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Notes -
Cthulhu always swims right.
A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.
Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.
Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.
This is, I fear, a great misunderstanding.
First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.
Here we are talking about a few measly decades. Barely a century. It would have been similarly easy to say that right wing victory is inevitable during the Thermidorian Reaction. And yet Moldbug's point is that even that was ultimately advancing the leftist agenda. Napoleon the monarch did more to liquidate monarchy in Europe than anybody.
And yet, even this view is itself a narrow trend in the whole of history.
Spengler, Vico and all the theorists of cyclical history whom Moldbug is very obviously cribbing from, would instead argue that history repeats itself. That it has seasons. That right wing victories are the stuff of certain periods, whilst left wing victories are the stuff of others. Both causing each other.
And this brings me to my second point, which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.
The man has an explicit definition he goes by in this context: the left-right axis is that of nomos, of either increasing or decreasing the formalism and bondedness of a society.
This is what leads him to state the aphorism about the w-force. That definition of the axis and the oft remarked upon shape of history as short periods of creation followed by long periods of decay. To Moldbug, the "left" is simply the party of decay. You'll notice that when he means "democrat" he usually uses the word "blue" instead.
This leads to unintuitive conclusions that blow up direct comparison between this contemporary lament and his broader historical point.
For instance, FDR, which is very obviously left wing (or rather, blue), is viewed by Moldbug in this context as a right wing figure. He is after all, a monarch, who reshaped and reconstituted the US government after a period of decay. An American Napoleon.
Moldbug's point here is really better stated formally by Nick Land and the Deleuzian concept of reterritorialization: that the forces of history (capital) work through destructive transformation cycles that will take a concept and its connections (territory) and destroy those connections (deterritorialization) and then take that now meaningless disconnected concept and reconnect and recontextualize it in a way that makes it mean something entirely different (reterritorialization).
Cthulhu swims left means that the process of recontextualization actually helps to destroy the original meaning of the concept. That Reaction in the simple sense or a want to return to a past state of things is a vain process because doing so only helps to destroy the past.
First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.
And second, while MM may want to relitigate enlightenment ideas broadly, in this case he uses examples that are a few decades apart:
On this part I agree. MM does that obnoxious thing SJW's did by redefining commonly used words to suit his political purposes. Like the left redefining "racism", MM redefines "left" to be basically "everything bad":
It's a big sneer at the outgroup. MM dislikes where society has headed, so he puts everything he hates in a big bucket, calls it the "left" and says it always wins. It's pure gerrymandering.
If this is an accurate gloss of Moldbug's perspective, "Cthulhu always swims left" doesn't sound merely trite (according to the stipulative defintion of "left" that Moldbug's using) but actually tautological. If you believe that things used to be good, but now they're bad, it logically follows that they became bad in the interim. Like, duh.
If you use the common definition of "left", as most people implicitly do when using the phrase "Cthulhu always swims left", then the phrase is simply wrong for the reasons I described in the original post.
On the other hand if you accept MM's vague redefinition of "left", then "Cthulhu always swims left" is basically tautological as you say, but you're smuggling in the ideology with the silly definition.
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