explaining "deep leftism"
(neo-liberalism)
Non-Zionism has taken a charitable stab at describing my ideology for me, and has also rolled Hanania and Karlin into the fold.
Hanania is a libertarian, so I don’t think the “leftist” label is appropriate for him. Centrist, sure, but not leftist. I haven’t interacted with Karlin yet, but I will take this opportunity to publicly invite him on my podcast so I can figure out where we disagree.
N-Z did a good job, and aside from minor quibbles, I could forward his essay to people who don’t understand what I’m about. At the same time, if I tell people, “imagine Moldbug, but leftist,” that isn’t very helpful for someone who hasn’t been introduced to Moldbug.1 So I’m going to attempt to explain myself without reference to Moldbug.
Summary:
To be deep left is to:
do to Christianity what Christianity did to paganism
mobilize women
increase urbanism
strengthen academia
UBI for college students
tiered school system according to test scores
interracial marriage to increase racism
maximize the freedom of McGenics
maximize innovation
deregulate AI and biotech
maintain the global economy
support Turbo-America and one-world government
militarily contain China in Taiwan
militarily contain Russia, a Chinese proxy, in Ukraine
invade Mexico and create a North American Union
win elections and maintain military morale by picking fights with woke activists
limit immigration to 10,000 per country, and sell visas in a bidding process with a $10,000 minimum
police black nationalism
reject anti-Americanism as far-right, ethnocentric, and small-minded
It’s fair to call this program “neo-liberal,” since it combines deregulation with aggressive government spending and foreign adventurism. But “deep left” sounds sexier.
Some of the confusion over my policy prescriptions has to do with a misunderstanding or conflation between the next four years, forty years, and four hundred years. I don’t take leftism as an eternal set of fixed principles, but a dynamic flow or process by which humanity is taken to the next level. Leftism has existed for at least 10,000 years as “innovative centralization” or “philosophy.” Leftism in 2024 looks very different from leftism in 2010 or in 1776, and it will look very different in 2040, or 2400.
time and technology.
As human beings, we struggle with the concept of time. This is the original sin of humanity — not living in the moment. The future and past open up before us, an infinite, disorienting expanse. It overwhelms with its monstrous, gargantuan vastness. What the hell is the point of doing anything, when we are so small?
The passage of time gains greater significance with the destruction of cyclical tradition. If humanity exists in a perpetual dream-time, or eternal return, then life and death aren’t so scary, because what was shall ever be so. But technology creates or invents time.
Astrology, for example, was a religion invented to regulate economic activity — trade, wine-making, planting, reaping, and hunting are all proscribed and coordinated for large-scale settled societies. Assigning each of the 12 signs to each human born is brute-force specialization to force people into different roles. It’s an early form of communism where the state assigns you a job.2
Agricultural societies worked for a long time and survived revolutions. When nationalism became the hot-topic, destroying the theological-aristocratic basis of multi-ethnic states, “blood and soil” was the mantra. You can kill the king, and defrock the priests, but the farmer survived.
It is only since 1880 that half of Americans stopped farming and found something else to do. The myth of “blood and soil” was gradually replaced with the socialist myth of the “proletariat,” the factory man, the man of “blood and iron,” as described by Bismarck. In 1945, manufacturing hit an all time high.
But just as manufacturing was shaping up to provide a new basis for national identity, to replace the farmer, it also began to decline. American nationalists, like Ross Perot, claim that NAFTA was uniquely bad for the American worker, but the decline in manufacturing jobs was already well underway prior to 1980. You can reduce such large-scale technological changes (automation) to superficial scapegoats like “outsourcing.” The Chinese are also automating their factories.
There will always be some percentage of people who work in factories or on farms, but these industries have declined to the point where they can no longer act as a cohesive force to unite society and provide us with a sense of national identity. In the same way that National Socialism and Communism were violent and ugly attempts to reformulate national identity under an industrial vision of humanity, wokeness is most concentrated in academia, and has its own excesses.
If I were living in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, I could be a dissident against the reigning ideology and promote liberal democracy as an alternative. But living in America, there are no alternatives.
For example, imagine that the allies never landed at Normandy, and the Soviets captured Paris, Athens, and Rome. They would then be in a position to conquer all of Africa and the Middle East unopposed. Against such a power, what good would dissent do? Or if the Nazis had captured Stalingrad and Moscow, and took control of the Baku oil fields, what would be the point of trying to overthrow the regime?
If you’re of the Jordan Peterson persuasion, and you believe martyrdom against 20th century collectivism is the apotheosis of morality, maybe we should take things back further. What would be the point of dissenting against Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, or Genghis Khan?
Yes, eventually, all these empires come to ruin, and America will too. But it is much more productive and impactful to work within a hegemonic system than to snipe from the sidelines.
In the case of the Jews, they rebelled against both Hellenic rule and Roman rule. But they didn’t just sit and complain when they were defeated. They also sought elite financial positions within the empire, and they achieved certain compromises within these systems. You could (convincingly) argue that Christianity was one of many such compromises, which hit the “sweet spot” between dissent and cooperation.
The form of Christianity in opposing Rome was quite different from the posture of the dissident right. Christianity didn’t laud Rome’s Persian enemies, or praise the morality of the Germans. It was actually Tacitus — a conservative — who praised the morality of the Germans, just as the dissident right today praises both the Russians and Chinese.
No, the Christians in their time were concentrated in urban centers, especially Greece, which even during the Roman period continued to be the educational center of Rome. If a Roman wanted to hire a slave to tutor their son, they would hire a Greek, not just because the Greeks were higher IQ (maybe they were), but because geographically, Greece was the center of academic learning.
In other words, early Christians concentrated their evangelical efforts in urban areas and college towns. They went after women from rich families, ethnically mixed half-Jews (like Timothy), and cosmopolitans. This is quite different from contemporary dissident right Christians, who believe that the solution to the current civilizational incoherence and tension is to flee to the woods and start homesteading (although they rarely practice what they preach).
Christianity, in its first form, was probably incoherent, communistic, celebrated Jewish holidays, foreign to Rome, and weird. It took decades (centuries?) before Christians like Saint Paul were able to reform the church into something like a “patriotic faith” which could conceivably be adopted by Constantine. The seeds of success were there, but they needed a severe makeover, tweaking, and finishing touches.
The “New Testament” wasn’t even really put together till 325 AD. No one was “reading the Bible” in those days. And even once the Bible was put together, it was only priests who read it. Ordinary Christians didn’t start interrogating the Bible in ordinary language until the proto-Protestants of the 14th century.
There are three stages of Christianity:
extremely weird, eccentric, cultish, bizarre, foreign (pre-Protestant)
put-together, reformed, official, priest-led, organized, patriotic (Catholic/Orthodox)
mass-populist, national-revolutionary, separatist, anti-aristocratic (Protestant)
When we apply this schema to wokeness, it’s not entirely clear whether we have fully left the first stage and entered the second stage. I would argue no. Wokeness has not had its council of Nicaea; there is no Bible of wokeness; there is no woke mass; there is no woke liturgy. It’s still figuring itself out.
My argument is that it is more productive to help wokeness become an official religion than to try to go back to Christianity. But that requires injecting some pragmatic concerns, like not allowing parasites to spit on the men with guns who keep the empire running (anti-white hatred).
Squaring this circle isn’t possible from a logical (Protestant) perspective. If Jesus said celibacy was optimal, why don’t we all become celibate? If adultery is a sin, why did Saint Augustine tolerate prostitution? The Bogomils and the Cathars were upset with these forms of hypocrisy. In Zoroastrianism, the Mazdakites took a similar position against hypocrisy. Buddhism’s relationship to Hinduism could be seen in the same vein.
I’m not arguing in favor of a perfect religion, but a practical one. Wokism exists, and wokists are already hypocritical, so let’s keep bending the pretzel to see if we can make things fit. If you can’t see how this is possible, that’s ok: you were born to be a follower of established religions, not a creator of new ones. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you read the Dao de Ching, you will find that paradoxical thinking is not an obstacle to mysticism, but its ally.
politics and religion.
Judaism is one of the few religions which views these questions on a collective, or even political scale. Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism have radically individualistic concepts of martyrdom. Even if you were the last Christian on the planet, if you profess faith in Christ, you can be saved.
Judaism contains this philosophy as well. Lot is the last good man in the city, and he alone is saved. Through some special dispensation, the evil of incest is abnegated to allow Lot to found a new tribe of Moabites. The evil of incest isn’t entirely abnegated, since these Moabites turn out to be quite evil themselves, although they aren’t disfigured with extra fingers or toes, so it’s a mixed bag. Boaz marries a Moabite, and his grandson is King David, so the Moabites can’t be all bad. Or maybe they are, and Ruth’s goodness is highlighted by her evil heritage. There are many possible interpretations.
The point I am getting at is that through men like Lot, or Job, Judaism does contain within it the seeds of a radical individualistic soteriology. But more so than its descendants, who are grafted onto the tree of Abraham, Judaism preserves a tribal concept of salvation. “Where we go one, we go all.” The salvation of the Jewish people is a political project.
This makes a lot of sense to me, since human language is a collective construct, and those of us with internal monologues (souls?) owe our thinking to a collective project. Furthermore, if salvation was purely individual, monasticism would be preferable, but most people are not willing to do this.
This is a long-winded way of saying “contradictions have to be placed in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Yes, wokism is anti-white. But it is also anti-white in a self-reflective, guilty way. True wokeness is a white person who sees themselves as racially superior to non-whites, and believes he/she has a white man/woman’s burden to uplift lower races.
A black person who hates white people is not “woke.” They are just bitter.
To give another example: the Jews were not woke when they sought to destroy the Amalekites. But the Jewish prophet were being quite woke when they condemned the nation of Israel for its transgressions.3
Wokeness is about moralistically humbling yourself before a universal ideology. Wokeness is a religious experience. Wokeness is bowing down in front of the image of the Asphyxiated George Floyd, crying, shaking, feeling the weight of your own sins upon you, and begging for forgiveness. Wokeness is not a conspiratorial Black Hebrew Israelite attacking a Jew for “stealing philosophy from Africa.” From a psychological perspective, these are different experiences.
Only white people can be woke, and this is reflected in the data. Woke beliefs are correlated with anxiety and depression among white people, but not among blacks. Anxiety and depressions are features, not bugs. Anxiety and depression are group-selective traits that help form the moral core of a priest class. In wokism, white people are the chosen people who bear the sins of the world. They are destined to save the world by abandoning their ethnocentrism and becoming truly universal. In this sense, I think wokism points toward transhumanism, or the creation of an entirely new race through genetic engineering.
predict the future!
What would a reformed wokism look like?
It is possible that the Republican Party could serve as a vehicle for “reformed wokism.” JD Vance will promote interracial marriage; Donald Trump will let trans-women into the women’s bathroom at Mar-a-Lago; Nancy Mace will recruit more women into the Marines. Why not just support Republicans, if they are solving the problem?
My argument is that Republicans have to be put under continuous pressure to reform, rather than backsliding into conservatism. Democrats should force Trump to do another January 6th. The temperature must reach a breaking point in order for this lump of coal to coalesce into a diamond.
Democrats need to win, and win bigly, in order for the conservative backbone of the Republican Party to break. I don’t know exactly what this would look like, in practical terms. But if you must have an answer:
Electing a Republican trans-woman to the presidency;
Caitlin Jenner launches a violent crusade against African countries who refuse to legalize gay marriage, killing millions;
President Jenner bans trade with China until the Uyghurs are granted independence;
A non-Christian Republican declares a one-state solution for Israel, where Palestinians are granted equal rights with Israelis.
It is also possible for wokism to be integrated from the left:
A prominent Democratic politician (think Michael Bloomberg) embraces some aspect of HBD;
The Democrats end democracy by restricting the franchise to PhD holders only;
The Democrats end birthright citizenship and create a gulf-Arab system (bringing back slavery) for 4 billion potential visa holders.
All of this is pretty silly and superficial, so don’t take these as predictions. I am not saying any of these things are likely in the short term, but some softened versions might be possible. For example:
The Republican Party wins the white gay vote;
The Democrats win over 60% of college educated whites;
America fights a major war where 1% of Americans die (WWIII);
America recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, and then ends aid to Israel;
College becomes free (UBI for academics)
technological catalyst.
Wokism will be integrated; it must be integrated. It is inevitable. We are not going back, we are going forward. The main reason I believe this isn’t because of the existing ideological inertia, although that should not be underestimated. The main reason is that technology, as it exists, is a flood being held back.
Why can’t I use Grok to generate violent pornography? Why can’t we clone human beings? Why can’t we clone Neanderthals, and place Neaderthal clones in human wombs? Why are people afraid of MRNA vaccines? The problem here isn’t so much technological inability as it is ethics.
Medical and AI ethics are holding back existing technologies. This is for good reasons. Generating violent pornography of random people is harmful, and Neanderthal clones might come out deformed, and MRNA vaccines might have side effects. This is all extremely dangerous. Maybe if we keep doing gain of function research, we will kill all humans.
But if we unleash any one of these existing forces and survive, Pandora’s Box will be opened, and humanity will exist in a new age. Or we won’t exist, but either way, it will be a new age.
This is scary, and I understand that when a normal person is confronted with these possibilities, they shrink back in horror. It is natural to fear the extinction of your kind and to prefer preservation at all costs. But at the deepest level, I am not a conservative. I want change at any cost.
That is different from desiring mass extinction or nuclear war. I do not want primitivism, like Ted Kaszynski. I am not a sadist; I do not want mass death or suffering for its own sake. I am Dr. Frankenstein; I am Dr. Jekyll; I am Dr. Faustus. I want to know. What would happen if we unleashed the beast? There is only one way to tell.
The cope of conservatives is to pretend these technologies don’t exist, or that they are overhyped. I actually agree that AI is overhyped and overinvestment in AI will probably lead to a tech bubble, similar to how internet hype led to a recession in 2000. This isn’t to say that AI is useless, but the internet isn’t useless either. Useful technologies can still lead to fraud, scams, and bubbles. Mark Cuban, for example, made his billions by selling a fake company which was worthless. He cashed out before the crash. The predictions of Ray Kurzweil are meant to sell books. There is a lot of grifting going on.
But even if technologies like AI only cause 10% permanent job losses, that will be dramatic. Even if genetic technologies only allow for a 10 point increase in IQ, that is enough to change the global balance of power.
Wokeness simultaneously opposes innovation while being its greatest champion. On the one hand, IQ is fake and anyone who researches group differences in intelligence is racist until proven innocent. On the other hand, it is the woke left that trust the science enough to take a genetic-modifier injection, and who want us to experiment on children with hormones and surgeries.
If I told you there was a brain surgery which could change a child’s gender, who do you think would defend the freedom to elect for such a surgery? The left or right?
It is the left that defends abortion, IVF, and euthanasia; it is the right-wing that opposes birth control. The left is deeply confused and contradictory, but there is hope.
The most fundamental form of property isn’t capital, but genetic property. This is because all property arises from genetic property. Without the genes which structure the brain, no thought or action is possible.
Are you allowed to do whatever you want with your biology, and the biology of your children? The left defends your right to conduct biological experimentation on children; the right opposes it. In this sense, the left is the catalyst for cataclysmic change, while the right is hysterically screaming, “STOP!”
I fully accept the ethical and moral risks of experimenting with AI and biology. Genghis Khan and communism killed millions. If Caesar’s Gallic Wars are not mere propaganda, then Julius Caesar killed off between 10-14% of the population of Gaul, which would make the Gallic Wars as deadly as WWI or WWII. Marx and Engels are correct in their assessment of the dirty, toxic, and dangerous conditions of early factories. People really did get crushed by machines, develop cancer, and die in horrible ways in the service of capitalism.
“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
-Joseph de Maistre
De Maistre was a conservative, of course, and he was bemoaning, in a Schopenhauerian way, the condition of existence. Nietzsche, by contrast, welcomed this realization and affirmed it.
Conclusion.
In the short term, I support the left mostly for its stance on foreign policy, education, and reproductive rights. In the long term, I think that by dedicating my energy to the left, I am helping to usher in a world-historical apocalypse and second-coming of either Christ or anti-Christ. Maybe these two figures will be unified into one syncretic Messiah.
By the second coming, I mean that Christianity as we know it will be entirely exterminated and replaced with a new religious paradigm, based on an entirely new sacred center. We’ve already hollowed out the center, and that process continues, but we have not yet seen the new sun dawning on the horizon. The early twilight is emerging.
Much of the superficial day-to-day expressions of leftism are incredibly lame and pathetic. I don’t enjoy black women screaming in my face about how “America is the most evil country to ever exist.” It is tiresome. But I do not believe the majority of black women are like this. The majority of humans, in general, do not dedicate much energy to politics. Political activists are a rare minority, and probably mentally deranged, on average.
If I were a normal person, I sure as hell wouldn’t care about any of this. I would be making money right now or relaxing on the beach with beautiful women.
I haven’t even read Moldbug, so this seems a bit pretentious on my part to ask someone to read someone that I haven’t read.
Were the 12 tribes of Israel distinguished by genetic, geographic, or ethnic distinctions? Or was this categorization a remnant of an earlier economic formula?
Amos 2:6-8, for example.
Finally reading this. I love that you’ve created your own ideology and wish we could have talked more about deregulating AI and biotech.
- “limit immigration to 10,000 per country”
&
- “invade Mexico”
i see what you did here 😝