Aug 25, 2025 03:57 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 25, 2025 04:39 PM by C C.)
RELATED: The Left's 100-year-long civil war with itself ..... Stalin: he was not the problem
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DWARKESH CLIPS
https://youtu.be/78II2ts-g1o
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Why is Marxism-Leninism, especially -- so attractive to young people and to intellectuals?
We have this history which is a bloody mess. Millions of people die, and they die because of the enactment of this ideology. How could people continue to adhere to an ideology like that during the murderous time period? And even more after the murderous time period when we can look at it dispassionately?
Here's part of the answer. Again, young people are attracted to the impatient, quick, total transformation of the world: Eradication of war, eradication of social injustice. And there's a simplicity to the ideology. It's kind of a total package. It gets rid of everything bad, just if you follow the precepts.
[...] In these kinds of systems, it's the intellectuals who make those decisions. They use the state as an instrument to overcome the injustices of the existing society. Again, the injustices are real, but that empowers them [literary intellectuals] to be in charge.
So the beauty of Marxism-Leninism, and why what we used to call the third-world loves this, is because they [literary intellectuals] get to be in power. It empowers them across the board. They get to make the decisions on the economy on, and they don't have to submit to elections. They don't have to have a mandate. They don't have to legitimate their rule beyond the ideological building of a new world of overcoming injustice.
So what we see again and again is young people being impatient for evil to end, but also empowering themselves to be in charge. They love the state. They love the state -- as an instrument for social justice, social engineering.
These individuals love to empower themselves as the decision makers because, after all, they're the intellectuals. They have studied the theory. They know better than others -- the workers and peasants and the downtrodden -- the lower classes.
[...] They get sucked in. Bread and circuses fools them. They have this false conscience. "But I know better, and I can be in charge, and I can get us to a better place."
Even along the way, bad things are going to happen. Some people who are innocent are going to die or be arrested. But with this is the march of history. This march of history is to peace and justice. And who is going to stand in the way of that?
Especially when it empowers you personally. So that you could never do this in the private sector. Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the private sector, and in a decentralized political system, in a federalized political system where nobody accumulates that much power.
Social engineering is always coercive. Always coercive...
COMMENT: Another reason is that -- due to competition from science, humanities scholars in the 20th-century had to find an endeavor and purpose for themselves that science was not entitled to encroach upon. That meant a central focus on ethics, fighting social oppression, and steering the world toward a socioeconomic utopia.
The only existing secular plan with momentum that they could rest those ambitions on was everything that branched off from Marxism (cultural hegemony, critical theory, cultural studies, and Neo-Marxism in general).
Ergo, the array of Euro-guilt oriented and rehabilitative prescriptions for the Western world that literary intellectuals have outputted since the 1950s. And due to the humanities and the social sciences sharing "humans" as their target of interest, it naturally developed that those soft sciences would become one of the portals (along with politics, activist movements, etc) for literary intellectuals to export their influence upon the world.
Why are intellectuals so attracted to Marxism? (Stephen Kotkin) ... https://youtu.be/78II2ts-g1o
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/78II2ts-g1o
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DWARKESH CLIPS
https://youtu.be/78II2ts-g1o
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Why is Marxism-Leninism, especially -- so attractive to young people and to intellectuals?
We have this history which is a bloody mess. Millions of people die, and they die because of the enactment of this ideology. How could people continue to adhere to an ideology like that during the murderous time period? And even more after the murderous time period when we can look at it dispassionately?
Here's part of the answer. Again, young people are attracted to the impatient, quick, total transformation of the world: Eradication of war, eradication of social injustice. And there's a simplicity to the ideology. It's kind of a total package. It gets rid of everything bad, just if you follow the precepts.
[...] In these kinds of systems, it's the intellectuals who make those decisions. They use the state as an instrument to overcome the injustices of the existing society. Again, the injustices are real, but that empowers them [literary intellectuals] to be in charge.
So the beauty of Marxism-Leninism, and why what we used to call the third-world loves this, is because they [literary intellectuals] get to be in power. It empowers them across the board. They get to make the decisions on the economy on, and they don't have to submit to elections. They don't have to have a mandate. They don't have to legitimate their rule beyond the ideological building of a new world of overcoming injustice.
So what we see again and again is young people being impatient for evil to end, but also empowering themselves to be in charge. They love the state. They love the state -- as an instrument for social justice, social engineering.
These individuals love to empower themselves as the decision makers because, after all, they're the intellectuals. They have studied the theory. They know better than others -- the workers and peasants and the downtrodden -- the lower classes.
[...] They get sucked in. Bread and circuses fools them. They have this false conscience. "But I know better, and I can be in charge, and I can get us to a better place."
Even along the way, bad things are going to happen. Some people who are innocent are going to die or be arrested. But with this is the march of history. This march of history is to peace and justice. And who is going to stand in the way of that?
Especially when it empowers you personally. So that you could never do this in the private sector. Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the private sector, and in a decentralized political system, in a federalized political system where nobody accumulates that much power.
Social engineering is always coercive. Always coercive...
COMMENT: Another reason is that -- due to competition from science, humanities scholars in the 20th-century had to find an endeavor and purpose for themselves that science was not entitled to encroach upon. That meant a central focus on ethics, fighting social oppression, and steering the world toward a socioeconomic utopia.
The only existing secular plan with momentum that they could rest those ambitions on was everything that branched off from Marxism (cultural hegemony, critical theory, cultural studies, and Neo-Marxism in general).
Ergo, the array of Euro-guilt oriented and rehabilitative prescriptions for the Western world that literary intellectuals have outputted since the 1950s. And due to the humanities and the social sciences sharing "humans" as their target of interest, it naturally developed that those soft sciences would become one of the portals (along with politics, activist movements, etc) for literary intellectuals to export their influence upon the world.
Why are intellectuals so attracted to Marxism? (Stephen Kotkin) ... https://youtu.be/78II2ts-g1o
