Hit Where It Hurts

And, "The System's Perfected Trick"

With the recent passing of Theodore Kaczynski from this world, it is fitting to write something relating two of his essays to American politics. With the entry of Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence into the 2024 Presidential race, and the indictment of former President Trump, the loci of power in America will reveal themselves through power’s effects soon enough. How can we hit power where it hurts? These are the places where “the system” “will not back off, in which it will fight to the finish”, as Ted K. puts it in his essay “Hit Where It Hurts.” It never hurts the system to attack it in terms of its own values, because the system will simply reorient its activities to realign with those values without a strategic defeat.

Therefore the system cannot be attacked on the basis of civil rights; that is, based on the idea that the current iteration of civil rights is not true to the real ideal of civil rights because contemporary civil rights is unfair to white people. Civil rights are absolutely fundamental to the system, so the system cannot be defeated by trying to force it to adhere more completely to its own core pillars of power; rather, the concept of civil rights must be attacked as something that is bad. If white people, or heterosexual people, or males try to attack the system from within the frame of civil rights, they only help the system. Rather, these people must attack the Civil Rights Act of 1964 directly, because the system cannot compromise on the idea that civil rights for all is an intrinsic good. As Ted K. directly addresses it:

If you push victimization issues (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, or poverty) you are not challenging the system’s values and you are not even forcing the system to back off or compromise. You are directly helping the system.

This leads us to the idea of “putting the woke away,” which is what Governor DeSantis seems to be primarily running on. The system is willing to compromise on the excesses of the far left because the system really is stretching the frame of civil rights and it needs white people to take their place within the system and do productive work. The relationship the system wants with white people is similar to what Ted K. writes on women and feminism:

Women's participation in the business and technical world integrates them and their families better into the System. Their talents are of service to the System in business and technical matters.

The system wants to avoid having civil rights attacked. It would much prefer to rejuvenate civil rights. This is clearly revealed to us simply due to the fact that there is so much pressure from power to do so. The combination of Elon Musk and Governor DeSantis and their crusade against “wokeness” tells us that the entire Pride phenomenon is not a critical area. It’s not where you’d want to fire the “proton torpedos” to destroy their Death Star.

On the other hand, Elon Musk and Governor DeSantis are both in support of the war in the Ukraine; Musk directly through his Starlink technology, and DeSantis through his rhetoric. The only person in politics who seems to be starkly anti-war is President Trump, who, as it happens, is being attacked in unprecedented ways to apparently keep him out of office.

The people in power do not actually care about how gay Russia is. The only thing they care about is their own hegemony. The war in the Ukraine serves these primary functions to this end:

1. It ensures that the dominant political system of the world will be a Sino-American managed economy with tight controls on the freedom of movement of economic goods and services.

2. It ties Europe and Great Britain deeply into total dependence on the NATO alliance system, which is simply to say that they are virtually entirely dependent on the United States for war-making, and will thus not disturb the Sino-American system, and neither will Russia.

Russia has demonstrated that it cannot be defeated economically, at least not on any suitable timetable. It cannot be attacked directly for obvious reasons. The only way to destroy Russia is on the field of battle in one of the last places in the world where a major war between west and east can be fought without necessarily going nuclear, and that is in the Ukraine. Russia can only be defeated in a slowly escalated, drawn out conflict that will collapse its political system and make it a junior partner in any relationships it forms with other countries, including Germany, China, India, Brazil, Iran, and other potentials. Russia does not necessarily have to “win” the conflict in order for the American ruling class to lose. Since this conflict must last for some time to grind down Russia, if President Trump simply negotiates a peace, the opportunity to destroy Russia will be gone, and Russia will probably end up even more powerful than if the conflict had not happened at all. This would be totally unacceptable to the system.

Therefore, we can see that there are two serious issues which must be attacked in different ways:

On the one hand, populist energy, as it re-emerges, must be ignited at the feet of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such that the system is denied the opportunity to defuse that energy safely. On the other hand, the right must agitate for an end to the war in the Ukraine as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the system has surpassed Ted K.’s assessment, and the imperfection in its “neatest trick” has been since perfected. In his essay “The System’s Neatest Trick,” Ted K. writes:

On the other hand, in certain contexts the System itself finds it useful or necessary to resort to brutal, aggressive methods to achieve its own objectives. The most obvious example of such methods is warfare. In wartime the System relies on agitation propaganda: In order to win public approval of military action, it plays on people's emotions to make them feel frightened and angry at their real or supposed enemy.

In this situation there is a conflict between integration propaganda and agitation propaganda. Those people in whom the cuddly values and the aversion to violence have been most deeply planted can't easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.

Here the System's trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been "rebelling" all along in favor of the values of integration propaganda, continue to do so during wartime. They oppose the war effort not only because it is violent but because it is "racist," "colonialist," "imperialist," etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.

The typical activists who were not normally aligned with warfare in the same way that they agitate in favor of Pride are now fully on board with imperialist, brutal warfare. Pride and Pentagon are fully aligned. This does offer some opportunity, however, because it gives the Right the chance to champion opposition to civil rights and war on its own terms, completely eschewing leftists of all stripes; but it also shows us just how much more consolidated the system is now than it was when Ted K. was writing, which is why the specific target of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 must be vectored in on directly, as time is short and the critical areas to hit where it hurts must be hit hard.