The Moulding of Communists

Frank S. Meyer’s book was a bit of a slog (as noted previously), but it paid off in the end.

In a nutshell, the book describes how Communists are recruited, selected, trained, and ultimately shaped into “cadre men” – true Communists. Unsurprisingly, the process follows how certain cults operate, with the same sorts of isolation from outsiders, brainwashing, jargon, consumption of free time and initiative, self-serving morality and ethics, totalizing worldview, and focus on the promotion of the interests of the organization.

While somewhat dated nowadays (my copy was published in 1961), the book nonetheless offered useful insights as to how we got to where we are today. One can read his description of how real, card-carrying Communists in the 1920s-1950s thought and behaved and find directly analogous thought and behavior patterns among the broader modern left. Modern cancel culture and political correctness are the direct descendants of practices common in Party operations in those years, but one can easily see the roots of wokeism, scienceism, climatism, and other lefty and left-adjacent ideological cults of Current Year in Meyer’s account of how the Party worked.

While they stand on similar foundations of a totalizing worldview, simplistic lenses for interpreting the entirety of reality, moral and ethical flexibility in the promotion of the Cause, rabid intolerance to dissent, etc. (things James Lindsay described in his essay Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism), these modern ideological cults look like cargo cults by comparison to the old Party – trying to apply the recruitment, propagandization, training, etc. of the old Communist movements without understanding how those things work or why the Communists did them.

Still with some degree of success, true, but without the remarkable degree of organization and competence Meyer describes – remarkable in no small part for having evolved in such a short time following the Russian Revolution.

 

 

Not Impressed With Our Technocrat Overlords

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. 

My reaction so far has amounted to, “This is what so much conspiratorial hubbub is about?” I’m about 50 pages or so in, and finding the writing style insufferable – such that every time I put it down, I swear I’m done with it.

The prime offense is that it reads like it was intended for an audience with an eighth-grade reading level – if that. Harari uses short, simple sentences. He waters down complex concepts. He uses some big words, but not too big. And a lot of repetition. Did I mention the simple sentence structure?

Yeah. He’s no Carl Sagan, let alone a Silas Hudson.

What probably ought to be the prime offense, however, is his extensive use of unsupported (because unsupportable) conjecture, presented as fact. Sure, I understand where he’s ultimately going with his assertion that prehistoric foragers led more rewarding or satisfying lives than we moderns (they owned nothing and were happy, you might say), but he can’t possibly know this as fact. It’s not something that can be known as fact when comparing two different extant cultures, where those who make up those cultures can be interrogated extensively about how contented they are – there are simply too many ways to look at the question to establish who is in fact happier.

I’m disappointed. I was expecting a more noodly piece of writing, with much to chew on with regards to technocracy and transhumanism and the like – so much so that I bought Sapiens bundled with Homo Deus and 21 Lessons. Now I’m going to have to decide whether to waste my time reading them or waste my money by not.

 

Blog Name Change

Since I’m no longer writing in the Ares Project universe, I’ve (finally) changed the blog name, and will eventually migrate it fully over to fistfulofphotons.com.

The name comes from a URL I bought on a whim probably ten years ago, and then forgot I owned. I may change it again when I come up with a name I like for the new project, but this amuses me for now.

Thoreson on Fallacy Hunting

You’ll notice that fallacies can only ever be found in your thinking, never in the thinking of those who thrive on pointing them out. It could be because they’re as good at avoiding fallacies as they are at identifying when others use them, but it’s not. They’re just intellectually dishonest.

Jedediah Thoreson

Thoreson on the Right Side of History

Anyone who claims to be ‘on the right side of history’ should be assumed to be a moral monster and treated accordingly. If you believe yourself to be ‘on the right side of history’, you can justify anything you find necessary to do to those who stand in the way of its realization – or who merely disagree with you. That justification is in fact the primary reason for their believing history has a ‘right’ side, and that they’re on it.

– Jedediah Thoreson

It’s a Zoo

Obligatory excuse-making: I’ve been finishing up a project at work (now completed) and trying to get done the Tile Job From Hell (not completed).

In the meantime, I’ve finished Parallel Lives, The Aeneid, Pilgrim’s Progress (Part 1, like Dante’s trilogy, I couldn’t make myself do the rest), and am halfway through Arabian Nights, and most of the way through The Moulding of Communists.

Parallel Lives was interesting, in part for the history it covers. I thought I knew a good bit about Roman history in the transition period from Republic to Empire, but nope – there was way more to it than I had previously learned, and Plutarch crams a whole lot of it into a short piece. The other interesting part was how obviously it was a primary source for several of Shakespeare’s plays (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, specifically).

The Aeneid was slow going, and as I’ve discovered is typical for classic epics and dramas, was poorly structured and edited by modern standards. It was like a story told by a five-year-old: this happened then this happened then this happened for ten thousand lines of dactylic hexameter. But like Parallel Lives, it was an engaging overview of Roman pre-history (albeit heavily mythologized and not exactly reliable), or at least how Romans of the early Empire wished to see their history.

It also portrayed the Trojans as the heroes of the Trojan War and the Achaeans as the bad guys, which amused me at first and which I attributed to the pro-Roman slant of the poem. Then I looked it up. Yeah. Even by Homer’s pro-Greek account, the Greeks were dicks.

Pilgrim’s Progress wasn’t bad, but it was overly-long and by the end seemed like a treacly Anglican reduction of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Arabian Nights is not what I expected at all. I knew it was a series of stories, but the framing device and its nesting/recursion of stories is handled quite well (in contrast to the chaotic structurelessness of The Aeneid), with the stories fairly short and to the point. They remind me very strongly of the stories in Idries Shah’s books, although it’s not entirely clear that they’re intended that way (some do appear have an obvious moral or underlying meaning, but that could simply be me reading things into the story out of habit from reading Shah).

Finally, The Moulding of Communists has been somewhat of a slog up to the current chapter, but it’s turning into an insightful look at how communists were recruited into the Party back in the day, and after recruitment, selected and formed into “cadre” members. The resemblances to cult practices are remarkable, so much so that I repeatedly wonder whether the cults of the 1960s-1980s weren’t actually following the same playbook (and in turn, it makes me wonder how Soviet communists managed to figure all that out, systematize it, and successfully spread it globally such that it was already commonplace by the mid-1930s in the US).

Space Billionaires – Or What?

One occasionally sees opinion pieces or activist rants about how “space billionaires” – guys like Musk, Branson, Bezos, or Bigelow – are somehow ‘ruining space’ by commercializing access or turning it into a tourism destination or filling the ‘space lanes’ with megaconstellations.

And that’s bad, oh so bad.

I would ask, how else do you think expanding civilization into space or sending humans to colonize Mars or the like is going to happen? Who do you think is actually going to get it done?

Civil space programs have had fifty-plus years to do it. Civil space agencies have demonstrated that they can’t create the technology and self-sustaining, large-scale space infrastructure necessary for permanent presence in space. Civil programs “spend that money right here on Earth”, where it lines the pockets of contractors and Congressmen and constituents while slowly accomplishing nothing useful towards actual space settlement. These agencies have also shown that they won’t do it, demonstrating through mission selection, technology development, etc. a bias towards space as a sort of nature preserve where civil servants and academics pursue Science(tm) – not a frontier where mere hoi polloi pursue their own interests (or worse: profits).

Military space programs have not led to settlement, either, but they have distinctly different priorities and make no claims otherwise. These priorities may, eventually, lead to an expanded human presence in space (through manned platforms or technological breakthroughs or the like), but given the nature of military applications and national security protections it’s unlikely that this will happen soon, or quickly, or develop in a direction that makes it self-sustaining. While developments helpful to space settlement could emerge from military programs, they’re not the purpose or end goal of those programs and so their appearance (or availability to civilians) can’t be depended on.

Which leaves the people who are want space settlement to do it for themselves somehow. Which is what has been happening over the past twenty years with the emergence of a truly commercial space industry – one which is systematically developing the pieces necessary for future space settlement.

What has proven essential in this is the combination of adequate capital and motivation. And this has appeared in the form of a few billionaires – Musk, in particular – having the money to invest in building the technology and sustain the effort until it becomes profitable, and deep personal interest in space settlement as a goal. And their undertakings – Musk’s, in particular – have created new millionaires with motivation who are in turn building new space startups of their own, building on the technologies and infrastructure established by these pioneers. This is gradually expanding the depth and breadth of the commercial space industry, which will gradually lead to self-sustainment.

Could space settlement have emerged without “Space Billionaires”? Possibly, eventually. Breakthroughs in (say) manufacturing technology or AI-assisted physics/engineering research or the like might someday have brought down the cost of space activities, enabling the far-more-numerous individuals having the same degree of motivation but lacking the resources to follow a “mom-and-pop” business approach. The “D.D. Harriman” strategy leapfrogs that long evolution and makes the “mom-and-pop” environment emerge sooner than it would have on its own.

Which is a long way of saying: you don’t actually want space settlement if you’re bitching about “Space Billionaires” leading the charge, because nobody else was going to get it going any time soon.

Improving on a “Classic”

How a mediocre episode of Star Trek might be improved:

Bele is taken to Lokai, and the two begin to argue about the history of their two distinct peoples. Kirk is puzzled by the animosity between the two, who appear to him to be of the same race.

When Bele explains that Lokai is evil because his people are black on the left and white on the right, Lokai interjects that the opposite is true: Bele’s people are evil because they are black on the right and white on the left.

Kirk, in an attempt to be clever, responds that he’s white on the top and black on the bottom – which, given he is clothed, they have to take his word on. “What does that make me?”

The two Cheronians howl in instinctive horror, Kirk’s snarky question having triggered the racial memory of another Cheronian people exterminated many millennia earlier. The two aliens immediately put aside their differences and unite in a campaign of annihilation against humanity, who they now perceive as either white-top-black-bottom (Kirk) or black-top-white-bottom (Uhura) members of the feared and loathed third Cheronians.

After a decade-long campaign of genocide across the Federation, Kirk is brought before War Admirals Bele and Lokai in the ruins of Starbase 1, the final survivor of the human race. When the tatters of his uniform reveal that humans are not, in fact, different colors top and bottom, the Cheronians belatedly realize that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

“Um. So sorry about that.”

“Yes, yes. We really should have checked.”

Kirk, spared execution at the last moment, sighs with relief tinged with grief and regret. Looking out a nearby viewport at the scorched and ruined Earth passing below, he says wistfully, “If only I’d joked that we were colored front-to-back, instead.”

At which the two Cheronians scream in uncontrollable terror at the racial memory of a fourth, much older and more fearsome Cheronian people, and transport themselves into the blessed escape of the void.

Spock arrives to rescue Kirk as the wreckage of the station begins to enter Earth’s upper atmosphere. A trite moral lesson is presented, and the credits roll. In the following episode, everything is back to normal and none of these events is acknowledged to have happened.

Why I Quit the Mars Society

Having fisked Bob Zubrin’s statement on the election, I think it’s relevant here to tell the story of why I quit the Mars Society: it’s because of the same kind of political B.S. I pointed out in that post.

I was one of the founding members of the Louisiana chapter of the Mars Society, and its president for a couple of years before I moved from NOLA to Denver in 2004. When I moved, I looked forward to getting more involved, given how close I would be to the Mars Society mothership. (As it happened, I lived about ten miles from Bob Zubrin himself, and used to see him at county Republican events.)

In July, about a month after moving, I finally had the time to contact the Colorado chapter and arrange to attend one of their meetings. On the day, I took off early from work and drove an hour up to CU Boulder – not then knowing the school’s reputation.

The meeting consisted of me, another new person, and 3-4 existing chapter members. Instead of discussions about advocating for manned missions to and settlement of Mars, the existing members spent the time ripping on George W. Bush and giggling about how stupid he was, as evidenced by whatever supposed solecism or blunder of his was then in the news.

On and on. With no recognition that the others in the room might have different opinions on the matter or might in fact have showed up expecting something other than shallow partisan political banter of no relevance to the purpose of the organization. The other new guy looked as annoyed as I felt.

A month later, I did it again. With the same result, but that the other new guy didn’t return. And after that, I didn’t return, either. Nor did I ever hear from anyone in the chapter. They didn’t seem any more interested in growing their organization than they did in serving the organization’s supposed purpose.

I attended two more conventions after that, but only because they were held in Boulder and I didn’t have to travel. None lived up to those I had attended in 2001 (which prompted me to start writing Mars fiction) and 2003 (which got me recruited by SpaceX). After 2008 or so, I just kinda forgot about the Mars Society. It seemed even then to be drifting into irrelevance.

When I point out the risk of a leader creating an unwelcoming environment in his organization by letting his personal political concerns intrude, I’m not doing so because I disagree with Mr. Zubrin’s particular political positions or his party affiliation, it’s because I’ve been on the receiving end of that unwelcoming environment – in his own organization.