NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Noted
Haha. Yes I really wrote it.
My goal is not to farm AAQC's. I am writing a book and serializing it on TheMotte to get feedback. The AAQC's are nice, but the feedback is invaluable. The working title of the book is They See Not [cf. Proverbs 135:16].
But this looks very much like you used AI to generate much of it, with perhaps some edits.
I do not believe it looks like it was written by AI. But, if you know of an LLM that will generate sourced evidence for the malignancy of the woke mind virus without being hacked, please do let me know.
Species of Tyranny and their Hallmarks (Part I: The Theory)
(c) Feb 3, 2025, by J. Nelson Rushton
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.
[Matthew 7: 15-16, KJV]
Webster's dictionary defines "woke" as being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. Notice that this definition doesn't mention identity politics, or censorship, or cancel culture, or radical progressivism. Indeed, it does not mention anything that is associated with wokeness in the commonsense understanding of the word. That is because today, even the dictionary is woke.
To be woke in the Webster's sense is a noble thing indeed; it is to be a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the defining characteristic of a storybook hero -- like Superman, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the Big Bad Wolf and rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old, grandma. Not coincidentally, and probably because it is sine qua non of a storybook hero, "defending the oppressed" has also been the stated agenda of some of the most murderous demagogues in modern history. Practically every murderer is also a shameless liar; thus, not being constrained by the facts, they naturally toward the loftiest possible story about their motives.
A tyrant's rise to power is often paved with woke-sounding platitudes. For example,
- [Our] aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.
- Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others.
- There must be a revolutionary party because the world contains enemies who oppress the people.
These are the words of Hiter, Stalin, and Mao Zedong-- who, between them, murdered tens of millions of their own people, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance, all in the name of "social justice". When you see a political leader rising to power on a fanatical message of standing up for the little guy, it's best to keep your rifle clean.
And how do such wolves rise to power? In many cases they are propelled by the will of the people. It is often believed that tyranny and democracy are opposites -- but the fact is that some of the most brutal dictators have risen to power on waves of broad popular support, in some cases through legal democratic processes, as was the case with Adolf Hitler. For this to happen, the tyrant must be shiny and slick enough to fool many people into complicity, and far more into complacency -- and they must keep their predatory intent in the realm of plausible deniability until it is too late for them to be stopped. It might be hard to believe this could happen, if it hadn't happened so many times.
So, how do we avoid being fooled, by leaders of our own party or those of another party? Are there signs that can be used to spot a rising tyranny in its formative stages, while it is still in its sheep's clothing? If so, those signs must be subtle -- or else it would not have been possible for so many intelligent, well-meaning people to be taken in by tyrannical movements through history.
Nonetheless, while they may be subtle, I believe there are certain hallmarks, or "tells", that tyrannical movements tend to exhibit even early in their stages --before they have gathered power, risen up, and bared their fangs. I hold that these hallmarks include, for example, the following:
- identity politics: as a caste system based on moral double-standards, often founded on a narrative of historical class exploitation
- authoritarianism: a sense of being entitled to control other people -- which engenders censorship, lawlessness, militancy, and arbitrary, intrusive governance
- extremism: policies and moral positions that flagrantly defy reason and common sense
So, my first claim will be that these characteristics are hallmarks of tyranny -- that is, identifying traits that can be used to known one when you see one.
However, not all forms of tyranny have the same character. There are fundamental differences between, for example, communism and Nazism, or between the rise and rule of Ayatollah Khomeini on the one hand, and Ivan the Terrible on the other. To borrow a phrase from author James Lindsay, there is more than one species of tyranny -- and each species, in addition to the general traits of tyranny, has its own characteristic markers that distinguish it from other species. This chapter will touch on two particular classes of tyrannical ideologies -- populist tyranny and its subclass of leftist tyranny -- and describe what I believe to be their identifying characteristics as well.
The subsequent chapter will illustrate how these hallmarks were evident in the early stages of the most murderous tyrannical movements of the 20th century -- Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism -- even before their true nature became obvious to their victims and to the world, and how they played out as these ideologies consolidated their power. I will also discuss how they are manifest in the woke movement today in the West.
Species of Tyranny
Tyranny can be defined as oppressive government rule. As I have discussed in a previously post, Plato wrote about the forms of tyranny that he and his forebears had observed in Classical Greece, but today we have more history to look back on. From our perspective, we can see that while many of Plato's observations are timeless, not all forms of oppressive government conform to the same model. It seems, author James Lindsay has put it, that there is more than one species of tyranny.
The tyrannical movement described by Plato is populist in nature. That is, in its rise to power, the tyrannical regime of The Republic derives its strength from broad public support. Generally speaking, this support need not come from an absolute majority of the population -- but it must come from a vocal and militant minority, that is large enough, and has enough allies, in the presence of enough passive bystanders, to seize power on the impulse of a "people's movement". Thus, Plato's tyrant is a demagogue: one who rises to power by stirring up and appealing to rash, angry sentiments that are festering among the population.
A demagogue can take office through a legal election or appointment (as with Hitler), through a revolution (as with Mao Zedong), or through a popular coup d'etat (as with Lenin). But not all tyrants are demagogues. A hereditary monarch, such as Mary I ("Bloody Mary") of England or Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible") of Russia, might indeed lead a cruel and oppressive regime, but their ascension to power does not rest chiefly on popular support, either of themselves or of their agenda. So, typically, a monarch's path to power does not resemble that of Plato's archetypal tyrant, even if they are, in fact, a tyrant.
On the other hand, despotic hereditary monarchs are not the sort of tyrant we need to worry about much in the West these days. From this point forward I will focus on populist forms of tyranny: those in which the tyrants take office on the strength of their public support, whether by legal means, illegal means, or a combination of the two as in Plato's Republic.
Even after restricting focus to populist forms of tyranny, not all of these have the same character. On top of being populist in nature, the tyranny described in The Republic is marked by radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and values. But not all populist tyrannies are radically progressive, or even progressive at all. For example, the path from democracy to tyranny in The Republic begins with weakening household patriarchy, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia took steps in the same direction -- but the Ayatollahs have not weakened the patriarchy in Iran (au contraire!). For another example, Plato’s tyrannical regime advocates open borders and a liberal immigration policy, much as the woke left has in recent times -- but such a program would not characterize the Nazis, to say the least.
On the other hand, while not all populist tyrannies are left-leaning in nature, it does seem that practically all, if not all, left-leaning tyrannies are populist in nature. This is empirically observable as well as naturally logical: if a tyrant, as such, has the power to impose his will upon the people without their consent, one doctrine he is not likely to impose is that of egalitarianism. He is more likely to impose a pitiless, top-down pecking order, with himself at the apex.
In light of all this, I submit the following:
- Tyranny is defined as oppressive government rule.
- Populist tyranny -- or what might be called "grass roots" tyranny -- is a form of tyranny that draws its power from broad-based popular support, at least in its formative stages.
- Leftist tyranny, of roughly the character described in Plato's Republic, is one form of populist tyranny -- though there are other forms of populist tyranny that are not leftist in character.
In summary, populist tyranny is a species of tyranny, and leftist tyranny is a sub-species of populist tyranny. What follows from that?
Populist Tyranny
The first consequence of the claim that populist tyranny is a species of tyranny is something that is obvious to any student of history, but evidently not obvious to many people: that populist tyranny is a thing in the first place. It seems to be widely believed that democracy and tyranny are opposites, and that tyranny can only take hold by being ruthlessly imposed from the top down. In fact, Webster's (now woke) dictionary lists democracy and tyranny as antonyms. But on the view I propose here, de facto democracy is not the opposite of tyranny at all. On the contrary, it is an essential prerequisite for the very kinds of tyranny we need fear most, viz., tyranny of a populist variety.
At a minimum, there is nothing logically contradictory about democracy and tyranny. The will of the people as a whole, at least in principle, could be to welcome over them a cruel and oppressive dictator -- so long as he is cruel and oppressive chiefly to a well-defined minority. So a democratic tyranny is possible in theory; the question is whether it could happen in real life. Philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau -- a key figure of the Enlightenment -- seemed to think not. Rousseau wrote that democracy is practically infallible, so long as it truly reflects the will of the people:
*As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being. Then, all the animating forces of the state are vigorous and simple, and its principles are clear and luminous; it has no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.
However, when the social tie begins to slacken and the state to weaken, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and sectional societies begin to exert an influence over the greater society, the common interest then becomes corrupted and meets opposition, voting is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and disputes arise.*
[Rousseau: Of the Social Contract, Book IV]
I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that.
The plain fact of history is that the population as a whole often supports leaders who cruelly oppress certain individuals or demographic groups -- and, in many cases, supports those leaders because they promise to oppress those people or groups. It might be difficult to know what the majority silently felt about, say, Lenin, or Hitler, or Ayatollah Khomeini -- but what the majority silently feels is not worth spit. In the real world, it is what a majority of active and vocal citizens feel that makes the will of the people -- in proportion to how active and vocal they are, and regardless of whether they assert their will by counting heads or by cracking heads. Formal democracy can soften the effect of this law of realpolitik, but democracy just-on-paper cannot soften anything much when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity [cf. Yeats: "The Second Coming"]. Germany was a formal democracy as Hitler was rising to power, as was Russia during the rise of Lenin. Yet, in the practical sense of rule by the people, Germany welcomed Hitler over them, as Russia welcomed Lenin -- in substantially the same way that Iran welcomed in the Ayatollahs, even though Iran was not a formal democracy at the time. Each of these leaders rose to power by winning a contest for popular support, one way or another, Rousseau's pipe dream bedamned.
Hallmarks of Tyranny
So, how do we recognize rising tyrannical movements before they reach full bloom?
To draw an analogy in zoological terms, consider, for example, how usually know a mammal when we see one. A mammal is defined as an animal that nurses its young with milk. But when you see a mammal in the wild, even of a species you have never seen before, you usually don't have to wait until you see it reproduce and feed its young to recognize it as a mammal. This is because mammals have a certain cluster of diagnostic traits -- that is, features that co-occur together in most mammals, and co-occur for the most part only in mammals. The diagnostic traits of mammals include having hair rather than scales or feathers, and being warm blooded -- as well as certain hidden anatomical features such as having three middle ear bones, a diaphragm for breathing, and a neocortex brain structure.
Each category of tyranny -- if we have chosen our categories in a way that reflects nature (or in this case human nature) -- should also have certain collections of diagnostic traits. I will refer to the diagnostic traits of each species of tyranny as its hallmarks. Below I will list what I believe are some hallmarks of tyranny, followed by additional hallmarks of populist tyranny, and the further hallmarks left-leaning populist tyranny. For readers familiar with the history of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century, these hallmarks may strike a chord of familiarity.
The hallmarks of tyrannical government of all sorts include identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
- Identity politics is the stance of advocating moral double-standards, in which people are viewed as having different moral status, eventually leading to differing rights or obligations, based on demographic characteristics such as race, class, sex, religion, and ethnicity.
- Authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. It manifests as highly centralized government authority, lawlessness, suppression of dissenting voices, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- particularly including widespread and vicious use of government authority against political rivals.
- Extremism is the embrace of policies and principles that flagrantly defy reason and common sense. In particular, it tends to include utopian "final solutions" to problems that are endemic to the human condition.
Populist tyrannical ideologies -- from that of Plato's Republic, to Soviet and Chinese communism, to Nazism -- exhibit the hallmarks of tyranny in general, with two modifications. First, the identity politics of populist forms of tyranny tend to be based on a narrative of historical class exploitation (e.g., by the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", or straight white males). Second, in populist tyrannical movements, the characteristics of authoritarianism, identity politics, and extremism emerge in a decentralized form, imposed by partisans of the ideology in any spaces, institutions, and jurisdictions where they hold sway. This process begins long before the movement consolidates central power, as we have seen happen with the woke movement in recent years.
Leftist tyrannical movements -- including all of the above except Nazism -- share all of the hallmarks as populist tyranny, with the stipulation that their extremism takes the form of radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and longstanding laws. Elements of radical progressivism (common to the Communist movements in the Soviet Union and China, to Plato's archetypal tyrant, and to the woke movement) include things such as negating gender differences, rejection of traditional religion, aggressive wealth redistribution, disarming private citizens, gutting the pre-existing legal system (e.g. legacy police departments), negating meritocracy, and denigrating traditional culture and cultural icons.
My next few posts will illustrate how these hallmarks were visible in the early stages of the three most murderous regimes of the twentieth century -- Russian and Chinese Communism, and German Nazism -- and how they played out as those movements consolidated and then abused their power. At the same time, I will discuss how these hallmarks of tyranny are visible in the woke movement in the West today, in case you haven't noticed. In fact, I believe the hallmarks of tyranny are exactly what differentiates the woke "social justice warriors" from good-faith progressives. What is alike between the two is a message of compassion -- that is, a call for each of us to do what we can to aid the visible, present suffering of our fellow men and women in need. What is different is that, with wokeness, this call for compassion is warped into a pretext for identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism. Tyranny to a tee.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Absolutely. https://jnelsonrushton.substack.com/
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
They [Athens] were briefly ruled oligarchically, due to the Spartans,
This glosses over some things that are worth mentioning, don't you think?
Thank you!
All the instances I found were forms of ανηρ, or adjectives without a noun
So in the latter case, what is the Romanized form of the adjective? Are you saying Plato literally called them democrats (transliterating into grammatically correct English)?
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Maybe this is the line that is causing the problem (from the OP):
The descent into tyranny is driven by a collection of people Plato calls drones, defined generally as those who do no useful work.
Plato's view here is narrow -- focusing on the sorts of tyranny he (or his teacher, Socrates) witnessed -- which were evidently of a leftist variety. The most natural constituents of that kind of tyranny are the non-working poor. But in a broader view, which Plato does not discuss, the natural constituents of the tyrant might be a different group.
Yes, people need a justification for what they're doing. But there is a lot of freedom in how that justification generalizes.
This is not something Plato touches on directly, but I have an idea about it. The guiding principle, if you can call it that, is a collective decision by the drones on the central question in founding any fundamentalist/extremist movement: As a function of the material and cultural circumstances I find myself in, what group can I demonize, scapegoat, and rally a coalition to attack and plunder? The details of the target group, the moral rationalization, and the attack strategy arise from culture and circumstance -- but when they find the answer it then plays out in (1) censoring the target group and their ideas, (2) scapegoating them for all the world's ills, (3) disarming them, (4) seizing their property in the name of justice, and often finally (5) murder. The target group is chosen opportunistically, not according to any eternal principle. Depending on circumstances, it could be heretics, Jews, the aristocracy, the Tutsis, the vaguely defined and ever-morphing "bourgeoisie", or straight white males. The tyranny Plato observed must have been of the left-wing variety, like that of Stalin and Mao -- but the dragon can wear the mask of the left, the right, religious fundamentalism, racial supremacy, or whatever.
Plato's "crawling drones" are thugs and paupers, that tend to stoke leftist tyranny, but leftist tyranny is just one of many possible answers to the question of who can I blame for my problems and attack and plunder with righteous indignation?
Also, that's pretty much a summary of the top-level post I am planning for next week.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Thanks. For every person that says this, there are probably 10 or more who feel it.
By "concise", do you mean (A) broken into smaller pieces per post (B), having less content altogether, or (C) putting the same content into fewer words? "Concision" usually refers to (C), but maybe that is not what you are saying.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
In his book "Conflict of Visions", Thomas Sowell slams Plato as an adherent of the "unconstrained vision", and a proto-Marxist. However, it is not clear that Plato actually advocates the policies he describes as "ideal state" to be a thing in the real world.
In any case, while the Greeks described certain problems very cogently, I wouldn't turn to them for wholesale solutions. They obviously never figured out how to run a sustained democracy. The Romans did, though -- from around 500 BC to 150 BC. Unfortunately, the Romans didn't write much in that period, and we do not even have a full text of their constitution, the "Twelve Tables of Roman Law" (I'm not even sure they kept a written copy). Maybe that's the secret -- don't write it down!
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
If you have Greek questions, I could probably attempt to answer them.
I'm going to take you up on that.
- In most instances of "Democratic man" in Book VIII of The Republic, does plato use "andres" or "anthropos"? Is there a difference between the two, or is one the plural of the other?
- At the beginning of Book IX, in the sentence, "Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are controlled by the laws and by reason" is reason "logos" or "nous"? I narrowed it down to "logos" in writing the OP, but my old draft sad "nous" and I must have had a reason to think that at the time.
If you're using Perseus, make sure to take advantage of the ability to pull up the text in English down the side. And if you just click on the word in Perseus, you should be able to find the LSJ entry
Thanks!
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
I think there are two things that can fill in the missing pieces of this puzzle:
- Plato believes in natural law, that is, that (rule of) law and reason have the same dictates for everyone.
- The flying drones and crawling drones play different roles in the coalition. The flying drones articulate a philosophy that validates the way-of-being of the crawling drones, and the crawling drones eat it up and enlarge the constituency of the flying drones. The crawling drones are more short sighted; the flying drones are more strategic.
I think there's something missing here, on the connection between indulging ones appetites, and the ideology which approves of such
Even one man marooned on an island has a conscience. He knows what he'd be ashamed for his father to see him do, if his father was there -- and that inner voice doesn't go away when his father dies. So in order to indulge his unclean appetites, he has to tell himself things like, "It's all good", and "Who's to say what's clean and unclean", and "Dad was a prick anyway" (which is why the woke smear their ancestors and tear down their statues). For that reason, I believe the behavior depends crucially on the ideology.
Plato seems to think the drones cause the ideology
Remember that not all drones are poor. Also, Plato's view is not as simple as drones causing demokratia.
In an earlier part of the narrative, not recounted in my essay, Plato says that it is brazen oligarchy that first begins to make the drones more numerous: ruthless exploitation by the rich of the poor and of each other, turning the some of the losers in the economic free-for-all into poor, ruined wretches (my words, but his basic picture of things). From there, the causation between drones and demockratia is a mutually recursive chicken-and-egg cycle. More drones --> more democratic men --> more drones --> more democratic men... But *basically if Plato had to pick a single root cause, I think he would pick the ideology rather than a certain group of people. He tends to focus on the ideal as ultimate.
moocherism as a constant political background force is not a new idea. An ideology which approves of them in general would be.
I'm not sure what "new" means here. I think Plato implicitly posits such an ideology.
I submit that living off of the work of others in your peer group violates universal, intuitively self-evident natural law. Every clan and tribe has disdain for people who don't pull their weight. Thus, saying it's OK to be a moocher requires turning down the volume on morality itself. It doesn't require that logically, but I believe it requires it psychologically. Moral nihilism is a very old philosophy, and I think its chief motivations make up a very short list: theft (by deception or by force, including government force), and sexual libertineness.
So as far as the ideology and the practice, I don't think you can have one without the other. Men find it easier to rationalize than to brazenly violate their conscience. A rationalization is better than sex. Have you ever gone more than one week without one good juicy rationalization? [Jeff Goldblum as Michael Gold in The Big Chill]
Again, most poor people even today do not claim a general right to redistribution
I don't know about that. They probably lean in that direction as a group far more than the working and middle classes when asked -- but they are not as zealous and vocal and organized in advocating it, because they are not zealous or vocal or organized on the whole. Crawling drones play different positions on the team than flying drones -- as different as quarterback and an offensive lineman.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
suspicion that most social conflicts are between the same impulses we've had for thousands of years. Maybe I gotta finally read the Republic. Is there a translation you recommend? Any prerequisite baseline level of familiarity with Greek?
I have been working from Benjamin Jowett's translation. His is easy to find online, as is Paul Shorey's in the Perseus digital library. I haven't looked at different translations enough to make a recommendation.
No need to know Greek unless you are reading it in Greek. I only know a few Greek words myself. I look up some of the key words in a Greek dictionary using a pain-in-the-ass process:
- Take part of the Greek text from the Perseus Library that I think has the word in it
- Put it in Google Translate
- Cut out parts of it and see if the target word (or something like it) remains in the translation, narrowing it down until I find the Greek word
- Look it up in Strong's Greek Dictionary, or some other Greek dictionary online.
I used to use ChatGPT for this, and it was awesome, until I realized that it doesn't always give me the same answer when I ask the same question twice. i.e., it's cull of crap.
I need a friend who knows ancient Greek.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
This Motte post is a synthesis and refinement of two posts I made previously on Substack. There were links to my Substack in some old posts I made on the Motte about Russian and Chinese communism, so that may be where you saw it.
Had to fix it, but it was cool while it lasted. The typo will live on in this comment.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Great post.
Thanks!
you have gotten one person to read the book!
...An angel got their wings today.
Say then, my friend : Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. January 27, 2025 Note: this is the second post in a series. The first one is here.
The ring of power has a will of its own. It betrayed Isildur, to his death. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the ring ensnared a new bearer.
-- Spoken by the elf-queen Galadriel in Lord of the Rings
Some people believe that wokeness emerged from the progressive counterculture of the 1960’s. Some hold that it has its roots in the 1930's with FDR and the New Deal. Others say that the origins of wokeness go back to the Frankfurt School of economics in 1920's Germany. Whatever wokeness is at its core, and whether it is good or bad, I submit that it is in fact older than any of that -- and, indeed, very old. That is the main thesis of this essay.
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato described a faction whose social and political agenda included moral relativism, lax enforcement of criminal laws, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and the repudiation of their society’s founding principles and traditional values. Plato called the adherents of this ideology dēmokratikoi andres [democratic men]. Plato wrote that a state ruled by such "democratic men" is on the brink of descending into tyranny. Steps along the path to tyranny, as Plato described it, include sexual liberation and equality, aggressive taxation of the rich, expansion of the welfare state, open borders, forgiveness of debts, suppression of dissenting speech, and the confiscation of weapons owned by private citizens. Today, many with a similar agenda refer to themselves as "progressives". Most of them, I suppose, are unaware that they are "progressing" toward a vision of the world that dates back at least two and a half thousand years.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato [Whitehead (1929): Process and Reality]. Whitehead was exaggerating, of course -- but at any rate this essay will consist literally of a series of footnotes to Plato. To the extent that there is truth in Whitehead's witticism, the difference between this and any other work in the Western canon is that I am up front about what I am doing.
Overview of The Republic, Book VIII
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato takes the view that the chief distinguishing characteristics of a person is the set of virtues that person honors. He sorts men into five basic categories, according to the virtues they honor most:
- The aristocratic man honors wisdom and integrity.
- The timocratic man honors martial valor, skill at arms, and military prowess.
- The oligarchical man honors wealth, and the virtues that enable a person to acquire wealth, such as industriousness and ambition
- The democratic man honors nothing in particular -- and therefore indulges his appetites without restraint.
- The tyrannical man honors, or in this case we might say bows down to, the merciless exercise of power.
Plato wrote that a nation's form of government emerges naturally from the values of its citizens, and in particular from the virtues they honor. In Plato's view, when the people of a society honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders who exhibit that virtue -- and, conversely, when citizens fail to honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders in whom that virtue is absent. The virtues present and absent in these leaders in turn determine the general character of the government. Thus, Plato writes that in principle there are five basic forms of government, corresponding to the five basic sorts of citizen (though, in practice, any given state is liable to be a mixture of these pure forms):
Do you know that Governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that states are made of oak and rock, and not out of the human natures which are in them.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The five forms government considered by Plato in The Republic are as follows:
- The aristokratíā is society ruled by men of exceptional wisdom and integrity, because its citizens most honor and admire those traits. Aristokratíā is usually translated as aristocracy, but Plato's intent is quite different from the modern meaning of that word. Plato holds aristokratíā (qua, rule by the wise) to be the ideal form of government, while he explicitly repudiates aristocracy in the modern sense, viz., the rule of hereditary nobles.
- Plato defines a timocracy as a state ruled by men with a record of exemplary military service -- because its citizens honor the martial virtues most highly. Plato cites Crete and Sparta as examples.
- He defines an oligarchy as a state governed, officially as well as unofficially, by the wealthy -- who are elevated to power and prestige by a citizenry who prizes wealth and the virtues that enable one to acquire wealth, such as industriousness, sharp dealing, and ambition.
- Plato uses the word dēmokratía to mean a state ruled by men of no particular virtue -- who are elevated to positions of power, one way or another, by citizens who do not honor virtue. Dēmokratía is usually rendered into English as democracy, but Plato's concept of dēmokratía differs importantly from the modern understanding of democracy, as will be discussed below.
- A tyrannía, for Plato, is a state ruled by a dictator who has seized power in a revolution or coup d'etat -- with popular support the majority of the population, who welcome such a dictator over them. Tyrannía is usually translated as tyranny. Note that while the words "tyrant" and "tyranny" have a generally negative connotations today, this was less true of their ancient Greek precursors týrannos and tyrannía. Like the word "Marxism" today, there were apparently some in ancient Greece who had an affinity for tyrannía, and some who had an antipathy for it. Plato was one who had antipathy.
Book VIII of The Republic is presented as a narrative relating an archetypal story of how societies can decay over time -- from the ideal form of government, aristokratíā, to the worst form, tyrannía, and passing through the three intermediate forms along the way. At each stage in the process, the regime-change is affected by a change in the values of the public, in terms of the virtues they honor. In other words, for Plato, politics is downstream of culture.
It is easy to see how politics could be downstream of culture in a modern democracy -- because the voting populace consists of the entire adult population, who confer official authority upon whomever they wish. It is less easy to see how politics would be downstream of culture in, say, a timocracy (military rule) or oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), where one class of people has an exclusive hold on official power. The question is why would the class-in-power willingly abdicate that power, or how could it be wrested from them by others with no official authority? One factor in such a transfer of power could be violent revolution or the threat of it -- but it seems that for Plato, this is not the only factor, or even the chief factor. On the whole, the transfers of power from one class to another in Plato's narrative hinge more on moral suasion and perceived legitimacy than on threats or force. The driving force (or the control variable, so to speak) in Plato's theory of political and societal change is what Thomas Paine called the constitution of the people -- that is, the moral character of society. This stands in contradistinction to Karl Marx's theory of dialectical materialism, in which the driving forces of societal change consists in the material conditions under which people live, including the laws they have written on paper.
Plato's Dēmokratía and the Democratic Man
Foreshadowing the Christian doctrine of the “will of the flesh”, Plato argues that men's hearts are naturally home to unclean carnal passions:
I mean those [passions] which are awake when the reasoning and human and ruling power is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime -- not excepting incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food -- which at such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.... In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
-- The Republic, Book IX
He writes that while all men have these beastly desires, they are restrained, more in some people and less than others, by law (nomos) and reason (logos):
Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are controlled by the laws and by reason.
--The Republic, Book IX
When a society is in decline toward disregard of virtue, it will be a mixture of those who have some regard for virtue left (in particular, "oligarchical" virtues such as industriousness and temperance), and those who have little or none. However, the less virtuous citizens may gradually corrupt the more virtuous and recruit them into their ranks. This recruitment proceeds by Orwellian manipulation of language -- by calling good things evil and evil things good -- and has a religious character, as if the target is being indoctrinated into a cult:
There is a battle and they [a man's less virtuous associates] gain the day, and then modesty, which they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and cast forth; they persuade men that moderation and orderly expenditure are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them [the man's virtues] beyond the border.
And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names; insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage. And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.
-- The Republic, VIII
Through this process, the recruit is finally transformed into a full blown dimokratikos anēr [Greek: democratic man], who no longer distinguish between clean and unclean desires:
If any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the others -- whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another... Let him then be set over against democracy; he may truly be called the democratic man.
-- The Republic, VIII
Plato writes that as more and more men within a society are corrupted, the entire society is transformed toward a state of dēmokratía, or virtueless society. Dēmokratía is a challenging word to translate. It is usually rendered as democracy, and its meaning is something like democracy (in the modern sense) in that it entails relatively broad and equal participation in government. In Plato's narrative, however, dēmokratía entails much more: a thoroughgoing ethos of equity, in which people regarded, not only having equal rights of life, liberty and property, but also as being of equal ability, uprightness, and achievement -- regardless of their actual respective degrees of ability, uprightness, or achievement.
According to Plato, the virtueless society has a freewheeling spirit of moral relativism -- and, in that spirit, discards the principles of its national constitution.
See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the 'don't care' about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine principles which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the city... how grandly does she trample all these fine notions of ours under her feet.
-- The Republic, Book VII
Its public officials are often selected on the basis of their professed loyalty, rather than ability or integrity,
...never giving a thought to the pursuits which make a statesman, and promoting to honour any one who professes to be the people's friend.
-- The Republic, Book VII
or, in some cases, at random by the drawing of lots, presumably on the grounds that "all men are equal" (Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato):
This is the form of government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.
-- The Republic, Book VII
The society that has ceased to honor virtue repudiates meritocracy:
These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
-- -- The Republic, Book VII
Since all ways of being are held in equal esteem, the people of the dēmokratía are diverse in their norms and values — one might say “multicultural”:
And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.
--The Republic, Book VII
Thus, the society loses its sense of shared national identity and social cohesion:
And there being no necessity, I said, for you to govern in this State, even if you have the capacity, or to be governed, unless you like, or go to war when the rest go to war, or to be at peace when others are at peace, unless you are so dispose.
--The Republic, Book VII
In addition to discarding its traditional principles and values, the dēmokratía neglects enforcement of the law, allowing criminals to freely roam the streets:
Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although they have been sentenced to death or exile, just stay where they are and walk about the world?
--The Republic, Book VII
In summary, the agenda of Plato's democratic men includes moral relativism, leniency in criminal justice, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and a loosening of their society's founding principles and traditional values. Sound Familiar?
Plato's Narrative of the Descent into Tyranny
Say then, my friend, in what manner does tyranny arise? -- that it has a democratic origin is evident. [Plato: The Republic, VIII]
Plato held that a society ruled by "democratic men" -- that is, men who neglect to honor virtue, or to distinguish between clean and unclean desires -- is in danger of degenerating into tyranny. The descent into tyranny is driven by a collection of people Plato calls drones, defined generally as those who do no useful work. The name "drone" is taken from the entomological term for male bees and ants -- who, even in Plato's time, were known to live off of the work of others in their hive, contributing nothing except to reproduce themselves.
Plato's "drones" are a rather curious coalition. He writes that there are two broad sorts: drone followers and drone leaders, which he metaphorically refers to as crawling drones and flying drones. The crawling drones, or drone followers, consist of career criminals and the non-working poor. The flying drones, or drone leaders, are elected officials and government bureaucrats who garner power by catering to the constituency formed by the crawling drones.
May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone in the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as the other is of the hive? ...And God has made the flying drones [drone leaders], all without stings, whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings. but others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they are termed.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The descent into tyranny begins the decline of patriarchy within the home.
I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom.
--The Republic, Book VIII
Foreigners and resident aliens are treated like citizens:
metic [resident alien] is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.
--The Republic, Book VIII
Children grow entitled and arrogant, and adults cater to them for fear of being labelled as authoritarians. Everyone wants to be the "cool parent" or the "cool teacher".
In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his students, and the students despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The decaying society embraces a spirit of sexual liberation and sexual equality.
Nor must I forget to tell [in a democracy] of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
Plato wrote that as the drones grow more numerous, the more ambitious drones begin to occupy positions of power and influence. Meanwhile, their less capable constituents form mobs to shout down speakers and suppress the political speech of those who disagree with them:
In a democracy, they [drones] are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema [public speech platform] and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies almost everything is managed by the drones.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
There are some members of society who have retained the virtues of the previous generation, such as diligence and temperance. Theses people naturally prosper, but the drones elect leaders who confiscate their wealth and redistribute it:
*Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass...They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders sure to be the richest. They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones... And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them... *
And do they not share? Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people?
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The drones use bureaucratic and criminal indictments to harass and immobilize their political opponents:
Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another... The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The redistribution of wealth continues, including the cancellation of debts:
At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets, ... liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one!
-- The Republic, Book VIII
The drones elect a leader who drums up national emergencies as a pretext for expanding the power of government. In Plato’s narrative, the emergency is a war — but a war on poverty, or a war on drugs, or a global pandemic would also do the trick.
He [the tyrant elected by the drones] is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
To enlarge his constituency, the drone-leaders open the borders and encourage the immigration of more drones from foreign countries:
And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them? They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if lie pays them. By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every land.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
In the last stages of social and political decay, corruption spirals out of control. Having plundered the wealth of the upper classes, the tyrant begins to confiscate the property of the working class and underclass that elected him, but now they cannot remove him from power. Plato likens the tyrant to a son who steals from the father who has raised him:
In so far as the fortunes of attainted [accused] persons may suffice, he will be able to diminish the taxes which he would otherwise have to impose upon the people. And when these fail? ... then he and his boon companions, whether male or female, will be maintained out of his father's estate.... By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he will find that he is weak and his son strong.
-- The Republic, Book VIII
Finally, the tyrant turns violently on its own citizens, drones and all, after depriving them of the right to bear arms:
Glaucon: Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence? What! beat his father if he opposes him?
Socrates: Yes, he will, having first disarmed him. Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and this is real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake.
--The Republic, Book VIII
Conclusion
It may be worth mentioning how I came to be acquainted with Plato's account of dēmokratía and the descent into tyranny. I first learned of it in listening to a lecture by Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe. The lecture was on Plato's Republic for its own sake; Rahe did not make any analogy between Plato's narrative and current day politics, and am not sure whether he intended to. Nevertheless, the analogy was clear to me, and I found it so uncanny that I was incredulous. To be frank, I was pretty sure that Rahe was cherry picking passages from a long text to make it look as though Plato was writing about contemporary politics. So, I read Plato's Republic for myself. In doing so, I found that, contrary to my expectations, Rahe was simply summarizing a section of Book VIII -- and that, if anything, he had undersold the similarity between Plato's "democratic man" and the modern left. I would not insist that you take my word for that, and I do not even believe it would be rational to take my word for it on the basis of the snippets quoted in this essay (for all you know, if you haven't read the text, I am doing what I suspected Rahe of doing). Thus, I invite the reader to examine the relevant sections of Plato's Republic for themselves. The entirety of Book VIII can be read in about an hour, or in two hours for a slow reader like me.
When he spoke of tyranny, Plato was speaking from experience, both personal and collective. At the time he wrote The Republic around 375 BC, Plato's home city of Athens had suffered through four different tyrannical regimes over a two-hundred year period -- including the reign of the so-called "Thirty Tyrants", which Plato himself lived though as a young man, and during which approximately five percent of the population of Athens was murdered by its own government. Summarizing the history of the era, Alexander Hamilton would later write,
It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. [Hamilton: Federalist #9]
So in The Republic, Plato was not speculating about something distant from his experience. On the contrary, like the "Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come" in Dickens's Christmas Carol, Plato had been where we might be going, and hoped to warn us so that we would be less likely to go there. Plato clearly has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his own time, and was probably on the other side from them of whatever political aisle ran through Athens at the time. Maybe they were right and he was wrong. But right or wrong, this faction must have existed, more or less as Plato describes them. If Plato made them up out of thin air, then he was not only a philosopher, but a prophet.
I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.
Sorry I haven't had time to respond to this thoroughly yet. However, I have rewritten my private copy of the original post, with your feedback in mind, and I think it is clearer in the new draft that my fight is not with progressivism/liberalism/leftism (though I don't want to heavily edit the original draft on the Motte, because that would make it less clear what people are responding to in some cases). Here are the relevant excerpts from the latest draft:
- America, and with it all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often cast as a struggle of left vs. right. Indeed, corporate media pundits male their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling show. But the fact is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
- But I do not think of wokeness as "the left". Wokeness is not progressivism -- or at least any sane form of progressivism -- and it certainly is not a movement for civil rights. Wokeness is to the civil rights movement what communism is to liberalism, and what the inquisition was to Christianity: it is a warlike tyranny, masking itself as a civil rights movement -- which has infected the progressive parties of the West, and is in transforming them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
- In the long run, the real culture war is not against the left or the right, but against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, aka extremism, aka supremacist movements -- of all forms. Basically, a fundamentalists are those demonizes their ideological opposition for personal or political gain. The fact is, tempting as it is to feel otherwise, there is some good and some bad on both sides of every argument and every conflict. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart. But fundamentalists are those who have rejected Solzhenitsyn's maxim, and, in their minds, redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people.
- Whether it wears the mask of the political left, the political right, or fundamentalist religion, fundamentalism has certain distinguishing hallmarks: the fangs that peek out from under its sheep's clothing. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people (their people) rather than principles, they tend to abandon the precepts of the ideology they claim to uphold. So, if you watch a fundamentalist movement closely, you will notice that the things they do often predictably lead to the opposite of what they say they want (know them by their fruits). Second, fundamentalists feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries, as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with -- not as punishment for particular crimes they have committed as individuals, not even exactly because they are bad people, but because they are the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people could be Jews, heretics, the "bourgeoisie", or even straight white men -- whomever the regime finds it expedient to portray as a historical class enemy, and blame for all the world's ills.
- Finally, a resurgence of wokeism is not the only ideological shift that we have to fear. While wokeism is the most visible threat today, in the long run we are also in danger of a pendulum-swing toward totalitarianism of a right-wing variety. Recall that in depression-era Germany, Nazism grew in just 20 years (approximately 1915 to 1935) from an obscure fringe movement to national dominance -- largely as a backlash against the very real and radical leftist threats of communist revolution and libertine excess. Such a quick swing from one form of extremism to the other may seem puzzling to those who view the culture war in terms of left and right, but it makes sense if we consider that fundamentalist regimes of the left and right are essentially more alike than different, and both grow in the same soil of moral decay.
- Even if my theory of how and why is all wrong, the fact is that quick swings from one form of extremism to another taken place before, and not just in Germany. Russia was a Tsarist autocracy in 1900, and by 1920 it was a Communist police state. France had a populist left wing revolution in 1789, and then welcomed Napoleon in as a military dictator in 1804. It is true that woke leftists have a habit of gratuitously labeling people who disagree with them as white supremacists, Fascists, and Nazis -- but is also true that there exist actual white supremacist, Fascists, and Nazis, who love to see that name calling go on, because the fog of crying wolf gives them a smoke screen behind which to operate and gather power. "It can't happen here" are the famous last words of many a nation through history.
Below is a link to the updated draft in my Google docs. If you have time to look it over, I would welcome further comments.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_d0pip_lYB5utNiyHA3mJfmQWo8isSUzBECjyf1FyxU/edit?usp=sharing
NR
To be fair, I think the Palestinians help as well. It’s very hard to get a Woke mind virus when you’re surrounded by people who want you dead. The two almost need each other as they’re defying themselves against each other an enemy unites tribes.
Agreed. Jonothan Haidt said that historically, shared identity typically springs from some combination of shared blood, shared gods, and shared enemies. The more I thought about it, the truer it seemed, but shared enemies may be the most important of the three. Even with shared blood and nominally shared gods, large societies often fracture and fall into civil war without a shared external enemy. As a famous example, the decline of Rome from a republic to an autocracy in the context of a class war (plebians vs. patricians) was rapid and almost linear over the 100-year period from found 150 BC to 44BC, following what seemed like Rome's greatest triumph: the total, permanent defeat of its archrival, Carthage, in a struggle between two global superpowers. (Sound familiar?)
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
Tit for that is the provable optimal strategy in an iterated game of prisoner's dilemma.
I do not believe this. I don't even think it makes sense to say, game theoretically. Source?
Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.
I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al. If there were a policy on the table, with good evidence suggested would mitigate one of those, at reasonable cost, without being liable to cause greater harm of some sort, I would be all ears. Do you know of one? Absent that, I don't think this is relevant unless it is just a thought experiment. If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...
We can't spend 20% of GDP mitigating climate change, 20% mitigating nuclear war, 20% mitigating an asteroid impact, 20% mitigating superbugs, 20% mitigating super-volcanoes, and 20% mitigating runaway AI -- because that adds up to 120%. Would you spend 10% on each one? I bet I can name four more plausible humanity-ending disasters before you post your answer. There is an interminable list of national and global disasters that are plausible within a few decades, and from that I infer that paying heavy costs to mitigate merely-plausible disasters is bad for our health and welfare -- unless some particular disaster is particularly plausible, and some particular plan can be shown to mitigate it without doing more harm than good.
I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want... So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.
To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... No, wait, there wouldn't be any inmates, because there wouldn't be any crime, because we'd all be drinking free soda pop and eating rainbow stew for every meal. But, since we don't have a crystal ball or a magic genie, some things can be achieved in a shorter time frame than others. The policy of (1) not housing trans women sex offenders in women's prisons is an issue of living debate which is short-term achievable, while the policy of (2) having a humane prison system is not. If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, but that's not an egg I'm willing to break.
To the meta-level point, I don't have data for the US, but in the UK only about 15% of people firmly believe that trans women sex offenders with penises should be housed in women's prisons [source]. That is about the same as the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis might still be alive in 2017 [source]. I don't have anything against either the trans-women-are-women crowd or the Elvis-is-alive crowd, but I also don't think I am obliged to consider their beliefs morally tenable or epistemically plausible. If I am talking directly with someone who believes a certain thing, I would politely entertain that thing -- but I can't entertain everything all the time just because somebody somewhere believes it. Some of my beliefs are out of the picture for other people, and vice versa, and I am OK with that. What I'm saying is that some charity is warranted here -- and I think your life would be better if you relax and stop being jarred when people, who are not speaking to you directly, are dismissive of things you believe, especially when you know to be on the fringe. Maybe you're right, even though almost everyone laughs off your theory, like Nikola Tesla or Alfred Wegener -- but even if you're right, it doesn't pay to get wound up about it.
Sure. For example, in the office my girlfriend shared with some other students, there was a map on the wall that was an equal area projection with Africa in the middle. The title was something like, "Socially Just Map of the World", and the heading under that said that usual projections of the globe onto a map "disadvantage Africa and South America, and Asia" (their words) by making them look smaller than they are by land-area comparison, and by placing them at the edge of the map, either horizontally or vertically. This level of pettiness over race was then new to me, and I chuckled and asked how anyone was "disadvantaged" by having a smaller land area on someone else's map halfway around the world. My girlfriend looked at me like I had blasphemed in front of a Bishop. She wasn't surprised that I had the thought (which was roughly as obvious to her as it was to me); she was appalled that I broke the taboo of questioning a bit of PC craziness in front of her classmates, and that she might be implicated by association ("Do you let him say things like that at home?"). This was in 1990, in the clinical psychology department at the University of Georgia, and it was the water they swam in every day.
I would emphasize that, at the time, she knew almost as well as I did that this stuff was silly, but lived in a state of ketman every day for fear of cancel culture. She gradually became more woke on the inside, though. If you think you can pretend to be something for long without becoming that thing, talk to a man who's been through a mock POW camp in SEER school (or else read "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo).
The leftist fundamentalists in the psych department in 1990 felt the same sense of entitlement to control other people as they probably do now, as long as they were in their element. We were going out to dinner with a group once, and one female grad student said, "If anyone orders veal, I am going to have a real problem with that." If veal had been on the menu, I'd have ordered it to find out the exact nature of the problem she was going to have -- but I suspect in my absence that would have been considered General's Orders. Another time, another girl said she had a problem with anyone who hunted. I asked if she was a vegetarian, and she said 'no', looking (1) guilty and (2) surprised, as if to say "you're not supposed to ask such things".
I only observed this directly for one semester, because my girlfriend -- who I had had a long-distance relationship with for four years of college -- broke up with me 3 months after we moved in together for grad school. There were several reasons for it, but I think one of them was that, while I was not particularly conservative at the time, my indefatigable Gomer-Pyle common sense (as I came from the math department were none of this was going on yet) was not only an embarrassment to her, but a danger to her career by way of voluntary association.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
You might be on the wrong side of history if... your excuse for the wrongdoing on your side is, "the other side does it too", or "the other side does it more".
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
If you did it in a bar to a private citizen, probably. But I think there are severe sentencing enhancements for assaulting public officials in the line of their duty, and especially cops, and especially with a weapon (per se or improvised) of any sort. And I reckon there should be. I'm kind of shocked by this on behalf of the cops.
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, especially focusing on the woke ideology, and how to combat them. The first two chapters were:
The third chapter is titled Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness.
Preface to Chapter 3
The radical progressive movement in the West today, aka wokeness, bears a striking resemblance to the populist tyrannical regime described by Plato in The Republic. Given that, one would expect wokeness to have more recent historical counterparts as well, and I will argue that it does. This chapter will examine parallels between today's woke movement and the early emergence of three major tyrannical regimes of the 20th century: Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism.
It is not surprising that wokeness looks and feels a good deal like communism -- since it is a common view that wokeness inhabits the far left, and communism is often thought of as the really far left. However, even in light of that, I will attempt to show that the historical parallels between wokeness on the one hand, and the early rise of Chinese and Soviet Communism on the other, run deeper than one might expect. It is perhaps even more surprising, as I will also argue, that many of these parallels also extend to the rise of Nazism -- which is commonly viewed as the opposite of communism, and as an ideology of the "far right". This following chapters will examine historical parallels in the emergence of all four of these ideologies (Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Nazism, and wokeness) along three lines: victim identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness
(c) Feb 6, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Diver's weights? Actually here, divers is an archaic spelling of diverse, meaning various and sundry. Of course different things have different weights and measures, but I think what is supposed to count as an abomination is different weights or measures for the same thing.
This phenomenon of diverse weights and diverse measures was brought home to me when -- somewhat to my chagrin, but also as the source of a few valuable life lessons -- I wound up rooming with a pot dealer for a few months when I was in graduate school. To be fair to him, my classified ad didn't specify "no drug dealers please" -- but, to be fair to me, he might have presumed on general principles that could be on my list of concerns, and given me a heads-up to see if it was a deal breaker. In any case, he didn't disclose his profession, and I didn't disclose a preference about that profession, and he moved in.
So one day my drug-dealing roomie has a client over and I am watching the deal happen in the living room. The dealer weighs out however many grams or ounces of pot was asked for, and then the customer pulls out his own scale, weighs the same lot again, and completes the transaction. Why the second weighing? The dealer isn't likely to have a broken scale; he buys and sells for a living. Aha!, I thought: Divers(e) weights and divers(e) measures! Evidently, it is a thing for particularly unscrupulous drug dealers to keep two scales in their pocket: one for buying and another one for selling -- and to pull out whichever one benefits him the most on each given occasion. That is the literal reading of the abomination in question -- though I suspect my pot-slinging roommate could plead ignorance on that score, not having not been much of a Bible reader at that stage of his life. Incidentally as it turns out, he is now, but that's another story.
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I define victim identity politics as a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation. The justification for woke victim politics was famously encapsulated by Ibram X. Kendi:
Here, Kendi is saying that (1) black people have been wrongfully oppressed by white people, in particular in America, throughout much of history, and that (2) the just and effective remedy for this offense is institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks over whites, presumably until the books are balanced. One of those things is true. Kendi's argument seems to be based on a general principle that when one class of people has been systematically wronged by another class, each member of the offending group then owes each member of the offended group preferential treatment and reparations. But in the light of day, this view breaks down for two reasons: first, the woke don't really believe it, and, second, the principle itself is ridiculous.
The more you study it, the more you see that woke identity politics is not about keeping a ledger of historical injustices between groups and trying to balance the books; it is about keeping a ledger of historical injustices committed by groups that oppose the woke agenda, against groups that support the woke agenda, while conveniently ignoring all other patterns of predation and exploitation in the country and around the world. For example, the woke say that America owes blacks reparations for slavery. Maybe She does; around 450,000 blacks were brought to the United States and its original colonies in the Transatlantic slave trade, and their descendants held in bondage until the end of the Civil War in 1866 -- the total evil and suffering of which practice over time defy imagination or calculation. But on the other hand, over 1,000,000 whites were brought to the Mediterranean region in slavery by the Barbary pirates, and their descendants held in bondage until decades after the practice had been abolished in the United States, under circumstances no less brutal and probably worse. We hear indignant outcries by the woke for America to pay reparations to blacks -- but where are the cries for Morocco, Libya, or Turkey to pay reparations to whites and their families for their past enslavement and its deleterious and lasting effects? Of course there aren't any, because (1) the peoples of the Barbary Coast are not political opponents of the woke agenda, (2) group justice for ancient wrongs is a ridiculous idea in the first place, and (3) even if whites asked for reparations for their centuries of brutal oppression under North African slavery, as Thomas Sowell wrote, nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
The woke would argue that, unlike the centuries-long slavery of whites in the Mediterranean, institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the United states is our problem, that it extends into living memory through the end of the Jim Crow era, and that its lasting effects are still felt by blacks today. And every word of that is true -- but if that is an outrage when it happens to some groups, shouldn't it be just as much of an outrage when it happens to others?
The raids of the Barbary pirates happened far away and long ago. But when it comes to alleged injustices by whites against non-whites, the woke certainly don't restrict attention to problems in our own back yard, or to problems that are currently going on. They fill the streets to protest the Israeli occupation of Palestine, wail angrily about the historical colonization of Africa by European powers like Belgium and Holland, and point their fingers over the long-ago British rule of India and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America -- all as if to say, look at all the terrible things white people have done. And they are right: white people have a lot of terrible things -- but so have other people, here in America and all around the world. Do the woke stigmatize the Japanese for their inhuman mistreatment of the people of Nanking and Korea during their subjugation under Hirohito? Do they lambast ethnic Hawaiians for the imperialism, slave driving, and brutality of King Kamehameha -- more recently than the American founding, and right in our own backyard? Are they calling for reparations to the Ute Indians for their epochs of enslavement and exploitation at the hands of the Navajo? And is anyone -- woke, Ute, or otherwise -- wagging their finger at modern day Navajos for those brutal crimes? Not at all. Not a peep. Why not?
Woke activists insist the United States should return the Black Hills region, in which Mount Rushmore is located, to the Sioux Indians -- from whom the United States seized it during the Black Hills War. And maybe we should: the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that the United States owed the Sioux $106 million in return for the wrongful seizure of the Black Hills. But on the other hand, nobody -- neither the woke, nor the Supreme Court, nor anyone else -- is suggesting that the Sioux should pay reparations of any kind to the Cheyanne, who occupied the Black Hills for years before being driven out at the points of Sioux spears. Even the Cheyanne don't push that agenda; if they did, it would loose from Pandora's box the principle that people other than whites can be held individually and collectively responsible for the ancient wrongdoings of others of their race -- and nobody wants that.
To apply the principle of collective guilt to any group other than those targeted by the woke -- whites, and men, and especially white men -- sounds crazy. And it is crazy, but it is not less crazy for one group than it is for another. The fact that it has been normalized in our public conversation to do this selectively to certain groups shows how far down the woke rabbit hole our whole culture has fallen, and how far we have to go to drag ourselves out of it.
The "social justice" crowd claims that (1) blacks are negatively affected by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow even today, and that (2) "systemic" racism continues to subtly permeate the fabric of our institutions, resulting in currents of racial prejudice that blacks must swim against -- and, therefore (3) policies and principles that discriminate against whites are necessary to "level the playing field". Claim #1 is certainly true, and I believe there is a good deal of truth to #2 -- but, again, does the social justice crowd go from #1 and #2 to #3 by the same logic for every group -- or are they pulling out diverse weights and diverse measures as it suits their political purposes?
If historical class maltreatment justifies present class favoritism, as Kendi claims to believe, then no group in modern history has earned it more than the Jews of Europe. If the Jews of Europe are not lagging economically, and are not overrepresented in Europe's prisons and poorhouses, should we conclude it is because, they have entirely escaped the effects of the brutal victimization that was historically aimed at them for thousands of years, to the point of attempted genocide almost within living memory? Or that all remnants of antisemitism have been completely extinguished from our institutional DNA and collective consciousness? Both claims are preposterous. If the Jews of Europe are doing better than the blacks of America, despite millennia of atrocious oppression and widespread lingering animus, it is only because the Jews of Europe do not act like fools as often as the Blacks of America. If blacks deserve officially sanctioned favoritism to level the playing field, on the argument that past discrimination requires it, then the Jews deserve such favoritism as much or mor. Of course that would only put the Jews farther ahead than they already are -- but, after all, a level playing field is a level playing field. Wouldn't the Jews be doing even better on a level playing field -- where they had never been persecuted and marginalized? So if the woke want to level the playing field, and if the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination, where are the strident demands for reparations and affirmative action for Jews?
It seems that a level playing field is not what the woke really want after all. They are often accused instead of chasing the dream of equity, or equal outcomes, defined as equal average levels of success and failure, in all major measures of quality-of-life (educationally, economically, in criminal justice, etc.), for every demographic group. That would explain why they don't support affirmative action for Jews -- and why the remedy for past discrimination against them isn't current discrimination at all. Some of the more extreme SJWs, such as Kamala Harris, even admit to wanting equal outcomes for all groups. But do they really want that? Do they apply the principle of equal outcomes evenhandedly to different demographic groups, for each basic measure of success and quality of life? Or is this another case of diverse weights and measures?
One key demographic group that is woefully lagging in quality of life in America, and falling behind farther with every year, is the largest minority group in the country comprising 49.5% of the population: men. For example, a man in America is around four times more likely than a woman to be sent to prison for a violent felony. (Should we automatically conclude there could be no other reason for this than sexism in the criminal justice system?) Roughly four fifths of all suicides in America are by men, and the rate of suicide among men increased 28% between the years of 2000 and 2021. American men die of drug overdoses at two to three times the rate of women, and almost 70% of homeless people in America are men. Even among those American men who escape catastrophic events like a felony conviction or a fatal overdose, educational and economic attainment among men is in worrisome decline. Only 44% of the students now enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States are men -- 12% less than the figure for women -- and men are falling rapidly further behind in this key measure of achievement and future success. Among adult men in the US, the percentage who are not working and not looking for work increased 3-fold (from 4% to 12%) between 1960 and 2010 and continues to grow. A tiny handful of the growing cohort of non-working men are independently wealthy -- but the vast majority are either sponging off of their wife or girlfriend, living on handouts from of the state, panhandling and hustling to get by as homeless addicts, or making their living through some form of organized crime. Twelve percent of all adult men in America now fit that description -- roughly the same proportion of men that earn graduate degrees, while two thirds of graduate degrees now go to women. To put that a different way, a man in America today is only half as likely as a woman to get a graduate degree, and is as likely to be an indigent or dependent as he is to get that graduate degree. In summary, men have disproportionately bad outcomes in several major areas of life, and they are falling farther behind in these areas by the year.
If you have been paying attention to the political discourse of the times, you may have heard statistics like these about the plight of men in America. But even if you have heard of these gloomy trends and disparities, you will have rarely if ever heard calls for pro-male affirmative action to remedy them, or seen women blamed for them wholesale as a class -- especially by woke SJW's. If the woke want what they say they want and think what they say they think, reverse discrimination and narratives of class exploitation should be right up their ally. But in the case of men, what happened to equal outcomes? and what happened to class exploitation as the explanation for group differences in outcomes? And if not equal outcomes and class oppression, what the Hell happened to leveling the playing field?
So let's summarize. The woke agenda is to balance the books of historical class oppression -- but only to examine the entries in the entries in those books where white men did something wrong. And they want to level the playing field -- except that they are fine to leave it tilted against groups that are succeeding on their own merit. And they want the same outcomes for every group -- and to impose quotas, regulations, and subsidies to bring about equal outcomes for all groups -- except for a striking lack of interest in any program or policy that would help men catch up to women in major areas of quality-of-life such as education, housing, and mental health. Make sense?
Cui bono?
The woke ideology's ideology does make sense if you watch what they do instead of listening to what they say. What is going on is that the aim of leveling the playing field, and the narrative of class exploitation as the automatic explanation for why some groups outperform others, and even the quest for equal outcomes by group, were all lies in the first place. The pattern of which groups are demonized by the radical left and targeted for group guilt, and which group disparities and trends the woke crusade to fix with affirmative action and reparations, are as clear as the pattern of which crooked scale a drug dealer chooses to weigh out his pot, depending on whether he is buying or selling: it is a matter of cui bono.
The table below shows the political leanings of several major demographic groups in the United States, according to Pew Research polls conducted in 2024 [source1, source2]. The number in the right-hand column is the percentage who described themselves as leaning Democrat, minus the percentage who described themselves as leaning Republican -- so the higher the number, the greater the number of self-described Democrats in the group. The groups appear in the table from top to bottom, ranked by their affinity toward the Democratic party.
Whaddayaknow? If you only looked at the left hand column, you might think this was a chart of the woke victim status hierarchy from top to bottom. There are two salient explanations of what could be going on here. The woke explanation would be that America is institutionally rigged to favor the groups at the bottom, and the Democrats are the ones who are trying to level the playing field -- so of course the groups at the bottom, who don't want the playing field leveled, tend more to vote Republican. If it were remotely true that Democrats wanted to level the playing field, that might be plausible -- but I believe there is a simpler explanation that fits more of the facts. Like Plato's drones buzzing around the bema, the radical left wants to silence and marginalize its political opponents, whose identities fit the pattern in the table above, and part of the plan is to demonize them as historical class oppressors.
As an experiment to test this, you could ask what would happen if Latino men began voting Republican in larger numbers. My theory suggests that, since selectively enforced class-guilt narratives are a propaganda tool of the woke, we would see a sudden wellspring of woke narratives about Latinos as class oppressors. But that experiment has already been run. Over the course of the last several years, Latinos began moving to the right politically source, to the point that almost half voted for Trump in 2024. Now Google "racism against Latinos" on the one hand, and "Latino white supremacist" on the other, and check the dates and sources on the top twenty articles for both searches. It seems that Latinos were once portrayed copiously in woke outlets as historical class victims -- until around 2023 when stories began to emerge of a nefarious white supremacy movement in the Latino community. So, either Latinos began flocking to the Republican party because they shifted toward white supremacy, around the same time left-leaning pundits came to their senses and realized Latinos had never been class victims in the first place, or the woke propaganda machine began to pump out articles about Latino white supremacy to marginalize that group as soon as they began voting more like white men. You make the call.
It is often said that the woke ideology is unforgiving. That is said with good reason: people have been cancelled by the woke left, for example, for years-old drunken social media posts, that were objectively inoffensive in the light of reason, and that were inside the window of acceptability at the time they were made. People have even been cancelled for liking such posts -- and in England some have been arrested. And that is pretty unforgiving. But, on the other hand, senator Roberd Byrd was literally an officer of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth (an Exalted Cyclops, no less!), and he was never cancelled for that. At the time of Byrd's death, he was a powerbroker in the national politics of the Democratic party and a dependable supporter of the Democratic agenda (the latter of which was no change; the Klan has always been dominated by Democrats). At his funeral, Byrd was lovingly eulogized by Democrats including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor Joe Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Representative Nick Rahall, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and former president Bill Clinton. So they aren't that unforgiving after all -- as long as you are squarely on their team. Diverse weights and diverse measures.
There is a second, less subtle reason whites would naturally appear at the bottom of the woke caste hierarchy. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to form a political movement -- not for the purpose of achieving any real aim of social justice, but just to plunder the wealth of an opportunistically selected class of people through the apparatus of the state. Who would be the most natural targets of such a scheme? the same as the natural targets for any other sort of robbery: the ones with the most money. This pattern dates back to the time of Plato, as he noted:
The pattern has repeated itself with the targeting of industrialists, aristocrats, and land-owning farmers (the "bourgeoisie") in the communist revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia, to name a few -- and with the targeting of Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Igbos in Nigeria, and Christians in Lebanon to name a few more. In every case named here, and many others not named, a disproportionately successful demographic group was demonized as a historical exploiter class and targeted for persecution and plunder, ending in tyranny, and in several cases genocide. Some of these groups, without a doubt, had histories of predatory exploitation of their countrymen -- and some of them, without a doubt, did not. But in no case did the persecution and plunder solve the problems of the alleged victim classes that perpetrated them. In each case, on the contrary, it affected a catastrophe for everyone involved. It turns out that the alleged historical exploiter class, even when it actually is exploitative, is almost never the problem at the root of lagging outcomes for less fortunate groups.
The final reason why whites would find their place at the bottom of the woke caste system is the simplest of all. Whether the targets are whites, or Jews, or aristocrats, or industrialists, or Tutsis, or Tamils, or Igbos, or somebody else, when people are hurting and hungry, it is easy to get them to hate others who have more than them, to churn this hatred into an ideology, and then to mill that ideology into a political regime. That is the nature of the game of modern-day tyranny -- from Mugabe to Khomeini, from Lenin to Hitler, and in scores of other cases. Many of the class-exploitation narratives leveraged by tyrannical regimes of the 20th century had truth to them; some had smaller threads of truth, and some were utter fabrications. But no good came of the victim identity politics in any case; it is a murderous plague, plain and simple. There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, remembering who did what to whom with an eye toward preventing it from happening again, and, on the other hand, saying, "...so let's do it back to them." Doing it back to them is the message Xendi expressed with such force and poetry, and his expression of that message -- the toxic, two-faced message of modern tyranny -- is the reason he has been elevated as a spokesman for the woke movement.
Conclusion
It is a natural question why, if wokeness functions largely a pretext for class warfare to demonize white people and redistribute their wealth, so many college-educated whites have nonetheless become infected with the woke mind virus. I will return to this question in detail in a later chapter, but the basic answer is that, in a tragedy of commons orchestrated by the woke censorship-indoctrination complex, it behooves them as individuals to be part of the problem in the large -- something like it behooved Uncle Tom. Doesn't it behoove you, at the very least to play along and keep your mouth shut? Playing along and keeping your mouth shut under tyranny is what Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, in his book The Captive Mind, called ketman. Ketman is a dangerous game: you can only pretend to be something for so long, before you start to become what you pretend to be. Even if you continue to secretly and silently resist being changed by one-sided propaganda pouring out of our major institutions, the young people around you, who only hear one side of the argument voiced by authority figures in public, will presume that side is just and right, and that it is an offense to their community to question or deviate from it. Our cowering in silence, even in silent resistance, explains why our children are getting away from us.
The following chapters will discuss victim identity politics under Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong.
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