It isn’t important which hill neoMarxists choose to die on. What’s important is that they die on whatever hill the Party chooses for them.
George Orwell didn’t write that all freedom is the ability to believe that 2 and 2 are 4.
He wrote that all freedom is the freedom to SAY that 2 and 2 are 4.
Out loud.
What you are seeing here isn’t credulity. That’s not the point. Many of the people who loudly say that 2 and 2 are 5 don’t actually believe that. Nor does the Party need or even want them to.
Beliefs aren’t important to the Party. Math isn’t important to the Party, either.
What’s important to the Party is compliance.
Here’s how this works:
The Japanese insult, “bakamono”, meaning fool or idiot, is written with the kanji characters for “horse” and “deer”.
This isn’t because the Japanese think of horses or deer as foolish. It’s a reference to a story.
On 27 September 207 BC, the eunuch Zhao Gao tested his power against the emperor’s. He presented a deer to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The emperor laughed and said, “Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?” He questioned those around him. Some remained silent, and some aligned with Zhao Gao and called it a horse. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao.
The ridiculousness of calling a deer a horse, or a woman a man, or two and two five, isn’t the result of stupidity or madness.
It’s the whole point of the litmus test.
If the Party says a deer is a horse, will you agree loudly and vehemently, or will you dissent? Will you comply with the evidence of your own senses, or with the dictates of the Party?
This is how the Party knows who are its slaves, and who are its enemies, which are the only two categories the Party will allow.
“Transwomen are women” isn’t a statement about biology. It isn’t even a statement about social roles.
It’s an oath of submission. What it really means is “I will comply, please do not hurt me.”
This is the true source of the “black lives matter”/”all lives matter” arguments of 2020. It sounds like a silly disagreement if you listen to the content of the words, because “all”, by definition, includes “black”.
But the content of the words was never the point. The point was to make you utter ritual words as a token of submission. Problem was, the words weren’t ridiculous enough. They didn’t distinguish between those who had a philosophical respect for human life, and those who would obey the Party no matter what.
See, the Party isn’t interested in sincere believers. They are of limited use, convenient before the Revolution, but, afterwards, they will be lined up in front of a shallow ditch and shot.
Why?
Because what the Party wants, the whole point of having the Party at all, is absolute power, commanding absolute obedience.
The obedience of even the most zealous of ideological allies is conditional… he obeys because he agrees. So the power of the Party over him is not absolute. They might, someday, do something with which he disagrees, and then he might disobey.
The Party does not want loyal allies who love it. It wants slaves who fear it. Only fear compels absolute, unconditional obedience.
The Party does not care what is in your heart and mind. It only cares that you kneel.
If you are a structural engineer, and the Party says that pi is 3, you must loudly declare that pi is three, and that anyone who says otherwise must be publicly executed as a capitalist imperialist colonialist running dog.
If you do not, you will be tortured and executed.
But you must also secretly memorize the real value of pi, and use it in all your calculations, because you will also be tortured and executed if your buildings fall over.
You must, however, never write down the true value of pi, to help you remember it, and you must carefully burn any page of calculations using it after you are done. If you are caught with these things, you will be tortured and executed.
You must instead spend 75% of your working time constructing fake calculations, starting with the assumption that pi is 3, and subtly introduce computational errors to lead your answer to the real numbers that you computed in secret.
No one will ever read these, but you must meticulously construct them anyway, because if your neighbor ever gets jealous of you, because your wife is prettier than his, or your state-issued apartment is ten square feet larger, then the secret police will check your work, and your only hope is that no divergence from the will of the Party can be found.
Otherwise… well, you know. Here, in the United States, the Party is an embryo. It doesn’t have the power to torture and kill you. It will do its best, of course, but right now, what it has to threaten you with is character assassination.
Racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, islamophobe, anti-semite, microaggression, heteronormative, nazi.
Damage to your reputation isn’t particularly fearsome compared to the Soviet, or the Chinese, or the Cuban methods of handling dissent. It isn’t much compared to what the Sandinistas did, or Sendero Luminoso, or Pol Pot.
But the Party needs to start somewhere. It needs to create fear, and train people in compliance, so it can grow.
The Party is not Marxist-Leninist. The Party has no belief system, and it never did. Marxism-Leninism was only ever about finding ridiculous things to force you to say.
Nowdays, the same purpose is served by obvious falsehoods like “transwomen are women”, and “diversity is our strength”.
Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X, April 9, 2025
I suspect there is a lot of truth to this. However, I have a question… If there are only two categories of people, then which category do The Party members belong? Or saying it differently, how is it decided who are members of The Party?
I have a nagging feeling there are other flaws in this, but it may be due to some oversimplification for illustration purposes other than fatal errors.
Assuming this is fundamentally true, then we have an interesting takeaway. Resistance to The Party only requires noncompliance. Pointing out the most absurd of The Party assertions widens a crack in the power of The Party. Think of the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. All it took was the correct observation of a little child to break the false assertion.
This is, of course, an exaggeration of reality, But the direction of the force vector to break The Party is dead on.
