The Myth of Progress: A Study in Power

Washington Gladden didn’t vanish — he lives on, reborn in the person of Ahmed Assid

Ahmed Assid, a Puritan neo-Jacobin revolutionary, went on a live TV debate last week to discuss what he describes as the malaise, he said, haunting delirious conservatism, and how this delirious conservatism is holding the Moroccan society back from the elixir of progress. There are some quarrels to discuss with both him and Lahlou, but since our neutral press seemingly accidentally only covered a defense of one aisle of the debate— obviously that of Assid, obvious for reasons we will outline later— it is only fair that our aim should be centered on professor Assid’s doxology. After all, it is needless to say that the law of excluded middle only applies in the center of the Overton window of each debater given a certain intelligence threshold. These people don't even realize their main points are not as mutually exclusive as they think they are, and there is so much in between these seemingly contradictory aisles. In effect, their lack of intelligence sedates them that they are fighting the moral equivalence of war without realizing they're eating from the same fruit.

For a secular like Assid, he surely is in an earnest need to act, sound and look like an evangelical missionary to gain the idle trust of the people, but with the small caveat that he does so in a fashion that is unbeknownst to him— after all, all hosts are genuine in accepting the parasite. If you ask professor Assid if he agrees with this allegation, he surely will frown, despair and feel disgust at what he would see as utterly inaccurate assessment of his believes which, in his views, are too high standards for these defamatory archaic descriptions.

Now, to do him some justice, his believes are surely novel, universal, all-embracing (one might well look up the Greek etymology of the word ‘catholic’), and seemingly different— there is nothing older than the idea that this is new. After all, what were the missionaries doing ? Earnestly spreading their gospel as the one true Word of God which was, by their standards, novel, universal, all embracing and different. Just like the missionaries, Assid doesn’t see a need to be called something— the no label privilege— he is just a human being naturally bestowed with the preeminent gift of reason which distinguishes him from the beasts (at this point, one would hardly distinguish between professor Assid and Francisco de Vitoria, both are staunch Salamanca acolytes after all)— though professor Assid would halt the call stack at that limit, because for him, going further down the biological taxonomization path is a fatal sin, this fatal sin takes away from the harmony that is the larger whole of ‘humanity’. Did it ever cross Assid’s mind that this fatal sin is the by-product of science and scientism that he zealously champions ? I wonder mysteriously, and you should too, dear reader— preaching his own fork of the gospel, but alas, he will get frustrated at us for tethering him to these out-of-fashion traditions of social transmission.

After all, the means of communication have changed, it became effortless to broadcast one’s ideas to a greater network size on one of these human zoo social media platforms, but the gospel remained intact. For Assid, whether this is good or bad depends on what sorts of ideas are being broadcasted, but that’s the Achilles’ heel in professor Assid’s moral system, but of course he doesn’t see this exploitable vulnerability (nor does he need to), he just assumes that his moral system just works by the grace of might makes right, a just-so story. Ideally, before he demarcates the good and bad, professor Assid should ensure that his moral system is internally clean and coherent, that it is further not vulnerable to bad ideas, especially bad ideas that sound good, or what Paul Graham calls sitcom startup ideas, but relax, we’re not scaling a startup here, we’re merely diagnosing the zoochosis that professor Assid’s moral system succumbed to, and which took a toll on him. Too much mental Aspartame, professor Assid, too much mental Aspartame…You might well want to check your blood sugar levels!

To do professor Assid more justice, I want to concede that he is perhaps more earnest in his believes than me writing this blog with an iota of hope of making a change and debugging some really ugly errors— I am writing this blog as a side play, and you dear reader, should treat it as if you found it as such. I could even go further to concede to professor Assid is right that conservatism is indeed suffering an unprecedented fatigue, and that the Moroccan prefrontal cortex is getting weary of the old groove, the only objection however would be a matter of whether this is good or bad, if these things are even well-defined. For a reactionary like me, this is the Great Tribulation. For a progressive like professor Assid, this is Jesus Christ’s second coming, the golden millennium of heaven on earth. Regardless of his earnest clinging to his believes like a monastic Desert Father in 3rd century Egyptian deserts crucified out of Rome for his burning veneration for Christ, it is sad for me to tell the world that professor Assid has been pwned. Not by the aliens, the NSA, Palantir, or the Federal Reserve. Professor Assid has been pwned by something, I fear, orders-of-magnitude more uglier, the myth of progress.

After all, professor Assid is an ascetic hermit choosing to live under the caves or holes in the ground or life in the desert, to eat maybe once a day or once a week, and to not fall sleep because the cause of progress is more important than the pleasures of this world, a staunch believer who’s ready to martyr his life for his utopia, his ideal world heavily demands it, every joule of his mental energy should be funneled in this one true belief of progress. But what is this progress that professor Assid is talking about ? Is it technical-economic progress ? cultural-political progress ? moral progress ? What do we do with it ? Where is it heading ? Who or what dictates which direction is good or bad ? Who or what dictates what’s progress and what’s regress ? the Great Reform Act 1832 ? the Edict of Nantes ? the New Deal ? the UFO religions ? the Jews ? the IMF ? Meinong’s jungle ? The mind staggers, as it should. Patience, dear reader, we will transgress these cheap little digs and reverse-engineer our way out to understand and pity the beleaguered situation that professor Assid desperately finds himself in— one is surely witnessing a man burning in his own flames.

Historical Cladogram of Assidism

I was baffled, and perhaps you too dear reader, by the fact that Professor Assid doesn't even understand his source code. Who wrote it ? maybe some World Bank or Pentagon employee’s legacy code ? Does it contain bugs ? can it be tested, refactored or debugged in real life ? is it immune to injection attacks (it obviously isn't) ? is it even, well, functional ? The curiosity grows, the mind waits, but no answers are provided, the silence reigns as the feelings of intellectual preposterousness starts to roam. Turns out someone or something else, some mysterious agentic force, wrote Professor Assid's source code for him. He surely seems to be helplessly unable to debug his compile-time errors, let alone run-time errors. Our focus should mostly be on his compile-time errors, professor Assid has problems understanding his own syntax and semantics that some talented progressives have no quarrel mulling over.

Professor Assid is anxious about the future’s inherent tendency toward conserving its uncertainty, but a more reason for Assid to take his benzodiazepines when thinking about the future is violence. Now take a pause, dear reader, and stare at the ironic duality of a man who’s anxious about the future tail-spinning into chaos, while simultaneously championing a ruthless way forward toward this very future that, by his own admission, is uncertain. This is not a strawman, it is only a strawman if we assume that professor Assid did his homework of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, ie, of demarcating the progressive ideals he’s evangelically pursuing from the evil forces of uncertainty that might devour any determinacy of our future. I make you a bet, dear reader, professor Assid didn’t do his homework in regard of this matter, he is generously making my own argument for me by being blunt enough about it. As for for his fear of violence, I find that infinitely ironic, infinitely dear reader because we have a crippling tautology here. In that light, I would love to see professor Assid turns his intellectual artillery toward explaining the 20th century Democide, the bloody French Revolution, or the Cromwellian bloodshed. Assid describes himself as a progressive human-right activist and a pro-Palestinian advocate:

My stance remains unchanged regarding the Palestinian cause, a stance which is also the initial view of all democrats. It considers Israel to be a state of occupation and clings to the Palestinian right till the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. It also condemns all forms of oppression to which Palestinians are subjected in their land.

I would love therefore to see him sink in misery and seethes at the fact that progressivism and (Christian) Zionism are theologically synapomorphic and introgressed and eschatologically homoplastic (the thrill of self-messianization is irresistible that it bends the laws of evolution toward independently converging to it). Shocking must it feel, I know, professor Assid. Take your Flecainide before you faint, or read Thomas Brightman’s eisegenesis of Genesis 12:3.

Assid surely hates violence, a pacifist 'humanist' that he is, but his intellectual lineage is the fons et origo of systematic violence at a scale never seen before in the history of the human race. If truth is to be told, professor Assid is a staunch champion of systematic violence, he may not know what his progressive instincts can do yet, but surely he will ruthlessly pursue whatever means necessary to bring his heaven to earth. After all, violence is instinctual, so no need to dwell so long on demonizing professor Assid with characters he so explicitly denies on the media. The man is already inundated with allegations, no need to press him further as that would be both morally and intellectually unwise. Instead, I will do the courtesy by giving him the benefit of the doubt, and if on the off-chance of you reading this professor Assid, I beg you not to exasperate at me handing out your moral system back to you in its rudimentary machine-code form with a disapproval rating— you might well need a decompiler at this point perhaps— I am going to try to make it as anesthesic as possible just like your progressivism is rendering you anesthetic to its flaws, it won’t probably hurt that much.

For Assid, progress is good because it is progress. Progressivism is good because it is making progressivism metric goes up. This is deliberately a circular definition because progressivism has no moral, metaphysical or evolutionary purpose outside the ballpark of this logical ouroborous. To make matters simpler, it is axiomatically reasonable to define progress as equal to change plus good direction (note how arbitrary ‘good’ is). Ergo, this deliberate circularity tactic of assuming that progress is good change by definition is fairly understandable because when you say that progress is good, you have to do some intellectual toil and demonstrate that your first-derivative is teleologically positive, ie, that change is happening in the direction of good, except you don’t really have to if you’re parsimonious enough to simply let the moral morass of ‘good’ do the job. Great! So far, we’ve already reverse-engineered two, and perhaps the only, tactics that Assid (or any equally fervent progressive) is ever going to use: logical circularity or expedient moralization. Hail us! Any more tactics I’ve left off ? Leave them in the comments.

To understand why Assid willingly and perhaps helplessly use these tactics, we should trace his intellectual and moral lineage few centuries back. Needless to say, we’re exclusively interested in reverse-engineering parts of professor Assid’s source code that pertains to the following ideas which he kept obsessively repeating throughout the whole debate: equality, justice, democracy, reason and humanity— one can only hope that the source code is without technical debt or it hasn’t reached its critical mass yet, but at that point I am just aiming too high— one can already herald that his codebase is full of dead code and skeuomorphised spandrels for the fashionable thrill of it, I equally hope that someone pushes it to our git, Morocco World News, our evangelically ‘neutral’ press (laughs in Robert Conquest).

So, where does the idea of progress come from ? There are two ways I like to think of and answer this question, the historical approach and the theological approach. A historian might point the finger at the English Civil War and Cromwellian interregnum, a theologian might point the finger at the Protestant reformation and the low church tradition. Both are good answers, both are historically and morally continuous and coherent— the Roundheads wanted to do away with absolute monarchy in favor of parliamentary franchise, the Protestants wanted to do away with rituals, sacraments, liturgy, hierarchy, Church and God in favor of personal conversion, informal worship, individual responsibility, Reason and Man. It is fairly obvious how the dot product of these two is strictly positive, there is a reason why divine-right monarchy bloomed so much under Catholicism, and there is a reason why Vox Populi, Vox Dei— the democratization of divine command theory— bloomed just as much under Protestantism, the positivity comes from the fact that displacing doctrinal authority, Protestantism, after migrating overseas to the New World, or to call it by its evangelical pseudonym, the Land of the Free, degenerated later into Christian liberalism, and in search for a new God after it killed the older One, the latter replaced God with the State and technology, the whiggish government of the Publius gang (unfortunately, we don’t have mug shots for Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Could’ve pasted them here, but at least we have their Federalist Papers, finely summarized as the messianic thirst for power), and technological progress to demonstrate the collective spirit of a nation judged by the Calvinist proof of work among the elect into what George Bush Jr once called ‘the beacon of democracy and liberty’ or what Antonin Scalia called ‘the minister of God’, a nation that is predestined to be a city on a hill that the world should learn from by ceding it the sovereignty to make the world in its image, Manifest Destiny, which embodies a political doxology of inevitability that shares the same LUCA with communism, by ushering in the age of prosperity theology, which continues to haunt the most acutely cornucopian corners of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to this day. After all, we all need a Jesus, and the liberal Silicon Valley is more hungry for Christ than the populist Southern Baptist Church— dial in Peter Thiel for more info, or click here to buy. In the end, the low church tradition devoured the high church tradition, bureaucracy devoured democracy which devoured monarchy. The two vectors of democracy and low church tradition are, hence, not linearly independent— they span a one-dimensional vector space that instigates a one-dimensional destiny of the human race, which is the same destiny that professor Assid is yearning for, that of progress, which is hell, but since every vector can only be expressed in terms of the generating family (spanning set) vectors of democracy and low church tradition that span it (the two forming a co-linear closed loop), the chances of Assid’s hominid brain unravelling the hell behind the facade of progress is under the grace of perceptually tautological, aggressive mimicry, ie, it’s dim— after all, if you only see the world from the sensory receptors of a parasite, you can only throw some T-cells at its cure misidentified as a parasite, you can only judge the goodness or badness of an idea based on whether it dovetails or misaligns with the parasite respectively— Assid’s perception is thus counter-immunized against its antidote, the flames continue to balloon into a larger mess.

But we didn’t fully answer our question yet, one thing is missing, something of a Messianic flavor, an eschatological investment strategy, completely unmatched by the most autistically talented high IQs of wall-street investors, which magically and mysteriously lowers one’s time-preference for violence, hatred, discrimination, etc, by deferring them to the age of Armageddon or the Great Tribulation depending on the opioid of your choice, one should cut this messianization gimmick some slack for its utility in lowering the social inflation rate for the homo homini lupus est much more efficiently than the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve, packaged in the form of a rebranded Belle Époque, of relative peace and socioeconomic progress, of low kinetic energy but high potential energy for postponed catastrophes and world wars: the idea of providence—God’s plan—, that the laws of history will, with the leg-up of divine intervention and care, mysteriously and agentically take care of all errors and bad ideas, that there are no ideas except for the idea that good will prevail, there are no alternatives, and one can only bask at the shiny light of the Zeitgeist— the progressing Spirit of the Time. Obviously this supposed Spirit of the Time or Zeitgeist is moving somewhere, the historical speedometer is measuring some changes. The numbers, Mason, what do they mean ? For a progressive, as we pondered before, this is relatively easy to answer even though it shouldn’t be, the progressive, in a blatantly Augustinian phraseology, can effortlessly point the finger to God’s plan, God will do it for us. Behind this exuberant superstition is the Calvinist belief in a mysterious, strictly monotonic historical force whose sole role is to ensure that good prevails, ie, Popperian historicism (Fukuyama’s End of History is just a downgrade of the former) or, if one wants to be precise, epistemological Darwinism. The caveat with epistemological Darwinism, and Darwinism in general, is that it bequeaths the matters of teleology to the mercy of power. I know, it is jaw-dropping to realize how a thinker of the calibre of Karl Popper stultified himself with orthogenesis, but being a prolific intellectual doesn’t immune you from wishful thinking— we all are desrinig machines, aren’t we. Of course, all it takes to unravel the facade behind this just-so story of inevitability is a little bit of inverse steganography that disclose its hidden epistemic suicide. Unlike with people, these things die before we know and masquerades an extended half-life before we know. Let’s not frown and despair, at least we know something beforehand, we know where professor Assid is going with this.

Just like Popper and Soros, Assid is also a believer of this just-so story— the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:10)— but again he might frown at us for saying this. After all, these progressives constantly optimize for covering up their religiosity because religious mimesis is a selective advantage as it is a good indicator of a good progressive— to be a zealous fundamentalist but a talented image-maker of reason and tolerance. But at this point, dear reader, I already took the courtesy of demonstrating that professor Assid is born again and baptized, all thanks should go to professor Assid himself, as it should. Professor Assid is a post-millennialist Yankee-pilled Dissenter who is too hungry for Christ that he finds it irresistible to immanentize the eschaton on the coarse surfaces of the Moorish lands. Father Seraphim Rose once characterized Nietzsche in the same vain:

Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.

This fervent sense of inevitability outsources responsibility away, that no one is responsible for anything, no need to worry because historical providence will take care of all evil by itself, history is asymptotically stable towards good as it self-corrects its malfunction. I wonder why professor Assid is pedantic and eager about making sure people are responsible for what they do and say. To me, that shows a little bit of cracks in his belief system— hurray! that’s good sign. But I am pessimistic, because I know his dose of progressivism can only increase just like cancer grows or entropy reshuffles, and winds up decimating any need for individual agency in favor of historical providence.

This millennialist just-so story of inevitability collapses into crisis when faced with obstacles that put it to the test, and turns into a timeless cycle of manufactured external threats— compare 60s America with today’s America, and the contrast is as clear as the light of the sun— a sense of determinedness of the future has been lost, the future has been cancelled for our dear Americans, but with Assid, we’re not there yet, but he surely yearns for it. He wants to turn the conservative tradition into a fossil record or anthropological artifact that you can visit in museums, or a vaporware if you’re geeky. His epistemic salvation still didn’t yet confront bugs that it can’t resolve for it to flounder aimlessly into its epistemic graveyard, or maybe, just maybe, it already did with the caveat that the host whose this epistemic salvation feeds on can’t see it yet, or perhaps never will— Assid’s ideological silhouette is both alive and dead, just like Schrodinger’s cat.

But regardless, Assid’s progress is still fairly embryonic, it still didn’t accumulate enough informal mental power over him to transgress the boundaries of what he considers, at least so far, reasonable, and mind you, what is reasonable shifts accordingly— it fills the shape of the container like water— but chill, dear reader, we’re not here to dim your light of the day away with this Humean blackpill or the Orthogonality thesis. So far, anything less progressive than Assid’s progressivism is reactionary, and anything more progressive is Western. Other than this being a mere question of time, it’s an example of incoherent and arbitrary solution to the heap paradox. Don’t frown at us, professor Assid, all the mental zombies that came before you drunk from this Kool-Aid, and sunk helplessly into the same tar pit (except for the innovators and early-adopters of this tradition, they’ve set the flag and everyone followed). After all, it is futile to be angry at the inevitable— the city on a hill can’t be hid. It is only by your own historicist pride that I say this, professor Assid, if there is anything you should be gritting your teeth at, it is your own Hegelian fentanyl. Face the wall.

Assid Gospel is The Social Gospel

At this point, it is not an exaggeration to refer to professor Assid as a unitarian minister. After all, if he believes in God, my guess is that he believes in the unitary nature of God, but theological spat aside, unitarian minister is perfectly morally aligned with Assid’s moral toolbox and role as an activist. So I am just going to call him a unitarian minister from now on. Our devout unitarian minister believes the following mysteries: tolerance, equality, secularism, social justice, common humanity or humanism and, the Moloch of them all, democracy. He surely wants to enact the Fifth Great Awakening on the Atlas mountains or in the metropolitan corners of Rabat or Casablanca, to usher in the age of prosperity for the Moroccan people, his own branch of the theodicy of fortune.

As for tolerance, he merely means a mimesis for tolerance. I am sure he doesn’t distinguish between the two himself, obviously he doesn’t need to, again. When pushed too hard, our unitarian minister feels an eschatological need to be intolerant. As Noam Chomsky, I assume one of his heroes or at least he should be, puts it:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

As with any unitarian minister, equality is not only a human universal, but a default aim that is ipso facto inevitable. It is the way things naturally are, any deviation is malaise, any attempt to ask questions in the opposite direction is intolerant enough to transgress the boundaries of fashionable opinion— the Overton window is too squeezed for our unitarian minister, that you shouldn’t be able to defenestrate progressive ideas that easily, you should instead defenestrate biological reality, the fly in the ointment. This default aim of equality is reached by a universally rational consensus on what is good, ie, universal truth, the Rousseavian enlightenment, the Comtean laws of social evolution. Inequality, and especially that of the natural type, is a red flag for our unitarian universalist. Our unitarian universalist might explain away economic inequality with a Sowellian line of thought or simply, since he can, the Original Sin rearing its ugly head, but he will asphyxiate in the presence of biological or genetic inequality, I am sure he will rush to conjure up an ad-hoc explanation for that too— the Turkheimian trap is irresistible for our fellow progressives and moderate conservatives alike.

Resulting from this equality is the secular lingua franca that religion shouldn’t be imposed as the kernel of social order, and that people should have individual liberty to pursue what they want, of course with the caveat that they do so without violence or aggression, which he sees as a small, irrelevant and erratic little bug within a democracy. Sure, it is just a little bug. I wonder how you square up with that little bug though. Also a reminder, bugs accumulate risk in swarm and network effects, you might well explain this.

Secularism, we are constantly told by the editorial board of TelQuel who’s obsessed with this idea— might well be an acute case of Stockholm’s syndrome— is a good match for the multicultural and pluralistic nature of Moroccan society. For these people, the Nash equilibrium cannot be achieved except by anointing power from any cultural or religious affiliation: power should be clean from sin. You can’t read that line and not chuckle up in irony.

For our secularists, the idea that society maintains its stability by gods, race, tribes, blood and soil, is archaic. Instead, we should structure society based on organic trust, shared stories and narratives, and social institutions. This transition from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity is necessarily concomitant to ceding people with the unhealthy agency and absolute sovereignty to individually construct their own meanings of life— secularism is nothing but social existentialism— the mechanical solidarity collapses to give way to a social order sensitively walking on the egg shells of mere organic trust, diluted social bonds and subjective demand for social alignment— the common consciousness has become uncommon, dull and languished in obscurity.

Our innocent secularists need to take some thermodynamics 101, or lobotomize their brains with the dreary fact that social institutions decline and get corrupted with power— the Spenglerian ghost haunts from without— which takes a toll on the people and society at large: our secular midwits might take the mic and explain to us why their progressive secular utopia is concurrent with the rising divorce rates, plummeting fertility and birth rates, declining demographics, surge of loneliness, single motherhood, and overall disruption of family order. What these midwits don’t want to hear is that social stabilization is and should be a mechanical process meant to serve a higher authority of the social fact, a memetic sovereignty over people via social interlocking, with a top-down coercive power, that surrogates their Misesian agency for stability. Thomas Sowell said it better than I ever could:

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

Qua a unitarian universalist, Assid surely believes in our common humanity, the cosmopolitanist citizens of the world, the grace of humanity as derived from its essence without the need for the grace of God. An immediate moral Schelling point of this universality is the duty to establish and preserve social justice. Assid knows that this social justice is not a given, it is not a sort of mechanical control mechanism that does its job by design, hence his need for the intervention of external powers that fix the errors of nature and natural order. Assid hates natural order because for him, natural order is 'oppressive' and hierarchal. For him, natural order is social Darwinism, and social Darwinism is nihilism, a world without God, regularity or order, left to the mercy of chaos, randomness, disorder, irregularity and lethal nonchalance. Ergo, the yearning for a Potentia Ordinata exposes Assid’s thirst for surrogate Messiah. Assid is a very, very religious man, he may not know it, yikes! He may think of himself as this tolerant hippie who’s just vibing with the supposedly orderly world, he may even have a very gnostic or esotericist or theosophical views on God, but this performative tolerance fades away the very moment his progressivist liturgy crumbles to provide an answer to the Gloomy Prospect, Assid rushes to give his own progressivist version of Gods of the Gaps as a stopgap answer to this fatal sin. This may strike you as shocking, dear reader, but at this point it shouldn’t. How can a philosopher of this calibre be pwnd ? Patience, dear reader, all will be explained below:

Assid, the Steven Pinker of our nation, is intensely hungry for a surrogate Messiah, that of the Democratic State and technology. This is fairly understandable— we all need a Messiah—, and he may not know it nor admits it if he does, but his salvation is the Democratic State and technology: More democratic state is good because it enforces equality, more technology is good because it enforces artificiality. Both these beasts secretes their euphoria and anesthesia to distract our unitarian universalist, Assid, from the tax of human nature. Pwnd!

But don’t feel ashamed for your instincts, professor Assid. Here is another a very special patient nonetheless with the same disease, Freeman Dyson:

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

For a brilliant mind such that of Freeman Dyson, it is really sad for me to tell the world that intelligence is not a barrier against injection attacks— the amount of other brilliant minds who drunk the Kool-Aid without a second-guess in matters pertaining to technology, stands a testimony to that fact.

And that, in my opinion, is what Assid is all about. As we’ve seen, these political doctrines that our unitarian universalist takes for granted, the Social Gospel, converge uniformly (and simply) to the justification of ceding power to the state and technology, of ceding power to disorder, the Moloch, the Minotaur, the Cthulhu, or whatever you choose to call. Here, take it from the Unabomber:

leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology.

While the set of leftism is not equal to the set of progressivism, I assure you that the intersection set of those two has a high cardinality.

Democracy, the Press and the Durkheimian Error

Professor Assid is not done yet, he posits that to defend ourselves against external enemies, we have to be a democratic country that bootstraps its intellectual engine by allowing debates and exchange of ideas in a marketplace of ideas on the plea of sane free speech, rule of law and constitutionalism. Professor Assid might well read Yuri Bezmenov at this point, or his favorite or at least he should be, Howard Zinn’s The Myth of American Exceptionalism. But if he is lazy, I would do the courtesy to lay it down for him in plain language, but excuse the brevity: the confounder variable in almost all ideological subversions that took place in history is democracy. In order for subversion to succeed, it needs 3 things in place:

First, the host or target state needs to be reactive: it needs to react to the subversion attempt. If it’s robust or merely apathetic, subversion simply doesn’t work. This is because subversion is a fundamentally reactive psyop, it obeys Newton's first law.

Second, the host or target state needs to have a fifth column, a group of traitors within that country, who are working hard to accommodate the demands of the subversive tactics from within.

Third, this subversion needs to take place surreptitiously for so long without the knowledge of the people of its goals or methods until it’s too late.

Subversion takes a really long time to work spanning 20~25 years. Most of those years are taken up by its first phase: demoralization, which takes roughly 20 years, the years required to educate a whole new generation of people. The point of demoralization is as obvious as it sounds, to weaken the moral veins of a nation by targeting its religion, education system, media, power structures, culture, law enforcement. In other words, demoralization aims to disrupt the reproductive organs of what Durkheim calls the social facts of a given society. The fact that this is possible is bad news for our fellow sociologist, but more on that later. The second phase is destabilization, the aim here is to totter the political structure (power struggles), the economy (overtaxation, inflation, crippling debt), the finance, and again, law enforcement, in order to cause administrative overload resulting from the increasingly incurred costs of complexity, ie, a complexity collapse: the costs of handling and working with complexity surpasses its benefits. The third phase is crisis: this is a rather obvious aftermath at this point, after all, the stability of a society is maintained by the functionality and efficiency, ie, effectiveness of its social structures. Therefore, the instigation of a crisis is a mere tautology, this crisis can take the form of a civil war or external invasion. And the fourth phase is normalization: the point is to create a new normal, a Kuhnian paradigm shift, on the grounds of which society redefines the measures of what is considered social order, social coherence or social stability. If you’re a system engineer or theorist, you could understand Bezmenovian subversion as a saddle-node bifurcation in the equilibrium points of our stochastic partial differential equation with society as its unknown function.

Democracy, the rule of the many— in reality, the rule of the mob and chaos— not only facilitates subversion theoretically and empirically, but it is itself a form of auto-subversion, a controlled demolition, a political autotomy, inorganic apoptosis. Democracy is vulnerable to indefinite malfunction given that the latter is initially non-zero (which is hard to impossible an achievement), democracy is easy to subvert because it is reactive to external perturbations, and not only reactive but fervently adaptive to them because this beast has no political purpose except in pursuing whatever excels instrumentally at accumulating power, and this is fundamentally owed to its fragile social topology: secular democracy derives its stability based on pure, organic trust. As with anything that relies penultimately on pure, organic trust, it can’t be trusted for so long, I hope you dear reader are smart enough to know this— the Madisonian nightmare eternally haunts social or political systems that are based off of pure, organic trust because the latter can be easily transmogrified into populist calamity, social unrest and majoritarian frivolity. For a disinterested historian, this is crystal clear, the majority of human political systems have been anything but democratic. For a statistician, however, an aetiological layer is supplied, the p-value of democratic weakness is just too significant, democracy is an ill-conditioned system. I would leave that for professor Assid to ponder over. Here is a little bit of assistance, try computing the condition number of a democratic system, and pray to God that number doesn’t exceed 10 to the power of 5.

But the problem with democracy goes further than its fragile social topology, after all the latter, despite being the penultimate condition for the effectiveness of subversion, is a mere by-product of the incentive system in democratic governance. In a democracy, there is no rule of law, the mere personal privileges under absolute monarchy are substituted by functional privileges of elected officials for temporarily owning the use of government (the usufruct). Moreover, in a democracy, there is no private ownership of government, as a result, there is no exposure to risk and reward in matters pertaining to the capital or estate value of the government. This capital consumption to increase the income of an elected official who’s eager to scheme as much money and power in a relatively short interval of time, weakens public trust, dilutes social bonds, and its shortsightedness induces a shortsightedness in society itself. This internal weakening of the social topology serves as a leg-up for subversion to topple over the nation very easily. We thus proved that the optimal form of government in order for subversion to succeed, ceteris paribus, is democracy.

As for the market mechanism, I don't think the market mechanism is that efficient, and I would like to think that you dear reader don’t think that too, credulity is such a naive behavior. The market tool is not immune to bad ideas. In effect, progressivism skimmed the cream via the market mechanism. From an Aristotelian worldview, the market is not asymptotically stable. The market deficiency is not self-corrected, it can only get worse precisely under the following mild conditions:

One, the teleological problem: if the market is manipulated or manipulable, ie, vulnerable to goal-disorientedness. Let X be the gains benefit from manipulating the market toward bad ideas, Y the costs of doing so. Unless you ensure that X < Y, the marketplace of ideas gives you the middle finger (saddle-node bifurcation). An empirically proved conjecture: X in the marketplace of ideas is equal to infinity. After all, that’s why progressivism wins in the end, all for the vicious reasons— might makes right. Ergo, the whole history of progressivism can be modestly summarized as just another Gettier case— a misunderstanding of the language of the beast: power.

Two, the instrumental problem: If the market is not well-trained (out-of-tuned hyperparameters are usually the cause): there is not enough market debt, ie, there is not enough 'enlightened' intellectuals. Assid is an example of a not-so-enlightened intellectual.

Keeping these two problems in mind as well as factoring in the social topology of secular democracy, networking technology created the perfect conditions where instinctual chaos took a toll on people precisely because it rendered the process of socialization organic, agentic and purposeful (non-automatic, subject to subjective will and demand), repackaged in the form of a marketplace of ideas— the positivity of the Misesian function came with its first-order costs, and its monotonicity second-order costs.

Democracy, this progressive myth, maintains its legitimacy by repeating its lies. The evolutionary engine for reproduction of these lies is the education system and the press— the modus operandi by which the social fact is transmitted and bootstrapped. This is why the press and journalism has a natural tendency to tilt toward the progressive aisle. For instance, if one can a posteriori imagine that, say, Morocco World News or some fancy engineering school defending a conservative side, one might well imagine the Nazis sympathetic to the jews, the Jacobins protecting the Bourbon dynasty, the Cromwellians aligning with Charles I, the neigh of the horse as intellectually superior to the poetry of Goethe, 4 = 5, P = NP, π a rational number, etc, etc, etc. For progressivism to skim the cream, it needs to subvert these social institutions functioning as reproductive organs.

And here comes the Durkheimian error, the erroneous idea that social order is unconditionally maintained by functional social structures. Unconditional is due to functional, and that’s where professor Durkheim exempts himself from blame, but only locally. After all, what is or is not functional is in the eye of the beholder. If a society commits suicide, Durkheim would hop on in and say that’s the end product of a momentous social dysfunction in society, but what if, professor Durkheim (I know you’re dead and can’t answer this), what if you misunderstand its dysfunction. In systems theory, this is a cold fact of some sort, we know all systems can commit suicide by their hands if they wish, after all, everything that is an equilibrium point for a dynamic system is better than otherwise, and suicide is also an equilibrium point.

Libido Dominandi, The Kernel of Progressivism

At this point, I think it suffices, in my judgment, what we’ve laid down together. Professor Assid may feel bleak at this point, if he ever read this. We better leave him alone fighting his own demons at this point, one last thing I want to mention pertaining to professor Assid is that I hope he heals from this disease, but I am not that hopeful, I am afraid that perhaps it is too late for professor Assid to put out those flames, and all what is left is ashes.

Now let’s rather redirect our efforts to understand the teleology of progressivism: what is the main goal of progressivism ? An intuitively minded voice might say: well, it’s progress. Apart from the commonplace teleological ambiguity of what progress means, this is too far-fetched from reality that it can’t even count as a first-approximation. In effect, intuition can’t fathom the strategic ambiguity behind progressivism, and it also goes without saying, that most, if not all, progressives are intuitively-minded people, so they tend to dovetail nicely with the myth of progress. But underneath this myth of progress, in the depths of hell, lies the throne of Cthulhu: power.

By power, we don’t mean electric power, fortunately for that type of power, we have enough signal processing or harmonic analysis theorems to measure it. Our concern is political power, ie, the power to compel or deter A to do or not to do B. Regardless of how simple this system design architecture is, as it contains only 3 elements: A, a command function, and B, unfortunately we don’t have a powermeter to measure political power directly, fortunately we don’t need such a powermeter. All we need are your brain cells dear reader, a little bit of theoretical analysis, deductive reasoning and Occam’s razor.

It is a good rule-of-thumb that when one thinks of power, one has to think of its generating vectors. For an algebraic mind, this is rather obvious. But for a historian or a political theorist, it might be much more complex than that. But this apparent complexity is mainly due to the fact that history or political theory are not concerned with tautological and general statements, as Frank Ramsey would say mathematics is. Let’s not quarrel further over this, and discuss the vectors of power.

When discussing the essence of power in general, one can think of many generating family of vectors for power. But here, dear reader, we are focused on the sort of power that ensures the existence, if not contributes to the growth, of progressivism. In regards to this form of power, its main legs are the State and technology. Without the State and technology, this power is no more, and all the liberal-progressive squeaks get silenced immediately. Without the State and technology, progressivism would disappear in a puff of smoke. This is rather obvious because progressivism is not ab ovo the default state of things— you can ask your uncle sitting on the couch, or visit the Kalahari bushmen, I assure you these people don’t have an iota of the sort of ideas that progressivism secretes.

A piece of theoretical reasoning that I personally like is hypothetical reasoning or, as the late James Flynn would put it, thinking in the hypothetical (a term for the mental artilleries put forth by Alexander Luria), because hypothetical reasoning works almost like magic, except that there is nothing substantially magical about it. A technique that I find powerful within the hypothetical reasoning tactic is eidetic reduction. At the best of my judgment, eidetic reduction is perhaps the most well-trained model to handle questions pertaining to the teleology of a given parasitic ideology. Follow me dear reader through the logic below:

Let’s ad-absurdum assume that progressivism is an anointed humanitarian movement, by anointed we mean it operates outside the logic of power. The point of course is to show, using eidetic reduction, that power is the essential, invariant and necessary eidos of progressivism via the penultimate step of proof-by-contradiction: setting the power parameter to zero, and watching what happens to the engine of progressivism just for the thrill of it. By ad absurdum, if progressivism didn’t need a coercive totalizing power to exist, then it would’ve existed since time immemorial. This is owing to the fact that political power, just like energy, is conserved— you have to take it from somewhere, and do so gradually because power is everyone’s opioid and can’t be leaked that easily. Progressives might explain the rise of progressivism by euphemizing power with enlightenment, science, Reason, and the increasing credit score of common humanity, but an equivalent reverse-engineering of these things eventually equally lead to power. If there is anything that mainly differentiates modern society from primitive society, it’s not Reason, after all there is not much difference in IQ in between, but power: the State got bigger, and technology got more dominant, the Flynn effect is superseded by the growth rate of the State and technology. To breed even the very rudiments of progressivism, a coercive totalizing force— embodied in the State and technology— is needed— this is why it is not shocking to equate progressivism with totalitarianism, the two after all merely differs in content and form, but not in substance.

Progressivism works in tandem with the State and technology, progressivism needs these beasts to survive, and they need it to justify their existence and growth. The result is a hodgepodge of a positive feedback loop that grows exponentially to…hell. Progressive ideas such as equality, justice, and common humanity justify the use of organization-dependent technology (technology that requires wide-scale compromise of society to its efficiency logic), and other progressive ideas such as economic fairness, environmental protection, and welfare justify the intervention of the state. It goes without saying that the State and technology themselves, regardless of progressivism, increase each others’ power, eg, technology causes environmental devastation which requires the intervention of the State, and the State in maintaining jurisdiction monopoly over its constituents, it needs sophisticated technology. All you have to do, dear reader, to demonstrate these claims is a simple proof-by-contradiction.

Eventually, the State and technology accumulates enough power without even achieving these ideals, progressivism leads to its own pareto-efficient state. I mean there is someone crazy here, and I am not sure it’s me. Look around, the state and technology are growing at an inexorable rate, but there is no equality or justice or environmental safety to be seen. A progressively-minded skull would hop on the explanation that perhaps the State and technology are dysfunctional, and we should fix them (these very people lament capitalism so much, which gave them a lot of their wishes). The thing is, dear progressive, that the State and technology are not dysfunctional, you just misunderstand their function, and their function is indefinite expansion of power as a sole end in itself, which is hell— a teleoplexic suicide. The main goal of the State and technology is the accumulation of power over the hominid brain, such that the hominid brain doesn’t have jurisdiction monopoly— ultimate decision-making monopoly— to do or not do B. In other words, the main goal of the State and technology is subversion of the Misesian type.

What progressives fail to understand is that under certain conditions where growth is unchecked, all non-perishable items tend towards their extreme values. A corollary of this is one can judge the ought of an item based on how its hypothetical-inevitable extreme looks like. The world is doing our dear progressives a great service by disclosing its extremity in the actual, not the hypothetical.

And that is, in my judgement, how progressivist ideas are intensely yearning for totalizing powers to bring about. Unfortunately, there is no other way progressivism can become a reality without succumbing to this opioid. After all, the Misesian distribution is conserved— there is only so much human need can be satisfied in a parsimonious world. Perhaps, we can reverse this. Perhaps, we can instead just let it destroy itself: with enough increasing complexity, this system architecture would grow tired of being increasingly unable to model its own complexity which will supersede its capacity to regulate it, and eventually, commits a complexity suicide. For now, as Deleuze puts it, there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.