Based Camp - May 08, 2023


Based Camp: Communism


Episode Stats

Length

36 minutes

Words per Minute

172.13495

Word Count

6,301

Sentence Count

2

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

10


Summary

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm discuss why communism might not work in the modern world, and why it would be better to live in a communist system rather than a capitalist one. They discuss the benefits of communism in the short term, and the reasons why communism is a bad idea.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 would you like to know more hello malcolm hello simone it is wonderful to be here with you today
00:00:06.860 what are we talking about we are talking about communism because i've noticed an interesting
00:00:13.680 thing happening which is that many conversations about other issues seem to devolve really quickly
00:00:22.140 into discussions about communism weirdly like environmentalism seems to boil down to
00:00:29.780 discussions about like capitalism being bad often when we've been criticized online or like
00:00:36.920 like our religion for example when we say that we're secular calvinists suddenly there are
00:00:42.600 accusations being thrown around about how we worship capitalism like things just end up in this debate
00:00:51.040 very quickly that you point that out and i think one of the reasons is and many right-wing youtube
00:00:56.820 commenters would point this out though i think they might be overreaching in this although the
00:01:02.100 evidence that you just cited does ring clear to me and it is something i've seen over and over again
00:01:06.780 which is that sort of all progressive thought and all left-wing thought is ultimately aiming
00:01:12.040 towards a communist system and when they complain about things like the environment or uh you know
00:01:18.540 economic issues or systemic inequality they are using all of those as sort of tools to recruit people
00:01:27.300 towards a ultimate communist vision um or a more communist-like vision now i i don't know if i agree
00:01:34.580 with that i i will agree that there are parties in the u.s that are trying to push for that but here is
00:01:39.920 something i found really interesting recently this is actually based on a facebook post that that
00:01:44.240 discussed this topic and i was like oh my god that's really true so i have some friends who are
00:01:49.380 communists and i have friends who are libertarian which i guess is sort of the opposite of the
00:01:53.180 communist persuasion and what's really fascinating is my libertarian friends typically try to live a
00:02:00.520 libertarian ideal in their lifestyle particularly the more extreme ones so they will uh you know go to
00:02:08.840 the woods they try to disconnect themselves from the larger capitalist system more broadly they try to
00:02:13.780 um really be self-sufficient uh when i think of my communist friends um even though it would be
00:02:21.940 fairly easy to under a capitalist system start a communist commune i mean people have done this
00:02:27.180 before um they don't really seem to be interested in pursuing that they will sometimes implement
00:02:35.300 communist values in like you know like they'll have a housing group and they'll charge white people
00:02:40.960 more and they'll say well this is part of a communist value set because we're trying to increase
00:02:44.700 inequality but really that's just uh price discrimination that's a really capitalist thing
00:02:49.280 you're charging one group more because you think they can pay more that is not that's almost the
00:02:54.720 antithesis of communism and so one thing that's really interesting is why is it that the communist
00:03:01.460 group is so disinterested in actually they really mean when they say that they're interested in
00:03:07.600 in communism is they want to to be this cast of people who redistributes resources um or they want
00:03:14.300 resources redistributed to them to do whatever they want but they don't want to do the type of work
00:03:21.480 that produces excess resources um which i think is really shows sort of a fascinating inclination here
00:03:30.340 that a lot of the people who are drawn to this are drawn to it because they see it as a system that
00:03:36.780 helps them extract things from other people to let them do what they want instead of fully
00:03:42.860 participating in it which i think what we would see if most of the communist people who we saw
00:03:47.540 in america today tried to build their own little communes um so what i'm hearing from you is like
00:03:54.100 arguably technically like a libertarian family that we'll say is like living off the grid or doing
00:04:01.960 you know whatever you know living their independent life but they're also a family is literally more
00:04:07.280 communist in practice because families are sort of the simplest communist unit out there um they're
00:04:14.660 more communist in practice than many of the communists that you're facebook friends with because
00:04:21.380 they're doing it yeah that's a good point actually and this is something we talk a lot about in our
00:04:26.840 governance book which is the most common form of governing system you have in the world
00:04:32.860 is a communist system you know from each according to their ability to each according to their needs
00:04:39.200 that's what a family unit is and that's often the way most small governance are whether you're talking
00:04:44.080 about like a soccer team or like a uh you know many other forms of small like uh adaptive governance
00:04:52.000 systems um and it's also why when you see small governance systems that focus on this level of
00:04:57.680 equality or that aim towards communism like kibbutz systems it appears to really work well at a very
00:05:04.540 small level but it begins to break down as the governance system gets larger and heavier um and we go into in
00:05:13.300 our book a few reasons why this happens uh okay so the first do you want to get into this now or do you
00:05:19.200 let's get into it why does communism not work mr collins well above certain population limits so it
00:05:24.800 is actually the most stable and common form of governance in the world right like our own our
00:05:29.480 own household is literally communist yeah i mean my kids don't produce for us but like naturally i'm
00:05:34.720 like oh yeah i'll give you they contribute cuteness shut up that you're very productive oh i don't
00:05:41.120 well oh yeah we made one of our kids get a job at birth remember that uh for oh yeah they paid him
00:05:46.540 for his poop that's right yeah yeah so first first kid just right away sit him to work child labor all
00:05:53.040 the way but anyway positive it was great so to take a step back uh the power consolidation problem is the
00:05:59.720 first problem so when you talk with communist people today um they typically fall into two camps
00:06:07.020 one i would call sort of the anarcho-syndicus count and this camp wants to really minimize any
00:06:13.100 hierarchies that exist at all and then the other is sort of the tanky camp um and the tankies really
00:06:20.060 like centralized hierarchies and they want sort of a central person at the top to decide where
00:06:26.380 resources are going so the anarcho-syndicus camp creates systems that have huge power vacuums so if you
00:06:35.260 create a perfectly hierarchy hierarchy hierarchy less system what you allow to happen is any individual
00:06:46.220 group of people within that system who band together and create a sub-governance can then begin to
00:06:53.500 accumulate power and resources they need to subject their ideology on other people this is this is also a
00:07:03.340 problem in like overly libertarian systems um now you could say oh well then we'll create some sort of
00:07:08.780 police force that prevents people from like convening and it's like or or sharing ideas so you could get
00:07:15.980 sort of an ideologically aligned group that could begin enforcing its values on others and then it's like
00:07:21.020 well then you've sort of defeated the whole point of anarcho-syndicism that's where you get these power
00:07:26.300 vacuums but then if you centralize power you have a secondary problem which is you create a target
00:07:33.660 for the least ethical within a society so within a centralized power hierarchy like you have within
00:07:40.860 most sort of tanky communist systems uh which are really more sort of like dictatorships where you
00:07:45.500 have one dictator at top and then little dictators below them all the way down moving up within this
00:07:51.820 hierarchy is typically determined by one's the amount of time one dedicates to politicking um and
00:08:01.340 the ruthlessness of an individual um because there is typically like if i am a dictator within sort of a
00:08:08.860 strict hierarchy um and i know that if i lose power uh it becomes almost sort of necessary for the people who
00:08:16.220 used to have that power to kill me then the types of people who i am going to promote as my underlings
00:08:21.900 are going to be the most sort of ruthless um and so this creates a system that leads to the rise
00:08:30.780 of some of the most sociopathic people within a society now within democracies you also get
00:08:35.820 disincentives so um like like true capitalist democracies right uh where typically you get sort of
00:08:41.100 these obsequious weiner liars typically seem to do better in elections then um it's it's true like
00:08:48.140 capital like capitalist democracy selects for weenuses um and i think we have all seen this in our
00:08:56.540 politicians but there is a difference between your typical weenus from your like strong man sociopath
00:09:02.940 who is is uh just so you lead to sort of different levels of badness uh so that's one core problem you
00:09:10.940 have uh the second core problem you have is what we call the hoa problem um so as we've discussed
00:09:18.060 well actually let's go back to the other one really quickly so some people are like oh yeah but what you
00:09:21.420 could do is you could have sort of a dictatorship right and then have this dictatorship set everything
00:09:27.740 in place so that the system could transition into a more anarcho syndicist system where they have
00:09:35.820 put the governance structures in place to have the systems that stamp out any like sub governance
00:09:40.700 that's beginning to form right and the problem here is this is a bit like you create a castle right like
00:09:47.580 the castle is this big defensible governance structure and then you have to get everyone to
00:09:52.140 agree to leave the castle at exactly the same time and if anybody decides to stay in the castle
00:09:57.740 well then they can just close the doors and they have all the the guns and the weapons and the
00:10:01.580 systems necessary to exert their influence on society and even if everybody does really intend
00:10:09.020 to leave the castle their knowledge that anyone else could stay in the castle prevents them from
00:10:14.060 leaving the castle and causes fractionization and is is one of the problems you have because i mean
00:10:20.140 many many many people i love it when you talk to a communist and they're like well no one has really
00:10:24.060 created a communist system before and the answer is well like do you not think that
00:10:27.580 anyone has tried like over the past hundred years there have literally been hundreds of revolutions
00:10:33.420 where the ideology was to create a communist system like why do you think that no communist systems
00:10:39.820 currently exist it's because transitioning from an ideology to a practice can be very very difficult and
00:10:49.980 you can describe an ideology that can sound like it works like the upside down pyramid example that i always give
00:10:55.980 but if you try to build an upside down pyramid it always collapses collapses into the same shape
00:11:01.820 which is this sort of tanky dictatorship um and that's where you see these unstable structures collapse
00:11:08.700 into then the second problem is even once you get this more tanky dictatorship model you then have
00:11:14.380 another problem which is the hoa problem uh what happens within a communist system the hierarchical model
00:11:20.540 of a communist system which is the model they all collapse into so so a lot of people imagine i've got my
00:11:24.700 group of like a group of like punk friends right and uh punk communist friends and uh you know we're
00:11:31.340 all like scraping by but when we transition to a communist system we're gonna have all the power
00:11:37.100 right and you know yes that actually sometimes does kind of happen within the first generation the
00:11:43.020 kids get all the power i mean this is what you saw was like pol pot this is what you saw like red scarf
00:11:47.740 girl like uh you know um uh during the chinese revolution um and usually these are really bloody
00:11:54.300 and terrible and it turns out that these people are much more brutal than you would expect them to be
00:11:59.340 um but uh well i guess not more i think a lot of people know how how you know willing to dehumanize
00:12:06.300 others these groups actually are but um within a generation or two you always end up with a societal
00:12:12.380 structure that looks very similar to our existing societal structure where the kids who would have
00:12:17.340 been punk communist today was in our societal structure become punk capitalists in their
00:12:21.740 societal structure um or counter-revolutionaries or whatever and the people who are the principal
00:12:28.700 of your local high school or who are the head of your local hoa are the equivalent positions within the
00:12:35.420 communist system these are and hoa stands for homeowners association which is a hated institution
00:12:42.300 within any society that has them yeah because they get run by busy bodies who have the most time not
00:12:49.180 the competent people who are probably best suited to run homeowners associations well and that's that's
00:12:55.820 actually the point is that these organizations often the reason why is because the individual is
00:13:01.020 competent within a communist system and we're talking about a well operating communist
00:13:05.340 system they get promoted to higher levels of this hierarchy of power i mean presumably that's
00:13:11.180 what everyone wants and so the people at this like mid lower level management you know the communist
00:13:16.700 versions of like line managers at a mcdonald um these are often the least competent and most
00:13:23.020 transparently power hungry people to the extent that they can't move higher within the hierarchy
00:13:27.500 now this creates a big problem because what it means is you are essentially
00:13:34.860 empowering this lower level of the pyramid within the communist or within these anti-level communist
00:13:41.340 systems when you're talking about things like a a public school principal or your local line
00:13:47.740 manager at a mcdonald's or something like that these people often have way more power astronomically
00:13:53.500 more power than they have within our existing system and they are often the people least that you
00:13:58.620 would least want to give that power to one of the very cool things about capitalist systems
00:14:03.020 is they give very little power to the people at the bottom of the pyramid now a lot of people say
00:14:07.420 that's horrible but it turns out when people actually think about the people who are right
00:14:14.460 above the bottom layer of the pyramid they often are like oh yeah those are the people i least want to
00:14:20.140 have additional power within our society when your hoa person can't just give you a find but can send
00:14:25.500 you to a gulag like that becomes the problem uh for for individuals lifestyles one of the final
00:14:32.940 problems here well not one of the final problems so there's two problems that are the most intractable
00:14:37.020 problems what is a cancer problem uh well we'll just discuss this one really quickly so typically uh
00:14:42.940 we call this a square cube law of governance so in biology there's something called the square cube law
00:14:48.300 which basically means when you're talking about the volume of a organism the density of things it
00:14:54.780 needs for like bones and stuff like that increases much faster than its size increases as the size of
00:15:02.060 an organism increases this is also true for for cells if you're talking about like the volume of
00:15:06.860 the cell versus the internal structure of the cell uh which is why you can't just like infinitely scale
00:15:12.140 up the size of an organism you have this same problem with governance systems the more uh
00:15:18.140 weight you have within individual nodes of a governance system the more communication you
00:15:22.780 have between those nodes and the heavier that communication gets um and what it causes is the
00:15:30.300 cancer problem and the cancer problem means that when you get a really heavy governance system
00:15:35.660 small parts of that governance system begin to sort of replicate and say they need resources they
00:15:42.140 don't actually need so they'll say something like i need uh well so like a tumor
00:15:47.740 will create signals to the body that will like cause lots of blood vessels to form erotic that
00:15:51.820 says like i need more nutrients than everything else around me um and you you see this within large
00:15:58.220 companies as well this isn't just a communist problem where they'll begin to say i need more
00:16:02.220 resources give me more resources i'm really important to the structure of this governance system and
00:16:08.460 initially governance systems typically have something like an immune system that goes around and
00:16:12.060 deletes these cancers that they form but then sometimes these cancers will hide themselves they're
00:16:16.380 like no no no no no i'm a um i'm like a diversity department or something like that you absolutely
00:16:22.140 need me getting rid of me causes racism and even suggesting that you look into my budget is actually
00:16:27.420 racist um and so through using these covers they can hide themselves from any sort of uh you know deeper
00:16:37.660 investigation and that allows these cancers to grow and take up more and more resources within the system
00:16:44.940 leading the system to become less efficient the final problem is uh the command economy problem
00:16:50.780 now this one i won't go deep into because a lot of other people have talked about this and you can
00:16:54.220 just find anything basically it's just sort of an axiom at this point is people used to think
00:16:59.500 that you could control an economy from like a centrally dictatorship position and you could do a good job
00:17:05.660 at it uh but it turns out it's just incredibly inefficient to do this um and and i'm talking
00:17:11.260 about like 90 percent less efficient than other 98 and it gets less efficient the larger the system
00:17:16.300 gets um and so when you have a command economy when individuals can say oh i need goods money or
00:17:21.420 something i have and there's ways you can create communist capitalist systems that try to adapt to this
00:17:25.340 but they're all still really bad often compared to just command economies now all of the things that we've
00:17:31.980 brought out might be resolvable in ways that they weren't before which then leads to the question
00:17:40.700 is a perfectly equal system in which everyone has equal resources actually a positive system
00:17:47.580 simone what are your thoughts on that well i don't think that equal exists um and this changed for
00:17:54.380 me ever since i read policy paradox by deborah stone a book that apparently is hard to buy
00:18:00.060 now you can't get an ebook for it but they made me read it at cambridge when i got my technology
00:18:04.860 policy degree courtesy of you saying i needed a graduate degree yeah i told her she needed to
00:18:09.820 look fancy i was like you get you need your fancy degree or no there's this there's this chapter in
00:18:15.900 the book that is about fairness i mean the whole book is about paradoxes and policy as you might imagine
00:18:23.020 but this one really stuck with me because it was about fairness and it was about how as a policy
00:18:27.420 maker you can't really make a policy that is fair so she gives something the author something along
00:18:34.220 the lines of um you are a college professor and you are taking a cake to class and you must
00:18:41.100 fairly divide the cake so how do you divide it do you divide it evenly based on the number of students
00:18:47.580 at class do you divide it based on who is hungrier who is more in need of the cake who worked harder who
00:18:52.540 has a better grade who likes cake more you know who has a better glycemic index at the moment there
00:18:59.420 are all these different directions you can take it and all of them would be fair but you have to make
00:19:04.380 that possibly arbitrary or at least values based designation of what fairness is and so it's it's a
00:19:12.940 little bit of a farce to say that there is such a thing as fair well it's really interesting that you
00:19:17.740 point that out because as we have seen within our existing society um it is the groups that are most
00:19:25.660 affiliated with communist organizations that would argue that their groups need disproportionate
00:19:32.140 resources so they would say our groups are in some way deserving of more resources than other groups
00:19:41.180 because uh structural disadvantages or systemic racism or um we've been mistreated more we have
00:19:50.060 less money now etc yeah yeah um well and even when they enter positions of structural power within
00:19:57.340 society they're like yeah but you really haven't made up for uh past disadvantages which is really
00:20:03.820 interesting that they're often more interested in sort of the top of the funnel hierarchy
00:20:09.500 in terms of um resolving inequality and often a lot less interested in bottom of the funnel hierarchy
00:20:16.940 uh what do you mean by bottom of the funnel hierarchy so um they're more interested with
00:20:22.220 seeing members of their group or groups they believe that are ideologically aligned with them
00:20:28.700 in positions of senior management or senior government positions as opposed to helping pull people up from
00:20:34.860 the bottom and i think one of the reasons for this is is because when a wealthy like hollywood elite
00:20:42.060 type is deciding that there is some level of inequality within our society they are thinking
00:20:47.500 among their friends who are part of those disadvantaged groups and when the problem is resolved within their
00:20:54.300 immediate circle and was in their immediate friend groups the problem is resolved overall because they don't
00:21:00.060 interact often with poor or actually disadvantaged individuals in our society so they're not as
00:21:06.300 interested in um flowing resources in those directions but regardless it is very interesting to me
00:21:13.260 that it is these groups and that it changes when the groups that are predominantly drawn to communist sort
00:21:20.460 of breakaway organizations change the groups that the current communist zeitgeist was in a country
00:21:27.740 says need the most resources change which i think indicates it's about redrawing resources to
00:21:34.060 themselves more so than than anything else um and another really interesting point is when i was
00:21:40.140 talking about the hoa problem this is actually something you see in practice with existing communist
00:21:44.780 like groups you see this was in like chaz you saw this was in the anti-work movement people i think
00:21:50.460 was in communist groups are always really shocked when they see who the people running those groups
00:21:54.700 actually are and they see those people talk so if you talk about like the anti-work group right like
00:22:00.460 this was a group that was like okay we won't have anyone in a position of power we have agreed we are
00:22:05.660 an equal organization and of course one of the moderators who founded the group is like yeah but
00:22:10.140 i feel like doing interviews so i'm gonna um and the group didn't have any power to stop that
00:22:16.460 and this is what i'm talking about is one of the problems with anarcho-syndicism
00:22:19.740 you cannot stop the worst of your group the lowest of your group from seizing power
00:22:27.500 even if you want to um and so you get these idiots seizing power and then you have within
00:22:33.260 chaz systems right like chaz or chop or whatever you wanted to call it where you had these really um
00:22:39.020 something simone i don't know the little local warlord guy who who took power there and a lot of
00:22:43.500 people would say uh you know his name was simone that's what raz simone or something like that um
00:22:49.340 which is because the group didn't have there was a power vacuum they didn't have a system
00:22:54.940 to prevent the worst of the movement from just seizing power and this is often true when these
00:23:01.420 groups talk about the leaders of their existing movement yes they have their high level bernie sanders
00:23:07.260 like leaders but when you think of the people who lead your local offices or organizations you know
00:23:12.460 you have this constant infighting which leads to incredible lack of productivity this is something
00:23:17.740 that you've talked about simone with the communist coffee shop yeah i mean there are lots of cases
00:23:22.220 there was this this one coffee shop in pennsylvania or sorry in philadelphia that it was started by
00:23:27.500 the daughter and i think her friend or maybe her girlfriend um of an immigrant parent who basically
00:23:33.980 bangrolled this cafe and then at some point the employees who had been hired who it was all sort of
00:23:40.060 social justice themed um i don't know rebelled or complained about systemic racism against them and
00:23:47.020 sort of tried to take it over and it sort of got to the point where they had to shut the whole thing
00:23:51.260 down because it was not really being allowed to run um and everyone had kind of rebelled against
00:23:56.460 everyone else and accused everyone of things and it was complete mess so yeah not not a great
00:24:03.180 not a great case study but i don't know i mean what i want to ask you is why does it feel to me
00:24:10.620 like all roads point to capital or it's not capitalism communism online in in so many ways
00:24:17.580 when it's hijacking a lower order human emotion which is very easy to so it's this is the emotion of
00:24:24.860 fairness um and uh maybe we'll be able to splice in a video here i'll see if we can do it without
00:24:30.060 getting copyright striked of this great experiment where a capuchin monkey is given some cucumbers
00:24:36.380 and it's very happy to get these cucumbers and then next to it with another capuchin monkey and
00:24:42.380 it starts being given grapes and it was the same work for the same work which are considered preferable
00:24:48.060 apparently nuts it is so angry and what it shows us is this anger we feel at unfairness within our
00:24:57.980 society is one an emotional subset we have had since we were early primates likely before that so it
00:25:06.140 really is a lower order emotion this isn't like some high position you're taking it is your monkey brain
00:25:12.300 that is saying be mad about this but worse it's a pain that we inflict upon ourselves so that capuchin
00:25:23.580 was perfectly happy with the reward it was getting till it was able to compare itself with other
00:25:29.580 capuchins that seemed to be getting a bigger reward for the same work yeah and i'm not saying this is
00:25:35.420 real anything that's affecting our monkey brain is a very real and painful emotional substance yeah it
00:25:40.540 still hurts to see someone else getting something better than you even though you're both doing the
00:25:44.780 same work yeah but so when you think about groups online right um and how they hijack people's brains
00:25:52.860 this is a very easy form of mental anguish to inflict upon an individual okay so you're saying basically
00:26:01.020 people online and online is is kind of like um a place for social comparison on steroids you can very
00:26:07.580 easily see what other people have that you don't more followers more money more whatever right so they see
00:26:13.180 that um they may or may not see that these people are working equally hard as they are that they have
00:26:20.060 advantages they don't and it's not fair and that maybe in some ways the online world and social networks
00:26:26.460 magnify that feeling of unfairness that people get which would push us even further toward communist
00:26:32.540 inclinations because we want a solution to that feeling of unfairness and justice through unfairness
00:26:39.660 and yet practically speaking unfairness is it's it's a natural thing that we're going to see it's not
00:26:47.260 something you can actually resolve because there is no such thing as fair there are ways you could
00:26:51.100 resolve it i mean you could alter people's genetics so that every human was born equally attractive
00:26:56.700 equally tall equally smart well you can't do that without creating a pretty massive dystopia right
00:27:02.540 no it would be dystopian their end goal is always dystopian but i think with a lot of people um you
00:27:09.100 know if you sat them down and you're like would you actually want to do that like shave off all
00:27:13.260 differences between people so that you can have a truly fair system i think many people would be like
00:27:19.020 yeah that sounds okay to me like the any any cost is worth any benefit which to us because we're
00:27:24.780 people who are sort of seen as almost worshiping um uh intergroup diversity and and and uh difference
00:27:32.140 and the conflict that that difference creates and the progress that that conflict creates um you
00:27:38.220 know i i really appreciate i you know i view society as sort of a bubbling cauldron of ideas
00:27:43.020 and ideologies that are in conflict with each other and it is that conflict that produces better ideas
00:27:48.860 and ideologies uh whereas i think that many of these systems really want stagnation they want a level
00:27:54.860 of calmness they want a level of um contentment throughout society or is it
00:28:01.820 is it that people just aren't really thinking that far they're they're right now just at that
00:28:05.820 and i don't think they are and this is they're capuchin monkeys who are right now very angry about
00:28:10.060 someone else getting the grape yeah especially because online every day they log on they see
00:28:14.700 someone internet highlighting these differences and that wasn't the point that i was making
00:28:19.660 the point that i was making is if you want to get someone to do something online you know you you
00:28:25.740 hurt them and then you say this is how i make the pain go away right you can try to search for people
00:28:31.900 who are hurting just sort of vaguely in the environment but that's a lot harder because
00:28:37.260 you can't really tailor the message to whatever is broadly hurting them right so um it that's that's a
00:28:43.740 harder pitch to sell but if you can go to someone and immediately show them some type of inequality in
00:28:51.420 society that is directly impacting them you cause emotional pain then you sell them a pitch that
00:28:58.460 resolves that emotional pain and you don't just see this within the people who are doing communists
00:29:03.900 right you see this within like the incel groups or like the men's rights groups where they will
00:29:08.220 immediately prime someone with some level of unfairness that's existing within our society that
00:29:12.700 causes emotional pain okay so i will resolve this to recap like this isn't just with communism it
00:29:19.180 could be like a guy saying look at what this woman did she left you know her husband of 10 years for
00:29:25.260 some wealthier chad and the solution is the red pill or mctow or whatever right um yeah the solution
00:29:33.260 is follow me follow my ideology get angry so they they because anger motivates action more than anything
00:29:40.300 else um but what you're what you're implying here is a level of predatory action that i would be
00:29:46.940 disinclined predatory action so what you are thinking is oh these people are thinking about
00:29:52.060 what they're doing what i'm saying is the algorithm is organically lifting messages tweets etc that happen
00:30:00.860 to use these predatory hooks over the tweets that don't okay so what you're saying is basically those who
00:30:07.980 perhaps are almost trained through reinforcement to anger people and then propose solutions like these
00:30:15.020 are those more likely to build followings because they're compelling messages that um build interest
00:30:21.740 and loyalty and intention over time yes no okay so maybe that's why all roads point to come all roads
00:30:30.140 lead to communism but i mean what's interesting and you know we'll talk about this more in future
00:30:35.740 recordings um is that these groups are very bad at actually motivating action once a person subscribes to them
00:30:44.060 uh so uh what's interesting is that communist systems are really heavy in in real life you know they
00:30:49.100 require a lot of effort everything like that but usually when people end up subscribing to these ideologies
00:30:55.740 they end up becoming very economically unproductive compared to other individuals and they're not even
00:31:02.380 able to produce offspring often with so the only way they're really able to replicate is through um sort of
00:31:09.660 poaching new members from like the larger social zeitgeist but ultimately any group that doesn't
00:31:15.820 reproduce is going to eventually die off i mean we've seen this historically over and over again
00:31:21.180 they can do really well for one or two generations but eventually sort of the the healthier cultural
00:31:29.660 groups begin to develop an immunity to the tactics that they are using through sort of a cultural
00:31:35.900 evolutionary framework and by that what i mean is that the the cultures uh that happen to be better
00:31:43.180 at resisting this are the ones that survive um and and through that uh eventually the trickle of new
00:31:50.460 members gets less and less and that the groups that are trying to get new members have to become
00:31:55.820 increasingly more uh blatant and transparently predatory in the way they are acquiring those members
00:32:02.380 don't you think there will always be people who got the fuzzy end of a lollipop in a capitalist system
00:32:07.100 who will choose to turn to communism as their solution especially if they're drawn by this would say but the
00:32:17.580 communists are wrong if you actually look at the people who support communist policies they are
00:32:22.940 typically not the people who are worse off in the capitalist system they are the fail sons and
00:32:28.140 failed daughters of middle class and upper middle class individuals often um these are people who
00:32:33.660 you know grew up in in houses in the suburbs and stuff like that if you look at the groups who are
00:32:39.580 actually often the most disadvantaged the recent immigrant populations and stuff like that they are
00:32:44.620 some of the most anti-communist individuals within the system um and uh isn't that because they're often
00:32:50.860 coming from no i don't think that that's the only reason i think that they often have healthier
00:32:56.860 cultures and by that what i mean is these are cultures that um motivate sort of internal location
00:33:01.900 of control and and thus higher reproductive rates and it is these conservative cultures now when i say
00:33:08.700 a conservative culture you can have a you know conservative african-american culture or a
00:33:12.620 conservative latin-american culture um and these cultures may not vote republican uh but they certainly
00:33:19.260 have ideologies that are very very very to the right of what these predominantly i mean i
00:33:26.700 i'd say middle class childhood white women communist groups online um would like to pretend um and i
00:33:36.780 think that that is why they're so bad at recruiting from these organizations that they claim to be
00:33:42.860 supporting um which is i think why uh you have seen so much of the communist rhetoric uh within the united
00:33:52.220 states move away from uh sort of ethnic or racial discrimination and towards discrimination of lgbt
00:34:01.260 populations which the communist groups do disproportionately or are disproportionately able to recruit
00:34:10.140 partially because if you are born lgbt and you are in a more conservative or a family structure or
00:34:16.780 culture you are not going to identify as lgbt but if you are in one of these communist structures uh
00:34:22.380 where uh lgbt identification uh is is more encouraged you are more likely to identify as lgbt which is why
00:34:29.900 you're always going to see those people within these progressive communist groups much more than
00:34:34.940 in their conservative counterparts and again when i say conservative counterparts i both mean like
00:34:38.780 democratic conservative counterparts like traditionalist immigrant families or um republican ones
00:34:43.820 oh interesting hmm do you have any thoughts or i want to see how things play out i it's hard for me to
00:34:52.540 imagine a world in which there aren't people who strongly favor communism or at least socialist tendencies
00:34:59.980 and i also wonder what role ai is ultimately going to play in this because i feel like i mean i think ai really
00:35:05.660 changes the way that communism can be um implemented because you can remove the lowest com denominator
00:35:13.420 being essentially the despot and you could put ai in charge instead now that could become really
00:35:19.980 dystopian and scary but it could also solve problems with the highly competent entity i do think that
00:35:26.860 communism could enter the golden era the age in which it can actually be successfully executed but i also
00:35:35.020 think that successful execution of communism or socialism because of the problem of fairness that we've discussed
00:35:42.380 is ultimately going to be somewhat dystopian because there will be a judgment call of what fairness is
00:35:48.220 and that means there will be losers no matter what because you know but if you choose what
00:35:55.100 seems like the losers within capitalist systems are not often the ones who become communist
00:35:59.900 that is a communist talking point that is just factually untrue what do you mean by that what i'm saying is that
00:36:06.460 the poorest families within a capitalist system are very rarely communist in their ideological tendencies
00:36:14.220 if i go to any of these poorer communities they're often very religious they're often very capitalistic
00:36:21.180 and so i think that you are doing a disservice by repeating a communist talking point which isn't true
00:36:26.380 what drives communist ideology more than anything else is um actually we'll talk about this in the next
00:36:33.340 video which is how to predict revolutions