A big difference between the right and the left is an acknowledgement that there are limits to the malleability of the world around us

The leftist imagines utopia but utopia is impossible whether on Marxist or cultural Marxist grounds, though for different reasons. At root the leftist seems to think that good intentions can reshape the world.

It should be obvious why money redistribution (classical marxism) can't work, but just in case: The function of a market is to solve a very complex communication problem; what is the cost in labor and resources of X? | X ∈ {all goods and services}

This question is critical because the people who make X need to know how much to make, and where to send it, and how much it costs them per unit, and how much to pay their workers, and 1000 other questions.

The complexity, the topology of this data is unimaginable, bigger than the biggest and most complex business logic of the world's most sophisticated technology companies.

The market is above all a communication mechanism, and it sends information about the physical costs of goods through a decentralized network of builders, buyers, sellers in the form of money

This concept is not difficult but most communistic thoughts stem from an inability to make this fundamental distinction: wealth = materials + energy*, money is an abstraction on wealth, a protocol of the market
(Energy ~= labor, human or machine)

Money:weath :: signifier:signified
The cognitive plateau needed to grasp this is the same as to be able to write computer programs is the ability to intuitively grasp the mechanics of the “pointer-pointed” distinction

Money is a pointer

People who don’t understand markets: if I send more packets, I have more bandwidth
(And admittedly when there is a surplus of unused network resources this can be true! But it only works under conditions of high surplus)

Think of a market as an internet of commerce. Before the internet, letters took weeks or months to arrive. Now we talk in seconds. Communists want to shut off the internet of commerce because they think the protocol is unfair

It’s not fair that some servers get more packets. We need to implement a single global load balancer that makes sure every host gets the same number of packets. 100% of traffic will be routed through the load balancer

(if this sounds non sequitur to you, it ought to)

This breaks the internet. It also breaks the market. It’s why communists always starve to death when they get their way. They turn off the mechanism of coordination that enables them to produce goods like food at society scale

Oh but the problem is real global load balancer has never been tried. The problem is that all the old load balancers were actually imposters. My startup has pure intentions and we will distribute the protocol fairly. Disruptive, indeed

The amazing thing about markets is that no one designed them. No one told us how to build them, it wasn’t a technology we discovered. Did anyone tell ants how to build colonies, bees how to build hives?

“Honey is the true protagonist of history” — Bee Nick Land

So that is why Marxism fails, but what about cultural Marxism? Same instinct, same pathology, different failure mode. Regular Marxism wants to redistribute wealth, cultural Marxism wants to redistribute success. Wat mean?

Marxism is anti-Buddhism. Marx looked into the abyss and he saw desire, and he determined that it was the source of all his suffering. The only answer he could think of was to satisfy all desires. Very unwoke there, Karl

The CMs realized that money was just a symbol and that if you multiply all dollars by 1000, it doesn’t make everyone richer. What if instead we could redistribute clout? Surely clout disparity (=social status) is the root cause of our unhappiness?

So instead of trying to take away your money they decided to play Robin Hood with your social standing and your credibility. It is half-working which is why we are here on anonymous reactionary twitter

Unlike wealth, clout is a zero-sum game. It’s impossible to create clout in one place without destroying it somewhere else, because status is transacted in attention and because social standing is relative

If you have a high opinion of everyone you have a high opinion of no one

Cultural Marxism is infinitely antagonistic and can never be satisfied because it’s nominal goal is for everyone to be high status (except for those nasty straight white men god they’re the worst)

That cultural Marxism wants something impossible, that it is powered wholly by resentment, that it is an ugly emotion which also drives its possessors to grow ugly in the body—this is not news

But despite this corrosiveness it is possible to transfer status from one group for another, it just requires capture of the organs of mass media, and it has a transaction cost so high it will bankrupt us all

For every one point of social status you redistribute, you burn four as a sacrifice to entropy and moloch, because you can defame someone, and you can build someone up, but the recipient of clout usually lacks the capacity to grow it organically and subsequently squanders it

The same goes for wealth, honestly, but it’s way more forgiving.

Social status is wealth that you store in your friends and you can move fame but you can’t move friendships

Money:fame :: wealth:friendship
The whole point of money is to be fungible, friendship not so much.
Communism makes you poor because it shuts off wealth generation protocols and social justice makes you isolated because it shuts off friend generation protocols

You doubt me? Spend some time reading social justice tumblrs and twitters. They can’t develop social capital because cooperation (the atom of friendship) requires not sabotaging each other with accusations of privilege so they are all miserable fucks who gobble antidepressants

The right on the other hand accepts and embraces human nature as one of the rules of the game we are playing, and instead of trying to push against it, we want to build institutions that operate within it

Christians know that to realize their heaven will take a fundamental and supernatural transformation of human nature. Marxists of all stripes believe they can do it by being good people with good intentions, and by killing or disenfranchising everyone who disagrees