Thread by @rechelon

Never stops being weird that the far left is better at fascistic means like community, tradition, status hierarchies, identity, borders, while the far right is currently better at anarchistic means like decentralized global innovative swarms.

The values/means mismatch is sharp.

I wrote about this at length when talking about antifa. The value of truth replicating centralized forms as activists scramble poorly for alternative social knowledge systems, while the value of power creates decentralized "chaos is a ladder" systems.

c4ss.org/content/50151

Charitably it does seem to point to a kind of optimism:

1) The right's decentralization fetish is empowering them as insurgents but makes them ultimately incapable of locking down the community/tradition/etc they want.

2) The left is perhaps the left precisely BECAUSE they have so much experience with fascistic garbage like community/tradition/identity/status. Familiarity with what the alt-right wants a) satiates those shitty primate urges, b) also breeds the desire to oppose such shit.

3) I've dinged antifa a bit for reproducing the epistemic/institutional forms of the existing social order -- "we'll just create centralized professionalized groups that will post the truth and then it'll win out!" -- but they are at least down the road to decentralization.

We still have to find new ways of structuring technology/culture/society to efficiently process information towards objective truth in a decentralized manner. But the initial seeds of this better world do seem to be developing.

The alt-right is the ultimate expression of amoral post-truth opportunism, but they're like an algae bloom in the midst of an ecological collapse. A symptom of the rapid collapse of a brittle system, but without the evolutionary chops to ever win out in the long run.

It's amusing when the alt-right whines about how they want strong communities with tightly policed boundaries, when this is (sadly) precisely what the radical left provides, what it excels at, what people primarily join it for. These are the whines of people who lost at the game.

It's the nazis shouting about "natural hierarchies" who have lost the hardest at the very robust status hierarchies at play in our society. The whole micro-ethnostate "everyone should get a free community" thing is a lot like incels on about how "everyone should get a free waifu"

So damn much of nazi organizing right now is them very painfully and ineptly trying to recreate the technics of community and organization that the radical left perfected eons ago. Same as incels essentially ineptly trying to recreate what queer subcultures have already built.

Reactionaries keep whacking off with talk about how they're redpilling everyone and gonna suddenly triumph forever against teh blues, and sure they could peel a lot of folks off the left if they could institute a mass preference falsification collapse. But:

This ignores why the left (broadly/socially defined) is hegemonic, why so many people preference-falsify to belong to it:

The left has all the empaths. Great prey for sociopaths. And those that have congealed around said valuable prey have developed the most interesting games.

Remember if you're a high-functioning amoral shitbag looking for challenging competition and novelty the radical left is one of the only games in town. In contrast the alt-right is for unskilled low-end idiot grifters and pays out peanuts.

The alt-right (correctly) recognizes that many in the "left" don't give a shit about the left's ostensible egalitarian values, so they (absurdly) think that those people will―under pressure―suddenly abandon the status hierarchy games of the left to join the losers outside it.

This is, to put it mildly, magical thinking. On par with the idea that everyone will voluntarily abandon capitalism once they realize it has losers. But everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. The game is maintained by everyone in no small part *because* it has losers.

The alt-right is a millennialism that prays for a magical cataclysm where everyone becomes low-functioning sociopaths like them and abandons both empathy and any serious competitive streak. A union of douchebags.

The more "intellectual" reactionaries think that this will happen because information technologies decentralize. When all that does is crack some No Platform walls and cause preference falsification to collapse among idiots and congenital losers.

Actual mass preference falsification collapse where tons of sociopathic folks abandoned the left for reactionary politics would need to provide incentive. Better community/tradition/etc institutions, more novel and competitive status hierarchies, AND a comparable supply of prey.

It's this latter one -- just how valuable of a resource the sincerely caring are for sociopaths -- that is largely going unexamined. Unions of sociopaths pretty much never emerge because non-sociopaths build useful shit, so they fight each other to be positioned to pull from us.