site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent? I definitely get that feeling based on my observations of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, combined with my observations of Leftist organizations. So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior. (Ok, I admit that this is just a little boo-outgroup. I hate Leftists with a passion and I like the idea that there is something inherent in their thinking which leads to repression.)

That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.

I'm spitballing a bit here, but my guess is that to some extent it's a matter of valuing individualism versus valuing collectivism. Perhaps people, institutions, and governments who value collectivism are more comfortable with the idea of suppressing dissent just as they are more comfortable with the idea of forcibly transferring wealth for some perceived greater good.

"Democratic"-style countries typically operate as "political markets" -- if you can assemble enough people who believe in X Policy to vote for you, you can make X Policy a reality. Of course, there are limiters, like Constitutions -- but even those can be changed if enough voters/representatives buy into such changes. It is a bottom-up model, theoretically.

Communist ideology anti-market. How a country is run is not at the whim of the citizens, but is, instead, top-down: The benevolent leaders determine what is best for the people, and the people comply, because they know that their wise leaders have figured out that the optimal way for everyone to receive equal everything is for Boris to dig ditches (even though Boris is skilled at architcture) and for Ivan to design buildings (even though Ivan is the useless son of a bureaucrat) with as little friction as possible.

What happens if Boris looks at Ivan's bullshit architectural models and petitions that he can do better? He might be correct, and a government that cares might agree and switch the two occupations. However, the government also knows that if Andrei sees Boris dissent from the system and succeed, that maybe Andrei will also dissent from his assigned role so he can be as personally fulfilled as Boris will be. This kind of thing is contagious. And so is the perception that the government of unelected elites who designed this perfect mechanism is flawed and makes mistakes, which undermines the entire theory that this system is really optimized for anything.

It seems there were two separate things going on. One: these regimes generated more internal dissent than non-communist dictatorships. Two: they reacted to existing dissent in more extreme ways than non-communist dictatorships normally did to the same sorts of dissent.

It’s not unique. We absolutely do it here. We actively suppress alternative theories of societal governance, we punish dissent (in western liberal societies, this is run through informal institutions. The government creates a theory called “hostile environment”, and then says you can be sued if you allow that to exist. This results in people not saying certain things in public lest we be unjobbed or kicked out of public spaces for crimethink) just as completely as any communist country ever did. We propagandize very effectively through mass media and through weakening institutions that compete with the government. This is why private schools are often forced to teach similar curricula to public schools and why homeschooling is treated with extreme suspicion. Those are potential seeds of dissent against the state’s views on social and economic issues especially. You can’t have that sort of thing if the state wants control.

All entities with a capacity for action will attempt to modify their environment to be more favorable to them. Communist states. Other states. People. Liberal democracies usually market themselves with free speech as a selling point, but observe them in action and you will notice that over time, they do their best to qualify and restrict that nominally free speech, to penalize undesirable utilizations of speech under some pretense, or to raise up institutions that exercise nominally non-state pressure to suppress certain types of speech.

This isn't unique to communism. Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval or never pretended to place value on free speech.

Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval

I'd say it's a little worse in communism, ironically because communist societies are supposed to earn public approval.

In a strongman dictatorship "I'm strong enough to crush all who oppose me" is something you brag about. In a theocracy you can say "we speak for God; better to crush blasphemy ourselves now than leave it for God to do later". Even in right-wing societies that are nominally run for all their members' benefit, there's no dogma that all their members opinions have value. A good muscle cell helps pick up the heavy thing it was told to and doesn't whine to the brain cells about the weight or about whether it should be picking up something else instead. If the people dissenting aren't actually respected then their dissent isn't as much of a threat, and you don't have to squelch it unless it seriously risks infecting your relatively small selectorate. (In practice right-wing authoritarians do squelch more than they have to, perhaps out of a cautious estimation of the risks here, perhaps because authoritarians are all dicks.)

But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality! Sure, maybe we have to go through a "socialist" stage where we still have a state with leaders, and those leaders are super-empowered so they can design and implement the plans that improve our economy and our people and get us all ready for the final communist end stage and the withering away of the state, but even life under socialism is supposed to just be getting better and better, accruing public approval on top of the approval levels that were necessary to begin the communist project in the first place.

So what do you do when "One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded"? (Communism also jumps in as a serious contributing factor to your problems at this point, via poor understanding of economics and mechanism design.) In @FCfromSSC's fascinating theory this "policy starvation" pushes even liberals to extremism; what must it do to people who began as communists? In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives! The peasants complaining might not really be part of your selectorate, but the ideology that you used as a Schelling point to organize and justify your state says that they matter, and so it's vitally important to you that their complaints don't cast enough blame on your part of the ruling coalition to make you one of the scapegoats for your collective failures. Letting them say what they want is, once your economy exhibits enough problems to make them persuasive, an existential threat to you! You almost have to declaim them as "wreckers" and punish them accordingly.

But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality!

Well then we're just back at "Real communism has never been tried", and we can never judge it.

It's not unique to communism so much as a natural outcome of both the left's and the dissident right's embrace of collectivism. If you shift the focus of judgment from individual responsibility to the collective, the only practicable solution to the free-rider problem will be totalitarianism.

I think no, right-wing authoritarian governments have a similar level of tendency to suppress dissent.

Suharto killed over 500,000 civilians in the 1960s as part of a supposed anti-communist battle.

As for the Soviet Union, it was great at suppressing dissent back during Stalin's time. After it softened, the tendency to suppress dissent reduced to such an extent that by the time the system fell apart, it barely used its massive security forces and military to try to hold itself together by force.

So I think talking about "communism" is kind of a bad way of thinking about it. It allows people to go back to the loose ideas Marx had and try to pretend the dispute is about economic ideas.

In practice Communists are trying to implement Leninism as practiced.

The best way to understand it is Moldbug's Brahmin trying to remake society by force. There's no room in that for a loyal opposition or principled dissent.

The Brahmin particularly don't like being called out for their mistakes by their lessers and will always crack down harshly when they can get away with it.

Not unique, just cruder methods. The chinese, once they got rich enough with capitalism to be able to afford state of the art censorship, no longer have to use concentration camps very much. Neither does Russia, for the same reasons.

The US can afford the very best, an entire ecosystem of disinformation funded by dead rich people's estates being directed by the current fashionable elites from the best schools. CIA cutouts, partisan outlets, VOA penetration. And because it is so sophisticated and decentralized, there is no need for camps, or even to do much int eh way of directing things. The system does its own targeting, see the SPLC.

Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent?

Russia and China had below-average tolerance for dissent before the Communists took power; thus 'persecute anyone who Notices that the sun doesn't shine out of our you-know-where' was seen as a more legitimate tool than it would be in the birthplaces of the Enlightenment.

I wouldn’t be certain about the former. The state response to Bolshevik terrorism and agitation in the late years of Czarism was, when compared to similar policies of Western nations, actually mild on average. The sheer difference between that regime and the Bolsheviks in terms of the number of people who were sentenced to forced labor or internal exile is also rather telling.

I was more referring to the tolerance for peaceful dissent.

You always have to consider the contingent historical circumstances that these nations develop under because revolutions never begin as a clean slate. It happens within a context.

If you take China as a popular example, almost nobody takes into account the fact that China has always had an authoritarian / autocratic streak since its inception. When you combine its unique history with the conditions under Mao Zedong, it doesn’t require a unique ideological causal factor to explain. This is why phrases like “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is so well know in area studies of the region. It’s a syncretism between the two and you can’t divorce one from the other. Just like Zen Buddhism with Capitalism in Japan or Confucianism with Korea.

In the west we suppress dissenting voices as well. The spectrum of acceptable opinion within the MSM for instance is extraordinarily narrow. It isn’t narrow because someone throws you in a concentration camp. It’s narrow for other reasons. We don’t call it censorship, we call it “content moderation.” In the same way the term “propaganda” fell out of favor after the Second World War and has since been referred to as the “public relations industry.”

Bruce Schneier has also done an interesting analysis that turns politics into an analysis of information systems and in particular the structure of information flows, which are what’s important to these systems. One thing he notes is that democracies take the form of what he calls “common political knowledge,” and it details the power that transparency of information has. Authoritarian societies take common political knowledge and turn it into “contested political knowledge,” such that institutional divisions become less well understood and rules are often very fuzzy. This has several security benefits that you often see applied in IR studies, that explains why regimes will almost always favor security over prosperity whenever there is a conflict between the two.

Revolutionary utopian ideologies see dissent as delaying the arrival of the utopia and as a sign of dangerous disloyalty that threatens the strength of the movement. Comrades are supposed to be building towards a singular goal. Arguing about the goal or the methods is a waste of time at best and the start of a fracture that might doom the movement at worst. I don't think Communism is unique in this, it's just the highest profile recent example. See the French Revolution or the Anabaptist German cities for older examples.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

CS Lewis had a point there, I think.

I can't help but notice the irony of a prominent Christian writer deriding "omnipotent moral busybodies", emphasis on the omnipotent.

I can't help but notice the irony of a prominent Christian writer deriding "omnipotent moral busybodies", emphasis on the omnipotent.

To be charitable to Ol' Staples, he probably didn't think of God as "busybodies", given that he's triune at most and doesn't really care about your moral behavior until you die.

There's a brass tacks, Anglo-libertarian bias to a lot of these responses, which I also share. But to hear Catholic Integralists e.g. speak of vigilance in their statecraft as soul craft agenda, I can see them being as dedicated to policing people's hearts and minds in a way on par with communists.

Many understand that all totalitarianisms are the same ultimately. But few understand that all politics are ultimately totalitarian.

The commies just get there faster because their ideology is uniquely prone to the strife that accelerates the logic of power.

Non-communist authoritarian countries usually have shared factors that make them less oppressive. The military junta that rules the Republic of Banana just wants to keep the shipments to the Dole company going. They will be ferociously repressive in certain limited circumstances, but they aren’t interested in regulating everyone’s fence-post heights to the millimeter in search of a better world.

Communist governments usually want to make major changes to the economy and society in a way that requires them to exercise a lot more direct state control.

Everyone wants to stay in power. This includes even democracies. The more dissent against the system there is, the more repressive said system will need to be. Communism just doesn't work very well, causing more dissent and thus needing more repression.

China is a good example. Maoism was totalitarian. Today's China is much less repressive, not because the Communist Party has embraced individual rights in any way, but because they simply don't need it as much.

Since they let go of the strict communism, they went from being as poor as Zimbabwe to being the closest thing the US has to a peer competitor. As a result, people don't generally feel like they'd be better off by overthrowing the system. And ambitious people can throw themselves into making money, rather than the only outlet for ambition being scheming either within or against the Party. There is less need for repression, and therefore there is less repression.

Capitalist-ish dictatorships generally have better economies and more outlets for personal ambition than do traditional communist dictatorships, therefore the latter are going to need more repression just to keep going.

Regimes that use military force for legitimacy could, in theory, let people think and believe what they want, but they would never ever ever let people have access to arms, since that would threaten the legitimacy.

Regimes that use consent of the governed for legitimacy would never ever ever let people think for themselves, since the people may turn against the regime. If communist countries' legitimacy comes from a (perceived) consent of the governed then the regime must control the information and minds to ensure the people continue to perceive the government as legitimate.

That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.

It's this. More to the point, it is a human tendency to think that if someone's wrong and insists on being wrong, it's OK to solve this problem by violence. Individuals are just as prone as collective institutions to think that 'error has no rights'. The normal way to handle heresy used to be violence, the normal way to handle differences between ruling class (ie. factions fighting for kingship etc.) was violence, it was normal for the masses to use violence when they wanted to overthrow the elites and for the elites to repress the masses with violence to keep their power. In practice, premodern societies had to allow a certain leeway simply because they lacked state capacity to handle everything; modern societies have that state capacity.

It actually takes a lot of societal and governmental indoctrination to get societies to the point where people are able to live with their political and religious differences, United States certainly having the capacity to enact such indoctrination. Even then I suspect a lot of it is simple apathy, a tendency to believe that politics has been solved and society stabilized to the degree that there's no real reason to care about anything and we can allow all sorts of weird freaks to have their say. This seems to explain the congruence of the late-90s end-of-history thinking with the post-political-correctness relative cultural tolerance.

Communists, fascists, religious extremists etc., then, are more willing to continue to shut their opponents down, either through state or through individual violence, because they're the ones who actually believe that their cause is just, important, and worth it to restore the use of violence as a general principle of handling differences.

Communists are more repressive because they actually think people can change.

Rightists and Leftists broadly define the outgroup as a minority. It might be defined as an economic class (‘capitalists’, ‘bourgeoisie’) or a social class (out of touch ‘elites’), or it might be defined nationally, religiously or ethnically, but the outgroup is generally a minority of the population.

What do you do when the majority - or at least seemingly a large mass of people - disagrees with you? The right has a built in explanation for this, which is expressed in different language at different places or times, sometimes more or less democratically, but which is essentially ‘some people are stronger, smarter, and more noble than others, we can lead, the rest will follow’ and this is broadly congruent. This leads to repression in far-right regimes being localized. It includes those groups marked out as the ‘true’ unassimilable enemy (see above), and a very small number of others who cause a nuisance, but there is no inherent need for the masses to be brought along provided they don’t threaten the running of the state. If you are not obstructing the running of government and do not belong to a primary outgroup, the reactionary regime generally leaves you alone.

The left lacks this explanation and dichotomy. Certainly, there have been attempts. The rural peasantry are inherently reactionary. The labor aristocracy are happy being kapos. But this all rings a little hollow compared to the fundamental ideological message - after all, unlike the right which is more willing to write off some people as outside the scope of the project, isn’t the core leftist idea that everyone (even sometimes former aristocrats and capitalists) can be reformed? Can become a servant of the revolution? Eventually, you reach a stage where the day-to-day political and social views of the masses need to be monitored, adjusted, and reported on. They are simply more relevant to communism as a political project. Communism cares about what people believe in their hearts in a way that reactionary traditionalist and right wing movements don’t - in part because communists think human nature is malleable in a way the right doesn’t.

This also makes for far more repressive forms of authoritarianism. In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike. Rightist regimes don’t make people go to Church. They might change the curriculum for kids, but they make no effect to convert adults ideologically, they assume they’re either in the small enemy group or already on their side. Communist countries have this problem less (not never, but less).

Going to(thé correct)church is strongly recommended and sometimes mandatory in rightist regimes with a religious component- Vatican II happened to blow up a load bearing pillar of Franco’s regime(and South Vietnam’s, but that’s another, longer, less straightforwards, story), but that didn’t mean public irreligion was acceptable.

The impression I have of fascist vs communist regimes is that unless you're a Jew or equivalent designated enemy category, the fascists will be satisfied with your lack of dissent, mostly you just don't get promoted over Party Members. Communist regimes extort ideological compliance out of the populace and expect you to, well, Signal your Virtue.

I'm sure there are all manner of counter-examoles from both directions, of course. "Regime" isn't a word with positive connotations.

The central examples of fascist regimes we have (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) both made ideological fealty mandatory and were extremely interested in regulating the lives of their subjects.

The distinction there is not fascist vs communism but totalitarian vs authoritarian. Authoritarian regimes are often satisfied with mere obedience, and may actively try to depoliticize the population at large. Authoritarian countries tend to have a weak, withered civil society. Totalitarian countries, by contrast, have a powerful civil society that has been annexed by the state.

Irreligion, no, but nowhere near the level of devotion required by the masses in a communist society. Weekly attendance at church was at maybe 40% at the height of Franco’s rule. A lot of that was residual, even then, the product of long habits.

Fascist Germany and Italy made more serious efforts at societal rituals, mass events, regular rallies but you were still far, far less ‘immersed’ in the ideology of Nazism as a random building inspector in a large town in German in 1937 as you were immersed in the ideology of Stalinism as a building inspector in a large town in Russia was in 1949 (assuming you weren’t a member of either party, which describes most people).

In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike.

Couldn't you describe the end of the Soviet Union roughly the same way, with some adjustments ("it became a market economy through black market in front of Gorbachev and he didn't care to stop it" etc., though also ideological liberalization in the form of glasnost of course), though?

The Soviet Union effectively repressed almost all private enterprise from the early 1930s to the mid 1980s. There were some smugglers and black marketers in 1975 but far fewer than there had been fifty years earlier. It was mostly effective. North Korea has a larger black market but it’s largely tolerated by the state due to extreme poverty as a supplementary income source.

Yes, and the Francoist regime also repressed the liberal forces, until eventually it didn't. (Also, my understanding is that the black market was already quite considerable a force in the Soviet economy in the early 80s.)

No. Because the fall of the Soviet Union threw probably half a billion people into massive poverty. To which almost 40 years later we still haven't totally climbed of.

Half a billion seems to be a massive overstatement. Otherwise I mostly agree.

The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million that got their living standards fall 3 times overnight. During the 90s we had even food insecurity and hunger.

The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million

I checked Google and it seems I was indeed mistaken. I’d add, however, that 2rafa’s argument is still basically correct: the collapse of the ‘90s did not affect all former Soviet satellite states to an equal degree, and the same applies to former Soviet republics.

People in much of Eastern Europe including Poland, Czechia and large parts of East Germany had higher quality of life by the mid-late 1990s than they did under communism. The Baltics saw the same effect with a large collapse in 1991-1993 and then recovery starting by 94-95, with ‘full’ recovery arguably by 1999-2001. Russia had the big crash in 98 and yet even there there was near enough ‘full’ recovery arguably by 2003 latest. And this ignores that in some ways capitalism brought improved product quality and some improvements to life even at the nadir of the economic collapse.

So at worst, after 50-80 years of communism, you’re looking at 7-10 years for a full recovery, which is extremely reasonable.

That is totally not true. The recovery in Balkans was at best 2006-2007. And then the global financial crisis hit. The standard of living took almost 20 years to recover. And arguably for people that are retired it never did.

I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.

As for the Balkans…

  1. Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.

  2. There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.

That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.

More comments

Threw? Or were these people already the opposite of American "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", having enough rubles on their sberkassa accounts, but no goods to spend this money on?

Yes threw the 90s were apocalyptic in Russia and the poorer republics are still below where they were. The Soviet Union wasn't exactly prosperous but it wasn't exactly poverty either and the entire system was set up for their state run economy so much random stuff just stopped working in the 90s in the former USSR.

It did genuinely cause a massive measurable decrease in life expectancy.

There were also related changes of the same nature. A massive drop in fertility, the rise of suicide rates, a massive rise in alcoholism and drug addiction rates, the reappearance of contagious diseases that were considered to be already eliminated etc. The latter was the result of the utter collapse of an already shoddy and underfunded healthcare system, as was the decrease that you mentioned.

You're right, I shouldn't write comments when half-asleep.

Governments and institutions have a general tendency to suppress dissent.

A state fundamentally sells security. You get courts and a capable army; they get your taxes. Supply, demand, solve for the equilibrium. Don’t push too hard, though, because failing to come to an agreement is a lose-lose proposition. Suppressing dissent lets states push that much harder before the revolts start.

It was true for the panem et circenses and for medieval fiefdoms. It’s true for us, too. We Westerners have the advantage of liberalism to take the edge off, but that’s all; we are not immune. When the going gets tough, you’ve seen Americans line up to sacrifice those principles. Just this once. Just for the really bad actors, right?

So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior.

It's not that there's something inherent in Marxism*. Rather, it's that Marxism was built by, and continues to attract, the types of people who already have a preexisting psychological disposition to suppress ideological dissent and view it as threatening. You see the same dynamics (that is, the dynamics of ideological suppression and the fear of wrongthink) play out everywhere from indie video game circles to "serious" leftist political organizations, it's plainly one and the same underlying phenomenon at work.

(* The notion of "communism" in general predates Marxism specifically, but, the Marxist and Marxist-inspired ideological strands are the ones that have been the most evolutionarily successful.)

Don't totalitarian rightist governments have a dim record on free speech too? Yes, but, it's different; it's subtle but different. Flipping things around for a moment, consider how Heidegger in his "Introduction to Metaphysics" lectures, delivered in 1935 (two years after the NSDAP came to power), argued that The Human Being As Such is ontologically grounded in "violence" and "struggle". I view this as an authentic expression of "the rightist mind" (or at least, a particular subtype or strand of it), and I view this as a legitimate difference between leftists and rightists. A committed Marxist simply wouldn't think or say that; even though they have engaged in a great amount of violence themselves in good conscience, and even though they have a certain degree of libidinal investment in the continuation of certain struggles that they claim to want to bring to an end. For all that, they are still not invested in the abstract concept of struggle itself; it doesn't structure their imagination in the same way. And this is part of what makes them leftists in the first place, and ultimately structures all the really-subtle-but-still-clearly-there differences in the ways that leftists and rightists think, talk, organize themselves, etc.

Analogously, rightists will suppress dissent for all sorts of reasons; because it's tactically the best move, because they legitimately believe that the target views will cause great harm if left to proliferate unchecked, because they simply take pleasure in the fear of their enemies; but they won't do it because they love suppressing dissent as such. The mind that loves struggle needs, first and foremost, enemies to struggle against. The mind that loves peace would rather see their enemies simply disappear into the mists of time. Or the mod queue.

I don't think there's much of a connection between the dissent-suppression of communist regimes and the dissent-suppression of leftist wokescolding. The latter has more in common with busybody church folk, and bitchy high-schoolers of whatever gender. That they both use Marxist gobbledygook is...a coincidence? A historical artifact? Orthogonal? One of those.

It's a direct and specific traditional inheritance which can be specifically identified and is so. So much so I would argue there is no actual meaningful difference. Wokescolding is a communism.

I thought wokescolding was invented during the protestant reformation.

I hesitated in including that communism is a liberalism which is a protestantism, but of course.

I suppose one could say further that these techniques are written in the human soul but even if cult behavior and purity spirals are just something we do, the specific modalities are inherited from somewhere.

If you read the captive mind, it talks about how the Soviets used exactly the kind of wokescolding behaviors we are all so familiar with to bring the Polish literary establishment to heel. The government wokescolds were called “dialectitions” and they would lead discussion assuming the role of a facilitator in exactly the same pose anyone who has done a DEI training would instantly recognize only with slightly more iron behind the velvet glove.

Why is it surprising that people who believe they are better and smarter than the market and deserve to control the economy also tend to believe they should command power elsewhere? Socialism without authoritarianism is in theory possible, but the same thought pattern leads to both.

The same way that would be authoritarians inevitably go down the path of socialism and try to boss around the economy. If you think you're smarter and should be in control of everything, why shouldn't that include telling big businesses what they can and can't do, implementing price controls, stealing from them with illegal taxations, and using government to seize stake in private corporations? Socialism and big government is a means to boss around people who would otherwise tell you to fuck off. It should say something that even the right wing dictators (and wannabe dictators) seem to never end up being economically libertarian.

The economy is one of the biggest ways that people make personal choices in their life. What do you trade for, who do you trade it with, what sort of job do you work, how long do you work it, how much can you trade? What sorts of things can you use in your day to day life and who can provide it? It's control over the food you eat and the homes you can live in. You can not have power if you do not exert control over the economy.

Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent?

No.

Not unless you engage in significant somersaults to exclude right wing regimes that engaged in significant censorship of dissent and say that they are therefore left-wing.

Power has a non-unique tendency to suppress dissent, regardless of its style or origin.

Sample size is a bit of an issue here especially since a few of the examples have cultural/historical reasons. Russia has been authoritarian for centuries in large part due to institutional memory of invasions. China has always been somewhat collective because I think the theory indicates necessities of what worked for rice farmers. It could be why they chose communism and communism not being the cause. Russia though I would list as just authoritarian due to history. N Korea would have some of the issues with China but obviously they are even more extreme for Asians. Japan obviously has some of the “harmony” attributes.

I think it's just that dictatorships have a tendency to suppress dissent and communism for a series of reasons has a tendency to become a dictatorship.

Also add the fact that communism has a tendency to cause dissent due to its poor material outcomes. Many authoritarian capitalist governments don't have to suppress very much dissent because the people make money and are at least happy enough not to rebel (ie modern Russia).

communism for a series of reasons has a tendency to become a dictatorship.

Ok, and what do you think those reasons are.

  1. Revolutions tend to cluster around a charismatic leader, this leader then naturally becomes a dictator. This is true of non-communist revolutions as well, think Franco, Pinochet, Mussolini and Hitler, for example.
  2. Communism is a centralized system, there needs to be something that makes all the decisions that would be taken by the distributed system of price signals of capitalism. This something has a lot of power and naturally tends to become and stay a dictatorship.

As for repression, it's inevitable in a dictatorship. If you are unhappy with the work of the dictator the only way to express it is through rebellion and rebellions need to be dealt with with repression. That's just how it goes.

Typically the pattern that you see is that the first dictator is overall a high quality individual that does a decent job governing and sees the need for repression decline over his reign. But every subsequent successor is a lower quality individual that's only good at playing court games, does a worse job governing and needs to apply further repression. So my recommendation to dictators is to make sure it ends with them, but that's easier to do in a capitalistic system than in communism. Communism however still has the AI god emperor option, it just has never been tried.

Communism- by which we mean intentional socialism or Marxist-Leninism- is too unworkable to exist without an authoritarian edifice, and so it only exists where dissent is suppressed.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats