65 Comments
3dEdited

It fits with my loosely defined cosmology that power doesn't corrupt, or corrupt absolutely. Those that seek power are already screwed up in some weird way, and they are drawn to any system that might provide them the path to power.

My only (slightly humorous) disagreement is the "China is a Communist country" designation. I've been hanging around in country for several years, and I've found the Chinese people to be the most hard wired for capitalistic entrepreneurial activity of any people on Earth...way more so than any general grouping of American citizens.

That's not to say entrepreneurial activity doesn't exist in America, and I could make arguments that Democrat inspired stupidities have snuffed out a lot of self employment proclivities, but in China, there's no social safety net, no nothing really, and people are left to fend for themselves, resulting in surprising numbers of small businesses constantly sprouting. Until the current leader put a clamp on things, I'd tell friends that if they wanted to see utterly unrestrained crony capitalism, come to China.

Now, of course, power centers were threatened, action had to be taken to cement existing economic interests, and there is a nominal nod to Communist ideals, but under all of it, the only thing I see are folks trying to figure out a business venture. Folks should read Wu Xiaobo "China Emerging"...and read it between the lines. Some of the most powerful business brokers were Party working every imaginable angle to fleece "The People" and abscond with literal billions.

Communist....nominally. I'm not sure how to describe it nowadays.

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I think that in many cases, power does indeed corrupt, in the same way that various things cause addiction in certain people. The conditions have to be right and the person's psyche has to be right to become, say, "addicted to painkillers", but I wouldn't call that "already screwed up in some weird way".

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Just before reading your comment I was thinking that leaders in very high positions tend to be natural leaders from childhood when they had little or no more proclivity towards psychopathy or being corrupted than other kids but as they got older the ones who took on bigger roles were both more likely to be the bad apples AND, bad apple or not, their growing power brought out some of their worst tendencies.

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Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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Only an idiot would think that is true without exception. And of course, nobody has absolute power anyway. The question is whether the number of exceptions is small or miniscule.

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As for the first part, I agree. Circumstances allow for the old wirings of power to be upgraded to premium silver, allowing the least amount of resistance for the corrupt to flow through the system. The intelligent psychopath is discerning. See also: (some) DEI consultants, pedophiles in the Church, narcissist psychologists, and the (some) experts of siphoning from government largesse.

As for modern China, that may be so, but I think it's important that it was something proximate to "Marxism-Leninism-Legalism' that opened the door for its modern characteristics. I lived in Vietnam for a few years and something similar happened there.

I'm not quite sure I agree with Arnold on this one as I think it's the submission of individualism to Collectivism that causes communism to fail. But that same submission is also the silver wiring that allows for the psychopaths to exacerbate the damage.

I might be wrong.

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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!”

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Uh-oh. I promised not to write on Substack, but Arnold goaded me with his mind-blowing unawareness about Marx's mindset. Communist Manifesto immediately jumped to mind, thank you for responding.

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"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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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2dEdited

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.

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I'm a little skeptical it is all. Do you think Jimmy Carter had psychopaths tendencies?

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I also think he was incredibly lucky to be elected. But I've personally known Baptist ministers with similar psychopathic tnedencies.

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Yes.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"They were capable of bringing Vietnam to a good future,"

Really? Are you just referring to a relative difference?

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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.

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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.

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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

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Capitalism has proven to be outstanding at generating wealth, while capitalism’s only modern competitor — socialism — has proven to be outstanding at generating starving peasants who are nonetheless driven like sled dogs by a cloistered elite.

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Yes. And on a related note, near the extremes of entirely socialist or unfettered capitalism, economic inequality (Gini) tends to be the greatest. A mix of socialism and capitalism seems to reduce inequality.

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Why is reducing inequality even a (worthwhile) goal?

Reducing poverty and maximizing opportunity - those are excellent goals.

Focusing on inequality is violating the Tenth Commandment.

Though I concede it has long been a successful political strategy for leftists and populists of all sorts.

Income inequality is almost always reduced during recessions. So we should always prefer to be in recession then, huh?

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Read what I wrote again. You seem to be arguing against something I never wrote.

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You said “A mix of socialism and capitalism seems to reduce inequality.”

Strongly implying that inequality is bad and that you prefer it to be reduced.

Why bring it up at all if you have no problem with inequality?

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I mentioned it because I thought it was interesting. Nothing else. Maybe I also hoped someone could add to the thought.

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“ Maybe I also hoped someone could add to the thought.”

👍

I did. I added that focusing on inequality is a fundamentally bad idea.

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I don’t disagree.

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“So why do Communist regimes turn out to be so evil?” Strong competition these days from soi-disant free democratic States… Net Zero, CoVid, the wars on farming, plastics, food, mobility, free speech… spring to mind.

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Aen't all at least Socialistic?

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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.

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"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.

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I think your broader point on the attraction of regimes that give people absolute power to people attracted to power is spot on.

I also reread Halberstam's book recently and I didn't think the sympathy for communism was as prominent as you did. I was mostly struck by his theme of the ignorance of the American generals and analysts about Vietnam. Not so much that communism was suited for the Vietnamese, but that the US strategy wasn't created or implemented by people who actually understood the society they were operating in. There is a passage where, I think, McNamara much later asked someone who'd been driven out of the Army over his insistence that things were not going well why McNamara got such bad information. This ex-colonel (I think) said "Because you never talked to anyone other than the people the generals wanted you to talk to."

Setting up organizations where the leadership hears unpleasant news is really hard.

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Re: "Humanity consists of a mix in which some people are inclined to cooperate, some people are inclined to defect, and some people are inclined to play the tit-for-tat strategy. People tend to gravitate toward a doctrine that is congruent with their personality."

Arnold indicates that defectors gravitate to communism and cooperators gravitate to libertarianism and neo-liberalism.

To what doctrine do people who play the tit-for-tat strategy gravitate?

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Middle management.

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City of Chicago City Council.... snark, yes.

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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.

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Specifically, in "The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution". A good book.

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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.

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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?"

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" 'Don’t you want to abolish state power?' Yes, we do, but not right now…" — Chm. Mao Zedong, from “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” 1949

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So true... When he realized what that actually meant, it was defenestration time.

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