Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

PATH TO RIGHT VICTORY

PItching an endpoint is fantasy storytelling without an operational means of bringing it into being with the resources at your disposal. Generals don’t fight wars with the men, weapons, supply lines, resources, strategy&tactics they prefer. They fight wars with what they have. As such the winners of all wars are those not that choose endpoints, but that choose the accumulation of resources to CHOOSE the endpoint.

All of you as factions, stuck in the fantasy role-playing game of unconsciously trying to sell an endpoint rather than selling a sequence of victories that accumulate resources (men) who have a common real interest in victories but uncommon fantasies of endpoints.

In other words, you’re trying to win a political game with cheap political attention with cheap stories that have worked only under a European time window that no longer exists. The unifying message is defeating the enemy, not the divisive endpoint.

The group that doesn’t tell stories, but accumulates victories by defeating the enemy, will accumulate resources victories and legitimacy necessary to influence the endpoint.

So factions need to stop playing the loser’s game of selling an endpoint, and instead, selling and accumulating small but increasing victories that talk about how evil the concrete existential enemy and threat is, and not causing division over unknowable unachievable ends.

There is no endpoint message that will sell other than victories. And there are no victories that allow the accumulation of power without a brand under which associate with those victories, and an organization that manages that brand.

And that brand must be nothing more concrete than righting an injustice by defeating the existential threat of an enemy. That will unify people. So you want an abstract symbol brand to claim victory on without an endpoint that creates division. Converge power.

This is why I generally don’t interact with the right because nazis, white nationalists, fundamentalists, and even civnats, are successfully factionalized and made weak by the fact that they provide the enemy the target that they need, making the reactionary the enemy: suckers.

The enemy works by undermining anything concrete: leaders, messages, endpoints. So the only way to defeat the enemy is to make THEM the story. And imitate trump by making the enemy defend the fact that you’ve made them the story. Trying to get cheap attention serves the enemy.

So the enemy counts on you trying cheaply build coalitions with leaders, symbolism, and endpoints, when the only way to defeat them is with slow, constant, material victories, where you demonize the enemy, saturate the narrative with stories of the enemy, controlling the story.

Why isn’t it obvious to the right? Because the right is just as emotional as the left and as anti-intellectual as the left is anti-rational. So the right is operating from the worst possible position: their own instincts.