You can observe a lot by just watching, as Yogi Berra said.  History is full of examples to learn from, if one were to attempt getting a revolutionary movement off the ground (and I, of course, advocate no such thing).  The Commies, for example, have much to teach us about organization, tactics, and above all, doctrine (“revolutionary theory,” they’d call it).  But, as models, they have one huge drawback: Tradition.  Communism in Russia and Asia rests on a thousand years of tradition; it seems to fit the peasant soul, such that they’re already practicing “naive communism” long before the Kommissars show up.

There is a revolutionary movement that managed to capture a large, advanced industrial nation, and it’s worth studying in detail.  Alas, this is the Internet, so the merest mention of this group brings out the lunatics.  So let’s call them the “Cat Fanciers.”  Ready?

I’m confident that the Ten (I think that’s what we’re up to now) Regular Readers follow me, but for drive-bys, I’m going to put this in all caps.  Please read it as many times as you need to, until you get it: THE DOCTRINE OF THE “CAT FANCIERS” DOESN’T MATTER.  AT ALL.

Let me repeat that: DOCTRINE DOESN’T MATTER.

The chief Cat Fancier himself didn’t worry about doctrine until very late in the game.  He started out, in fact, as a spy from military intelligence, assigned to dig up dirt on the group he ended up leading.  We’re only concerned with movement-building techniques here.  I have zero desire to discuss who did what during the War, or who should or shouldn’t have been sentenced to what at Nuremberg, and I sure as hell don’t want to discuss the details of the War itself.  If you want to cosplay as the commander of 5th Panzer, making little “vroom! vroom!” noises while steering your Tonka trucks around Mom’s basement as you recreate the Battle of Kursk, go nuts.  Just do it elsewhere, please.

In the early days, the Cat Fanciers had two major objectives.  The first — “destabilizing the ruling regime” — gets all the press, even though the Regime was doing an excellent job of that on its own.  Objective Two is the important one: Giving angry, disillusioned young men a sense of purpose.

Well into 1919, most Germans didn’t think they’d lost the War.  It wasn’t going so great at the Front at the time of the Armistice, but that — it seemed obvious at the time — was due to the chaos in the rear.  Most ex-soldiers, certainly including the head Cat Fancier, thought that the eventual peace would be equitable and honorable.  Had we known what was in store for us at Versailles, many if not most of them thought, we’d have kept fighting, Armistice be damned.  Better an end with horror than a horror without end.

That was the Cat Fanciers’ appeal.  While every mainstream party was tainted by appeasing the Allies, every other “fringe” party was explicitly for pie-in-the-sky stuff.  The “Right” (used only for convenience) wanted a clear impossibility (bringing back the Kaiser).  The Left wanted Communism, and while the Commies’ doctrines could be pretty appealing, they seemed to carry with them absorption by the Soviet Union.

Exaggerating just a little for effect, we can say that the Cat Fanciers, of all the parties, mainstream or fringe, wanted to move Germany forward, as Germany.  A vote for any of the mainstream parties was a vote for knuckling under — to the Allies, to the Vatican, to “International Finance Capital” (which, it’s important to note, meant Great Britain and especially America, i.e. the architects of Versailles, NOT you-know-who).  A vote for the fringe-Right meant throwing your vote away, as the Kaiser wasn’t coming back, and a vote for the Left, fringe or mainstream, meant reducing proud Germans to mere proletarians… whose bosses were in Moscow.

It was a powerful message.  Imagine the plight of millions of young men, who wasted the best years of their lives fighting for something that they now realize was a lie.  Worse, it was always a lie — Industrialists (again, and crucially: more America than you-know-who) cooked up the war, and got fat off it while poor boys got gassed at the Front.  And now, those same frauds are in politics, making noises about how we should let Washington, London, or Moscow tell us how to live.

So here’s this organization, led by one of our own, that promises all the camaraderie of the Front, and takes care of you in tough times.  The Cat Fanciers spent vast sums (proportional to their tiny budgets, anyway), helping out comrades in need.  Indeed the Kitten Patrol, their large, highly visible organization of street-brawling headbusters, would often put down-and-out guys on the payroll for a while, just so they could feed their families.  In a chaotic situation, where nobody knows where the next meal’s coming from (or even what the money’s worth from hour to hour), these guys take care of their own.

That’s why you need an organization.

Part II soon.

Since we’re all just doing hypothetical, theoretical spitballin’ here, let’s open the floor.  Let’s say a hypothetical group, not us, were to stage a meetup, further to organizing Fight Club / Project Mayhem-style.  On D day at H hour, we’ll all go out in the streets wearing an all-white Pats baseball hat with an upside-down American flag pin on the brim* (such that people who live in Greater Boston etc. don’t accidentally start blabbing about Our Thing to unsuspecting fans).  We’ll loiter at the busiest shopping area within a ten block radius of our houses for an hour.  When you recognize one of your own, give him the “OK” sign.  (Be subtle-but-clear about it).  Then find a way to surreptitiously exchange contact info — maybe carry a business card that you can “accidentally” drop as you pass — then check back here for further instructions.

[Again, don’t actually do this.  This is just a thought experiment.  We all love Big Brother here].

It seems we’ve already hit an insurmountable problem.  Even if we assume that Rotten Chestnuts isn’t under surveillance by the Feds (and lately I’ve been noticing a floral delivery truck marked Flowers By Irene circling my block), we’ve just transmitted the key piece of information in the clear.  Even if we communicate in unbreakable cipher from here on out, at some point you have to transmit the instructions for picking up your secret decoder ring in plain text…

Once you get the code, though, the problems persist.  I assume any such group would be an “organization” only in the loosest sense, but even there, someone has to be Tyler Durden, keeping track of what all the Fight Clubs within Project Mayhem are doing.  Remember, the key to this whole (entirely hypothetical!!!) thing is that everything it does — everything — is 100% perfectly straight-up LEGAL.  (One of Tyler Durden’s top priorities would be to get some crack lawyers into the Club).  Tyler would need to be able to track activity, and enforce discipline if necessary.  In other words, there would need to be some loose group communication, if only to keep track of things.

And as the movement grew, the need for coordination would increase.  I’ve already suggested a way to keep in touch — a fake (or hell, even a real) discussion board.  I suggested a “pickup artist” community, as they’re already eyeballs deep in conspiratorial lingo, but anything sufficiently specialized and dorky will do.  A baseball site would probably do the trick (VORP! WHIP! BABIP!  It sounds like Batman fighting the Riddler back in the Sixties).  The idea is that you can communicate in all-but-plain text, piggybacking on their jargon.  Look for posts by “Hubert Q. Fakename” after 12/2/2018 (I assume it’d be easy to go back and fake time stamps, such that Hubert looks like a longtime poster?  Software people, please help).

Which raises another problem.  I assume that piggybacking on existing jargon would fool search algorithms (again, where my comp-sci brothers at?), but it’s still hosted on a commercial site, and people have to log in with IP addresses, user names, etc.  I know there are ways around this — TOR and whatnot — but a) I’m sure TOR itself was developed with some back doors, and b) more importantly, you need people tech savvy enough to use this kind of thing.  I’m not, and I doubt most kids are.  (Remember, the key word in any mass movement is “mass.”  Meaning you’re dealing with the dead center of the bell curve.  If most people are idiots, then what does that say about our membership roster?).  Everything would have to be 100% plausibly deniable, without your average poster realizing it.

[While I’m sure it’s possible to set up some kind of super-secure, ultra-encrypted server in a secret lair somewhere, that would be a big neon sign for the Feds.  Setting up a home server in her goddamn bathroom was actually the smartest part of Hillary Clinton’s whole caper — surely the Media-certified Smartest Woman in the World wouldn’t be so stupid as to do that, so nobody bothered to look.  She botched it, naturally, but the initial idea was pretty clever].

Last, and most important, are the face-to-face meetings.  Intimidation — completely legal intimidation — is the whole point, and that requires visibility.  The Left’s greatest advantage is that they can do this in the clear, under their own names — it’s not a crime to say “gosh, it sure would be a pity if someone doxxed you.” It’s not a crime to retweet it.  And that’s how they get you.  I’d suffer zero penalties, legal or social, if I did that openly, under my own name, as a Left-winger, targeting a right-winger.  It’s not a crime for us to do it, either, but we all know that we’d immediately put ourselves in the crosshairs of every liberal busybody in every government organization nationwide (which is to say, pretty much all of them).

This is why it’s critical to make the uniform — the ballcap or whatever it hypothetically is, theoretically — a fashion thing before making Fight Club’s existence known.  That’s also why it’s important to choose an obvious variant of something already popular.  Who knows, maybe that group of pissed-off young guys is just the local Pat fan club, and the team just lost?  What are you going to do, haul every Chad and Stacy from Local U down to the police station for a chat?  Get ready for a flood of phone calls from pissed off administrators, teachers, and parents!

And with that, you’re right back to the start — how do we even make ourselves known to each other (theoretically), without blowing OpSec all to hell in the first five minutes?

I have no answers.  I’m pulling all this straight out of my ass as I type (and it’s all a thought experiment anyway).  I’m sure it’s covered in Spycraft 101 at CIA school, but unless you’ve got the manuals (or, better yet, firsthand experience) I don’t think that’d do us much good.  Plus this is the Internet, where 1 in every 5 guys is a ninja paladin Green Beret who got kicked out of SEAL Team Six for being too badass; nobody would believe you anyway.  I know a few of you are comp-sci types, so you could probably knock together a solution for the middle stages, but the “getting to know you” part seems hopeless in the modern urban surveillance environment.

Suggestions?

*Yes, you will probably look like a dork, especially if you’re past a certain age.  And yes, all-white anything makes your butt look big.  What’s more important, saving America or looking cool?

The late, great David Stove once said,

There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

By “scarcely any” he of course meant “none.”¹  People get all hot and bothered about the word “transcendental,” I suspect, because lots of us think other people use it as secret code for J-E-S-U-S.²  But it isn’t.  The transcendental is just a “lunatic belief…to which [we] attach great importance.”  If you’re not sure what yours is, fill in the blank:

It’s just a _____.

Everyone has something to put in the blank such that, if someone said it to you, you’d sock them on the jaw.  Atheists are the most fun meta-example.  Tell an atheist that hey, it’s great that you’ve got 1001 irrefutable proofs that there’s no Invisible Sky Fairy, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter a bit — if all we are is dust in the wind, dude, then our illusions are actually more valuable, because otherwise Camus is right and philosophy’s only real problem is suicide.  You first, Cheeto-breath.  Atheism is just another teenage fad.  You’ll grow out of it, just like you grew out of being a goth and a metalhead and a skater and the seventeen other things you were sophomore year.

And so on.  Your teenage Libertarian — otherwise so calm and reasonable — will break down crying if you tell him that The Smiths are “just a band.”  Tell a Packers fan that football is “just a game” and watch what happens.  Tell the guy who’s doing twenty-to-life that those Air Jordans were “just sneakers.”  See what I mean?  We don’t want to believe that people can find transcendental meaning in a pair of sneakers, but 1200 homicides a year say otherwise.

The fastest route to transcendence, though — and by far the most consequential — is through politics.  A successful revolutionary movement is just a cult writ large, and revolutionaries damn well know it.  Why do you think Lenin created a cabinet-level Ministry of Education — complete with Enlightenment Commissar! — to proclaim that The Workers are the source of all that is good and vital in the world?  And he wasn’t a patch on Heinrich Himmler, whose neo-pagan fantasias would be awesomely kitsch if they weren’t so terrifying.  We can infer a general rule here:

A successful revolutionary movement must offer

1. A transcendent goal, and
2. Transcendent experience.

The first without the second is your basic New Year’s Resolution — you think about how great life would be if you were to drop 20 pounds, but since the future benefit is only a fantasy and hauling your sweaty, hungry ass up the stairmaster is reality, most New Year’s Resolutions don’t make it past January 4.  The second without the first is your basic rock concert — it’s fun to get drunk and high and half-naked with 20,000 of your new best friends, but it’s back to the office on Monday.

It doesn’t have to be explicit, and it sure as hell doesn’t need to make sense.  The clowns who shoot each other over sneakers almost certainly can’t articulate why that makes sense to them, any more than Packers fans can explain why they stand shirtless in subzero weather for three hours.  Indeed, the Left got where it is, I argue, simply by romanticizing college.

Betcha didn’t see that coming!

College sells itself as both 1 and 2.  The transcendent goal is, of course, “a good job,” which if you remember your own adolescence is entirely hypothetical at that point.  But it’s also the whole “going off to college” thing — going to school, getting the gear, giving your parents the “College Mom” bumper sticker at Christmas.  Why do you think NCAA football still exists?  As eggheads outside the ivory tower always point out, only a handful of programs make money.  Not to mention all that toxic masculinity!!!  Football is marketing — that’s it.  My old employer, Flyover State, made it the cornerstone of the campus experience, even though the team last won a bowl game in Nineteen Seventy Never.  A whole bunch of kids around there took it for granted that they’d go on to be Flyover State Fightin’ Deplorables when they graduated high school, just like Mom and Dad (and these days, often Grandma and Grandpa too).

Which is also the “transcendent experience” part.  I don’t know about you, but I started missing college by about the fourth time my alarm rang at zero-dark-thirty and I had to haul my suited, necktied ass down to the cubicle for another eight hours of the rat race.  By the end of my first month in The Real World, I’d forgotten all the shitty parts of college and could only recall the good times.  By the end of the second month, The Good Times had acquired their own capital letters.  Remember how great it was to be able to roll out of bed at 2:30 in the afternoon?  The endless nights of cheap beer and easy girls?  All the afternoons lazing around the frat house with Chugs and Dudester and Munchie, solving all the world’s problems over some cool tunes and righteous bud?  Me neither, but by the time I had to file my first income tax returns I could swear all of that stuff happened, like, all the time.

That’s how they get you.  Because, of course, the radical Leftist politics were always there, steady white noise, like your Mom’s heartbeat in the womb.  You may not remember anything specific — in fact, they’re counting on it — but you remember the gist of it.  Quick: What did you learn in English Lit 101, all those years ago?  “Uhhhh…. something something Shakespeare oppresses women.”  How about HIST 201, Colonial America?  “Errr….. Harriet Tubman?  No, wait, Crispus Attucks!  Also something something genocide of the noble Native Americans.  And slavery.”  How about MATH 101?  “Something something algebra is racist.  Also sexist.”

Any successful revolutionary movement must focus on the revolutionary experience.  Fights over whether we should all wear white Patriots hats  — or should we wear hats at all, or do they have to be Patriots hats, and does white make my butt look big? — are all fine and good, but without the experience, it’s just fashionista crap.

The point is meeting people — “male bonding,” if you must.  We can all prance around dressed like Tinkerbell, Queen of the Fairies, for all I care.  You build a movement by giving people an experience.  It doesn’t have to be the whole Leopard Lodge, Grand Poobah deal — shouldn’t be, for obvious OpSec reasons — but it has to be something more than just grousing on the Internet.  Wearing a hat — or a fez, or a Tinkerbell costume — is only a conversation starter, a wink and a nod, a way to let other people know you’re in the know.  It’s the same as wearing college logo gear to the grocery store.  “Oh, you’re a Fightin’ Deplorable, too?”

Being in #TheRealResistance is, by definition, a bonding experience.  The trick is to plausibly deniably let everyone know you’re in it.  It’s no Big Rivalry Game, but it’ll do.

^{1. though I suspect Stove, who was not without intellectual vanity, gave himself a pass.}

^{2. Stove was one of them.}

One of the keys to understanding egghead psychology — insofar as it can be understood — is the concept of agency.  It means “the ability to meaningfully influence events.”  Brown people, obviously, don’t have it, as they’re forever getting colonized / exploited / murdered by cops as they’re holding their hands up to show that they’re harmless gentle giants walking back from their Advanced Calculus classes on their way to mentor gay disabled Cub Scouts.  But here’s the thing: White people don’t have it, either.  In fact, no one does.

Consider the British Raj.  This should be the paradigm case of eeeevil White people sticking it to noble, helpless brown people, and indeed, it sure looks that way on the surface.  There’s an entire academic discipline, Subaltern Studies, that exists only to dredge up new Subcontinental grievances.  But if you look a little closer….

How the hell did 200,000 White folks, max, hold down a native population in the hundreds of millions?  That question has baffled the History biz for decades.  Even those of us who resisted the compulsory enstupidation of K-thru-college education tend to wonder at it.  The answer — are you ready? — is so simple, so obvious, that it’s right there in our faces, and only loooong indoctrination, by the entire culture, could make us miss it:

The natives don’t think of themselves as The Natives.

It’s a category error.  If you’ve ever been to India… hell, if you’ve ever even looked at a map of India, you’ll notice that the place is huge.  It’s got hundreds, probably thousands, of distinct ethnic groups, each following their own customs and speaking their own language (India has, sez Wiki, “1635 rationalised mother tongues, 234 identifiable mother tongues and 22 major languages” as of 2001, the last official census data released).  The “official” language, Hindi, is spoken by less than half the country (and it’s Hindi-lite; the real thing is spoken by about 25%, which is probably somewhere close to the number of English speakers.  The problem with trying to learn a Subcontinental language, I’m told by people who’ve done it, is that everyone you meet wants to practice their English on you).

How do you convince an “Indian” from Bangalore to obey you, even to the point of fighting other “Indians” from Delhi?  Simple: Point out that Delhi is a thousand miles away, they speak a different language there, practice a different religion… It’s the same way you get a Frenchman to fight a Russian, or a Scotsman to fight an Englishman.  And that’s how the British did it.  It was really that easy — well into the 19th century, the “British” were just another political group, to be allied with, fought against, or ignored, as the situation dictated.

Race didn’t matter much until the Mutiny, and even there, the best explanation for “British” victory isn’t race, but politics.  The British thought of themselves as “The British,” all right — a small, easily identifiable minority, under real and constant threat — but “the natives” were what they always were: A loose collection of wildly different peoples.  The British had simple, straightforward war aims: The return to the status quo antebellum, which they could describe in exquisite detail.  They could also woo reluctant rebels back with detailed, implementable promises of reform.

The “natives,” on the other hand, had no grand plan.  How could they?  Once the British were gone from each region — a shockingly simple accomplishment — the local powers had to figure out, now what?  The seventeen zillion princely states still had longstanding beef with each other, Delhi was still a thousand miles away from Bangalore, and the “natives” were still just human beings, which meant that they immediately took advantage of the chaos to settle all their longstanding grudges with each other.  So long as the British held firm — and they were 10,000 miles from home, with no hope of reinforcements in under 6 months — and didn’t do something unforgivably stupid, the “natives” were hosed.

So it would seem that “the British,” at least, had “agency.”  But… did they?  Here’s where it gets interesting.  You can find named individuals, who did specific things that contributed to the Mutiny’s suppression — Hodson really did have Bahadur Shah’s sons killed after recapturing Delhi, and the archives probably have the name of the officer who had mutinous sepoys blown from cannon at Ferozepore.  Did Hodgson, then, and Left-tenant Smith (or whoever he was) have agency?

It sounds that way, but there’s fierce debate over the impact — if any — of any of those decisions.  The “bloody gate” still exists in Delhi; did it crush the last spirit of the rebellion, or inflame last desperate acts of resistance?  Ditto blowing from cannons — it’s a hideous way to die; if that’s what I’m in for, I’ll go down fighting, thankyaverramuch.  So Hodson fails the agency test.  He did what he did, but what difference, at that point, did it make?

As with everything Liberals say, details defeat them.  Just as no Liberal knows which specific regulations he wants back, to counter the horrible effects of “deregulation” of the ___ industry, so no professor would ever assign “agency” to a named individual, if for no other reason than it would let someone else get tenure by denying it.  No, really: I was a part-time prof at best, and I could easily construct an “argument” painting Hodson as a victim of systemic class prejudice in the Indian Army.

That’s the key.  I went into all that detail because I wanted you to see two things.  The first — how much effort eggheads make to escape the obvious, and how successful their efforts have been — I’ve written about a zillion times before.  The second is relevant here: In the crunch, nobody has “agency.”  The vast, panoramic sweep of History is just the interplay of impersonal forces, like “Racism” and “Capitalism;” when you get right down to it, individuals don’t matter.  At all.  And if individuals don’t matter, then they — the professors themselves — don’t matter.

Which is why they say the things they say and do the things they do.  Have you ever played Civilization, Sim City, or a game like that?  Hell, ever played Monopoly?  It’s fun sometimes to do goofy, counter-intuitive things, and why not?  You don’t really get thrown in jail if you can’t pay the mortgage at St. James Place, any more than the residents of Sim City really get stomped when you unleash Godzilla on them.  Just to stick with a theme, anyone who’s old enough and nerdy enough remembers Civilization‘s “nuclear Gandhi.”  Who hasn’t ICBM’d that asshole a few times, just on general principles?

It’s all a game to these people, and since they’re in total control of their environment, it’ll be beyond Thunderdome in the outside world before they’re forced to confront Reality.

And that’s the attitude they’re teaching your kids.

Every known human society has its organizing myth.  All those myths are about security — from other tribes, from nature, or from both.

As society gets bigger and more complex, so, too, do the organizing myths, to the point where we often forget they are myths.  Everyone knows, for example, that “representative democracies” like America are founded on “the consent of the governed,” which takes the form of a “social contract.”

When did you actually sign your social contract, Citizen?  Did you initial all the highlighted blanks?  Did you read all the fine print?

It’s no secret I think Leviathan is one of the finest things written in English.  It’s one of only two books of political philosophy you’ll ever need to read.  But…

…..it’s barmy for all that.  Hobbes bases his reasoning off a thought experiment: the war of all against all in the famous “state of nature.”  The “state of nature” doesn’t actually exist.  Hobbes knew the state of nature doesn’t exist, and at one point I’m pretty sure he comes right out and says “the state of nature doesn’t really exist” (the closest real-world example he could find were the Indians surrounding Plymouth Plantation).

But he rolls with it anyway.  We only form governments to escape the state of nature, he says, and the only reason we want to escape the state of nature is that life there is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  And the reason for that is…. wait for it…. wait for it…. That all men are equal in the state of nature.

Seriously.  This man, who ends up constructing an eloquent logical argument for the most absolute monarch that could ever be, starts with the fundamental premise that all men are equal.

See why they don’t actually want you to read what the Dead White Guys actually said?

John Locke agreed, of course, and through him, via Montesquieu and the rest, we get to Thomas Jefferson and his “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal,” and from there to the “consent of the governed” nonsense they made you memorize back when they required Civics in grade school.    We like the notion of “consent of the governed,” so we ignore the “all men are created equal” gunk it comes from.  We should’ve stuck with Hobbes’s much better, much more cynical, origin of government: “The power of the mighty hath no foundation, but in the opinion and belief of the people.”

There’s your “representative government,” all right, since nothing represents humanity better than the judgment that we’re all fools, throwing away our lives for some inbred weirdo in a funny hat.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  One reason the “state of nature” is such a compelling thought experiment, especially to us “conservatives,” is that we know men are really like that.  Put a group of guys in a state of dire scarcity — cf. any bar on a Friday night where the men outnumber the women — and you’ll see vicious, brutal, indeed Hobbesian competition.  However:

We aren’t in a state of dire scarcity.  None of us, I would venture to guess, has ever needed food and had no realistic possibility of getting some.  We may not have liked the options on offer — soup kitchens, panhandling, dumpster diving, Arby’s — but we knew that we were about 12 parsecs away from starving or resorting to cannibalism.  Unless you have actually been in the heat of battle, watching your comrades fall bleeding around you  — and few Americans have — you’ve never been certain there’s a pretty good chance you’re about to die, like, NOW.

“Scarcity” in the State-of-Nature sense is meaningless to us, and because it is, “social contract” arguments lose whatever force they once had.

What we need, then, is a new myth — a REorganizing myth, if you will.  I have no idea what this would actually be, but it’s time to think outside the box.  Perhaps literally. Our greatest external threat, the one that is 52,902 times more likely to do us in than exploding Arabs, car accidents, and the Designated Hitter combined, is…. caloric surplus.  We’re simply not built to handle an all-food, all the time environment.  It’s deadly, and all the worse because it sneaks up on you.  A government based on self-control — “we hold this truth to be self evident, push away from the table, fatso” — is a damn sight better than “all men are equal.”

Thoughts?

Being moron Socialists themselves, academics shy away from studying the psychological effects of life under Communism.  They’re… interesting, to say the least.  Imagine what living in Victory Mansions must do to your sex life, for instance.  Since there’s no privacy — communal kitchens, communal bathrooms, three families to a room — people do what comes naturally, well, naturally.  Animals aren’t embarrassed, after all, so neither should you be.  Lose your counterrevolutionary bourgeois hangups, comrade, and just screw standing up in a stairwell like a good Bolshevik.

As with sex, so with everything else — eating, bathing, sleeping, everything.  And conversation, of course.  If every phone in Romania wasn’t bugged, it wasn’t for lack of trying by the Securitate.  And while the low-rent Securitate was reduced to ostentatiously following random people around as a terror tactic, the Stasi, with Teutonic efficiency, simply signed up one in every six East Germans as snitches.  And since the vast majority of Communist “free time” was spent standing in line, private life became all but impossible.

Hence the baffling, brass-balled brazenness which is the first thing you noticed upon meeting someone from behind the Iron Curtain.  Since we Westerners once valued our privacy — kids, ask your grandparents — we thought that escaped Commies would be furtive, mousy little creatures.  They weren’t.  They were the opposite, in fact, and it makes sense if you think about it for a minute:

In Soviet Russia, everyone’s on the take.  Everyone’s a potential snitch, and every nook and cranny is bugged anyway.  You have to take a dump in full public view, and only after haggling with Der Kommissar over how many squares of toilet paper are in this month’s ration, and that only after standing in line for six hours with 1,500 of your new best friends.  Under those conditions, shameless is the only way to live.  You don’t just lie — to everyone, all the time — you construct an elaborate, deliberately random web of lies, so that the NKVD has five or six different stories about you, and they all contradict each other, and since all the various lies and sub-lies and sub-sub-lies that make up the five or six different stories are all just about offering to bribe the store clerk for an extra swatch of asswipe anyway, it’s not worth hauling you into a dungeon for some rubber hose time.

And those were Europeans!  Asian Commies, who come from face/shame cultures, are much worse.  Everyone who has been around even first gen Chinese-Americans knows that they cheat.  Egregiously.  On everything.  Even when there’s no possible benefit to cheating; even when it’d be easier, safer, and smarter to play it straight.  They just can’t help themselves.  East Asians may have a higher average IQ than Caucasians, but approximately 99.3% of their available brainpower goes into figuring out ways to game the system.  How do you think the barely-even-Engrish speakers who staff every computer lab in America all aced their SAT verbals?

The point of all this isn’t just to bash Commies, fun though that is, and as much as this post will be exhibit A at my thoughtcrime show trial.  The point is: This is our future.  Not, I hasten to add, because we’ll be overrun by the Yellow Peril — see Cheating, consequences of endemic, above — but because we’re doing it to ourselves.  Facebook and Twitter are turning an entire generation into New Soviet Friends.

I worked in academia for years (thank you, Jesus, for early retirement).  I’ve met thousands of college kids — social media addicts all.  If you want to know what they’re like, read this and this.  It’s RS McCain’s beatdown, in his inimitably epic style, of one Julia Baugher, aka Julia Allison, aka one of the trailblazers of the “girl-talking-dirty-on-the-Internet” route to e-celebrity.  Mx. (or whatever) Allison (or whatever) was cute, DTF, and utterly shameless.  Combine those with the then-new platforms of Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006), and you have, if not the first Internet famewhore, then certainly one of the most meteoric rises to Internet famewhoredom yet recorded.

McCain (and others) take this gal’s post-Wall lament as the well-earned wages of cock-carouseling — an object lesson for younger-hotter-tighter girls to hurry up and get a ring put on it, lest they end up like Julia Allison.

But that’s the thing.  While Julia Allison might be, as McCain declares, a Cluster B headcase, the younger-hotter-tighter generation aren’t.  This:

most likely narcissistic, with many symptoms of borderline, as well… she also shows some mood disorder symptoms, with the grandiosity of manic-phase bipolar followed by the crash of depression and failure

just IS your Basic College Girl, 2018 edition.  It’s not pathological if it’s completely normal, and this is what “social media” — aka “living your entire life in full public view at all times” — does to you.

Note the dates.  Yes, Julia Allison is a headcase, but only because she juuuust missed social media’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  She was born in 1981, which made her 23 at the dawn of Facebook and 25 at Twitter’s debut.  She’s a very late Gen Xer, and while the whole “generations” thing is overblown, she’s still part of an age cohort that saw a certain reticence about one’s personal life as both good and necessary.  So, yes, a Gen Xer doing the whole kiss-and-tell-everything routine is an exhibitionist.

BUT: People who were born in 1981 were just getting around to having their first kids, maybe, in 2006.  That generation, the one that is just now entering high school, is the first one to have grown completely up in a social media-saturated world.  The interstitial generation — kids born in the late 1990s; the kids that are in college now — were the kids of Gen Xers, full stop.  Even if they were early and vigorous adopters of social media, they were still born to parents who, like Julia Allison, had (or in her case, should have had) some fairly strong residual prejudice in favor of privacy.  Some of that should’ve rubbed off on their kids.

It didn’t.  McCain’s description of Julia Allison — the frenetic “dating,” the simultaneously fervent yet shallow affect (“we were in love! It just didn’t work out”), the mood swings, the grandiosity, the utter inability to self-reflect — could be pretty much every college girl I’ve met in the last decade.  And I have met a lot of college girls.  They live this way because they can’t live any other way.  If you admit to having made a bad decision, then all of your 3,598 Facebook friends and Twitter followers have also made that same bad decision.  If the outcome is your responsibility, then their outcomes are also their responsibility…. and we can’t be having that.

The glowing screen’s distancing effect makes it worse.  At least in the bad old days in the USSR, everyone knew someone who knew someone — a real person, Margya Homernovna of 742 Evergreen Prospekt — who really had been hauled away by the KGB.  You could cruise by her former apartment at Victory Mansions and see someone else living there; you could talk to her ex-neighbors and get blank stares: “Never heard of her.”  On social media, though, even your best “friends” are little more than video game characters.  “Julia Allison” isn’t a person, she’s a brand — a point she herself makes all the time, in an effort to sell her “personal branding advice” to prospective clients.

And that’s the last thing.  In a social media-dominated world, what exactly is wrong with being Julia Allison?  She herself might not like it much… or she might: Is “professional victim” not also part of her personal brand?  Who can say?  More to the point, Julia Allison is rich and famous.  She had her own tv show.  She still gets paid to jet around the country and talk about making zillions of dollars by using Twitter.  She has “dated” fitness gurus, tech startup wizards, DJs, doctors, congressmen, and John McCain’s son.  To a college girl, that’s winning, full stop.  And here’s proof: Julia Allison currently lays all her problems at the feet of social media and Sex and the City.  SATC is off the air, but Twitter’s still around.  If it’s so bad for you, why doesn’t she just… you know… stop?

To ask is to answer.  It has never occurred to her to stop — other than as a marketing move — because she can’t.  This is life in the Glorious Social(ist) Media Future.  And if you think Those Darn Kids Today are bad, just remember: Twitter was founded in 2006.  The real Young Pioneers are just starting high school.