My son (12) recently asked me about the difference between the “left” and “right” political parties and I discovered that it’s actually very difficult to explain. I’ll tell you what I told him, so you can decide for yourself.

Initially, the meaning was straightforward. Those politicians who supported the king assembled at his right, and those who opposed his policies (but were considered his loyal opposition) assembled at his left. Basically, the right was the government and the left was the opposition.

Later, the meaning shifted and the “right” was understood as conservative and “left” as reformist or revolutionary, and this is the core of the meaning we have today.

However, when the “left” political option wins the elections and forms the government, and the “right” is the opposition, the situation turns into a complete opposite of the initial meaning, which confuses things greatly, because we can no longer define “left” and “right” in relation to the government policies, but only in relation to the basic philosophy of politics, where the sides differ on the basic concepts of what they are trying to do with the state.

In order to come up with a generalized definition, we first need to see some specific examples and see whether we can come up with a rule that encompasses them. So for instance the leftists will say that there’s injustice in the society because some have more than the others, and those injustices need to be remedied by implementing a progressive social policy, like taxing the rich in order to give social benefits to the poor. Since the basic assumption is that people are equal, the difference in wealth is explained as a result of some sort of a crime – if you have ten equal people and some pool of resources, such as ten loaves of bread, and some end up with more bread than the others, the conclusion is that the inequality of distribution is the result of injustice, where some took more than their fair share while the others ended up empty handed. This is then extended to all spheres of life – if some are more educated than others, it’s because of social injustice. If women do different things than men, it’s because of social injustice. If dogs chase postmen, it’s because of social injustice. You get the picture.

The rightists, on the other hand, don’t think there’s any great social injustice taking place in the world, because they don’t think all men are equal. Some desire knowledge and study, while others prefer to watch football on TV. Some desire success and wealth and work diligently, while others are satisfied with moderate income and a peaceful job without stress. Some follow religion, others are atheists. Some want to raise a family, some care only about advancement of their technical field. Those differences add up and produce different outcomes, which explains the different social conditions without any need of introducing an additional factor such as injustice. The rightists simply don’t view equality as a desirable outcome, since it would erase the basic motivation for advancement – if people knew they’ll always have the same outcome, regardless of how hard they worked or what they invented, would they be motivated to invest so much extra effort? Of course not. Besides, one needs to trust the proven methods. If people did something for centuries with good results, don’t interfere with it. Instead, introduce a level playing field with the same laws applying to everyone, and trust that the outcome will be justice, because inequality of outcomes is just, if it reflects different choices. If women prefer to raise families, they will avoid professions which require complete dedication, and will naturally not be as represented in some fields as men. The outcome reflects the choices, without any need to resort to “oppression” or “injustice”.

In essence, the leftists start with some concept of an ideal society and they perceive the difference between the actual state and their theory as the reality’s problem, and they then want to impose their theory upon reality until they get them to match. Essentially, they are dogmatic idealists. The rightists, on the other hand, start with observing how things are, and then they attempt to understand why things work the way they work. Essentially, they are pragmatists and they think in a way that is quite scientific, because the main difference between dogma and science is that dogma starts with some ideal concept and tries to impose it upon reality, while science starts with the observation of reality and then attempts to form a theoretical model. The idealist sees a hawk eating a rabbit and interprets it as cruelty and violence, and desires a world in which hawks wouldn’t eat rabbits. A scientist sees hawk eating a rabbit and understand that this is simply what hawks do – they cull the rabbits, which both improves the rabbit gene pool, and lessens stress on the habitat. If the rabbits were allowed to reproduce exponentially without the presence of the predators, they would overgraze the habitat and die off, maybe to the point of extinction. So, the scientists would warn against imposing our emotional or ethical views upon nature, because it is much wiser to simply observe and learn, without making judgments, and maybe even revise your own personal ethics based upon observations, instead of sticking blindly to your initial viewpoints.

Essentially, the leftists start with the assumption that they know better, that they are smarter, that what they propose would mean progress, and that anyone who opposes them is primitive, stupid and needs to be either controlled, repressed or killed for the good of the world, because the leftists know better. It doesn’t matter that the leftist ideologies invariably fail and destroy the societies that attempt to implement them: the leftists never change their position, because it is dogmatic, not scientific. A rightist is basically a creature of the free market. If he attempts something and fails, he will conclude that he needs to do something better and different in order to succeed the next time. He observes those who succeeded and attempts to emulate them, and he observes those who failed and tries to learn from their mistakes. Essentially, he observes the reality and learns from it in order to improve his probability of success. The leftist starts with an ideology, and if that ideology fails, he rationalizes it in some way, usually as a conspiracy of the regressive forces of society, which need to be fought and destroyed in order for his theory to work.

So, basically, the leftists are conceited dogmatic idiots, and the result of implementation of their ideas is always some form of anti-evolution, where those with the correct ideological attitude are promoted and the others are repressed, where the successful ones are punished and the unsuccessful or mediocre ones are rewarded, and the result is a society with total lack of motivation, which is then corrected by introducing some persistent threat or danger which serves to mobilize people to work and sacrifice their well-being. That’s why the socialist states are always in a state of war with someone, they always embrace a siege mentality and they fail once the people stop believing in the reality of the threat; that’s why the Soviet Union collapsed almost immediately after the cold war ended and they realized there’s no longer a danger of Americans killing them all. There simply was no reason to tolerate their bad economy if there was no threat of war – why would they? This mechanism is usually poorly understood by people who didn’t live in socialist countries that embraced such siege mentality.

So, essentially, the leftists were repeatedly proven wrong by history, it was experimentally proven that their methods reliably fail, because they remove the primary incentive of progress, which is the difference in outcomes as a function of difference in choices. “There are many kids in your class”, I told my son, “who have different grades. This difference in outcomes is the result of their different choices. Some hang out with other kids all day and play soccer. Some are checking their Facebook account and chatting for ten hours every day. Some, such as yourself, read books, talk to their parents and are engaged in intellectual pursuits. For you, this has an outcome of being great at everything intellectual, but at the cost of being a social outcast and sucking at soccer. You obviously understand why this is the case, and consider the tradeoff worthwhile or you would have changed your behavior in order to adjust. It’s the same way with the adults. Sure, there are additional factors. Some kids have stupid and violent parents who are drunk and/or beat them up. Some are simply too stupid and unmotivated to care about anything. But for the majority, it’s a function of inputs influencing the outputs.”

So, when you see a hawk eating a rabbit, don’t act like a child, crying “poor little bunny rabbit”, but instead try to understand what is actually going on, and why there’s a rabbit in the first place – why the rabbit needs to have great hearing and big ears and why he needs to be fast. Imagine a world with no predators. Essentially, the life on Earth would still be somewhere before Cambrium, consisting of sponges and jellyfish, because there would be nothing to punish evolutionary failures, nothing to punish the bad choices, nothing to reward good choices and evolutionary successes. There would be no reward for having good eyesight and no punishment for being slow and blind. You have hearing, eyesight and all other senses exactly because you need to have them, because there’s a reward for having them and using them to the full extent, and punishment for failing to do so, and the punishment is not eating, not reproducing and in being eaten by a leopard. You have so much brain because you need it, you simply can’t afford not to have it and not to use it. You are weaker and slower than the other animals, and you need to think your way to success. Failing to think results in failing to eat and failing to understand where the leopard will ambush you. Bad choices have bad outcomes.

So, we have an interesting situation here. Initially it looks like the leftists are correct in their diagnosis and attempted treatment of societal ills. There are inequalities, since people are equal this is unjust, injustice needs to be remedied, those who oppose it must be fought.

However, after closer examination, it turns out that they are completely wrong. People are not equal, and they are not supposed to be. Evolution works by producing a certain amount of variety within any species, and this is why we reproduce sexually and not by cloning. The purpose of sexual reproduction is to provide greater variety, which will allow some specimens to survive where the others will fail, simply because some rabbits have bigger ears than others, and some have quicker reflexes than others. On the other hand, some hawks will have better eyesight and speed than others, and will eat when the others will starve. In humans, there will be variation in abilities, variation in motivations and variation in outcomes. Those who have better outcomes will be preferable in sexual selection, and those who have inferior outcomes will have their children die off due to lack of resources, thus closing inferior evolutionary paths forever. Attempting to correct that will have terrible outcomes. Treating all people as equals, as clones, is a terribly stupid and evil thing to do. For instance, if you have someone who is an evil, drunk fucktard who beats up his children regularly, his children are all half-retarded and he has no friends who are willing to help him, the state needs to let him and his children die off. To take resources away from successful people who made better choices, and use those resources to finance the reproduction of losers and incompetent evil fucktards, it’s simply evil, it’s like culling healthy and fast rabbits in order to lessen the competition for the lame, slow rabbits. Soon you will end up with a diseased and inferior rabbit population. Essentially, in order to have evolution and health, you need to have a difference in outcomes, you need to have a reward for good choices and punishment for bad choices, and both reward and punishment need to be quite radical and unambiguous.

So, basically, the difference between the leftists and the rightists is that the entire nature functions according to the rightist principles, and the failed communist states functioned according to the leftist principles. Pick your government accordingly.

I was thinking about tolerance, and how it is supposed to be the cornerstone of our civilization and what not.

I think it’s actually complete nonsense and here’s why.

If you live in some Western country, in Europe or America, and you want to create a political party or a social movement which advocates murder of those who criticize your beliefs or offend you, if you advocate treating women as inferior, if you advocate treating other religions as inferior, if you advocate destroying ancient relics belonging to cultures you find offensive, you’ll either be put in prison or in a lunatic asylum, you will be socially ostracized, lose your job and essentially be perceived as a bigoted Nazi piece of shit, and rightly so.

However, if another culture or a civilization does the same thing, those very people who would crucify you, a member of their own civilization, for holding such beliefs, suddenly come to defend you because “other cultures need to be respected”, essentially they will advocate tolerance. In fact, you can literally tear living hearts out of prisoners of war and sacrifice them to your gods, and if Mel Gibson makes a movie criticizing such practices, he will be attacked as intolerant for even expressing a critical opinion of you.

Which brings us to my second point: the Western civilization has serious internal contradictions based on self-loathing, and this needs to be resolved, and quickly. I understand that a Victorian attitude of “we are superior and we need to bring the inferior peoples up to our high standards” eventually produced Nazism, and that the assumption of one’s own superiority combined with the simple logic of good stuff needing to prevail over bad stuff eventually produced the holocaust; however, citing Hitler and the Nazis every time someone says that there are superior and inferior things and people leads us nowhere. Of course there are superior and inferior people. Even the liberal critics of such position will agree – they will see the Nazis as inferior people, who need to be killed or in other way punished, for instance. They will see the “intolerant ” people and philosophies, at least within their own civilization, as inferior, worthy of contempt and destined for extinction.

So, essentially, this intolerance toward the intolerant ones suffices to prove that it’s not about tolerance, but about defending some implicit underlying set of values that describes the Western civilization as such, and the thing is, I’m not exactly sure what that is. We had Western civilization before we had equality of races, religions and sexes. Even the Nazis are obviously a branch of the Western civilization. It’s not about Christianity, either, but it might be about secularism, moral relativism, humanism and science. I don’t know how to define it, but I can recognize it when I see it.

But why does the Western civilization so readily denounce its own unacceptable offshoots, while tolerating even worse offenders outside of its fold? What comes to my mind is that it might seem as a way to avoid intercivilizational conflict, so rather than to judge everything on merit, or to reject all merit altogether, one needs to suspend critical judgment outside of one’s civilization – so if one of our own were to insult a Jew, he would be denounced as a Nazi scumbag (and rightly so), but if Arabs or Iranians insult Jews and call for their annihilation as part of a daily routine, we need to tolerate them and accept that it’s “part of their culture”.

Yes, it’s part of their culture, I agree, but if their culture happened to be a part of our civilization, it would be utterly denounced and seen as the vilest bigotry and scumbaggery that it indeed is. If a German or a French man thought women need to be obedient to men, are inferior to men, and need to be covered head to toe in some cloak in order not to be seen by “strangers”, what would we think of such a man? We would think that he’s a sexist piece of shit and a vile scumbag. However, a billion Muslims espouse those same beliefs, and organize states and laws accordingly. How are they different from, let’s say, the Nazis, who also espoused intolerant, racist beliefs and organized states and laws accordingly?

That’s why I don’t care about tolerance and I think it’s not a value worth upholding. Rather, I’m a meritocrat, meaning I perceive things and people on a coordinate system of merit. If someone knows more and performs better on tests of mental aptitude, he’s smarter. If someone is kinder and gentler than other people, he has more value on that axis than people who are cruel and abusive to others. If someone is perceptive and truthful, he fares better on the axis of adherence to reality than people who are liars and deceivers. Essentially, it’s not a single-axis space, and it’s a complex thing, but there are values and there are people who are better compared to others. It’s better to be smart, honest, kind and helpful, than to be stupid, dishonest, cruel and abusive. I think we can agree on that. However, if you do agree on that, what remains to be agreed on is universality of application of this principle. If it’s good for me to be smart, kind and gentle to others, and it’s a good thing that people in my town and in my country are smart, kind and gentle, and not stupid, cruel and violent, how is it that the rule stops working as soon as I try to apply it to people outside my town, state or civilization? How is it that in my town, if a man treats a woman like shit, he’s a sexist scumbag, and if a man in another town or a state does that, I have to tolerate his culture, and I can’t perceive his culture according to my normal set of values, as that of sexist scumbaggery and therefore inferior to mine?

I will leave this question open, as something to think about. However, I personally believe in an absolute justice, I personally believe that God will punish every villain and a scumbag on merit of his deeds and spiritual state, regardless of his “culture”, because tearing live people’s hearts out as a sacrifice to gods is an evil deed, and it will not be pardoned because it was normalized within a certain culture, just as killing millions of Jews in gas chambers will not be pardoned just because it was normalized within a certain culture.

Where tolerance actually makes sense is at the point where you refuse to take responsibility for other people’s lives and choices. True tolerance is to live according to your own chosen principles and to accept that it is so for others; that all will be judged on absolute merit, and that all will most likely be quite short of perfection. In order to be tolerant, you don’t have to turn a blind eye to the evils of others. You simply need to be an alternative to evil, and that’s the best way in which you can possibly fight it. You don’t fight evil by rounding up all evildoers and nuking them. You fight evil by being its opposite. And tolerance… tolerance is the part where you admit it’s not your place to force others to make the choices you personally favor. However, tolerance is merely a necessity, derived from human ignorance. Do not expect God to be tolerant. Expect, however, to be judged fairly and objectively, on absolute merit.

I recently heard that Foxconn and other manufacturers are switching to a completely robotic manufacturing process for smartphones and similar mass-produced electronic devices.

This means that unqualified manual labor is to be removed from the manufacturing process, essentially meaning that instead of a dehumanized human screwing a PCB into a phone case ten times a minute you’ll get a robot doing it.

This is good news for the communists who are always fighting for the “rights” of workers, trying to “liberate” them from manual labor. However, one must ask what those “liberated” people will do? Detroit is full of people who were “liberated” from working in the automobile industry. What are they doing now, when they no longer “have to” screw car parts together and spray paint them? Are they switching to the manufacture of robots that manufacture cars? No, they aren’t qualified. Are they producing CAD/CAM software for the robotic factories? No, they aren’t qualified. They were barely qualified to screw parts together, and are simply too old and too intellectually limited to acquire skills necessary for migrating into jobs that require a high level of expertise. No, they migrated to either state welfare or crime.

And I’m afraid that it’s in all of our future if things don’t change in some radical way, because, the way I see it, the logic looks like this:

A machine takes a man’s job. A man is now unemployed and his present skillset is obsolete and not in demand on the market. The fact that he was “freed” from his work only means he was rendered unnecessary. The fact he’s free doesn’t mean that the machine works instead of him and for him. No, it works instead of him and for his employer. The worker is simply fired, the employer gets the benefits. Now, what can the unemployed worker do? One can say that a job that’s closed in car industry because of robots means a job opening in the robot industry, but it’s not the same job. It requires different qualifications. Furthermore, it’s not the same number of jobs. The math is simple – a switch to mechanical production will decrease demand for human labor, and/or raise the bar of skillset necessary for employment. This will render the least qualified workers permanently unemployed and, in fact, unemployable, because they are either too old or too stupid to really learn how to do anything other than screwing parts together in a repetitive manner. In their permanently unemployable state, they can either live from charity or start selling drugs. This model post-dicts our present situation quite well, because that’s exactly what happens.

One unimportant result of the process is that the manufacturing might migrate away from Asia and back into USA, because it’s essentially the same where you put the robotic factory, and if you do it where your consumers are, you save money on transport. Since there’s no human labor involved, labor unions and syndical protections no longer motivate companies to export manufacturing abroad, but that’s not relevant for this article because the workers are still unemployed, wherever the robot plant is built.

If you follow this logic to its limits, you get 10% of the today’s workforce employed in super-demanding jobs such as CAD/CAM software manufacturer, 3D model designer, robot designer, designer of the quantum-level amplifiers in the optical sensors, designer of computer displays, memories, CPUs and storage arrays, and then you get their servants, the guys who bring them coffee and clean up behind them, prostitutes who sell them sex and entertainers who make them laugh after work to blow off stress. The other result will be the extreme efficiency and capacity of the manufacturing process. The only problem is, who will buy all that crap? Because, you’ll end up with much more stuff than there are people with money, since you fired them all in the process. The only work remaining for the unqualified labor is basically crime – the stuff that’s out of the standard regulated economy, basically “hos and blow”; that, or they can resort to democracy and force the government to tax the robotic factory owners and give them the money.

So, how do we get out of this mess, in some constructive way that wouldn’t introduce communism (which is probably the only economic system that is scientifically proven not to work) or lead to dissociation of society into some dark Blade Runner-like dystopia with super-rich on one end and “little people” on the streets?

I’m almost inclined to shrug and leave the question open, but I might actually attempt to answer it by proposing that we change the motivational structure from a right-based one to duty-based. You see, in a right-based system you have a right to fire people so you do, and you stop giving a fuck about them there. In a duty-based system, you consider it your duty to care for the well-being of your workers. If you replaced them by something, you don’t just fire them. You look into ways in which they can remain useful, ways in which they can be compensated for their past services to your company. You either give them a good parachute or you promote them into flight attendants, you don’t just throw them out of the plane. Just a thought.

But a duty-based system might not be compatible with either capitalism or socialism, but rather with some form of enlightened feudalism, which might eventually prove to be the most resilient, humane and stable of all systems of economy and government, because in feudalism, it’s noblesse oblige. Yeah, it’s an unpopular opinion in thoughtspace where “democracy”, “human rights” and “freedom” are the words that substitute “truth”, “duty”, “dignity” and “justice”, but when “free market economy” fails, when democracy fails and the concept of human rights fails, as I predict it will, what then?

I recently became aware of a very strange argument used by the feminists, about a so-called “subject-object dichotomy”, where “subject acts, and object is acted upon”, and women are supposedly seen by elements of society as playing the role of an object, where they are acted upon without much sensible interaction or even consent.

I must admit it’s one of the stupidest things I’ve heard lately, and I heard so many stupid things I’m drowning in them.

You see, the implication is that women need to be an important factor whose consent is required in all things that concern them, and whose opinion and judgment is a cornerstone of every decision. They are not. Most people, most of the time, are objects. Furthermore, they are background noise. They are irrelevant, they get in the way and we don’t give one third of a fuck about them. When I take a bus I don’t want to interact with other passengers. I don’t want to see them as persons with whom I would have meaningful interactions. I don’t even want them to be there in the first place. I just want them to mind their fucking business enough so that I can pretend they aren’t there, so that I can get where I’m going while knowing as little as possible about them as persons. To me, they are not the reason why I’m in the bus, they are the undesired side-effect of public transportation. The reason why I’m in the bus is that I need to go from A to B while my car is being serviced. This type of ignoring others can be an act of kindness, because reducing interaction in a crowded space where interaction is not desired is actually a way to show respect and to be polite. It’s the same thing as not talking loudly in a plane, where people can’t get away from the noise you produce and would even want to sleep, pretending you don’t exist, as difficult as that might be.

So basically, when you have a video game with non-playable characters, or a movie with background casts of passers-by, taxi drivers or people who sell newspapers to the main character, their unimportance isn’t a big philosophical issue of them being reduced to objects; it’s merely an accurate portrayal of the basic fact of urban life, which is that you are constantly surrounded by unimportant people you don’t give a fuck about and who live an existence that is completely parallel to yours. It doesn’t matter whether they are men or women, businessmen or beggars. You just want to be left alone in order to be able to live your life without constant dispersal of attention and energy into things that do not really concern you. So that’s one thing – for most people, you’re not a person. You are background noise they try very hard to ignore because they are trying to live their lives.

The second aspect is context which gives an interaction its ethical value. Sometimes treating someone like an object is bad, sometimes it is neutral and sometimes it is good. If someone you talk to acts condescendingly towards you, ignores your opinions with a dismissive attitude, addresses your opinions while talking to someone else as if you don’t exist, it’s a real problem. That’s where being treated like a non-person, or a non-subject, really matters and where it’s something that is ethically and morally wrong. Sometimes, as in cases where a criminal rapes and kills a random victim whom he sees as a drop-in replacement for someone he really has a problem with, and not as an independent real person, this can be purely evil. However, in most cases, as in our previous example of politely ignoring the other people on the street or in public transportation, it can be neutral or even positive. In some cases, for instance a firefighter responding to a call and saving a family from a building, it can be a really great thing – you don’t want to feel profound personal obligation and gratitude towards a firefighter who saved yours and your family’s lives, you really want him to treat this event as business as usual, where you and your family are merely objects of his daily work, like a cat stuck on a tree or needing to pump water out of someone’s basement. The feminists can bitch all they want about not wanting women to be portrayed as “damsels in distress”, but honestly, they really do. They really, really want society to feel an automatic reflex of helping women in distress, because when someone starts unzipping his pants to rape you, and you scream for help, you really want the accidental passer-by to see you as an object, as a damsel in distress, and to react instinctively to protect you, whether by beating the wannabe rapist up, or by calling the police and then beating him up. You don’t want him to have a meaningful interaction with you as a person, you just need immediate and concrete help in your generic situation which is covered by the “damsel in distress” social clause, requiring accidental passers-by and casual bystanders to actually do something constructive without any reward, any personal reason and any personal interaction.

You don’t like being an object in someone else’s world? Well better get used to it, because that’s exactly what you are. You are not important, you are not empowered, you are not the reason why other people are on the street. You are mostly ignored, sometimes you are acted upon, and sometimes you act, but if you think you’ll ever get to be the important factor in every possible interaction, you desperately need to have your ego checked before your nose starts interfering with air traffic. And be fucking thankful for the “damsel in distress trope” because that’s the society’s way of reiterating the need for accidental bystanders to help you when you have a heart attack on the street, or when someone wants to fuck you against your will while holding a knife at your throat while you cry for somebody, anybody to help you. Not to have a meaningful interaction with you as a person because he admires and respects your personality, but because you are a damsel in distress and he is expected to help those.

And if you think only women are portrayed as objects in movies and games, you’re out of your fucking mind, because you obviously didn’t play the latest Tomb Raider where Lara Croft kills unimportant men as easily and as trivially as she kills deer for food, and you didn’t see the movies from the Marvel universe where the Black Widow routinely, trivially and callously dispatches dozens of men with the trivial ease one would feel while brushing his teeth in the morning while thinking about what shirt to wear.

And if you actually watched all that and didn’t see a problem with it, then fuck you, because you are a pompous, callous idiot. Go have a meaningful interaction with a surgeon while being operated on, instead of being anaesthetized and treated as a mere object.