Now, for all the anti-communist right-wingers out there, you might still strongly doubt all of this. And indeed, you have some good reasons to fear that in such a situation the Masses would degenerate, nonetheless, into laziness and rent-seeking. But all of your data points come from contexts that are emphatically not Aristocratic Communism. As I would be the first to admit, the Left has built its entire modern political strategy on defaming the rich and lying to itself, but you must admit that the modern Right does some fibbing itself. I think the main fib that’s relevant here is the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy. How rude! They’re not poor because they’re lazy, they’re poor because they’re stupid. In part. There are other factors causing them to be poor, also, but one reason they’re poor is that they happen not to be blessed with the mental hardware that leads others to win all the money games (which, only in capitalist secular modernity gets equated, incorrectly, with their “human worth” or ultimate dignity, and only because capitalist secular modernity has no basis for value other than economic value; in True Communism, differences in intelligence become normatively inconsequential in how people are ultimately valued and treated).
That poor people tend to be dumber is even acknowledged in Marxism, it’s just packaged instrumentally for marketing purposes. Anyway, stupidity is not their fault (it’s at least half heritable), so casting normative aspersions on the poor is evil, and its part and parcel of the ethical death-spiral that is modernity. Just like the Leftist lie gives rich people good reason to leave the whole planet behind in squalor, this Rightist lie gives the masses good reason to select their mouth-noises for how well they pull on the public’s heart strings rather than for how well they bear witness to the truth of reality.
Honestly, it now looks to me like we free-speech-people are serious idiots for imagining large numbers of deeply alienated people would long be capable of caring about the human capacity for distinguishing better models of reality from worse models of reality. How boring and useless is this concern, unless you have the substantial resources necessary to make something of it.
Conservatives have drastically underestimated the oppression of the left-leaning masses. Because leftists lie even in the simplest descriptions of things, conservatives have inferred that all the “oppression” is surely one big, tall tale. It is true leftists often instrumentally twist what they really feel and exactly why (as most people do), but they tell the truth when they say things to the effect that they “can’t take it anymore.” When lefty activists freak out about some minor political event as if the world is coming to an end, it’s very easy for normal people to dismiss them as only confused, but what I am telling you is that the degree of this confusion is so intense and widespread that the magnitude and urgency of the social problem they are pointing to really is as big and bad as the end of the world, not just “for them” but for what they’re going to do to society if somebody smarter than them doesn’t find a way to alleviate their suffering. That didn’t fit on my placard when I was an SJW, so that’s one reason why I’m trying to get these thoughts down now. I’m minimally intelligent and disciplined enough to vaguely get by in a middle-class profession, but the truth is that I feel closer to the normal unwashed masses than to the rich producer class. That’s why I still write from a left-leaning perspective, despite continuing to venture deeper and deeper down the ghastly red-pilled rabbit hole that is the Left’s most hidden and foundational bargains with Lucifer.
You might have already noted that there’s a negative version of the hypothesis sketched here: the primary toxic aspect of the modern radical–left drive, which is really becoming a systemic problem for Western society, is not the demand for resource redistribution (in fact, rich people generally want to give, for reasons of personal psychology and social stability) but the correlated tendency to tell lies to themselves and others for instrumental purposes (most saliently, about different individuals’ and groups’ objective abilities). It’s understandable why these tendencies are correlated, because one of the most natural ways to argue for more resource redistribution is to say that the Have-Nots deserve more and the Haves deserve less. And this was a damn powerful rhetorical method, if you look at the early Workers Movements; they succeeded in forcing a whole lot of redistribution in many times and places.
What the Left didn’t realize is not simply that differences in objective individual abilities are real, but that technological acceleration would amplify rather than attenuate them. The technologically amplified cognitive superiority of the new rich, and their corresponding mobilities, are now too great (up to and including access to space travel and a monopoly on all the proceeds from intergalactic colonialism). The rich already have everything on such lockdown — in gated communities and private jets and private AI systems and tax havens — that even if there was some democratic social movement able to map this territory and make a concerted effort to pounce on it, it would already be a day late and a dollar short. Capitalism itself sees and acts on the future like no other human organization can, simply by paying whoever happens to be farthest into the future. This is why rich people have all the resources in the first place, they are thinking more steps ahead. It is no exaggeration to say that they live further in the future than normal people. The world Elon Musk lives in includes mental photographs of the future, which might not enter my head until months or years after they enter his. That is why I can’t do the things he does. Someone smarter than you is, pretty literally, an alien from the future.
The mainstream Left, including the now mainstream radical variants that see themselves as left of the mainstream Left, is now running purely on fumes, rehearsing routines that only barely worked with the early Worker Movements. But a game only starts once, and now that these routines are fully intelligible to all the people with money, they make no sense. But because their maps are so divorced from the territory, the Left is doubling down on them with increasingly hilarious adaptations: for instance, if lying about the superior abilities of the rich doesn’t get the goods anymore, try lying about the differential abilities of anyone around you! Of course, most people around you don’t have many more resources than you to redistribute, hence the often noted oddity of applying white privilege discourses to poor or even average white people. You can’t get blood from a stone, but that doesn’t stop someone who’s just compulsively rehearsing inherited routines.