the left always wins.

Deep Left teleology.

Why have progressively more virulent forms of leftism succeeded so uniformly, especially in the last 500 years? In evolutionary terms, what gave leftism the competitive advantage?

Many rightists dispute the notion that leftism has any competitive advantage at all. Bronski claims that leftism is an artifact of mutational load rather than a “mind virus.” Nietzsche claims it is a product of the resentment of the priest. Evangelicals believe it is the influence of Satan. TradCaths believe it all started with the Reformation. Antisemites believe it is a Jewish trick.

If leftism was merely a product of the Reformation, we wouldn’t see it so prominently among Catholics. On the other hand, Evangelicals must be fairly Satanic themselves, since they promote female preachers and the abolition of race. Contra Bronski, leftist ideas (such as John Ball’s Lollard movement in 1380) emerge much earlier than modern dysgenic birthrates. Jews didn’t emancipate themselves; they had to be emancipated by gentiles, so they could not have originated leftism in its earliest form.

Even if Nietzsche is right, there is still a question of “why?” By what mechanism is it that the priest manages to dominate the warrior? In the scientific view, leftism has been so successful because there is something about leftism that is powerful, adaptive, and confers an advantage to states and cultures which adopt it.

degrees of leftism.

Leftism can be adaptive, while at the same time culture destroying. To give a biological example: it is good that your stomach contains acid, which it uses to break down food. However, if your stomach produces too much acid, it will break down the stomach lining, giving you an ulcer, which, if bad enough, will cause you internal bleeding, and eventually death. Just because some degree of leftism is adaptive does not mean that all degrees of leftism are always adaptive for every situation.

It is also the case that a small animal contains less stomach acid than a large animal. If you tried to fill up a mouse with the stomach acid of a moose, the mouse would explode (yuck). Similarly, a less complex civilization like Rome (120 million people maximum) could probably not handle the amount of leftism we have in the world today (5 billion people plugged into a globalized internet economy).

Our ability to “handle leftism” or our tolerance for leftism is related to the concept of “luxury beliefs”: there are certain beliefs which act as a tax upon the population, which poorer populations cannot afford. More social complexity (economies of scale) allow for more leftism. Or, stated in the reverse, leftism allows for and tolerates more social complexity than more traditional societies.

social complexity.

Imagine an extremely far right society. This society is 100% white, blonde haired, blue eyed. Everyone is not just a Christian, but they are specifically Dutch-descended Calvinists who believe they are the true blood descendants of Israel. They believe that when Yahweh commanded the Israelites to slay all the Canaanites, he was speaking to blonde haired, blue eyed Dutch people. They believe the term “Canaanites” represents every other human on the planet, including Slavs and Italians.

Pursuant to these beliefs, these Dutch-Calvinists speak a reconstructed dialect of Hebrew, which they believe is their native language that they forgot because of Satanic deception. They refuse to speak Dutch anymore, because they believe all other languages are corrupted by the serpent seed of Cain. They believe that learning other languages will confuse the children of Israel and mix them together with the other nations.

Suspend your disbelief, and suppose that this rightist society was extremely technologically competent (bear with me). It has every modern military weapon, including hypersonic missiles and nukes. It has nuclear submarines and satellites. Although it is small (the size of North Korea), it cannot be defeated militarily, at least not without great cost.

What level of social complexity would this society have? It wouldn’t have any internal ethnic divisions, or racial divisions; no language divisions or religious divisions; it wouldn’t even have political divisions or disagreements over fashion. Everyone would wear the same clothes and eat the same food. It would have a Social Complexity of 0.

Compare it to an extremely diverse society, with millions of ethnicities, languages, and religions, and no internal agreements on fashion. Such a society would have a Social Complexity of 1. It would be highly individualistic and leftist.

One of the obvious issues with far right cults is that when they become sufficiently large or successful, they inevitably find something to disagree on.¹ Maybe an esoteric metaphysical doctrine, like transubstantiation or the filioque. Maybe a group of polygamists causes social turmoil. Maybe a monarch leaves no legitimate male descendants, and the nobility split between his bastard son and his brother.

In this sense, even societies which begin with a Social Complexity of 0 seem to spontaneously or entropically generate increasing levels of Social Complexity. If increasing Social Complexity cannot be tolerated within the same political or religious formation, this inevitably leads to schisms, to reduce the Social Complexity back to a tolerable or manageable level.

But, suppose none of that happens. This is an ideal far right society, with no internal divisions. How will it interact with its neighbors? Will it be able to trade, or carry out diplomacy? Will it be able to forge alliances? Will it be able to spread its influence, or at least establish friendly relationships with other countries? It becomes apparent that Social Complexity is not just a problem within societies, but between societies. A society’s ability to tolerate, manage, and overcome Social Complexity determines not just its domestic functioning, but also its functioning international relations.

But again, in this ideal case, the far right society has no need for these “liberal” ideas of friendship. It is so autarkic, so self-sufficient, and so militarily powerful that it has no need for friends and allies. Instead, it conquers its opponents through sheer force. Instead of managing the conquered population with compromise or a universalistic religion, it removes that population with genocide.

genocide is expensive.

When Rome conquered Gaul and Britain, Roman historians, and Caesar himself, sought to emphasize and glorify the military might and violence of the conquest. But less often remembered is the fact that Caesar was a great diplomat. He forged alliances with the Celts, and ended up placing his Celtic allies in the Roman senate. He was a multiculturalist!

This was a big deal for Rome, which for centuries prided itself on the purity of senatorial bloodlines and lineages. This would be like placing African warlords in the Chinese National People's Congress. Can you imagine Xi Jinping bringing African warlords into Beijing, and declaring them “Chinese communist officials”? The senate was humiliated and insulted by Caesar. For this, among other things, they stabbed him for betraying the Republic.

Back to the ideal far right society: there could not be any Caesar-like diplomacy among these Dutch-Hebrew-Calvinists. They would believe that any sort of negotiation with the enemy was a form of spiritual pollution, a limp-wristed tactic of hagglers and cowards. Furthermore, since they believe that any sort of ethnic intermarriage is a sin, they couldn’t just slay the men and enslave the women. As a result, their only way to conclude a war would be through a total genocide of the native population.

There are periods in history where this has occurred, but it was rare and costly. It may have occurred in ancient Britain around 2500 BC, but at least 10% of the pre-Indo-European DNA survived through intermarriage. Genghis Khan preferred to threaten people than to genocide them — genocide was used to make an “example” out of a town or village, so that the others would surrender.

“fanatics” surrender after 8% deaths.

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, they still had an army of 6 million people. It wasn’t in a position to fight outside of the mainland (there was no fuel to operate ships or planes), but it could dig trenches, build fortifications, and launch waves of kamikaze defenders at American invaders.

In 1945, 2.8 million Germans surrendered. Japan and Germany, which were supposedly far-right states with a god-like emperor and fanatical dictator, did not “fight to the death.” During WWII, Japan lost up to 4.34% of its pre-war population; Germany lost up to 8.86% of its pre-war population (including Volksdeutsch, Germans living outside of Germany).

What if, instead of accepting the German or Japanese surrender, the allied forces explicitly demanded the complete genocide of the entire civilian population? Millions of Germans would have never surrendered.Wwhat would the point have been in surrendering, if genocide was assured, advertised, and inevitable? The Japanese would have watched two nuclear bombs go off, and say, “well, there’s still no point in surrendering. If we surrender, that just makes it easier for them to kill the rest of us.”

The German government attempted to convince its population that genocide was indeed inevitable. The Morgenthau Plan was especially useful for convincing Germans that their country would be completely de-industrialized and enslaved; their women and children would be raped; Germany would be occupied indefinitely by a foreign military; waves of foreign races would be imported to implement the “Kalergi Plan” to destroy the German people biologically.

In fact, Germany did lose about half of its territory; Germany has now lost 20% of its energy-intensive manufacturing since 2018; two million German women were raped; 30% of Germans have a migrant background; 35,000 American troops occupy Germany to this day.

None of this is to say that Germany is some kind of hellhole: Germans still have a higher standard of living than most other Europeans, let alone people living in the developing world. Rather, the point is that millions of Germans still surrendered, despite the supposed “fanaticism” of the Nazis. As it turns out, people will make a lot of political and ideological compromises to avoid being killed (even Nazis).

However, if the Americans openly advertised their intent to exterminate every last German man, woman, and child, a German surrender in 1945 would have been less likely. Instead, facing certain death, millions of fighting age German men would have never surrendered, leading to much higher allied casualties.

leftist Genghis Khan.

Genocide is costly, not just for the victims, but also for the perpetrators. Any country which is willing to genocide its enemies degrades its ability to forge alliances and engage in diplomacy. If alliances and diplomacy are liberal or leftist ideas, then consider Caesar, Alexander, and Genghis Khan to be a leftists.²

Genghis Khan began by uniting warring Mongol tribes, and executing the Mongol nobility who opposed his centralization of power. It was his diplomacy, tact, and skillful alliance building that allowed Mongols to overcome petty differences and unite as a world-historical force. Similarly, Napoleon didn’t conquer Europe by exterminating the Germans, but by integrating them into his army. When Napoleon marched into Russia, his Grande Armée was two-thirds French, and one third non-French.

When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, instead of exterminating the Persians, he ordered his generals to adopt Persian customs and marry Persian women. Doing so was an attempt to integrate or “reverse assimilate” into Persian society. When the Normans settled into northern France, they adopted the French language and French culture. If cultural chauvinism is a feature of the right, then these sorts of concessions can be viewed as a feature of the left.

The ability to universalize, compromise, and to find common ground was central to the ability of Romans to expand their territory. Romans didn’t exterminate their new subjects; instead, they used Interpretatio Romana to integrate foreign Gods into their pantheon. When they attempted to conquer the Jews, they found an issue — the Jews, unlike other populations, were extremely intolerant of religious syncretism. There was never a Celtic, Germanic, Iberian, African, Anatolian, Thracian, or Dacian revolt against an idol of Zeus. In this sense, the Jews were culturally intolerant to religious innovations, and in this sense, more “conservative” than other groups.

Because the Jews were not willing to assimilate into Roman imperialism, the Romans did begin to adopt genocidal methods, killing up to a third of the Jewish population. This far exceeds what was done to Japan by a factor of 8x; it would be the equivalent of killing 30 million more Germans than already died in WWII. This wasn’t the standard Roman procedure, because it was expensive. However, given the intolerance of the Jewish religion, the Romans were not able to use assimilationist tactics.

The Romans became so tolerant of different religions and ethnicities that they accepted a Phoenician dynasty of emperors, including Elagabalus in 218 AD, who attempted to force the Roman senate to worship a black cube instead of Jupiter. He also introduced one of his female relatives into the senate, and created a parallel "women's senate," the senaculum. As the concept of Romanitas became increasingly diluted and meaningless, Rome became reliant on mercenary armies, foederati.

Within 20 years of the “humiliation of Elagabalus,” the Crisis of the Third Century began, splitting the empire into three parts. Each was plagued by mass immigration,³ invasions, assassinations, hyperinflation, economic depression, and pandemics. The military no longer had any loyalty to the political institutions of the state, and soldiers would fight for whichever warlord could pay them the most.

While some degree of “civil nationalism,” religious pluralism, and tolerance of foreign cultures helped Rome build its empire, the loss of its core identity, including its state religion and ethnic heritage, contributed to its decline. Leftism giveth, and leftism taketh. Like any technology, it can be destructive, and if not wielded properly, it can kill the user.

Fast forward to 1492, and Europeans began to resume the imperial project of Rome in the Americans, Africa, and India. Although native Americans did experience a large population decline due to pandemics, this was not (at least not initially) due to a conscious conspiracy on behalf of the colonists. Instead, both the Catholic church and the Puritans explicitly stated their intention to convert the natives and bring them to Christ.

Most successful empires in history — Mongols, Romans, Christians — have utilized diplomacy, alliances, and some form of “inclusion” where out-groups can assimilate, or where elites “reverse assimilate” into the population. Outright genocide is rare, and even when it does occur, it usually only eliminates 30% of a population (except in cases of pandemic, which are unintentional). Eliminating 100% of a population is extremely costly.

Even if there was an ideal rightist society (ethnically pure, religiously intolerant, sexually chaste) which had an extremely strong military, it would still find it difficult to conduct diplomacy, trade, and form alliances with its neighbors. This is not just because such a society would alienate its neighbors with threats of genocide, but because there would be internal pressure from within the society to never compromise with foreigners.

“nationalism for all peoples”

This is why a large number of self-described nationalists use the phrase “nationalism for all peoples” (NFAP). NFAP is an attempt to get around the basic problem inherent in ethnic chauvinism and religious intolerance. “You do you.” It is a libertarian ethos at a national scale, and if we understand libertarianism as a form of classical liberalism, then it is clear that NFAP is a form of liberal tolerance of foreign cultures. Sometimes, NFAPers go so far that they become “third worldists,” and start praising the genocide of first world “colonialists” as a moral form of nationalism.

This attempt is always complicated by the fact that people who genuinely take pride in their culture are naturally supremacists. If you think Christianity is better than Islam, you evangelize. If you think whites are better than blacks, you enslave. The liberal version of this is “economic sanctions to protect gay rights.” In practice, NFAP is a compromise between liberal universalism and the natural human tendency toward territorial expansion and imperialism. It is very difficult to find any period of history where NFAP was adhered to, followed, and enforced without some kind of universalistic moral framework like Christianity (leftism).

What is leftism, anyway?

At this point, it is important to clarify what is meant by leftism. Leftism has many features, and I will highlight a few of them to demonstrate how they work together toward a common goal of managing social complexity:

1. Pacifism;

2. Feminism;

3. High taxes;

4. Universalism;

5. Tolerance.

Pacifism.

Pacifism was not a big part of the Roman religion, but it was a central feature of Christianity which replaced it. Pacifism was described by Nietzsche as a “slave morality,” but it is obvious to see why this would be beneficial from the perspective of social administration. A violent religion like Norse paganism believed that to die peacefully was dishonorable, whereas to die in battle guaranteed entry into Valhalla. As a result, Norse pagans were never able to assemble a centralized state until they finally adopted Christianity in the 11th century.

Pacifism has a trade off: it sacrifices some degree of warrior virtues in favor of internal stability. In the context of tribal societies, pacifism is unsustainable and deadly. It is possible that many of the agriculturalist societies of Europe in 3000 BC were relatively pacifistic, and this is why the patriarchal Indo-Europeans were so effective in taking over these societies. But once a state is established, some degree of pacifism is advantageous, since it limits the amount of internal chaos.

Feminism.

Alongside pacifism is feminism and androgyny. Modern feminists argue that “gender equality corresponds with a country’s lower likelihood of using military force to resolve disputes with other countries,” and “the severity of violence used in international conflict decreases with higher gender equality.” To translate this to something a Norse pagan could understand: feminism and androgyny increase pacifism. When faced with the threat of primitive tribal warfare, gender equality is insane.

However, once a state is advanced enough that its military is more dependent on technology (and the economy) than on brute strength, then some degree of feminism is necessary. As even Joseph Goebbels said, “No one who understands the modern age would have the crazy idea of driving women from public life, from work, profession, and breadwinning.”

Taxation.

Taxation is limited among tribal clans. Primitive gangs do not have the ability to tax their subjects very highly, because high enough taxation will result in violent revolt. It is only when a population has been sufficiently pacified that higher levels of taxation become possible. Taxation, at some point, is part of a spectrum with slavery.

This is a libertarian argument, but it is true. If the government can tax 90% of your income, then effectively you are working for the government. You don’t have a choice. High taxes are a result of a leftist cultural environment, but they also allow states to accomplish important things, like winning wars.

The greatest determining factor of whether or not a medieval king could win a war was his ability to raise money for the war, and this is still true today. The greatest fighting force on earth does not mean much if it is not fed, supplied, and equipped, and this is very expensive.

Universalism.

Universalism has been the subject of much of the discussion so far. Universalism allows for foreigners to be integrated as citizens. This process of assimilation allows for a state to increase its size, its economy, its tax base, and its pool of labor. It also eliminates the need to have a standing occupation, and eliminates the threat of revolts, sabotage, and guerrilla warfare. Much criticism (from a purely strategy standpoint) has been laid on the Nazis for not integrating captured Russian soldiers into their military. Whether or not this criticism is valid, it shows the value that universalism has in a military context.

Interpretatio Romana was a way of seeking peaceful cohabitation between Roman governors and their Celtic, Germanic, Africa or Middle Eastern subjects. “We’re not so different, you and me. My Gods are your Gods.” Romans didn’t just force their religion on others, but they compromised. This spirit of compromise eventually led to the proliferation of foreign cults within Rome, which undermined the state, and led to the collapse of theocracy. But Rome would have never been able to administer such large and diverse territories for centuries without this eventually fatal piece of leftism.

The 18 approved female hairstyles of North Korea.

Tolerance.

Toleration of deviant behavior, whether it is sexual, cultural, or religious, has to do both with universalism and pacifism. If someone has blue hair, tattoos, wears clothing of the opposite gender, engages in promiscuity, and worships Satan, the biggest threat to this behavior comes from chauvinists and particularists. Chauvinists believe there is a right way to do everything: a correct way for men to dress and style their hair. “Some fashion is better than others.” Particularists believe in a particular religious doctrine, and believe that some sexual activity is dishonorable or hell-worthy.

Chauvinism is the natural male instinct for social conformity, which is a feature of warrior cultures, as expressed by the military uniform. In this way, tolerance of deviance is a means of suppressing warrior culture as a means of increasing pacifism. Particularism is the opposite of universalism, and permitting tolerance for different sorts of lifestyles within a society also allows for greater acceptance of different cultures from abroad.

For a colonial or imperial culture, the ability to be fascinated by and appreciate the exotic (as in the case of Orientalism), facilitates the process of pacifying foreigners via a compromise of cultural values. As a result, Freemasons were especially prominent among the Dutch East India Company, as well as the leadership of the American Revolution. This is because Freemasons highly valued universalism and tolerance.

Thanks for reading.

1. Even more often, they schism when things are going poorly for them.

2. Viewing the transition from tribalism to nationalism as a leftist one can be explained in further detail here: https://open.substack.com/pub/deepleft/p/the-ten-stages-of-nationalism

3. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/11/genetic-history-rome