Why The Right Always Loses
“Sure your ideas are good. But are they contagious?”
Everyone hate writing solutions because solutions are specific while problems are general.
I am no different. Perhaps I am even worse, because I am agreeable. The reason I want to “fix society” is because I want gay things like “everyone to just be happy”.
This is a fools errand, of course. Because you can’t make everyone happy. You can make more people happy. You can make more people win. But ultimately at least a few people will lose. And even if that weren’t true—I am not smart enough or at least I won’t live long enough to factor everything in anyway.
But getting closer is worth it. That’s all human progress is. Getting closer to win-wins. Getting as many people winning as possible. That’s literally the definition of civilization. “How civilized is your society?” is just another way of saying “how much of your society’s interactions are win wins for the broadest number of people?” is it not?
Obviously even though things are largely if not mostly win-lose, we must compare it to how it used to be or how some other place currently is, not some impossible fantastical ideal. And compared to those what we have today in the west is pretty good.
Doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of problems. There’s been a lot of externalities and bugs created by these recent software updates to human civilization that have yet to be squished. But going back to our old code just isn’t the solution.
And even if it were, it’s not going to happen.
Progressives Have Always Been In Charge
Progressives always have been and always will be in charge. Not these specific progressive beliefs, but the progressive type of people.
The beliefs change. Even the individuals mostly change. But the character profiles never do. Progressive beliefs just become the conservative beliefs of the next generation. The progressives themselves often even becoming conservatives as they age. Only partly because their opinions changed from actually getting jobs and money and a family. More because their opinions, just like their clothes, once fresh and hip and edgy, are now old and stale and boring. But the Progressive temperament, the Progressive institution, is always off exploring to find some new established system to disrupt and reorganize toward some fantastical and impossible ideal.
And this is why society always moves leftward. And why everything conservatives believe at any point in time can be traced back to “radical leftists” from a century prior. Everything you value was the idea of some psychotic leftist freak some time in the past. Because everything follows the technology adoption curve. Including ideas.
The progressives do all the innovating and disrupting. Yes, they also do all the insane retard shit too. The difference between the silicon valley entrepreneur and the transkorean biqueer LGBTQIA++ activist is one of degree, not kind. But that’s because you have to be insane to try something new. And most new ideas are bad.
But that doesnt mean you can rest on tradition and “how we’ve always done things” forever. The world is ever changing. And in such a world, stagnation and complacency is death.
And even if this weren’t true: if you won’t be the first to some new, novel, more efficient way of operating: someone else will. And they will happily use their newfound power to kill you and take your shit.
Whether any specific new idea ever gets out of the early adopter phase, ie how contagious it is, is based on several factors. Including how “win win” it is. But also how appealing it is to power. If a set of beliefs furthers the existing power structure, it has far more memetic potential.
There’s a bunch more traits that make an ideology (or anything for that matter) more primed to go viral. But that will have to wait for another post. The point I want to make here is:
“RETVRN”, in all its manifestations—this golden age thinking by conservatives and reactionaries toward whatever time period “when everything was better” they claim allegiance to—is like saying we have to go back to flip phones because iPhones are addictive and terrible and ruining peoples lives.
You’re not entirely wrong. There are a lot of problems caused by modern phones. Everything you are identifying as negative with them you are right about. But what you’re failing to see is all the hidden positives they brought that you not only take for granted but which everything has now become completely dependent on.
You Don’t Actually Want To Go Back
First, there are a thousand positive things the modern world has brought you which you conveniently ignore.
Using just our smartphone example: you don’t need a map to go anywhere. you can work remotely because your work is on your phone. You can look up anything anytime anywhere. You can start an online business or make friends with the same interests or a dozen other things.
Externally, its created far more positives than negatives for you. The actual problem is simply that humans are fantastic at getting used to things that feel good, and never letting go of things that feel bad. It’s literally why we have civilization in the first place—infinite desire.
And thus you can, without effort, forget these positive things and even downplay them when they are presented. Meanwhile your loneliness, isolation, lack of meaning and power and family and control loom over you constantly. This “bias” turns your default emotional response to “progress” negative. Were you to consider the whole picture, it would be clear it’s a massive net positive.
The fact that you don’t have to die from a tooth infection or watch most of your children die from dysentery or work for sixteen hours in a factory or a farm or chasing down a bison are huge improvements but which are not obvious and feel irrelevant unless you actively make yourself aware of them.
If you’re temperamentally past-oriented or not a fan of disorder, you blame the left as the cause of this suffering and become a far right-er. And if you’re temperamentally future-oriented or not a fan of restriction and control, you blames the right and become a far left-er.
The tint color of the glasses you see the world through—determined mostly by your temperament (largely genetic) and your early childhood experience, not “objectivity” and “reason”—determine who and what you blame for the problems we all see. It’s like the parable of the blindmen and the elephant. Except the elephant is size of the whole planet and your temperament and early childhood experience determine on what part of it you are born.
Use as much “reason” and “objectivity” as you want, you are still only seeing part of the elephant. And since you are born on the trunk it is obvious to you, through “reason and evidence” that an elephant is like a snake. So when you hear the libs saying it is like a tree stump (born on a leg) Occam’s Razer and Bayesian Inference say they must be either stupid or lying. Reason is only as accurate as your background research, and when you’re a dumb monkey with only a few thousand years of background research, reason is limited at best.
But I’m getting off track. Back to why you dont actually want to RETVRN:
Second, you for some reason assume that even if we could go back it won’t all just happen again. Whether it’s back to the 80s or 50s or the 1650s or full Uncle Ted all the way to pre-civilization. What exactly is to stop it from all happening again? Maybe with education (how do you intend to educate the hunter gatherers?) you can hold it off for longer probably. Maybe even twice as long. But power can remain insatiable longer than you can remain motivated to resist it.
Water down a mountain always finds a way. You cannot stop it. Only redirect it. And failure to understand this is how you get pwned. Just like how the smallest and least powerful government ever devised in human history was within a few generations corrupted and coopted, and is today the biggest and most powerful government ever to exist. Power always finds a way.
Third, You can’t just parse out the interrelatedness of things as if they weren’t interrelated. “I could work remotely from a laptop and use a flip phone”. The iphone is just the tech of a laptop merged with the tech of a flip phone. It’s an order of magnitude more convenient to just merge them. How are you going to stop someone from inventing this? You going to make it illegal? Good luck with that.
This interrelatedness is the case for every problem reactionaries (and libs too) of all flavors identify. Whether it’s iphones, video games, and social media. Or religion, sexuality, and family (or for libs: guns, racism, and income inequality). Every “negative” modern change was brought on by a dozen different interrelated factors, most of which even you wouldn’t want to give up, and most if not all of which would eventually recreate themselves anyway. Unless you are going to obliterate life on earth, you can’t stop the signal (and even then, it’d probably just start over in a few billion years).
I get it. You want to have your cake and eat it too. Which is why you’re trying to enforce your goal through the state. You think you can have iphones and no one be addicted to bullshit. Or contraception without promiscuity. Or grocery stores without factory farming. Or computers without wealth inequality. Or surgery without big pharma pushing happy pills. Or technological innovation without ideological degeneration.
But you dont really think this hybrid model is possible. Well, you have no idea whether it’s possible or not. You haven’t thought too much about it. At least not about all the practical stuff about how we got here or what all you’d actually be giving up or how not to have the same thing just happen again. It’s just what you wish were possible. And that’s fair enough.
If, however, you spend enough time looking into how we got here, I think you too will realize that all the things better about today you take for granted, are actually only one side of a two headed coin. The other side being all the degenerate and toxic shit you so poignantly and articulately rail against. 1
And even assuming this were not true— even if it were possible to parse out the baby from the bath water of the modern progressive regime—what is indisputable is that your “awesome old tried and true system that is better than today’s degenerate trash” is what today’s degenerate trash spawned out of. Current year is the inevitable end state of the implementation of your worldview, evident by the fact that this is literally what happened.
There is probably a way to heavily modify the old system so that it doesn’t lead to today. But I’ve never seen a right winger (outside of maybe the NRx folks) even acknowledge this fact, let alone actually account for it in their solution.
Protestantism leads to the death of God. Capitalism leads to progressivism. Individualism leads to the degeneration of the family. Whites’ unique openness to the outgroup that allowed them to innovate and build also leads to mass immigration, consoomerism, and tiny hat gang in positions of disproportionate power. The internet leads to addiction to dumb bullshit. Technology leads to birth control leads to feminism leads to promiscuity leads to porn and isolation and single motherhood.
Again, this doesnt mean it’s impossible to mitigate and improve the balance of these trade offs. But you should assume that the default outcome of yesterday is today—that there is a very good reason we stopped doing what we used to do and started doing what we currently do. And failure to understand or even acknowledge this fact only guarantees we make the same mistakes all over again.
Fourth, let’s even say you would be willing to sacrifice these dozens of benefits to repeal neo-liberalism (or whatever you want to call the modern Blue Empire): You can’t. And you never will. And this is inherent in the fact that you want to make the change in the first place. Because you are a loser with no power. If things were working for you now, why in the world would you want to “go back”? Even the most “moral” and “selfless” person who was succeeding in this system wouldn’t give it up to go back to something that would be worse for them. You want to go back because you are personally getting screwed in the new system. You want to go back precisely because you don’t have any power. But the fact that you don’t have any power is precisely why we will never go back.
Sure, maybe things will go so far off the rails that civilization will collapse. It has before. It probably will again at some point for some time at least.
But despite every one and their mom saying this is the decade it all collapses, for every decade of the last who-knows-how-many, for some reason it stubbornly persists.
Perhaps it is because the system wishes to live. And it will shower with fiat bux every big brained boot licker it can find who can concoct any scheme at all that might give it just a few more years. It might run out of them eventually. But it clearly can devise many more than anyone thought possible.
And if it ever does all fall down: what in God’s name makes you think it will be your plan that gets implemented? Why would they implement the plan of the losers? When their God (progressivism) fails, do you think they are going to to consider it was because Satan (conservatism) was the good guy all along? Of course not! God was simply thwarted because they didn’t fight Satan hard enough! And thus they will, like they always do, just blame their failure on you and go back to trying again to implement the vision of their God, the God of the winners—that which is most appealing and sustainable to power.
The people who dictate the future are the people who succeed in the present. Always has been like this. Always will be.
Don’t get me wrong: You don’t have to like the present. I certainly don’t. But you do need to understand it. I want to reengineer things precisely because I find the current model intolerable and gay. But that is exactly why I stopped wasting my time screeching about politics and focused on building my own power so I could become wealthy and free of it’s chains.
I wanted to RETVRN too. Or at least I wanted to change things. At the base of it all, my original motivation for starting this entire project of trying to figure out how to fix the world was because I too was a loser and didn’t fit in anywhere and didn’t have any real relationships and I and everyone around me were miserable and addicted to dumb bullshit. So I sought out to engineer a world in which I would have been happier.
But eventually I realized losers don’t change anything. Power changes things. Which is why everyone wants it. And why no one wants your fucking loser advice. Because it signals you don’t have any, which means you can’t help them get any, which means you are at best invisible and at worst a cancer that must be destroyed.
So I stepped back and focused on me for a decade. I “sorted myself out”. And now I’m the asshole with power and money. Or at least enough of it to be able to spend all of my work energy trying to solve this problem without having to worry about whether someone is going to try and cut off my income by getting me fired from my job. Or even too much about if someone will ever pay me to try and do this. Eventually I will have to make more money, sure. But I can afford, at least for a while, to just worry about being correct. And without the weight of this anxiety, I can see things much more clearly.
Contagions and Vaccines
The truth is that we would have never left if the old models worked. And now that we have left, everyone is inoculated against them. Most people becoming convinced that the old models were bad was a pre-requisite to implementing the current model. Meaning: embedded in the fact that we “ditched the old ways” is the fact that almost no one but a small sect of the new system’s losers will ever willingly RETVRN to them.
By trying to RETVRN you are taking the path of most resistance. And the path of most resistance requires excessive force to overcome. And force requires power. And the only reason you want to return in the first place is because you don’t have any. See the problem? You’re not only losing and will continue to lose, but you lost before you even began.
Your solutions were designed in and for a time when you had power. Meaning they only work if you’re in already charge. And yet you are trying to use them as means of reclaiming your power. How do you magically plan to get the power to reimplement them? And what’s the point of reimplementing them if you can achieve power in some other, easier way? How do you square this circle, friend?
The truth is that you don’t have a plan for how to win. You have a plan for how to feel important as a consolation prize for the fact that you aren’t winning. And that plan looks something like screaming in to the void, clinging to nostalgia, steadfastly refusing to accept the glaring reality that you have already lost.
You’re like the high school jock turned fat drunk, pissed that the nerds are the winners now. But you’ll never be king again until you can provide the utility of a king. And how exactly do you plan to be the star quarterback at the local high school when you’re a middle aged washup who can’t go 24 hours without getting plastered?
You think you wouldnt be a loser if we went back to how things used to be. You believe your skills or temperament or values would have been useful and acquiring of power in a previous world.
And you might be right. But you probably aren’t. The things you believe now are the things the Progressives believed then. Meaning you’d either have been a progressive then (making you evil), or more likely been conservative then, believing the even older shit that previous losers believed at that time, leaving you in the same situation you’re currently in but without all the perks of the 21st century.
And even if this weren’t true: the overwhelming majority of skills and traits that would have made you successful before would make you successful today (charisma, social skills, sucking power’s dick, pretending to believe whatever the regime says, high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, etc). You think things have changed when they have not. At least not by nearly as much as you think. You just conveniently ignore all the things that sucked about then because either A. you believe they would have been someone else’s problem (eg if you are white and male you are less likely to get rekt by a RETVRN) or B. that you will feel hopeless and aimless and blackpilled if you actually look at the beforetimes with any reasonable objectivity.
“If shit sucked then as much if not more than it does now (or if it sucked hard enough for enough people to work their ass off to replace it and so would just do it again) what is there to do other than give up and coom?”
That is what is truly motivating your uncontrollable and overwhelming need to “do something” despite having no viable plan. Because that question, that powerlessness—rightfully—terrifies you.
But running from one’s fears only makes them stronger. If you refuse to go into the dragon’s lair to slay him while he sleeps because you’re afraid he might wake and kill you, all you do is guarantee that he comes to your village and kills not only you, but everyone else too.
And to your credit: you understand this. At least conceptually. You are out there fighting, despite the burden it puts on you.
But your error is not a lack of action. Your error is a lack of reflection.
Your error is that you think the dragon is the progressives. Or the deep state. Or the jews. Or the globalists. It’s not. The dragon is the reality that you already lost. Long before you’d even joined the war.
And the longer you spend in this fantasy world that there is hope in your old dead empire ever riSinG AgAiN, the more the current year, and all it’s negative consequences and externalities, propagates unabated.
You can keep tilting at windmills pretending youre slaying dragons or whatever other little delusion you’d like to fend off the existential terror that is slowly closing in around you. Doesn’t matter to the dragon. Doesn’t matter to reality. He will continue his slow march closer toward you and your little town and then, with a bounce in his step and a glimmer in his smile, incinerate you and everyone you love all the same.
What Is The Alternative
So what do you do? Well you certainly don’t waste all your time trying to infect people with viruses they are already vaccinated against. You mutate that virus so that it bypasses the vaccination.
And that requires something that has never before existed. Something the immune system has never seen. Something which artfully blends the pro’s of the new model without disposing of the pro’s of the old model while mitigating the con’s of both. A little something we around here like to call a “win win”. And then you engineer a game theory that makes that new virus contagious as hell, to the point where, like any good virus, its propagation is not something that massive effort must be expended trying to enforce, but which massive effort can be expended trying to stop and would hinder nothing.
Did we have to fight to spread COVID around the world? No. We had to fight, harder than we’ve fought anything in half a century, just to prevent it from spreading so hard and so fast that it overran everything.
And it didn’t even work. Because contagious viruses are anti fragile. Because they adapt. They mutate. If you can’t kill them completely, they will only come back stronger than ever, immune to your containment strategies.
The more you fight them, the stronger they become. This as true of cognitive contagions as it is of biological ones.
Your idea might be good. But is it contagious?
It should go without saying: not all contagious ideas are good. And not all good ideas are contagious.
Bittorrent is a decent contagious idea. Antifragile for sure. But “good” is questionable, given it’s ambiguity around western property rights and thus inherent antagonism to power (low meme potential).
Bitcoin is a really good contagious idea. Antifragile, good, and actually appealing to power (most disagree with this. I’ll argue why you're wrong another time).
Democracy is a mediocre if maybe bad contagious idea. But it is certainly anti fragile, a la Yarvin’s Cathedral.
Communism is a really bad contagious idea. Killed a hundred million people. Yet remains the premier worldview of the educated classes.
If you are a right winger and dont understand why communism is reasonable and borderline unkillable then you’re NGMI. Similarly, if you’re a left winger and don’t understand why White Nationalism is reasonable and borderline unkillable you’re NGMI.
Until you understand that “good” ideas and “contagious” are not the same thing, you will continue to lose.
Everyone focuses too much on making their ideas good. No one focuses enough on making their ideas contagious. On making them something people will actually adopt. Or at least, no one who isn’t only looking out for themselves. Spend a week in Silicon Valley and it becomes obvious that a shitty product that has high memetic potential is infinitely better than an amazing product that is low. All the institutions of power and wealth are focused intensely on making ideas that benefit them contagious. And when the only ideas that spread are ones that screw you, well… you’re going to get screwed.
Until the “good guys”—those looking out not just for themselves but for civilization on the whole—learn marketing and persuasion and game theory and probably a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t even apply to classic zerosum contagions; until we figure out how to engineer self-perpetuating pro-social viruses in the same way that Bitcoin engineers it’s pro-social utility with NGU technology and Proof of Work: we will continue to be slaves, the losers of the zero-sum games at the fancy of power and wealth.
Dead Ideas Are Dead For A Reason
Stop trying to bring back dead ideas. You should use dead ideas to inform new ideas, but trying to RETVRN is at best a waste of time.
Nationalism is as likely to come back as newspaper, ethnic pride among whites as slavery, pre-modern religions as bloodletting, outlawing abortions as the geocentric model of the solar system, or [insert other thing you want with related thing you dont know is related that you dont want here]. It doesn’t matter what you think should happen. Or even what would be good to happen. Until you understand how ideas spread and how to engineer improved ones that people will effortlessly adopt, you’re just spinning your wheels fecklessly.
And it’s more likely actually much worse than a waste of time. Because what actually will happen when you fight the modern immune system by trying to cause a resurgence in an already-inoculated-against virus is the immune system attacks back. Those who are inoculated (most people) see a resurgence of your ideas no different than they’d see a resurgence of the black plague. And they will respond just as forcefully and without mercy.
If you’re going to shoot the king, you better not miss. And all you’re doing is missing. Firing wildly at the castle with your eyes closed, screeching “We WiLL RiSe AgAiN!!!!” . I can assure you, this is not an effective means of achieving anything more than a fleeting gasp of meaning before you get fucking shot and buried in a ditch.
And if you ever manage to gain any traction, convincing your buddies who are equally as panicked about their own impending doom, to start shooting blindly at the castle with you, you only increase how much resources and attention is dedicates in trying to destroy you.
There are like 800 KKK members left in the whole country, yet the libs acts like it’s 8 million. Why? Because it’s analogous to if there were 800 cases of bubonic plague. How many would you tolerate before you’d want the entire state apparatus coming together to stop it? It doesn’t matter whether right wing reaction is actually contagious and dangerous or not. Whether Power and all it’s adherents’ contempt is akin to an autoimmune disorder or an accurate response to a pathogen. All that matters is they feel threatened and the white blood cells are coming for you.
Your gasps of dying breath, your panicked clawing to survive, your middle finger as you “go out with a bang”, only exacerbates their desire to burn you to the fucking ground.
The more you fight, the more they fight back. And if you ever actually gain any traction, even a glimmer of success, you only turn power from “we are winning. this easy” to “oh shit we might actually lose”. Which turns them, and all their followers, from cold and calculating, to irrational and sadistic. They not only press the boot tighter on your throat but they begin to enjoy it. Which only makes you feel even more afraid and more convinced you must fight their evil. Which only makes them… so on and so on.
Just look at how the immune system responded to Trump. He literally did nothing. He was a dud. He didn’t build a wall, he didn’t deport illegals, he didn’t lock her up. He just made funny jokes. And the entire Blue Empire went absolutely batshit over him, every day, for four entire years.
And now that he’s gone they are traumatized as hell and have fixed every last loophole they hadn’t already so nothing like that can ever happen to them again. If we ever had any semblance of “fair” elections before, I can assure you, we certainly don’t now and never will again.
Oligarchy is anti fragile. And every time you attack it, you only make it stronger. Which only makes the problem worse.2
Just like COVID and our response to it: if you keep appearing so dangerous and uncontrollable, you won’t ever “win”. You’ll just cripple the entire system in it’s war to stop you. Everyone is worse off in the end. Except the assholes at the top of course. They get only more wealth and power. Do you want an Orwellian Police state? Because this is how you get an Orwellian Police state.
Just look at how Power responded to the nothing burgers of January 6th or Charlottesville 2017. As far they are concerned a bunch of goofballs trespassing in the white house or half the country’s white male autistic population walking around with tiki torches are akin to another Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
You “fighting” for your right wing future’s-past is exactly what they are using to convince the populace that “authoritarian socialism”, or whatever you want to call it, is the only way to keep them safe. You, and your foolish need to “just do something” is the scary monster they tout far and wide to convince the populace that the only way they will be safe is under daddy globalist’s surveillance and control.
TLDR
You cant solve problems with the same thinking that got you into them. The “way we used to do things” is the medium in which “the shitty way we do things now” was grown. Traditional beliefs caused progressive beliefs. The before times caused current year.
You already lost. And every time you throw a tantrum, you only give power an excuse to clamp down harder.
The hydra of power has always been and always will be. Every successful lobbing off of a head only grows two more. Maybe two or three hundred years ago you could, like Hercules, lob off each head and cauterize the wound before another grew back. But all the guys just like you who believed someone has to do something without any idea of what to actually do screwed the pooch on that one. Now there are ten million heads and they’ve learned to just start cutting each other off to spawn even more.
You can no longer stop it. You can no longer kill it. You can only go somewhere else so it doesn’t kill you long enough for you to figure out how, by appealing to it’s own interests, you might incentivize it to willingly submit to you.
There is no going back. Only forward. Only through. The sooner you realize this—the sooner you stop clinging desperately to old bullshit “solutions” that already proved themselves powerless against progressivism by the fact that it replaced them in the first place—the sooner you can stop making the problem worse and start having even a chance at making it better.
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Modern right wing reaction to progressivism reminds me exactly of Marx’s classic left wing reaction to capitalism. Artfully crafted diagnosis with a surgically precise articulation of the symptoms. But a laughably childish and ultimately disastrous treatment plan.
Honestly, the Oligarchy should be thanking us (I was on the Trump train too). We pen tested their system and didn’t even charge them a dime.
I’d be interested in a follow-up to this article.
The right doesn’t always lose