Left political singularity

The French Red Terror, the Soviet Great Terror, the Cambodian autogenocide, and many others were all examples of what I call left political singularities.

Left wing repression tends to make things lefter, which tends to worsen left wing repression, which makes things even lefter, which …   The process only stops when the latest despot starts to realize he is not left enough, he is being outflanked on the left, is going to be overthrown by those even lefter than himself, and promptly gets rid of everyone important who is even lefter than he is.

Right wing repression does not have this effect, because right wing repression, for example Pinochet, pressures people to forget about politics, whereas left wing repression reaches into every person’s life and forcefully pressures them to piously say the politically correct things.  Left wing repression forcibly politicizes everything, even your personal private sexual activities.  Right wing repression depoliticizes everything.

In Stalin’s pamphlet “Dizzy with success” it looks to me he was trying to thwart the terror, but terrified that if he tried to thwart it too vigorously, would be its next victim.

Under Tsar Nicholas II, the way to power came to be to be lefter than thou. The safest way to ally was no enemies to the left, no friends to the right. And so everything from there on moved ever lefter. And the lefter things got, the more the way to power was to be lefter than thou, the more dangerous it became to have friends to the right, so the lefter things became, the faster they moved left, consuming each leader in turn for insufficient leftism.

Left wing repression tends to make things lefter, which tends to worsen left wing repression.

We see a similar wind up in the French Revolution.  The King moves left, leftists, in particular Rousseau and Voltaire, do very well, so everyone moves left.  Voltaire and Rousseau were repressed by the supposedly right wing authorities only enough to generate favorable publicity for their works.  The old order was condemned by highly successful intellectuals who somehow wound up with lots of money and young women.  Where were the defenders of the old order?  Not even the King defended it.

There is an obvious and plausible defense of hereditary monarchy and the hereditary principle:  If power is up for the grabbing, there will be a lot of grabbing, and this will at best dissipate lots of wealth, and at worst kill lots of people.  The replacement for King Log is apt to be King Stork.   Past democracies and republics were apt to degenerate into advance auctions of stolen goods, and often those in power were reluctant to yield power when they were supposed to, so that election became civil war.  In the lead up to the French Revolution, we see those attacking the monarchy prospering and succeeding, and we did not hear anyone defending the monarchy, not even the Monarch.  Charles the First of England defended hereditary monarchy, first with the pen, then with the sword, and though he lost temporarily, and lost his head, in the end he won, but  Louis the Sixteenth of France did as much to undermine monarchy as any man.

Voltaire tells the French that the monarchy needs overthrowing.  Well, if the monarchy needs overthrowing, and and an intellectual can do very nicely under the monarchy while calling for its overthrow, likely an intellectual could do even better if it was overthrown, and those intellectuals had to step into the vacuum and replace it.  And having stepped into that gap, they declined to imitate the monarchy’s tolerance for its enemies and disdain for its supporters.

King Charles the First told us that the King should protect the subject’s life, liberty, and property, but the subject should not concern himself with politics, that being the King’s business.  King Louis the sixteenth however, told us that the King “must always consult public opinion; it is never wrong”.  Well if the King himself says that, who is going to deny it?  When the King himself will not defend the Royal prerogative, who would?  And thus under Louis the sixteenth, an ever leftwards process was set in motion, culminating with the red terror in 1795.

Another way of stating this theory is that when a political belief system intent on gaining power, what I have been calling a theocracy, even if there is no God involved as such, finds it has been pushing on an open door, the push continues, till it blows up in their face and faith.

Leftism is such a belief system, rightism is not, rightism merely being a coalition of random odds and sods being rolled by leftism, and random odds and sods who disagree with leftism on any of a thousand different points of doctrine. Leftists, unlike orthodox Christians, can always be outflanked by purer and more extreme leftists, leftism being a this worldly doctrine, and so the push proceeds. Feminists get outflanked by gays, gays by transgendered.

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24 Responses to “Left political singularity”

  1. […] civil war. Another possibility, particularly in Europe, is Islam. A fourth possibility is a leftist singularity. The most likely possibility is a right-wing surge of the native population and the violent […]

  2. […] friends have it. Anticipated because it assumes the slide toward the Left Singularity (as it has been called) will continue. Much worse is to come. The pace is anybody’s guess, but there is wisdom in […]

  3. […] believe we’re on the verge of a great shift in political perception: what Jim Donald calls a “left singularity,” a period when the leftward drift of politics ends. I don’t know what ultimate form that shift […]

  4. […] we’re on the verge of a great shift in political perception: what Jim Donald calls a “left singularity,” a period when the leftward drift of politics ends. I don’t know what ultimate form […]

  5. […] grandfathered in as an industry titan, and, in 2017, the exception is no longer acceptable.  Jim explains this concept […]

  6. Entropy-7 says:

    I was an executive in my university’s debate society. There was a core group of us – the best and most experienced debaters – who all identified as right wing. We had a plurality with the remainder being on the left or apolitical sophists. We were an exception on the CUSID circuit with maybe UofA or UofC being right-of-centre on a regular basis.

    So the majority of university debaters were mostly leftists and, with only certain exceptions, the judges at tournaments were usually the debaters at the host university and therefore mostly leftists, and everybody knew that.

    Some teams would run nakedly political cases that always leaned left assuming that the opposition would present the counter case on the right and give them the advantage of political bias among the judges.

    We would have none of that and so we formed out counter case EVEN FURTHER TO THE LEFT. That totally discombobulated the other team because any argument against our case was implicitly a criticism of their own case. They had half an hour to come up with their case, which may have been “in the can” for days or weeks before that, but only 5 minutes on the fly to reinforce their position which usually resulted in Goldilocks arguments such that they occupied the sweet spot whereas we wanted to take things too far.

    We never lost those debates.

  7. […] questionnaire I’ve come across). The triangle also effectively conveys NRx ideas like the Left Singularity and the Trichotomy (the latter to a more limited degree I might expound on). It also illustrates […]

  8. […] to Jim and Spandrell, who have done the most to forward the idea of political […]

  9. […] Nick Land explains the “left singularity,” a concept introduced by James Donald. […]

  10. […] and I’m happy to have made my contribution to it. As every year passes, we get closer to 2037 (or 2025), our work becomes more important. We gotta come up with something quickly guys. So keep up the […]

  11. […] I’m happy to have made my contribution to it. As every year passes, we get closer to 2037 (or 2025), our work becomes more important. We gotta come up with something quickly guys. So keep up the […]

  12. […] not-dialectic (diannihilectic) between left and lefter creates a paradox, wherein any attempt at serious debate on the subject is immediately reduced to […]

  13. […] we are quickly approaching the “left singularity“, which will create a sociopoliticoeconomic blackhole from which not even the light of truth […]

  14. […] late 90s website. Feeling down. Who is going to stop people from ruling others by being holier than thou if not them? I guess the Catholic Church will not do as a replacement for the Anglican one. I […]

  15. […] is for change, has very important ramifications, one of which was Jim Donald’s theory of the Leftist singularity. If the Left is for change, and you have a political system in which change is not only not fought […]

  16. […] with Nick Gillespie at Reason, Nassim Nicholas Taleb stumbles upon an under-appreciated aspect of Left Singularity: “The problem we have had in almost all Western countries is that nominally they say they are […]

  17. […] links with Jim’s point, in a truly insightful article on his blog. European monarchies were not reactionary polities at all. They played the game that […]

  18. PRCalDude says:

    Another way of stating this theory is that when a political belief system intent on gaining power, what I have been calling a theocracy, even if there is no God involved as such, finds it has been pushing on an open door, the push continues, till it blows up in their face and faith.

    In the opening chapters of Romans, Paul develops the idea that, in general, God’s judgment upon sinners in this semi-eschatological era is always more of their sin. IWO, if you’re addicted to pornography, your punishment is “being given over” to more of the same. The same is true on a society-wide level. Though I am not a theonomist, there is a general rule about societies and governments themselves needing to conform to a certain basic level of law and order, or else they are given over to the very lawlessness they love (and later a dictator or lunatic ruler of some sort).

    So how long do you wager we have? I live on the northern end of the bay you used to you live on. Bad idea?

    • jim says:

      Since 1996 I have been predicting collapse sometime around 2025 or so.

      Whatever happens, California will probably prefigure it, and when it finally comes down, other parts of America are are likely to be less affected than California.

      Of course collapse does not necessarily mean the end of the leftward move, it might merely be the beginning of an even more extreme leftward move, the outcome of crisis being unpredictable. It is probable that following the crisis we shall return to a more normal social order, which would be perceived as very large rightwards move – but normal social orders have often been quite bad. After the crisis, anything can happen.

      Groups where women are liberated tend to be conquered from outside by groups where women are not. Sometimes this results in the male population being executed, and the female population made into concubines and housekeepers. I expect an outcome hopefully less dire, but comparably reactionary.

      • PRCalDude says:

        White people here do not want to admit to themselves that they are like the Boer. I doubt the ones who’ve left the state b/c of the Mexicans will admit to themselves that the Mexicans were the reason.

        I’ve met South Africans who will not speak frankly on the matter of leaving South Africa either. Funny that so many ended up in California. This is why I’m also not optimistic about leaving – these problems tend to follow you.

        I am, however, interested in your plan.

        • jim says:

          My plan? Plan? As an individual, my plan is: Be prepared to move, get more passports, and check out the nicer Asian states.

          For America as a whole, rather than myself individually, what Americans should do is end theocracy, and end democracy. A restricted franchise would work – restricted to heads of households with substantial property, concealed carry permits, good credit records, and who pay taxes. Voting should be strictly linked to taxpaying, so that voting is more like deciding what you are paying for, rather than what someone else is paying for. Fix marriage and restrict divorce to make marriage more attractive to men, to reduce the prospect of winding up supporting your ex wife while she bangs bikers and the pool boy, and then as well as fixing the reproduction rate, most propertied heads of household will be male.

          To end theocracy, it would be necessary to have a political purge of government and quasi government employees – fire everyone with a record of left activism, which almost all of them. I count the universities as quasi governmental. If they don’t want to fire their left activists, they can do without government money.

          However this partial, mild, and moderate reform is probably too small to be feasible. In practice, we will likely get collapse and civil war, for which I recommend the more drastic reform of feudalism or anarcho capitalism.

  19. spandrell says:

    Very insightful. I read your explanation of Stalin as the man who stopped the leftist rampage coming from the late Tsars, and have been thinking about it since.

    The thing is leftism is not just one particular belief system that intends to gain power, not just one kind of theocracy. Leftism *is* theocracy. Leftism could be defined as the sort of political movement that aims to gain total power over a society.
    The particular doctrine doesn’t really matter, its just a matter of zeitgeist. The easier way to gain power in late 18th century France was to argue against the Aristocracy, in the early 20th Russia was to argue for collectivization, in today’s Muslim world is to argue for Sharia (which was a non issue for decades).

    There are also ancient political movements with aimed at the kind of suicidal power rampage. So leftism is a constant of human society, just happens to have been unleashed more often lately. Its the manifestation of chaos.

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