Advice to a frustrated leftist intellectual

Hey. I understand you’re frustrated. I’m frustrated too.

I will not, however, be leaving for the dissident right. Doing so would be both immoral and self-defeating.

Of excesses

There have been, shall we say, excesses. These range from short manners to the odd murder attempt. A lot of these excesses are made up. For example this woman:

Was having a polite conversation but just happened to be photographed at an inopportune moment and turned into a reaction image. About half to three-quarters of the ‘look at this ridiculous SJW’ stuff is made up.

But certainly, there have been real excesses sometimes truly dark. Peer-reviewed documents were retracted merely because people were angry. People who have done genuinely wrong things, but nothing deserving death, driven to suicide through public shaming. Truly ancient documents dug up to assassinate reputations. A pervasive air of sneering arrogance. A lack of awareness of the moral-spiritual intricacies of life, everything flattened into approximating narratives.

My experience of ‘excesses’

Let me tell you some of my stories. One woman threatened to beat me with a crow-bar because I organized an event ‘against identity politics’. There was already so much angry discourse around the event that my only response was to find this funny.

One incident I remember clearly is not in the top ten, or even in the top fifty in terms of objective seriousness- nonetheless it sticks out like a craw. I was at some party and objected to postmodern frameworks as a method for investigating the world. I was told, ‘of course, you would say that you’re a white man. The arrogance still strikes me today. They knew nothing of my story, they simply presumed, - my particular struggles with OCD and about half a dozen other disabilities- various trials and tribulations due to societal injustice- all of this gone.

Another incident that I find particularly hurtful in this regard- which I’m going to talk about in an article coming out soon on the dangers of thinking you can quantify disadvantage at a glance- was a time when I was particularly vulnerable.

I’d just climbed a cliff, and screamed into the storm for God to give me an explanation of why so many people including myself were suffering so much. In other words, I was in such a borderline psychotic state that I reenacted the book of Job. I eventually fell to the ground and cried when God didn’t answer me from the storm. I was, naturally, gripped in the childish narcissism of all annihilating distress. Finally, when I ran out of tears I walked home.

When I got home, I decided that I needed to work on a project to keep myself sane and prevent me from reenacting any further biblical stories. I had written a draft of the first chapter of a story. I contacted an author I am friends with on Facebook who I’d admired as a child and asked if she’d take a look at it. This is all I sent to her:

Hey, I am sorry to bother you and you must get this a lot, but I have been working on a novel for about six months now. I was wondering if you'd be willing to take a look at a brief, two page writing sample and let me know if you think it is worth pursuing, and if you had any tips.

She never replied. However, a few hours later, she posted on Facebook about the entitlement of white men who ask her to be their unpaid mentor. Long-time readers might recognize this story, but just because I’ve singled it out a couple of times, does not by any means mean that it’s the only time something like this has happened to me. A lot of shit has happened to me, and I bet it’s happened to everyone. I just picked this story because it’s illustrative. I guess I have a massive chip on my shoulder about what kinds of social barriers to flourishing win you points in THE DISCOURSE, often because of their visibility, and what kinds don’t.

I am tired of it all. I am so tired of not having my problems recognized. I am so tired of micropolitics that ignores structure. I am tired of politics as a mosaic of competing brands. So much childish bullshit like performative edgy spite, denunciation for the sake of imaginary moral vindication, a deep need to lash out hunting for a target, weird puritanism, the creation of internal status hierarchies, and cruelty not wise enough to fear itself. All of it. I am so sick of it. I bet you are too.

But it’s not all about me, or you for that matter. Neither of us matters all that much in the grand sweep of things. There’s a romantic sense, of course, in which every human matters infinitely. Okay, well, sure, but I’m just one of an awful lot of infinities and so are you. The cruelties we face are just calls to try improve things. All humans bear the historic mission of the liberation of humanity so we must go on. The harvest is plentiful, the laborers too few, and frankly incompetent. Yet we incompetent harvesters must go on.

None of this gives you an excuse for abandoning the left

At the risk of making myself sound like the villain of the piece: “Our plans are measured in centuries”. How long have we been here? See the scope of it all. Humans alternately enslaved and liberated by the discovery of their own powers. A project to raise sapience free up to eternity. I might sound transhumanist here (and I am) but I wasn’t the first to see the left as engaged in a transhuman project. The tradition of all dead generations weighing upon us as a nightmare. Escaping the realm of necessity for the realm of freedom- all of these are Marxist ideas. This is a very old fight to abandon just because a few people are being petty in 2024. The choice is a moral choice, not a selection of social scene. Are you a moral agent or a balloon blown around in a social-media gale?

Imagine a historian one hundred years from now, a good historian, with a good heart. I am not talking about the historical consensus in a hundred years. I am talking about what a wise, morally righteous and deeply learned historian would say in a century and I am using this as a clarificatory device for bringing out your own higher moral self, distanced from the tumult of the present.

This historian, sympathetic as they might be, is not going to say “Oh, okay, sure this person jumped in bed with a bunch of segregationists and people who make jokes about trans women killing themselves, but this is a-okay because their former comrades were weally anmnoyin’. He’s not even going to particularly care if you jumped in bed with the right because the left were cruel to you. It’s not that the historian doesn’t care about cruelty, it’s just that, at this scale, that’s not the sort of thing that matters. It’s tough but that’s life.

You don’t need to associate with any given group of people to be on the left. If you can’t stand the left in a particular space, whether Twitter or a university activist scene, take that as a call to either make the scene better or lead and go build a different and better engine elsewhere.

If you do abandon the left, do not assume your new friends will be any wiser, kinder or less annoying

Now we get to why leaving the left to escape the irritating is self-defeating, the grass ain’t greener. I hear a lot about leftwingers who leave for the right. They usually slam the door on their way out. In a lot of cases, they are amply compensated for their dramatic exits. How many people have sold themselves through the narrative of being ex-leftists? But, thirty pieces of silver aside I wonder if they are happy now.

There was recently an article on here by a former white supremacist who said he’d left because he went and lived among Midwestern white people, and found them boring. This is the eternal problem of the dissident intellectual who turns to the right, more often than not, their new friends are boring. On the right, your choices are two- associate with the dull and leave intellectual life, or associate with the mad. Much the same is true on the left, and for that matter, the center. You either choose to live in interesting social circles (as in “may you live in interesting times”), with all the problems that entails, or among people who have a lot going for them, but just aren’t all that interested in talking about Big Questions. Subcultures interested in big questions and/or big adventures tend to attract pathological sorts.

There are, of course, saner and madder portions of the intellectual right, just like there are saner and madder portions of the intellectual left, but on the whole the problems of moralistic screeching, dogmatism, and sudden inversions of feelings toward others are just as bad, if not worse among the literate right, particularly among those below the age of forty.

When their new friends make caveman sounds about lab meat, scream at each other that they are traitors because of their various positions on a real-estate conman and reality TV star, reuse frog memes that are at this point over ten years old, argue that the council of Nicea was not vicious enough in its condemnation of cohabitation and debate whether lusting over Japanese Cartoon characters make them traitors to the white race, I wonder how pleased former leftists are at their escape from woke moralism.

I can tell you for a fact that right-wingers make far more murder attempts on each other than left-wingers. I can also tell you for a fact that would -be right-wing intellectuals are riven through by the bonds of a life that is crushing them. They’re just as broken as the left, but even more pathetic, for though they are broken themselves they have the nerve to argue that the weak should submit to the strong. They lack mastery of the self, scream for mastery over others, and in their darkest heart crave to be mastered because they’re cowards.

To be an intellectual in the sense of being interested in human affairs is to be around broken people. Only broken mirrors reflect themselves. Don’t let journalists on the anti-woke beat sell you a bill of goods according to which moralism and nastiness are unique pathologies of the left. Did you know that there are journalists trying to convince you that strange manias about sex and sexuality are the special province of the left? We live in a weird and bitter age.

A diagnosis of the current interpersonal problems on the left

The twin roots of the problems on the left, sometimes referred to collectively as ‘identitarianism’ are kyriarchy and micropolitics.

Kyriarchy is the view that there are just a bunch of interacting forms of oppression and that these forms of oppression have no conceptual, historical, or structural center, like a nest of tangled cords. In this view, capitalism is just another thing. We have a bucket of problems: {Sexism, racism, colonialism, classism, inequality, poverty, capitalism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, acephobia, interphobia, biphobia, allism, language discrimination, infertility discrimination, exclusion of non-citizens, culture-supremacism, sexual assault, domestic violence prison violence} they’re interrelated in various ways and they intersect, but there’s no real structure. Crucially, if you don’t lose out from a form of oppression, it is often assumed that you win out from it.

There is another model, a Marxist model, this model:

1. Sees oppression as centered on class structure. Sexism, for example, functions as a part of capitalism, and before it functioned as a part of capitalism, it functioned as a part of class society.

2. Argues that oppression makes things worse for everyone except the ruling class. Look at it this way. Racism means that the white worker gets four cookies, and the black worker gets two. This does not mean, in any absolute sense, that the white worker is privileged by racism because, without racism, both workers could get six cookies. Racism divides the working class, weakening its bargaining power.

There are a lot of complexities here. We can debate how completely various forms of oppression are co-opted into capitalism. We can talk about the interests of white workers in the short-term versus long-term horizon, and the problem of the psychological wages of whiteness, straightness and patriarchy etc. But the Marxist model has a lot going for it. In a practical sense, I particularly like the fact that it doesn’t imply we should all be at each other’s throats. It doesn’t imply that if I am a man and an anti-sexist, this is an altruistic choice on my part, rather than solidarity in a shared project for the benefit of all including myself. Neither callow selfishness nor distant philanthropy, but a shared project.

Micropolitics is the view that the personal is the political. Our ways of interacting with each other as individuals are primary outcomes in politics, worthy of much focus and attention. It leads to endless personal conflict because it suggests that personal conflict over modes of behavior is a legitimate way of changing the world.

Micropolitics is related to a further problem- discursive idealism, according to which the discourse itself is the target of politics. we need to fight so viciously in the discourse because the discourse just is what matters, or at least a big part of it. Why care about queers in poverty when you can care about queers on the big screen. The truly terrifying thing about discursive idealism, for someone like me at least, is that in making discourse the sight of battle, it makes it impossible to talk politics without doing politics and thus doing battle. Even if you just want to have a talk about strategy, you’re assumed not really to be talking, just signaling allegiances, setting up battle lines etc. When the conversation becomes the war, conversations get unpleasant.

Micropoltics and Kyriarchy theory interact explosively with two prior problems:

1. The phenomenon of activist fragility- those who tend to be attracted to political activism, left or right, tend to be unstable and have a variety of internalizing and externalizing problems.

2. The phenomenon of perverse incentives in an attention economy- the internet is set up to give attention to those who are nastiest.

My advice:

1. Explain the Marxist materialist approach to people as an alternative to kyriarchy, micropolitics, and discursive idealism.

2. Try to get people to go offline and organize there.

3. Try to get people to organize industrially.

That’s all we can do. Be a brave spirit. I really wish I had more for you, but a better world is possible, and we know this, because it has gotten better many times already.

You’re not alone.