I disagree with the analysis claiming " evil " intentions on our leaders. Communists aren't evil; they believe in institutions that will create evil outcomes. We know in the market economies that monopoly power will create institutions that will evolve into maximizing their self-interest at the expense of both progress and other people like customers.
Some people desire money and, in the process, often optimize wealth generation to benefit society. When the desire for money creates the status the leader desires, the institution has to face reality and the probability of going bankrupt if it makes irrational or poor decisions. This self-selects for institutions that utilize the creativity of most of the members and effectively disperse decision-making power and creativity. As an unintended consequence, creativity from many people will be utilized to the benefit of the whole society.
Other people want power and control over others as a social advancement mechanism. People with that motivation are attracted to non-profit, political, and governmental institutions where reality and accountability are limited.
There's an ambiguity in Arnold's thesis: are certain people attracted by the opportunity to use violent means or by the moral license to do so? They're not the same. A truly diabolical person doesn't need a moral license: he just doesn't care about harming others. But he may value the opportunity to use violent means.
My suspicion is that plenty of contemporary leftists enjoy, if not violence, then at least bullying and public condemnation of others, but that they retain enough decency to need a moral rationale for doing it so as to avoid feelings of guilt: they have to think that their victims deserve it. But plenty of leftists historically have probably just been psychopaths.
Certainly the goal of Utopia represents a benefit great enough that violent means to attain it will seem warranted to some.
There is a great series of articles I've discovered precisely about this subject - why people attach themselves to Marxism so strongly (and so wrongly):
Communism, real communism, is inherently bad with human beings as they really are. Peaceful, voluntary, community based communism can work for adults who choose it, but it fails for many of the kids who are involuntarily forced to live in it. It’s partly based on a false ideal of human equality, when humans are only equal in the eyes of God.
Society can approach treating different people as equal only in Law, such that violators of the law get the same punishment. This sometimes seems a bit unjust, so on a case by case basis there may be extenuating or mitigating consequences. Like in the recent Daniel Penny case, an action resulting in death that was taken to protect others.
Functional families are like temporary communism, where the parents make the money and set the rules and boundaries of behavior, and share food, clothing, housing & care, as needed limited by their family budget. But the good parents try for fairness, according to unwritten by real differences in their kids, like that boys eat more than girls, generally. Not equality in all getting the same stuff—since they don’t all want the same.
Monks & nuns, without their own kids and with vows of poverty & service to God, can live in such sharing communities.
For too many, the equal sharing sounds good, but always fails and, no matter who is in charge, will always fail. So it’s a terrible idea in practice. Fascism actually works better for society, National Socialism. China is far more fascist, in its govt influence over nominally private businesses, with lots of inequality. Fascist Spain was a better place to live than communist Russia as the USSR. Hitler’s crazy Jew hatred gave fascism a bad name. Real fascism … is being tried in China and was working BUT the latest leader Xi is successfully becoming a dictator king, likely to rule until death.
Those willing to be more dishonest and ruthless in order to have power are more likely to get it. And are already a bit corrupt.
Your thesis surely is true in part, but I also think you under-estimate the power of ideas on culture, the influence of culture on psychology, and the impact of psychology on behavior. Not that Christians are perfect, but the Sermon on the Mount teaches to “turn the other cheek.” The Quran teaches “fight … those who fight you. … [F]ight [oppressors] until there is no oppression.” Marxist historical materialism is all about class struggle and revolution against the oppressors. If the core ideas of the ideology are violent, we should not be surprised to see violence in the culture spawned by those ideas.
Marx may not have intended for his ideas to foster violently repressive totalitarian states, but that is where his ideas inevitably led. Forbidding voluntary transactions between free people leaves coerced transactions between unfree people as the only alternative.
This post fits with my latest post, so I have included a link to it. My comment below on activists and eliminationist theories of parasitism was derived from my (then draft) post.
“ People tend to gravitate toward a doctrine that is congruent with their personality.”
I agree.
I am surprised you failed to mention progressivism.
Which clearly selects for authoritarians who are not cruel but who *are* smug Karens.
And oppressor-oppressed wokeism seems to be smack in the middle of Communism and progressivism in terms of control and cruelty/violence.
But I do confess that I was surprised how open the progressive Karens were, and for the most part have remained, to the oppressor-oppressed wokeism seems in their midst.
I guess the conclusion is that the commonality on elite authoritarianism trumps prior abhorrence of violence?
I think it's simpler and more universal. Brutish, violence prone humans will rise to the top of any institution that tolerates and rewards them. Period. Full Stop.
It's entirely about the structural features of the institiution, starting with a fundamental question, "What effective means are embedded in the institution that actively exclude the brutish and violent from power?"
As you note, not all institutions are equal. Some, notably Rousseau and Kant descended political philosophies create conditions more fertile for such abuses than others. Such features include a readily subverted corps of true believers ready to act in the name of their preferred source of alleged dignity and promissed economic benefit.
And even if overt violence is suppressed, covert violence and social intimidation will substitute. Witness today's "Zero tolerance for bullying" playgrounds, which are septic pits of a perverse society of children watching each other like hawks to gain favor by pouncing upon the slightest social infraction.
Ultimately, the question comes down to "How do good people, who wish to peacably and productively pursue positive sum games protect themselves by excluding those exploitatives who don't?"
Activism in general attracts the personality disordered: it licenses bad behaviour and gives a form of power without responsibility. Activism with the prospect of power even more so. A Polish psychiatrist wrote about this.
The ideologies of Nazi Germany and Communism were both based around eliminationist theories of parasitism—that the Jews/bourgeoisie were exploitive parasites whose elimination would liberate the Aryans/proletariat. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are parasites—for example, via the Theory of Surplus Value—and you and yours would be better off without them, then they are primed for mass murder. Class “science” or race “science”, either sufficed. The Marxist mass murders were justified on the grounds of getting rid of exploitive parasites as per the Theory of Surplus Value.
The program in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is very much about centralising things in a state that mobilises resources. Mikhail Bakunin’s critique of the tyrannical implications of Marx’s ideas—in ‘The State and Marxism’, written in 1867—proved to be quite good prediction:
“It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!”
"Activism in general attracts the personality disordered: it licenses bad behaviour and gives a form of power without responsibility. Activism with the prospect of power even more so. "
I don't disagree but at least one commenter explicitly stated, and much of other discussion implies, that it only attracts the disordered regarding political/state leaders. I immediately doubted that and doubt it at least as much regarding activists. The more I think about it, the bigger I think the proportion who aren't particularly disordered (more than average).
Even if I agree with most of what AK wrote here, and even if I agree a bit that Soviet Communism was probably not what Engels intended, I too was struck by how “charitable” AK was to Marx here.
I think Engels is perhaps confused at best, and that quoted passage highlights it. The centralizing of resources is the control of people. Not just because people are resources, but if the state owns all production decides who gets what, then the state controls everything. Everything must go through the state, and it can choose what it wants. The state does not wither but achieves its maximum potential.
I suspect he actually knew that, but imagined himself and friends as the heads of the state and so didn’t want to advertise it.
I had a similar reaction to Halberstam. I think one reason he felt that way is he, and most people who thought about it, had a nineteenth century "stage" view of history (of which, Marxism is one variant). "Feudalism" was a distinct stage that came before industrialism and modernity. In order to get to prosperity and liberalism, feudalism had to be broken. South Vietnam, in Halberstam's view, was still in feudalism and was being kept there by the existing social system that the Americans were propping up. The Communists, on the other hand, were committed to getting rid of feudalism. They were capable of bringing Vietnam to a good future, while the people the United States were allied with, were not.
According to this view, since affluence, civil liberties and all the good things of modern life required destroying feudalism, they could not be achieved if the people the US was backing stayed in power. However, they were possible if the National Liberation Front/Provisional Revolutionary Government came to power.
Many people who opposed what the US was doing also convinced themselves that the NLF/PRG were not committed communists. They were "nationalists", "agrarian reformers" who had been pushed to the communists because the US and its allies shunned them.
I don't think many people who opposed US participation in the war thought long and hard about possible futures for the country. Mostly they just thought the war was horrible and any sort of peace was better.
"But there are still people who enjoy violence when they commit it themselves. Others experience enjoy it vicariously. Celebrating the murder of the health insurance company CEO. Or going to a horror movie."
Enjoying comitting violence and enjoying it vicariously, especially when it's not real, seem rather different to me but I have no idea what the psychological community says about this.
"I think that Communism attracts men who want to rule by force."
It's good you later clarified this referred specifically to the communist leaders but I think it's worth noting the overwhelming majority of communist followers and sympathizers are probably rather pacifist.
“… the overwhelming majority of communist followers and sympathizers are probably rather pacifist”
Ummmm… if you are referring to 60s flower children and hippy “commie symps”, then sure.
But to me your assertion is quite dated.
The people who are communist followers and sympathizers today are primarily either woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues, or they are authoritarian “progressives”.
Even you wouldn’t claim the former group are pacifists.
And the latter group - besides, as I’ll note, being the ones who overwhelmingly support funding the war in Ukraine - are quite happy to force their fellow citizens to do (or not do) all sorts of things they prefer at the point of a government gun. Hard to call such people “pacifists”.
Even if they prefer someone else be the ones holding those guns…
Sorry to disappoint but yes, I would say the vast majority of woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues are non-violent. I don't see shout-downs or even cancel culture, as detestable as it usually is, as violence.
I don't agree that a pacifist viewpoint of internal government is contradicted by supporting military response to an outside state actor.
Maybe pacifism isnt the right word for what I meant. Up until your mention of woke SJWs and Ukraine, every comment I've seen is about offensive violence. That is what I'm saying most communist followers and sympathisers are not.
“Sorry to disappoint but yes, I would say the vast majority of woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues are non-violent. I don't see shout-downs or even cancel culture, as detestable as it usually is, as violence.”
So in your view, Nazi supporters and Nazi sympathizers can be viewed as pacificsts? Or at least as non-violent?!? So long as they are not the ones doing the extermination of Jews and Gypsies themselves - that is the logic?
So the Harvard groups that on Oct 8th who wrote “we hold Israel responsible for all unfolding violence” are pacifists. 🙄
And the almost 50% of 18-24 year olds who said in Harvard-Harris polls that they support Hamas (not “the Palestinians“, but Hamas) are pacifists. 🙄🙄
And those woke CRT types who subscribe to oppressor-oppressed ideology that explicitly states that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppressors by ANY MEANS NECESSARY are pacifists. 🙄🙄🙄
Words mean things.
I didn’t engage with you on whether most of the American leftists who support communism and sympathize with it are personally wimps and wouldn’t be the ones personally committing violence. I was solely addressing your claim of them being pacifists.
Re: the authoritarian progressives today we can simply have a legit difference of opinion and/or difference of opinion on terminology. Fair enough.
If you don’t wanna listen to me, maybe listen to to Mounk:
“ And yet, it was on Bluesky that prominent journalists—including, but not limited to, the infamous Taylor Lorenz—openly rejoiced in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As long as progressives perceive the victims of a crime to be morally evil, the moderators on Bluesky appear to believe that threatening violence against them is justifiable.‘
“What can possibly explain the descent of a platform populated by progressives who claim to abhor all forms of violence into an echo chamber that revels in violence against anyone who defies its taboos or threatens its ideological conformity?”
“There is also an ideological element—a justification of violence has been interwoven with far-left ideology for well over a century.”
You said that most oppressor-oppressed ideologues who support Hamas and believe in the use of *any* *means* necessary* to overcome one’s oppressors are non-violent and are pacifists.
By your words, you can be considered a non-violent pacifist even if you explicitly support brutal violence against others.
All this talk about evil and psychopathy is strangely un-Klingian. Arnold rarely makes the fundamental attribution error. You don't need "evil" to explain the actions of communists and Marxists. It's simply necessity. Good men may be drawn to communism, but once in power, they are faced with the fact that the only way their system could possibly work, is if everyone is on the same page: filled with the same zeal, commitment and willingness to go along with the program. Of course, that's never going to happen, so the leaders are faced with the unfortunate realization that they're going to have to force some people to do things they don't want. There is resistance, and soon enough, the forcing gets more forceful, and the numbers and categories of people that need to be forced expands. Pretty soon, you've got to crush the entire nation under an iron fist - most regrettable, but ultimately, they believe, it's for the good of all. The totalitarian nature of Marxism is built into its illogical logic - no "evil" or insanity is necessary.
I will quote a couple paragraphs from an old Moldbug essay, "What if there is no such thing as 'chaotic good'", written in his signature tongue-in-cheek-up-to-the-ear style but pertinent to the current discussion. "Planarism" is the prevailing dispensation.
--
Evil is not the same thing as malevolence. Nor is good the same thing as benevolence. Evil and good are results, not volitions. There are people who actively pursue evil - psychopaths - but psychopaths, as an almost invariable rule, act alone. Most people spend most of their time pursuing good, and all large organizations are organized around some concept of good.
Since most of the large-scale phenomena in recent history which most of us would consider "evil" have been the result of actions of people acting within organizations, "evil" must be the result of actions which someone considered "good."
By conflating evil with malevolence, planarism derives the logical result that evil can be extinguished by eradicating malevolence. So planarists strive everywhere and at all times to think good thoughts, and to persuade others to do the same.
When planarists read and write history, they spend far too much time on the landscape of emotional attachments and airy mystical beliefs, and not enough on practical cause and effect. As in the case of religion, our sense of classification is being fed superfluous information which is meaningless and disorienting.
In our planarist society, every kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics," which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement. Planarists these days think they've abandoned religion in favor of reason. In fact, in their endless jihad against malevolence, they have become fanatical, moralizing prigs, and their actions often do more to promote evil than to dissuade it.
[...]
Because the planarists _are_ benevolent. Most people want to be chaotic good, not chaotic evil, because they are benevolent, not malevolent.
The problem is that the relationships between benevolence and good, and that between malevolence and evil, are not strong. So by using the words "good" and "evil" to mean "benevolent" and "malevolent," planarists distract themselves from real problems and real solutions.
In the UK between 1900 and 1989, as the concept of social justice moved from being the program of a political faction to a universally shared ideal, the crime rate (number of offenses known to the police, per capita) rose by a factor of 46. That is, it's not that crime, per capita, went up by 46%. It's that it went up by 4600%. (The number is now back down to 37.)
No one intended this result. No one in 1900 was saying: follow our program, build the New Jerusalem, and wonderful things will happen. Oh, except that crime will increase by a factor of 46.
No doubt there's some truth in what you say but it doesn't explain the most violent of communist leaders. Maybe they were just random anomalies but it seems more likely there is something to what AK says and it's not a fundamental attribution error.
I think because there's not an obvious ladder to climb to the Presidency it may fall outside my general rule. But I also think lots of those who seriously sought the Presidency were pretty psychopathic.
Those who got "elevated" in some unexpected manner seem not to be so bad. Think Coolidge. Truman, Eisenhower, Ford.
Some seemed to me to become more psycho after they gained the spot.
I think Wilson, FDR, LBJ were supreme examples. I think Nixon had other problems.
But Carter, I think suffered from Messiah Complex that I saw in my youth among the worse "stiff-necked" Baptist ministers in the area. He had that, perhaps sociopathic rather than psychopathic, belief that he always knew the right answer, and that anyone who disagreed with him was just wrong. That he spoke directly to God and that God listened. His malaise speech is part of that pattern. But perhaps I'm judging to harshly.
I think Obama is a psychopath, and McCain certainly seemd to be. Kerry, probably.
A lot of my belief may come from observng the events rather than the motivations.
I disagree with the analysis claiming " evil " intentions on our leaders. Communists aren't evil; they believe in institutions that will create evil outcomes. We know in the market economies that monopoly power will create institutions that will evolve into maximizing their self-interest at the expense of both progress and other people like customers.
Some people desire money and, in the process, often optimize wealth generation to benefit society. When the desire for money creates the status the leader desires, the institution has to face reality and the probability of going bankrupt if it makes irrational or poor decisions. This self-selects for institutions that utilize the creativity of most of the members and effectively disperse decision-making power and creativity. As an unintended consequence, creativity from many people will be utilized to the benefit of the whole society.
Other people want power and control over others as a social advancement mechanism. People with that motivation are attracted to non-profit, political, and governmental institutions where reality and accountability are limited.
There's an ambiguity in Arnold's thesis: are certain people attracted by the opportunity to use violent means or by the moral license to do so? They're not the same. A truly diabolical person doesn't need a moral license: he just doesn't care about harming others. But he may value the opportunity to use violent means.
My suspicion is that plenty of contemporary leftists enjoy, if not violence, then at least bullying and public condemnation of others, but that they retain enough decency to need a moral rationale for doing it so as to avoid feelings of guilt: they have to think that their victims deserve it. But plenty of leftists historically have probably just been psychopaths.
Certainly the goal of Utopia represents a benefit great enough that violent means to attain it will seem warranted to some.
There is a great series of articles I've discovered precisely about this subject - why people attach themselves to Marxism so strongly (and so wrongly):
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/worshipping-the-future
Highly recommended.
Communism, real communism, is inherently bad with human beings as they really are. Peaceful, voluntary, community based communism can work for adults who choose it, but it fails for many of the kids who are involuntarily forced to live in it. It’s partly based on a false ideal of human equality, when humans are only equal in the eyes of God.
Society can approach treating different people as equal only in Law, such that violators of the law get the same punishment. This sometimes seems a bit unjust, so on a case by case basis there may be extenuating or mitigating consequences. Like in the recent Daniel Penny case, an action resulting in death that was taken to protect others.
Functional families are like temporary communism, where the parents make the money and set the rules and boundaries of behavior, and share food, clothing, housing & care, as needed limited by their family budget. But the good parents try for fairness, according to unwritten by real differences in their kids, like that boys eat more than girls, generally. Not equality in all getting the same stuff—since they don’t all want the same.
Monks & nuns, without their own kids and with vows of poverty & service to God, can live in such sharing communities.
For too many, the equal sharing sounds good, but always fails and, no matter who is in charge, will always fail. So it’s a terrible idea in practice. Fascism actually works better for society, National Socialism. China is far more fascist, in its govt influence over nominally private businesses, with lots of inequality. Fascist Spain was a better place to live than communist Russia as the USSR. Hitler’s crazy Jew hatred gave fascism a bad name. Real fascism … is being tried in China and was working BUT the latest leader Xi is successfully becoming a dictator king, likely to rule until death.
Those willing to be more dishonest and ruthless in order to have power are more likely to get it. And are already a bit corrupt.
The trend towards low violence identified by Pinker isn't merely or chiefly cultural but biological ie driven by evolution.
States have selected for less impulsively violent by executing violent offenders.
This is a part or rather an extension of the self-domestication hypothesis which can be found in Wrangham.
Specifically, in "The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution". A good book.
Your thesis surely is true in part, but I also think you under-estimate the power of ideas on culture, the influence of culture on psychology, and the impact of psychology on behavior. Not that Christians are perfect, but the Sermon on the Mount teaches to “turn the other cheek.” The Quran teaches “fight … those who fight you. … [F]ight [oppressors] until there is no oppression.” Marxist historical materialism is all about class struggle and revolution against the oppressors. If the core ideas of the ideology are violent, we should not be surprised to see violence in the culture spawned by those ideas.
Marx may not have intended for his ideas to foster violently repressive totalitarian states, but that is where his ideas inevitably led. Forbidding voluntary transactions between free people leaves coerced transactions between unfree people as the only alternative.
This post fits with my latest post, so I have included a link to it. My comment below on activists and eliminationist theories of parasitism was derived from my (then draft) post.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/modelling-coordination-in-an-activist
“ People tend to gravitate toward a doctrine that is congruent with their personality.”
I agree.
I am surprised you failed to mention progressivism.
Which clearly selects for authoritarians who are not cruel but who *are* smug Karens.
And oppressor-oppressed wokeism seems to be smack in the middle of Communism and progressivism in terms of control and cruelty/violence.
But I do confess that I was surprised how open the progressive Karens were, and for the most part have remained, to the oppressor-oppressed wokeism seems in their midst.
I guess the conclusion is that the commonality on elite authoritarianism trumps prior abhorrence of violence?
I think it's simpler and more universal. Brutish, violence prone humans will rise to the top of any institution that tolerates and rewards them. Period. Full Stop.
It's entirely about the structural features of the institiution, starting with a fundamental question, "What effective means are embedded in the institution that actively exclude the brutish and violent from power?"
As you note, not all institutions are equal. Some, notably Rousseau and Kant descended political philosophies create conditions more fertile for such abuses than others. Such features include a readily subverted corps of true believers ready to act in the name of their preferred source of alleged dignity and promissed economic benefit.
And even if overt violence is suppressed, covert violence and social intimidation will substitute. Witness today's "Zero tolerance for bullying" playgrounds, which are septic pits of a perverse society of children watching each other like hawks to gain favor by pouncing upon the slightest social infraction.
Ultimately, the question comes down to "How do good people, who wish to peacably and productively pursue positive sum games protect themselves by excluding those exploitatives who don't?"
Activism in general attracts the personality disordered: it licenses bad behaviour and gives a form of power without responsibility. Activism with the prospect of power even more so. A Polish psychiatrist wrote about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_ponerology
The ideologies of Nazi Germany and Communism were both based around eliminationist theories of parasitism—that the Jews/bourgeoisie were exploitive parasites whose elimination would liberate the Aryans/proletariat. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are parasites—for example, via the Theory of Surplus Value—and you and yours would be better off without them, then they are primed for mass murder. Class “science” or race “science”, either sufficed. The Marxist mass murders were justified on the grounds of getting rid of exploitive parasites as per the Theory of Surplus Value.
The program in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is very much about centralising things in a state that mobilises resources. Mikhail Bakunin’s critique of the tyrannical implications of Marx’s ideas—in ‘The State and Marxism’, written in 1867—proved to be quite good prediction:
“It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!”
"Activism in general attracts the personality disordered: it licenses bad behaviour and gives a form of power without responsibility. Activism with the prospect of power even more so. "
I don't disagree but at least one commenter explicitly stated, and much of other discussion implies, that it only attracts the disordered regarding political/state leaders. I immediately doubted that and doubt it at least as much regarding activists. The more I think about it, the bigger I think the proportion who aren't particularly disordered (more than average).
Agreed.
Even if I agree with most of what AK wrote here, and even if I agree a bit that Soviet Communism was probably not what Engels intended, I too was struck by how “charitable” AK was to Marx here.
I think Engels is perhaps confused at best, and that quoted passage highlights it. The centralizing of resources is the control of people. Not just because people are resources, but if the state owns all production decides who gets what, then the state controls everything. Everything must go through the state, and it can choose what it wants. The state does not wither but achieves its maximum potential.
I suspect he actually knew that, but imagined himself and friends as the heads of the state and so didn’t want to advertise it.
I had a similar reaction to Halberstam. I think one reason he felt that way is he, and most people who thought about it, had a nineteenth century "stage" view of history (of which, Marxism is one variant). "Feudalism" was a distinct stage that came before industrialism and modernity. In order to get to prosperity and liberalism, feudalism had to be broken. South Vietnam, in Halberstam's view, was still in feudalism and was being kept there by the existing social system that the Americans were propping up. The Communists, on the other hand, were committed to getting rid of feudalism. They were capable of bringing Vietnam to a good future, while the people the United States were allied with, were not.
"They were capable of bringing Vietnam to a good future,"
Really? Are you just referring to a relative difference?
According to this view, since affluence, civil liberties and all the good things of modern life required destroying feudalism, they could not be achieved if the people the US was backing stayed in power. However, they were possible if the National Liberation Front/Provisional Revolutionary Government came to power.
Many people who opposed what the US was doing also convinced themselves that the NLF/PRG were not committed communists. They were "nationalists", "agrarian reformers" who had been pushed to the communists because the US and its allies shunned them.
I don't think many people who opposed US participation in the war thought long and hard about possible futures for the country. Mostly they just thought the war was horrible and any sort of peace was better.
"But there are still people who enjoy violence when they commit it themselves. Others experience enjoy it vicariously. Celebrating the murder of the health insurance company CEO. Or going to a horror movie."
Enjoying comitting violence and enjoying it vicariously, especially when it's not real, seem rather different to me but I have no idea what the psychological community says about this.
"I think that Communism attracts men who want to rule by force."
It's good you later clarified this referred specifically to the communist leaders but I think it's worth noting the overwhelming majority of communist followers and sympathizers are probably rather pacifist.
“… the overwhelming majority of communist followers and sympathizers are probably rather pacifist”
Ummmm… if you are referring to 60s flower children and hippy “commie symps”, then sure.
But to me your assertion is quite dated.
The people who are communist followers and sympathizers today are primarily either woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues, or they are authoritarian “progressives”.
Even you wouldn’t claim the former group are pacifists.
And the latter group - besides, as I’ll note, being the ones who overwhelmingly support funding the war in Ukraine - are quite happy to force their fellow citizens to do (or not do) all sorts of things they prefer at the point of a government gun. Hard to call such people “pacifists”.
Even if they prefer someone else be the ones holding those guns…
Sorry to disappoint but yes, I would say the vast majority of woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues are non-violent. I don't see shout-downs or even cancel culture, as detestable as it usually is, as violence.
I don't agree that a pacifist viewpoint of internal government is contradicted by supporting military response to an outside state actor.
Maybe pacifism isnt the right word for what I meant. Up until your mention of woke SJWs and Ukraine, every comment I've seen is about offensive violence. That is what I'm saying most communist followers and sympathisers are not.
“…yes, I would say the vast majority of woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues are non-violent.”
Call me crazy, but somehow I doubt that the Dalai Llama or Mahatma Ghandi would support Hamas, or call support for Hamas “non-violent” pacifism…
“Sorry to disappoint but yes, I would say the vast majority of woke SJW oppressor-oppressed ideologues are non-violent. I don't see shout-downs or even cancel culture, as detestable as it usually is, as violence.”
So in your view, Nazi supporters and Nazi sympathizers can be viewed as pacificsts? Or at least as non-violent?!? So long as they are not the ones doing the extermination of Jews and Gypsies themselves - that is the logic?
🙄
Gotcha.
So the Harvard groups that on Oct 8th who wrote “we hold Israel responsible for all unfolding violence” are pacifists. 🙄
And the almost 50% of 18-24 year olds who said in Harvard-Harris polls that they support Hamas (not “the Palestinians“, but Hamas) are pacifists. 🙄🙄
And those woke CRT types who subscribe to oppressor-oppressed ideology that explicitly states that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppressors by ANY MEANS NECESSARY are pacifists. 🙄🙄🙄
Words mean things.
I didn’t engage with you on whether most of the American leftists who support communism and sympathize with it are personally wimps and wouldn’t be the ones personally committing violence. I was solely addressing your claim of them being pacifists.
Re: the authoritarian progressives today we can simply have a legit difference of opinion and/or difference of opinion on terminology. Fair enough.
Again, read what I previously wrote again. You aren't responding to what I wrote.
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-cruelty-is-the-point
If you don’t wanna listen to me, maybe listen to to Mounk:
“ And yet, it was on Bluesky that prominent journalists—including, but not limited to, the infamous Taylor Lorenz—openly rejoiced in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As long as progressives perceive the victims of a crime to be morally evil, the moderators on Bluesky appear to believe that threatening violence against them is justifiable.‘
“What can possibly explain the descent of a platform populated by progressives who claim to abhor all forms of violence into an echo chamber that revels in violence against anyone who defies its taboos or threatens its ideological conformity?”
“There is also an ideological element—a justification of violence has been interwoven with far-left ideology for well over a century.”
I responded to EXACTLY what you wrote.
You said that most oppressor-oppressed ideologues who support Hamas and believe in the use of *any* *means* necessary* to overcome one’s oppressors are non-violent and are pacifists.
By your words, you can be considered a non-violent pacifist even if you explicitly support brutal violence against others.
All this talk about evil and psychopathy is strangely un-Klingian. Arnold rarely makes the fundamental attribution error. You don't need "evil" to explain the actions of communists and Marxists. It's simply necessity. Good men may be drawn to communism, but once in power, they are faced with the fact that the only way their system could possibly work, is if everyone is on the same page: filled with the same zeal, commitment and willingness to go along with the program. Of course, that's never going to happen, so the leaders are faced with the unfortunate realization that they're going to have to force some people to do things they don't want. There is resistance, and soon enough, the forcing gets more forceful, and the numbers and categories of people that need to be forced expands. Pretty soon, you've got to crush the entire nation under an iron fist - most regrettable, but ultimately, they believe, it's for the good of all. The totalitarian nature of Marxism is built into its illogical logic - no "evil" or insanity is necessary.
I will quote a couple paragraphs from an old Moldbug essay, "What if there is no such thing as 'chaotic good'", written in his signature tongue-in-cheek-up-to-the-ear style but pertinent to the current discussion. "Planarism" is the prevailing dispensation.
--
Evil is not the same thing as malevolence. Nor is good the same thing as benevolence. Evil and good are results, not volitions. There are people who actively pursue evil - psychopaths - but psychopaths, as an almost invariable rule, act alone. Most people spend most of their time pursuing good, and all large organizations are organized around some concept of good.
Since most of the large-scale phenomena in recent history which most of us would consider "evil" have been the result of actions of people acting within organizations, "evil" must be the result of actions which someone considered "good."
By conflating evil with malevolence, planarism derives the logical result that evil can be extinguished by eradicating malevolence. So planarists strive everywhere and at all times to think good thoughts, and to persuade others to do the same.
When planarists read and write history, they spend far too much time on the landscape of emotional attachments and airy mystical beliefs, and not enough on practical cause and effect. As in the case of religion, our sense of classification is being fed superfluous information which is meaningless and disorienting.
In our planarist society, every kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics," which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement. Planarists these days think they've abandoned religion in favor of reason. In fact, in their endless jihad against malevolence, they have become fanatical, moralizing prigs, and their actions often do more to promote evil than to dissuade it.
[...]
Because the planarists _are_ benevolent. Most people want to be chaotic good, not chaotic evil, because they are benevolent, not malevolent.
The problem is that the relationships between benevolence and good, and that between malevolence and evil, are not strong. So by using the words "good" and "evil" to mean "benevolent" and "malevolent," planarists distract themselves from real problems and real solutions.
In the UK between 1900 and 1989, as the concept of social justice moved from being the program of a political faction to a universally shared ideal, the crime rate (number of offenses known to the police, per capita) rose by a factor of 46. That is, it's not that crime, per capita, went up by 46%. It's that it went up by 4600%. (The number is now back down to 37.)
No one intended this result. No one in 1900 was saying: follow our program, build the New Jerusalem, and wonderful things will happen. Oh, except that crime will increase by a factor of 46.
No doubt there's some truth in what you say but it doesn't explain the most violent of communist leaders. Maybe they were just random anomalies but it seems more likely there is something to what AK says and it's not a fundamental attribution error.
After decades of teaching Org Theory I've come to believe that all closely coupled organizations either attract or create psycopaths for leaders.
Maybe you have to exhibit psychopathic tendencies to climb that particular ladder.
I'm a little skeptical it is all. Do you think Jimmy Carter had psychopaths tendencies?
I also think he was incredibly lucky to be elected. But I've personally known Baptist ministers with similar psychopathic tnedencies.
Yes.
I'm no expert on Carter but do you know something about him I don't or are you just assuming it is true because he became President?
I think because there's not an obvious ladder to climb to the Presidency it may fall outside my general rule. But I also think lots of those who seriously sought the Presidency were pretty psychopathic.
Those who got "elevated" in some unexpected manner seem not to be so bad. Think Coolidge. Truman, Eisenhower, Ford.
Some seemed to me to become more psycho after they gained the spot.
I think Wilson, FDR, LBJ were supreme examples. I think Nixon had other problems.
But Carter, I think suffered from Messiah Complex that I saw in my youth among the worse "stiff-necked" Baptist ministers in the area. He had that, perhaps sociopathic rather than psychopathic, belief that he always knew the right answer, and that anyone who disagreed with him was just wrong. That he spoke directly to God and that God listened. His malaise speech is part of that pattern. But perhaps I'm judging to harshly.
I think Obama is a psychopath, and McCain certainly seemd to be. Kerry, probably.
A lot of my belief may come from observng the events rather than the motivations.
I'm not a presidential scholar.