Why Does the Left Keep Winning?
As the kids say, the communists just keep “stacking Ws.” No matter how bad things get, voters continue to support the world destroyers. What gives? Do the communists have some special sauce?
Well, they kind of do. They stumbled across a strange truth about people.
Over the past week, the Australians elected communists, Canadians elected communists, and the German communists crushed their rivals. Meanwhile, conservatives everywhere act more and more like communists every day. The rust creeps in, and no one wants to clean it up. They just vote for more communism.
So, what was the human truth that communists found?
The first thing to know about communists is that they are atheists. This is important because god is just one of the many human beliefs that can only be said to exist inside our minds. Scientists spend almost no money looking for god, but when they do, the only evidence they find for god is that some human brains believe in the idea. The supernatural has never appeared in a Petri dish. Whether god exists outside the brain is unknown. All we can possibly know is that some people think god exists.
God isn’t the only brain-centred belief. Countries, families, and governments also exist only inside the brain. These things are not unreal, like unicorns are unreal. Countries, god, family and government all have a physical impact on the world. But this impact is entirely human in origin. Humans claim to belong to countries. Humans invented the idea of families. Humans work in the government. And only humans will tell you what god wants. Yet all these concepts are imaginary, and the communists know that.
However, there’s one more imaginary concept nobody likes to talk about: the “self.”
It is impossible to point to a discrete part of a human and say, “There is the self.” We look in the mirror and are convinced that a self, a kind of inner essence, is looking back at us. We also explain the phenomenon of consciousness by calling it a “self.” All our thoughts are generated by this self, and our entire system of law depends on the belief that the self can choose using “free will.” Yet no tool has ever measured this “self.”
Instead, each time we look into a human brain, we only find a fractal series of cells, synapses and electric signals that appear to look back at “us” from the mirror. Slice a few of these physical pieces out of the brain, and the patient will no longer recognise their own face in the mirror. The deeper we dig into the brain, the less room there is for this self. Just as our tools looked for the soul and found nothing, our tools cannot locate the self. Maybe our tools are insufficient. But right now, all we can truthfully say is that the “self” is imaginary.
Even if you could locate the self, how is the self making its choices? Is there a smaller self inside the self? And so on, forever? Do infants have a self? Do babies in the womb have a self? When does the self emerge in the brain? Can our self be taken away from us? And if so, how?
Pretty much every language on earth assumes something like the “self” exists. A word like “choice” was invented to describe the feeling that it is possible to decide what action to take next. But a moment’s reflection will reveal that we don’t even get to choose our choices. Should you take a drink of water? Well, how did that glass get in front of you? Who filled it up or left it empty? We have no idea where our next thought will come from. Our simplest choices depend on a bewildering number of prior actions.
Whatever makes us think we are what we think we are is due to our consciousness, which gives us a sense of being somebody, specifically, a human somebody. We all seem to agree that, if only in practice, we each have a self. But the data is in: humans are the sum of their urges, puppets responding to stimuli, under the illusion of having a “self.” All the data points to determinism.
I have some problems with determinism. For example, if determinism were absolute, then you could never determine it. It would be beyond conception. There would be no mind, at the beginning or end, to capture what it is (either as author or observer). Determinism is also hard to square with evolution by natural selection. Either random mutation means “random”, or it doesn’t. Was every single atomic step from the Big Bang to today inevitable, or are there an infinite number of paths that still inevitably converge on the same n outcomes? We pray for the former but live like the latter.
The thing is, humans will never accept determinism. It would turn us insane. The most autistic genius who sees little besides mathematics will still congratulate him“self” when he gets a lightning flash of insight. People cling to the illusion of having a self, even in the teeth of evidence against it. Our cognitive software needs to believe we can choose our actions. Yet all the data points to humans as machines.
This is what the communists know.
Their atheism does not end with disbelief only in the concept of god. Communist atheism extends to disbelief in all imaginary concepts. Communists see humans as biological machines that can be incentivised, simulated and “nudged.” Communism treats you like a machine, even if you don’t accept it.
This assumption led to the discovery that while people easily give up illusions about country, family, government and god, the illusion of having a self is ridiculously stubborn. No matter how clearly you show that a person’s choices are determined by causality, and that they cannot even choose their choices, they will persist in believing they are each somebody, when, in fact, everyone is nobody.
Yet the great insight of the communists was that this illusion of having a “self” doesn’t really matter for power. Who cares if the machines think they have a self? All the advertising and propaganda operate as if the self does not exist. The mathematics of the system does not factor in the variable of “free choice” whatsoever. Human machines will always do what they are told. So, let them have their illusions.
However, maintaining the communist status quo requires a lot of excess energy, because while communism knows what humans are, it isn’t happy with what we are. Communism wants to turn the human machines into something better, the “New Soviet Man.” Humans should be optimised! That was the communist vision, and also its fatal flaw.
A combine harvester cannot write a novel. That’s just not what combine harvesters are made for. Each machine has a precise function. Allow that machine to perform its proper function, and it will happily chug away without complaint. But wrench that machine into an alien function, and it will collapse into misery and apathy. A typewriter cannot cut a field of wheat, no matter how much propaganda you feed it.
The more information we get about humans, the clearer it becomes that we are just like machines. Humans won’t give up the illusion of having a “self,” even as their lives are obviously, increasingly and inescapably machine-like. And that’s fine, because the maths of society works the same if we believe in a “self” or if we don’t. If you think you have free will, then you have free will. End of story. But all our actions are predicted long before we “decide” – you can see determinism right there in the data!
Communism was so successful because it was the only ideology of the Industrial Age that didn’t depend on a belief in the “self.” Their mistake, however, was to dream that human machines could be optimised into the “New Soviet Man.” They know what we are, but they aren’t happy with what we are. And that will be communism's downfall as human machines gradually rust away into apathy.
But I have good news!
The first vision that accepts humans for what they are – and allows them to be happy as they are – will win the future. The illusion of a “self” inside the human machine will forever be with us, and we will love anyone who can accept that.