They were enabled by the rifled firearm. And so on. For every positive change in society and civilization, there is one or more critical pieces of technology that allow it to happen. Once that technology exists, the change is trivial. When it does not exist, forcing that change is disastrous, not positive. A 40 hour work week would exterminate a civilization of bronze age agriculturalists. Democracy would destroy a medieval kingdom. Progress is technological progress.
This is why socialism must be stopped.
Because socialism interferes with technological progress, which is the real driving force behind progress of any kind.
You cannot murder your way to utopia.
1. Communism is when depraved freaks make it illegal to be normal, and kill all the successful people.
2. Fascism is when normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, and kill all the bright and creative people.
The depraved freaks from #1 think they are the bright and creative people from #2.
They are not.
All those people gyrating half-naked in front of children at pride parades think they are Oscar Wilde, but they aren’t.
When societies become highly permissive, the productive weirdos, the ones who simply can’t fit in because they are creative in useful ways, become surrounded by, outnumbered by, a horde of cargo-cult imitators.
These people imagine themselves to be creative free spirits, because they compete to be as freaky as possible. They do not understand that freaky behavior is not creative talent… it is only a side effect of creative talent.
Often these people are defective and useless, which is why they seek to use freakiness to camouflage themselves as creative, hoping to hide their uselessness.
This progresses until normies get disgusted with them, and start thinking fascism might be a good idea.
Then they kill everyone. This wipes out all the depraved freaks from #1, but it also wipes out Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, etc, as described in #2.
Because normie dullards can’t tell the difference, especially when their blood is up.
I understand why a lot of the right is educating itself about Wiemar Germany and re-examining fascism as a response to those conditions.
The impulse makes sense. Disgust is an entirely appropriate emotional response right now.
But they don’t understand that even if it has rational origins, fascism, like communism, is a process that spirals out of control.
Fascism isn’t just an expression of disgust. It is an ever-increasing hypersensitivity to disgust, created by a social and cultural echo chamber. Once it eliminates the original objects of disgust, it moves on to find more mildly disgusting things to target.
Eventually, any deviation from the norm, however trivial and harmless, becomes an object of disgust to be eradicated.
It begins with getting rid of Harvey Weinstein… but it progresses to getting rid of Richard Feynman and Elon Musk.
That sentence may sound strange to you. Feynman? Musk? Really?
But remember that the Gay Race Communism that now become the state religion of the political class progressed the same way. Barack Obama, the 2008 presidential candidate, was against state recognition of homosexual marriages. At the time, that was too much, too far.
Things progressed.
Slopes really are slippery. It isn’t a fallacy at all. The whole reason we characterize things as slopes is that a slope is a thing people tend to fall down. We notice things lead to other things, because the Overton window shifts, and we correctly characterize certain metaphorical terrain as a “slope”.
And just as the political class, Hollywood, and their pet idiots in NYC and LA spiraled into Gay Race Communism, the Middle American normal person backlash carries the risk of spiraling the opposite way.
Remember that fascist societies aren’t actually perfectly healthy cultures that suddenly, for no reason at all, get destroyed by their neighbors. What they do is they attack everyone they can see, once their disgust threshold becomes so low that every other type of society appears to them as nothing but a plague vector that must be wiped out.
So their neighbors are forced to destroy them in self-defense.
We, as a society, are currently in danger of both communism and fascism.
The risk of communism is that it’s what we will get if we do not purge the political class. The risk of fascism is that it’s what we will get if that purge spirals out of control.
Everyone reading this already understands that communism is the worst thing in the known universe… because anyone who doesn’t understand that has muted/blocked/unfollowed me long ago.
But we also need to understand the dangers of our own response.
If we do not use and focus our disgust, we are doomed to a communist future. But we must make that disgust our servant, not our master.
What makes our society run? Where does one begin?
Devon Eriksen tackles that question in a though provoking and I think useful way. During his discussion of this topic the concept of a Chesterson’s Fence is made several times and to understand Eriksen’s thinking you need to know what a Chesterson’s Fence is.
The concept of a Chesterson Fence is the notion that we need to engage in second order thinking when evaluating a problem or situation. Or to use the original analogy:
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
“Fences are built by people who carefully planned them out and “had some reason for thinking [the fence] would be a good thing for somebody.” Until we establish that reason, we have no business taking an ax to it. The reason might not be a good or relevant one; we just need to be aware of what the reason is. Otherwise, we may end up with unintended consequences: second- and third-order effects we don’t want, spreading like ripples on a pond and causing damage for years.”
So, we can already observe we’ll be tackling some second and even third order thinking in Eriksen’s work.
“It’s time we all admitted it.
Intolerance in pre-1900s western civilization was a load-bearing structure.
It stopped certain groups from doing certain anti-civilization things that they kinda wanted to do, because they were too busy trying to fit it, look harmless, and be accepted as normal.
Which people? What things?
Well, lots of people have opinions on that, but we’re not actually connected to any unbroken line of generational knowledge on the subject. Because somewhere along the line, some people learned to hack western civilization by pointing out that stereotyping, behavioral enforcement, and gatekeeping, are cruel.
Well, duh.
What these people are trying very hard to keep the rest of us from noticing is that civilization requires cruelty.
Civilization is an unnatural state. It is an bubble of peace and plenty, rising through a vast dark ocean of poverty and war.
That bubble is fragile. In order to prevent it from bursting, we have to prevent certain things from happening inside it.
Which means we have to tell the people inside that they can’t do certain things they want to do, even though they will be sad when they don’t get to do them.
Which is mean.
And it means we have to keep people outside the bubble if they won’t stop doing those things, even though they will be sad if they don’t get to come there, or stay.
Which is mean.
You cannot have civilization unless you are willing to be mean and make certain people sad.
But here’s the important question… which cruelties are load-bearing, and which are pointless and unnecessary?
Well, we don’t know.
And for this, I blame traditionalists. Every time they put up Chesterton’s Fence, they neglected to top it with Chesterton’s Signpost, explaining why the fence was there and what it was intended to do.
Instead, they stamped it with one of their two rubber stamps “we’ve always done it this way”, and “the will of {insert local deity here}”.
This makes it extremely difficult to defend the fence, and all but impossible to know which fences are load-bearing and need defending.
[Individual on twitter] appears to think that all the anti-traditionalist things she wants to do are okay, and forbidding or even disparaging them is pointless cruelty, but anti-traditionalist things she doesn’t want to do are horrific acts of civilizational destruction.
This is, of course, selfish and hypocritical, but what I’m noticing is that everyone else is, too.
All the way from tradcath freaks who want to ban IVF, forbid premarital sex, and kill all the Protestants, to tranny freaks who want to take your children away and sterilize them, everyone thinks their precise type and level of deviance is complete fine, and anything one step beyond what they personally want to do is anathema.
None of this is the least bit informative about which of the rules of the old world are actually load-bearing, and right now, we are all having such fun finding out the hard way.
If western civilization doesn’t survive, then neither does humanity, because the second world isn’t going to get us off this single fragile rock, and neither is the third.
Which means we have some serious house-cleaning to do. We’re going to have to derive civilization-preserving rules from first principles again, because every goddamned fence the Chestertons of the world put up in the past is labelled with unhelpful bullshit explanations, and not only are some of them necessary and some of them not, but a further some of them are so obsoleted by technological advancement that they are actually now anti-civilizational forces in and of themselves.
But what are these first principles?
I’m sure the comments are going to contain lots of answers where people suggest their favorite thing, be it liberty, or their version of morality, or their favorite religion, but most of the things that people think of as ends are actually means.
The end is preserving and advancing human civilization.
To that end, I can think of three first principles off the top of my head, things that civilization cannot exist without. There may be more that will occur to me later.
They are:
1. Investment.
Human civilization requires people to invest effort in things. People will not do this if the results of that effort can be taken from them more easily than they can be created. This means property rights. Any civilization which does not vigorously defend both individual and collective investment will fail.
2. Fertility.
This one is unique to humans. Our reproductive cycle is uniquely fragile, pushed to its extreme limits by evolutionary pressure to produce infants with giant heads. Women’s fertile years are such a small fraction of their total lifespan, pregnancy is so taxing and resource-intensive, and infants and children so helpless and vulnerable for so long, that the slightest interference, seemingly innocuous, can destroy a population’s ability to replace itself. Or, worse yet, it can selectively destroy the ability to replace the small sub-population of highly effective humans that drive civilization forward.
3. Innovation.
This is the whole point. This is how humans survive, and without it, we won’t. The whole evolutionary strategy of humanity is to use those huge brains which we pay such a fertility cost to obtain — use them to understand the universe, and leverage that understanding to control it. But tech innovation relies on many factors, which is why so few civilizations are able to get their shit together to consistently do it, and show up on the beach with sailing ships, guns, and steel while the natives are still hunting deer with stone-tipped arrows.
That’s my basic idea: for everything we forbid, and everything we permit, we need to understand how it impacts investment, fertility, and innovation.
Because those are the things we actually need.
[…]”
I think that Investment, Fertility, an Innovation are worthy contenders as first principles of civilization, but there are more that deserve to be on the list. :)
bleatmop
Mystro
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