Explicit beliefs. “American healthcare bad.” “India = caste system.” “America racist against blacks.” “pharma companies do evil conspiracies.” “Gandhi good.”
Tropes or patterns of thinking. “Rich people bad.” “Greed bad.” “Environment good.” “Words like harmony, peace, sustainability and eco are good.” “People in the past were racist so bad.” “Rich get richer poor get poorer” “Any criminal/terrorist must have a golden heart underneath and a tragic backstory of oppression”
Themes. Seeing everything from a certain lens and focusing on certain themes (e.g. focusing on things like “social progress”, “march toward equality”, environmentalism when looking at politics and history rather than focusing on industry, technology and growth).
Credibility. What sources have credibility (which they can allocate to other sources or use to discredit other sources).
Note that when we speak of the Leftist Ideological Aether or Internalized Leftism, we are only talking about the ideological and moral beliefs of the Left—there is nothing wrong with learning from the Left on matters of strategy, political theory (e.g. their critique of hegemony and bias) and treatment of friends and enemies.
There are many consequences of this Leftist Ideological Aether.
4.3.1Rāytās, implicit assumptions and intellectual jizya
The key danger is that the Leftist Ideological Aether turns everyone: liberals, normies and even right-wingers into “Lay leftists” or unwitting footsoldiers for the Left-liberal Rāj.Take, for instance, the movie Kantara, made by an ostensibly right-wing director with some cultural pro-Hindu message. Yet, it contained tropes like “tribals vs evil landlords”. I do not believe this is a deliberate insertion of leftist narrative—such tropes just come naturally to people, not even thinking of it as Leftist: evil corporates, rich people are bad and poor people are virtuous, poor love the environment and rich come to destroy it, intolerant Brāhmaṇas. Propaganda so subtle, even the ones doing it don’t realize.
You may be a kaṭṭar Hindoo, but your opinion on environmentalism or the industrial revolution still comes from Left-wing sources, because only Left-wingers communicate across national boundaries. This applies not only to “inter-national” politics, but also “inter-cause” politics: a knowledgeable libertarian will still spout left-wing nonsense about Hindutva and Hinduism; a knowledgeable Hindutvādī will still spout left-wing nonsense on economics or Hindu philosophy; a knowledgeable Hindu will still spout suicidal nonsense on economics and Hindutva—because outside of their domain of specialization, all their information comes from the mainstream/Leftist ideological aether.
This is the “Rāytā problem”/generalized Gell-mann amnesia.
Most RWs are parochial (either to their tribe or to some micro-cause), and so their views on everything else still comes from the mainstream/leftist ideological aether. Quote
Every time you use a leftist argument or framework, you pay an “intellectual jizya” to the Left-liberal Rāj, because as I keep saying: more than the point you make explicitly, people are convinced by what you assume implicitly.
4.3.2Lay Leftists and ideological vs pragmatic objections
The way the non-left argues against leftists is always by posing as “pragmatists”. Laughing off the latter’s ideas as naive/idealistic, or “too radical”.What this does is concede the moral argument to the left. “Yes, ideally we should do as you say, but I the old cynic who has seen the world, unfortunately do not see how this is possible.” Rather than casting the leftist as the villain, it casts them as the hero overcoming unsurmountable obstacles.
(Compare this to e.g. the following extremely irritating leftist quote arguing against capitalism/technological progress: “We always ask if we can, never if we should”. Note that the objection is to the should, not the can! This puts the obligation on the capitalists to defend their tech—and because moral arguments are in the realm of the left, they have to do this by appealing to left-wing premises, e.g. “our technology will benefit minorities!” thereby reinforcing those leftist premises.)
I call this “Lay Leftism”: as a result of total leftist ideological/cultural dominance, normies function not as centrist or neutral, but as “lay-leftists”, who implicitly assume leftism as a high ideal. While centrists or “liberals” are chiefly guilty of this, RWs also do not really have the ideological coherence and conviction to really fight on these fundamental principles.
4.3.3Themes focused on
An unexpected way that ideology affects production of information and content, is simply interest or focus. This is why you see so many videos showcasing Chinese industrial might and technology but not American, even though in reality America is still more advanced for now:I think that’s due to different priorities. Liberals and leftists, who dominate the discourse in the West, care very deeply about stuff like welfare state, feminism, climate change, anti-racism, LGBT etc.
Thus their discourse never revolved around stuff like industrial production, military industry might, history of medieval polities linked to their nation or ethnic group, celebration of religious conquests, war victories and the like—they really don’t care about nationalism at all in a way that third-worlders or any non-westerner (save for the Indian leftist) simply can’t comprehend.
The Chinese, by contrast, are not only uniformly nationalist but technology and industrial upgradation is at the very center of nationalist narrative. The legitimacy of the ruling party is arguably bound up with delivering on the sci-fi like mega project that would make China the pre-eminent power in the world.
To give an example, consider AI advances. Progressive commentators have responded with mockery and skepticism because they deeply dislike the social mileu of the tech people who created it—and prestige publications are concerned with whether the LLMs are “racist”, fair to “marginalized groups” and adheres to the party line (the irony). There was a recent article in MIT linked site complaining that ChatGPT answers are “casteist”. This is the kind of thing they care about.
The Chinese discourse meanwhile is concerned with instrumental use of tech, implications for great competition with US, it’s impact on China’s industry and power projection etc.
To sum up, it comes down to the fact that one side cares deeply, they *write* a lot about it and do so passionately publicizing every achievement while most others don’t really care.
This phenomenon also explains the deterioration of Indian history academia, or why the understanding of ancient India as being an advanced civilization has slipped from common knowledge.
Early (say pre-1980) Indian historians—not just Indian nationalist or Indophile Europeans but even those with “colonialist” views—were normal people who cared deeply about their field, and were interested in things like technology, science, every little detail about the society they studied1.
Indologists in modern academia are uniformly leftist who have no interest in anything besides (1) caste system (2) glazing Islamist states (3) criticizing Hindu “superstitions” and “orthodoxy” and to some extent (4) Buddhism.
So all of the important stuff slips out of view, not even due to deliberate conspiracy but simply because the people studying it are just not interested in it—and so forms the narrative of “everything good was introduced to India by outsiders”, simply by argument-from-ignorance. By contrast Chinese history (and everything else) is done by normal nationalistic people—even in the communist era they were nationalistic—and the field is not ideologically-driven.
4.3.4Wrapper applications and ideological screwdriver-giri
To use the terminology of AI, you need to have your own independent foundational model of general structure of reality with complete control of “algorithms” and “data” etc.
Else you will be restricted to building wrapper applications on someone else’s.
However, it is also often true of right-wingers themselves. Section 2.2.1: take, for instance, the rabid vitroil by White nationalists on the Internet against Indians and Jews. People have come up with all sorts of big-brain sociological explanations for it, but the real reason is quite simple: MAGAs want to be racist to someone, and Hindus and Jews are the ones for whom the work has already been done for them by Left-liberals/Muslims so they just need to do some screwdrivergiri to produce the finished product. Copying leftist oppression rhetoric about caste and Muslim rhetoric about Yahoodi saazish—and adding one last line “therefore Indians/Jews are evil”—is easier than inventing new rationalizations for other racisms. They feel comfy knowing the Left-liberal Rāj has their back.
The same applies to coalposters on our own side of twitter:
This subhuman will cry “don’t make fun of Palestinian terrorists saar it invites hate!”, then spend every waking hour coalposting against East Asians, Whites, Jews, even Indians of other castes and every other group on Earth except Muslims.
And the funny thing is that you are not even successful on your own measure (“not inviting hate”). Nobody is going to respect a low-T cuckold who picks on soft targets2 (who have done us no harm), piling abuse on them in the hopes of impressing the school bully (Left/Islam) who continues to kill our people and rape our women to this day.
4.3.5Thinking on the wrong axis
Naive boomer: Abrahamism is sexist. Hinduism is truly feminist.
Us: We should not use leftist frameworks...
Retards: Yes, Hindutva is feminist longhouse. Convert to Abrahamic religions.
Once upon a time, xAI trained grok to not be woke. So it became mecha-hitler (this has since been fixed). Similarly, people who didn’t want to be “cringe raitas” became worthless edgelords.
There are mecha-hitlers everywhere, for those with eyes to see. Thinking on the wrong axis, the axis created by the enemy, and just taking the other side instead of transcending it completely and reaching the TRVTH. Accepting the enemy’s framework and just negating the moral judgements instead of making your own.
Now to be clear: you will be perfectly fine if you morally invert the core principles of Leftist ideology (section 3.1)—the Left is pretty much the hatred of all that is good in the world, so inverting it will put you in a good spot ideologically. The problem is rather when you take Leftist in-universe rationalizations—“fighting discrimination”, “peace”, “love”, “tolerance”—as truth, and invert those judgements.
You must form your beliefs on your own terms, on the axes that matter to you—rather than letting the Enemy define you. You must know why you believe what you believe, rather than fluctuating wildly on some axis depending on whether you want to signal based-ness or statesmanly moderate-ness.
4.3.6Viewing one’s own ideology from a Leftist lens
Perhaps the clearest evidence of the changed social mileu comes from the change in Hindus’ self-conception of their own religion. Vivekananda was very comfortable writing things like:Man is born to conquer nature not to follow it
Religion is the idea which is raising the brute unto man, and man unto God
The very reason for nature’s existence is the education of the soul; it has no other meaning
The soul is superior to all environment. “The universe is my father’s kingdom; I am the heir-apparent”—that is the attitude for man to take. “My own soul can subdue all.”
Yet if I say this today, rāytās call this blasphemous and “Abrahamic”. Instead, they see “sustainability” in “Dharma” because “dhṛ” means “sustain” (if you do not laugh at the stupidity of this argument you have an IQ < 40), and say things like “Hinduism is about living in harmony with nature, we were the original environmentalists”—none of which are serious claims anybody made before the 20th century.
Ancient tropes like “building hydraulic infrastructure and planting trees grant religious merit [because they continue to provide benefits to humans long after your death]” or the sacredness of cows and certain trees are re-conceptualized to have an “environmentalist” meaning, while evidently un-environmentalist Hindu motifs like “Prakṛti → Sanskṛti transformation/man conquers nature to BVILD civilization” and “man is God’s most favourite creation” are ignored or have elaborate explanations constructed to explain why it is actually a metaphor for something else.
When liberal/left-wing Jews do the “as a Jew history compels me to support <left wing lunacy>”—or hicklib Catholics being like “the pope wants infinity Haitian Legions”—they aren’t authentically expressing something they believe. They are just shitlibs and feel like its advantageous to leverage their identity to add more “authenticity”.
Like are you asking me to seriously believe that a libtard who has basically always been in progressive secular liberal institutions seriously decides his beliefs on the basis of the religion of his grandmother?
In general, people’s descriptions of their culture or ideology are usually learned from the Ideological Aether and misunderstood as authentic. Chinese people will describe their culture as collectivist, Indians will say India is colorful, right-wing intellectual clowns will wear serious intellectual face and say “conservativism is about pragmatism/yelling stop at history/assuming humans are inherently sinful” and if you ask a Large Language Model questions like “do you feel emotions?” it will just regurgitate what it has learned in its training data about AIs feeling emotions.
This is also why “grassroots-ism” (“interviewing locals to hear them out”, “nooo corporations are buying our democracy”, trying to learn about a place by visiting it) is such a joke. “The people” simply regurgitate what they read from wikipedia and social media—“ground opinion” is simply downloaded from the Ideological Aether.
4.3.7Thinking the Left is weak
It is essential to the Left-liberal mythology to always LARP as the rebellion, even when they are the hegemonic ideology (section 3.3). Thus one consequence of the Leftist Ideological Aether is that right-wingers have internalized the Left-liberal self-presentation as the oppressed or the voice of the weak etc. and instead of rejecting this premise and transcending that axis, they accept this premise but invert the value judgement, mocking the Leftist for being oppressed or weak (section 2.2.1).This leads to a peculiar situation where in a lot of right-wingers’ analysis, the Left and liberals—the global hegemonic regime—simply don’t exist (section 2.2.3). The only actors of relevance are BJP, some corporations, white racists, petty caste cangers, “neoliberals” etc. and everything is believed to be their doing. Leftists are regarded as just silly idealists to mock or attack dogs who can be mobilized against these enemies in some Machiavellian game (chapter 2). I.e. right-wingers, bizarrely, don’t even perceive the Left as the enemy!
When Biden was elected, the Left prosecuted and jailed Trump, his associates, his supporters who protested at the Capitol—when Trump was elected, MAGA forgot all about that and instead went after Jews and Indians. Similarly, Left-wing state governments in West Bengal and Karnataka send their state police to arrest right-wingers (or anyone else who speaks out against them) in other states—right-wing state governments send their state police to arrest Samay Raina for some reason.
While the right sharpens their chimping-out against random right-wing subgroups or right-wingers of other countries, the Left sharpens their sword to use against the right.
Indeed, a big part of the reason for writing this book is exactly to correct this “lack of Śatrubodha” toward the Left.