To understand leftism, you just have to understand its fundamental animating goal, which it turns out is very straightforward: to dissolve us all into interchangeable human gray goo
Once you've got that in place, everything else follows from it
The mind naturally recoils from this goal, because of how unnatural it is. It throws up all kinds of rationalizations, "No, it's about protecting those who can't protect themselves"
Yeah, you're making my point. The value of harm reduction, continued to its end goal, is gray goo
This basic principle immediately exposes the flaw at the core of Marxism, which the modern liberal "right" treats as Ur-Leftism, because the "liberal right" is itself a ridiculous contradiction, doomed by its inability to reach back *beyond* Communism
This flaw being its central tenet, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
Yeah, this *insists* that humanity isn't interchangeable, that the gray goo end-goal is impossible, it requires some or many to have more abilities than needs: i.e. hierarchy
That very basic break in logic is game over for Marxism. But the continued drive of the left to provide a new replacement for its obvious logical and natural failure is proof that the urge of leftism runs much deeper than *economic* equality, than the gray goo of "equal wealth"
Since the leftist urge to the gray goo state is so profoundly abhorrent to life, whenever a mirror is held up to its unnatural desires, it collapses into a state of frenzied, hysterical paranoia
Which you might recognize as "Every single day of the last five years of politics"
Because the urge remains. It is a fundamental piece of the human social psyche
Marx didn't conjure this up out of nowhere, and neither will it just go away because his *economic* gray-gooism collapsed under its own contradictions. It will always seek a new outlet
The coal that feeds the engine of this leftist urge is resentment, or ressentiment, and it was supposed to come from the working class:
But then the working class, despite some remaining grievances, turned out pretty fine, materially. So it had to mine its coal from a new source
The new coal comes not from the working class, but ironically from the *educated* class, the traditional Marxist enemy, now turned against the working class
The ones who were promised that education would lift them not out of material poverty, but status-poverty
Arguably this is just the same process repeated, but if so, that only strengthens the point
Because when the coal mine of working-class ressentiment proved exhausted, the educated class exposed that it was actually mining itself. That's *why* it had to enact the Long March
This is how the gray goo reasserted itself. Now that the proles have proven useless to the Urge, all differences among educated *elites* (we've all been to college!) are proof of gray goo. Sex. Gender. Race. Intelligence. All must be broken down to end inequality, forever at last
"Neoliberalism," then, is the process of the would-be elite class swallowing their own leftist bullshit, and hating the taste of it, and enforcing it on everyone else because they loathe the idea of anyone not suffering like they did
They're mining their own coal
So they're swallowing their own faeces, in the original industrial term; the workers have proven useless to their impulse, but "luckily" for the leftist urge there are now more academics than workers, so the values shift, by pure coincidence, as well
Anything is preferable to their fear that they're not good enough, incapable of existing outside of the gray goo end-state, where the anxiety finally ends
They would rather reduce all the world to coprophagic slag than admit that they are what they are:
You know what, here's the hottest take I can drop, Stephen King *should* have been the next Poe or Lovecraft, he had both the imaginative horsepower, the narrative mastery, and the sense of horror necessary to become this.
Some of King's work, especially his early ones, and *especially* the first four Gunslinger novels, prove this. He had it in him. Immense, insane imagination, the sensitivity was there.
Bad. Ass. Author. But there was something just a little off. He couldn't quite do it.
So wait—my most volcano-scorching-hot take is that early Orson Scott Card, the Mormon, is the greatest horror author of our age. He sold out later but his '70s/80s shorts are the most horrifying works I've ever read from that period. Even more terrifying than King
"The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised."
lol. Houellebecq presaging a lot of his own soon-to-come preoccupations here
lol, right. "We at the highly scrupulous Intercept would never 'expose' our political enemies, who we definitely don't report on because we hate them. We just wait for any outlet with even lower standards to make these people a matter of public interest—and *then* we expose them"
This is Activist Journalism 101, it's a completely incestuous movement, "respected" outlets know they can just sit back and wait for millennial bottom-feeder outlets to "do the work" for them
Then they're allowed to link to it, as legitimate journalism, and launder it upwards
As this process has continued it's become even more pathetic than that, their justification isn't even some VICE article written by a 21-year-old college girl, it's literally "online speculation"
Oh wait "Multiple links to speculation," so now we get to launder it into fact
So while it's true that Trump really didn't even want to do anything that outrageous, the reason the system spent five years squealing like it was dying was because even that much would have kneecapped it
Not ended it, not at all—but crippled it, yes
Look, to me, neoliberalism has two core modules: its economic module, and its social module
Leaving the latter aside, its economic module is globalism, there's no arguing that. And two of the core components of globalism are free movement of goods, and free movement of people
I don't really "believe" this. But as the traditional means of manipulating a population toward the desired goals become less and less effective, actual supervillainy is going to become more tempting—esp as you still own the means of propaganda. They'll defend whatever you do