didmyownresearch

[didmyownresearch]

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

John Maynard Keynes

[didmyownresearch]

Sorry, but I fail to see how your remarks relate to my post.

"I've told you!", or, why the left lost the US elections

No, this gives me no pleasure. It is like futilely watching a car crash in slow motion. But you could see it coming if you paid attention and stuck your head above the echo chamber. 

It wasn't really Trump who won. It's the Democratic party that lost.  Trump got 74.2 million votes in 2020 and 74.8 million votes in 2024, so he didn't gain much since his defeat. The Democrats, however lost 10 million votes. That's quite a drastic decline. And it really has little to do with their candidates. Biden was not that much more attractive than Harris. There are more fundamental explanations. So, I'm going to present here what I believe to be the two main reasons for this collapse. One is more concrete, the other more innate.

I. The derailing of the left

During the last twenty years the left-wing agenda was hijacked by what I have chosen to call the post-left. It gradually replaced liberal and social values with identity politics, and moved from a pacifist strive for human rights to cheering a violent battle that aims to enforce the radical postcolonial dogma.

This transition has disastrous results, both in the US and worldwide.  The woke agenda alienated the lower middle class, whose insecurities were amplified by the attack on traditional values. Furthermore, by abandoning the struggle against capitalistic exploitation in the corporates-controlled economy the left lost its one and only offering that relates to the actual welfare of the common people.

It didn't matter that eventually the post-left fringe deserted the Democrat's camp as Harris was too right-leaning to their taste. The damage was already done. Their vociferous, belligerent tactic drowned all the other voices. In the eyes of the unsophisticated working-class public these became the faces of the left: some pompous intellectual snobs, perhaps blue haired with weird pronouns, rioting and waving the Palestinian flag.

II. Democracy in disrepair

It's a common misconception to view a democratic rule as a permanent structure, defined through a constitution or any other rigid legal code, and leaning on stable institutions that regulates and controls its routines. Not so. Unless there's some focused effort to fix the inherent flaws in the system it will deteriorate, as those who benefit from these flaws use their excessive power to preserve and deepen their control. The 250 years old American system is corroded. Public opinion is manipulated by a media cartel; politicians' career depends on the funding from tycoons and mega corporates; the judicial system is thoroughly politicized; and, a weird, twisted and anachronistic election method ensures that no more than two presidential candidates from the same two specific parties shall ever have a chance of winning.

Everything in this system drives it towards a zero-sum confrontation that stems from an acute ideological, social and cultural polarization. As a result, extremists thrive and the moderates shrivel. Instead of a rational and moral debate we have an emotional struggle, where the strongest motive is to humiliate the adversary. Donald Trump is just a figurehead, a tool to hurt the lefties. This is a horrible way to arrive at coherent political decisions, but here we are. It was a battle of egos, and those who cared more won.

[didmyownresearch]

"I've told you!", or, why the left lost the US elections

No, this gives me no pleasure. It is like futilely watching a car crash in slow motion. But you could see it coming if you paid attention and stuck your head above the echo chamber. 

It wasn't really Trump who won. It's the Democratic party that lost.  Trump got 74.2 million votes in 2020 and 74.8 million votes in 2024, so he didn't gain much since his defeat. The Democrats, however lost 10 million votes. That's quite a drastic decline. And it really has little to do with their candidates. Biden was not that much more attractive than Harris. There are more fundamental explanations. So, I'm going to present here what I believe to be the two main reasons for this collapse. One is more concrete, the other more innate.

I. The derailing of the left

During the last twenty years the left-wing agenda was hijacked by what I have chosen to call the post-left. It gradually replaced liberal and social values with identity politics, and moved from a pacifist strive for human rights to cheering a violent battle that aims to enforce the radical postcolonial dogma.

This transition has disastrous results, both in the US and worldwide.  The woke agenda alienated the lower middle class, whose insecurities were amplified by the attack on traditional values. Furthermore, by abandoning the struggle against capitalistic exploitation in the corporates-controlled economy the left lost its one and only offering that relates to the actual welfare of the common people.

It didn't matter that eventually the post-left fringe deserted the Democrat's camp as Harris was too right-leaning to their taste. The damage was already done. Their vociferous, belligerent tactic drowned all the other voices. In the eyes of the unsophisticated working-class public these became the faces of the left: some pompous intellectual snobs, perhaps blue haired with weird pronouns, rioting and waving the Palestinian flag.

II. Democracy in disrepair

It's a common misconception to view a democratic rule as a permanent structure, defined through a constitution or any other rigid legal code, and leaning on stable institutions that regulates and controls its routines. Not so. Unless there's some focused effort to fix the inherent flaws in the system it will deteriorate, as those who benefit from these flaws use their excessive power to preserve and deepen their control. The 250 years old American system is corroded. Public opinion is manipulated by a media cartel; politicians' career depends on the funding from tycoons and mega corporates; the judicial system is thoroughly politicized; and, a weird, twisted and anachronistic election method ensures that no more than two presidential candidates from the same two specific parties shall ever have a chance of winning.

Everything in this system drives it towards a zero-sum confrontation that stems from an acute ideological, social and cultural polarization. As a result, extremists thrive and the moderates shrivel. Instead of a rational and moral debate we have an emotional struggle, where the strongest motive is to humiliate the adversary. Donald Trump is just a figurehead, a tool to hurt the lefties. This is a horrible way to arrive at coherent political decisions, but here we are. It was a battle of egos, and those who cared more won.

[didmyownresearch]

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), dir. Arwen Curry

[didmyownresearch]

The RGB Model of Political Ideologies

The conventional outlook on political ideologies pictures them on a spectral line from far-right to far-left. This view is often (justifiably) criticized as being over-simplistic. There were several attempts to modify and improve the political mapping. For example, the Horseshoe Theory argues that the political spectrum is curved so that the extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing are actually rather close to each other ideologically. Other, relatively popular schemes, are the Nolan Chart and the similar Political Compass that puts the political doctrines on a two-dimensional map, where one axis corresponds to the left-right dichotomy with respect to economic policies, and the other axis to the span between libertarian and totalitarian standpoints.

Here I want to present an even more elaborate scheme which essentially maps a political stance onto a three-dimensional space. As a metaphor I shale threat the three "ideology" traits as the primary RGB colors:

"Red" represents the weight which the ideology attributes to the notion of a Tribe. The specific definition of the relevant tribe can be derived from ethnicity, nationality, religion, race, and any other identity group. The more an ideological doctrine values tribal identity, the redder it becomes.

"Green" represents the weight which the ideology attributes to the notion of a Morality. The more an ideological doctrine respects moral values, the greener it becomes.

"blue" represents the weight which the ideology attributes to the notion of the individual. The higher an ideological doctrine regards the individual and its rights, the bluer it becomes.

These three categories seem to me more fundamental than the conventional measures related to economics and to governmental authority. They correspond to basic psychological motives rather than to abstract concepts. Typically, one would seek a chiefly "red" stance when he wishes to compensate for his personal feeling of impotence through his group identity; one would be attracted to a greener ideology if he is conscientiously motivated; and, one would go "blue" when his senses of personal freedom and of entitlement prevail.

In the image I've tried to depict the RGB mapping of several common ideologies. Although there are many possible combinations, real-world political positions are mostly grouped around the ellipse shown in the figure. Progressing along this curve clockwise would take us from right-wing to left-wing. However, as in the Horseshoe Theory, when you move too far to the left you pop up at the extreme right.

When you mix all of the ingredients equally you get the "white" liberal-left ideology, which I've termed "Social-Liberal". This position recognizes the significance of both universal humanistic morality, individualistic personal freedom and social-cultural group identity. It's perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

[didmyownresearch]

How come we are so fucked: the decline of modern democracy

The second law of thermodynamics states that the level of disorder in any closed system cannot decrease. Unless there's some external influence, things can only get more and more messy.  The earth is not, by any mean, a close system, and therefore neither the biosphere nor human activities are in fact directly governed by the second law in the strict sense. Nevertheless, we can still formulate a version for this law of nature that is applicable to human societies: without a focused intervention everything shall get worse.

A democratic government is a synthetic thing. It was made; it didn't just evolve. The first system for a modern democratic rule was set up in the US of A during the late eighteenth century by its founding fathers. It was based on ideas by liberal European thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu‏. Although the US was hardly a true democracy then – it legalized slavery and assigned voting rights to white men only – the system it procured still served as a template for all modern democracies hence: parliament, government and head of state (and potentially other public positions) elected by the general public according to the majority rule.

There is no perfect system of government. The US Americans, for instance, tried to construct a fair system, but it was rather naïve and it still contained many loopholes that could be exploited by some groups to increase their own political power on the expanse of other groups. Moreover, when certain people become powerful due to flaws in the system, they use this power to enlarge end deepen these advantageous defects, gaining even more power, and that allows them to increase yet again the inherent unfairness. This dynamic is common to all forms of government, not just in the US: barring a dramatic disruption or, alternatively, a continuous effort to counter decay, the imbalance and unfairness can only increase over time. It's the "second law" of sociodynamics.

Indeed, dramatic disruptions can occur. The US had a civil war. Germany fell into fascism and then was defeated and conquered in a world war. However, revolutions and total wars are rare, unpredictable and bloody. The only practical way to preserve a fair, liberal democracy it to fight for it relentlessly. The problem is, most people fail to understand this fact. They have this false vision of a democratic system as a stable structure, protected by its constitution and by its institutions. And because they don't take into account the second law of sociodynamics, they become passive subjects of the deteriorating system, ignorant with respect to the fundamental reasons all this is happening around them.

One of the resulting misconceptions is to regard conservative politics as representing just another ideological stance. In fact, those who lead the fight to conserve a faulty system are typically the ones who benefit mostly by it. And they have a built-in advantage, exactly because of these faults. It’s a positive-feedback vicious circle – the powerful have the power to preserve and magnify their power. The fact that they operate within a supposedly fair democratic system only help to obfuscate the actual dynamic behind the scene.

But it doesn't end here. There's another factor that make matters much worse than they could have been. The masterminds of modern democracy made a fatal mistake in their design. They stipulated that political power is allocated strictly based on majority. And this, as it turned out, is profoundly destructive.

Democratic governments profess to represent a "social contract", empowering it to rule for the benefit of the society as a whole. However, in effect, they frequently gain control that is only based on a small majority. For example, a governing coalition may have gained a very narrow majority of just 51% of the votes but obtained practically all the political power. Moreover, in a heterogeneous society, where political and ideological affiliations are rooted in rigid ethnical, religious or socio-economical divisions, the same parties can gain the electoral upper-hand repeatedly in every election. Constituents of minority groups, large or small, are being incessantly deprived of any significant influence on the national policy.

Minority groups suppression has far-reaching consequences. It undermines the very essence of the social contract as it leaves many citizens politically powerless. Consequently, the state can ignore their interests with impunity, make them outcasts, and, in extreme cases, even persecute them under the guise of a lawful democratic rule.

The "winner takes it all" scheme generates a constant socio-political tension, hatred between rival political tribes and deep frustration that often leads to violence. Such social disintegration can be observed in democratic countries all over the world. Politics became a zero-sum game, and it's fucking up our societies and, eventually, our lives.

But what can be done? Is there any other fair way to determine policy without resorting to the who-got-more-skulls arm wrestling? Is there a way to drive society toward consensus rather than division? Is there a way to disrupt the vicious circle of the powerful using their power to gain more power?

Well, as a matter of fact, there is! I intend to elaborate about it in future posts. Meanwhile, it may be illuminating to consider the method employed in the NBA draft, and how it prevents specific teams from perpetuating their hegemony.

[didmyownresearch]

Why there's no intelligence in Artificial Intelligence

You can blame it all on Turing. When Alan Turing invented his mathematical theory of computation, what he really tried to do was to construct a mechanical model for the processes actual mathematicians employ when they prove a mathematical theorem. He was greatly influenced by Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems. Gödel developed a method to decode logical mathematical statements as numbers and in that way was able to manipulate these statements algebraically. After Turing managed to construct a model capable of performing any arbitrary computation process (which we now call "A Universal Turing Machine") he became convinced that he discovered the way the human mind works. This conviction quickly infected the scientific community and became so ubiquitous that for many years it was rare to find someone who argued differently, except on religious grounds.

There was a good reason for adopting the hypothesis that the mind is a computation machine. This premise was following the extremely successful paradigm stating that biology is physics (or, to be precise, biology is both physics and chemistry, and chemistry is physics), which reigned supreme over scientific research since the eighteenth century. It was already responsible for the immense progress that completely transformed modern biology, biochemistry, and medicine. Turing seemed to supply a solution, within this theoretical framework, for the last large piece in the puzzle. There was now a purely mechanistic model for the way brain operation yields all the complex repertoire of human (and animal) behavior.

Obviously, not every computation machine is capable of intelligent conscious thought. So, where do we draw the line? For instance, at what point can we say that a program running on a computer understands English? Turing provided a purely behavioristic test: a computation understands a language if by conversing with it we cannot distinguish it from a human.

This is quite a silly test, really. It doesn't provide any clue as to what actually happens within the artificial "mind"; it assumes that the external behavior of an entity completely encapsulates its internal state; it requires "man in the loop" to provide the final ruling; it does not state for how long and on what level should this conversation be held. Such a test may serve as a pragmatic common-sense method to filter out obvious failures, but it brings us not an ounce closer to understanding conscious thinking.

Still, the Turing Test stuck. If anyone tried to question the computational model of the mind, he was then confronted with the unavoidable question: what else can it be? After all, biology is physics, and therefore the brain is just a physical machine. Physics is governed by equations, which are all, in theory, computable (at least approximately, with errors being as small as one wishes). So, short of conjuring supernatural soul that magically produces a conscious mind out of biological matter, there can be no other solution.

Nevertheless, not everyone conformed to the new dogma. There were two tiers of reservations to computational Artificial Intelligence. The first, maintained, for example, by the Philosopher John Searl, didn't object to idea that a computation device may, in principle, emulate any human intellectual capability. However, claimed Searl, a simulation of a conscious mind is not conscious in itself.

To demonstrate this point Searl envisioned a person who doesn't know a single word in Chinese, sitting in a secluded room. He receives Chinese texts from the outside through a small window and is expected to return responses in Chinese. To do that he uses written manuals that contain the AI algorithm which incorporates a comprehensive understanding of the Chinese language. Therefore, a person fluent in Chinese that converses with the "room" shall deduce, based on Turing Test, that it understands the language. However, in fact there's no one there but a man using a printed recipe to convert an input message he doesn't understands to an output message he doesn't understands. So, who in the room understands Chinese?

The next tier of opposition to computationalism was maintained by the renowned physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose, claiming that the mind has capabilities which no computational process can reproduce. Penrose considered a computational process that imitates a human mathematician. It analyses mathematical conjecture of a certain type and tries to deduce the answer to that problem. To arrive at a correct answer the process must employ valid logical inferences. The quality of such computerized mathematician is measured by the scope of problems it can solve.

What Penrose proved is that such a process can never verify in any logically valid way that its own processing procedures represent valid logical deductions. In fact, if it assumes, as part of its knowledge base, that its own operations are necessarily logically valid, then this assumption makes them invalid. In other words, a computational machine cannot be simultaneously logically rigorous and aware of being logically rigorous.

A human mathematician, on the other hand, is aware of his mental processes and can verify for himself that he is making correct deductions. This is actually an essential part of his profession. It follows that, at least with respect to mathematicians, cognitive functions cannot be replicated computationally.

Neither Searl's position nor Penrose's was accepted by the mainstream, mainly because, if not computation, "what else can it be?". Penrose's suggestion that mental processes involve quantum effects was rejected offhandedly, as "trying to explicate one mystery by swapping it with another mystery". And the macroscopic hot, noisy brain seemed a very implausible place to look for quantum phenomena, which typically occur in microscopic, cold and isolated systems.

Fast forward several decades. Finaly, it seemed as though the vision of true Artificial Intelligence technology started bearing fruits. A class of algorithms termed Deep Neural Networks (DNN) achieved, at last, some human-like capabilities. It managed to identify specific objects in pictures and videos, generate photorealistic images, translate voice to text, and support a wide variety of other pattern recognition and generation tasks. Most impressively, it seemed to have mastered natural language and could partake in an advanced discourse. The triumph of computational AI appeared more feasible than ever. Or was it?   

During my years as undergraduate and graduate student I sometimes met fellow students who, at first impression, appeared to be far more conversant in the academic courses subject matter than me. They were highly confident and knew a great deal about things that were only briefly discussed in lectures. Therefore, I was vastly surprised when it turned out they were not particularly good students, and that they usually scored worse than me in the exams. It took me some time to realize that these people hadn't really possessed a better understanding of the curricula. They just adopted the correct jargon, employed the right words, so that, to the layperson ears, they had sounded as if they knew what they were talking about.

I was reminded of these charlatans when I encountered natural language AIs such as Chat GPT. At first glance, their conversational abilities seem impressive – fluent, elegant and decisive. Their style is perfect. However, as you delve deeper, you encounter all kinds of weird assertions and even completely bogus statements, uttered with absolute confidence. Whenever their knowledge base is incomplete, they just fill the gap with fictional "facts". And they can't distinguish between different levels of source credibility. They're like Idiot Savants – superficially bright, inherently stupid.

What confuses so many people with regard to AIs is that they seem to pass the (purely behavioristic) Turing Test. But behaviorism is a fundamentally non-scientific viewpoint. At the core, computational AIs are nothing but algorithms that generates a large number of statistical heuristics from enormous data sets.

There is an old anecdote about a classification AI that was supposed to distinguish between friendly and enemy tanks. Although the AI performed well with respect to the database, it failed miserably in field tests. Finely, the developers figured out the source of the problem. Most of the friendly tanks' images in the database were taken during good weather and with fine lighting conditions. The enemy tanks were mostly photographed in cloudy, darker weather. The AI simply learned to identify the environmental condition.

Though this specific anecdote is probably an urban legend, it illustrates the fact that AIs don't really know what they're doing. Therefore, attributing intelligence to Arificial Intelligence algorithms is a misconception. Intelligence is not the application of a complicated recipe to data. Rather, it is a self-critical analysis that generates meaning from input. Moreover, because intelligence requires not only understanding of the data and its internal structure, but also inner-understanding of the thought processes that generate this understanding, as well as an inner-understanding of this inner-understanding (and so forth), it can never be implemented using a finite set of rules. There is something of the infinite in true intelligence and in any type of conscious thought.

But, if not computation, "what else can it be?". The substantial progress made in quantum theory and quantum computation revived the old hypothesis by Penrose that the working of the mind is tightly coupled to the quantum nature of the brain. What had been previously regarded as esoteric and outlandish suddenly became, in light of recent advancements, a relevant option.

During the last thirty years, quantum computation has been transformed from a rather abstract idea made by the physicist Richard Feynman into an operational technology. Several quantum algorithms were shown to have a fundamental advantage over any corresponding classical algorithm. Some tasks that are extremely hard to fulfil through standard computation (for example, factorization of integers to primes) are easy to achieve quantum mechanically. Note that this difference between hard and easy is qualitative rather than quantitative. It's independent of which hardware and how much resources we dedicate to such tasks.

Along with the advancements in quantum computation came a surging realization that quantum theory is still an incomplete description of nature, and that many quantum effects cannot be really resolved form a conventional materialistic viewpoint. This understanding was first formalized by John Stewart Bell in the 1960s and later on expanded by many other physicists. It is now clear that by accepting quantum mechanics, we have to abandon at least some deep-rooted philosophical perceptions. And it became even more conceivable that any comprehensive understanding of the physical world should incorporate a theory of the mind that experiences it. It's only stands to reason that, if the human mind is an essential component of a complete quantum theory, then the quantum is an essential component of the workings of the mind. If that's the case, then it's clear that a classical algorithm, sophisticated as it may be, can never achieve true intelligence. It lacks an essential physical ingredient that is vital for conscious, intelligent thinking. Trying to simulate such thinking computationally is like trying to build a Perpetuum Mobile or chemically transmute lead into gold. You might discover all sorts of useful things along the way, but you would never reach your intended goal. Computational AIs shall never gain true intelligence. In that respect, this technology is a dead end.

[didmyownresearch]

The Five Stages of Perception

Before I started learning physics, I thought Quantum mechanics was very weird and mystifying. Then I took several courses in Quantum theory and came to the conclusion that, although it is indeed counter-intuitive, it is still logical and can be grasped and fully comprehended. But then, one day, I suddenly understood what this theory implies with respect to reality. I had to admit to myself: Quantum mechanics is far stranger than I had imagined before I've studied it.

Well, some time ago I stumbled upon a saying attributed to the nine-century Zen master Qingyuan Weixin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin), that goes like this:

“Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.”

Now, this Zen koan, or proverb, seems to indicate quite the opposite progression than the one I have experienced with Quantum physics. Starting with the pragmatic, simplistic view: everything is as it seems; Then, coming to question the external appearance of material objects; Finally finding rest at the understanding that, at the "very substance", a cigar is just a cigar.

Then I thought some more about the koan. I reckoned that, rather than contradicting my own experience, the two paths are in fact complementary. There are not three but five stages of perception, as one comes to understand the world better. They are:

The naïve state: everything is grasped at face value, without any questioning.

The mystic state: things are not as they seem. There is a hidden, spiritual nature to matter.

The materialistic state: objects and phenomena may be complex, but they are governed by mechanisms that are knowable and intelligible.

The bewildered state: things don't add up. There is something fundamental that we don't understand about nature. Mountains are not mountains.

The enlightened state: it puts your mind, finally, at rest. Alas, you must be enlightened to be able to grasp it.

The ancient Zen masters didn't have any science and therefore could not truly comprehend a materialistic view. Qingyuan Weixin begun its journey from the naïve stance of the layman, but after he was introduced to the arcane Zen knowledge, he adopted a mystical view. Then, (so we are supposed to believe) by absorbing the essence of Zen thinking, he managed to leap straight into the enlightened state.

I, on the other hand, started from a mildly mystical view of physical nature, but quickly adopted physicalism, as befit a respectable man of science. This comfortable view was shaken and finely shattered as I grew older and wiser. So, both me and master Weixin climbed the same ladder, but stepped on different stairs. He started lower but reached higher. I'm still stuck, bewitched, bothered and bewildered.

[didmyownresearch]

The Post-Left and the Death of Humanism

Trigger Warning: this post may cause distress to people of certain political persuasions

Once, lefties in the US were called liberals. I mean, they still call them that sometimes, but this title has become increasingly absurd. American liberals were people that maintained the classical humanistic values: freedom, equality and human rights. Unlike the European liberals, for example, who were actually right-wing conservatives that advocated the alleged "free market", Laissez-faire economic policy,  the American liberals were mostly social democrats that believed in a welfare state.

Currently, such left-wing liberals are a dying breed. There are, of course, a lot of people that still hold a similar stance, but their voice diminishes and no longer resonates in the mind of the general public. And these remaining liberals find it progressively harder to stand against the tide of the so-called progressive agenda (pun intended). Consequently, they lost confidence in their own political philosophy.

Why did this happen? From the sociological standpoint this shift in connected with the rise of the neo-liberal economic discipline which dismantled the welfare state and dealt a devastating blow to the middle class, escalating economic inequality and driving societies to class warfare. We may also attribute the transformation to the effect of social media and the way it enhances and spreads extremist views, fosters group thinking, and allows nefarious element to manipulate public opinion. However, in this article I want to take an alternative, history of ideas perspective.

The cornerstone of Humanism is the belief in universal values. It is a direct offspring of the Enlightenment movement which laid the foundations of modern democracy. These values are summed in the slogan of the French Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité (meaning liberty, equality and fraternity). In particular, fraternity, or, more generally, solidarity, is a key ingredient of any political struggle for humanistic values. Such a struggle has a chance to succeed only by joining hands and forming a broad coalition of all who share these values, regardless of the specifics of their identity.

Unfortunately, this strategy of indiscriminating solidarity, although being highly effective, had a fatal flaw. When you belong to an oppressed group, say, Black US Americans in the 1960s, gaining salvation through the aid of white folks feels degrading. It implies that you belong to a weak community, and therefore require the help of a stronger hegemonic group to be emancipated. It was for this inherent psychological factor that Black Americans began shifting their ideological association from Martin Luther King's Humanism to Malcolm X's Black Supremacy, and, that the feminist movement became less about "women are equal" and more about "women are better". As soon as Equality was, to some extent, gained, the fight was redirected toward the much more emotionally satisfying Empowerment.

Empowerment doesn't require universal solidarity. Empowerment doesn't require universal values. When the newly rising identity groups searched for an alternative to the Humanistic ideology they found surprising allies in the Academy. During the 1970s the postmodern school of thought was gaining dominance in the (ironically termed) Faculties of Humanities. And it provided the exact theoretical foundations for what has since been known as Identity Politics.

What postmodern intellectuals were claiming was basically this: there are no universal values, only culturally dependent narratives. What was considered universal was in fact only the particular worldview of the hegemonic white-patriarchal-heterosexual-Christian society. For this reason, there is no basis for solidarity that encompasses, for instance, both white people and people of color, or both men and women. At best, different oppressed groups can, strategically, share a common cause. Typically, its every group to itself: we African Americans shall redeem ourselves, thank you very much; we don't need the favors of some patronizing white liberals.

Indeed, this was much more empowering than this wimpy we-are-all-equal-let's-hug attitude. On the downside, while the various racial, sexual, ethnic, religious and gender-related groups were gaining respect and cultural predominance, the socioeconomic conditions of the actual individuals within these groups were quickly deteriorating. The Neo-Liberal revolution of the 1980s led to a constant rise of economic inequality, specifically in the US and the UK but with a worldwide impact. The lower middle class was going bankrupt. The poorest, most of them from minority groups, were thrown under the bus.

The rise of the "Progressive" post-left doctrine and the associated identity politics hindered any attempt to form an effective left-wing coalition against the conservative-right attack on the working middle class. Socialistic and Social Democratic political struggle was always founded on class solidarity. When it disintegrated, as each identity group became self-absorbed, this strategy failed.

During the first two decades of the third millennium, whilst graduates of postmodern indoctrination grew up to hold influential positions, the post-left dogma spread from the academic circles to mainstream media and popular culture. Its fixation on group identity and culture war practically replaced all the classical left-wing agendas, both the humanistic and the socialistic. The left was conquered.

Concurrently, a similar process was taking place also on the right wing. The conservatives' political platforms were being overtaken or pushed aside by the much more radical populist right. Although the populists tried to align their agenda with the conservatives, their support base didn't really care much about neo liberal economics or about geopolitics. The majority were middle class people whose standard of living was deteriorating, and their petty bourgeoisie way of life threatened. They were looking for someone to blame, and there were two obvious scapegoats: lefty intellectuals and minorities. While the post-left was promoting the cultural fringe, people of traditional upbringing were becoming increasingly intimidated by it. Those who could at last stomach gay people were now asked to accept Trans. After finely coming to terms with racial equality, they were faced with affirmative action that put them in a disadvantage. And all these reforms were endorsed quite aggressively by the post-left controlled media and getting the support of the arrogant and privileged upper middle class. Populist politicians, who always had keen instincts for these sorts of things, jumped on this golden opportunity to instigate a culture war.

There is a caricature that became viral, in which three people sit around a table. One of them is a blue-collar working-class type; in front of  him a plate with a single cookie. The second is a person of color that appears to be an immigrant, sitting by an empty plate. The third is old and resembles the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner of many right-wing outlets. His plate is full of cookies. He is saying to the working-class guy: 'Careful mate... The foreigner wants your cookie!'. The typical populist-right method of gathering pollical support and deflecting opposition to its greedy predatory practices, is to find the poorest, most beaten group of people and blame everything bad on them. Immigrants are the easiest victims. Next in line are traditional scapegoats such as people of color, LGBTs, Muslims and Jews. Finaly, misogynistic propaganda can also be employed whenever the political opponent is a female.

All this is a battle proven tactic of the populist right since forever. The post-left agenda, however, by detaching itself from any relevant struggle for social equity and by hindering any chance of class solidarity, made the right-wing job quite straightforward. And the stronger the populist right became, the fiercest the culture war raged, and thus the post-left could call more of its own troops to arm. So, it came to be that these two adversary twins, the post-left and the populist-right, fed each other and assisted it in its campaign to hijack the traditional left and right platforms.

Still, humanism and the belief in universal moral values were very much alive up to the third decade of the new millennium. The fatal blow to the humanistic ideology as a dominant component of public sentiments was delivered by the most harmful of all the post-left inventions: postcolonialism.

Like several other destructive political ideologies, postcolonialism was developed originally from an authentic and justified criticism of modern society and its historical afflictions. Indeed, after enriching themselves by exploiting colonized nations and tribes, the European colonial powers pulled out, leaving in their wake devastation and chaos. Many current conflicts and crises worldwide can be traced back to colonial times.

Yet, as frequently happens, what started as legitimate and mostly accurate has been transmuted into the deranged. Complex historical and sociological circumstances were condensed into two simple principles: white man bad; violence is the answer. No more flower children for you! Get Charles Manson!

What really drove the postcolonial movement off the edge was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, another open sore from the English rule era. Ingenuously, one would expect that Israel would be praised as a prime example for an indigenous nation that manage to obtain its ancestral land back from an oppressive colonial power. However, the Jewish state was founded through war with local Arab population and the neighboring Arab countries. This war ended with a resounding Arab defeat, and many of the local Arab population were driven from their homes to become refugees.

Arabs were among the favorite victims cherished by the postcolonial movement. Ironically, it was Arabic colonialism that made Muslim Arabs the dominant population throughout the Levant and north Africa. But since advocates of postcolonialism only care about European colonialism, this historical fact made little difference.

What made thing increasingly worse in the eyes of the post-left was that Israel became, starting from the 1970s, USA's pet ally. And since most of Israel's government since then were right wing, it was easy to hate them. So, the post-left activists rewrote history to create a narrative that suited their preferences. In this narrative, the Jewish national movement, i.e., Zionism, is actually a plot of European Jews and European governments to invade a foreign land of the peaceful indigenous Palestinians, violently rob their lands and hold to it while killing anyone that opposes their evil rule. This revisionist historical tale had almost no connection to reality, but reality is but a weak rival to emotional convictions.

The fervent anti-Israeli crusade bore disastrous results for both Palestinians and Israelis. It encouraged Palestinian extremism, convinced them to abandon the peace process that started baring fruits in the 1990s and resort to violence in a war they could only lose. This, in turn, drove the Israelis toward the hardline right-wing leaders and triggered further escalation. As the anti-Israeli post-left propaganda became increasingly menacing and vicious, Islamic fundamentalist got more assured in their delusional fantasies of subjugating the Israelis by force, and the Israelis more antagonistic to the Palestinian imploration for liberty.

What had started as a moral campaign for that termination of the west-bank occupation and inauguration of a free Palestinian state, ended as a rallying against the existence of Israel and the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism, aka Zionism. Palestinian nationalism was good; Jewish nationalism was evil and colonialist, because Jews are, supposedly, just white Europeans, masquerading as indigenous. The post-left has finally made it all the way back to the antisemitic, racist far-right. The gun Frantz Fanon hang on the wall at the first act by promoting violent resistance against colonialists in order to, basically, empower the subjected natives, now fired its shot by providing a legitimacy to fascist fundamentalists to massacre innocent civilians, which were, absurdly, just another tribe of indigenous people.

Sometimes good intentions pave the way to hell. By forsaking natural, universal moral values and adopting a political theory tailored to make the oppressed, or the allegedly oppressed, feel good about themselves, the post-left finally hit rock bottom. Inheriting the postmodern belief that language creates reality, it implemented a jargon that dehumanizes anyone whose group identity conflicted with the praised Noble Savages. If you belong to the wrong tribe, you cannot do good, and your wellbeing doesn’t matter. If you belong to the right tribe, your every act is justified. And, to make matters worse, this extreme reactionary ideology called itself "progressive" and covered itself in a coat of sanctimonious moralistic rage. Slavers and Nazis at least knew deep down (or not so deep down) they were evil. But when you paint yourself as savior of the oppressed, you naturally can maintain a high opinion about yourself.

There are still quite a few people who believe in authentic left-wing principles and its humanistic values. Yet, the true liberal left has become deeply confused. The dogmatic and violent social intimidation of the post-left mob forced the soft-hearted liberals to take cover. Many caught the Stockholm Syndrome and are trying to fit their views into the "progressive" agenda. Unless they wake up and realize their movement had been hijacked, humanism will die as a relevant ideology. It is already in a critical condition.

[didmyownresearch]

This is not a political blog

...but there will be History, Sociology and Political Science in it.

Initially I was meaning to make it purely about Science and Philosophy. But, things being as they are, remaining aloof was starting to feel like playing the harp while Rome is burning. The world is sliding quickly downhill as stupid, cruel people outshouting any voice of reason and humanism. So, l'll try my best to make some small difference.