A common misconception is that politics is about policy: about having the correct opinions, autistically supporting whowever has the closest views to yours on the political compass, and arguing for good policies and against bad ones on the internet. A common overcorrection to this view is “politics isn’t about policy; politics is about power”.
A more complete picture is that politics involves three things:
Ideology – having a vision for the world (e.g. policies), your terminal goals, the reason you want political power in the first place.
Execution – implementation/organizing and working tirelessly to gain power and implement this vision.
World models – correctly understanding the game and the battlefield you are playing on: who the players are, what they want, how they operate, their relative degrees of power.
We have by far the best execution and organizing capability among all large right-wing political groups in the world1, especially given the incredibly challenging global circumstances, and is the only right-wing movement to properly understand and apply the “politics is downstream of culture” meme2. There is yet one risk here: which is that large portions of the right-wing youth do not carry this same level of agency and sanguinity. This is the bhosaḍpiller problem, more in section 6.2.
It is my view that the third: world models, are by far the most critically neglected on the right.
The BJP is successful with “familiar” commanding heights of power (legacy media, film, and battling traditional enemies like Pakistan/Naxals/separatists). Where they fail is in new or less obvious theatres like civil society, decentralized social media, academia.
They crushed Naxals with ruthless Śuṅgan efficiency — but leftism gained in full force in academia right under their noses, due to their negligence of what “humanities in IIT” would mean.
They’re very competent. They just don’t understand this new world.
The aim of this book is to dispel false world models of politics (and the stupid big-braining that results from believing them), and give you the correct world models instead. Not least because:
Systems are anti-fragile to threats they understand, and fragile to those which don’t.
Your finger is fragile to a hot object, but Maxwell’s demon is anti-fragile to it, because it knows the exact positions and momenta of every particle therein and can use it to generate work.
India was fragile to EIC because it was an alien enemy. Today such an entity would pose little threat, because the basic concept of “Indians should unite against foreign threats” has been drilled into our minds3.
India is anti-fragile to Pakistan. Middling when it comes to Muslim supremacism in general; though it was once an understood threat, that understanding has slowly been eroded by decades of Nehruvian secularism.
But it is fragile to the Left-liberal Rāj, because it doesn’t understand it.
(On fragility before alien enemies)
“Men back then simply did not see the East India Company as we do today. Moral judgement on them is pointless.”
10-mark question: What is the analogous entity today, whose ways are so alien that nationalists do not understand as their competition, but has emerged as the true sovereign?
The answer is, of course, Left-liberalism.
Right-wingers constantly underestimate the sheer strength of the Left-Liberal Empire, its absolute control over all the institutions of the world, with silly memes like “oh they’re just deluded college students, they’ll outgrow it” or “they’re idiots who don’t realize they’re getting played by oil companies/christian missionaries/online racists/dehātī casteist parties”
They think of liberals as their rivals only in the narrow domain of winning elections and making policy, not seeing the latter’s desire to (and success at) completely and absolutely control every last aspect of society. They look at “liberals crying over something trivial” and laugh at it as pathetic, not realizing that those are the tears of Alexander: that they see even the slightest bit of unconquered territory as intolerable.The right-winger thinks the real game of politics is between nations, companies and groups motivated by self-interest. The idea that some “ideology” could be a serious participant in this game sounds like a childish delusion.
Well, those deluded idealistic children grew up, and remade the world in their own image.
Their goals are alien. Their methods are alien. Their behaviour is alien. Much like the kings confronted by the East India Company, Right-wingers conclude that this must mean liberals’ goals are orthogonal to their own, and not a direct threat—“instead, let us focus on the REAL enemy, other countries’ nationalists, maybe we can even USE the leftists against them!!”.
Nonetheless their goals require the complete annihilation of your world and all you hold dear. And they have no reason to compromise with you.