All of the following claims represent ideas which are popular in some large social movement. And they all have one flaw in common. It is a flaw which makes each of these statements completely invalid:
“Rich people are actually more generous than poor people.”
“Socialists don’t actually want to go around killing people because they own a family farm.”
“The movement to embrace traditional family structures has nothing to do with white supremacy.”
“Trans people have no interest in indoctrinating your kids.”
“What black people want is special privileges, to be given exception for crimes and lower test scores.”
“Indigenous wisdom teaches us _________.” You can fill in that blank with anything.
What these and many similar statements made in every political discourse fail to account for is the scale and complexity of human diversity. I’m talking about real diversity, not DEI diversity. Basically, none of those statements is accurate — as offered or as commonly conceived.
Taken in turn:
Yes, averaged together, the top .01% wealthiest people give away an astronomically higher percentage of their total wealth every year than any middle class family anywhere. That would be more or less accurate if we only calculated the annual philanthropy of Warren Buffet and Jackie Chan and assumed that every other billionaire didn’t give away anything. Big numbers are funny that way. When looked at more keenly, most of the super rich do in fact basically just rob people and give nothing back.
No, most contemporary socialists that can hold the thread of a conversation don’t want to round up and kill famers. Also, yes, hordes of socialists have rounded up and killed farmers — specifically because they were people who owned farms. The Bolsheviks killed tens of thousands of people for being multigenerational farming families and nothing more. Other socialist movements through Asia followed suit. So, the claims about the brutality of socialism are not unfounded. We can’t say that socialists, categorically, don’t want to kill farmers. We also can’t say categorically that they do.
The problem with all of these claims is that there are lots of people. Because there are so many people, yes, some black folk will just want unearned hand outs forever. It has nothing to do with the nature of black people, but there are a lot of us. And, as much as I might like for things to be otherwise, we don’t all get together, deliberate, and come to consensus about how to engage with society at large. Yes, some trans people are grooming children to be queer, and yes some of those people are sexual predators. On the first point, yeah, people who primarily value identity groom children toward their identity markers. And people who believe in moral relativism necessarily primarily value identity. That’s not a trans thing or a queer thing. That’s an immature person thing. On the second point, the existence of trans sexual predators doesn’t establish a connection between being trans and being a sexual predator. It only establishes that being trans isn’t a cure for the sociopathy of predatory relating. The overwhelming majority of sexual predators continue to be straight. Again, not because there’s any connection between the two. It’s just an arithmetical inevitability.
And, so on, and so forth.
There are so many people on earth now that all of our political theories and conceptions of social order need to be run though a whole new kind of critical filter. “Does it scale to inconceivable complexity?” We have to ask that question now about everything we’ve ever believed was simply true about people and about society.
In this chapter, we’re going to address the ways in which some groups have not only tackled that question but have gotten all the way to the other side and learned to use inconceivable complexity in social scales to their advantage — not generally for the betterment of society.
Hey, did you know that if you tell a friend about this body of thought that when you get far enough into it that your brain begins to twist in on itself and you see all of society as writhing twin ouroboros, copulating and cannibalizing each other in aperiodic fractaline tessellations of living memetic flesh that you won’t necessarily have to deal with that alone?
— just a consideration.