Red Team vs Blue Team: The Current Political Crisis

Clark, formerly of Popehat, writes about the history of this centuries-old war.  The synopsis of his argument is that modern political battles between the Left and Right (or, in Moldbuggian terms, the Optimates and Vaisya of Red Team, and the Brahmins, Dahlits, and Helots of Team Blue) has seeds that trace back centuries.  He argues that there have been three major conflicts thus far; he begins with the English Civil War of 1642-1651 (Protestants versus Catholics, Parliamentarians versus Royalty), follows it to the American Revolution (an odd alliance of Red and Blue on both sides), and finishes with the American Civil War, another clear-cut case of North versus South, of Red versus Blue.

His analysis of the Declaration of Independence is particularly noteworthy, as it explains the ongoing conflict between Red Federalism and the Blue’s desire to have a living constitution:

If we look at the text of the Declaration of Independence , we see two different types of complaints about the English government. The document is, quite frankly, schizophrenic, complaining simultaneously that the dish of the king’s governance had both too much salt and too little.

On the one hand, the king meddled in the freedoms of the common people by having too many laws and too much taxation (you can find all of these complaints in any Republican party platform of the last fifty years):

• “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. “
• “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”
• “For abolishing the free System of English Laws”
• “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death” (black helicopters! NAFTA highway!)

Yet on the other hand, the king meddled – not in the freedoms of the common people – but in the freedoms of the Harvard elites to rule the common people:

• “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
• “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance”
• “He has refused to pass other Laws”
• “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws”
• “For suspending our own Legislatures”

Brahmins, supported by their Dahlit and Helot slaves, believe they can build a perfect world if only they are granted a little more power; the Optimates and Vaisya remember that each of the previous times they were given power, it was monsters like Cromwell who took over, a man who described genocide as a ‘religious experience’.

Clark also describes a hypothetical ‘Grey Team’ that has developed – the tech industry, the geek bloggers, the bulk of Gamergate – but this is nothing but typical Brahmin chicanery.  In Colleges and Universities, you’ll find that professional political scientists will tacitly endorse ‘radical’ positions (a meaningless term; the radical position is merely the state-approved form of anti-state rhetoric, it has no core, and only serves to increase state power; think Che Guevara t-shirts bought from a corporation, or Hot Topic counter-culture) while criticizing neo-liberal positions (an utterly non-existent straw man used to oppose traditional conservatism without attacking Neo-conservatism¹, a group which they’re happy to work alongside, even if they’re not strictly allied).

Grey Team is Blue Team; they just pretend to be a separate group.  For historical corollaries, think of the Northern Abolitionists who argued in favour of the Civil War on humanitarian grounds, when the actual purpose behind the war was the centralization of Federal power, or of the Anglican theologians whose meditations on God were used to empower the Crown as it slaughtered the Irish.

If any of this reminds you of Michael Trust’s theories about r/K Selection and his book The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics – award yourself a gold star.  They are one and the same.

I used the word ‘crisis’ in the title of this piece for two reasons.  The first is the most obvious: that we are on the verge of this cold war getting hot once again (the polarization in politics is evidence of that).  The second is that the battlefield has changed, and we might very well be in a position where winner takes all.²

Present day technological developments are game changers; the social effects of mass communication, information abundance, marketing³, and related technologies can be seized by either side to achieve a major victory over the other.  In the case of Blue Team, they are very close to realizing their goal of perfect Orwellian Utopia, a dictatorship without a dictator, by incentivizing the populace into self-censorship.  We are already seeing this strategy being employed.

First there’s the shadow banning and censorship appearing on social media.  It’s important that we don’t simplify this into a tit-for-tat form of propaganda control; “Well, if Red Team were in power they’d be censoring the heretics.” There’s something deeper at play.  The Last Psychiatrist described the real game back in 2014:

Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn’t be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. “Cyberbullying is a huge problem!” Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings– but because criticism makes women want to be more private– and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it’s gotta go.

The attack on anonymity and privacy is the real reason for the censorship.  You may have been noticing that alongside the speech codes being foisted upon us by Twitter and Google, there’s been a gradual erosion of privacy.  Registering for an email now requires a cell phone number, fighting a DMCA/Harassment claim requires your address, and the use of online handles is becoming increasingly difficult.

Forget women for a moment; think of sexual perversion.  The simple analysis of these speech codes would suggest that we now need to ‘celebrate the diversity’ of men dressing in drag and masturbating to childrens’ cartoons.  A more thoughtful approach would notice that, by protecting sexual perversion from ‘harassment’ or shame, a tacit encouragement of said perversions – in particular the publicizing of these perversions – is the inevitable result.

A decentralized, networked panopticon which is able to compile a detailed dossier of your friends, buying habits, sexual interests, political opinions, et cetera, ad nauseum.  Protecting people from harassment isn’t the end – it’s the means.

Thirty years ago Yuri Bezmenov, an ex-KGB agent, explained that the Soviet infiltration of Hollywood, and its promotion of promiscuity, was only the first step in demoralizing the West; that ultimately the Hollywood homosexuals were nothing more than useful idiots, that if the communism they promoted were ever successful then they’d be the first ones put into the reeducation camps.  His comments echo throughout the recent Extra Credits video – themselves faithful adherents to Blue Team – as they describe the Chinese social media experiment known as Sesame Credit: an App that measures how good of a citizen you are.  It applies basic principles of gamification to manipulate the users into self-censoring; into striving harder to demonstrate their obedience, while shaming any independent thought within their personal networks.

Here in the West, a slightly different approach is needed.  In China, the mother’s milk includes concepts such as the Mandate of Heaven and loyalty to the Emperor; here each man has his castle, and the focus is on individual liberty.  Censorship in the West requires that we side-step the constitution, and twist liberty into license.  War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and No Judgement is Judgement for All!  In the West, we won’t enslave the individual to a government-controlled standard of behaviour; instead we’ll allow you to opt-in to a corporate-controlled network.  Enter Peeple; the Yelp! for people, recently returned from the grave.

The end result will be a society reminiscent of the Anime series Psycho-Pass, a science-fiction dystopia where ‘activated’ emotional states are criminalized (the penalty is death), and the amygdala-deficient citizens stare on blankly as murder is committed before their eyes.

There are numerous other factors as well; government surveillance, mathematical analysis of social networks, non-lethal pain inducing weaponry, facial recognition software that can record your emotional state, the destruction of physical currency, the promotion of pornography, and many others – but I trust the reader knows all of this already.

The most potent weapon available to Red Team is psychology; the knowledge that Blue Team is composed of narcissists who wind up destroying themselves.  Their recruitment and control tools all function off of a narcissistic heuristic – a false digital front to hide the craven individual behind the screen – which leaves them vulnerable to the simple exploits that work on all narcissists:

Their need for validation;

Their hatred of children;

Their slavish hedonism.

For now I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader.  How can we on Red Team – us who value children and virtue – create a structure that allows Blue Team to murder their unborn, to pursue lascivious sterility, to suicide through drug addiction – while insulating our own from these vicious social ills?

I believe that it can be done.  But it will require some audacious theology.

ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ

1. Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism and the present day GOP establishment, was a Trotskyist; contrast to the Stalinist utopianism and Leninist individualism of the Democratic establishment.  Both sides are working off of the same fundamental playbook, the primary difference between the two is that the Democrats focus on the individual, ’empowering’ them into becoming reliant upon government, while the neocons ‘bail out’ banks, corporations, and foreign governments, making those large entities beholden to the establishment.  The heuristic behind neo-conservative thought is the Game Theory developed by John Nash, a paranoid schizophrenic who sought stability through subversion and antagonism.  To put it simply, so long as nobody is cooperating in a healthy manner, geopolitics becomes predictable.

2. But don’t count on it; “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” For what it’s worth, Dio’s Holy Diver came onto the playlist as I typed this.

3. To understand just how powerful marketing can be, I recommend the BBC documentary The Century of Self.  Say what you will about Freud, his nephew employed his theories and was able to change the course of history.