One of the most misunderstood topics amongst the Dissident Right is the topic of “woke corporations”. Many self-identified “right-wingers” (especially those of the “Economic Populist” and “Third Positionist” variety) fail to understand true nature of progressivism and how it spreads. They’re very good at identifying the existence of the problem but are incapable of understanding what incentives led to the origins of the problem in the first place. Many right-wing dissidents will choose to take a page from the Leftist playbook and blame “unfettered capitalism” for the rise of consumerism and social egalitarianism in western countries. While this argument may sound nice on paper, there are several factors that show why this isn’t the case.
Defining Wokeness: Before I explain what causes the current moral decline and political polarization within western countries, we must first define what wokeness even is. Wokeness can be best described as any aggressive political push for egalitarianism usually based on the idea that anything that doesn’t have a equity-based outcome must be the result of bigotry or discrimination. The end result of egalitarianism is what we’re currently seeing in our society today. Anyone who is straight, white, and/or male is considered toxic and privileged because of who they are. No amount of appeasement to those who believe in Wokeness will ever change this. For further information on what Wokeness actually is I’m going to link to a video by the Youtuber MentisWave for further context:
Biological Leninism: The Neo-Reactionary blogger Spandrell defines Biological Leninism as the following:
“So again, the genius of Leninism was in building a ruling class from scratch and making it cohesive by explicitly choosing people from low-status groups, ensuring they would be loyal to the party given they had much to lose. It worked so well it was the marvel of the intellectual classes of the whole world for a hundred years. Meanwhile, what was the West doing? The West, that diehard enemy of worldwide Communism, led by the United States. What has been the American response to Leninism? Look around you. Read Vox. Put on TV. Ok, that’s enough. Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. There’s even movements propping up disabled and fat people. What Progressivism is running is hyper Leninism. Biological Leninism. When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant. In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn’t work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one’s talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class. Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin’s direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That’s the nature of the Cathedral.
Biological Leninism by Spandrell
Basically what Spandrell is saying here is that Biological Leninism is how progressive ideals gain influence in Western Civilization. Biological Leninism doesn’t spread through traditional coordinated leadership but instead because of incentives created by the inefficiency of Liberal politics. One of the main problems of Liberalism is that it’s divisive democratic political structures lead to abnormally high levels of political polarization and bureaucratic inefficiency compared to the aristocracy that predates it. I’m not going to focus too much on the failures of Liberalism since I want to save that topic for a potential future blogpost but it’s important for us to acknowledge these flaws since this is what allowed Biological Leninism to fester in Western institutions to begin with. People (mainly political elites) are unsatisfied with the current status quo want immediate change. What makes Socialism trendy amongst the downtrodden is that promises high status to those who don’t deserve it. Egalitarians constantly demand that things such as “food” or “healthcare” is somehow a right and must be provided to all as a result. Not only this opinion popular on the left but there are also so called “right-wing” economic populists pushing for this nonsense as well. Little do these pseudo-conservatives realize is that the same economic leftism they’re praising is also a major cause for the rise the excessive hedonism that they claim to oppose.
Negative vs. Positive Rights: A negative right is best understood as “freedom from interference”. It’s the right to do what you like so long as you aren’t harming others or their property. Examples of violations of negative liberty include but aren’t limited to: slavery, extortion, rape, murder, physical abuse, groping, child abuse etc. What all these negative liberty violations have in common is that they involve one individual forcing to another person to either give up something they own or have their body being used and/or hurt in a way that they never consented to. The opposite of negative liberty is positive rights. It’s the idea that people should be obligated to provide for others even if they don’t consent to such an arrangement. The problem with this is pretty obvious. Forcing one individual to provide something of theirs to someone else against their will isn’t all that much different than endorsing slavery. For further information regarding this topic I recommend reading my previous blog post on the Civil Rights Act.
Do Free Markets Cause Moral Decay?: Now that I’ve explained why left-wing economic policy fails from a moral perspective it’s now time to talk about the other elephant in the room: Economic Populism. Economic Populists (also known as Econ Populists for short) is a mainly conservative movement which is attempting to obtain power by appealing to the left. They believe that fiscal conservatism leads to morally bankrupt society and that the only way to fix it is to adopt left-wing economic policies and mix it with socially conservative government policy. The main problem with Econ Populism is that it’s logically incoherent from the get-go. For one, there’s nothing conservative about leftist central planning. The welfare state for example is one of the leading causes behind moral decay:
“The welfare state is a debt state that will no longer be able to pay off the promised benefits to future generations. Due to the above-mentioned incentive structure, more and more payers are being withdrawn from the system while at the same time the number of beneficiaries is growing. In parallel, benefit levels are rising steadily and the social bureaucracy is expanding. This not only increases government spending constantly, but also reduces potential economic growth, because fewer and fewer people are working in the productive sector. However, less economic growth in turn leads to an increase in the number of people in need. A vicious circle has been set in motion. The welfare state is fighting more and more desperately the problems it has caused itself. Pay-as-you-go systems are accelerating the path to financial ruin. Most social “insurances” (pension, illness, unemployment) are based on the pay-as-you-go system, i.e. the amounts paid in are immediately passed out to the beneficiaries. Since the available funds are simply redistributed, nothing is saved, no investment is made and no income is generated. As payers become fewer and fewer, get older and have fewer and fewer children, the system has a serious problem. For decades, the enormous construction-related cost increase of the social systems can therefore only be countered by the constant expansion of public debt. The mass immigration of the unskilled, conceived as a solution, will not solve this problem, but only make it worse. Reforms of the welfare state are either superficial or leave only a slight bend in the steadily rising expenditure curve over the coming 15-20 years. Consequently, the rate of government spending in Western democracies has risen from an average of 12% to almost 50% over the last hundred years. Expenditure attributable to the welfare state already accounts for more than 50% of the state budget in Germany. In the last forty years German national debt has grown from 167 billion to 200 billion euros! If all the pension and social entitlements of the municipalities and federal states are taken into account, the figure is 8,000 billion or 8 trillion euros, respectively. In the business world, a company in a comparable situation would have had to file for bankruptcy due to over-indebtedness. In other Western welfare states, the situation is similar.”
Free Private Cities by Titus Gebel pages 32-33
This quote from the entrepreneur Titus Gebel perfectly explained how welfare states discourage productive financial savings amongst private citizens in favor of government dependency and high debt. This excessive progressive government spending is also known as high time preference behavior. Time preference within the content of politics and economics is how often someone is willing to spend money or implement short sighted political policies now compared to how likely they are to save money or prioritize long-term stability. Welfare spending and other left-wing economic policies always lead to higher time preference in terms of economics and politics due to it leading to political instability and extreme economic debt. Welfare programs also have an overwhelmingly negative effect on birth rates. Women on welfare are less likely to have children leading to the decline of not only birthrates but also western families as a whole. The difference between Econ Populists and Leftists is that Leftists KNOW their policies lead to hedonism and they don’t care. This is what they want after all, so why would they oppose it? This video clip explains all of this in greater detail:
Another argument that both Econ Populists and Leftists love to use is the idea that capitalism puts profits over people. People who use this argument claim that the profit incentive dehumanizes people by encouraging businesses to treat their customers more like vessels to suck resources from rather than individuals with their agency, livelihoods, autonomy, and interests. This argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what profit even is. In order to profit financially in a free market economy, you need to provide something that is in consumer demand. In other words, what determines profit is whether or not you’re providing value to society. A business that provides something no one wants won’t make any money because its products and services don’t have any consumer demand. Another problem with this argument is that it assumes that altruism isn’t profit-driven when in reality it is. This because of a concept known as “psychic profit”. The term psychic profit is defined by the Mises Wiki as…
“Psychic profit and loss is an increase (profit) or decrease (loss) in the acting man’s satisfaction or happiness. Psychic profits and losses are sensible, subjective, mental and purely personal. They can be neither measured nor weighed. They can only be felt or sensed. The psychic profit or loss derived from any action can be compared with that of another solely in terms of more or less.”
Psychic profit and loss definition from the Mises Wiki
Some of you may be wondering what any of this has to do with altruism. The connection to psychic profit and altruism is that those who help out others without any financial gain often do it because it makes them feel better personally. Whenever someone helps out others in order to make themselves feel better, this is known as “psychic profit”. This means all human action is profit-driven, regardless if you’re getting paid with physical currency or not. Even the most altruistic individuals are motivated by selfish reasons even if they refuse to admit it. It’s impossible to escape profit and loss incentives because incentives are a core part of human nature. To imply otherwise would be an rejection of reality itself. Ideologues that reject reality are infeasible because they’re nothing more than utopian wishful thinking rather thing being backed by hard evidence.
“The cathedral”: If you’ve been paying attention to the Spandrell quote I references previously you’ll notice he mentioned something known as the “cathedral”. The term was originally coined the the reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) to describe decentralized “alliance” of progressive media pundits and Marxist academic intellectuals that control the Overton Window of our modern society:
“I notice more people using this label, which I coined a long long time ago, and have always had ambivalent aesthetic feelings about. I used a capital C, but I see more of the miniscule and I think it’s better. “The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society. The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure. Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together. For instance: in 2021, Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post are on the same page. If there exists any doctrinal difference between any two of these prestigious American institutions, it is too ineffable for anyone but a Yale man to discern. (Though it may say something that Gray Mirror is not taught at Harvard.) In 1951, Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post were on the same page. But Yale in 1951 was on nowhere near the same page as Yale in 2021. If you could teleport either Yale into the other’s time zone, they would see each other as a den of intellectual criminals. So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.”
A brief explanation of the cathedral by Curtis Yarvin
Basically what Moldbug is saying here is that the cathedral is not an organization or secret society but rather an network of progressive intellectuals (mainly journalists and academics) that use their media influence to push false doctrines designed to control acceptable opinion and to keep our current managerialist technocratic leadership in power. Despite having no real leadership, pretty much everyone in the cathedral has the same agenda, that being the promotion of internationalist globalist progressivism. I’m personally not going to talk about the cathedral much in this blog post because Yarvin has a habit of making the cathedral structure and motivations overly complicated. For now I recommend watching this other recently uploaded video by MentisWave which does a better job at explaining the cathedral than I can. The reason why I’m mentioning the cathedral is because it plays a major role in the manipulation of the political narratives within western societies:
In conclusion regardless if you agree with my economic policies or not, one thing is undeniable is the origin of “wokeness” within western societies has nothing to do with fiscal conservatism but rather more has to due with the failure of Liberal democracy as a political system and progressive economic policy discouraging investments and savings through bureaucracy while subsidizing “free riders” (those who provide nothing of value to society as a whole). Social Conservatives that appeal to the left in hopes of gaining power will quickly find out about the harsh reality that left-wing economic policy can only bring left-wing results. There is no such thing as “Socially right, economically left”. If you are economically left at all, your policies WILL end up creating a left-wing society whether if you like it or not because of the socially egalitarian incentives that those policies ALWAYS cause.
Stateless Sovereignty 