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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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I believe the perspective FC is coming from is one in which it is understood that the basest level of human interaction is, as nature, red in tooth and claw. "Might makes right" isn't a moral precept, it's a factual description of the most primitive level of homo sapiens social organization. Government began the first time the strongest, quickest guy in the social unit said "Do what I say or I'll fucking kill you."

There's a fantastic scene in Wildbow's current serial Pale, in which a red-tribe-y combat sorcerer finds himself trapped in a realm in which, as a fundamental Law, violence is not permitted.

Anthem drew a knife.

“Anthem, I don’t advise this,” Miss called out.

“Of course you don’t.”

“It’s Law.”

“It’s your Law. I draw my power from older Law, closer to the Seal. It stands as a basic principle, of competition, violence, and duels. Dig deep enough in most bodies of law and Law, there is always a right to trial by combat. It supercedes.”

Violence is always an option. And as an option, it often sucks, even when you win. Much of hierarchy, and tradition and civilization is just scaffolding to reduce how often we actually resort to direct violence to resolve disputes. "Peace, kindness and love" are nice ideals, but they don't actually offer a useful alternative method of dispute resolution. This issue is made stark when we talk about ideologies like Marxism, whose action plan is essentially:

  1. Tear down all existing social order, traditions, civilization and mores.

  2. ???? (Something magic happens).

  3. Utopia.

When we tear down all that scaffolding, we don't unleash the World Spirit/Planet Ghost/Friendship is Magic. We actually just revert to the oldest, default paradigm, violence. Will to power. Trial by combat. And so Marxists always end up with Stalins and Pol Pots and Raz Simones (notice how it took him less than 24 hours to reinvent the first human civic tech, Monopoly on Violence?)

To the extent that it's a revolutionary ideology, Woke will have the same problems. To the extent that it's not a revolutionary ideology, but just window dressing on liberalism, progressivism can dodge that same problem.

When we tear down all that scaffolding, we don't unleash the World Spirit/Planet Ghost/Friendship is Magic. We actually just revert to the oldest, default paradigm, violence.

Marx and his disciples very explicitly embraced violence as their mechanism for ushering in the new world. Genocide-analogs were not a failure mode, but very much an explicit part of Marxism, and a part carefully retained when even supposedly-"core" ideas like the Proletariat were discarded. It's difficult to determine which current leftists are lying to themselves about this fact, and which are merely lying to everyone else; the persistant refusal to simply abandon the old blood-soaked monster leaves me deeply skeptical of the existence of a third variety. Marx offers an excuse for lining people you don't like up against a wall. If that's not what you're interested in, why is he still relevant?

Marx offers an excuse for lining people you don't like up against a wall.

He really is not all that unique in this. Hell, you don't even need a fancy theoretical justification for doing this - people in the 20th century got the ol' blindfold-and-cigarette treatment all the time just for insulting whoever happened to be in power in their country.

Marx offers intellectuals a justification they can accept in place of base human will-to-power (which they think themselves to have transcended). Same reason Christian theologians twisted themselves into knots justifying war against the infidel; they had both a desire (or need, depending on where one stands) to wage war, a desire/need to not believing themselves to be in violation of moral precepts/self-conceptions which would normally deem such acts as evil.

The ability to do violence is the only truly inalienable right.

What does that even mean?

It means that violence is intrinsic to the human experience, ineradicable (and thus inalienable). All practical rights rely for enforcement on the assumption that the people can enforce them with violence if necessary. It is this principle that underwrites "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another". The basic rights, of self-defense, of self-determination arise from this ancient right. All others are based on it, at some abstracted distance. A right is a principle that is morally correct to defend with violence. What is "revolution", but an appeal to the most ancient and basic of all rights? The Last Argument of Kings is the last argument of every man.

It’s inalienable in the sense that you can’t take it away from someone. As long as I have arms, legs, teeth, I can use violence.

It's not about that. The point is, your right to do violence is the only truly inalienable right you have. No one can take it from you except by killing you.