We’re all surely familiar with the “map” of politics. The square graph that contains all the possible political positions. You answer a questionnaire and it plots your x and y position on the graph. This guy:
This graphic, ironically, captures quite succinctly how confused most people are about politics. The separation of “economic” and “social” into independent variables is a fallacy. A society is an economy. The production of goods and services are largely for the purpose of social interactions, and most social interactions are economic in nature (for the more philosophically inclined, this is about peoples’ confusion over how ends and means are praxeologically linked together). People do not understand this, so these graphs surely do represent what people believe. But it is ultimately meaningless, because while cognitive dissonance can exist in peoples’ heads, it can’t manifest in reality.
In truth, the more “libertarian” you are, the more “right wing” you are, and vice versa. If you oppose the state, you support the “traditional” family order and all the morals that come along with it. If you support the state, you oppose traditionalism. Different combinations can exists in peoples’ heads, but not in reality.
This is obviously going to upset the groups that hold the opposite combinations: statist traditionalists (who are usually called “fascists”), and anti-traditionalist “progressive” libertarians.
Progressive libertarians are variants of, and probably overlap significantly with, “libertarian socialists” or “anarcho-communists”. This is cognitive dissonance in the synthesis of politics and economics, as if you can choose socialism vs. capitalism and anarchism vs. totalitarianism independently. This choice only exists to people who don’t understand what these things are. The whole point of socialism is to decouple wealth from production. You can’t do that without redistribution. Even in the fully developed communist utopia, redistribution is happening at the moment of laboring. The laborer labors to produce something, according to his ability, and it is immediately redistributed to the communal store for consumption by someone else, according to his need. Who does this redistribution? The state. That is what the state is.
I know there’s the Marxist argument that wage labor is redistribution of labor from the laborer to the factory owner, but they ignore the fact that factories don’t fall out of the sky. They were produced too, so they belong to someone in particular, not anyone who wants to come into the factory and use it to crank stuff out (not only did someone build the factory, someone financed its construction). Capitalism is the order where produced goods remain in the hands of the producers, until they voluntarily exchange them. There is no problem of redistribution, and no need for a state. An anarchist social order cannot be anything but “capitalist” in the purest sense of the word. To claim otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand the basic fact of physical nature that goods originate in the hands of their producers, which means to each according to his ability, and all the “unfair” inequality that implies.
The attempt to combine social “progressivism” with libertarianism, or social “conservatism” with statism, is the same kind of schizophrenia, but with politics and society. But society is the economy and vice versa, so this is really just another manifestation of the same underlying confusion.
All of these groups, and everyone in between, operates on the widely held fallacy of confusing authority with power. The state is the instrument of power in society. It holds the guns, commands the armies, and runs the courts. But not only is the state not the instrument of authority, the state specifically exists to undermine authority. Authority is a natural perception of expertise. An “authority” on a subject is, correctly defined, someone who is widely perceived to be worth listening to about that subject. As such, someone with a lot of authority can be extremely influential. This is like what we call “power”, i.e. the ability to make things happen your way, but it’s fundamentally different. Power is the imposition of influence by some instrument of force, which includes intimidation (no shots fired, just lots of guns pointed in a certain direction). It is the alternative to authority. A society organized around power is a society not organized around authority. Someone with authority does not need power, and someone with power does not need authority.
It is precisely the difference between a leader and a ruler.
The “anarcho-communists” plainly state they oppose “hierarchies”. They oppose authority. To them, being “anarchist” means no one has the kind of influence that authority would grant them. There are no leaders in their society. What they have less trouble admitting, though it will come out if you question them enough, is that they must replace authority with power. Some ancoms are so deep in cognitive dissonance, in the form of hippy-dippy “peace and love, man” fantasizing, they genuinely don’t see how violent their ideas are. The ones who are out there organizing and strategizing a plan for how to implement their system are well aware of it and will gladly tell you it starts with a purge of all factory owners and landlords. Nothing but a nightmarish instrument of violent power could possibly flatten all hierarchies. Hierarchies are abundant in nature. They exist in animal packs, in insect hives. Shit, they even exist in physics (big masses gravitationally bind smaller masses in an ongoing chain to larger and larger scales). Egalitarianism is supremely unnatural, and like anything unnatural, it requires constant effort to keep it existing in defiance of its own instability.
The ultimate irony of egalitarianism is that the “best” egalitarians will rise to the top and dominate.
The fascists, and their softer variants of “social conservatives”, claim to oppose all the forms of “moral decay” we see: divorce, abortion, slutiness, illegitimate children, homosexuality, sexualization of children, and so on (notice all of these are about sex in some way; as I’ll explain there’s a reason for that), and believe the right kind of rigid statist hierarchy, ideally ending with an Übermensch at the top, is the way to prevent things from “naturally” decaying as they currently are. They are just as confused as anarcho-communists. They don’t understand how cognitively dissonant the attempt to combine a strong government with central planning and taxation with a pro-family pro-traditionalist social order is.
While obviously not a Marxist, my account of history and society is highly materialist. I believe the foundation of all social sciences is economics, and that economics ultimately drives history. Political revolutions happen when the population becomes poor enough to revolt. Most social movements in politics originated out of an economic crisis and ultimately promise to solve that economic crisis for the average man. As such, I see “society”, and the “social order”, as a direct outgrowth of the economic order.
In economics we can place all human behavior into two broad categories: the productive and unproductive categories. To fulfill their consumption needs, humans either engage in production (mixing their labor with nature-given resources and other previously produced capital goods, and trading the products of labor with others), or in confiscation (using force to obtain the products of labor of others). Both of these scale to economic “systems”: capitalism and socialism. Both rely on the forceful (violent if necessary) enforcement of behavioral norms (for capitalism, the protection of private property; for socialism, the compulsion to labor for the communal store).
We can do the same for “society”, and place social behavior into two broad categories: the monogamous and polygamous categories. To produce children, humans either engage in marriage or in “hookups”. Both of these scale to social “orders”: the family order and the state order. Both need to solve the problem of how to raise children to adulthood. The family order solves this by having the man who impregnates the woman remain with her and the children and engage in resource acquisition on their behalf. The state order solves this by confiscating wealth at scale and providing it to single mothers, and eventually state-run child caring centers.
Some people may consider it a non-sequitur to go from hookups and single motherhood/daycare to statism. But they don’t understand sociology. Marx and Engels did. In Marxist terminology, the child-producing-and-raising unit is called the “base”, and the social order is the “superstructure”. They correctly identified families as the “base” of the “superstructure” they called capitalism. They also correctly identified the state as the instrument of moving society past the capitalist stage into the socialist stage.
The two categories largely align with the two mating strategies seen throughout the animal kingdom, which are called the “R-selecting” and “K-selecting” strategy. R-selecting is a strategy used by prey animals in resource-abundant environments. Their main problem of survival is not production, but avoiding environmental dangers (i.e. getting eaten). Food is plentiful. Their strategy is to “fuck like bunnies” (rabbits are a prime example of R-selecting animals): mate as much as possible with the most optimal mates. Some of the offspring will be eaten, and the rest will have plenty of food. K-selecting is a strategy used by predators in resource-scarce environments. Their main problem of survival is not dangers, but production (hunting). Food is not plentiful. Their strategy is to carefully select mates that are good hunters, pair-bond, have a small number of children and very carefully raise them into adulthood as good hunters themselves.
For humans, K-selection becomes marriage and families, and R-selection becomes “hookup culture”.
It has been a long-standing goal of every communist movement to eventually replace families with a “centralized” child-raising system. The 20th century has gradually seen the construction of these systems, the primary of which is the “public school”. The fact children eventually leave their state-assigned caretakers (misleadingly called “teachers”) and return home to their biological parents is due only to the fact this system is incomplete. Over the decades, the amount of time children spend away from home and at either school itself or some school-sponsored and organized activity has gradually grown. Through a system of daycare, all funded by taxation, the role of parents in a socialist or communist order is reduced to simply performing the sexual act and then carrying the child to term.
As we are seeing, the goal extends beyond this. Socialists and communists seek to completely sever the tie between reproduction and sex. They are seeking to do this in two ways: birth control technology, and the legalization of abortion. The purpose is to further reduce the role of biological parents to mere sperm donors and womb-lessors, and if/when technology allows, fully replace natural reproduction with genetic engineering and artificial incubation. Once sex is completely decoupled from reproduction, the distinction between “types” of sexuality that are fertile (heterosexual vaginal sex) and types that are infertile (anal sex, homosexuality, pedophilia, hookups with condoms/birth control/abortion) becomes meaningless. The point, of course, to sex beyond reproduction is pleasure, and sexuality becomes a mere aesthetic taste, no different than having a favorite food or genre of music. The role of biological gender becomes meaningless too, and as technology allows, gender becomes a mere choice of which logistic role one wishes to play in sexual acts, i.e. which genital configuration to possess. The decoupling of “social” gender, i.e. different clothes and hair styles for men and women, becomes so meaningless that it can be chosen at will and re-chosen at any time.
A lot of red pilled people think the true purpose of school is to “indoctrinate”. This is really just a convenient reuse of the “school” system. Ultimately the purpose of public school is to allow people to have illegitimate children and stick them somewhere while they have full time jobs.
Once the separation is complete, an economic order based on private property won’t make any sense or be possible. Children will either be born to single mothers or in laboratories. Who will take care of them? A social order in which people are not pair bonding and organizing into families, who privately own their estates, will leave children uncared-for. Even as adults, children born outside of family structures won’t have any “safety net”. There’s a reason socialists and communists won’t shut up about “safety nets” and how “cruel” a capitalist order is for not guaranteeing people jobs, giving them unemployment, and ultimately providing everyone with a guaranteed minimum income. These are the people who have no families. They were raised by public school and rejected their family (including extended family, like of grandparents and great-grandparents), or more recently, they likely were born into already fractured families. The “safety net” of capitalism is families. If you lose a job and run out of money, or suddenly need an expensive surgery, you are rooted in a community, primarily with blood relations to several highly successful and established members of that community, who will offer you help.
But in order to be part of a strong family-structured community, there needs to be a strong family structure. Your grandparents need to have stayed married, and had your parents in wedlock. If your parents are the illegitimate children of single mothers, you may not even know who your grandfather is, and your grandmother may be limping by on welfare and rotting away in a nursing home (she won’t be able to help you). The more cases of this are in your extended family structure, the more fragmented that structure will be, leaving you with little to no familial community. You will then have less of a choice to rely on them. As society continues to see this kind of destruction of families, those born into this world increasingly have no choice but to rely on state-run, tax-funded systems as replacements for communities. Without family communities, there will also be less pressure to resist temptations toward infertile sexual activity, and to instead get married and start one’s own family. There will be a positive feedback loop of “alternative” lifestyles which will further erode the family structures that still exist.
Now, how will this society solve its production problem? Families solve it with private property. Men marry women and work to obtain resources, which become the privately owned estate of the family, that is eventually passed down to the children. Men are incentivized to work and be financially successful in two ways. First, they own the fruits of their labor. Second, they are socially expected to financially sustain their wives and children, and will be largely excluded from sexual access to women unless they can be good providers.
A society not organized into families, where children are raised by the state, does not have this. To put it bluntly, the solution is slavery. The most productively capable men will be forced to produce the goods and services that are distributed to single mothers or state-employed child caretakers. The organization will tend to be that men work to supply the resources to state care centers and its employees, and the day care employees are women. As the distinction between men and women erodes, there will be an effort to equalize the distribution, but this will always compete with the biological reality that men are stronger and better suited to manual labor. The typical distribution will be for men to perform manual labor and women to act as “enforcers” (this was a common organization in chattel slavery).
It won’t be called slavery. It will be called “taxation”. People work in order to provide for themselves, and are taxed heavily to employ the care centers and caretakers. The overall result is the same as in with families: the capable laborers labor enough to provide for the consumption needs of themselves and those not capable of productive labor: children and the caretakers of children. The difference is in the family order, a man works to provide for himself, his own wife and his own children. In the statist order, a man works to provide for himself, state caretakers and children who are not his. Perhaps the key difference from this perspective is that the person working to provide for a child is no longer directly involved in raising that child.
The 20th century in the West has seen the gradual devolution from the family order to the state order. First the state put in place the legal and logistic structures to tax enough wealth away from families to fund the construction of public schools and the employment of women as caretakers at these schools. This is the first step of decoupling child-raising from child-bearing. Women still took care of children, but a mother only took care of her child for part of the time, while the rest of the time a “school teacher” took over. Conversely, these “school teachers” only cared for their own children in the evening, and cared for others’ children during the day.
This had the effect of increasingly getting women into the workforce. Instead of being “homemakers”, some women became teachers. As the tax burden on families was higher, the need for the mother to enter the workforce increased. The ones who didn’t were left idle at home with no children, in a household burdened with higher taxes. This pushed even more women into the workforce. Women became less connected to their own children and families. Furthermore, women who committed adultery and ended up pregnant out of wedlock were far less doomed than before. They had more opportunities to be employed themselves instead of relying on a husband for resources (and if they were single mothers their prospect for marriage was much worse), and they could work during the day because their children would be in school. So then more women started seeking to have sex outside of marriage.
Correspondingly, men had more opportunities to have sex with women without marrying them or providing for them. Despite paternity laws, it was simply easier for men to impregnate women and then disappear, escaping the need to financially support the woman and the child. This opportunity was likely greatest for married men, who had already demonstrated high enough sexual market value to get married.
This all conspired to erode families. Women spent less time with their own children, the ones fathered by their husband, and became less connected to any of them. If they had an affair and got pregnant, the marriage might end, but she would be better able to support herself and the children and wouldn’t need to stay home with them. Men no longer had to be productive and marry a woman to have sex. The number of illegitimate children started rising. Illegitimate children found themselves born into broken or fragmented family structures, or family structures built on a lie. The pressure from above to continue the trend and get married themselves began to weaken, and the need for an alternative social order like the state for a “safety net” increased.
The world wars culled off a large number of men, leaving many women widowed at a young age. Some of them of course remarried, but there were fewer eligible bachelors. If they couldn’t find husbands, they could “lower the price” of the good they offered (sex) by offering it without marriage. They would have affairs and end up with illegitimate children.
This came to a head in the ’60s when women began openly revolting against the constraints of the family order. Left to pure biological drive, females tend to select only from the most highly fit males, while men seek more quantity. This makes sense from a gene-propagation perspective: a man’s genes are most likely to succeed by spreading his plentiful sperm and impregnating as many women as possible. A woman’s genes are most likely to succeed by reserving her scarce eggs and womb for the best sperm. Women were increasingly turning to affairs with the “top 20%” men instead of getting married, but still suffered social stigma for doing so.
The social stigma used to be an expression of economic disaster: women who had illegitimate children couldn’t take care of themselves and the child. With this largely eroded, the social stigma began to appear as an arbitrary, snobby aesthetic judgment (“Victorian”). At this time, technology began to produce female birth control, further reducing the risk of “unwanted” pregnancy, and this allowed women to have more hookups with men until they decided they were ready to produce a child. Women began explicitly attacking the male domination of the workforce in order to ensure they can achieve self-employment to care for themselves and any illegitimate children they have. The lives of “slutty” women who never got married and ended up as working single mothers became more and more economically viable.
By the ’70s, marriage itself had become a seemingly pointless social structure. Taxation had risen to levels that readily funded a massive “free” public school system that largely took care of all child-caring except for housing and feeding them overnight. Men, particularly highly desirable men, obtained more and more opportunities to lead “bachelor” lifestyles where they slept with many attractive women and never had to settle down. The men who did settle down had to pay almost as much high taxes as bachelors, but also had to provide for his wife and children. For attractive men, the husband and father life became increasingly less desirable. When women achieved the right of no-fault divorce, it became even less desirable still. Only the less attractive men who were never considered an option for extramarital sex were still better off getting married.
Correspondingly, the more attractive women seeking marriage had to increasingly settle with less attractive men. For the less attractive women who never could have married highly attractive men, they started to have more opportunities to sleep with attractive men by offering sex at the marriage-less “discount”. The prospect of marriage and family became more and more of a pointless trap for everyone except less attractive men. Correspondingly, women fought for no-fault divorce and divorce exploded. The remnants of previous generations pressuring the Boomer generation to get married simply led to high numbers of failed marriages.
These trends continued to the current generations, where both young men and women are fully employed, and highly attractive men hook up with above-average attractive women with streamlined apps on their smartphones. Highly attractive men have a record low incentive to get married and have children and instead study and perfect the science of dating multiple attractive women simultaneously (a.k.a. “game”). Women have a record low incentive to leave the workforce and be homemakers with a husband instead of just hooking up with attractive men, then getting impregnated by an attractive man when she’s ready and raising the child single. The marriage rate and birthrate have plummeted.
In the sexual marketplace, women flooded the market with sex to more attractive men, which caused the price to bottom out. Women now have a much harder time attracting a man for marriage, because other women, including ones more attractive than her, are offering sex without marriage. Even women who would otherwise wish to lead a traditional lifestyle with marriage are pushed into extramarital sex and, if they want a child, having an illegitimate child.
Perhaps even more alarmingly, there is a growing body of less attractive men who have been pushed entirely out of the sexual marketplace. They are not in the “top 20%” and are therefore not selected for “casual dating” or hookups, and are frustrated to find that most women are not only not “marriage material”, they are extremely narcissistic sluts and would never consider marrying them to begin with. If it were not for pornography, these “incel” men would have probably already turned to mass terrorism. They are forced to enter the workforce to care for themselves, having little to no family structure to fall back on, and are stuck with the largest tax burden Westerners have ever seen, forced to work to fund single mothers, public schools and other systems that ultimately subsidize a hedonistic orgy they aren’t invited to participate in.
Those men are becoming increasingly agitated and extremist. Most of them at least have a rough understanding of what has happened to the West. Fueled by their personal history of rejection by women, their judgment may be somewhat clouded. They place undue blame solely on women, who are simply responding to the incentives in place. They also incorrectly see “degeneracy”, that is infertile sexuality (hookup culture, homosexuality, transvestites, sexualization of children, etc.), and drug and pornography addiction, as a cause rather an effect of social decay.
Because they fail to see that the real engine that drove this decay was the system of taxation that began diverting the wealth of families toward the system of state child-rearing (the system that ultimately makes it possible for women to behave the way they are behaving without starving to death), they seek a solution in the state. They are turning to “right wing statism”, “social nationalism”, or “national socialism” in droves: a system that promises to provide a state social safety net for men, impose traditionalism on women and outlaw degeneracy by force.
They also don’t understand that the whole point of the state system was to enable this kind of behavior. The entire purpose of subsidizing childcare, single motherhood and abandonment of family (i.e. health insurance, unemployment, all things that used to be managed by families) was to allow people to have a free-for-all fuckfest and eventually “decide” what gender they are. It was always fundamentally to “free” people from the confines of a “traditional” socio-politico-economic order.
Of course, statism will only make things worse. The more power the state has, the more opportunities there will be to organize and survive without families. To be sure, the system will collapse either way, in one of two ways. The first is violently. The incel men, and plenty of family men shackled with a massive tax burden and having to protect their children from the larger social order (and watching the more unlucky men having their children confiscated at gunpoint by the state), will start the “boogaloo”, and the productive engine will grind to a halt. The other is nonviolently. The tax burden will continue to increase as the currency gets devalued and the state fails to solve the economic calculation problem until its own logistic systems of taxation and “education” become technically unworkable and fail. Already, the system is deeply indebted and so fundamentally broken it can no longer provide wealth at the level it could in the mid-late 20th century (this is obscured by the proliferation of modern technology).
Then, the schools and teachers will no longer get funded. Illegitimate children to single mothers, and probably some of the mothers themselves, will start dying instead of being cared for by the state. Only those who organize back into families will survive this. With that reorganization, taxation will evaporate and markets among productive families will begin to emerge, gradually building up a new capitalist order.
I noted at the beginning that the traditionalist capitalist family order is K-selection for humans, and the degenerate socialist orgy is R-selection for humans. I also mentioned that we see K-selection in nature where resources are scarce, and R-selection where resources are plentiful. This is the motor that drives the see-saw of human history. Scarce conditions lead to K-selection, which grows a productive society that eventually produces wealth in abundance. This then pushes people into R-selection. But unlike rabbits, nature didn’t provide that abundance. Productive society did. Once R-selection erodes the productive society, the abundance disappears and people find themselves in conditions of scarcity. This pushes people back into K-selection, which starts the cycle over.
As the saying goes, “bad times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times”.
And this is why, regardless of what you believe, when push comes to shove, you’re either a traditionalist anarchist or a progressive statist.