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Notes -
Shame comes with fiduciary responsibilities: it is the interest paid on a positive balance of social credit.
When the faction[1] stewarding the account runs out of social credit, or the social interest rate drops to 0 or (worse) goes negative, shame disappears. Wrong but aesthetically pleasing policies decrease this balance, like rioting, defending illegal migration, and hysteria over an uncommon cold- the trick is to limit your imposition of shame to the interest only so you don't run out of it. A virtuous people can do this, but being too focused on your social credit balance compromises you in other ways.
A minimum level of shame (and interest) is required to enforce message discipline. Once you stop having that, you stop being able to generate interest entirely, and the opportunity for rival investors appears to take over stewardship of the account- once the interest rate rises, they're locked in until they overspend or the bottom falls out of the social economy again.
This is now what has happened- the right overspent hard from 2016-2024, and now the left is hunting the right's institutions of social capital generation (academia, etc.)
I disagree. If the left/classical liberals can deliver on its promises- that fixing the abuses of right-wing/progressive privilege will make things better- then the left will start generating social capital [and thus shame] for itself and transition back into being right-wing. The 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win' cycle typifies this- social credit holders always eventually go bankrupt, and this happens slowly, then suddenly.
Elon Musk is a liberal (definitionally, but not popularly, left-wing), so he doesn't believe the right should be allowed to accrue any social credit because when they do, the typical abuses happen. Left-wing thought has the opposite problem in that, when the economy switches from a positive-sum to a zero-sum mode, it failed to store up social credit and gives way to whoever the right-wing is at the time; this is why classical liberalism ultimately died in the '80s, and part of why it has returned now.
[1] Right-wing thought is defined by the desire to keep a balance higher than what market conditions otherwise dictate; or in other words, the dominant faction that's seeking to increase and wield a balance in this way is by definition right-wing. (This is currently Progressives- the people who call themselves left-wing- so it's very confusing.) This is also, by definition, why the left "always wins" (Progressives simply believe that calling themselves "the left" means they should always win, but winning ain't a left-wing idea and "correct" isn't a real political identity.)
Um, did you perhaps interchange the words "left" and "right" in this sentence? Because if you didn't I'm not sure how this makes sense.
Also, I'd say that the period of overspending social credit is more like 2015-2021 or -2022 (the extreme measures taken against Trump and Trumpists started back in 2015 IIRC; the Fair Game order on Musk was 2022-4, and was an utter outrage, but that was naked governmental force, not weaponisation of social credit).
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