Thread by @ConceptualJames

In a manner of speaking, though not literally, every Communist eventually ends up in the gulag he built to imprison and reeducate others.

Why?

It's because every powerful person in a Communist-like regime is vulnerable to baseless accusations of hypocrisy they cannot survive.🧵

In some sense, there are two types of societies: free and tyrannical. There are also two types of tyrannies: those run by warlords and what we might call Virtue Paradigms. While Communists can be as brutal as warlords, they run Virtue Paradigms.

As some will recognize, I'm borrowing from my brilliant, insightful friend @PardyBruce here in characterizing political orders as being based in freedom or virtue. My claim is that all political Virtue Paradigms are intrinsically vulnerable to baseless accusations of hypocrisy.

To be clear, a "freedom" paradigm is one in which the purpose of government is to secure individual liberties and thus to protect the freedom to pursue virtue (or not). A "virtue" paradigm is one in which the purpose of the state is to enforce a particular ethic on the people.

"Freedom people" (those who support freedom paradigms) can be virtuous, but when they are it is by choice. In a Virtue Paradigm, the state sets an ethic, which is a particular conception of virtue, for its people and forces or coerces people to live by it.

The claim I'm making is that all Virtue Paradigms are inherently less politically stable than Freedom. In fact, they're almost certainly guaranteed to devolve into catastrophe because of the combination of their political incentives and their vulnerability to baseless accusation.

In practice, Virtue Paradigms will nearly always eventually devolve into complete corruption or circular firing squads ("perpetual revolution") that grinds them and the people they rule over into the dust (and the grave). They're disasters that sound good on the front end.

Virtue Paradigms do not necessarily start in evil even if they end there. They usually start with some perfectly true and good claim like "if everyone upheld X as a virtue, then society would be better." When they're evil (like Marxism), they still sell themselves this way.

In Marxism, the virtue claim is that "if everyone was really equal because everyone truly valued equality as a virtue, then society would be better," in case you don't know. In Fascism, it's "if everyone upheld the (ethno)nation above themselves, then society would be better."

The ethic X that everyone is supposed to uphold doesn't have to be a grand vision for society, of course. It could be very simple, basic, and ultimately true, such as "if everyone upheld the Ten Commandments, then society would be better." That's factually true and good.

In other words, the problem isn't in whatever the ethic X happens to be. The problem is that the ethic X is going to be enforced by a state with a monopoly of power over people to enforce it, thus destroying their freedom and placing them in a Virtue Paradigm built on an ethic.

The reason this is the case is that the ethic X, true or ridiculous, not only can be but will be replaced by another ethic Y later once the apparatus of the Virtue Paradigm (that is, "benevolent" tyranny) is erected in the first place. This isn't a maybe. It's a guarantee.

The reason ethic X is guaranteed to be replaced by ethic Y at some point in every Virtue Paradigm (which is to say the paradigm is unstable) is because every Virtue Paradigm is vulnerable to baseless accusations of hypocrisy. Every single one. Always.

Human beings are insanely sensitive to accusations or observations of hypocrisy. It's part of human nature. It's so strong I used to say the world would happy set itself on fire if it could just call other people hypocrites in the process. That's some exaggeration, but it's huge.

The point here is that humans are incredibly sensitive to identified hypocrisy (real or fake) and will act on it, even against their other interests. It's a very powerful social motivation. Therefore, accusations of hypocrisy can be overwhelmingly powerful political weapons.

This fact is good when the accusations of hypocrisy are true. We want to identify hypocrites, especially when they're in positions of power and influence over other people, because the outcomes of their hypocrisy are usually damaging or abusive.

Not all accusations of anything, including hypocrisy, are true, though. It's very easy to make baseless accusations of hypocrisy by deliberately misinterpreting their actions, motivations, or stated principles. Nonetheless, false accusations are powerful political weapons too.

In a Virtue Paradigm, leadership is based upon fealty to the given ethic, ultimately, creating an immense vulnerability to accusations of hypocrisy. Some of these will be true because no one is perfect. Others will be false because they're powerful political weapons.

People who can successfully make baseless accusations of hypocrisy against their political superiors and rivals, measured against the ethic of the Virtue Paradigm, will be rewarded by rising in the hierarchy of power in the Virtue Paradigm. Thus, it's incentivized.

It's necessary to realize that just like how Freedom people can be virtuous or not; Virtue people can also be virtuous or not. The people in a Virtue Paradigm do not automatically become virtuous because the state forces them to pretend they are virtuous!

So while virtuous people might make true accusations of hypocrisy when they arise in either paradigm, only unvirtuous (unscrupulous, or evil) people will make baseless accusations of hypocrisy in order to elevate themselves in the power hierarchy or to take down a rival.

The Virtue Paradigm, because it is based on a conception of virtue that has to be enforced by the state, is vulnerable to baseless accusations of hypocrisy against its ethic, and unvirtuous people are incentivized to make such accusations for political advantage.

Therefore, unscrupulous, unvirtuous people will eventually rise to the top of any Virtue Paradigm, rather ironically, by weaponizing the Virtue Paradigm and its ethic against their political rivals in dishonest ways. This is Communists putting their predecessors in the gulags.

These unscrupulous people will not be able to survive forever in the Virtue Paradigm they conquer, however, so eventually they'll use their power to change the standard of virtue (ethic) such that it consolidates and insulates their own power. Ethic X is replaced by some Ethic Y.

But where did Ethic Y come from? Ethic Y came from unscrupulous, unvirtuous actors who manipulated the schema of the Virtue Paradigm to gain power and then close it off to others, so Ethic Y is virtually guaranteed to be less ethical/virtuous than Ethic X was.

Moreover, the power consolidation process in the Virtue Paradigm means that the new, unvirtuous leaders will shore up their power by making further baseless accusations of hypocrisy against their colleagues and underlings who might pose a threat to their ill-gotten power.

A few cycles of these processes deep, and the Virtue Paradigm isn't virtuous at all. It's a naked tyranny that exists only for the elevation and protection of its evil rulers, still claiming to do so in the name of some Greater Good in the name of some virtue everyone must hold.

So we can see Virtue Paradigms are disasters in the making. No matter how right and true the initial virtue(s) they hold to might be, by tying political power to the enforcement of that virtue, they create a system guaranteed to corrupt itself into despotism and tyranny.

The American experiment was an experiment in having a country governed neither by a warlord (hence, Rule of Law) or by a Virtue Paradigm. It's a Freedom Paradigm. The open question it's always trying to answer is if such a thing can be maintained.

I'll stop here, even though I want to do a couple of tangent threads including whether or not the Freedom Paradigm can work without virtuous people, the crucial role of voluntary choice in making virtuous people, and even whether the Ten Commandments can be enforced at all.