Look at what we've been subjected to - the equivalent of chemotherapy. They attempt to destroy us to separate the person from the idea, and if we die, we die. They're not concerned with our well-being.
Get them fired. Make them social pariahs. Force them to publicly admit the most disturbing aspects of their belief system. Induce psychotic breakdowns, like the post-2016-election 'scream at the sky' gathering.
The alternative is inevitable violence as open conflict results in the deaths of innocents. We've got to start taking scalps publicly - and privately.
Do you know a leftist co-worker who has terrible work ethic? Get them sacked. Talk to HR about their disruptive habit of bringing up politics in the workplace.
Do you know a leftist who cheats on his wife? Ruin his marriage.
Do you know a leftist who drinks too much? Buy him a bottle of whiskey for his birthday.
Do you know a leftist who dodges tax? Drop a dime to the IRS, the state revenue department, the county treasurer.
Do whatever you can legally, and whenever possible privately. Don't let them externalize their failings and blame them on you.
It's far kinder to force them into hard situations where they might have to examine their priorities than to wait until there's nothing left to do but put a hole in their head before they start rounding up Kulaks.
3/4 of your examples are: "If they violate the rules, try to give them a consequence." Except for that drinking part, and most of your intro.
That's an important issue because you've gone from consequences for rule violations to subversively attempting to destroy someone's life. You might as well have said:
Do you know a leftist who's an alcoholic? Send him whiskey.
Do you know a leftist that is a manic depressive? Tell him to kill himself.
Do you know a leftist that had his son recently die? Remind him that it's his fault and he deserves it.
Do you know a leftist that has a crummy car? Cut his break lines.
Or really, you could end each question with "Shoot them" and skip all the subversive elements because you're not trying to do anything in a "kinder" manner when you are encouraging people to "destroy the host".
You've done nothing but mimic their behavior because it hurts you and makes you feel bad. So, you want to hurt them. It isn't going to be an effective tactic because it proves them right. In fact, it guarantees the violence you are pretending you care about avoiding. Yes, they have every right to blame you for their failures... because you caused them. It's not his failure that you cut his breaks. And if he survives and decides to go after you, that really is your fault, and I'll shed nary a tear the result you earned.
Considering Leftists have massive establishment cultural power and capital, proving them 100% right about how right wingers are secretly out to get them, can't be reformed, and must be purged... when it's also your own argument... is going to be a massive self-own and a detriment to the rest of us who are anti-Leftist.
The smart thing to do would be to build parallel institutions and enough emotional and psychological fortitude to deal with their nonsense, so that you no longer have feelings of extreme insecurity... but you'd rather just hurt somebody instead.
If your position was: have them face consequences to their actions, and learn from their behavior, then I'd agree with you. And you half-heatedly argued that point. But that's not what your primary argument is. Instead, you're arguing: hunt them down like animals so I can feel better about what they did to me.
I didn't tell you to cut anyone's brakes. I told you to stop putting up guard rails.
You've fundamentally misunderstood the entire point, because you're suffering from an excess of nobless oblige.
Our enemy is a nihilistic, self-erasing, miserable personification of self-loathing. He escapes this with performative outrage and unearned and undeserved outside support.
These parasites depend on the productive and the positive to perpetuate their purposefully pointless existence. They are overgrown children, and it's long past time we stop playing the adult on their behalf and allow them to suffer the consequences of their actions.
You've fundamentally misunderstood the entire point
It's certainly possible I did because 3/4 of your examples seemed fairly normal, but you intonation and alcohol example seems far more malicious.
because you're suffering from an excess of nobless oblige.
I'm not taking that because it makes me feel good. It doesn't. It is tactically superior. Fundamentally, the ability to forgive and teach independence/self-sufficiency to the benighted victims who are cast out by the Left's eternal purity spiral is the strongest form of subversion to their cause that exists.
There is nothing better than individual self-interest to upset an asserted collective interest. They, themselves, depend on that to make money.
To my original point, forcing them to feel the consequences of their actions is necessary. Going out of your way to hurt them with consequences you deem inevitable or necessary, regardless of whether they were actually going to have them happen naturally, is a whole different thing that validates their entire narrative about power. That is, 'to seize power and use it against everyone enemies before they use it against you'.
They are overgrown children, and it's long past time we stop playing the adult on their behalf and allow them to suffer the consequences of their actions.
I don't disagree with that sentiment at all, but it sounded like you weren't stopping there. It sounded like you were going further to incite and cause consequences that weren't something they had already earned.
Their ideology is a mixture of nihilism and self destruction. You cant kill something hell bent on killing itself with western values. The best you can do is show people what they truly are, scared, pathetic, purposeless deviants. The reason these rats are always so mentally fucked up is because they have no purpose, so they cling to destroying the West, because we are the pinnacle of modern society. The believe they can find purpose if they only destroy what is good around them, sacrilege to tear down our objectivity and rationality. They indulge in drugs and liquor until their futility catches up with them. They are lost, craven, and insecure. Because of this they lash out at those who warned them, those who said that the vices were cheap in comparison to family, community, and faith. There is nothing more fear inducing than the thought you wasted your life because the temporary indulgences always came before, until the indulgences don't quite please the same and your body doesn't quite hold up as well. Imagine the horror of being so wrong you wasted your one chance at true happiness. Imagine how hard you would fight for that to be wrong. Imagine how many other lives you would ruin just to keep being told you are right.
They are lost, craven, and insecure. Because of this they lash out at those who warned them, those who said that the vices were cheap in comparison to family, community, and faith
These people are literally the reason the left got so far.
To answer that question, we need to look at how ideologies have historically died. Shall we look at communism?
Communism, specifically Stalinism, was extremely popular among leftist intellectuals in the 1930s. Figures like H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty were big fans, and continued to be big fans through the Holodomor and the Moscow show trials where hapless old Bolsheviks confessed to being part of terrorist plots, and were executed for their pains.
The first real blow came with the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact. A lot of people were communists, because they believed that this was the way to fight fascism, and when they not only saw their great utopia throw in its lot with the Nazis and order foreign communist parties to both not criticize Nazi Germany and oppose any war efforts against it, they became disillusioned.
Communism managed to win back some of its mystique on the back of Russian soldiers fighting for their homes. A lot of allied propaganda also valorized Stalin and downplayed his crimes, because there was something worse out there. In European countries, a lot of people were impressed by the communist resistance, and as a result joined the communist parties.
After World War II, things quickly turned more sour for the communists. The coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 led a lot of useful idiots and fellow travelers to abandon communism. Never mind that the coup was far less bloody and brutal than how the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia, and the resulting regime was much less repressive. But these types are not known for their great knowledge of history.
In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes against the Party and the military (not against the peasants, obviously). This led to another massive exodus from communists around the world. For years, they had denied that Stalin had done anything wrong, but for the leader of their world movement to admit it, was a devastating blow. It also led to the Hungarian Uprising, which was brutally crushed, which also lost them support. In 1968, the same thing happened in Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek attempted to create 'socialism with a human face', which was also crushed by the Warsaw Pact. Again, many people left.
The deathblow for communism was the fall of the Soviet Union. Which is ironic, because if we had taken communists at their word, then most did not support the Soviet Union as it was a repressive police state. Yet its collapse led to a collapse of the ideology. A lot of them, I think, were just looking for a movement that is anti-Western. Had it been Nazi Germany, you would have seen some of the same people supporting it.
So how did they lose support? A lot of them seem to center around betraying ideals, or at least what the useful idiots thought were communist ideals (Stalin actually admired Hitler, and vice versa). Communists always pretended that communism is true democracy, so when they crush the people, it looks bad for them. The crimes of communist regimes coming to power also did a great deal. But their loss of political power did them in completely.
A lot of communists, like wokists today, I think were just interested in creating revolution and mayhem. Many communists joined the Nazi Party after it took power. Hitler himself remarked that it was much easier to turn a communist into a Nazi than a Social Democrat. It seemed less of an issue what form this authoritarian dictatorship took, than that there was a revolution resulting in an authoritarian dictatorship.
Wokism is not as closely connected to a state as was communism. Unfortunately, this makes them protean in trying to disclaim responsibility for things like the Rotherham grooming scandal, which are unquestionably a result of their ideology.
There is not a silver bullet now, as there was not in the case for communism. I do think that wokeism commitment is far more shallow than was communism. It has no intellectual underpinning whatsoever and is mostly emotional. Unfortunately, emotions can be very powerful.
There is a good chance that wokeism is just a fad and that it will burn itself out. But I have been waiting for Thermidor since 2014, and it keeps getting worse. The fact that it is deeply embedded in all our corrupt institutions will also make it more difficult to dislodge. Basically, you have to imagine that we live under a dictatorship, and that the wokeist wave will only cease when the criminal and corrupt elites lose faith in their project.
They will when it ceases to suit their interests. For example, if wokeism turns on the elites. But for now, it is a great way to divide people and atomize them, making us so much easier to control.
One of the reasons Wokism is so seductive is because it appeals to all the basest human characteristics.
Tribalism is obviously one. You're automatically part of a tribe, and you can easily identify the enemy tribe.
Envy: That other tribe has nice stuff that they were only able to get by exploiting you.
Abdication of personal responsibility: Your situation is not the result of your own decisions and behavior. It's that other tribe, which have created the entire system to hold you back It's their fault, not yours.
Hatred. You should hate that tribe, because they are out to get you.
Self-righteousness: You are right and just to want to harm that tribe. You can burn their stuff down and feel good about it.
Laziness: You don't have to make any more effort to determine the truth, or evaluate ideas based on merit. That stuff is hard. Instead, your truth is your "lived experience," and anyone who disagrees with that is your oppressor.
Narcissism: Your public denouncing, cancelling, shrieking, chanting empty slogans, and other low-effort signaling draws attention to you to let everyone know what a wonderful person you are.
More laziness: After all the white supremacist patriarchal cis-heteronormative capitalist institutions (i.e. Western Civilization) have been completely destroyed, a new utopian society will magically pop up in its place, and everyone will finally be equal, and all your needs will be provided for.
Enlightenment values, however, are more challenging:
You are free to do what you want, but you are accountable for your actions. If you take risks, you may face negative consequences.
Nobody owes you anything. Life isn't fair. You have the right to pursue happiness, but that doesn't mean you'll get it, even if you work really hard.
You'll have to use reason to evaluate ideas and find the truth. You may even experience uncertainty. This can be uncomfortable.
Others are free to express ideas you might not like. You can't just say "you're oppressing me!" and expect that they will be silenced. You might actually have to pit your ideas against their and run the risk of being proven wrong.
No end state. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Whew, that sounds like hard work! Think I'll just go on Twitter and call everybody I don't like a racist.
Wokeism and nihilism go hand in hand. Its a zero sum game. Douglas Murray also brought up the excellent idea that societal fatigue is a major factor in this. Western superiority has all but killed the foundations upon which it's empire was laid. How long can a people keep going when they no longer believe in what made them exceptional?
Then woke propagandists: Media "journalists", "actors", "game devs", "bipastisan" "activist" institutions like ACLU & SPLC, "professors", "teachers" - ensure everybody is fed the woke paranoid delusion of imaginary nazis everywhere.
You can’t just attack an ideology through one vector to try and kill it. Much like how the puritan left got their stranglehold, there needs to be a lengthy, multi-faceted process to beat them into irrelevancy.
There needs to be a legal effort to reign in these massive corporations and shatter their power, changing education to ensure radicals can’t use it as a brainwashing factory and so students are equipped with the tools to identify and effectively argue against people who would argue in bad faith and seek to abuse and manipulate (motte and bailey, gish gallop, appeal to authority, appeal to morality, gaslighting, DARVO etc) and more money spent on mental health because IMO there’s a spread (almost pandemic of sorts) of psychopathy and sociopathy among the puritan left atm. A regular person isn’t equipped to identify, interact and deal with such a person and shouldn’t have to.
I’m sure there are even more issues that need to be addressed, but these are the ones I can identify at the moment.
You build a pocket far better than their pocket. Then they either want to get in, as long as you protect your bubble they will assault the walls until the corpses fill in the moat.
With facts. Which is precisely why these ideologies targeted academia. They control the accepted facts, and they can discredit and defund those who dare question their newly defined orthodoxy.
To put it simply, Leftism is wholly defined by your usurpation of another's will, forever. That is not an ideology. There are no principles. There is no consistent value set, nor presupposition. Hence: you can't fight it like one. You can't counter an argument that has no set premise, and who's only conclusion is: "I'm right and you are wrong." Hence, there is no point.
The Left relies on the acquisition of power from a source that already exists because they struggle terribly to do anything to build power from scratch. This is our fundamental advantage, and why genuine Liberalism & Individualism is the only answer to Leftism. All other approaches will fail, and will shatter with concerted pressure by Leftism.
Firstly, you must destroy the mechanisms for central power and authority. Central power & authority is the fuel that Leftism seeks out, perpetually. It will never rest, and will always find a way in, because it will define a way in for itself. No central authority can resist it. Instead, all power and authority must be set against itself, and it must always have it's scope violently limited.
Secondly, you must destroy the insecurity that creates a need for dependency in a central authority. They must take responsibility for themselves, and be able to succeed on their own individual merit, as they see fit. Bio-Leninists must not be allowed to remain bio-Leninist. They must become productive and successful for themselves, and cherish their individual success, responsibility, and gain that they acquired with little help. This denies the central authority's protection racket of the slaves it needs to run it's armies and bureaucracy.
Liberalism addresses the former. Individualism addresses the latter. All other efforts will fail given time.
All other forms of authoritarian structures are able to be subverted and co-opted by concerted effort, or are simply shattered by concerted pressure. When co-opted, the leftists wear the previous structure as a skin suit until their parasitism and vampirism destroys the society. When shattered, the previous institutions are broken and scattered, but their protection rackets have formed their own bio-Leninist failures which will now be exploited for control by the new Leftist regime.
Authoritarianism shatters from pressure, where Liberalism bends. Prescribed social ordering is immediately co-opted, where individualism's decentralized social ordering is impossible to co-opt, to hard to predict, and to quick to adapt. When you add Republicanism to your political mix, you create a massive defense in depth that makes it neigh-on-impossible to properly conquer the society through Leftism.
Use Republicanism to create competing hierarchies of power, on competing levels. Use Liberalism to set the power structures against themselves. Use individualism to disincentive political power as a legitimate means of success. A series of inter-connected meritocratic hierarchies will develop, and the chance for a Leftist take over in a single life-time is pretty much nill.
"But Gizortnik, that sounds like your just advocating for Americanism. You'd argue that under FDR we were a Socialist country, and we've got Leftists running amok!"
By the Founding Father's own accounts, Americanist principles were hard to instantiate. Moral authoritarianism was absolutely normal in American society, and violent honor cultures are why "Fighting Words" exception exists in the law. Moral authoritarianism is a way in for Leftist domination. So were efforts at Racialism, because Racialism has always been a progressive intellectual pursuit. You can't just set one tier of government against itself, you have to set all of them against each other. You have to attack all forms of authoritarianism, because all forms of authoritarianism are going to be co-opted. Protectionism must die.
This is one of the reasons the Catholics are utterly back-asswards on thinking that a Catholic moral ordering institution could protect the west from Social Justice. Bullshit. Catholicism invented the god damned concept. Racial protectionism has lead to the same shit. Social Justice, National Justice, Racial Justice, Economic Justice, Environmental Justice, Religious Justice, it's all the same fucking scam. Some arbiter of "justice" declares that that they will bring society into the correct ordering if you just give them the power to do so. No. Kill it with fire immediately. Reject justice entirely.
Authoritarianism must be castrated. Protectionism must die. Justice must be invalidated. Equality must be abolished.
Nothing is just, nothing is equal, stop asking for daddy authority to buy it for you. You build what you want to see, or you fail. We will all, of course, be willing to help you, so long as you don't intend to build it on top of us.
That is how you defeat Leftism, you deny it it's food until it recedes. Then you empower the individual to never go looking for it.
Yeah, and you have to try and break all of those down. Your fundamental question is really: "how do you break centralized corporate power?"
You'll have to fundamentally break down all corporate protections and limited liability organizations. All of them are effectively extensions of government power. You'll have to stop disincentivizing private ownership and private businesses, along with ending disincentives against entrepreneurship and sole proprietorship. In fact, sole proprietorships should be the primary form of business, not corporations.
We live in a Socialist system already. Corporatism is the end result of any practical application of Socialism, and our entire monetary Keynsian monetary system is built on socialist economics. You can't even just burn the cathedral down, you have to literal deconstruct it via disassembly. Tax laws, tax subsidies, court systems, whole arbitration processes, full agencies, entire bureaucratic networks, whole credential systems, etc, etc.
I wonder if a good way to do so would be to deconstruct it in the same way they've done quite successfully to liberalism.
The main issue with post-modernism, iirc, is that it inevitably arcs towards nihilism because all it's capable of is pulling a thing apart. The only thing that's saved the critical theory types from this fate is that they resolutely refuse to subject their own ideology to the rigorous examination they impose upon that of other people.
You destroy the host.
Look at what we've been subjected to - the equivalent of chemotherapy. They attempt to destroy us to separate the person from the idea, and if we die, we die. They're not concerned with our well-being.
Get them fired. Make them social pariahs. Force them to publicly admit the most disturbing aspects of their belief system. Induce psychotic breakdowns, like the post-2016-election 'scream at the sky' gathering.
The alternative is inevitable violence as open conflict results in the deaths of innocents. We've got to start taking scalps publicly - and privately.
Do you know a leftist co-worker who has terrible work ethic? Get them sacked. Talk to HR about their disruptive habit of bringing up politics in the workplace.
Do you know a leftist who cheats on his wife? Ruin his marriage.
Do you know a leftist who drinks too much? Buy him a bottle of whiskey for his birthday.
Do you know a leftist who dodges tax? Drop a dime to the IRS, the state revenue department, the county treasurer.
Do whatever you can legally, and whenever possible privately. Don't let them externalize their failings and blame them on you.
It's far kinder to force them into hard situations where they might have to examine their priorities than to wait until there's nothing left to do but put a hole in their head before they start rounding up Kulaks.
Based af my dude
Humans can have a genetic-memetic symbiosis or a genetic-memetic parasitism.
Socialism is the memetic equivalent of t. gondii.
3/4 of your examples are: "If they violate the rules, try to give them a consequence." Except for that drinking part, and most of your intro.
That's an important issue because you've gone from consequences for rule violations to subversively attempting to destroy someone's life. You might as well have said:
Do you know a leftist who's an alcoholic? Send him whiskey.
Do you know a leftist that is a manic depressive? Tell him to kill himself.
Do you know a leftist that had his son recently die? Remind him that it's his fault and he deserves it.
Do you know a leftist that has a crummy car? Cut his break lines.
Or really, you could end each question with "Shoot them" and skip all the subversive elements because you're not trying to do anything in a "kinder" manner when you are encouraging people to "destroy the host".
You've done nothing but mimic their behavior because it hurts you and makes you feel bad. So, you want to hurt them. It isn't going to be an effective tactic because it proves them right. In fact, it guarantees the violence you are pretending you care about avoiding. Yes, they have every right to blame you for their failures... because you caused them. It's not his failure that you cut his breaks. And if he survives and decides to go after you, that really is your fault, and I'll shed nary a tear the result you earned.
Considering Leftists have massive establishment cultural power and capital, proving them 100% right about how right wingers are secretly out to get them, can't be reformed, and must be purged... when it's also your own argument... is going to be a massive self-own and a detriment to the rest of us who are anti-Leftist.
The smart thing to do would be to build parallel institutions and enough emotional and psychological fortitude to deal with their nonsense, so that you no longer have feelings of extreme insecurity... but you'd rather just hurt somebody instead.
If your position was: have them face consequences to their actions, and learn from their behavior, then I'd agree with you. And you half-heatedly argued that point. But that's not what your primary argument is. Instead, you're arguing: hunt them down like animals so I can feel better about what they did to me.
I didn't tell you to cut anyone's brakes. I told you to stop putting up guard rails.
You've fundamentally misunderstood the entire point, because you're suffering from an excess of nobless oblige.
Our enemy is a nihilistic, self-erasing, miserable personification of self-loathing. He escapes this with performative outrage and unearned and undeserved outside support.
These parasites depend on the productive and the positive to perpetuate their purposefully pointless existence. They are overgrown children, and it's long past time we stop playing the adult on their behalf and allow them to suffer the consequences of their actions.
It's certainly possible I did because 3/4 of your examples seemed fairly normal, but you intonation and alcohol example seems far more malicious.
I'm not taking that because it makes me feel good. It doesn't. It is tactically superior. Fundamentally, the ability to forgive and teach independence/self-sufficiency to the benighted victims who are cast out by the Left's eternal purity spiral is the strongest form of subversion to their cause that exists.
There is nothing better than individual self-interest to upset an asserted collective interest. They, themselves, depend on that to make money.
To my original point, forcing them to feel the consequences of their actions is necessary. Going out of your way to hurt them with consequences you deem inevitable or necessary, regardless of whether they were actually going to have them happen naturally, is a whole different thing that validates their entire narrative about power. That is, 'to seize power and use it against everyone enemies before they use it against you'.
I don't disagree with that sentiment at all, but it sounded like you weren't stopping there. It sounded like you were going further to incite and cause consequences that weren't something they had already earned.
If I had used 'smokes too much weed' and 'buy him a bong' instead, I'm guessing you wouldn't have reacted so strongly.
Their ideology is a mixture of nihilism and self destruction. You cant kill something hell bent on killing itself with western values. The best you can do is show people what they truly are, scared, pathetic, purposeless deviants. The reason these rats are always so mentally fucked up is because they have no purpose, so they cling to destroying the West, because we are the pinnacle of modern society. The believe they can find purpose if they only destroy what is good around them, sacrilege to tear down our objectivity and rationality. They indulge in drugs and liquor until their futility catches up with them. They are lost, craven, and insecure. Because of this they lash out at those who warned them, those who said that the vices were cheap in comparison to family, community, and faith. There is nothing more fear inducing than the thought you wasted your life because the temporary indulgences always came before, until the indulgences don't quite please the same and your body doesn't quite hold up as well. Imagine the horror of being so wrong you wasted your one chance at true happiness. Imagine how hard you would fight for that to be wrong. Imagine how many other lives you would ruin just to keep being told you are right.
These people are literally the reason the left got so far.
To answer that question, we need to look at how ideologies have historically died. Shall we look at communism?
Communism, specifically Stalinism, was extremely popular among leftist intellectuals in the 1930s. Figures like H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty were big fans, and continued to be big fans through the Holodomor and the Moscow show trials where hapless old Bolsheviks confessed to being part of terrorist plots, and were executed for their pains.
The first real blow came with the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact. A lot of people were communists, because they believed that this was the way to fight fascism, and when they not only saw their great utopia throw in its lot with the Nazis and order foreign communist parties to both not criticize Nazi Germany and oppose any war efforts against it, they became disillusioned.
Communism managed to win back some of its mystique on the back of Russian soldiers fighting for their homes. A lot of allied propaganda also valorized Stalin and downplayed his crimes, because there was something worse out there. In European countries, a lot of people were impressed by the communist resistance, and as a result joined the communist parties.
After World War II, things quickly turned more sour for the communists. The coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 led a lot of useful idiots and fellow travelers to abandon communism. Never mind that the coup was far less bloody and brutal than how the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia, and the resulting regime was much less repressive. But these types are not known for their great knowledge of history.
In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes against the Party and the military (not against the peasants, obviously). This led to another massive exodus from communists around the world. For years, they had denied that Stalin had done anything wrong, but for the leader of their world movement to admit it, was a devastating blow. It also led to the Hungarian Uprising, which was brutally crushed, which also lost them support. In 1968, the same thing happened in Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek attempted to create 'socialism with a human face', which was also crushed by the Warsaw Pact. Again, many people left.
The deathblow for communism was the fall of the Soviet Union. Which is ironic, because if we had taken communists at their word, then most did not support the Soviet Union as it was a repressive police state. Yet its collapse led to a collapse of the ideology. A lot of them, I think, were just looking for a movement that is anti-Western. Had it been Nazi Germany, you would have seen some of the same people supporting it.
So how did they lose support? A lot of them seem to center around betraying ideals, or at least what the useful idiots thought were communist ideals (Stalin actually admired Hitler, and vice versa). Communists always pretended that communism is true democracy, so when they crush the people, it looks bad for them. The crimes of communist regimes coming to power also did a great deal. But their loss of political power did them in completely.
A lot of communists, like wokists today, I think were just interested in creating revolution and mayhem. Many communists joined the Nazi Party after it took power. Hitler himself remarked that it was much easier to turn a communist into a Nazi than a Social Democrat. It seemed less of an issue what form this authoritarian dictatorship took, than that there was a revolution resulting in an authoritarian dictatorship.
Wokism is not as closely connected to a state as was communism. Unfortunately, this makes them protean in trying to disclaim responsibility for things like the Rotherham grooming scandal, which are unquestionably a result of their ideology.
There is not a silver bullet now, as there was not in the case for communism. I do think that wokeism commitment is far more shallow than was communism. It has no intellectual underpinning whatsoever and is mostly emotional. Unfortunately, emotions can be very powerful.
There is a good chance that wokeism is just a fad and that it will burn itself out. But I have been waiting for Thermidor since 2014, and it keeps getting worse. The fact that it is deeply embedded in all our corrupt institutions will also make it more difficult to dislodge. Basically, you have to imagine that we live under a dictatorship, and that the wokeist wave will only cease when the criminal and corrupt elites lose faith in their project.
They will when it ceases to suit their interests. For example, if wokeism turns on the elites. But for now, it is a great way to divide people and atomize them, making us so much easier to control.
One of the reasons Wokism is so seductive is because it appeals to all the basest human characteristics.
Tribalism is obviously one. You're automatically part of a tribe, and you can easily identify the enemy tribe.
Envy: That other tribe has nice stuff that they were only able to get by exploiting you.
Abdication of personal responsibility: Your situation is not the result of your own decisions and behavior. It's that other tribe, which have created the entire system to hold you back It's their fault, not yours.
Hatred. You should hate that tribe, because they are out to get you.
Self-righteousness: You are right and just to want to harm that tribe. You can burn their stuff down and feel good about it.
Laziness: You don't have to make any more effort to determine the truth, or evaluate ideas based on merit. That stuff is hard. Instead, your truth is your "lived experience," and anyone who disagrees with that is your oppressor.
Narcissism: Your public denouncing, cancelling, shrieking, chanting empty slogans, and other low-effort signaling draws attention to you to let everyone know what a wonderful person you are.
More laziness: After all the white supremacist patriarchal cis-heteronormative capitalist institutions (i.e. Western Civilization) have been completely destroyed, a new utopian society will magically pop up in its place, and everyone will finally be equal, and all your needs will be provided for.
Enlightenment values, however, are more challenging:
You are free to do what you want, but you are accountable for your actions. If you take risks, you may face negative consequences.
Nobody owes you anything. Life isn't fair. You have the right to pursue happiness, but that doesn't mean you'll get it, even if you work really hard.
You'll have to use reason to evaluate ideas and find the truth. You may even experience uncertainty. This can be uncomfortable.
Others are free to express ideas you might not like. You can't just say "you're oppressing me!" and expect that they will be silenced. You might actually have to pit your ideas against their and run the risk of being proven wrong.
No end state. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Whew, that sounds like hard work! Think I'll just go on Twitter and call everybody I don't like a racist.
Wokeism and nihilism go hand in hand. Its a zero sum game. Douglas Murray also brought up the excellent idea that societal fatigue is a major factor in this. Western superiority has all but killed the foundations upon which it's empire was laid. How long can a people keep going when they no longer believe in what made them exceptional?
Wokeism flourishes under woke power: woke governors, mayors, DAs, cops, feds, bureaucrats - ensure woke criminals enjoy anarcho-tyrrany.
Then woke propagandists: Media "journalists", "actors", "game devs", "bipastisan" "activist" institutions like ACLU & SPLC, "professors", "teachers" - ensure everybody is fed the woke paranoid delusion of imaginary nazis everywhere.
The first step is to fire them all.
You can’t just attack an ideology through one vector to try and kill it. Much like how the puritan left got their stranglehold, there needs to be a lengthy, multi-faceted process to beat them into irrelevancy.
There needs to be a legal effort to reign in these massive corporations and shatter their power, changing education to ensure radicals can’t use it as a brainwashing factory and so students are equipped with the tools to identify and effectively argue against people who would argue in bad faith and seek to abuse and manipulate (motte and bailey, gish gallop, appeal to authority, appeal to morality, gaslighting, DARVO etc) and more money spent on mental health because IMO there’s a spread (almost pandemic of sorts) of psychopathy and sociopathy among the puritan left atm. A regular person isn’t equipped to identify, interact and deal with such a person and shouldn’t have to.
I’m sure there are even more issues that need to be addressed, but these are the ones I can identify at the moment.
You build a pocket far better than their pocket. Then they either want to get in, as long as you protect your bubble they will assault the walls until the corpses fill in the moat.
With facts. Which is precisely why these ideologies targeted academia. They control the accepted facts, and they can discredit and defund those who dare question their newly defined orthodoxy.
Control the mind, control society.
You don't kill Leftist ideology because that's not how Leftism works.
Leftism is based solely on War as a principle.
To put it simply, Leftism is wholly defined by your usurpation of another's will, forever. That is not an ideology. There are no principles. There is no consistent value set, nor presupposition. Hence: you can't fight it like one. You can't counter an argument that has no set premise, and who's only conclusion is: "I'm right and you are wrong." Hence, there is no point.
The Left relies on the acquisition of power from a source that already exists because they struggle terribly to do anything to build power from scratch. This is our fundamental advantage, and why genuine Liberalism & Individualism is the only answer to Leftism. All other approaches will fail, and will shatter with concerted pressure by Leftism.
Firstly, you must destroy the mechanisms for central power and authority. Central power & authority is the fuel that Leftism seeks out, perpetually. It will never rest, and will always find a way in, because it will define a way in for itself. No central authority can resist it. Instead, all power and authority must be set against itself, and it must always have it's scope violently limited.
Secondly, you must destroy the insecurity that creates a need for dependency in a central authority. They must take responsibility for themselves, and be able to succeed on their own individual merit, as they see fit. Bio-Leninists must not be allowed to remain bio-Leninist. They must become productive and successful for themselves, and cherish their individual success, responsibility, and gain that they acquired with little help. This denies the central authority's protection racket of the slaves it needs to run it's armies and bureaucracy.
Liberalism addresses the former. Individualism addresses the latter. All other efforts will fail given time.
All other forms of authoritarian structures are able to be subverted and co-opted by concerted effort, or are simply shattered by concerted pressure. When co-opted, the leftists wear the previous structure as a skin suit until their parasitism and vampirism destroys the society. When shattered, the previous institutions are broken and scattered, but their protection rackets have formed their own bio-Leninist failures which will now be exploited for control by the new Leftist regime.
Authoritarianism shatters from pressure, where Liberalism bends. Prescribed social ordering is immediately co-opted, where individualism's decentralized social ordering is impossible to co-opt, to hard to predict, and to quick to adapt. When you add Republicanism to your political mix, you create a massive defense in depth that makes it neigh-on-impossible to properly conquer the society through Leftism.
Use Republicanism to create competing hierarchies of power, on competing levels. Use Liberalism to set the power structures against themselves. Use individualism to disincentive political power as a legitimate means of success. A series of inter-connected meritocratic hierarchies will develop, and the chance for a Leftist take over in a single life-time is pretty much nill.
"But Gizortnik, that sounds like your just advocating for Americanism. You'd argue that under FDR we were a Socialist country, and we've got Leftists running amok!"
By the Founding Father's own accounts, Americanist principles were hard to instantiate. Moral authoritarianism was absolutely normal in American society, and violent honor cultures are why "Fighting Words" exception exists in the law. Moral authoritarianism is a way in for Leftist domination. So were efforts at Racialism, because Racialism has always been a progressive intellectual pursuit. You can't just set one tier of government against itself, you have to set all of them against each other. You have to attack all forms of authoritarianism, because all forms of authoritarianism are going to be co-opted. Protectionism must die.
This is one of the reasons the Catholics are utterly back-asswards on thinking that a Catholic moral ordering institution could protect the west from Social Justice. Bullshit. Catholicism invented the god damned concept. Racial protectionism has lead to the same shit. Social Justice, National Justice, Racial Justice, Economic Justice, Environmental Justice, Religious Justice, it's all the same fucking scam. Some arbiter of "justice" declares that that they will bring society into the correct ordering if you just give them the power to do so. No. Kill it with fire immediately. Reject justice entirely.
Authoritarianism must be castrated. Protectionism must die. Justice must be invalidated. Equality must be abolished.
Nothing is just, nothing is equal, stop asking for daddy authority to buy it for you. You build what you want to see, or you fail. We will all, of course, be willing to help you, so long as you don't intend to build it on top of us.
That is how you defeat Leftism, you deny it it's food until it recedes. Then you empower the individual to never go looking for it.
Wait, how do you do that.
The internet is currently a practical centrally-controlled monopoly with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Clpudflare, Paypal/Mastercard strangling everyone.
Yeah, and you have to try and break all of those down. Your fundamental question is really: "how do you break centralized corporate power?"
You'll have to fundamentally break down all corporate protections and limited liability organizations. All of them are effectively extensions of government power. You'll have to stop disincentivizing private ownership and private businesses, along with ending disincentives against entrepreneurship and sole proprietorship. In fact, sole proprietorships should be the primary form of business, not corporations.
We live in a Socialist system already. Corporatism is the end result of any practical application of Socialism, and our entire monetary Keynsian monetary system is built on socialist economics. You can't even just burn the cathedral down, you have to literal deconstruct it via disassembly. Tax laws, tax subsidies, court systems, whole arbitration processes, full agencies, entire bureaucratic networks, whole credential systems, etc, etc.
I wonder if a good way to do so would be to deconstruct it in the same way they've done quite successfully to liberalism.
The main issue with post-modernism, iirc, is that it inevitably arcs towards nihilism because all it's capable of is pulling a thing apart. The only thing that's saved the critical theory types from this fate is that they resolutely refuse to subject their own ideology to the rigorous examination they impose upon that of other people.
Strive to be as truthful as humanly possible. Lies die in the light of truth.
And I think it's been going on longer than "decades".