real communism has never been imagined

the failure of second order thinking

there is a famous adage, generally muttered from atop a smoldering pile of human misery, skulls, and poverty:

“that wasn’t real communism. real communism has never been tried.”

this is, of course, nonsense and the real consequences of real communism are so uniform, universal, and inevitable that it takes a special sort of ignorance to fail to see the pattern of the facts on the ground.

and this got me to thinking: perhaps this also implies that it takes a special sort of ignorance to want to do this in the first place. i suspect this is so. communism is, apart from the desire by the cunning to manipulate the credulous into ceding all collectivist power and submitting to self-enserfment, predominantly a failure of second order thinking. it’s true even of the leaders. if you are capable of thinking in 2 or more orders, you see that it’s always going to fail. if you can’t, it seems like a swell idea.

hence the framing “real communism has never been imagined.”

because communists lack the ability.

because if they had it, they wouldn’t be communists.

consider this happy nonsense encapsulation that has been circulating on X as a sort of “gotcha” where single order sub-mitwits say “see, i fixed it!” and crow about collectivism = justice.

see, we just changed the system and made it so that there was no fence around the ball game! we all share and the “systemic barrier” was removed! vote stalin and che 2028! we got you fren!

of course, anyone with 2 braincells to rub together rapidly adds this next panel because they are familiar with ideas like “incentives matter” and “the creation of value does not occur without some means to participate in the capture of the value.”

there is only one way this ever goes.

and you can claim that “real justice has never been tried” until you are blue in the revolutionary beret, it will not change this one whit. reality is not optional and laws of economics are not suggestions. irrespective of the predictive abilities of a coercive political class, humans respond to incentives in predictable ways.

but team “we want to run the show collectivism clown club” does not care about this. the smarter of them see second order thinking as a threat to their ideological dominance and dogmatic justifications, and the useful idiots pulled along in their wake simply lack the ability to think in multi-hop consequentialism and happily run riot tearing down every fence in chesterton and wrecking every value generating institution or individual they can lay hands on then act surprised (likely because they honestly are) when suddenly everyone is poor and hungry.

the mouth noises used to rationalize it change, but the underlying song is exactly the same:

define, vilify, excoriate.

the masses will happily follow you if you give them a hall monitor sash and praise their having been beastly to others as virtue.

the struggle session is real and you are either with us or against us.

mao would have felt right at home on a US college campus at the apogee of the wokester warlord period.

this is not history rhyming; this is plagiarism.

and there is no room in such a system for second order thinking like “if we silence all dissent, how do we not wind up in echo chambers with no reasonable ability to assess the quality or stupidity of our actions?”

and questions like “hey, won’t this ever tightening purity spiral eventually mean that the leopards all wind up eating our faces too?” are forbidden until the panthera party gets to you.

that’s kind of the point.

and it leads to unchecked “stupidity as loyalty test” until the death count grows so vast that it’s not even tragedy anymore, it’s just a statistic.

and the failures of second order thinking are just devastating.

and these people never learn.

they cannot learn.

like marx and engels, it’s a vanguard of privilege leading a motley of malcontents who fall for the:

“the world needs change.

this is change.

so the world needs it”

tautological fallacy.

leading the lemmings off cliffs with failures of logic and imagination.

because they cannot imagine a second order effect/incentive like “not if they come to be DEI hires and get free welfare, housing, medical care, and cash.”

whether these people are simply singularly dishonest or simply too poor at shape rotation and incentive modeling to understand the consequences of their actions really doesn’t matter because in neither case will “educating them about why rent control actually increases the rent” change anyone’s mind.

the dishonest leaders sees this as a threat to discredit in order to keep power and the dullard follower cannot think in second and third order effects to see why “rent low = low supply = rent high.”

so post this all you like.

you’ll make no dent.

this fact is both a strategic limitation and a clarification:

you cannot change minds here by giving econ or logic classes.

those who believe have been selected for either being unable to grasp the material or for having a vested interest in dishonesty.

all they know is “if you are anti-rent control, you must want high rents!”

worth keeping in mind.

for just as the path to communist calamity is well worn and always the same, so too has been the path out.

and it tends to get a little rough.

i’m not saying i prefer this to, say, a happy rights based republic, but past a point, the marxist long march takes that off the table and you only get to pick from the “opponent defects” boxes on the prisoner’s dilemma.

yeah, it’s coercive and authoritarian, but it’s the inevitable second and third order effect of communists wrecking everything they touch as they seek collectivist control.

at a certain point, people say “if we need to have authoritarianism, let’s at least get a an ordered society out of it.”

and then they do.

amusingly, the communistas never seem to see this one coming either…