“I am not one of those who think that the people are never in the wrong. They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say, that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people. […] Where popular discontents have been very prevalent; it may well be affirmed and supported, that there has been generally something found amiss in the constitution, or in the conduct of Government.”
-Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)
There abound errors upon compounded errors in the popular considerations on why people are unhappy and live in fear, unable to trust their neighbors, divided, uncertain what tomorrow politics will bring. Left and right, if we suppose these as a crude generalization of the two bodies composing the greater social whole of the classes beneath the elite, have probably never been so divided in this country since the destructive – even if noble – Civil War. However, we also need to immediately draw out the presence and machinations of the third party, the elite, who cannot be reasonably associated with either party, even while they operate through them for their own purposes. It would be as much a mistake to identify the Church with the Nobility in a kingdom, an equivocation that ultimately only serves those in power as their true identities, purposes, and means remain undiscovered, even while some elements of reality are mixed in with that assessment. Here we shall lay out a few theses to help bring clarity to present circumstances.
The first element which must be described are the natural divisions of the people – who are here defined as that group who are brought together by the government as a population of citizens ruled together by the government. These are everyone who is not elite. The elites, in turn, are effectively those who preside over the government, either directly or indirectly by their possession of great wealth and power, managing the country in alignment with their personal pursuits and ambitions, which is ultimately to form and maintain their intergenerational wealth. While they may constrain each other by the same laws as the people exist under, and certainly they seek to mitigate all excesses of power as murder and theft – between themselves at least – for the most part the government and its laws are a means by which they rule rather than something they are ruled by. This is an inevitable state of affairs – laws are ultimately agreements between humans to enforce a common set of rules, to define who is in the right and who is in the wrong in case of transgressions, so that equilibrium between people prevails so far as possible and conflicts are resolved and ameliorated with the least amount of violence and uncertainty. This is the role elites find themselves in, and whether one considers it by natural law or pure happenstance, so we must require them to abide by this necessary role of civilization, to regulate relations between people in order that a common prosperity prevails for all.
This natural and inevitable division between the elite and the people is vertical. The elite are those who operate from “above” the law, as it were, not that they are not constrained by it so much as they are personally responsible for seeing that it is maintained. They are expected to temper those excesses between themselves and the politicians directly responsible for enforcing and defining those laws, much as parents are expected to regulate and civilize their children. If they neglect this role, then all is quickly chaos, and their future holdings of wealth and power uncertain, so in fact it is in their self-interest to enforce the law between themselves and for the sake of the people. Some may defect against this role in reckless pursuit of greater wealth and power for themselves, but the majority generally seek to temper these excesses. The elite overall have the most discretion, the most influence to define and see to it that laws are enforced for the common good, and so we have elaborated on them in order to draw them out as a distinct faction in our society, as influential in their few numbers as the better part of the hundreds of millions they rule over.
The people, in their great numbers and generally in possession of the greater amount of power and wealth among them (the numbers by which we define elite wealth such as “net worth” more dependent on the good organization of the people than in turn), are however unable to bring that power and wealth to bear as directly as may the elite. The elite are few and, at least individually, often superior in coordinating between each other. The people are numerous and it is much easier for them to feel individually that other natural divisions of interests are more immediate and effective in influencing their day to day life and expectations of the future. These natural divisions – which I assert as natural as their basis for divergent interests is due to inevitable differences in how humans sort themselves, for better or worse – gain much more of the people’s attention because they are more obvious and, typically, more immediately and apparently responsive to their own rhetorical clamorings in politics. I draw out these divisions as a positive, rather than normative, manner, as some by their ideologies seem intent on admitting only those divisions useful to their analysis and attempting to abolish by words the reality of these other divisions as inconvenient to how they imagine they might operate in pursuit of personal and collective ambitions, e.g. Marxism or contemporary racial ideologies such as “anti-racism” or “white nationalism.”
These divisions, which are an incomplete list, may generally be defined by their differing interests, which orients them to the government and politics differently in how their own personal ambitions and pursuits for happiness might be optimized. While they might otherwise have most things in common – as we are all human, and need for sustenance the same things as food, shelter, to gain by our work, to care for our families, to form friendships, to attain healthcare as necessary, and so on – the means by which the people go about these things and exercise their stake in civilization afford some advantages to certain kinds of policies over others. This is largely what defines politics, and what politicians seek to appeal to in gathering together those voting constituents necessary to gain the votes they require to hold their position. An individual will likely belong to several, and certainly all individuals a part of these groups does not hold all the same interests or beliefs as all other individuals in their group, but there is a distribution with a median set of interests typically held in common among them, even if only in the loosest and most general sense.
These groups may be defined by class, race, gender, and citizenship. Thus we have the upper classes – typically wealthier than the rest, but dependent on continuing labor to sustain their income. The middle classes often have careers that provide them a good income so that they do not want for most material things. Then there is the lower classes, who are the most heterogeneous, and are as a rule poor. The lower classes are most abundant as a rule, and typically they are consolidated as a political force by politicians who seek to reinforce those aspects of their life they feel are most immediately required to maintain their safety in an otherwise precarious world. Some of these lower classes have a more immediate interest in purely material benefits, others might feel that less tangible but equally immediate social benefits are in their interest to improve and reinforce by political means. Either way, the upper classes and middle classes, at least with respect to members of their own class, have a more homogeneous and coordinated vector of interests around which they tend to pursue their interests in common, while the lower classes are most likely to resent each other and be fearful of the others’ gain by some kind of political conquest resulting in some kind of dispossession, whether that is material or social. As a rule, middle and upper classes prefer to resolve their political disputes by compromise, while lower classes are more likely to believe and pursue zero or even negative sum games of power, as little their possession of it might seem, because such little possession makes them feel the sting of what little they have being deprived more acutely.
The races do not need much elaboration, but we might draw out certain ideas about races that are popular. Some suppose that race is all-important, and indeed, in the popular media, racial conflict is almost always the angle that brings the most energies attending to it. Racial differences seem the most apparent and, even if humans belonging to different races might otherwise have more in common as a class when it comes to their interests, especially in the lower classes they are often the most acute difference when one considers that, say, poor whites and poor blacks are otherwise very similar in what they require of government. Some will argue that “race” as a subject is entirely made up, and while they might be right that race as such is wielded as an instrument of power to divide, it is faulty to paper over the differences in such a manner – and often the racial ideology of “social constructivism” is employed by academics and journalists secure in their status as precisely that instrument of power to divide! The differences are real and have some innate basis – although obviously neither is this to suggest it is the one and only determining basis of an individual’s character and interests. Rather, the differences manifest them as slight differences in the distribution of interests of their members and, at least as a matter of personal optimism, their differences cannot only be overcome but make them a more versatile force – if they could be brought together under a banner that allows them to concentrate their considerable power to obtain certain material and social benefits they require in common. But, alas, these differences seem to be a division which politics (remember that elites are above our politics!) draw out in order to more easily corral their voting pattern in the interests of politicians even if that is against their common interests as a whole. Voters are, as a rule, more swayed by what is immediate and apparent, than the more abstract idea of class.
Gender, at least as we shall handle it here, is only that divide between men and women. This division shall be considered in terms of reproduction, as that is the natural and ineluctable reason for their differences. Other “genders,” as considered by those under the sway of metaphysical ideas beyond the scope of this essay to address, shall be attended to as a “non-reproductive class,” the reasons for their being grouped together made apparent then. As to men and women, what divides them and what brings them together are their particular interests as they are oriented towards reproduction by nature. Here I will not abide so much confusion as predominates contemporary discussion concerning them, but I will cut to it straight out of a scientific, perhaps anthropological, interest. Nature has found utility in causing men and women to be particular in how they are constituted and their preferences as it serves their own advantages in reproduction, per evolutionary necessity. This difference might be stated as thus: men have it in their interest to reproduce with abandon, women have it in their interest to reproduce with care. It is less costly for a man to conceive a child than a woman, as the burden of childcare will far more likely fall on the woman. Many social norms and customs have sprung up around these differences in reproductive interests, to ameliorate behaviors that, if pursued by the sexes without respect to their mutual interests, would be destructive to the pursuit of civilization. In fact, the norms surrounding our interest in reproduction and the care of children is one of the most important factors distinguishing our societies from the rest of the animal kingdom, and they more or less define civilization. In the long run, we require men and women to reproduce in a manner benefiting the civilization of children, so that they carry forward the matter of our societies into the future.
Politics has played men and women against each other, much to our respective detriment, as it has made it more difficult for men and women to understand each other, at least in terms of what customs and manners men and women follow respecting the differences of their sex. The distribution of differences between women and men, when measured along numerous divisions, have a fair degree of overlap but it would be inadmissible as a matter of scientific interest to ignore that, in the end, men and women demonstrate very distinct patterns in constitution and preference. An individual who might be an outlier along one dimension are rarely outliers along every other dimension, so that even when some trait demonstrates itself in an individual to distinguish themselves from others of their sex and to seem more similar to the other, only such an exceptional few are in fact outliers along each quality so as to definitively blur the line where differences matter to us. How one admits – or denies – these facts, and what one makes of them are a matter to politics insofar as politicians can appeal to men and women respectively for votes. In the United States at least, men are more likely to vote Republican, women more likely to vote Democrat, but this is really a slight difference overall. A more distinguishing pattern which illuminates the matter of sexual differences, is that unmarried men and women are more likely to vote Democrat, and married men and women more likely to vote Republican. So, in fact, what resolves differences in how the sexes tend to vote and thereby express their interests depends more on their individual immediate relationship with some member of the opposite sex. This makes a lot of sense when one considers their interests per reproduction, which marriage has emerged as a social custom to normalize those relations.
The last natural divisions are more inchoate and more difficult to define generally, though they make their presence felt more particularly here and there where they are a substantial group. There are immigrants, who are either trying to or only recently have acquired citizenship, and are usually intent on assimilating themselves into American culture in order to make a life for themselves and their children. Of course there are further divisions of immigrants, which often makes them opposed to each other in terms of interests, not only racially but what conditions arose as to bring them here. The Hispanic groups seeking to escape crime and tyranny and poverty in their countries are quite distinct from the wealthy Chinese seeking to secure their capital profits from China here in the United States where they will not be so arbitrarily dispossessed by the CCP. We can say little about immigrants for our analysis here, except to note that their interests are often particular and suited to their own particular conditions and groups with which they arrive and who help them to establish themselves here in our country. They are otherwise further distinct from native citizens who, though they are descended from immigrants several or more generations back, are Americans in mind and spirit insofar as they have only been exposed to American culture as a basis for forming their worldviews. There are also indigenous people, but as a political force they are little felt, and practically speaking they are often grouped with these minority groups, ironically closer to immigrants than natives.
The final group for our consideration are an even more variegated group of highly particularized individuals, whom we can group together as non-reproductive in outlook even if a few of this group otherwise do care to have children. These are gays, lesbians, trans, and whatever else some individual might consider themselves, as it is usually centered on sexuality, in particular a divergence from reproduction, non-reproductive is how they shall be considered. The reason for this is simple: since they are non-reproductive, their interests are centered entirely around themselves, with little reason to care or consider the future of civilization beyond their own lives. This is not said to denigrate or devalue them as persons, only to point out that they tend, than all the other groups brought up so far, to have far less tangible stakes in the future of society beyond their persons, e.g. children. A person who has children is far more likely to feel innately the need to re-orient their interests beyond themselves, to care for the future of a society which they will not personally benefit from, so that it will benefit their children instead. These non-reproductive individuals do not have that as a matter to influence how they feel in the present, and so they tend to look out particularly for their own present interests and do not feel the sting of worrying about the future of a society they will not be around to experience. Since they are otherwise distinct in their interests between each other, there is not much more for our analysis to say about them.
Now, having laid out all the foregoing natural divisions of the people, we may finally attend to that matter of politics to understand what motivates present phenomena where it concerns popular narratives and seemingly likely changes in government that are about to affect us all very soon. All of these groups of the people, when it comes to how they organize themselves in order to influence politics in favor of their interests, have a limited number of means for doing so, because when trying to coordinate so many people with differing interests to consolidate and direct specific kinds of policies they are required to conjoin by rhetoric and phenomenal flourishes in media those stimuli that produce the final effect of making them vote for specific politicians and putting pressure on politicians as a whole to deliver legislation. Thus we have, in the end, “two or three” groups. This final outline is indeterminate, in that it seems there is no final way to eliminate two of these three, even if those two in fact are really ultimately under the rule of one and so have that status in common with each other. These are the elite, the left, and the right. The elite are, as described earlier, above politics, instead effecting their rule through the mechanisms of government and politics to maintain their status. The left and right are apposite wings of the people, who end up divided out of a political necessity to maintain the largest possible effective constituency as woven together from the many groups who live with each other in our country. Thus we have two groups of the people, who appear split not only by numbers of their population but in political power, effectively 50-50.
If the people had some way to unite to become one, they would overwhelm the elite. This would be bad for them. It would likely result in some degree of instability (all ventures and changes bring with them risk), but it would not be intolerable or unmanageable. But it would be bad for the elites, as far as their interests are concerned. Their hold on the institutions of society would be considerably loosened, the government would reorganize itself to satisfy the interests of the more powerful group, and very likely many of the most popular policies could be realized, such as universal healthcare, education reform, criminal and prison reform, and so on. Perhaps mixed in would be several disastrous policies, and probably these reforms would be sub-optimal, but they would still probably be better than current arrangements – so far as the interests of the people are concerned, and to the detriment of the elite. There would still be an elite, but they would be weakened considerably, and it would determine a reorganization of geopolitical alliances. But this is almost certainly never going to happen, as the necessities of game theory on the individual and group level for the people determine them to be in more immediate conflict with each other almost as it were a metaphysical principle.
The elite are a savvy and cunning class. They play to win. So far as they escape the notice and scrutiny of our popular media and discourse, this is certainly by design. The organs of information dissemination and definition, from media to academia and nonprofits, are owned and controlled by these elites, and just as one does not tend to air their own dirty laundry on their social media, so the elites tend to give considerably more attention to the faults of the people over which they rule. Thus popular opinion is rife with conflict and concerns with grievances and faults in others. In all the chaos many people – probably the overwhelming majority in fact – never realize the true source of their problems, and tend to form their theories around the immediate instrumental utility of deferring blame and putting it on others, so that in the case of political reorganization by policy and legislation, it will be their opponents whose interests diverge from their own who will be advantaged less than they, or else disadvantaged more than they.
So, for the sake of incorporating much the phenomena that has already been gathered together under other popular theories, and elaborating in a way that makes sense of the world with reference to those things which people already understand, I will lay out my own analysis in familiar terms. Call this, if you will the control theory of the Cathedral. Where I will diverge from this analysis by Moldbug is in distinguishing “the Cathedral” from the elite, who rather than necessarily being parts of the Cathedral, operate through the Cathedral as a mechanism to control and regulate society in pursuit of their own interests, regardless the language of interest utilized by the Cathedral to effect that control and regulation of the mass of the people.
The elites are not leftists. Nor rightists. Of course it is easy enough to point out numerous examples of elites giving vast sums of money to causes and movements and institutions that have a definite political characterization. Koch, Soros, Thiel, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, and so on, are less ideologues than they are live players. Ideologues are subordinates of their ideology – these men put ideology beneath them, utilizing ideologies like one would a particular programming language to make a computer produce some result. For example, one points to Dorsey giving Ibram X. Kendi $10 million. Many conclude from this the startling idea that Dorsey is subordinate to Kendi! If one thinks about this for a second, it is rather silly. The money is flowing from Dorsey to Kendi – Kendi is the dependent. To be very provocative, we can easily determine that their relationship is as master to slave – I leave you to figure out whether you are the master or slave with respect your employers who pay you for the work you do for them.
We can inquire easily and even a little cynically what kind of move Dorsey is making by giving such a tidy sum to Kendi. Now Dorsey owns Kendi. Kendi, the incipient prophet of the emerging woke ideology, is in the pocket of Dorsey. To live players, the meaning is very obvious. Dorsey is freed to act with a great deal of latitude, and Kendi must rise to defend his lord. If Kendi does not, then everyone else who might give Kendi money, who might help establish Kendi’s popular position in the unfolding narrative and establishment as a man with considerable influence in determining and forming public opinion, will realize that Kendi is disloyal. If Kendi bites the hand that feeds him, other elites who might patronage Kendi will refuse him their help, and might even use their own organs of power to destroy him lest he use his influence to hurt them. To be a little uncouth, Kendi is Dorsey’s bitch. A rich and influential bitch, but a bitch nonetheless. Kendi does not possess power of his own will and person, but is dependent on power. He acts to create the consent required for the powerful to rule, like a priest who tells the faithful they are obligated to their king. He is an extension of the elite’s control, a representative who performs his service by the mastery of a popular programming language. It would be a mistake to identify him as an elite or to suppose that his opinion is identical or even aligned with his masters.
The same kind of analysis can easily be made for similar arrangements. When a man gives an institution or person money, he owns that person. That person now works for them, even if it is only in an informal manner. They gain control over that institution and its people. There is no reason they shouldn’t be willing to give money to causes that might not represent their personal sentiments, in fact there is great strategic reason in doing so, because their control of those institutions most likely to direct popular forces against them can now be flipped, co-opted so that they direct popular forces against each other – helping to secure the status of the elite, free from the bother of the people showing up with torches and pitchforks when they realize they’ve been sold out. This is why it is a grave mistake to try to infer the politics of an elite by which institutions they choose to give money to, as if they were giving money in the same way one of us would give money to Bernie Sanders or a charity. The elites are giving money to gain control over whom they give money to, and by extension indirectly the mass of the people that institution or person influences. The people give money because they are suckers. It is ludicrous to suppose that a person giving $50 to an institution because they believe in its purpose is doing so for the same reason as a person giving $5 million who is now basically free to call in favors through its network of influence.
So why does it seem leftism is more popular in these institutions used by the elite to launder consent? First, we might consider it tactically. Where the left and right are able to develop a mutual consensus on interests and so strive for policies to benefit them, this threatens the elites. But there are also deep and meaningful differences between the left. Since it is harder for the people to coordinate than the elites, it follows that conflict is more likely and easier to break out between left and right than they are to find consensus in their conflicts with the elite. One way or another, the left and right end up in a bitter fight with each other, whether by natural happenstance or by elite subversion – either way, the result is a cycle of conflict which will cause both left and right to expend the better part of their energies and resources on that conflict with each other. Eventually, a clear winner will dominate the other, and subordinate them to their own control of valuable resources in order to direct government to satisfy their interests to their own advantage even if to the disadvantage to the other. However, even though one side might come out the clear winner, it will be weakened by having needed to expend so many resources on dominating the other, and it will need to continue expending much of its resources to remain dominant. This makes it easy to control by a superior force, who can now make its prominent individuals and institutions dependent on them, and thereby control the entirety of the people through a willing faction satisfied by dominating the other faction.
There are other elements of strategy to consider with respect to the elite’s relationship with the people. Obviously, the elite would like to control popular discourse as much as possible. Regimes of universal censorship and suppression have proved themselves fragile, not because they are ineffective at regulating speech, but because in fact elites require the information that the people generate by unbounded discourse. In other words, there is more benefit to less bounded speech, because they are able to utilize the information created, and censorship regimes suppress that useful information as well, so that elites are unable to use their power and resources effectively and much of it goes to waste, putting them at a disadvantage with other elites. But there is nonetheless the incentive to suppress some speech, as a means of breaking emergent coordination among the people so they cannot band together effectively to press for their interests. Therefore, it makes sense to suppress some speech, but certainly not all. First, if one suppresses the speech of a particular political faction, it is likely to gain the support of the other faction, giving the elite 50% support in their actions. If they were to suppress speech more evenly across political factions, the result would be 100% opposition. Second, suppression of speech works as a favor to the dominant political faction through which they operate, making the favored faction easier to control as they feel their dominant position is secure. Third, they can suppress speech in one faction such that the information which is mitigated from developing makes it more difficult for the two factions to unite by the dominant faction realizing what interests they have in common with the subordinate faction such that they might work together to realize common goals against the elite.
We might also ask why the elites would control through the leftists, and why leftists seem to have come out on top. For this we can examine the interests that bind the left and the interests that bind the right, and what advantages and disadvantages those interests bring with them.
There are two kinds of factors to examine, and both will be required for a full decomposition of the circumstances that bind them. The first kind of factor is the essential – those innate qualities of individuals that predispose them to certain kinds of policies and considerations over others in pursuit of what they consider their interests. The second kind of factor is the accidental – these are the circumstances which are influenced by historical happenstance, which bring together groups by places and times such that they were moved to work with or against each other under the prevailing conditions of their time. Many times people confuse them with each other, by genuine confusion and oft by politically motivated bias. Political parties will, in the moment, present a principle as a matter of eternal and essential truth about the world, because such a principle, at that moment, is convenient to them – but then they will drop it and adopt another as time needs. Underneath this switching we can detect other principles at play, usually the historical factors that brought together those particular groups so as to constitute the faction in its present. Likewise, people will sometimes essentialize the accidental, by referring to the happenstance bringing together certain groups as though some of their qualities are what associate them to that faction, rather than some other quality beneath appearances. We will argue first by principles of pure reason to recognize tendencies in how people associate themselves, then draw out how history has tended to revolve around these essential considerations of the necessities which move people.
The broadest principle we can draw out to recognize the differences in how people consider their interests and what moves them to associate as they do is time preference. Time preference is, very simply, how willing one is to act so as to maximize the favorability of present circumstances over future circumstances. The higher one’s time preference, the more they prefer circumstances which suit them in the present, with less regard for the future. The lower one’s time preference, the more one considers the future, willing to forego present pleasures in order to satisfy an expectation that suits what they consider will be more favorable to them. Between left and right, insofar as we might correlate it as a spectrum to time preference, the left tends to higher time preferences and the right to lower time preferences. The left is more usually seeking to satisfy present needs and wants, whereas the right is more usually seeking to satisfy expectations about future needs and wants. Neither is “correct” in some absolute moral sense, but this tendency predisposes each to certain kinds of advantages and disadvantages.
There are circumstances which suit higher time preferences. If one is poor, one must do more to satisfy present needs and wants, because the past has prepared them less to have those resources already at-hand to them in order to satisfy their present needs and wants. This means, for them, giving up the potential to save up resources for the future, because they have less margin available which they can forego for the sake of that future. Likewise, their experience might have taught them that, when they do save up, they are unable to realize the benefit of those saved resources due to some unexpected setback, meaning they gave up some present benefit for nothing. Therefore groups which are more disposed to being hand-to-mouth in their circumstances are oriented to the left. They seek welfare and protections so that their present circumstances might be more favorable.
There are circumstances which suit lower time preferences. If one is wealthy, they have a much greater margin of wealth which they can forego consuming in the present in order to save or invest it in projects that will deliver them even greater abundance in the future, under the expectation they will be able to enjoy it then. If one has children, then one feels intensely the need to forego one’s own benefit in order to benefit their children, which means giving up many present pleasures. It also disposes one to consider how society will be after they are gone, and hoping to benefit their children in that future, they will tend to orient to the right with policies that are intended to maintain the benefits of civilization which not they but their children and children’s children will enjoy.
Again, these are not value judgments. However, obviously, when there are limited resources at-hand, and many groups must vie with each other to determine how those resources are used, and resources being used for the sake of the present mean giving up them up for being used in the future, and vice versa, conflict will be intense. One can certainly make up their own mind with a subjective evaluation about who deserves to have more say about how resources used, but that is an entire other discussion from this one – we are, rather, seeking to understand the layout of the land.
Such an essential factor can help explain certain distinct phenomena observed in our present politics. Families – or, at least, married men and women – tend to vote much more conservatively than the unmarried. This is due to their lower time preference, because they feel much more tangibly, by having children, the significance of the future and civilization beyond their own lives and what they will be able to enjoy. The non-reproductive, e.g. LGBT, tend to vote much more liberally, because they have a higher time preference focused more on themselves, as they are far less likely to have children and therefore feel less tangibly the significance of the future beyond their own lives. To people who do not and will not have children, whatever is not consumed by them in their own lives will simply not be consumed by them, and means giving up what they could consume that does not impinge on their interests for the future of civilization beyond them. In other words, it is rational for the non-reproductive to consume everything they can now, because what is left behind will not be left for anyone they care about, at least not as tangibly as parents feel about their children.
This means groups with a higher time preference tend to aggregate in the left, and groups with lower time preferences tend to aggregate in the right. Their interests give them distinct advantages. The left has more advantage in the present, because as a group they are willing to use more resources to win now, because they are less concerned about making sure there will be more resources in the future. The right has more advantage in the long run, because as a group they are willing to use less resources in the present but save them up and invest so that they and their children in the future will be afforded more favorable circumstances. Thus the two groups are bound in an eternal struggle, with each at certain points dominating the other, but this dominance can never last forever, as their success tends to undermine themselves in the long run as conditions change to favor the other.
As a coalition, the left is far more fractured than the right. The right has concern for their own children’s future as an interest binding the majority of its individuals. This means they have substantially more in common with one another – whether white or black, man or woman, citizen or immigrant – than groups on the left do. Each group on the left is defined more by self-interest, higher time preferences. Higher time preferences bring with them as a consequence interests which are more difficult to reconcile – gays have less in common with immigrants have less in common with blacks – than whites have in common with blacks and immigrants, via their common interest in having families (or, at least, in the long run, they will tend to revolve around that common interest, present defects notwithstanding e.g. the high rate of fatherlessness in the black community). Higher time preferences, higher entropy, higher disorder. In fact, this makes the left easier to use by elites as a control mechanism, because if the left tried to use their superior position to the right (under present circumstances) to exceed the elite, the elite could very easily play the differing groups of the left against each other. Most blacks and immigrants have more traditional sexual moralities and despise gays, blacks and immigrants compete with one another economically and politically for welfare, all the various kinds of gays and queers and lesbians and trans are at each other’s throats constantly.
The historical conditions bringing about the current circumstances are decades of economic prosperity and technological innovation. We are wealthier now than humans have ever been before in history, and it is easier than ever before to provide every person what food and shelter they require. Of course circumstances can be improved to make food and shelter even cheaper (and that is not a bad thing, as far as people trying to start families are concerned). But this abundance has also meant that people need care less for the future, and there has been a considerable buildup of entropy in these few decades, as our prosperity allows us to essentially treat the symptoms of this entropy with money. Eventually this will no longer be possible – but probably, we can manage to persist with some reforms here and there for another several centuries.
This hodgepodge of coalitions on the left can also serve to explain the Trump presidency, and why there were practically no gains for anyone during that time – because neither left nor right won, but the elites won. They had little power to find anyway to compromise with a president such as Trump, not because he was so opposed to their interests, but because the elites made it a defining feature of leftist affiliation that one needed to hate and oppose Trump at all possible costs. Trump is, in reality, an innocuous politician even if a brash personality. His policy positions put him just a little left to Clinton – Bill Clinton. As far as Republican presidents go, he was the furthest left of any Republicans, and only superseded in orientation to the left by Obama. There were obviously a number of policies that Trump would have been open to working on with Democrats, and he would’ve been very popularly esteemed by his own base at the same time. Instead, the four years of his presidency were stagnant, with nearly nothing being done. Why should this be the case, if it was in the interests of the left and right for him to succeed?
Of course, for Trump to “succeed” means only – being a popular president. To those who get their information only through the organs owned by a few billionaire elite – Trump was the absolute worst thing to ever happen, ever, a fascist who might even be worse than Hitler. We were promised lynch mobs and concentration camps and deportations and so many more horrible things. Republicans didn’t expect these things – at worst, the reasonable among them were inclined to hope for deportations of illegal immigrants, or at least the criminal among them as are allowed to flourish in places like San Francisco. He was never disposed to any of these things – he really only wanted to be popular. Which is not a useless personality trait. He is vain. He would’ve gladly signed many bills favored by Democrat constituents, like school reforms, prison reforms, healthcare reforms, and so on. If only they’d allowed themselves to compromise. But they couldn’t. Anyone perceived to even just compromise with Trump would mean cooperating with someone that everyone knew was a fascist, according to the media organs of Trump’s enemies in the elite. But why should the people care what the elite want about these things? Shouldn’t they have been willing to accept what they could get? In fact, the entire four years was an embarrassing and disastrous loss for the people, who have been set back by decades, if not an entire century, in pursuit of their common interests.
The left was corralled into shooting themselves in the foot by their elite controllers because it was in the interest of the elite to do so. All those policies and bills that the left desperately strive for which they could’ve had with Trump – foregone. Because any politician who compromised with Trump would’ve been anathema as well. Any compromise brought forward by Democrats that Trump would’ve gladly signed off on – it would have made him more popular, with both left and right, and, more importantly – it would’ve revealed he was not nearly as bad as he was painted. The fiction needed to be maintained, a delusional groupthink cult. We are not unfamiliar with these kinds of cult dynamics, where group cohesion dominates the way people think over plain common sense. I know my assessment is, at least in this moment, distasteful for those oriented to the left, but I’m also entirely certain they will eventually be persuaded to my way of thinking.
Trump was a disaster for the people. Not because Trump, but because Trump provoked a coordinated reaction by the elite. Why not just allow the people their few political victories? Because many of the elite depend on the way things are for their power and wealth. Perhaps they could eventually divest themselves from the current system and invest in a new system, but they could not have done so as quickly as required under a successful and popular Trump presidency. If the Democrats were allowed to pass those policies under Trump as are in their interests, it would have been a disaster. So let me repeat my conclusion about the Trump presidency: the left and right did not win – the elite won. And as far as most the left and right are both concerned, the reason they lost under Trump was because of the other side, which such a pervasive and popular opinion only goes further to prove how massive was the elite victory. The elite are only more in power. The left is all too happy to let Biden, “their guy,” do all the things they denounced Trump for, which he never actually did. The troops in DC may become a permanent feature. Biden is reverting to a business as usual in DC attitude. He will not give the left the policy victories they thirst for.
Another reason for the elite to withhold from the interests of the people, is that if they gave the people what they want, they could no longer promise it in order to entice people to vote. They would only be giving up their bargaining chips. It’s not as though there are fewer voters in response to actually receiving fewer of the policies promised them. In fact, it is the universal opinion of those on the left that this most recent presidential election had the most voters, ever. Those on the right who are more skeptical, are happily censored by willing leftist instruments of elite subversion. More voters, for delivering on fewer promises. That suggests very disastrous incentives for the people. The more the elite withhold, the more people vote, the more they only get mad at each other.
This is a short primer on our present circumstances, which I hope will illuminate my readers. It is important to remember and distinguish the elite from leftists per se. The elite truly interested in ideology for its own sake are the exception, and giving money to institutions and movements hardly signals personal alignment of sentiments. That is perhaps a good explanation for why these institutions and movements so rarely succeed – because despite their own clamor and funding, the elite don’t actually want them to succeed – because they are not, in fact, leftists (or rightists, for that matter).
Principia Memetica 