In one of the Facebook forums I visit from time to time, I came across the following series of essays from blogger Bloody Shovel. The subject is Biological Leninism, which also fits well with the concept of r/K Selection theory. (which I also recommend)
In short, the left has been very successful at taking over Western institutions because they promise improved status to groups that would, in a pure merit-based society, have lower status. This makes them very loyal to the ideology regardless of facts, logic or changing positions that may suit the current circumstances.
A long but very worthwhile read.
Any country has a ruling class. What I call “loyalty” you could also call asabiya; the coherence of the ruling class as such. Their ability to stick with each other and gang up, keeping the structure of rule stable. Feudalism got that; the nobility was the ruling class, they formed a society very much separate from that of the peasants, and they took much care that their rule was never contested. The destruction of that world by enlightened liberals resulted in a ruling class which was orders of magnitude less cohesive and orderly. You might be a libertarian and think that is a good thing, and you may have a point. But any organization wants to fight entropy and ensure its stability and reproduction. Liberalism historically has shown itself incapable of that. Leninism was the first solution to that problem.
Leninism is, of course, applied socialism. Socialism was huge before Leninism was even a thing, and that Marxism was and is still popular is not due only to Soviet patronage. Socialism works by hacking the Social Calculus Module that humans have in our brains. Remember, humans care deeply about status. Status is what drives human behavior. Everybody works to achieve more status, and to avoid losing status. Socialism of course sells egalitarianism. It tells people with low status that they can get some more. The Industrial Revolution had forced millions of peasants into the cities, and they all felt they had lost status in the process. Economists will tell you that the standard of living of industrial workers (according to some measures) had actually improved. And that may be so, but the workers didn’t think so, and they were pissed.
So these socialists come by and tell them they have this plan to make them gain status, big time. That was huge. Yes, sure, Christianity had also started promising the meek that they were morally higher than rich people; they’d all go to heaven unlike those perfid rich guys. But that didn’t translate into actual, real-world status. Socialism was promising actual goods. And so it became huge. It’s still huge. It’s pretty much catnip for humans. It’s instant check-mate.
Socialism works not only because it promises higher status to a lot of people. Socialism is catnip because it promises status to people who, deep down, know they shouldn’t have it. There is such a thing as natural law, the natural state of any normally functioning human society. Basic biology tells us people are different. Some are more intelligent, more attractive, more crafty and popular. Everybody knows, deep in their lizard brains, how human mating works: women are attracted to the top dogs. Being generous, all human societies default to a Pareto distribution where 20% of people are high-status, and everyone else just has to put up with their inferiority for life. That’s just how it works.
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There’s a reason why there’s so many evil fat women in government. Where else would they be if government didn’t want them? They have nothing going on for them, except their membership in the Democratic party machine. The party gives them all they have, the same way the Communist party had given everything to that average peasant kid who became a middling bureaucrat in Moscow. And don’t even get me started with hostile Muslims or Transexuals. Those people used to be expelled or taken into asylums, pre-1960. Which is why American Progressivism likes them so much. The little these people have depends completely on the Left’s patronage. There’s a devil’s bargain there: the more naturally repulsive someone else, the more valuable it is as a party member, as its loyalty will be all the stronger. This is of course what’s behind Larry Auster’s First Law of minority relations: the worse a group behaves, the more the Left likes it.
This is also why the Left today is the same Left that was into Soviet Communism back in the day. What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it’s all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it’s gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin’s Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.
If you think it can’t get worse than transexuals or pedophiles, you’re really not understanding how this works. Look at this NYT article: a black woman, ex-con, convicted of murdering her own 4 year old son. She served 20 years in prison, which she spent studying sociology or something. After leaving prison, she applied to study a PhD at Harvard, which rejected her. Progressives were up in arms. How could you!
Go to the link, and look at that woman. Look at that face. She never expressed any remorse over killing her children. She lied about it in the PhD application. She disposed of the body and never told the cops where her son’s corpse is! This is utter and complete psycho. Nobody in their right mind would want anything to do with this woman. But that’s precisely the point. In most human societies before 1900 she would have been killed, legally or extralegally. But precisely this kind of person, someone who should in all justice be the lowest status person on earth; that’s exactly the people that the Left wants on its team. You can count on her extreme loyalty to any progressive idea that the party transmits to her. And so, yes, of course, she finally got her PhD, at New York University. And unlike 97% of PhD students out there, you can bet on her getting a full tenured professorship very soon.
