In general, I do not understand this urge that people have to imagine every modern idea as derived from some ancient religion. Christians themselves do this to take credit for the prosperity of the modern world, and those opposed to Christianity do it to pin all the evils of the modern world (communism/Left-liberalism/fascism) to Christianity. No, people just have original ideas and original stupid ideas all the time (and even among intellectual antecedents, there can be many that aren’t covered under the domain of religion).
Christianity isn’t even some deep and coherent philosophical framework that has many implications that can be drawn from it—but even an actual “theory of everything for philosophy” like Hinduism will not give you special insights into questions like “should you pass the Enclosure acts?” or “What is the least-bad tax?” or “how do we build a heat engine?” beyond what you will get from standard scientific methods.
The main reason I stress this is that a lot of crackpots on the right have the habit of avoiding confronting the enemies (Left-liberalism and Muslim supremacism) trying to look for the TRUUUEE puppet master (section 2.1), in this case by saying “Left-liberalism is actually just Christianity”. No, it is not; and even if you think they are somehow connected in theoryceling they do not regard themselves as so, and randomly seething at Christians will not do anything to fight the Left-liberal problem (section 2.4).
With all that said, we may still compare Left-liberalism against other, more ancient religions and identify patterns.
3.4.1Left-liberalism vs Left-absolutism
In competitive democracies, factions with the understanding of great importance of unsaid views and instinctive sense to co-ordinate with other “party” members without any instruction from top or formal organizations wins.
But this cannot be the correct model. For one, doctrinaire communists envision an eventual utopia whose economy is either “libertarian socialism”—where there is no private property, and anyone can freely take or use any resources or capital (apart from human bodies and goods like toothbrushes regarded as “personal property”)—or “democratic socialism”—where all resources and capital are owned democratically, so that every economic decision is subject to a vote (either among the public or some set of workers)1. So certainly, Left-liberals can be technical communists. In terms of authoritarianism, Left-liberals have proven themselves more than willing to employ that against their right-wing enemies2; and in terms of violence, they have no qualms about continuously running cover for Islamist and Communist terrorists.
Left-liberals in America will pose as moderates, saying “of course we’re not socialists, we just believe in X, Y, Z—in fact, we would be considered right-wing in Europe!” But—forget Europe—even if you described to them a country as overregulated and socialist as pre-1991 India, there is no doubt as to which side they would support. Likewise as the Overton window has steadily-shifted leftward, all the extreme positions that they once scoffed at as “strawmen constructed by right-wingers” or “slippery slope fallacy” have been embraced by them3. And even the “moderate liberals” have iteratively legitimized more and more left-wing politicians they once called just “fringe voices not representative of the liberal mainstream”—Bernie, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and now Zohran Mamdani, coping by saying it is those politicians who have moderated (lol).
There is no point at which they will draw the line and reliably say “yes, this is my position; if our country goes to the left of it I shall become a right-winger”—they only maintain strategic silence about positions to the left of where they pose themselves as standing. Thus, effectively, there is no ideological difference between them and the more “hardcore” communists. The true distinction between the two strains is that of means, not ends:Uncompromising vs Śāntipūrvak. So-called communism (hereby “Left-absolutism”) is uncompromising in achieving its goals, demanding total revolution immediately, purging anyone seen as “insufficiently pure”—while Left-liberalism works in a Śāntipūrvak manner, through incremental/progressive change, consensus-building, slippery slopes and good-cop-bad-cop. This explains the emphasis on Revolution and Autocracy in Left-absolutism vs Activism and Democracy in Left-liberalism.
Doctrinaire vs Intuitive. Left-absolutism is more formal in its doctrine, while Left-liberalism relies more on an intuitive grasp of ideology and “who has Moral Authority” spread among its adherents. This may be compared to the Greek vs Indian (or “Babylonian” as Feynman called it) approaches to ancient mathematics, or jñāna-yoga vs bhakti-yoga.
Never declares victory. The Eastern Bloc states proudly declared they had won the communist revolution and now everything was controlled by the Party, the “People’s Army”, “People’s Republic” etc. Left-liberalism, due to its belief in infinite recursive revolution—never declares victory, never recognizes itself as the new Hegemonic Ideology, and keeps claiming to be the eternal counter-culture.
Namelessness. A consequence of both the intuitive approach and never declaring itself as the new regime, is that Left-liberals rarely ever take their ideology by any name—stubbornly resisting labels like “woke” or often even “leftist”. They only ever say they are “following the science”, “giving a social message”, “doing journalism”. Their enemies are not threats to them but “dangers to democracy”, not expressing opposing views but “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”.
Greek math : Indian math
Communism : Left-liberalism
Jñāna-mārga : Bhakti-mārga
The former derives beliefs from strict axiomatic foundations while the latter derives it more intuitively/instinctively by deriving things in random directions in a memespace.
Feynman called it “Greek school vs Babylonian school”.
Other apparent differences in ideology—the apparent focuses on economics vs socio-cultural movements, the pro-industry attitude of the Soviets compared to Indian or Western Left-liberals—are really due to historical happenstance (and in fact, in contrary to popular opinion, it is the Left-liberals who have the purer left-wing ideology). This is elaborated on in sections B.1.6 and B.1.7 and quoted below.
Deradicalization of the Communist World
Two peculiar developments occurred within autocratic communism:
Unlike Left-liberals in the West, it did not keep up with the various new social revolutions, retaining an older, more Faustian-spirit outlook on the world compared to the social transformations in the West. One reason for this is that unlike Left-liberalism which had no fixed doctrine, the rigid “doctrinaire” nature of communism prevented it from adapting and generalizing its ideology to changing social circumstances that Marx had not foreseen. ShazCoder gives another explanation: in the brutal authoritarianism required by their uncompromising nature, they purged the social classes that generate leftism in the first place: radical academics/intellectuals, professional activists, trade unions. Thus, Left-liberalism’s relative “softness” can be considered a patch to this “revolution eats its own” problem found in Left-absolutism.
In a bid to “prove” their ideology and generate the wealth necessary to spread it far and wide, they became obsessively passionate about building industrial and military might, something that had never been core to the communist ideology proper (indeed, this is why you will not see modern communists passionate about industrial maximalism). While the Americans were also passionate about winning the Cold War, this was restricted to military and space innovations; everything else was already operating at a high efficiency as it was done by the free market.
Ultimately these developments are responsible for the “based” picture people have of autocratic communism. It is not, as right-wingers say, that the Soviets are the OGs and Indian or Western communists are the rip-offs—no, our repulsive communists are the OGs, the Soviets became based and industrial-maximalism-pilled due to happenstance.
These developments would eventually lead to the weakening of the fanaticism that is so characteristic to the ideology. The economic system in the Soviet world would, of course remain socialist, and economic stagnation would eventually set in in the 1970s—causing people to simply start losing faith in communism, eventually leading to the fall of the communist empire in 1991.
China, too, would lose faith in communism—but unlike the Soviets they simply transitioned in the 1970s to capitalist economics and Chinese nationalism (while remaining nominally communist), resulting in an economic miracle.
Dumb critiques of communists “from the left”
This phenomenon—of the communist world exhausting its leftism—is fundamentally the reason for the apparent split between democratic socialism (Left-liberalism in the West) and autocratic socialism (Left-absolutism in the Soviet Union), and also why so many critiques of communism are so dumb, like “real communism is an utopian fantasy”, or focusing on the authoritarian nature of these regimes and saying “they became what they swore to destroy”/“some animals became more equal than others”.Because these critiques were developed by democratic socialists like Orwell who disapproved of the methods of the autocratic socialists but not their goals—and the same critiques have been inherited by right-wingers from the Leftist Ideological Aether. The dampening of leftism in the Soviet Union had vindicated the Left-liberal approach over the uncompromising approach: it would not cause “revolution eats its own”, and it did not require the singular pursuit of economic and military might to spread its ideology.
In reality, no: communism is not “good in theory”, the theory is stupid. “Real communism” without an authoritarian government, where all animals really are equal and property is socially-owned so that economic transactions are made democratically or anarchically, would be far, far worse than any communist regime (the Left-liberal/Nehruvian Rāj in India after all practised pretty much the democratic-socialist ideal, and we know how that turned out).
3.4.2Chaoskampf (the hero and the dragon)
Ethnic cleansing: hero slays dragon
Sanskṛtization: hero conquers, spares, tames and uplifts dragon
Classical liberalism: hero and dragon work together to find gold
Ethnonationalism: hero and dragon maintain cold distance
Leftism: dragon slays hero
Context: the Indo-European “hero slays dragon”/chaoskampf motif slowly turns into “hero conquers, spares, tames and uplifts dragon” in Indian legend. Kṛṣṇa-Kaliya, Janamejaya-Takṣaka, Garuḍa and the Nāgas, maybe even Viṣṇu-Śeṣa is a depiction of him having “mastery” over chaos.
3.4.3Mythology surrounding proselytism
Islam: We must convert or destroy the infidels, because they insult our god.
Left-liberalism: We must convert or destroy the infidels, because they oppress our gods.
Christianity: We must convert the infidels to save them from hellfire (they also oppressed our god, but we should forgive them).
Hindus: We must educate people (not necessarily just outgroup infidels) about philosophy and Sanskṛtize them, while being tolerant of superficial differences, to help them attain mokṣa.
3.4.4Left-liberalism vs Classical Liberalism
The rise of the Left-liberal Raj bears some resemblance to the global spread of Buddhism. Both piggybacked on the material value created by ideologies that were “culturally” parent to it (Classical liberalism and Hinduism respectively), persuaded elites to take the Dharma’s interests to be their own and eventually became the destroyers of their parent ideologies while usurping credit for the latter’s success.
Industrial Revolution : Classical Liberalism : Modern Liberalism = 2nd urbanization : Hinduism : Buddhism
2 enabled 1, the surplus of which 3 (which is a more prosletyzing ideology than 2) piggybacked on to project global soft power. Left-liberalism shares nothing of substance with Classical liberalism. It does not believe in liberty (section 3.1), capitalism or the human conquest over the wild and irrational. Many apparent similarities people observe—e.g. “even in the Classical Liberal era Britain screwed India in many ways in the name of human rights”—are really universal features of all empires going back to antiquity, and have nothing to do with the ideologies.
However, there is another apparent type of “liberalism” that must be explained. We naturally imagine that a country is authoritarian if you are jailed for criticizing the leader and country, and liberal if you are not—“of course Western countries are liberal, see the kind of things they say about Trump!”
And yet, the country that sends the most people to prison for social media posts is the U.K.4, and the rest of Europe not too far behind. The thing is that we conceive of countries and “authoritarian” for imposing authoritarianism on behalf of the Oldest Gods: Religion, King and Country. Imposing authoritarianism on behalf of Left-wing Ideology—punishing those who criticize sacred groups and movements, those who commit sacrilege against unions and activist groups, or those who dispute “expert consensus” on topics like climate change and COVID—does not register in the same way, because our ideas about liberty and authoritarianism were originally construed with reference to the Oldest Gods: Religion, King and Country.And on this, Classical liberalism bears some blame (despite all the good that it has done): it deposed the Oldest Gods, leaving an ideological power vaccum (which it itself refused to fill) that would be filled by the Left-liberal Rāj.
Describing Classical India as a “Buddhist society” is perhaps like describing modern America as a “leftist society”.
Sure, everyone is woke, hates capitalism … but the system is still largely a capitalist machine.
3.4.5Leftism as inverse Hinduism
Left-liberalism may be seen as a dark, inverted form of Dharma where Gods are replaced by the Client Groups, Brahman is replaced by the Omnicause, Yajña is replaced by Protests, Brāhmaṇas and priests (who answer only to the gods) are replaced by Left-wing academics and activists (who answer only to the Client Groups), other elites are replaced by “Liberals” who are the vanguard of the Left, Mokṣa is replaced by “Liberation” that is the unattainable endpoint of the recursive revolution, the Trivarga Puruṣārtha is abandoned for a totalizing commitment to this all-consuming dharma and the Ṛṇatraya are waived off (waiving off debts being a typical manner by which western religions have gained converts).[...]
The 3 goals (Puruṣārtha) are Artha, Dharma and Kāma. Leftism worships Degrowth, Barbarism and Ugliness.
The 3 obligations (Ṛṇatraya) are to produce children, to learn and to maintain religion. Leftism says you have no such obligations.
Leftism is the moral inversion of Hinduism.