Spandrell has begun to analyze why people believed in socialism. They should not have: by the time Marx had arrived they had seen the Jacobins and the White counter-revolution: Napoleon, the chaos Europe was left in and the conservative restoration. But the new working class were tempted.

By envy, but more importantly. covetousness. They saw those who had risen at the beginning of the industrial revolution, and wanted their status. They wanted their security. Their dissatisfaction was fuel to the revolutionaries. What Spandrell describes as catnip for humans I would call something older. Temptation.

The 19th century, which destroyed the Ancien Regime in Europe, was an economic and scientific golden era, but politically it was a mess. A revolution every decade, governments which lasted months, huge scandals every week. Elections were a violent and chaotic affair. If anything got done at all it was because the political chaos gave way to economic freedom, and the private sector got things done. A lot of things done. But the intellectuals weren’t cool with that. Intellectuals are always the reserve army of the bureaucracy. They want the government to get things done.

With all the scientific advances of the last centuries, the 18th and 19th century intellectuals were just brimming with excitement with all the things they could get done. All those plans of social engineering. Utopia on earth! It just seemed so feasible. And yet they could never pull it off through the political process. They just couldn’t pull it off. The politicians and bureaucrats just weren’t loyal enough. Constant factionalism and infighting made any real reform impossible.

Until Leninism, that is. Now Leninism is most likely mislabeled. Lenin did indeed found the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But Lenin died in 1924. And the Soviet Union was still a huge mess in 1924. It was Stalin, general secretary of the CPSU since 1922 who, through the means we all know, really built the Communist Party and stabilized the Soviet government. Stalinism is used to refer to his brutal purges and his approach to criminal justice, but it would be more accurate to use Stalinism to refer to what we today call Leninism; the structure of rule of single-party Communist regimes.

Say what you will about the Soviet Union: the Communist Party was loyal. They got things done. Every crazy and stupid thing that the Politburo approved got done. Yes, it took a while to achieve that result. Stalin had to kill a lot of people. But it wasn’t through sheer terror and cruelty that the Communist Party worked. The Communist Party had a system. Which worked. It still works today in China. You might have noticed how people in the West today talk about China in these same terms. China gets things done, it does them fast and cheap. China got the world’s biggest high-speed rail system in the time that it takes to dig a tunnel in Boston. And for not that much more money. That’s not a coincidence. That’s Leninism at work.

Any country has a ruling class. What I call “loyalty” you could also call asabiya; the coherence of the ruling class as such. Their ability to stick with each other and gang up, keeping the structure of rule stable. Feudalism got that; the nobility was the ruling class, they formed a society very much separate from that of the peasants, and they took much care that their rule was never contested. The destruction of that world by enlightened liberals resulted in a ruling class which was orders of magnitude less cohesive and orderly. You might be a libertarian and think that is a good thing, and you may have a point. But any organization wants to fight entropy and ensure its stability and reproduction. Liberalism historically has shown itself incapable of that. Leninism was the first solution to that problem.

Leninism is, of course, applied socialism. Socialism was huge before Leninism was even a thing, and that Marxism was and is still popular is not due only to Soviet patronage. Socialism works by hacking the Social Calculus Module that humans have in our brains. Remember, humans care deeply about status. Status is what drives human behavior. Everybody works to achieve more status, and to avoid losing status. Socialism of course sells egalitarianism. It tells people with low status that they can get some more. The Industrial Revolution had forced millions of peasants into the cities, and they all felt they had lost status in the process. Economists will tell you that the standard of living of industrial workers (according to some measures) had actually improved. And that may be so, but the workers didn’t think so, and they were pissed.

So these socialists come by and tell them they have this plan to make them gain status, big time. That was huge. Yes, sure, Christianity had also started promising the meek that they were morally higher than rich people; they’d all go to heaven unlike those perfid rich guys. But that didn’t translate into actual, real-world status. Socialism was promising actual goods. And so it became huge. It’s still huge. It’s pretty much catnip for humans. It’s instant check-mate.

As such, Leninism wanted people who had nothing to do lose and everything to gain. By choosing those with no qualifications and future, they were able to weld them to the party. This loyalty allowed them to destroy, to break, in the name of progress and efficiency.

The Chinese still work this way.

And the modern progressive or conservative party is no better. There is no room for a man of genius. They hate and fear Trump, or Blair, or Clinton, for they have options beyond the party.

Which they worship. Their God is jealous, particularly when he is falling.

A political party is a very different beast from an individual politician. A political party has no use for rich people. Well their money is welcome: but rich people tend to not be very loyal. They can afford to have a personality. As a political leader, politicians are your employees. You don’t need staff who’s very skilled or competent. They just need to be loyal, obedient, and have some ability to get elected. It helps if they can talk. Look good on TV. But that’s about it.

You want people who are loyal, who will vote what you want them to vote. As Roissy would tell you, a man, or a woman, is only as loyal as his options. So the ideal politician is the man who doesn’t have anything else going on for him. Someone for whom being a politician is the best thing that ever happened to him. Somebody who positively known that if he ever leaves the party his status would drop. Marco Rubio, say. He’ll play ball. He better.

Any system ruled by political parties will always move to the left. Their business model is based on getting low status people to work for them. Obviously they must give them something in exchange. And they must motivate voters to vote for them. Their promise is simple: You, low status people, help us out, vote for us, obey our commands, and we will give you high status. Don’t vote for us, disobey us, let the right win, and you will remain low status.

Once the left wins, which it always does, because they are better organized, better able to form majorities in comparison to rich pricks who have no good reason to coordinate. High status people have been in the losing side in politics for 300 years. So what? They’re still rich. Life is good. Yeah taxes are higher. And women are incomparably more annoying.

Covetousness is fed to us. Daily. There are advertisements trying to get us to desire that brand clothing, or this car, or this status. To which I have some observations.

1. I don’t understand why I have to own everything that is beautiful. I can admire other’s possessions, and be glad of the success of others. Perhaps I lack some envy, or perhaps I have trained it out. What I do know is that running that cute car is very costly: both Robyn and I have had european cars, and keeping them going is not cheap. So if I see an exotic car (and I do) or a vintage car going I respect the owner and enjoy the mobile sculpture. We can do the same things with other possessions.
2. Status, leadership, does not come free. The party is a lie: to lead you must give your honour and mana to others. You cannot hold onto it. You cannot filter it to only those whom you like. You must help those who have been placed under you, particularly if you don’t like them, they are irritating, and they don’t learn. For your job is to keep the system going, despite the fools. This requires those with ability, not those with loyalty. The reason that the Leninists fall and will continue to fall is that they fear the competent, for they may not be loyal. Their demand of loyalty above all rewards boneheaded stupidity as a survival mechanism, and therein lies their eventual end.
3. Your life is not your possessions. Nor is it your credentials. Nor your file. Your life is more than that. Material gain alone does not satisfy. It has never satisfied. It has never saved. There are more important things.
4. Regardless of your status, failure, suffering and death comes to us all, and the Leninist have no answer to this. Indeed, the life of the Leninist is one of fear, for if you do not keep completely up to date with the current fashions, you are damned as a conservative, and become the victim of the next struggle session. The older idea of suffering being a chance to share in the redemption of the world, as we work for Christ, is missing from dialectical materialism. This leave a spiritual vacuum papered over with lies.

Bioleninim, instead, is an ancient lie. It destroys.

Do not be like this, and beware: for if you fight the Leninist you may end up just like them.