The Critical Compass Podcast - September 22, 2026


Leftism Is a War Against Reality ｜ Clayton Reeder - Capitalism & Morality 2026

Mentioned
Mencius Moldbug Richard Dawkins Mikhail Bakunin Murray Rothbard Justin Trudeau Samuel Johnson Steven Pinker Václav Havel Marxists Marx Adam
Independent Alberta Needs Independent Albertans ｜ Darcy Gerow - Capitalism & Morality Calgary 2026

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

146.55

Word count

2,389

Sentence count

157

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Leftism is always getting crazier and crazier because there are always more hierarchies to
00:00:04.920 tear down. What is chaos? It's the opposite of order and hierarchy. But it's these hierarchies
00:00:11.940 of authority that make liberty possible, and they're the patterns in which diversity is
00:00:17.000 strength because of a higher principle that holds different things together in their proper place.
00:00:22.300 Without hierarchies that bind us, without difference, without unity and diversity,
00:00:27.760 without logos, there's no obedience, there's no humility, there's no sacrifice, and therefore
00:00:33.300 there's no meaning, there's no order, there's no personality, there's no higher values,
00:00:38.580 there's no liberty because there's no responsibility. Total breakdown and dissolution.
00:00:43.780 It's the abolition of man. And so the left ends up waging this war against reality itself.
00:00:51.180 and you can't really beat reality. So this is the perfect fight for them. It means it's a fight
00:00:58.040 that you don't win, but it demands infinite resources. It demands infinite power. And
00:01:03.800 that's very convenient for our political enemies who don't have our interests in heart.
00:01:09.460 now my title order beyond left and right that's a you know pretty complicated for the time we
00:01:21.960 have today but I do want to talk about that a bit especially the left and why everything keeps
00:01:27.880 getting more disordered most of us in this room have probably some sense that the left has gone
00:01:34.720 way off the deep end in the last few years. I want to talk about why they are crazy and why
00:01:39.740 they will keep getting crazier. Nothing is off limits to this. And it's important that we're 0.85
00:01:45.780 not unsophisticated and just call all the leftists a bunch of commies and Marxists,
00:01:51.480 because modern leftism is totally divorced from the classical Marxist scientific historical
00:01:59.360 account of capitalist worker class conflict. And Marx, by the way, was not at all interested in
00:02:06.180 things like gender expression or alternative sexual lifestyles or the idea of, say,
00:02:14.440 evil white racism being some kind of supreme oppressor or anything like that.
00:02:18.860 The modern left is also a lot more insidious than the old kind of leftism we often think about, 0.92
00:02:24.700 because despite our Western institutions, this post-Marxist leftism has infested everything.
00:02:31.800 Our governments, mass media institutions, public education systems, and all of this is transmitted
00:02:39.640 through urban professionals, celebrities, teachers, academics, bureaucracies, journalists,
00:02:45.780 even corporate HR departments. While we often think about left and right in terms of the National
00:02:51.960 assembly during the French Revolution because you had the revolutionaries sitting on the left
00:02:55.620 and the royalists sitting on the right. These are deeper ideas that don't just originate in
00:03:00.180 historical time. The main substance is really more fundamental in the way we experience the
00:03:05.340 world and it's almost kind of like a masculine versus feminine kind of thing or something like
00:03:09.820 that. But let's build up some intuition about what the left is or how it works. Let's think
00:03:15.300 about a few things the left does not like. Capitalism. Some people have more than others.
00:03:21.960 And private property means exclusive ownership and control over scarce resources.
00:03:26.800 It implies difference and exclusion.
00:03:30.160 Or how about beauty?
00:03:32.920 Some of us may have observed that the left often seems to celebrate ugliness.
00:03:37.540 And even many leftists will get bent out of shape out of people enjoying beautiful things.
00:03:43.080 So for capitalism, obviously some will serve their fellow man more effectively than others and they will get more property.
00:03:50.460 And this creates this special kind of hierarchy. It's not by power and exploitation, but it's by
00:03:56.540 service and creating value for others. And then the thing about beauty is that it's just there.
00:04:02.400 It just is. There's no argument needed for beauty. Beauty confronts us with this stark reality of
00:04:07.940 natural hierarchies and intrinsic values. And these are signposts showing us that beneath all
00:04:14.600 the various expressions of leftism, there's this idea of it being rooted in this opposition to
00:04:20.860 hierarchies. And so in simplest terms, leftism is oriented around the idea of some kind of
00:04:26.280 egalitarianism, that in some important way, everyone is basically the same or deserves
00:04:32.420 equal recognition. And the right, generally speaking, does not believe in this leftist
00:04:37.760 equality stuff. And for the more traditional conservative type, they would believe in
00:04:42.720 traditional forms of hierarchy, a natural order, so to speak, fundamental, indispensable, and
00:04:49.060 ancient. I want to quote from Erich von Kernelt Ledin, an Austrian nobleman and an expert on
00:04:55.920 20th century political ideologies who died in 1999. He once described himself as a liberal of
00:05:02.160 the extreme right. He was a liberal, but he was also a monarchist. And elsewhere, he called
00:05:08.680 himself a Christian conservative anarchist. But in any case, he despised fascism, communism,
00:05:15.160 and democracy, and he regarded all of these as being under the same umbrella.
00:05:20.280 He wrote this, the right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking,
00:05:25.980 a readiness to preserve traditional values, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings
00:05:31.500 which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. So he makes the right
00:05:37.600 sound pretty good. Now pay attention to what he says about the left. The left is the advocate of
00:05:43.760 the opposite principles. It is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity.
00:05:49.740 Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same,
00:05:55.860 envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated.
00:06:02.040 Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications.
00:06:07.060 The word one is its symbol.
00:06:09.060 One language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school,
00:06:14.220 one law for everyone, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.
00:06:19.680 He illustrates this with education.
00:06:21.980 He says, church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors,
00:06:27.800 none of this is in keeping with leftist sentiments.
00:06:29.880 The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity
00:06:37.060 and equality. The idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils
00:06:42.400 be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion
00:06:47.780 and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least similar ways.
00:06:52.800 So think about that. Oneness, uniformity, equality, identity, sameness. You can see this impulse is behind the modern progressive left thesis, the so-called woke position, something like this.
00:07:09.440 The lack of equal outcomes between groups in any society entails the persistence of social injustice, which must be eliminated through social action.
00:07:21.380 And this is just one expression of the leftist principle.
00:07:25.920 However you dress it up, we have the idea that inequality as such implies something bad.
00:07:31.880 Inequality is unnatural, enforced with power, upheld by systematic structures of oppression, or whatever you want to call it.
00:07:39.440 And so leftism inherently strives to tear down every fence and limit, dissolving social constraint and tradition for the boundless achievement of this goal.
00:07:50.260 Sounds good to the hardcore leftist, but it sounds bad for probably most of us.
00:07:55.920 And yet this basically undergirds the secular religion of our modern Western social democracies.
00:08:01.660 And if you want to get to the core of why this is so powerful, think about how naturally it's easier to break things down, to degenerate, than it is to maintain order and virtuous hierarchy.
00:08:16.720 In Mencius Moldbug's old writings, he talked about, you can take a teacup, throw it in the air, it'll smash on the ground into a million pieces.
00:08:24.140 But you can't take those pieces, throw them into the air and have them reform into the cup.
00:08:29.660 It's easier to break down norms and rules and traditions and promises and values and hierarchies
00:08:36.060 that make society and economy function in a healthy way.
00:08:39.940 It's a lot harder to build things than it is to destroy them.
00:08:45.320 And honestly, we all have maybe nice lives.
00:08:48.360 We could destroy our entire lives in like an hour if we really wanted to.
00:08:52.420 That's how easy it is to break things.
00:08:55.300 When you compromise on a rule, it becomes easier to compromise again and again and compromise on other rules.
00:09:03.280 It's the most natural, obvious thing in the world.
00:09:07.140 And this is probably why the left has such confidence that history moves a certain way, and it's on the right side of history.
00:09:14.120 Breaking down barriers, erasing borders, but in a good way, they'd say.
00:09:18.640 And this is what great leftist thinkers like Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins or Justin Trudeau have said at times.
00:09:26.680 And now we see the waters rising.
00:09:30.040 Leftism is always getting crazier and crazier because there are always more hierarchies to tear down. 0.57
00:09:36.040 There are more boundaries to dissolve, more and more norms to toss in the trash.
00:09:41.160 And when we always hear, you know, oh, the left has gone too far this time and the pendulum is swinging back.
00:09:48.340 Keep in mind, there is no too far for the left.
00:09:51.680 The left-wing pathology recognizes no limits to its own goal.
00:09:56.980 There's always more lines to cross.
00:09:59.800 It's like the sun rising over the horizon each day.
00:10:03.040 How can there be a new dawn if the line is not crossed?
00:10:06.660 And so in cosmological terms, this is chaos.
00:10:09.480 For physics, it's like entropy.
00:10:11.880 In religious terms, it's the waters of the flood.
00:10:14.160 And that image, the waters of chaos unleashed, is rather applicable here.
00:10:20.980 This might get a little weird, but there's spooky spiritual stuff mixed up in all of this.
00:10:26.420 The key precept of the left, equality, has been expressed in many ancient stories.
00:10:32.780 Ancient commentators on the biblical flood narrative have talked about how that whole cataclysm happened because boundaries dissolved completely.
00:10:40.140 Even theft was universal.
00:10:41.540 You know, no private property.
00:10:44.160 But perhaps even more notable is what the serpent, the Nakash, said to Adam and Eve in the third
00:10:50.340 chapter of the book of Genesis. You shall be as gods. None shall be higher than you, and there
00:10:57.040 shall be no authority that binds you. Perhaps this oneness and equality at the heart of leftism has
00:11:03.680 this diabolical aspect that animates it. You might not believe in spooky stuff, demonic stuff,
00:11:11.540 but have you ever felt that the leftists get a little demonic sometimes? Have you ever seen that?
00:11:19.360 Mikhail Bakunin and Saul Alinsky said Satan was the first revolutionary. Samuel Johnson said the
00:11:25.600 first wig was the devil. Here's a fun little fact to maybe throw in here. The Latin word for left
00:11:32.620 is sinister. That's pretty weird. The great scholar of primitive religion, Eliad, he found
00:11:40.540 that ancient spiritual beliefs focused on escaping the burdens of history, the eternal
00:11:45.560 return, the dissolution of hierarchy and order, and the return to chaos for the possibility of
00:11:50.940 renewal. This is seen in the ancient chaos festivals like Saturnalia, or the pagan religious
00:11:57.560 practice of the orgy, or seeking mystical experiences where one returns to oneness
00:12:02.920 without alienation. On a cosmological level, the return to primordial chaos is the extreme
00:12:10.660 endpoint of the leftist vision once you dig all the way to the bottom.
00:12:15.260 What is chaos? It's the opposite of order and hierarchy. But it's these hierarchies of authority
00:12:21.580 that make liberty possible, and they're the patterns in which diversity is strength because
00:12:26.840 of a higher principle that holds different things together in their proper place.
00:12:31.860 Without hierarchies that bind us, without difference, without unity and diversity,
00:12:37.500 without logos, there's no obedience, there's no humility, there's no sacrifice,
00:12:42.120 and therefore there's no meaning, there's no order, there's no personality,
00:12:46.020 there's no higher values, there's no liberty because there's no responsibility.
00:12:50.900 Total breakdown and dissolution. It's the abolition of man.
00:12:56.000 Nicholas Gomez de Villa said, one of my favorite quotes,
00:12:59.940 Hierarchies are celestial.
00:13:01.820 All are equal in hell.
00:13:04.100 The left is convinced that man can be transformed, redeemed from his fallen state.
00:13:09.160 It offers a messianic vision of the perfect egalitarian system, a kingdom of God without
00:13:16.020 God and without a king.
00:13:18.180 And so the left ends up waging this war against reality itself.
00:13:23.440 And you can't really beat reality.
00:13:26.100 So this is the perfect fight for them.
00:13:27.880 It means it's a fight that you don't win, but it demands infinite resources.
00:13:33.640 It demands infinite power.
00:13:35.500 And that's very convenient for our political enemies who don't have our interests in heart.
00:13:41.760 What should our response be for this brief time?
00:13:45.060 I'll just end with a few quick comments, but this is the conversation that needs to continue.
00:13:49.960 So you know the old left, if they didn't like you, they throw you in the gulag. 0.88
00:13:53.880 So you're a bad dude, off you go.
00:13:56.500 The New Left is different. It works in terms of guilt manipulation. It's more subtle.
00:14:02.760 And one of the reasons it's so effective is its claim to the moral high ground.
00:14:08.120 And too often we let them have it, and they do what they want with it.
00:14:13.040 Now, people like Etienne de la Boétie, Murray Rothbard, or Vaclav Havel have all talked about how systems of coercive power persist not only with the threat of violence,
00:14:23.560 but because ordinary people participate in them by acting as if they believe what they know to
00:14:28.920 be false. So Havel said they live within a lie. And that means for people like us, we have to be
00:14:36.400 very careful about every small act of acquiescence that helps enforce the leftist religion and
00:14:43.180 socializes us into that ritual participation. Also, this might sound weird, but you know,
00:14:51.740 maybe we should kind of stop arguing with these people. We've spent so much effort, so much effort
00:14:58.080 in this marketplace of ideas trying to convince the left to leave us alone. They cannot leave us
00:15:04.520 alone. That is a betrayal of their entire mission. They're not going to just flip the switch and get
00:15:10.540 deprogrammed there. So to argue against the left, so to speak, that means lead by example instead of
00:15:18.140 having dumb debates. And that means being pillars of a community. Sounds cheesy, but that's the real 0.90
00:15:25.140 deal. Build a business. Help your neighborhood. Go to church. Do some charity. Maybe you can't
00:15:32.360 stop the waters of chaos. But maybe, maybe, maybe you can contribute to an ark that will survive
00:15:41.600 the flood. That's it for now. Thank you very much. Hope you have a really great time today.
00:15:48.140 Thank you.