Politics Made Simple

Are you confused by politics and the incessant squabbles between the left and the right? Mystified why politicians bother to speak at all in public when everyone expects them to be constantly lying? And why all the political deception in the first place? Now you can end your confusion with this handy primer.

Liberals and Conservatives, Victims and Bullies

Virtually every political disagreement boils down to a difference in how people answer the following question: Whom do you side with in a conflict, the underdog or the bully? Do you care about the happiness of strangers? Feel bad when they’re mistreated and wish there was some way to help them? In that case, congratulations: you’re a sentimental leftist!

Or do you think those who suffer deserve it because they’re too weak or lazy or stupid to avoid the abuse? Do you find yourself cheering for the aggressor and wondering why the bully got all soft and stopped pummeling the nerd just because the nerd started crying? Well, then, welcome to the club and hail Satan: you’re a right-winger!

The political continuum is divided along these main lines, between those on the left and those on the right or roughly between liberals and conservatives. However, politically-active people have a vested interest in obfuscating what politics is all about, as I’ll soon explain, so the conventional labels are fraught with misleading connotations. Thus, to clarify the situation, we should understand that “liberal” refers to a sissy, a groveling or resentful loser, while “conservative” means someone who surrenders the burdens of humanity to revert to a state of animal selfishness.

If you’re relatively weak, either physically or mentally, you feel bad when other weak people suffer, because you can easily imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes. And weak people suffer because the world is impersonal and unfair, and so weaklings are ground up and spit out of nature’s maw. If you were strong rather than weak, you’d be tempted to abuse your advantage and become the bully, in which case you’d stop identifying with victims.

If instead you are a bully, you feel sickened by weakness, because you’re secretly afraid to admit that even if you’re strong and callous enough to dominate other people, you’re an ant in the larger scheme of things. So you refuse to identify with losers. But you can’t afford to bond with fellow bullies, because they could turn on you at any moment. You’re in competition with your fellow aggressors, so you find yourself all alone with your capacity for empathy atrophied.

Weaklings team up to fight brutality and injustice by forming sanctified organizations called “governments.” The purpose of a government is to help those who can’t help themselves because they’re busy being clowned and dominated by an unfair world. Properly speaking, then, all governments are left-leaning or socialistic.

The conservative form of “government” is more properly called a tyranny. In political and economic jargon, a tyranny is a monarchy, a dictatorship, or a monopoly. Conservative government licenses not the responsible managing of affairs of respected citizens, but the prerogatives of a tyrannical few who dominate the many. The purpose of tyranny is to let nature take its course, to make people behave like animals by imposing animal law on those who could do better. The animal behaviour in question is the tendency to form power hierarchies dominated by the strongest, most psychopathic members of the group, that being nature’s most stable way of organizing social populations throughout what is aptly called the animal kingdom. In a conservative society, the weak majority is ruled over by a strong, mentally deranged (hubristic) minority as in Saudi Arabia, Nazi Germany, plutocratic America or any ancient kingdom or empire, and instead of being allowed to form unions or representative governments to alleviate its misfortune, the majority is trained to accept its lowly station and to defer to the mad pursuit of power. Whether it’s the divine right of kings or social Darwinism or the neoliberal fusion of corporate salesmanship and government, the tyrants spread myths to make excuses for the inhumanity of nature for which they stand.

The “traditions” the conservative wishes to preserve aren’t testaments to human wisdom or reactions to natural injustice, since those would be progressive and thus the opposite of conservative. Instead, the traditions that matter to conservative practice (leaving aside the conservative’s empty propaganda) are one and all pretexts for acting like animals. Recall that in nature there are frequent struggles to survive and only rare opportunities for benevolent cooperation, because the world is godless. If you cooperate you risk being betrayed, whereas if you think selfishly, the genes will benefit from the resulting competition between would-be dominators, even if you should be bested in the ensuing conflict. The strongest, most ruthless creatures—called “predators”—rise to the top of the food chain, and the “conservative” is the fellow who’s just fine with that happening in “human” societies.

Femininity, Masculinity, and the History of Political Lies

Another way to understand the main political difference is to notice that liberalism is feminine whereas conservatism is masculine. These opposing sets of values are based on a divergence in the brain’s ways of thinking, which in turn evolved in our formative hunting-and-gathering period, called the Paleolithic or Stone Age. As explained in Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary, and in Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess, hunting and gathering require different skills. Prehistoric humans survived by dividing the labour between the sexes, which therefore acquired different hardwired specializations and predilections.

Women gathered berries, fruits, and herbs, thus acquiring the talent for holistic thinking, for surveying the context and passively waiting for the earth to yield its bounty. Women also looked after the infants and the home camp, because they’re biologically equipped to carry the infant to term, to give birth and to nurse the young, during which time they bond chemically with the offspring. Men made themselves useful by undertaking the adventure of hunting wild game and bringing back meat to camp. Men thus needed to specialize in planning step by step how to outsmart their prey.

Two ways of thinking thus developed which are present in every human brain, although men tend to be more masculine than women, and women more feminine than men. What’s called “femininity” is roughly equal to the left-wing attitude (although to right-brained thinking): both are about cooperating to solve problems in a fair, sustainable, inoffensive manner. Masculinity is the way of the hunter which requires hard-heartedness, cunning, and the flagrant imposition of one creature’s will to live at the expense of another’s. In short, masculinity is the celebration of predatorial and thus animal values, whereas femininity is progressive to the point of being posthuman in orientation.

What happened in the Neolithic Revolution some twelve thousand years ago was that humans settled down to farm, and so men found themselves out of a job. The hunting part of hunting-and-gathering wasn’t needed anymore, since people discovered ways of maintaining docile livestock to be slaughtered at will, and farming optimized women’s gathering process. For over three million years, men had evolved masculine traits and they couldn’t just lie down and receive the peace and progress of the Neolithic Revolution. To do so would have been emasculating. Men therefore turned their masculine energy inward. Men hunted each other, becoming proficient at war and political domination through tyrannies, otherwise known as conservative cultures or God-given kingdoms. Thus began the recorded human story which, to the consternation of women, is almost entirely the story of the male abuse of power and so is properly called “history.”

Prehistoric masculinity encompassed the values and strategies of hunting, including the courage and honour of venturing into the unknown wilderness to track and struggle with the beast and to enrich the tribe with its carcass. That masculinity was fundamentally amoral—however men and women accommodated themselves to their specializations. The division of labour was driven by the evolutionary imperative to survive as animals thrown into the indifferent wilderness.

Modern—in the sense of Neolithic—masculinity is a further corruption of the original male function, the latter being part of nature’s genetic exploitation of our species for its inhuman pseudopurpose. The politics of behavioural modernity began with the masculine/conservative squandering of the victory of femininity that had occurred with the triumph of agriculture. Men ran wild in the civilizations that grew from the fruit of feminine labour. Farming supported population growth and the leisure to develop advanced technologies and flourishing cultures (arts and ideologies), and men adapted to their obsolescence by preserving a vestige of their prehistoric lifestyle. Instead of preying on wild animals, they devised and codified social hierarchies that dehumanized large segments of society, providing the most masculine minority of alpha males the chance to demonstrate their manliness by dominating the helpless masses (especially the slaves and women).

So whether you’re a man or a woman, if you’re a leftist, you think in a feminine, lily-livered manner, and if you’re conservative you’re masculine and thus an asshole.

More specifically, if you’re a feminine or liberal male, you have to lie to excuse your failure as a masculine man and so you embrace the myths of beta-male culture. You call for a large, functioning government to secure the welfare of the majority, while you implicitly understand that a large, democratic or technocratic government becomes dysfunctional, and you look forward to that dysfunction as an opportunity to empower yourself in an underhanded fashion. For example, you may look for loopholes in the unwieldy tax code or you’ll expect every democratic administration to corrupt itself by the end of its term, and you feel manly as you vote the bums out (even though as a mere beta male you’re the victim of this absurd, broken political system).

If you’re a feminine female, you have to lie to avoid going to war with masculine men and to justify your sexual attraction to predators. This lie is called “mainstream feminism,” which is part of the culture of political correctness. Unless they’re radical transhumanists, these women have to pretend that masculinity isn’t bankrupt, that human progress doesn’t consist in the complete domestication and eventual elimination of our species at the hands of the machines that are the ultimate inheritors of the world order created by feminine labour (by Neolithic, historical “progress”). Moreover, these women want to turn men into babies to give free rein to their mothering instincts, and so in recent decades in Canada, the United States, and parts of Europe, they’ve taken the lead in creating a liberal culture of overprotectiveness.

While beta males are ambivalent about their animal nature and so can seek power only dishonestly through underhanded, civilized schemes, in their professions and their function as law-abiding citizens, feminine women likewise are driven to lie to avoid reckoning with the absurdity and horror of human social relations. These women would empower themselves as mothers of the masses and tamers of human predators, using big governments to reinstitute the egalitarian sort of society that had prevailed out of necessity in the Paleolithic period. These schemes of feminine women are doomed to fail for two reasons. First, because liberal governments are inevitably infected with what Nietzsche called the natural will to power; specifically, governments are corrupted by the machinations of pseudo-civilized, psychopathic males, otherwise known as leaders in the private and public sectors. Second, because the heterosexual woman’s brain has evolved to prefer the psychopathic, predatory man, since that’s the man who succeeded in the hunt and in equipping the tribe with fur and iron-rich meat.

If you’re a masculine male, you have to lie, in turn, to avoid admitting that you’re behaving as the very sort of narrow-minded animal you long to hunt and kill for sport or nourishment. Thus, you dress up the evil and madness of your values and political policies and practices with all manner of dishonest theology and pseudoscience. God allegedly blesses the king’s right to rule over his subjects. The Church’s medieval empire is likewise blessed by God even though as far as can be discerned from the earliest Christian documents, Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was a feminine omega male who wanted out of all earthly endeavours. And American empire is blessed by a preposterous marriage between bastardized Christianity and economic Darwinism or “libertarianism.”

These macho males demand the shrinking of government to enable the bestialization of private life, as unrestrained capitalism or the “free market” exacerbates social inequalities, creating the dominance hierarchies that testify to nature’s victory over the human potential for godlike transcendence, and that gratify the corrupted ego of these predatory males as they’re nevertheless worshipped as idols of greed and ruthlessness. In short, these males have to pretend that oligarchy isn’t a betrayal of humanity on behalf of the animal kingdom we’ve supposedly left behind.

And if you’re a masculine (that is, a conservative) woman, you too are prone to lie about what you really want and how you actually behave. By voting for psychopathic males, for example, you provide cover for the bestial culture which men dominate. You thus betray womankind and your feminine instincts. To mitigate the cognitive dissonance, you subscribe to some lame theology that provides zero spiritual sustenance. You demonize foreigners and other races, but by playing that masculine game of dividing and conquering the masses, you ignore the overwhelming reality of patriarchy, which is that since the corruption of the Neolithic Revolution men have dominated women above all. These women are thus obviously traitors to their kind, as feminine (liberal) women are quick to point out. 

Political discourse, therefore, is the sad art of pretending that the managing of large human populations isn’t a humiliating clusterfuck. The disputes about privatization and taxes, government inefficiency and propaganda, democracy and the encroachment of hypercapitalism stem from that original division between those who are weak and who side with victims, and those who seek to abuse their power, between those who dream of progress as an escape from animal habits, and those who condemn that dream in the name of a flight to self-destructive savagery. So that we can avoid addressing the underlying issues, political discourse consists almost entirely of self-serving lies. Both liberal democracies and tyrannies resort to lying to skirt the ghastly truths that conservatism is flat-out evil while liberalism is a pipe dream for insipid weaklings.

Having learned these truths, you’re now burdened with the choice between cynical disengagement from political affairs and the search for some ennobling, creative alternative. Good luck with that.