Leftists Are In A Purity Death Spiral
It seems almost impossible to describe this very simple concept to an increasingly large percentage of leftists: If you disagree with someone’s opinion on [Political Position A], but agree with them on [Political Position B], you can still work with them to make [Political Position B] happen, without compromising your stance on [Political Position A]. This is called forming a political coalition, a temporary alliance to achieve a common goal. Importantly, you must understand that a political party is not and will never be a cohesive collection of people who all agree with each other. It is literally impossible because a political party is so huge and diverse.
Diversity means a diversity of opinions and takes. Due to the existence of an average person being a fallacy, every single person you know is statistically likely to have at least one really weird or messed up opinion about something - they just aren’t telling you about it. If you’re lucky, it’s about something you don’t care about, but the more purity tests you have, the more lines you draw, the more statistically impossible it becomes for anyone to actually pass them all. This applies to any large group - no matter how “cohesive” a particular group seems, statistically it must be formed through the alliance of many different smaller subgroups, recursively. This recursion usually continues until you reach a group with a couple hundred people, which is the size of an average human tribe, and the largest socially cohesive unit that is possible. Every larger group is, in actuality, multiple subgroups that have come together, each with slightly different views.
Every “bad opinion” you refuse to engage with is another line in the sand. It cuts you off from potential allies. It shrinks the size of your coalition.
Eventually, you enter a purity spiral, where almost no one can satisfy your demand for moral purity. Everyone has made mistakes. Everyone has bad takes on things sometimes. You cannot affect change if your social group has excluded the entire rest of humanity from it:
This purity spiral has strangled so many leftist spaces that it has become a well-known problem. I see people complaining about it constantly, in many different places. They’re scared and frustrated, because every time anyone has a disagreement over something, it’s treated as you being a potential right-wing infiltrator trying to destroy everything, instead of an honest disagreement. This happens because leftists often cannot concieve of someone who is “morally good” having such an “obviously bad take”, except they don’t consider that maybe the problem isn’t as obvious to everyone else. This happens way more often than you think! Why? Because humans are incredibly diverse! But instead of celebrating this diversity of ideas, the left has cultivated a callout culture problem that severely punishes any deviance from their idea of Moral Purity, which itself is inconsistent and depends on who stumbled on your old tweets.
This kind of behavior is incredibly counterproductive. It creates a low-trust environment where everyone is looking over their shoulders, where people are constantly worried about associating with someone who did something vaguely questionable five years ago. An environment ruled by fear is not one that engenders cooperation. In fact, it does the opposite, because a social environment where people are constantly terrified of internet hate mobs is the perfect environment for fascism to flourish. The left did this to itself. It continues to reject allies that don’t adhere to a subgroup’s specific set of beliefs, which are all mutually incompatible with the others. Nuclear power, scientific research, economic systems, voting systems, guns, crypto, AI, you name it, we have a purity test for it. Leftists think this is keeping their movement “pure” when in reality it’s keeping their movement from actually stopping the fascists.
Refusing to work with anyone else who doesn’t satisfy your particular moral purity test isn’t “standing for something”, it simply means you are doing the fascists work for them. An old poem comes to mind:
First, they came for the cryptobros, and I did not speak out—
Because cryptocurrencies are evil, and the world is better off without them.
Then, they came for the ai artists, and I did not speak out—
Because ai slop is evil, and the world is better off without those that debase art.
Then, they came for the gun enthusiasts, and I did not speak out—
Because we needed better gun control anyway, we're better off without them.
Then, they came for me—
and there was no one left to stop them.
Let’s go through some common objections:
"that's not fair, the original poem wasn't about people who were evil! You've used evil people, as if they would help me!"
Yes, that’s the fucking point. They will, in fact, help you, in the right context, under the right circumstances. Refusing that help is suicide.
"I don't care if it's suicide! Unlike you, I'm willing to die for what I believe in!"
Then go ahead and die. You can take your moral purity with you, because the fascists will shoot you all the same. Purity tests are just a convenient way for you to sabotage any effective resistance we could have mobilized against fascists, and once they’ve killed everyone who disagrees with them, the only people left on the planet will be racist psychopaths, and your moral purity will have succeeded in creating a worse future for everyone. You will sway nobody, because you worked with nobody. You vilified every other potential ally, and so they will simply let you die, and you’ll take your morals to the grave.
What’s frustrating about this particular claim is that it is usually a complete fabrication. Almost nobody is actually this dumb. If the fascists start hunting down gay people and a cryptobro offers to smuggle you into another country to save your life, you’re gonna accept the help even if you hate cryptocurrencies, because you don’t wanna die. The thing is, even if it requires a life-threatening situation to force some people to begrudgingly accept help from those they don’t like, nothing ever fundamentally changed - the cryptobro never hated gay people in the first place! They would have been willing to help you the entire time, but you were too obstinate to accept the help until you had a gun pointed at your head!
"If that's the case, then humanity deserves to go extinct"
If this is your honest belief, you either need therapy or you’re some kind of hardcore transhumanist (in which case, 𝓯𝓲𝓷𝓮, 𝓘 𝓰𝓾𝓮𝓼𝓼). Either way, leave the rest of us alone while we try to actually fix things instead of participate in a doomer death cult. The conservatives have enough of those already.
Now, if anyone is still here, let’s walk through the steps required to build a coalition that enshrines trans rights and ends the Gaza genocide, followed by forming a new coalition that bans generative AI, without compromising any morals in the process. First, we must recognize that active genocide and stripping human rights are higher priority than most other issues we care about. This requires internalizing that, while we can find many allies willing to help us end the genocide in Palestine, many of them will have some pretty shitty opinions on things! You’ll have to put up with:
- People who like cryptocurrencies
- People who like capitalism
- People who don’t like [your preferred economic system]
- People who like the military
- Yes, people who like AI too.
- Even people who disagree with you about [that other thing you really care about]
All of these groups are potential allies. You must internalize that you are only working with these groups to achieve one particular result, and that is where your loyalty ends. You are not chaining yourself to cryptobros, or ai artists, or gun nuts, or libertarians. You are only recognizing that, despite the fact that these people have some pretty terrible beliefs sometimes, we all agree that genocide is bad and stripping trans people of human rights is also bad.
Now, the alliance with people who like the military requires using nuance. Yes, I know twitter has apparently make it impossible for people to use nuance, but you need to understand that “people who like the military” is an enormous section of the populace, so there are going to be a lot of subgroups within it. The people who simply believe the strong should rule the weak are the fascists, which are the ones you can never work with. The people who believe that violence should be used to defend your values and never against civilians, on the other hand, will likely be strongly against any kind of genocide.
Use this fact to drive a wedge between the two subgroups, separating out the ones that support you while causing in-fighting that weakens the ones against your position. Once you’ve separated the two subgroups, it won’t be hard to show that the current attacks on trans people is preparing for a genocide as well, which will make it much easier to convince your new allies to also oppose the current attacks on trans groups, even if they didn’t previously care that much. By maximizing the number of people you get on your side (the side of “we shouldn’t let Israel murder innocent people” and “the attacks on trans rights is a precursor to genocide”) you can finally become a real, viable threat to the democrats, who don’t seem to have any actual values anymore, so I can’t actually list them.
Now that we’ve replaced the current democrats in office, we build a coalition for banning generative AI, leveraging our previous work. We’ll start with the cryptobros. Yes, I know you hate the cryptobros, and sometimes it’s for a good reason. Now it’s time to use one of those reasons, by driving another wedge between subgroups by identifying the ones who support generative AI versus the ones who don’t care one way or the other. This is easier if you can express exactly why you object to generative AI - even if you have many reasons, picking one (like it’s impact on artistic livelihoods and worker rights in general) gives you a sharper cognitive knife to work with, metaphorically speaking. Knowing exactly what you want makes you less vulnerable to ideas a charismatic person says are good that don’t actually further your goals.
Then you need to go to the AI people. Your goal here is not to throw the entire group under the bus, but to once again leverage nuance to drive apart individual subgroups. When a previously cohesive group realizes it doesn’t actually agree about everything, the group as a whole is greatly weakened. There are many subgroups within AI that only care about AI that has actual research value, like folding proteins or identifying breast cancer or detecting blood cancers. These groups would be happy to support targeted legislation that bans generative AI, like LLMs and image generators, especially if you focus on a specific harmful aspect, like AI being used for misinformation (many AI researchers legitimately want to help society, not harm it). By acquiring allies from some of the AI supporters, without attacking the entire concept of AI as a whole, you’ve shattered their group coherence and greatly weakened the proponents of generative AI.
The other groups likely have a random smattering of support or opposition to generative AI. Pulling in ones already against it will be easy, but the majority of the groups likely don’t care - your job is to pull them to your side, and the best way to do this is by trying to find something they care about that is negatively impacted by AI, like their jobs. Remember that the opposing groups will also be recruiting people to their side, so it is crucial you find a sharp reason, a specific thing that aligns with something that subgroup does care about. It is going to be rare that you can make anyone else care about every single issue you care about, because people can’t care about everything, but if you successfully accomplished something with them before, they might find it prudent to listen to you instead of the other side.
In some cases, if there isn’t an obvious shared value, you may need to offer them something, like joining a different coalition to address one of their key issues. This still doesn’t require you to sacrifice any of your morals - you simply need to find an issue that you both agree on, like universal healthcare or implementing UBI or treating veterans better. In exchange for you working with them in the future on one of those issues, they might be willing to side with you on an issue they essentially have no opinion on. It is not necessary to convince everyone in the entire world to share your exact political opinions, only for them to agree to help you.
Furthermore, after you manage to ban generative AI and you start working on passing UBI, you can go right back to the generative AI supporters. All you need to do is point out that it will be much easier for them to unban generative AI if some form of UBI is passed, and they’ll be willing to help you pass UBI even though you previously worked against them. Despite your past differences, it is still in everyone’s best interest to work together, and no one has to compromise on their morals. You can still oppose generative AI even after it’s proponents help you pass UBI. Nobody needs to compromise on their morals because fundamentally opposed goals can still share some values. It is crucial to recognize when someone you disagree with shares your values in another area of society, and work with them to further that specific value.
This is largely how any functioning political system works. However, leftist circles keep getting hijacked by moral puritans who insist that even working with anyone who has ever done anything slightly bad will somehow “corrupt” the movement and everyone in it will magically turn into witches democrats. This isn’t really possible, because the democrats don’t actually do anything right now, and even worse, it could be a propaganda tactic. The FBI deliberately used similar tactics against the civil rights movement in the 1960s: they would send inflammatory anonymous letters falsely accusing an african-american organization of misusing funds. These were literally the period equivalent of our modern social media callout posts, except now callout posts can come from astroturfed accounts that seem like real people. All these moral puritans insisting that we shouldn’t “compromise our morals” by cooperating with other people might just be Russian agents, or real people manipulated by Russian agents.
Regardless, whether the moral purity panics that repeatedly consume leftist circles are real or astroturfed by Russian propaganda, they cannot be allowed to continue. If leftists want a snowball’s chance in hell of actually stopping the fascists, they must learn how to cooperate with their fellow human beings instead of demanding moral purity that simply serves to destroy their own movement.
