The Left Singularity is increasing leftism causing ever faster increases in leftism until something breaks short of achieving infinite leftism in finite time.
Dark ages are slow, more or less continuous, economic and political decline, imperceptibly slow, typically about one percent a year on average, hard to notice against the background of random economic and political fluctuations.
Left Singularities, on the other hand, unlike dark ages, end with a decisive boom, a close approach to infinite leftism in finite time. Sometimes a left singularity is followed by reforms or a restoration. Sometimes, as when Stalin purged the left, things just stop getting worse, but do not get a whole lot better.
The basic mechanism of a left wing singularity is political correctness. The elite competes to be holier than each other. Everyone is compelled to be ever holier, and the holier they get, the more everyone is compelled to be even holier.
if we believe the “Admonitions of Ipuwer”, Bronze age civilization ended in a left singularity. Archeaology shows that bronze age civilization ended with a bang, that led directly and immediately to a dark age. Presumably the social technology of trade and commerce was lost in the left singularity, and not immediately recovered.
Recent events in China happened the other way around, a long slow decline into darkness, with intermittent left singularities along the way, and then the restoration following the Maoist left singularity cured the dark age.
China was in continuous slow economic decline from the Southern Song Dynasty until Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Thus a dark age, terminating in a left singularity followed by a restoration, rather than starting in a left singularity.
Which gives me hope that our left singularity will be followed by a similar restoration.
The bronze age left singularity resulted in the total destruction of most existing states, with new states growing up from large extended families. Assyria survived, and Egypt did not altogether cease to be a state, but the rest of them mostly vanished. Egypt survived in bad (highly leftist) condition – liberated women and all that.
Rome suffered its bout of leftism before its greatest days, and then suffered a long slow decline that terminated in anarchic and disorderly feudalism, not leftism. The dark age did not set in until long after Rome’s bout of leftism, and we recovered from the dark age without any left singularities.
The decline of China started with a burst of leftism, but not a full blown left singularity. During its decline there were at least two left singularities – Maoism and Chang Hsien-chong – arguably more. The final left singularity was followed by a cure, which is not a very common outcome of left singularities, though I have hopes for Russia That cure was the communist party converting to a hereditary aristocracy with an electoral monarchy, which elected competent monarchs, the first such monarch importing an economic system from Hong Kong, which had absorbed eighteenth century Manchesterism from nineteenth century colonialists and preserved it, more or less, though the twentieth century.
For feudalism with electoral monarchy to work, the election should be for life or good conduct, the removal of a monarch being an extraordinary, and usually quite violent, event.
Russia, on the other hand, after recovering from its left singularity, attempted to import the modern western economic system, which turned out that they imported the parasite but not the host.
The bronze age transition from large scale civilizations to disorderly familism happened abruptly and was mediated by a left singularity. The transition to disorderly feudalism following the decline of Rome just gradually happened without any connection to radical leftism.
The French left singularity ended in the Red Terror. The French left was fairly thoroughly squashed by Napoleon, much as the Russian left was very thoroughly squashed by Stalin. It utterly and permanently disappeared following its attempted recovery of power in the Paris Commune. Britain imposed its institutions on France, so today’s French left is a colonial outpost of the anglophone left.
The initial stages of a dark age are over taxation and over regulation, where the government attempts to persistently tax and regulate beyond the Laffer limit. However in the final stages of a dark age, the government is apt to be nonexistent, lawless tax collectors gradually becoming indistinguishable from bandits, which does not in it itself necessarily cure the dark age.
Leftism tends to involve:
Breakdown of traditional gender roles, emancipation of women.
Breakdown of traditional hierarchies, progressing towards more democratic and bureaucratic forms from authoritarian and legal forms. Dissolution of responsibility and answerability for decisions.
Anarcho-Tyranny, where protection of the law from criminals is removed from decent citizens, but self-organized self defence is still illegal.
Millenarianism, the belief in an ongoing or near-at-hand massive transformation of society. Accelerating this is considered a moral imperative. This belief also justifies the above breakdowns as disposing of “outdated” things
What Happens in a Left Singularity
In the realm of discourse, non-leftist ideas become increasingly unacceptable, with their proponents facing social, professional, and legal consequences. The negative consequences for speaking against leftism quiet down the resistance and thus increase the boldness of the left, which accelerates the process.
The French left singularity began with false popes of Avignon. Its initial growth was relatively slow, becoming rapid, pathological, and alarming under the highly progressive radical left regime of King Louis XVI.
The anglophone left singularity began with the Puritans, ended in Cromwell doing a Stalin and crushing everyone to the left of him. After Cromwell died, Monck made a military coup. His praetorians proceeded to “guard” parliament and restore the monarchy. Leftism continued to fester, but did not really go malignant in Britain until perhaps 1770 (American Revolution) or 1820 (failure of King George to divorce Queen Caroline despite conspicuous infidelity, disobedience, and gross sexual immorality).
It manifested with alarming moonbat crazy biting mad leftism in 1820, and has continued to get worse faster and faster ever since.
The Russian left singularity began not with a religious heresy, but rather with Alexander the Liberator being fashionable and influenced by British leftism.
The British nineteenth century enclosures were a land reform that redistributed land from the aristocracy to the individual peasants. The left wanted the land redistributed collectively rather than individually, so that the left would have to administer land and peasants (administering the peasants on behalf of the peasants, because they love the peasants so very much). What you think you know about the enclosures is the left demonizing them. The enclosures were in practice a quite reasonable moderate left wing land reform – but the left wanted a moonbat crazy frothing at the mouth biting mad left wing land reform, and did not get it, and so have stridently demonized the enclosures to this day.
In Russia, Alexander the liberator, influenced by fashionable British leftists, introduced the moonbat crazy frothing at the mouth biting mad left wing land reform that they had been seeking, and to this day argue should have happened. He distributed the land to the serfs collectively, rather than to the individual serfs. But of course, the serfs were, for the most part, incapable of administering the land, so there followed endless further reforms to administer land and serfs, which moved Russia ever lefter, creating an ever larger class of government and government privileged leftists, eventually culminating in the artificial famines of the 1930s, leading to Stalin’s great purge, during which he purged both the largely imaginary right, the wreckers, and the terrifyingly real left, the trots, thereby ending the left singularity started by Alexander the Liberator.
