Technology, communism and the Brown Scare

by Mencius Moldbug

Technology is but the latest in a long line of industries to fall victim to the Brown Scare—America's ginormous, never-ending, profoundly insane witch-hunt for fascists under the bed. Why does the Brown Scare grow even as its enemies shrink? Hint: America is a communist country.

Genres: Politics, History, Science, Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction

35 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Pen name of American political theorist and software developer Curtis Yarvin.

Reviews

[Sean Chick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd extended essay that's good points get lost in Moldbug's Zizek like digressions and rhetorical flourishes. It works best in explaining why we fear fascism more than communism, even though fascism is effectively gone outside of fringe groups, while communism's crimes are only vaguely understood. At least in America. The reasons are complicated but I offer two practical ones. First, we never fought the communists in an existential war where we uncovered their crimes nor did we suffer under communist occupation. More importantly, the Nazis killed Jews, who are one of the most literate and professionally successful groups in the world. So you get memoirs, films, and documentaries about the Holocaust and well funded museums. Mao murdered illiterate Chinese peasants. So did Japan, and their crimes during World War II are discussed less often, current Chinese rhetoric not withstanding.

Those are some practical ideas. Moldbug seems to think it is merely that "America is a communist country" and the original communist country, being the wellspring of revolution (although he never quite makes that point about 1776). There is some truth to this. Karl Marx considered America the most progressive nation on Earth in 1861 and hoped it would survive the Civil War. European radicals filled the ranks of the Union army, men such as Thomas Francis Meagher and Franz Sigel. This is at core my father's argument, that everyone on the Left deep inside is a communist. They use the terminology of Marx and only condemn communism in half-hearted ways. Indeed, communism is the future because the current mode of liberalism is dull and it is inevitable that we only "progress" further, With Moldbug noting how the mores of communist intellectuals of the early 20th century are now mainstream. Communism is in the Left's genes so to speak and therefore can survive.

One might counter Moldbug with the obvious blood and treasure spent on defeating communism from roughly 1947 to 1989. In addition, communism can be explained as a product of leftism unchecked, just as one can say about facism's relation to the Right. I grant Moldbug that he has a worthwhile argument against this formulation. It goes like this.

Communism and democracy are made by people not close to those they purport to help. It is non-empathic altruism. Your average white progressive has precious few Hispanic or black friends, just as Lenin and the Russian communists were not peasants. Communism allows one to gain power by punishing the wicked while doing good, satisfying humanity's "chimp" and "angelic" (as Moldbug puts each) natures at once.

The people accept the situation for a few reasons. One, democracy/communism makes people feel powerful even as they are excluded from true power. Second, there is the witch hunt and this portion of the book is undeniably the best, and all the more potent since it was written before leftist witch hunts became the status quo. The witch hunt appeals to the dual nature (chimp and angel) while asserting one's power and showing preference. So as not to antagonize, it is necessary to be quiet on certain subjects, and realize no amount of "free speech" will save you. Like the witch units of old, the Nazis exist but are on the fringe. Their exclusion is to reinforce a moral order. Tweet a hammer and sickle and you are fine. Do not tweet a swastika. Nazi memorabilia is banned on ebay. Communist memorabilia is not. In our world, Hitler is Satan and World War II was Satan's failed revolt. To be clear, the later point is my analogy.

At any rate, witch hunts assert power and reinforce a group's mythology. When I say mythology I do not mean that Nazism was not real and did not cause real harm (to put it very lightly) only that it serves a certain function that is as old as Sumeria. Arguably, this mythology is more powerful since it actually did happen.

Moldbug at this point misses a mark that he hints at. Prohibitions on micro-aggression are not new. In centuries past they were reserved for the nobility. You could not be an "asshole" to Samurai unless you were a Samurai. Yet, we see them applied, with increasing legalism, to marginal groups. Yet, blacks, migrants, women, gays, and others do not hold the reins of power. Where Moldbug sees these groups as part of the communist mindset, I say they are an emerging power dynamic. Therefore, we have the cognitive dissonance of them wielding considerable power, and yet still laboring under limitations, itself a recipe for revolution. In this case though it is social revolution, and much more disjointed. In addition, there is one group that often rejects social revolution. That is the poor. Recall, that the communist wishes to help those they only barely know, and who themselves may not want change. Perhaps that is why, according to Moldbug, the communist/progressive fails them. According to Moldbug the workers under communism were not much better off and nor are blacks in 2013. It is a dark thought with some truth but one that does not hold, for both groups also reaped certain advantages in the wake of revolution and change. And really, that is why Moldbug offers interesting thought experiments, but ones that often break under the weight of empiricism and the blade of nuanced thinking. So the book loses 1 star and an extra star for his scattered prose. The essay offers an interesting way to consider the world and is a bit more creative than most, but it requires too many leaps of logic and a certain historical amnesia.

In the end, I do not think we are a "communist country" but a liberal one. Our naivete about communism in 2019 is a product of historical circumstance, although I grant that communists and their sympathizers are rarely persecuted. I believe this is because they were until now seen as a joke in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. China is more like a grand communist larping society. Yet, Marxism is not dead, and communism of a sort is making a comeback for some of the reasons Moldbug mentioned back in 2013. That said, is it communism? Moldbug really means progressive, and if the progressives upset the elite, you can expect the kid gloves to come off or at least to see a boat-load of hypocrisy. A true Red Scare is not unfathomable considering that progressives have made an uneasy alliance with the business class.

[Artur · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprisingly deep essay on the roots of American progressivism and its inherent consanguinity with communism tactics and targeting. Although it mutated to better suit the environment it has to live in, it is still an old good 'virtue signalling' kind of activism that lusts for power and always displays itself as underdog, even if had taken over the whole political horizon beforehand. As a person who lives in a post-USSR society and knowledgeable of USSR history, I can say that it isn't communism itself, but rather its framework that is used to communicate another strain of progressive ideas and fight for power. Americans fear fascism more than communism even though fascism is long gone and there are a lot of reasons for it, namely, communism blends in much better and feels better on the outside, also it is not understood to the full extent by American society as was fascism, Americans don't have much knowledge of its crimes. Although, the essay could use a little editing and cutting away some parts that digress too much from the main point. Ideas are interesting, but writing makes them a bit hard to reach.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mencius Moldbug's digressions do not work in his favor. This specific diagnosis of the hegemony of The Cathedral might have been eye-opening in 2013, when the original UR blog post was published, but overall the piece reads like it was written by an accomplished programmer with a severe case of whatever is the literary equivalent of ADHD.

Otherwise, and despite somewhat disagreeing with the AIACC proposition (yet Moldbug is not entirely mistaken, in the sense that C refers not to capital C policies but to a certain, more elusive, lowercase C Weltanschauung), the dissection of what are now all too common tactics (e.g. "No true Scotsman", witch-hunts or their modern equivalent, "cancel culture", etc.) strikes yours truly, reader in 2021, as almost prophetic. I guess things were already this bad back then, huh?

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some brief (edited) excerpts that pretty much capture the tone and topics of the essay

Witch hunting for Racists, Fascists, and Sexists
Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, ... they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling ... from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we wouldn't see a lot of witch-hunting and we would know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career - let alone when it is a weekend pastime enjoyed by millions of amateurs - we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

Witch-hunting on a purely informal basis, Popehat’s "social consequences," scratches the political itch perfectly, because of course here is actual power — the power to harm other human beings — being exercised by ordinary people who are not mysterious bureaucrats in the nation's capitol.

Offensive Behavior and Law
Two thousand years before anyone had even heard of a microaggression, a bunch of old white guys called "the Romans" considered this issue and concluded: de minimis non curat lex (the law does not concern itself with trifles). Of course, we know the Romans were a bunch of ignorant heteronormative dicks ... Why should anyone be allowed to be a dick? Why should that be okay, in our tolerant society?

A legal system in which rudeness to certain people attracts the attention of the law … is by no means unusual in human history, nor is it universal, though it is always a crime to insult Power. It’s really the Enlightenment system of uniform legal protection that’s unusual.

In old Japan, it wasn’t illegal to be an asshole, even to a samurai, but it was illegal to be an asshole to a samurai if you weren’t a samurai. You might say the samurai were a sort of protected class. Always and everywhere, "microaggressing" against the protected class is hazardous to your health. There was even a word, dating back to those same Roman dicks who gave us this "de minimis" bullshit, for a system of law that assigned certain people special rights. This set of rights varied, but in almost every case, the right not to be offended (by those outside the subset) was the first and most basic. The word, in fact, was **privilege**. Meaning, in Roman dick-speak, private law.

The privilege of not being offended, the most basic and customary privilege of nobility, after centuries of desuetude has been reinvented and regranted. But the grantees have no resemblance to any traditional noble class. Not only are they not a ruling class, they don’t even seem … especially noble.

Communism
My Pill is: America is a communist country.

The basic problem with the outside agitator Commie subversion narrative is that it’s way too optimistic. Were communism some exotic pest, it would be easy to eradicate. Perhaps we could find some kind of microscopic wasp that kept it in check in its strange foreign homeland. Indeed, the usual pattern with an invasive species is that resistance to it is strongest in its actual homeland. That is in part the reason for my claim; Americans have partial immunity to communism because communism has been embedded in the USA since the beginning ... It’s an interesting exercise to try to construct a meaningful and objective prior distinction between an American communist and an American liberal of the mid-to-late 20th-century. They generally identified as communists, though when they wanted to confuse outsiders, they’d say **progressive**.

Communism creates enormous destruction while failing to advance at all toward its stated goals. That’s kind of why communism sucks so much.

One of the easiest ways to see why America is a communist country, for instance, is to define communism as a cultural tradition, essentially a religion, which is transmitted through early nurture like a language. Although languages are not, of course, encoded in our genes, they have an evolutionary history like that of genetic traits. Englishmen are related to Germans, English is related to German. Language and dialect diversity hasn’t done well in the 20th century, but political and cultural traditions have taken the biggest hit of all. Both worldwide and in America, the set of belief systems is far narrower in 2013 than in 1913. Broadcast technology kind of does that. Political and military developments have, of course, played a role as well. What this means is that if you look for Americans in 1913 who have the same basic worldview of an ordinary American college student in 2013, you can find them. But you can’t find a lot of them.

In the terminology of the father of modern political science, Gaetano Mosca, communism is a political formula — a pattern of thinking that helps a subject support the organized minority that governs him. Typically a modern political formula allows the subject to feel a sense of political power that convinces him that he is, in a sense, part of the ruling minority, irrespective of his actual conditions. Communism works because it solves this problem more effectively than any other political formula in wide distribution today. ... Just as pornography can stimulate the human sex drive without providing any actual sex, democracy can stimulate the human power drive without providing any actual power.

We might define communism as non-empathic (callous?) altruism (empathic altruism being known as charity). Dickens, no stranger to genuine empathy, had a term for nonempathic altruism. He called it telescopic philanthropy. Perversely, when you help people, or appear to help them, you become a patron and you gain a sense of ownership over them.

In classic Bolshevik communism, who is the revolution for? The workers and peasants. But… in classic Bolshevik communism… who actually makes the revolution? Nobles (Lenin) and Jews (Trotsky); to wit, the groups in Russian society who are in fact most distant — emotionally, culturally, and socially — from actual workers and peasants

How’d that whole Soviet thing work out for the workers and peasants? Heck, for the last 50 years, one of the central purposes of American political life has been advancing the African-American community. And over the last five decades, what has happened to the African-American community? I’ll tell you one thing—in every major city in America, there’s a burnt-out feral ghetto which, 50 years ago, was a thriving black business district. On the other hand, there’s a street in that ghetto named for Dr. King.

[A. I. · Rating 3 out of 5]

While MM makes some good points, it's hidden behind to many layers of rhetoric to make a cohesive argument

[Alejandro Paulovitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

America is a communist country.

Truer words have never been spoken and Moldbugs take on how a small liberal clique has taken over our political system imposing their will (the cathedral/matrix) is a splendid definition of how our western societies have entered a new era of decline.

[Marduk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so taken in by the prose and humor that by the end of it, I couldn't even remember what it was that I was reading. I still can't. But it wasn't boring, this I know.

[Richard Joya · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, my favorite Moldbug book.

[Walter Hartwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it was a longer work I would have been exasperated by how it's written, but it's brevity made it more of a fun read. It was my first UR read.