Leftism is just an easy excuse
To expand on the Maoism post. Marquez came up with the flattery inflation theory to explain how cults of personality evolve in mechanistic terms. But the same idea can be used to explain not only Red Queen spirals of sycophancy. Any ideological innovation, both in states and inside small cults or organizations, behaves under the same principles.
Any political system, any organization, even the smallest one, is going to have people in power, and people out of power who want to be in power. Or at least marginally increase their level of power.
Which means you need to challenge those who are in power. The powerful are powerful because they have organized themselves into a power coalition, bound by ties of loyalty. A solid power block where all members are strongly loyal is, for all purposes, indestructible. So the only way to challenge the powerful is to try to incite disloyalty among its members.
More likely than not, some members of the ruling coalition are not very loyal. They'd rather defect. But they can't backstab the coalition just like that. You don't do that; it looks bad. Your comrades will go against you. There are costs to defection.
Unless you're not the only defector. You need a way to signal your intention to defect, so that other disloyal fucks such as yourself (and they're bound to be others) can join up, thus reducing the likely costs of defection. The way to signal your intention to defect is to come up with a good excuse. A good excuse to be disloyal becomes a rallying point through which other defectors can coordinate and cover their asses so that the ruling coalition doesn't punish them. What is a good excuse?
Leftism is a great excuse. Claiming that the ruling coalition isn't leftist enough, isn't holy enough, not inclusive enough of women, of blacks, of gays, or gorillas, of pedophiles, of murderous Salafists, is the perfect way of signalling your disloyalty towards the existing power coalition. By using the existing ideology and pushing its logic just a little bit, you ensure that the powerful can't punish you. At least not openly. And if you're lucky, the mass of disloyal fucks in the ruling coalition might join your banner, and use your exact leftist point to jump ship and outflank the powerful.
Note that this applies to any ideological system. In Islam, the best excuse to defect is to claim to be more fundamentalist. In Medieval Europe, is to love Christ more. In pre-WW2 Japan, it was to be a more fanatic militarist who fights for the glory of the empire.
The same dynamic fuels the flattery inflation one sees in monarchical or dictatorial systems. In Mao China, if you want to defect, you claim to love Mao more than your boss. In Nazi Germany, you proclaim your love for Hitler and the great insight of his plan to take Stalingrad. In the Roman Empire, you claimed that Caesar is a God, son of Hercules, and those who deny it are treacherous bastards. In Ancient Persia you loudly proclaimed your faith in the Shah being the brother of the Sun and the Moon and King of all Kings on Earth. In Reformation Europe you proclaimed that you have discovered something new in the Bible and everybody else is damned to hell. Predestined by God!
All of the above is bullshit. But it's useful bullshit. And humans will believe from the bottom of the hearts any bullshit that is useful enough. There's some individual variance in the ability to come up and sincerely believe any crap, but there's always cathartic rituals to prove that the we're in all in this together, this licensing you to become a true believer. At any rate, the whole point of the above is to signal your disaffection from the status quo. The precise content of your signal is irrelevant. It is completely dependent on the particular ideological ecology of your culture. But the underlying mechanism is the same. You want power, and you signal your intent in the optimal way to minimize the chances of official punishment, and make it easy for others to join your banner.
The degree to which this signals spiral into complete madness depend on how strong the ruling coalition is, and how vital it is to attain power. If the ruling coalition is solid, and has good mechanisms in place to ensure the loyalty of their members, potential defectors will be punished for signalling their intentions, no matter how embellished they are in the language of the state religion. If you are well fed and life is safe and good, there's little incentive to defect.
However, if the ruling coalition is too large, and hence weak, dispersed, and has few mechanisms of appraising and ensuring the loyalty of its members; or if the only way of ensuring access to food, shelter and security is to have some access to political power; signalling your intention to defect by proclaiming that 5 year olds should be able to be castrated, or by proclaiming that Kim Jong Un can climb buildings like Spiderman, is suddenly a good proposition. And once you do, and succeed, everybody else will be forced to follow your banner, and the new ideological innovation will become an official article of faith. You don't want to be the last guy that denies that Kim Jong Un is Spiderman.
And again: the precise content of the ideological point doesn't matter. Your human brain doesn't care about ideology. Humans didn't evolve to care about Marxist theory of class struggle, or about LGBTQWERTY theories of social identity. You just don't know what it means. It's all abstract points you've been told in a classroom. It doesn't actually compute. Nothing that anybody ever said in a political debate ever made any actual, concrete sense to a human being.
So why do we care so much about politics? What's the point of ideology? Ideology is just the water you swim in. It is a structured database of excuses, to be used to signal your allegiance or defection to the existing ruling coalition. Ideology is just the feed of the rationalization Hamster that runs incessantly in that corner of your brain. But it is immaterial, and in most cases actually inaccessible to the logical modules in your brain.
Nobody ever acts on their overt ideological claims if they can get away with it. Liberals proclaim their faith in the potential of black children while clustering in all white suburbs. Communist party members loudly talk about the proletariat while being hedonistic spenders. Al Gore talks about Global Warming while living in a lavish mansion. Cognitive dissonance, you say? No; those cognitive systems are not connected in the first place.
And ideological sincerity doesn't make sense on the face of it. Why would anything like that ever evolve? Given how ideology actually behaves, a gene that made you be coherent with your ideology can't possibly spread in the gene pool. A gene for being able to aptly manipulate nonsensical abstract points to signal your position and intention vs. the present power structure; now that's useful.
Leftism evolved, step by step, backstab by backstab, as Christian Europeans signalled their dislike with the status quo by gently pushing the state religion just a little bit further, in the direction most likely to get people on your side, and prevent the powerful from punishing you. Surely nobody can disagree with extending the franchise to our hard working middle class? Surely nobody can disagree with abolishing the enslavement of our fellow humans? Surely nobody can disagree with giving citizenship rights to our women? Surely nobody can disagree with stopping the criminal prosecution of homosexuals?
And so, every little step in the way, power-seekers moved the consensus to the left. And open societies, democratic systems are by their decentralized nature, and by the size of their constituencies, much more vulnerable to this sort of signalling attacks. It is but impossible to appraise and enforce the loyalty of every single individual involved in a modern state. There's too many of them. A Medieval King had a better chance of it; hence the slow movement of ideological innovation in those days. But the bigger the organization, the harder it is to gather accurate information of the loyalty of the whole coalition; and hence the ideological movement accelerates. And there is no stopping it.
57 comments
[…] Spandrell Leftism is just an easy excuse […]
[…] Leftism is just an easy excuse […]
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
You have nailed it: especially when there is civil strife, everyone is watching everyone else for signals of loyalty and disloyalty. Ideology (and religion) serves that signal. That's why ideology can affect powerful men who would normally pay no attention to the ramblings of ideologues and religious nuts. This is one good reason for avoiding civil strife and political conflict. However, there's a difference between post-revolutionary states and normal states. It is very common after a revolution to go through a series of phases: honeymoon, power struggle among the revolutionaries, consolidation, renewed radicalism, new consolidation. (Happened in France, Russia, China and more.) The "renewed radicalism" phase is distinctive to those regimes.
In all human organizations, everyone is watching everyone else for signals of loyalty and disloyalty all the time. The particular ideological dynamics of revolutionary states are due to their particular inefficiency with appraising loyalty, given their numbers and lack of information. It takes a while to fix that.
OK insincerity makes sense up to a point but it seems that once the struggle for power heats up enough, insincerity would be a fatal disability because the rival faction could use that to kill you, sometimes literally depending on the circumstances.
Which is why everybody is perfectly sincere. All the processing takes place in the background.
There are varying degrees of sincerity. Some are insincere. Some are sincere under influence. And others will believe no matter what. For example, East Asians may be materialistic now but when Buddhism first arrived, apparently there were East Asian devotees willing to burn themselves alive (though this was motivated more by imitation of the Bodhisattva than by Tibetan nationalism as in the 21st Century). The thing about such things was that the sincerity of these believers seems to be orders of magnitude deeper than most believers such that popularity alone does not explain it. So while social pressure may explain the ideological and theological passions of the masses, a more complete picture would also address the most fanatical truest of true believers who really do internalize the ideology.
Scott Atran has spent time studying suicide bombers, and he thinks its about the social incentives in their close circles. So fanaticism can be produced. Some people seem more amenable than others, of course.
Yes but two things... 1. We know fanaticism is contrived in the sense that the ideologies in which true believers are fanatical were not usually invented by them and that they adopted them under the influence of others. But is there anything leaders can do to produce a higher proportion of fanatical true believers as opposed to just shepherding a mass of conformist opportunists? 2. Not all people are Leftists and not all Leftists are Leftists in the same way. There are ideologies whose believers factionalize under sub-ideologies. In addition the ideologies themselves rival other ideologies with only a Zeitgeist of sorts providing the direction in which results flow and in which one ideological camp beats another. Furthermore the Zeitgeist is not unfailingly in one direction. For most of the 20th Century, the Zeitgeist favored Communism until the late 80s-early 90s when suddenly Communism wilted like a head of old lettuce. Not that the Left disappeared; it definitely survived but changed its direction in favor of diversity and environmentalism. This was due to anti-Communist factions within the Left as well as the Right fighting off Communism until it lost all credibility. So while your explanation explains how an ideological camp could become more extreme about following its doctrines, the bigger picture must take into account which direction and which ideology is adopted by the Zeitgeist.
Communist sympathizers withered because Communism collapsed. It stopped being a good excuse. Good excuses must be unfalsifiable; the less factual content the better. After Gorbachev, suddenly there was a flood of actual data on how Communism works; so claiming communism is good stopped being a good argument to use for status whoring. The Right "fought it off" because it was suddenly fairly easy to fight off. Funny how anti-Communism succeeded so rapidly after 80 years of struggle, huh. Note how the Right is completely unsuccessful in the fight against Global Warming. There's no factual content, so it can't be falsified. And fanaticism can and is produced quite reliably. Again, check Atran's work on Palestinians. They are pretty good at producing suicidal jihadis.
Global warming can be falsified, and it has been by the temperature record, as the previous cycle of claimed human caused global cooling was. That's why it's now "climate change", which is indeed absolutely unfalsifiable. And, you know, that it's unfalsifiable is the only argument I can muster against it, which of course doesn't work.
This is all covered by elite power theory. It is both. They believe according to their self-interest and believe sincerely nonetheless.
[…] is one nation. A reading of De Jouvenal’s On Power (and Moldbug of course) as well as this post is extremely instructive on how this comes about, and why it is pushed and accepted by those in […]
I saw this happen right in front of me during the 1960's, when the New Left overthrew the Old Moderate Left. The Old Lefties couldn't really fight back, without having their liberal credentials questions, which was after all the basis of their power. The whole thing was masterfully handled, I have to say.
That left only seems moderate in retrospect. They did the same thing to their predecessors.
I am very glad to read this. I have a post on my site called "Leftward drift is the new means of production" and was afraid this would become some sort of mystic phenomenon glad to see thought along these lines. An important question is if there is 'leftward drift' what is a 'rightward pivot' and in what terms can this meaningfully be achieved in organizations? Perhaps some sort of index to keep an idea of where we are on the axis? A few vitality metrics minimally I would hope.
That is an excellent question. A quick answer would be that rightward pivots happened when the power coalition is solid enough to punish defection; or the threat of defection is big enough that the power coalition is motivated enough to attack preemptively. But that state of affairs never lasts long, for structural reasons, and so leftward drift soon starts again, especially in large organizations. In smaller groups you can appraise loyalty better, so you can prevent drift more effectively.
Rightward movement is the hand of Gnon, generally. Obamacare steamrolled the right but it turned out to be a mess. Australia and Europe went whole hog with carbon credits, but the markets collapsed like one more dot com, turning everyone into cynics. Liberals everywhere fell overthemselves to love up radical Islam and then ISIS showed up. Venezuela is gracefully entering the Woodchipper of Gnon, as the USSR and China did before.
"woodchipper of Gnon" i died laughing. that just made my day
The suite, the module is deeply rooted and universal, so must be at least a neolithic legacy, when society consisted of small bands and tribes. Its a powerful delusion, so must have profound survival benefit. Population was limited by food, so it must involve avoidance of starvation. Its the famine survival module. If you haven't enough to survive, and others in the band have more, you get together with others on the outs, stoke indignation, find a leader that you follow slavishly, who *compels* those with more to share.
Except anarchism. Claim to love Exit more? Hard to do without actually exiting, thus no longer being capable of defecting.
No exceptions. This Anarchism of yours doesn't really exist. And now you know why.
In theory, anarchism if implemented would add the signaling spirals by abolishing power coalitions. But since in practice anarchism would replace institutional leaders with mobs the same dynamic would apply except that power would be more of a collective attribute than an individual attribute--that is, if the powerful anarchist forces didn't just create a para-state that unofficially mimics the state like a para-military unofficially mimics the military. I don't know the details but it appears that Nestor Makhno's Free Territory established a para-state through the Soviets and Assemblies and that the CNT-FAI's initial push for revolution would have created a para-state if it hadn't used the Popular Front as a reason (or excuse?) for joining the Spanish Republic in its war against the Falange.
And ideological sincerity doesn’t make sense on the face of it. Why would anything like that ever evolve? Given how ideology actually behaves, a gene that made you be coherent with your ideology can’t possibly spread in the gene pool. A gene for being able to aptly manipulate nonsensical abstract points to signal your position and intention vs. the present power structure; now that’s useful. Probably the best paragraph I've read this week. And yet, some ideologies—tapestries of bullshit, if you will—seem to lead to far better, i.e., more stable, more prosperous, outcomes than others. How do we get an ideology that does that? Or an ideology that picks and ideology that does that...
Is it ideology that leads to good outcomes?
Even if we were to attempt, just for fun, a logical comparison of Confucian or Buddhist ideologies with Protestant ideologies, there probably would not be much of a comparison between the two. And yet both have historically given rise to perfectly stable societies. And, of course, there's a question of causality here. Do ideologies come before material stability, or are ideologies just post-hoc rationalizations?
But Confucian, Buddhist and Protestant ideologies share the natural law (C.S. Lewis call it "the Tao"). They disagree in the spiritual realm, but all of them agree in the earthly realm. They promote pro-social behaviors. Leftism promotes anti-social behaviors. "Do ideologies come before material stability, or are ideologies just post-hoc rationalizations?" You don't get material stability without a good ideology (meaning ideologies that promote things like being prudent with money, sexual repression, family, high natality, etc.). All cultures start with a good ideology and then they get material wealth. After that, they get bad ideologies (at least in the elite).
[…] Leftism is an easy excuse for signalling attacks. […]
[…] anyway. Spandrell’s latest argues that people disagree with authorities for the social signaling. I mean, it’s true, […]
Great post, but one quibble. Unless you intend to lump japanese emperor worship in with leftism, you aren't talking about leftism at all, just politics in general. Everyone defects from the ruling coalition by trying to be "truer" than the center. In the US, Democrats do it by claiming to be better progressives, Republicans by claiming that they're better Republicans ("real americans" being perhaps the purest expression of the concept) but everyone is doing the same thing. That might have been your point, but I felt it was worth pointing out.
That's true, but since the Left is hyper-political, and tends to politicize everything, their spirals tend to be more hysterical and all inclusive. At least that's what I'd say...
I'd say it's the leveling instinct on the left that makes them more pernicious. The average lefty is more likely to defect, because defecting from authority is the basic left wing impulse. Sure, the right can pull the "we are the true servants of the emperor" stuff you see in Japan, but it seems almost tautological that a room full of people swearing up and down to support true authority is going to be more stable that one trying just as hard to pull it down. And since people are primates and thus hierarchy isn't ever going to actually go away, the previous leftist generation can always be accused of betraying the cause for building whatever hierarchies they did.
Cochran says that Japan in 1941 wasn't very stable: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/various-crap/#comment-66714
the Japan situation is interesting because of how rare it is to see an army where the generals are afraid of their majors. And the Kwantung Army might have been nuts, but they never decided to, say, up and murder all the kulaks/nobles/etc. in Manchuria to prove how much they loved the emperor.
That's the funny thing though: the Emperor was a fairly Anglophile liberal man, and the whole militarism thing didn't amuse him at all. None of which stopped the majors from deciding to go full retard in expansionist war, even to the extreme of attempting a coup to prevent the surrender even after the nuclear bombings and the Soviet declaration of war.
For example, the Kwantung Army decided to attack the Russians (Khalkhyn Gol) by itself, without authorization from the Japanese government or even the Army high command. How weird is that? It’s actually not weird at all. Many empires throughout history in their rapid growth phase did so via individual initiative taken by military commanders on the periphery - Caesar conquering Gaul, Cortes conquering Mexico and the East India company dominating India are all examples.
[…] is his usual awesome self here: Leftism is just an easy excuse. The power hungry will always search for ways to get some from those who have it. Ideology just […]
[…] sovereignty, which continues to define its horizon. Crossed lines to the future. Leftism is just an excuse (for this). Musings on complexity and order. Moral sanity (provoked). The secret of power. Weed on […]
small typo.. should be power bloc. not power block
This whole post is one of the most brilliant things you've ever written.
Reblogged this on Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar and commented: 5/5.
[…] the particular content of their ideas is completely irrelevant. As it happens, humans evolved in fairly egalitarian forager groups, so egalitarianism always has a […]
[…] But she isn’t the only one. There’s lots of people like her, in any country, in any institution. Jerry Pournelle had the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization will always end up being led by people devoted to the benefit of the organization, not to doing whatever purpose the organization originally had. Which is another way of saying that any organization will eventually be led by people who only think of benefitting the people who lead the organization, i.e. themselves. The greedy power-hungry. Let’s call them Clintons, for lack of a better word. Every organization will eventually always end up being led by Clinton’s. Simply because they take care that they end up ruling. They seek power will all their heart, and they get it. That’s how you get Conquest’s Law too. All organizations not explicitly rightist will always end up turning leftist. Why? Because the left is simply what the Clinton’s do. The Left is whatever works at achieving power and keeping it. […]
[…] have read their history and know that going back to the past is neither feasible nor desirable, that there are systemic reasons why the Left always wins, and that the signaling patterns that move modern politics are likely to […]
Very good but I don't see how things like gay marriage are defections. I think they are defended by power. I guess people get status and power by being "more Catholic than the Pope". Sometimes it is only status in their circle of acquaintances. Sometimes it is only power, whether they are replacing the existing power or getting a position inside it.
Defecting i.e. attacking the center of power, not leaving the group at large. The pope himself never tries to outpope himself, it's always some ambitious junior member of the elite who tries. It wasn't Clinton who pushed for gay marriage, but Andrew Sullivan, who nobody knew before that, and become famous through it. Plenty of old school leftists were purged after gaymarriage became a thing.
[…] I’m probably the most disagreeable alt-right out there, in that my specialty is pointing out how every single political idea out there is either stupid or impractical, and I use profuse examples from ancient and modern history to make the point. Recently I’ve been pointing out why political ideas are either stupid impractical, and why they still keep coming up because the point of having political ideas is not their brilliance or practicality, but just to get some status points in ad-hoc local signaling games. […]
[…] The Puritan hypothesis is true. At least I believe it is true. When will we know for sure? If president Trump fails to turn the tide? What if Trump crowns himself king? Leftists will have lost at any rate. Alt-righters, NRx and dark enlightenment will continue debate. But leftists will always creep back into the debate, finding other weak spots in the coalition to defect against. […]
[…] progressivism aren’t contingent. They aren’t just some random stuff that got in there. The progressive memeplex evolved because it’s fit. For better or worse, talk about human equality is good social glue. It makes it easy to make […]
[…] every 4 years, and that kind of stuff. I could never understand any of it; until last year when I finally had my epiphany, thanks to Scott Atran and the basket of mangoes that Pakistan sent to Mao Zedong. Now I understand […]
"ideology is just a rationalization" is something I've been pondering for a long time. When I had left libertarianism upon entering college wand was exposed to WN types, I started to say "Ideology is how white people rationalize acting like n*ggers" When I thought more on it, the list of racial slurs expanded slightly, as some ideologies are there to allow jewing people over as well. I think you've perhaps expressed this more eloquently than I.
[…] shout-out to Spandrell’s post on this subject, of leftism as “just an easy […]
I remember having my doubts about this back then but I find myself more in agreement now. It is a good way to approach why signalling spirals exist: because the ruling coalition itself has a political formula to justify its power. So if it the political formula is leftist, attacking it from the left is relatively safe as they cannot be seen crushing that. How did a first ruling coalition adopt leftism as a political formula? Probably spiralling out of Christianity's charity etc. aspects as a political formula. Not only that. Smarts-signalling is at nearly as important as virtue-signalling and Enlightenment-era smarts signalling spiralled out of Renaissance Humanist smarts-signalling, which placed an importance on reading the classics, and it all spiralled out of the Catholic Church's immense love for Aristotle and other classics. My only beef would be why focus on defection from the elites? Forming a strong opposition requires the exact same signalling spiral. The two are entirely indistinguishable. This is important because sometimes it is hard to tell overdogs from underdogs. Were radical leftist college students from rich families overdogs or underdogs? NRx theory says the overdogs run history and no underdog rebellion wins without the support from a faction of the overdogs. But it is often hard to tell overdogs from underdogs. And if defecting overdogs and ambitious underdogs use the same exact spirals then we don't need to tell them from each other! That would be a very welcome simplification. So if, say, someone is saying "I am oppressed because I am black" we don't have to worry if he is a defecting overdog or an ambitious underdog. Because it is hard to tell.
"But it is often hard to tell overdogs from underdogs” Man, you have this talent for throwing huge non-sequiturs around. All those mini-dissenting memes, whether produced by proles or elites, only get amplified if the elites want them too. You *need* elite complicity for any meme to get big enough that people start to adopt it. That includes 'we dindu nuffin' and everything blacks believe today.
Of course, but the point is that plebs do pick up the memes from the elites, so the very same meme acts both for signalling elite defection and pleb recruitment. This means if the only thing we know about someone is that they are repeating a meme, we do not know if they are wannabee elite-defectors, actual elite-defectors recruiting the plebs, or some pleb who got recruited. All three will largely act alike. This is the important part.
The really wonderful thing about the internet age is how we can watch a generations worth of change happen in a decade. The internet speeds up the signal of signaling and what used to take a lifetime now happens in a few years. So maybe the historians on this site can tell me, what happened after the inevitable overextension and crash of previous leftist societies? Did people fragment into new clusters or get vacuumed up by remnants of older ideologies?