Political ideologies are built like religions or cults, promising to deliver us from evil and bring us into the wonderland of salvation: The next Rome, end-stage communism, perfected magic-masonic enlightenment democracy, or the libertarian utopia of John-Galtistan.
Some people are born into an environment of strong believers and indoctrinated accordingly. Some join an ideological group later in life. Some never care about ideologies but ultimately have to live in a system based on ideological concepts.
A firm believer’s identity is tied to his belief. His hopes, his fears, his social circle. His decision-making.
It’s always made to look very scientific, even in cases when the construct is based directly on prophets and gods like in Islam. Muslim theological experts are considered legal experts and political scientists all in one. They were expected to define everything in long-winded treatises.
Marx wanted to be the Pope of socialism and simultaneously its leading scientist. He was engaged in bitter feuds with his competitors who also pretended they could explain and solve everything. Socialists think that endless talking and writing makes everything legit, from Gulag camps to wars of aggression.
Western “political science” treats the enlightenment like a magic force and winks at Freemasonry which was created under King George I. for the British Empire. Go to any democratic Western nation’s capital, stare at the temples and obelisks, walk past the stores selling handbags or watches for 30.000$ and check the prices of houses there.
To be a libertarian is to be perpetually frustrated. Liberty is awesome but about as rare as a unicorn and about as stable as some super-particle that exists for a femtosecond in an experimental accelerator. It’s unobtanium. Libertarian theorists submit scientific papers to each other, congratulating themselves for solving the problem of exploitation and violence, but nothing ever changes. Something is very off and more libertarian papers and podcasts don’t help.
The extreme right just wants to be Rome. The state construct is supposed to be god. The pseudo-science simply glorifies Rome and successors to Rome, while explaining that every deviation leads to decay. The theorists sound like the worst kind of scumbag lawyers who defend criminals.
Political science has never matured into a real science
In a real scientific field we expect gradual meaningful progress and sporadic breakthroughs. This is not what we can observe in political science and historical research. There has been no real progress and no breakthroughs. Our understanding of enlightenment democracy is as primitive as it was over 200 years ago. Socialism is still the same. Libertarians can’t move on from Hayek, Mises and Rothbard. The extreme right prides itself for not making any progress.
People make a choice of ideology based on genetics, personality, upbringing, opportunism, a sense of belonging, money and status. You grew up privileged and liked it? Conservative. You were poor and miserable? Leftwing or extreme right. You hated your rich parents? Left. You like responsibility and individuality? Libertarian. You want to just belong and be normal? Political middle of enlightened democracy.
In the age of algorithms and psychometrics there is a myriad of factors to calculate this. If you live in a classic regime you are pretty much forced to submit to a single ideology. If you live in the West you are pressured to think and move within an artificial frame of just a few political-ideological categories. You are supposed to pick one of several controlled ideologies and that is it. Within a single ideological category there is more division of course.
The ideologies fail at core levels
Standard ideologies have given us explanations on how humans make decisions and what is causing evil. Yet these ideologies pre-date many modern scientific findings and breakthroughs about humans.
A useful theoretical model to explain how people should and shouldn’t live together needs to include
- modern science about pathological evil in individuals and group dynamics
- a deep understanding on how espionage works as a set of hidden mechanisms
- a much improved view on history in regards to evil and espionage
The common ideologies all avoid a comprehensive scientific understanding of evil because this would rob them of their core promise that they, and only they, can properly explain and defeat evil. In today’s world the followers of an ideology may superficially use medical terms like “narcissistic” or “psychopathic” when talking about their opponents. But they don’t really apply psychological-medical knowledge to keep their own group healthy. They don’t dare to analyze how evil their heroes and idols were. They will cooperate with evil rich people and foreign regimes. A cult dies when it’s honest about itself.
- The left made every excuse for the USSR. They denied that Marx was a mildly-talented scumbag who couldn’t handle money or deal with people, yet he is regarded as the prophet for how people should live and work together.
- The extreme right makes excuses for Hitler and every psycho empire from the past that they like.
- Adherents of the enlightenment somehow manage to overlook how the British Empire faked its own enlightenment and the US was run from the beginning by a tight privileged group managing the killing of natives and importing slaves. High-ranking Democrats and Republicans alike are implicated in the Epstein files. French democracy was a weak affair and they still fought their own colony from 1954 to 1962.
- Scary rich individuals today with government contracts have bought up a lot of libertarianism through think tanks. Other libertarian celebrities distrust the US elite but somehow can’t manage to call out the Russian regime or even China. Fans of Ayn Rand tend to glorify robber baron dynasties.
The real world is messy and purely moral decisions are often impossible. Yet the big ideologies fail consistently at a basic level in the real world, outside of the theoretical academic realm. In the real world large-scale, powerful ideological influence campaigns usually serve organized evil. One ideological group is quick to call out their opponents as riddled with spies, paid mouthpieces who regularly get updated orders from their secret handlers. But a group will not admit that it itself is riddled with spies, working for organized evil.
The different theoretical models for an ideal society and how to get there have never properly examined the vast dimension of espionage, even though we have tons of data.
This would rob the ideologies of their ability to construct historical arguments. They will say that what happened in the past was ABC and therefore we have to do XYZ today. Yet the past was dominated by the field of espionage; as much or more than by warfare. This massively increases the difficulty level of figuring out why key individuals in the past did what they did. Motives could be secret. Someone may have acted on the secret instructions he received from an organization without even necessarily knowing much about the organization. An agent may have only pretended his overt loyalties and a double agent may have pretended to flip.
- Socialists avoid a professional analysis of whether their saint prophet Karl Marx was an informant for the aristocrats, whether Stalin had worked as an informant for tsarist secret police, whether Lenin was a snitch and whether the movement was totally infiltrated to begin with. If they go there their cult dies.
- Right-wing extremists don’t want to look whether their heroes like Hitler had been compromised informants and assets. They don’t want to examine the true power of aristocratic super-clusters from Europe. They don’t want to deal with the fact that Putin is a former goon from the KGB 5th Directorate of Leningrad and hates Westerners. They don’t want to know that their favorite figureheads betrayed them and work for the authorities.
- Followers of the enlightenment magic are often like children. They do not want to face the reality that democracy wasn’t real. That it has been fluff to hide trditional empire structures.
- Libertarians would end up in a mental health crisis if they knew the true history of managed capitalism and how US and Russian elites have bought up their movement. They will applaud a celebrity doing Russian subversion.
Every major ideology claims to understand evil and to have the toolset to defeat it:
- Marxism wants to eliminate significant private property and individual freedom. This would end the exploitation mechanism and even wars.
- The extreme right promises a wonderland of tightly controlled citizens without deviation. The solution to everything is the totalitarian state.
- Enlightenment democracy promises checks and balances. The average person gets to participate through voting and talking to others. This system would detect evil/criminal behavior and prosecute it
- Libertarianism wants to keep the state apparatus as small as possible.
These different theories of evil are fundamentally incompatible. One group’s devil is the other group’s god. This is how Western populations stay divided.
When you joined the communist movement before the Russian Revolution, you didn’t know the espionage background of your leaders. They may have been secretly working for foreign or domestic networks. Socialism was heavily infiltrated by aristocratic intelligence. You also didn’t know if your leaders were pathologically evil. Once a revolutionary government exists, you have zero opportunities to vet and change the leadership. The government will use espionage against any suspicious citizens. Marxist theory is of no help then.
A typical democracy didn`t begin inside of a vacuum. It somehow grew out of an empire. It could be subverted by hidden networks from the old system or foreign networks or new pathologically evil networks. A justice system as well as other checks and balances can only function if they have not been infiltrated. Too little surveillance and democracy dies. Too much and it dies. The freedoms a democracy provides make it vulnerable to espionage with evil intentions. A politician or corporate CEO may be working for the enemy of democracy and capitalism. Democracy, as it has existed, has too many politicians, too many laws, too many lobbyists, too many policies and too much ideological gibberish for the average voter to examine. It’s like clicking “I have read and accept the terms of service” on the internet when you haven’t read the 30 pages and you couldn’t understand the text anyways.
Libertarians want small government, maximum privacy and other freedoms which all provide cover for pathological evil and espionage. In theory, private property presents an opportunity to have a market for counterintelligence. A libertarian society cannot magically emerge out of a vacuum. Any society is already heavily infiltrated and faces more danger of infiltration. The average citizen or customer tends to make bad decisions and shun responsibility. Libertarians know this paradox. Give freedom to goons who will immediately use that freedom to support a new tyranny? They can’t solve this dilemma. Instead they fantasize about ideal societies, a John-Galtistan, or commercial behemoths which can keep the goons in check. Cult-like systems tend to win over libertarian academics.
The rightwing sees an empire as moral so objective standards of morality are simply not applied. Empires have been characterized by pathological evil and they all knew that nobody dares to question winners. A new rightwing system like the Nazi government can be crazy evil, its leaders may be foreign spies and it can`t be changed by the population. An Aristocratic cluster of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars pretended to appreciate the Nazi ideology and spied against the regime for the benefit of Britain. If you explain these things to an extreme rightwing believer he simply cannot compute this. He will revert to the basic talking points of his ideology.
Theoretical models for a society like technocracy or a system focused on ecology are ultimately just variations of the big ideologies.
A democracy may be fully compromised from the very beginning, meaning it is simply a step towards some type of tyranny or a cryptocracy where all parties and mayor industries are secretly controlled. A cryptocracy offers many benefits for a pathological elite. Elites can stay mostly invisible and run political and economic front organizations. Forcing a single ideology onto a diverse population has to many drawbacks in the modern age. It is more efficient and safer to give people a set of controlled political options. It provides the illusion of participation, freedom and hope. Ideological preference is usually determined by a mix of genetics, upbringing and circumstance. Through psychometrics an elite can maintain databases about the current strength of individual ideological categories and subcategories. It is a basic technique of deception to provide an artificial frame. The people move inside of that frame and decide between controlled categories.
Conspiracy pseudo-science
The only political movement that had a focus on pathological evil and elite-level espionage was and is a complete mess: Traditional conspiracy mythology focuses mainly on the idea of a Jewish super-lodge of satanists running Western countries. Pure evil is defined as Jewish subversion and Jewish mystery cults. Somehow Jews were masterful spies and no one else could compete, even though other groups were much bigger, had empires, vast espionage capabilities and practiced mystery cults within the elite circles.
Classic conspiracy authors display a very poor understanding of how espionage is conducted and how it has been used historically. The core fairytale centers around the small Rothschild family which supposedly stole fortunes from the House of Hessen, scammed the London stock exchange, took over the central bank of the British empire as well as the main banking district. All that without any special tricks up their sleeve.
According to this legend the vast aristocracies were stupid and passive. In reality, the House of Hessen had recruited Mayer Amschel Rothschild as an asset to perform tasks. He was then handed over to the British crown and his sons provided cover for British money transactions and likely British spy operations against France, Germany and Austria.
Conspiracy authors allege that all over Europe and elsewhere other jews from small communities managed to conserve a full blown mystery cult and a far reaching operation to take over various empires. In reality jews lived under the same surveillance system as everybody else. Some additional rules further confined jews in order to mitigate any possible risk from them being different than the regular population.
All empires were surveillance states. Informants lurked everywhere, just like in the modern era in places such as Soviet East Germany with the Stasi secret police. Hundreds of years ago average folks were expected to observe any foreign traveler with suspicion and peek out of their windows at night to check if the neighbors had any late-night guests or if someone was going somewhere without a good reason. Investigators didn’t have limitations like today. Torture was legal. Threatening families of suspects. There was no Miranda babble and staying silent and lawyering up. Getting recruited as a spy was a way out of peasant hell.
Jews had no empire and no way to escape the surveillance. They were one of the least likely groups to ever pull off a significant operation. Conspiracy authors typically excuse evil perpetrated by members of their own ethnic group and favorite ideology. Muslims describe jews as devilish while praising fourteen hundred years of muslim imperialism including all forms of Jihad. Patriotic American conspiracy authors make excuses for slavery and the genocide of natives. Some authors praise Hitler and deny the holocaust. In summary the conspiracy ideology presents a faulty understanding of evil and espionage. Besides hating jews there is no coherent concept of what a country should be like.
Conventional ideologies contain some interesting bits to attract followers. A traditional nation state under many conditions may provide stability and protection. The left was superficially correct in stating that modern western systems are rigged and too much like old empires. The democratic concept of checks and balances and the guardrails of a republic is somewhat sound under many conditions. Freedom is wonderful, yet extremely fragile and difficult to attain. We are faced with absolute evil and masterful espionage even though conspiracy mythology is garbage.
Outside of academic circles the ideologies were simplified for the target audiences. They all have a simple gimmick at their core:
- Fair distribution of wealth
- Salvation through empire
- Liberty
- Choice
- “it`s the jews “
The more simple the pitch the more perfect the logic appears so followers see evidence everywhere. A propagandist typically uses the simple core gimmick, describes a theoretical perfect utopia society where everything works, and then delivers a variety of recipes to achieve this utopia.
