How to make a cult destroy itself

Here’s a thing to ponder: The year is 1944, you’re a cynical general in the German army and you want Germany to lose the war. What do you do? Do you spread anti-Nazi propaganda? This is a surefire way to get yourself in trouble. Do you assassinate Hitler? This would be the most ineffective thing you could do, as someone else would seize power, someone who would probably be more competent than Hitler. No, if you want your country to lose the war, you need to encourage your fellow officials in unquestioning devotion to their Führer. By doing so, you create a single failure point, make dissent impossible and thereby prevent debate and reasonable disagreement from allowing improvement over current plans.

Organizations of like-minded individuals, are perpetually at risk of falling victim to group polarization. Those who wish to destroy such organizations, merely have to encourage them in their innate tendency to radicalize and become intolerant of differing perspectives. Their radicalization makes the organization unappealing to newcomers, the intolerance prevents reform from making the organization more attractive again, while the flaws in the organization are exacerbated to a degree that the survival of the organization as a whole ends up at stake.

Let’s look at a few examples. If I were a Bitcoin Cash supporter who wanted to destroy Bitcoin core, I wouldn’t go to Bitcoin Core platforms and argue in favor of bigger blocks. I would attempt to ostracize anyone who wants bigger blocks, calling them trolls and shills. I would come up with new organizations on a daily basis that should be boycotted by the community, because they dared to move away from Bitcoin Core and embraced some competing coin. I would spend every day complaining about our competitor. Anything that’s excessively badmouthed becomes appealing to people.

I would call those who embrace the competitor “greedy”, “evil”, “dishonest” and “selfish”. Those are negative terms, but they insinuate that your opponent is following his own best interest. Those who are smart would respond to this by abandoning the sinking ship, as it becomes clear that they’re expected to make a sacrifice for a cause that can’t stand on its own feet apparently. Those who cease to “hodl” aren’t “dumb”, they’re “cowards” and “traitors”. Appeal to people’s willingness to sacrifice and you start a rout.

Most importantly, I would take the arguments my nemesis proposes that don’t make sense to me and amplify them. Bitcoin doesn’t properly function with low fees and fees should ideally exceed the block reward, to help the system pay for itself. Explain that blockchains have terrible scaling capacity. Convince participants in Bitcoin Core of these ideas that underlie their ideology and the community eventually becomes unattractive to newcomers. Why would a newcomer be interested in a system that’s thought of as poorly able to scale by its own adherents and dependent upon high costs for customers to use it? You want me to step into your scheme because you stepped into it yourself, but what’s in it for me?

In a similar manner, I would be able to destroy the social justice movement. When a reasonable young good-looking white girl like Emma Watson holds a speech, I would complain on Twitter about her “white feminism” and how white women think of feminism as an issue between white women and white men. I would bring up her privilege as a skinny girl and ideally, I would painstakingly look for something she uttered at some point in her life that could be interpreted as insensitive to one oppressed minority or another.

If male feminists would bring up feminist talking points, I would argue that they’re “derailing” and trying to “make feminism about men’s issues”. I would insist on the need for safe spaces, where these male feminists are not welcome. I would raise the bar for them to be acknowledged as real feminists and insist they should degrade themselves to a degree that no sane man would want to associate himself with feminism. You’re not a real male feminist until you’ve cross-dressed to demonstrate your dislike of gender roles. I would insist that any semblance of masculinity left in them is “toxic”. You’re not a real male feminist if you play Mario, as you’re perpetuating gender stereotypes by rescuing a princess from a castle.

When a young black man named Deshawn with an arrest warrant out on his name beats a police officer’s face into a bloody pulp before being shot in self-defense, I would “demand justice”. The early civil rights movement skipped over Claudette Colvin, because they realized Rosa Parks appeared more respectable to the white public the activists were trying to appeal to. To destroy the modern social justice movement, I would seek out edge cases instead, that hardly garner any sympathy from those not already part of the movement. Those from within the movement who would insist that it might not be wise to rally to the defense of a criminal, would be easily dismissed: You’re a liberal, a moderate, a reformist! You have mentally assimilated racist propaganda!

The most important tool I have to destroy the social justice movement, is to place it in opposition against everything that is fun and cool.  Social justice is a descendant of the left. As a descendant of the left, it inherited the history of rebellion of the 60’s, the machismo of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, as well as cannabis, LSD and Woodstock. It manages to feed off this heritage, but like any inheritance not properly managed, the accumulated capital eventually runs out and something new needs to be produced.

Today everything cool and innovative is found on the right. Peter Thiel, Satoshi Nakamoto, Julian Assange and Milo Yiannopoulos are products of the right, that appeal to people. The last martyrs of the left are the dead cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, but they’re reluctant to claim their martyrs, as these cartoonists were not murdered by Christian white males, but by victims of white supremacy instead.

Music and art too are now the domain of the right. Anna von Hausswolff has antifa try to shut down her concerts, because she posed on a picture in a Burzum T-shirt. However, if you look far enough, you’ll notice anyone who has made any sort of worthwhile music in the past decade has probably covered Burzum or Death in June at some point, or at the bare minimum worn a T-shirt of either band. To produce art means to provoke. Satanism and homosexuality no longer provoke anyone, the last taboo our society has is intolerance towards minorities.

If the left becomes too boring, it’s going to find itself alienating people. I’m sorry, but Beyonce Knowles’ spoiled little sister’s complaints about people asking to touch her hair can be considered neither art nor music. It’s boring people to death, it makes North Korean Socialist Realism look like genuine art instead. We’ve reached the point where the left has consent contracts to offer, whereas the right offers gang-bangs with swastika-bearing outlaw motorcycle gangs. If you ever wonder how Trump got the women’s vote, now you know. The only guaranteed way to lose a woman is to bore her. The modern left is boring. If I wanted the patient to succumb to his sickness, I would simply push the boredom to its natural conclusion. Men who talk to women they don’t know outside of designated unprovoked-social-interaction spots like nightclubs would be fined or rendered unemployable. Every artist within seven degrees of the Führer would have his gigs picketed and his hosts shamed. I would want everyone who is even remotely cool to have the stigma of racism or “fascist sympathies.”

If it looks like my plan to destroy the social justice movement isn’t just a thought experiment, but a successful program currently nearing completion, that’s because the social justice movement itself is a fanatical last death rattle of the 1960’s era new left. Movements in crisis tend to radicalize, imagining the failure of their ideals to bring about utopia is due to their incomplete implementation, rather than the fallacies intrinsic to their own model of reality. Bloodletting cures tuberculosis, so if the patient is feeling worse after bloodletting, clearly he hasn’t lost enough blood yet! The social justice movement will find itself fading into oblivion as it continues to further radicalize, in the same manner as ISIS in Syria and Iraq successfully made Islamic fundamentalism obsolete and Hitler caused the demise of imperialism. Group polarization, when not recognized and addressed, causes every human social arrangement to implode under its own accelerating fanaticism.