The evolution and dynamics of left-progressivism

From Rousseau to courses in Theory.

The evolution of left-progressive ideas starts with Jean-Jacques Rousseau valorising mythic “wild” humans—the not-yet-corrupted-by-civilisation humans more in touch with man’s inherent goodness—while famously categorising the embedded human achievement and learning of civilisation as imprisoning, in his ringing declaration that:

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.

This is a socio-gnostic view of humans as imprisoned within society that is at the root of later oppressed/oppressor dichotomies. It also naturally leads to the notion of the cognitive elite aware of this profound social imprisonment versus the deluded mass. This awareness came to be, again and again, read as granting that aware elite a righteous authority not given to others.

Society-as-prison then raises the question of: who are the gaolers? Once the notion of oppressive imprisoning forces within society gets projected on to targeted groups as oppressors—the creators of the social prison—they and their’s become maleficent opposers of correct understanding and action.

“Decolonisation”—where indigenous cultures are valorised and are to “rescued” from the corrupting oppression of “whiteness”; of Western corrupting-by-colonising imperialism—is a re-packaging of Rousseau’s original vision that also gets much of its emotional energy from valorising the aware elite versus the deluded mass.“Decolonisation” is every bit as much cartoon (simplified) and caricatured (distorted) history as Rousseau’s original vision.

Miguel Bruna, Unsplash.

The adding in of the demonisation of the maleficent creators and facilitators proved to be natural to this social-prison view of society, creating the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy (dare one say binary?) that has gone through so many iterations (class, later gender, race, sexuality, disability, …). The “enemies-of-the-Revolution” guillotine politics of the French Revolution was the first—but very much not the last—dramatic example of such demonising of the imprisoning oppressors whose removal represents liberation.

Rousseau’s concept of the general will came to be used to valorise the notion of a single manifestation of legitimate political action. Specifically, it came to be applied to the project of liberation from oppressive imprisonment.

Repeatedly, what has proved to matter is not how various thinkers originally conceived their ideas, but how those ideas came to be adapted and adopted. It is the uses and forms of ideas that resonate with people that then replicate.

We are a highly imitative species—it is central to both our learning and our cooperative strategies. What has proved to matter is not merely mimetic (imitative appeal) but also memetic (resonant) power—for we humans cognitively model significance, not facts, so ideas spread by activating a sense of significance. That is how they resonate in order to replicate.

Illiberal liberation

Projects of liberation-from-imprisoning-oppression justify concentrating social power in the service of moral purposes that all must adhere to. This very much played out in the Reign of Virtue guillotine politics of the French Revolution, where alleged orientation towards The Revolution as trumping moral project became literally a life-and-death matter. It also played out in every Marxist (i.e. Communist) Revolution. This is very different from liberal notions of liberty.

Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was very clear that the pursuit of liberatory—i.e. oppression-removing—justice requires the crushing of freedom:

Marx completely failed to recognise that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts: the more freedom, the less justice, and the more justice, the less freedom.

(Marx gar nicht gesehen das Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit dialektische Begriffe sind je mehr Freiheit desto weniger Gerechtigkeit und je mehr Gerechtigkeit desto weniger Freiheit.)

Freedom legitimises private projects. The grand project of liberation from all oppression cannot allow any private action to get in the way.

Instead, trumping authority is given to the aware elite who are deemed to be empowered to ascertain which moral and other cognitive errors no one has the authority to express. This authority extends to anyone righteously motivated to speak on behalf of the oppressed/marginalised. The notion of the vanguard of the proletariat became the vanguard for any group deemed marginalised.

Such deemed righteous authority is a social dominance play dressed up as moral or social concern. Such concern is how relational aggression—aggression that targets people’s social standing and connections—normally disguises itself; including from the aggressors themselves who typically see what they are doing as just social concern, just moral concern.

Self-deceit is often useful. This is particularly so with relational aggression, as parading itself as moral or social concern makes such aggression more effective. It gives such aggression more emotional consistency; it eliminates the cognitive complexity—and possible “tells”—of conscious deceit; and parades itself as legitimate, so not aggression, so not a social dominance play, even when it is.

Liberal notions of liberty are about spreading the authority to act, to speak, to consider, to own, broadly across the society. Liberation from “oppressive/bigoted/alienating” speech—the project of hate speech; of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI); of mis/dis-information—is profoundly illiberal precisely because it strips citizens of the authority to act, to speak, to consider, to own.

Such speech control operates under the principles of the inquisitor that (1) error has no rights and (2) those with the correct understandings are able to ascertain error. These principles replace the liberal principle of the dispersed authority of citizens. We can see this replacement in every Communist Revolution; in every Party-State (whether Fascist, Nazi or Communist).

The next key step in the evolution of left-progressive ideology was political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon valorising the imagined future:

The golden age lies not in the past, but in the future.

(L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir.)

This is not merely the arrow of time, it is a profound moralising of history as having a (morally urgent) direction.

Hegel provided metaphysics for such moralising. Hegel mythologises history, giving history inherent dynamics generating a direction to events that initiates have a Hermetic understanding of: i.e., a wisdom from understanding not given to others. This leads to people being judged according to their orientation to the direction of events—and their understanding thereof—so according to whether they are on “the right side of History”. (The thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern came to be associated with Hegel’s historical dialectic, but does not actually come from him.)

The way the EU elite judges the electoral choices—actual or potential—of EU citizens according to whether they accord with the morally trumping EU project of “Ever Closer Union” is very much a manifestation of this moralising of the direction of history. Such moralising is profoundly anti-democratic, as it trumps the contingent choices of voters.

The dispersed authority of voters—who vote however they choose—is inherently at odds with the notion (and authority) of a moral-cognitive elite who know the “proper” direction of history. Much of the “Our Democracy” rhetoric is fairly transparently “our” democracy when the “right” people get voted for but the path to perdition when the “wrong” people get voted for. Indeed, to protect “Our Democracy”, candidates and political parties have to be subject to a cordon sanitaire to stop them from polluting “Our Democracy”, where citizen votes are very much not the key criteria.

This is another form of vanguardism, one that seeks the ritual legitimation of elections while leaching as much of the significance out of elections as possible. While the UN (completely) and the EU (rather less) are means of giving ideas authority with either no—or as attenuated as possible—electoral oversight, the most institutionally complete attenuation of the significance of elections in contemporary democracies was the Blair-Brown UK Governments of 1997-2010 moving so much policy to technocrats in quangoes; to judges via human rights legislation; and to the EU. The current state of the UK is a comment on the inferiority of such ambitions compared to feedback from elections that matter.

We talk of liberal democracies because they represent the combination of the liberal dispersed authority of citizens to to act, to speak, to consider, to own with the democratic dispersed authority of citizens voting (and their voting mattering). There are two tensions here. There is an inbuilt tendency for state action legitimised by voting to encroach into the other realms of action by citizens (the “demon in democracy” problem). We have also seen the use of expansive concepts of rights purporting to be the authority of those with the designated rights—but actually the authority of those who judge when and where such rights operate—to override the authority of the citizens-as-voters to decide various questions.

Turning the spiritual into the social

Especially when adapted by the Young Hegelians (later known as the Left-Hegelians), Hegel’s mythologising of history provided a further mechanism—beyond Rousseau’s socio-gnosticism—to turn the spiritual into the social: to take religious, even occult, patterns and ideas and re-package them in social, and material, forms. What resonates with human minds in religious or occult forms can also resonate when re-packaged into social and political, even materialist, forms.

A key idea in Hermeticism is that properly-oriented humans participate with God in the process of creation, a process that the Creator requires to complete Himself. This is God-as-Becoming not God-as-Being. Take God out of the story and human action becomes the definitive process of creation.

Marx takes God out of the story, creating a new, human-centred, version of the Hermetic vision of Creation-as-Becoming. Despite his overt materialism, Marx is a profoundly religious thinker:

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. [Emphasis in original.]

Marx creates a vision of the moral urgency of the socially-transformative future; commitment to which future thereby becomes the benchmark of judgement, trumping every other moral concern or cognitive understanding. Hence, for example, the division into “bourgeois” and “proletarian” science; into “bourgeois” and “proletarian” democracy; and so on.

We can see the essentially religious nature of the left-progressive stream of thought in the “true Communism has never been tried” trope: Communism never fails, people fail Communism. There is always some fatal flaw—typically discovered after the fact—which explains why it turned out so badly this time around. The next time, however, will be different, because the righteously-motivated cognitive elite has got its act together: they have achieved the right Theory; they are the right sort of moral heroes leading the way to the future; have perfected the correct cognitive wizardry mapping the social dynamics; to be the truly effective social shamans that emotionally and rhetorically bind together Theory and action (i.e., praxis) to usher in the transformative future.

The power of the imagined future as a benchmark of judgement is precisely that it there is no information from the future, so the future can be imagined to be as glorious as one wants. This provides a huge rhetorical advantage, as anything humans have actually built will have flaws and limitations that the glorious future is innocent of. The imagined future—insulated from correcting information, because there is no information from the future—becomes the realm of trumping authority: the realm of unimpeachable (i.e., divine) authority.

Religion rests on evolved mechanisms that are independent of any (explicitly) supernatural metaphysical claims. Such mechanisms can be, and have been, repurposed. There is no shortage of quotes from prominent figures in the development of left-progressive ideas that are explicitly or implicitly religious. One of the most famous is from Antonio Gramsci:

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. [Socialism is] Religion in the sense that it too is a faith with its mystics and rituals: religion, because it has substituted for the consciousness of the transcendental God of the Catholics, the faith in man and in his great strength as a unique spiritual reality.

Quoted from “Audacia e Fede” in Avanti! in J. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981, p.88.

Louise Perry picks up on progressive politics as a substitute religion:

2:20 progressive politics does offer … a sense of meaning. It offers a sense of history having a clear shape, there being a clear story about why we’re why we are where we are and where we’re going. It offers a sense of community—showing up to protest or whatever it is—and a sense of collective identity. It also offers enemies, which are very satisfying to the human mind, to have a clear opponent.

The transformative future performs the same role as heaven in monotheism—the unknown destination that is the source of salvational authority.

Setting the imagined future as the benchmark of judgement generates—as there is no information from the future—maximum valorisation from minimum information, and so minimum constraints. It creates the valorisation of the imagined, but not-reality tested, under a delusion of knowing; the valorisations of destruction (including “deconstruction”) in the name of transformative creation; the valorisation of transformative domination and dominion by the righteously aware under a self-deceiving cover of morally-trumping-because-socially-transformative.

In his vision of the social-transformative future, Marx invokes a (mythical) primitive communism—that ultimately derives from Rousseau—showing our inherently social being, to create an End of History vision of human potentiality leading to global communism. In creating this mythologised history of primitive communism —> oppressive and alienating structures of class, due to exploitive and alienating possession of property —> global communism, Marx systematically mischaracterises how historical societies—and particularly mercantile societies—work.

Marx’s theory of surplus value damns those engaged in the discovery, coordinating and risk-management of commerce as parasites. You convince a group of Homo sapiens that those people over there are parasites—and you and yours will be better off without them—then you have primed the situation for massacre and mass murder. Every single Marxist mass murder invoked Marx’s surplus-value characterising of entire social classes as exploitive parasites. (The Nazi mass murders did so by race.)

The transformative social vision needs a view of humans whereby human potentiality can realise its grand metaphysical vision. This precludes fully grappling with how human cooperation actually works and why—part of the reason why Marx’s concept of class is so attenuated. For to fully grapple with how human cooperation works, requires grappling with enduring constraints, both from us being evolved beings—hence biologist E.O. Wilson’s famous witticism about socialism/communism as “great idea, wrong species”—and from the simple realities of social coordination, such as information problems.

Marx deeply embedded Conflict Theory into the left-progressive stream of ideas. This is most famously done in his and Engel’s statement that:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In this focus on social conflict, Marx—and all that descends intellectually from him—quite systematically fails to accurately examine or understand the mechanisms that humans use to coordinate at scale across otherwise competing genetic lineages. While social conflicts absolutely do exist, human societies are far more characterised by cooperative mechanisms. This has to be so, to create societies at the scale we do.

Moreover, one cannot create societies of human flourishing unless one effectively harnesses such cooperative and coordinating mechanisms. This is something that regimes based on Marx’s ideas repeatedly, catastrophically, failed to do, for reasons that are deeply, and disastrously, embedded in Marx’s thought. Due to their degradation of, and rejection of, so many mechanisms of coordination, such regimes need the persistent and pervasive application of coercion to operate, and evaporate with remarkable speed when the willingness to coerce dissipates.

The turn to accepting commerce we have seen so spectacularly in CCP-run China post 1978, and in CPV-run Vietnam, is from letting cooperative social mechanisms Marx explicitly rejected do their thing. A turn to commerce that continues to be in tension with the CCP’s ideology.

What Marx does very effectively is create a vision that is mythically powerful, one for moral heroes, cognitive wizards and social shamans. As Louise Perry points out, it provides a sense of meaning; a sense of the where we are, have come from, where we are going; a sense of community; a sense of identity; and a set of enemies. Marx’s underlying vision has proved to be mythically powerful, independent of what he says about economic processes.

The combination of Hermetic initiates whose “understanding” of the “science” of history makes them moral and cognitive trumps over all unbelievers, with the socio-gnostic vision of existing society and societies as imprisoning alienated and exploited humans, has huge emotional resonance. This especially so as it enables folk to declare any constraint to be oppressive: so that oppression can always be found.

In one of their most famous statements, Marx and Engels very much express the view of society as being a social prison that needs to be utterly transformed by the righteously motivated:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

This is very much a vision from someone whose favourite line from literature was Mephistopheles stating in Goethe’s Faust that “all things that exist deserve to perish.”

MEPHISTOPHELES: I am the spirit of perpetual negation;
And rightly so, for all things that exist
Deserve to perish, and would not be missed—
Much better it would be if nothing were
Brought into being. Thus, what you men call
Destruction, sin, evil in short, is all
My sphere, the element I most prefer.

Johann von Wolfgang Goethe, Faust (1806)

This is a vision that rejects all the hard-won learning embedded in institutions and in the use of the full range of coordinating mechanisms.

Itis a vision that both motivates and coordinates through people signalling their mutual commitment to the narratives and beliefs that bestow social righteousness. As long as folk are insulated from the consequences of falsity, the fact that various claims are false is not a flaw but an advantage: for the more willing people are to rationalise away; to ignore; to not notice; to not question; any problems with these claims, the stronger the signals of commitment to the shared vision become.

While the entire history of Communism displays the signalling advantage of portentous falsity, so does claiming that a person with penis is a woman, or that the proper way to show care and compassion to a gender non-conforming child is to hormonally and surgically mutilate and sterilise them. The various false abstractions—the mountains of rhetorically powerful bullshit built on molehills of truth—that pervade left-progressive thought provide substitute supernatural claims; claims liberated from the constraints of reality-testing that thereby become affirmations of faith.

They are very much the opposite of science. The commitment to them, however, is a clear signal of loyalty to the shared status game of being moral heroes, cognitive wizards and social shamans, ushering in the transformative future—including to whatever levels of self-deception are required.

The moral, metaphysical, human, urgency of the process of social transformation means that orientation to that future becomes absolute over all other concerns and choices—including democratic concerns and choices.

Marx thereby creates a moral-cognitive mechanism—a social technology—whereby someone without any practical achievements whatsoever can feel profoundly superior to anyone and everyone else. This also empowers bitter envy, as their actual social position so contrasts with the grandeur of their inner vision, with Marx himself—and the molten anger of his rhetoric—being a profound exemplar of that enraged envy. Anger is the core emotion of so much Communist propaganda.

Economist Thomas Sowell’s analysis of the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions of politics applies to all this. The Constrained vision says we need checks on the flaws in human nature (science, competition, profit/loss, property, tradition, Parliamentarianism, democracy, …). We need these for human flourishing, as we are not blank slate but evolved beings with various innate propensities, capacities and limits.

The Unconstrained vision says we need to get rid of everything that gets in the way of releasing the full human potential. This leads directly to constraint = oppression. The claim is demonstrably nonsense, but rhetorically and motivationally incredibly powerful.

We can see this mythic power operating in the notion that Trans people are sacred. What represents a greater triumph over incarcerating constraint than releasing the inner gender soul from the misleading signals of imprisoning flesh?

Left-progressivism is naturally anti-traditional, as tradition is both constraining and comes from the oppressive, hellish past, not the golden future. Left-progressivism is overtly radically egalitarian, as hierarchies constrain and, in a blank slate world, there are no organic or natural hierarchies. In practice, the more Left—the more committed to the radical transformation of society—the more intensely cognitively and morally hierarchical they are, as the more committed they are to being a cognitive and moral elite with the authority to transform society; the transformed society that will then be radically egalitarian in the golden future.

Left-progressivism is perversely tolerant—again and again ready to define deviancy down, to seek to get rid of stigma—as socially-ordering norms constrain. The Left is cognitively extremely intolerant—very ready to intensely stigmative dissent—as the project of social transformation requires unified social action.

Further adaptations

After the failure of Marx’s economic and revolutionary predictions in the chaos at the end of the Great War (1914-1918), the Frankfurt School de-coupled the vision of an oppressive and alienating society—dominated by conflict between groups—from a concern for material (economic) conditions and specifically economic class dynamics. It explicitly elevated critique of what exists (Critical Theory) over mere seeking of understanding of what is and of how things work (Traditional Theory). This moved such analysis even further away from how humans actually cooperate and coordinate.

As one YouTuber cruelly observes:

2:40 Leftists enjoy the aesthetic of rationality, but they change the definition of reason to blind faith in their own institutions.

[A key feature of Critical Theory is that it retreats even further from describing the transformational future than does Marx. The follower of Critical Theory concentrates on critiquing the oppressive (i.e. constraining) elements of existing society and, as they are dismantled, the transformational future will emerge. This is what I call Social Alchemy Theory—boil away the oppressive, constraining present and the transformational future will emerge, like gold from base metals.]

The next stage in the evolution of left-progressive thought were adaptations from French Theory (Michel Foucault especially). These adaptations de-coupled the left-progressive stream of ideas from concern with physical reality, turning all questions into social questions, to be judged according to the alleged effects on “marginalised” groups.

It is only at this adaptations-from-French-Theory stage that strikingly more female thinkers become important in left-progressive ideas. Prior to that, what became known as feminism had mostly fitted in with previous “let us in” movements of the Emancipation Sequence where—in the Anglosphere—free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians voted to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants voted to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites voted to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men voted to get rid of exclusions on women, straights opted to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians.

This shift to a significant number of female intellectuals becoming important in the development of left-progressive ideas—such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldúa, Peggy McIntosh, Gayle Rubin, Kimberlé Crenshaw, ….—not coincidently is also when feminisation of institutions and professions is taking off. (The scale of female influence can be over-stated, due to the use of—in particular women of colour—to re-package ideas, so that there are not “too many” Dead White Males in bibliographies.)

The notions of righteousness within left-progressivism has proved particularly resonant with use of ostracism to punish dissent; and to developing new forms of moral propriety and stigmatisation; so with patterns that feminisation encouraged, or let loose.

The equality caper

This entire stream of thought is profoundly pre-Darwinian. Even the thinkers born well after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) entirely fail to grapple with the reality of us being evolved beings, the reality of everything social emerging from the biological.

Instead this stream of thought is based on blank slate conceptions of Homo sapiens. It has to be, as only blank slate conceptions enable the level of social transformation claimed to be possible and which provide their benchmarks of judgement. This is especially as the aim of equalising individual and groups provides an easy moral metric—any inequality damns the existing society and any tolerance of inequality damns dissent.

Equality also provides an excellent basis for power and authority. In any serious equalising project, there is a huge status, power and authority gap between those being equalised and those doing the equalising.

Consider Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): Diversity gives power over hiring; Equity power over resources; Inclusion power over speech and association. The grandiose moral claims—“fighting bigotry!”—provide cover for authority and resource grabs by activist bureaucrats.¹

The problem is not only that the evidence basis for so much of DEI is incredibly thin. The problem is with the whole equalising—and especially equalising by groups—project. The project is a blank slate project and as such represents a revolt against reality.

Humans may be the blankest slates in the biosphere, but we are not remotely blank slates. Once genetic variation among both individuals, and distribution of traits within groups, is admitted to matter, the equalising ambition falls apart. Once cultural variation is admitted to matter, the equalising ambition falls apart.

The grand equalising project rests on abstractions that are not true. They are so not true, they function as supernatural claims: claims not grounded in how the world is. Belief in them become acts of faith in the progressive political religion and its salvationist politics.

Morality as claim and camouflage

A persistent pattern is left-progressives not being good at making money in activities that require consent of others for one’s income. They therefore tend to flourish within the more unaccountable, parasitic—even predatory—elements of states and societies. These areas are typically also highly insulated from the practical consequences of left-progressive policies, while being very congenial to the mutual-signalling and status-plays aspects of left-progressive ideas—their genuine rhetorical and mythic power and capacity to both motivate and coordinate.

Implementing left-progressive policies also turns out to be—sometimes intensely—predatory and parasitic. The more this is so, the more grandiose have to be the moral claims to generate a camouflaging legitimacy (including for the adherents themselves). The rhetorical and mythic power of these ideas is not only a strength, it is a necessary protection.

There is a huge amount of projection in the way left-progressives are so keen to damn others as predatory and parasitic—i.e. as alienating, oppressive and exploitive. As many people have observed, the practitioners of the “politics of compassion” are regularly full of very public hatred, anger and contempt, even cruelty; the practitioners of the “politics of tolerance” are regularly full of intense intolerance of differing views. As projection is a mechanism for emotional resolution of internal tensions, the progressive penchant for projection—unlike mere disagreement or critique—is generally very forcefully expressed.

Networking dynamics

The social dynamics of left-progressivism is based on a structure of core, activists, participants, and supporters. The core are the theorists and key organisers who are strongly committed to—some version of—left-progressive ideas. Around them are the activists, who are also committed but may have some specific focus.

Further out are the people who buy into the narratives of righteousness—who accept the various markers of what makes one a good person. They are much less likely to be committed to the core ideas. Indeed, they may have little or no idea of where these ideas come from. Tell them that much of this is ultimately Marxist or Marxian and they will react with disbelief, even contempt. They have not come to these ideas by reading any of the original Theorists, they have picked them up socially, or via derivative writings, as being what good progressive folk believe.

Further out still are people who vote for political candidates and Parties that have bought into broadly progressive policies. These are subject to all the influences on democratic voting. Their voting patterns often have very little to do with left-progressivism as such, and far more to do with what social coalitions various Political Parties assemble and the choices offered to them—including the failings of opposing Parties and candidates.

The areas where these stream of ideas have the most influence are the universities, school systems, bureaucracies—government, corporate and non-profit—and the media. The influence on the other realms of social action is almost entirely downstream of the colonisation of universities by left-progressive ideas.

In the case of schools, it is from the colonisation of Education Faculties by (in particular) Critical Pedagogy. In the case of media, it is from the shift to journalism being dominated by graduates of elite universities plus the shift of mainstream media to becoming purveyors of narratives of righteousness, thereby signalling to subscribers what is the current set of markers of being a good person. In the case of bureaucracies, it is from the resource and authority boost—and accountability protection—they gain from adopting various moral projects.

The technocratic conceit that public policy is a technical problem provides a mechanism for taking the management of trade-offs—which is central to politics—out of the hands of the voting citizens. Once democratic accountability is attenuated or removed, such institutions become rife for colonisation by motivated networks. This has proved to be another pathway for left-progressive ideas.

Modern, mass prosperity, mass bureaucracy societies provide institutional milieus where motivated networks of people insulated from the practical consequences of their ideas can flourish. The sheer mythic power of left-progressive ideas are excellent for motivating and coordinating such networks.

The propensity of networks to monopoly—as the larger the network, the cheaper it is to add an extra person and the more benefit there is to joining the network—encourages the creation of opinion conformity within networks around shared “this what good people believe” status games. The need to balance the benefit of reach (more people reinforcing the status game) with protecting the benefits of membership via exclusion—and the cheap-signal nature of much of the required piety displays—encourages purity spirals. (Mainstream book publishing in the US—not coincidentally, overwhelming female—has gone mad from such dynamics.)

Source,

The mythic power of left-progressive ideas has, again and again, trumped their falsity precisely because insulation from consequences of their falsity enables the use of rationalising away of evidence; of inconvenient concerns; of inconvenient questions; of inconvenient noticing, to be a signal of commitment. Once you embrace the idea that the affirmation of correct ideas in the correct language is the essence of being moral, you become committed to curating your inflow of information to maintain that sense of self. So much of legacy media provides that curating-information service, not least because journalists are themselves playing the same opinion-conformity status games.

Conclusion

Several things are very clear from the history of left-progressive ideas. First, the ideas are highly adaptable. Second, their underlying patterns keep repeating. Third, their falsity is a coordinating advantage. Fourth, they have very strong mythic and motivating power.

The one thing they have never been, however, is good for human flourishing. That is where their falsity does count, as reality wins in the end.

Alas, the collision with reality has repeatedly let loose catastrophic consequences. These consequences have far less warning power than they should because the ideas are highly adaptable, their falsity is a coordinating advantage, and they have very strong mythic and motivating power. For the inconvenient past never counts—except in forcing adaptations that then repeat underlying patterns—as there is no information from the future, so the golden imagined future can endlessly promise social salvation, as this time it will be different.

It will be different in details, but not in being good for human flourishing. It doesn’t repeat, exactly; but boy does it rhyme.

References

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, State University of New York Press, 1997.

David Cayley (ed.), The Ideas Of Rene Girard: An Anthropology of Violence and Religion, David Cayley, 2019.

R. H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law, University of Chicago Press, [1988] 1990.

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2. https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Ryszard Legutko, (trans. Teresa Adelson), The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Encounter Books, 2016.

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Quill William Morrow, 1987.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.

1. Musa al-Gharbi points out, in We Have Never Been Woke, that DEI can operate as a perverse signal of meritocracy—“we look everywhere for talent!”. There are much simpler ways of doing that, which US civil rights law—especially disparate impact—has got in the way of. The first state to bring a DEI program was the Soviet Union, with its Korenizatsiya program. Mao developed his own version of DEI and notions of privileged/oppressor v oppressed groups (the so-called Black and Red identities), which was an improved version of the Soviet original. North Korea has its own version, the Songbun system. Corporate America may have adapted DEI for its own purposes, but its ideological roots are very clear in its history.