Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ideology Page 1 of 3

Nothing Is Wrong With Transhumanism In Theory

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On June 15, 2026

24 Comments

Only in practice.

Transhumanism is one of those topics where I feel like Marx declaring “I am not a Marxist.”

Do I think transhumanism is basically a good idea?

Absofuckinglutely.

Do I like most of the people who call themselves transhumanists?

Fuck no.

I don’t like being human. I’ve spent days on end screaming in agony. I’ve lain in a mixture of my own puke and shit for hours, in so much pain I couldn’t move. I’ve thrown up more than many bulemics.

Then there’s aging.

Then there’s other people (see Israel, dog rape, genocide, etc, etc..)

Now don’t get me wrong: humans can be great. Someone did eventually come to my hospital room (an orderly, they do the real work) and clean off all the vomit and shit and a nurse did once save my life (I wasn’t entirely thrilled at the time, but she gave a damn.)

But the fact is that human life is often ass, aging sucks, illness sucks, being weak and powerless and pushed around by your own government or someone else’s government sucks, and so on. We’re stuck in bodies we didn’t choose, which often spend lots of time hurting us grievously and making us sick.

So if we could extend lifespans a lot while ALSO reducing the effect of aging, I’d be all for it. (We’ve done a bit of this already.) If we can reduce pain and suffering and disease and so on, I’m all for it.

If we can increase abundance and have a society where people don’t have to work but still have more than enough, that’s great!

And if someone wants to change their body so they like it more, I’m all for that. Good for them!

The problem with transhumanism is transhumanists counting virtual people who don’t exist and pretending their making decisions which will make trillions of people in an imaginary future better off while hurting people living today.

Silicon Valley morons who think they’re brilliant because they’re rich and who don’t get that improvements that don’t wind up helping the majority, but are gated behind massive fees are good for them, and no one else are the flag-bearers of modern transhumanism. It’s more likely the way we’re going that transhumanist technologies, as they are developed, will give us an elite that is smarter, healthier, fitter and lives longer while the masses live shit lives, suffer and die in droves.

It’s the problem with doing anything thru non-competitive markets. You want palliatives, not cures. You want a cure for cancer that costs 50K a pop, not to sell it just above unit costs so everyone can be cancer free.

If your first priority is being rich, and your second priority is helping people, your second priority doesn’t functionally exist.

Transhumanism is a great idea. I think human bodies basically suck. I think better bodies that hurt a lot less, age less and so and are modifiable so we can make our own choices rather than accept the result of evolution and the genetic lottery of who our parents are is a good idea. And while we’ve got a pretty good Pope right now, Christians can stick “suffering is good” where the sun don’t shine. They can have it, leave me out.

But too many modern transhumanists are obsessed with theoretical people who don’t exist yet and with getting rich, and not making sure everyone benefits.

If they can’t be trusted to even spread the wealth, how can they be trusted to share permanent genetic and technological advantages they could wealth gate to create a genetic (cybernetic?) aristocracy which is actually superior?

Transhumanism: great idea, despite what the trads say (If God made us so we suffer this much, that isn’t a good thing, it’s proof God is a piece of garbage.)

Modern transhumanists: mostly just people who want to be superior and gate it behind toll booths that make them wealthy and leave most people without the benefits.

(Aside: I’m putting off writing about the new Iran deal till we see the actual text of the agreement. Too many people saying too many different things. It sure does look like a US loss, but if so it’s a good thing even from a nativist perspective for the US to admit it rather than dragging out a situation which hurts them more than Iran.)

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Character and Destiny

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On June 4, 2026

8 Comments

From 2012 to 2014 this blog’s project was a large number of pieces on ideology, and quite a few have been about character: how it is created by experience, and how specific types of character (like sociopathy) are selected for amongst our leadership classes. I want to reprint some of these, because they’re fundamental and at least half my readership has never read them.

We’ll star with “Matters of Character”.

Let’s parse this out:

1) Character (personality), determines how people act.

2) While part of character is clearly genetic, much of it forms out of our experiences. Different experiences create different types of character. As a simple thought exercise, you would be a very different person if you had been born five hundred years ago in, say, Central Africa, than you are today.

3) As children, our primary experience is of school. We are a very schooled society, with the upper classes starting school at age 5 or so, and continuing into their mid twenties. Twenty years of schooling is not uncommon. Fifteen to sixteen is completely normal.

4) This schooling takes place when we are forming much of our character, when we are most susceptible to having our character changed.

5) In addition to this, we are influenced by media of various kinds (including books), our parents, and our peer group.

6) Different time periods form different characters, as do different nations, because people born in those times and places have different experiences. The more synchronized events are, as Newberry has noted, the stronger this is. In a mass media society, with relatively fast technological and social change, it makes sense to speak of generations. The character of people born 20 or 30 years apart in modern societies will be different, and within cohorts similar experiences will tend to create somewhat similar patterns of character.

7) Society is nothing except people and their creations and interactions over time. Walk around an old neighbourhood one day, and look at the buildings, the road, the trees and think about all the people who made everything you see, and all the people behind those people. Read the laws, and know that people made those, and enforce those.

8 ) Because society is just people, past and present, the nature of society is formed by our character.

9) If we want a different society, we must deal with matters of character.

10) Because we should be leery of engaging in eugenics, for reasons which should be obvious, changing society involves changing character through changing our lived experiences.

11) Everyone’s character matters, but some people’s character matters more than others. The more power someone has, whether that power comes from political position, charisma, force, or money, the more their character matters.

12) Leaders inform the character of people. People tend to act up, or down, to their leadership.

13) Money is permission. The more money you have, the more you get to decide what other people do. This can be directly through hiring them, or indirectly by buying the products of other people’s time. As the market society has spread to more and more of our lives, what we do is what gets paid for.

14) Who we give money to, and be clear that what banks, government and financial institutions do is decide who gets money, and what they get to spend it on, determines much of the lived experience of adults, and indeed of children outside school, and with the rise of for-profit schooling, inside school.

15) Money positions are of three main types. Elected (taxes); officers (CEOs and so on who control a lot of money that isn’t theirs); actually rich (the money is their own).

16) In all three cases who gets that money is a social choice. Billionaires are a social choice, created by government policy including tax policy, and the entire structure of how profits are booked. Multi-millionaire CEOs are a social choice, created by tax and other laws as well as social norms. And politicians are a social choice, especially in a democracy, but even in autocracies, though in such societies few people’s active and passive consent is needed.

17) If we select for positions of power, whether monetary, political, or charismatic, people whose character is such that they do not insist on good outcomes for the majority of people, then those outcomes will occur only by chance, if the happenstance of technology and environment aligns in what amounts to random fashion. Having not been planned, having not been understood, any such prosperity and freedom will not last.

18) If society is just us, and is a matter of our character combined with environment and technology, then we must consciously choose what we want our character to be. If we look at how we raise children and see that it is not creating the sort of people required for a happy, free, healthy, and prosperous society, then we need to change how we rear children. This is a social decision, not an individual one: we can choose a different type of learning (not necessarily schooling), we can choose a different type of media, we can choose to encourage different types of parenting (parenting styles have changed massively over the last 100 years, more than once).

19) We can also change how we select our leaders, both political and economic, to whom we give money, and for what purpose. We already do: Who makes money is a social choice, embedded in our tax code, laws (like “IP”), and monetary system. We can make other choices and create a system where people make money because they do good, not because they do evil (see “bankers”).

20) We can change our adult experience of the world, and when we change how goods and services are distributed (note that I did not use the word “money”), we will change our experience of the world, and in so doing we will change our character.

21) We can do so even if our current character is flawed. The politicians who ended Jim Crow were themselves mostly racists. They were racists who knew that racism was wrong. It is possible to look at one’s own character and know that it is simply a product of experience: to say “I am racist and sexist but I still know that is wrong.” It is possible to be involved in corruption (Kennedy Sr., the first SEC chairman) and decide to help clean it up, to end it. It is possible to have all the accoutrements of privilege (FDR) and turn around and change society mostly for the better.

We are all products of our time and place. We are all products of our parents and our experiences; millions of small events which shaped our character, for good, for ill, for kicks.

All of us (except maybe a few enlightened sages).

The full realization of how shaped we are is one of the watersheds of any voyage worth having. If you cannot look at yourself, and see how shaped you were, then you are trapped by those experiences, an even more limited and finite being than you need to be.

Once, however, you see the shaping, feel it, know it, and acknowledge it, then you are not free, but you have the potential to be more free, to change what you are and who you are, both individually, and as a group.

Character matters. It is destiny. Change your character, change your destiny. Change the character of nations; change their destiny.

Change the character of humanity; change our destiny.

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The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition

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On January 29, 2026

8 Comments

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live.  The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect:

Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street.

Imagine that.

This is a reprint from 2015, but I think it makes an important point worth repeating, especially for all the new readers since then.

The right thing to do is almost always cheaper and gives better results, at least if the welfare of people is your concern.

If people are poor, give them money.  If people don’t have a house, get them a house.  If people are sick, get them health care.

The fact is, though, that you have to want to do the right thing. People tend to get down on the Church of Latter Day Saints, but for all their issues, I’ve always had a soft spot for them because I’ve heard many stories like this:

The church donated all of this,” Bate says. “Before we opened up, volunteers from the local Mormon ward came over and assembled all the furniture. It was overwhelming. For the first several years we were open, the LDS church made weekly food deliveries—everything from meat to butter and cheese. It wasn’t just dried beans—it was good stuff.” (The Utah Food Bank now makes weekly deliveries.)

I ask him if this is why the programs work so well in Utah—because of church donations.

“If the LDS church was not into it, the money would be missed, for sure,” he says, “but it’s church leadership that’s immensely important. If the word gets out that the church is behind something, it removes a lot of barriers.”…

….

“Why do you think they do it?” I ask(my emphasis)

“Oh,” he says, “I think they believe all that stuff in the New Testament about helping the poor. That’s kind of crazy for a religion, I know, but I think they take it quite seriously.”

A major driver of the social welfare movement in the United States was the social gospel.  The ending of sweatshops, the huge work programs of the 30s, the provision of Medicare and Social Security was driven in large part by Christian crusaders who believed that what they did to the poor, they did to Jesus.

You have to want to do the right thing.

This is just as true when dealing with matters like inequality.  FDR and the politicians of the 50s ran marginal tax rates for high earners at 90% or so because they, and the American people, genuinely believed that no one should have that much money.  They believed that it was earned by the efforts of other people: a rich person is someone who gets rich on other people’s work, with very rare exceptions, and even they get rich because of the society they are in.  (For a complete explanation of that, something most people refuse to understand, read “It’s Not Your Money.”)

Ethics and mores; belief, is why people do things.  It doesn’t exactly come before material circumstances (the two influence each other, with material circumstances, including technology, determining a range of possibilities), but within what is possible, belief in what we should do determines what we actually do.

In the world today we have the resources not just to feed everyone, but to give them a decent life, with education, entertainment, and housing that is warm in the winter and at least not unbearable in the summer.  We can cloth everyone well.  We have had the ability to do this for at least a hundred years or so, in theory, we’ve had it in practice since the recovery from World War II.

To do so, however, we must believe that we should, and we must be willing to act on that belief.  There will be sacrifices (a lot fewer billionaires, a lot less McMansions), but in the end even most of those who complain would be objectively better off, because inequality is robustly associated with worse health and less happiness, even for those who are the richest.  The top .01%, if they were still the top .01% but had far less money and power, would be happier and healthier in such a world.

As such, the battleground of belief; of ideology, is as important as that of technology. It is belief, mediated by power and turned into behaviour, which determines what actually happens in this world.

The Black Book Of Capitalism: Sanctions Version

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On January 14, 2026

30 Comments

There’s a black book of Communism, which essentially claims that every death caused by a Communist government is the fault of communism.

A while back some people decided to put up an article on the death toll of Capitalism in Wikipedia, very carefully sourced. It was deleted.

Anyway, there is zero question that Capitalism has killed more people than Communism, no matter what number you use for Communism. It’s absurd to pretend all deaths caused by the Great Depression weren’t capitalist deaths and without the Great Depression (which, by the way, did not effect the USSR) there is no World War II, so you can add in all those deaths. Not to mention all the Imperialist wars and native genocides, which were definitely part of capitalism.

But even recently capitalism is a death machine:

I’d say that almost all deaths by hunger in the world are caused by capitalism, as are those from lack of shelter. After all, with very few exceptions the world is run on capitalist principles. Since there is more food produced than needed to feed everyone, and since capitalist markets the primary distribution method for food this is entirely reasonable.

Capitalism as an ideology is, in any case doomed. Climate denialism idiocy aside, as climate change and environmental collapse accelerates it and “democracy” will be blamed, as they should be, since almost all the damage occurred under their watch and what’s more they knew and not only did nothing but accelerated the process. We knew in the 70s, I remember the debates and the response wasn’t to do a big renewables push or try and seriously systematically reduce hydrocarbon use, it was to try and figure out how to pump more oil.

Obama famously bragged that he was responsible for the fracking boom and Trump is pro-coal, pro-oil and anti-renewables, while gutting EPA rules on environmental contamination.

Not to speak of over-fishing, destroying our soil, the collapse of insect populations and so on.

A system of production and distribution which runs on planned obsolesence cannot be good for the environment and is obviously stupid. “Let’s make things break quickly so we can make more” is insanity. It’s what capitalist markets require and if you don’t understand how moronic it is I don’t even know how to explain it.

(Aside: Related to the America’s fall I note that sanctions are the main reason the US is going to lose dollar hegemony so soon, it could have been kept for a few decades yet if it hadn’t been abused.)

Anyway, when it comes to mass murder the problem that Communists had is a combination of a weird sort of honest “just kill them” and getting blamed for things like famines that somehow capitalism isn’t responsible for.

No system in world history, no ideology will be near to capitalism’s final death tool. Not by at least an order of magnitude, and likely two orders of magnitude.

 

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Can You Just Out-Breed Your Domestic Enemies?

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On December 29, 2025

25 Comments

There’s a constant trope on the right that the best way to win is to have more kids because eventually you’ll outnumber your enemies?

Seems like it makes sense. It is part of why Christianity won in the Roman Empire: they forbade anal and oral sex and contraceptives (yes, they had clumsy contraceptives back then) and emphasized that sex was for having kids and out-bred the pagans.

But it wouldn’t have worked if the children had preferred the pagan life. Christianity at the time offered a ton of social support, including very practical support like food and housing. Most Romans were poor, and if you were poor you needed the community that Christianity (and some other mystery religions) offered. Christianity offered a better life and a better after-life, for that matter.

Christians today think “we’ll just out-breed them” but it only works if when your kids grow up they don’t go to the big city and discover that there’s a more enjoyable and dignified way to live. Women may realize they don’t want to have multiple children and would like to have sex without necessarily getting pregnant. Ideas of social justice and equality may appeal to both sides, and arguments for atheism and agnosticism start looking mighty convincing when you see how many different religions there are all claiming that they’re the true religion.

The same is true for political ideology. If you’re poor and have no hope for the future maybe socialism looks a lot better than capitalism or the day’s version of MAGA. Maybe communism or anarchism. Or even just standard liberalism with individual rights.

This is what has been happening for well over a century to religion in advanced countries. Fewer and fewer believers, even when the religious breed like rabbits, because secular society or ideologies offer more hope and self-respect. Same with the decline in belief in capitalism. Capitalism says that people earn what they deserve. If you’re not making it are you going to believe you suck and deserve a shitty life or are you going to find an ideology which says “actually, the game is rigged, you aren’t a loser and we can make the world better for people like us.”

I know which one I’d choose.

Breeding is fine, but it only matters if you can hold onto the kids you spawn. And you can only do that if you are seen to offer a better life. This is at the heart of the right wing hatred of universities: kids go to university and realize that a better life is possible if they don’t buy into right wing arguments. They also meet brown people and discover, “hey, they’re just people.”

For a long time, when each generation was better off than the one before it, liberalism basically took the majority of non-liberals and turned them into liberal capitalists. Why wouldn’t it? It was clear that if they bought in they’d have a better life than if they didn’t.

Now liberalism and capitalism are failing. The right is trying to offer an alternative, and a lot of people have gone for it, but it’s also failing to deliver. Watching Trump basically destroy farming communities is instructive. And when it fails and is seen to fail, well, it’s going to be hard to hold on to those kids.

Breed all you want. It’s irrelevant if what you offer isn’t better that the lives possible to people by changing their ideology and loyalty. True victory isn’t having the most descendants, it’s having people act as you would have them act.

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We Don’t Have To Live In Hell

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On December 18, 2025

29 Comments

A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)

Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.

We don’t have to live in hell. It’s a choice.

We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.

The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”

It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)

Many, many more.

They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.

There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)

China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.

It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.

And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.

And in that is a genuine hope.

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By The People? For the People?

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On November 25, 2025

19 Comments

The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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Revisiting Original Sin and Identity Politics In the Age of Woke Backlash

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On October 14, 2025

30 Comments

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If you’re anything like me every time you hear the word woke used you wince. Conservatives don’t know what it is and just use it as a hobgoblin, Liberals created it but pretend they didn’t and the left is forced to reluctantly defend basic principles like “everyone should be treated equally”, and “people should have control over their own bodies” after Liberals made doing so noxious.

All of this is based on two thing: cold hard economic math, and the ideology of identity politics as original sin. We’ll look at both, but let’s see some of the results first:

But it’s not just the Youngs:

Now some of this is straight up economic competition. Women get most of the college degrees, they dominate in multiple professions including law, and despite the wage gap, they’re bringing home the bacon. When I was at an elite all-male school in the 80s some of us mentioned to Mr. Skinner, the resident socialist history Prof, that we thought having girls around would be marvelous.

“If we had girls, half of you wouldn’t be here.” And he pointed some fingers.

Chilling.

The bottom line is that there are men who would be more successful if women were restricted to various pink collar ghettos like they were in the 50s and 60s. There’s no denying it and pretending otherwise is stupid and dishonest. So some of “get back in the kitchen” is pure self-interest, whether or not most men will admit it.

But part of it is the original sin of identity politics. I was first introduced in a big way in the early 90s, when I went back to university. As it was explained to me, repeatedly, since I was white, I was racist, and since I was male I was sexist and apparently being heterosexual was somehow dubious. I was willing to accept the first two: I grew up in a somewhat patriarchal (it wasn’t Republican Rome) white society, and sure, I’d taken in some of the values. (As for heterosexuality, well, women are wonderful and no, I’m not changing that preference.)

So, OK, if you’re male you’re probably sexist and if white probably racist (though they would have said 100% for sure.)

OK. I’m bad. It’s not my fault, really, I was raised that way. How do I fix it.

And this is where the problem came in. Apparently no matter what you did, or said, or however much you were re-educated, if male you’d always be sexist and if white you’d always be racist.

“Wait, so you’re saying I’m a bad person, and that I can never be a not bad person?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, I don’t think I want to be part of your movement.”

Here’s the thing, folks, if your religion (and ideology is religion without the appeal to the supernatural) insists people are bad, it has to give them a way out. Even Catholics, obsessed with the original sin, allow that it is possible for humans to become good and wind up in Heaven. Evanglicals, with their “born again” shtick, offer forgiveness for anything.

First you make people feel bad, then you offer a way for them to feel good about themselves. Many will jump thru quite a few flaming hoops to “not be a bad person” and “be a good person.”

Identity politics didn’t offer that. You were bad. You would always be bad. There was no salvation, no good deeds, thoughts or words cold ever truly cleanse of you of your sexism or racism or whatever. (-Isms expanded over the years, till everything had an -ism.)

Identity politics did have its victories, for sure, as with Catholic guilt, people will strive even against the impossible. “Can I be a male feminist, please?” “I’m an ally, right, not one of the bad ones?”

But it also alienated a lot of people with its message of “you’re bad and you’ll always be bad.” The explosion of -isms, of various disadvantaged groups which, as epistemological given, could never really understand each other created a flock of interest groups, some small, some medium sized and all of them undercutting the mass solidarity required to pursue shared interests. (Like not letting the rich impoverish us all.)

Mass political movements are about solidarity, shared interests and an agreement not to make separate peace. I’m 57 and male, but I still care passionately about abortion rights, even though it’s an issue which is unlikely to ever effect me personally. I’ve defended trans people, even though I’m not trans, because I feel they should have the right to bodily autonomy and that they’re being picked on because they’re weak and an easy wedge to use against the larger LGBTQ movement. I’m happy for China that they lifted a billion people out of poverty, even though I’m not Chinese and it’s probably going to fuck me over personally as a Canadian. (That’s mostly the fault of US and Canadian politicians, not Chinese, so I don’t blame the Chinese.)

Identity politics was political malpractice on an epic scale. “Don’t break solidarity” is the first and last rule of mass politics, especially any sort of real populism which seeks to make the weak strong by forming them into a mass capable of demanding their interests be met, or else.

This is the reverse of the rule of the powerful. “Keep the masses divided and fighting themselves, so they can’t fight us.”

Anyone who destroys solidarity is working for the masters, not for the people, whatever they personally believe.

We’ve spent 50 years destroying the political basis of New Deal prosperity. It’s dead, Jim, with about a thousand stab wounds. Identity politics pressed a lot of those daggers home.

Let’s hope we can find something better, a way that unites us and takes care of all of us (well, except for the oligarchs). The world’s looking mighty dark in the West these days, and if we don’t pull together, most of us are assuredly going to hang separately

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