Social Prosecution

One way or another, they're gonna try to get ya

Originally published on February 4, 2019.

For the past few years, we have been seeing a tremendous increase in a phenomenon which I refer to as “social prosecution.” This has taken place as the Left finds itself in a position of increasing power over the culture and the means of cultural discourse (e.g. social media, flow of information on the internet, etc.).  Yet, the Left has not been able to establish more than a relative parity with the nominal Right in the formal political arena.  As a result, the Left has had to seek alternative means for punishing its enemies since they don’t have much ability to do so formally yet.

Before I proceed to the main discussion about social prosecution, I’d like to lay a little groundwork first.  It’s often said that politics is downstream from culture. In other words, as trends, assumptions, mores, and whatnot within a society’s cultural milieu begin to change, these values will begin to be reflected in the political realm after a bit of lag time.  However, an equally salient fact is that culture, in turn, is downstream from power – which is not to be confused with politics.

Power is the ability to shape or change your circumstances in a real way, one that is actually effective.  As a result of the Left’s long march through the institutions, they have gained significant (and in some cases total) control over most areas of information control and influence – the academy, entertainment, social media, journalism, and much more.  This allows them to alter the direction in which western cultures evolve, which then translates into political change on down the road.  That is an exercise of real power, no matter how silly we may be tempted to think Clown World is.  But, it’s necessarily a slow process.

We all know the Left would love to be able to persecute and destroy its opponents completely, if only it were in a position to be able to. We know this because that’s what the Left always does when it achieves political power. It even does this to the extent of cannibalising itself of those who are not the “right kind” of leftists, the sort of purity spiraling that was observed in the early portion of Solzhenitsin’s Gulag Archipelago, whereby the Bolsheviks were as quick to purge Social Democrats, Anarchists, and other leftists as they were those on the Right. It’s seen even today in the USA on a smaller scale in the form of intra-leftist fighting and virtue signaling between various intersectional special interest groups.

What we all need to understand is that when it comes to the Left, there is really no such thing as a “moderate leftist” or “left-leaning centrist.”  There are only leftists who cannot exercise the power they would like, and therefore cannot reveal their radicalness to the extent they would wish to, but who WILL do so as soon as they sense the opportunity. The default setting for the Left is permanent revolution, whether they are currently able to act on that impulse or not. This is why Cthulhu always swims left – apart from nominal rightist opposition (which, let’s face it, has been purposefully tepid in most of the West for over a generation), there really are no brakes checking the Left’s movement in that direction.

So what can the Left do when it finds itself in the position of having “soft” power (through control of institutions, opinion-shaping, etc.) such that it can influence the culture, but their ability to exercise political power has not “caught up” yet?

This is where social prosecution comes in. It is a technique that the Left uses as a “cheat code” to harm its enemies, even though it would seemingly have no formal power available to really be able to do so (through being restrained by residual constitutionalism, control of political offices by political enemies, etc.). It does so by playing to its strength – power over culture dissemination (which is not the same thing as culture creation, we should remember) and the flow of “social information” via social media, “woke capital,” and so forth. It uses these to create social circumstances in which those with the wrong attitudes, who express the wrong opinions, or are even merely representative of the wrong demographic or cultural idea, can be targeted (akin to Alinksy’s Rule 12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it”) and neutralised.

Keep in mind that this involves much more than “social disapproval” as has been seen in societies for time immemorial. With mere social disapproval, the target may find it annoying or psychologically hurtful, but ultimately there’s not much that a society that merely uses social disapproval can really do to the one being targeted – he or she can still live their life as a curmudgeon, willing to “buck the system” but still live more or less normally. Likewise, there is still the”social maturity” on the part of people to be willing to work and trade with people who they dislike or strongly disagree with.

The key word here is prosecution.  Prosecution – as any lawyer or legislator will tell you – involves the capacity to inflict real punishments upon the one who is successfully prosecuted, whether it be fines, jail time, bodily harm, or even death. This is where the Left’s recent behaviour comes into play and is why I say that its using a cheat code to get around their formal lack of political power.

The Left routinely uses all kinds of things like doxxing, deplatforming, etc. to harm those it targets.  The object is not mere social disapproval, but real harm to those it targets – loss of income through lost employment, loss of the means to participate in civil society through free speech venues, even physical harm through the loss of anonymity designed to allow antifas and other violent criminals the ability to commit actual violence against targets. In this way, the Left is able to inflict punishments that mimic or are similar in effect to those which would be inflicted by a government which formally prosecuted someone in a criminal or civil trial.  Lost income is lost income, whether it comes from a punitive fine or from being fired for saying the wrong thing online after your employer starts receiving threats. Whether the government executes you or some antifa fruitcake shoots you, you’re just as dead either way.

Obviously, their ultimate goal is to synchronise the informal capacity to inflict social prosecution with the formal ability to inflict actual prosecution, something which is becoming closer to reality in the many Western countries. The end game is, of course, the suppression of all dissent to the globohomogayplex agenda.  Ultimately, the Left wants the threat of social prosecution to become equivalent to that of actual prosecution, as would have been the case with Havel’s green grocer.

One of the points to Havel’s essay is that it describes a “post-totalitarian” social situation in which the government doesn’t have to come in and arrest you for wrongthink because the citizenry is supposed to be so cowed that it voluntarily yields itself to rightthink.  The green grocer, if he refused to display the Party’s banner, would face social prosecution – he’d lose his job, his children couldn’t go to good schools anymore, he would be stripped of his ability to participate fully in his own society,

“Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth…

“The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children’s access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the post-totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.“

The green grocer is not punished by secret police or torturers – he is punished by his fellow citizens who are also, likely, unconvinced of the truth of the Party slogans but who fear the social consequences should they speak out as well.

This is the situation the Left has worked assiduously to create in Western societies today, even without formal access to all the levers of political power.  It is why companies whose purposes ought to be the production of goods or services instead spend so much time and money proving how “woke” they are with support for LGBT or ethnic minorities or whatever else.  It’s why their employees can be fired for refusing to wear rainbow ribbons.  The chances are that most executives and managers wouldn’t otherwise really care about these issues strongly enough to punish someone for them, but they themselves are too weak to resist the flow.

So what can be done? The easy answer is to lash out, to strike back.  This is not very feasible since right-wing activism (almost) always fails. Instead of being effective, this would merely give the Left propaganda points and would be a good way to generate sympathy for the Left, accelerating their move from informal to formal political power.

While difficult, the obvious answer is to try to stymie them at the source of their ability to socially prosecute their enemies. This means finding ways to undermine the soft power that allows them access to cultural control.  Hollywood, Big Music, Big TV – all of these are sources of this power.  It’s not enough to simply tune out for yourself – ways need to be discovered (or recovered, as the case may be) for encouraging this to be done en masse.  In many cases, such as with woke capital, more punitive measures which actively seek to remove “woke” individuals from converged institutions will need to be implemented, even if these themselves seem “authoritarian” (which isn’t really a bad thing anywise).

Ultimately, there are no quick and easy answers that won’t involve a lot of protracted fighting at the cultural and institutional levels. The short-term goal is to secure enough victories that the ability of the Left to gain further political power is hampered, which is why concerns about demographics and things like the Wall and other means of preventing the Left from importing more voters for itself are so acutely important, even if immigration isn’t really a topic you personally find interesting.

The long-term goal has to be to roll back progressive control over the institutions of soft power through which they influence the culture and enforce doxxing, deplatforming, etc. This may require political intervention in some instances (e.g. friendly state legislatures asserting their control over state universities).  In others, it may require efforts at effecting the complete destruction and replacement of leftist-converged institutions, sort of “get woke, go broke” on a grand scale.  At any rate, any and all efforts should be made to terminate the cultural and social power of the Left before it can reach the “political singularity” that it seeks.