Reply to Keith Woods on Power, Ideology and History

Today Keith Woods wrote a critical reply to my last article on The James Lindsay Debate Club Theory of History. Let’s put aside his personal attacks to get to the meat of it. Woods is a theorycel and therefore he does not like my argument that all political formulas boil down ultimately to ‘BS BS BS BS, therefore I rule’. He prefers a vision of history driven by men pursuing high ideals which then shape and change society. His article is an exercise in searching for true believers with such high ideals and then presenting these as a refutation of my argument. The trouble is that my argument does not assert that those in power are always cynical or that they do not believe their own BS, my argument only asserts and let us repeat:

people get into power, whether by force or fraud, and then tell people what they should think which nearly always coincides with actions they have already taken.

This says nothing about motivations, beliefs, good faith, bad faith, self-delusion or anything else. It is a value-free description of what happens, it does not pretend it can see inside the hearts of men, it is an objective description of the process of power. In other words, Woods responds throughout to a strawman because he has read things into the theory which simply are not there.

Let us take one example Woods puts forward: Ayatollah Khomeini (who led the 1979 Iranian Revolution). Surely this man was a true believer in his own brand of Islam? Of course, but so what? He nonetheless achieved power by a combination of force and fraud, outmanoeuvred and outright killed his rivals, and then used that brand of Islam to justify those actions. He didn’t win a debate in the free marketplace of ideas; he seized power at the barrel of a gun. It just so happens I covered an Adam Curtis documentary on exactly this earlier today during which you can see how this played out in real time. The masses in that case were united in their opposition to the Shah’s regime, but they had many different agendas and ideologies and ideas about how to run the country and what post-Revolutionary Iran would look like. The Mullahs, led by Khomeini, were the most organised minority, so it was they who seized power and got to execute their rivals and so it was their BS justifications that won the day, while the ideas of the liberals, leftists, democrats and so on who made up the revolutionary coalition were never realised as ideology (which is to say ‘ideas backed by power’, see my definition of ideology here). It would be instructive to watch that documentary holding both my theory in mind and the ‘debate club’ theory to see which one more accurately describes reality.  

Now if you understand the argument, properly stated, you’ll see that all the rest of the questions asked by Woods are somewhat irrelevant. Let’s look at just one example:

Does Parvini believe Thatcher wasn’t an earnest believer in libertarian economic theory? 

It’s not relevant. Whether she was a true believer or a cynic, the process is entirely the same. Incidentally, in another Adam Curtis documentary I covered recently, at around the 57 minute mark, Curtis includes a clip of Thatcher from February 1985 in which she says, ‘it’s not a doctrine to which I’ve ever subscribed, I think it actually came in with Milton Friedman, I used to read about it … it’s a theory to which I’ve never subscribed.’ Thatcher was saying this about monetarism, which the Tories famously adopted as a policy in 1979 and had abandoned by 1981 because it had failed. By 1985, circumstances had changed sufficiently for it to be politic for Thatcher to outright deny this ever happened, true believer or not. What Thatcher would never have said in 1985 at the peak of her powers was ‘look, I made a mistake, and therefore I should not be in power anymore.’

Let’s look at a second example. Woods writes:

Civil Rights law empowered wokeism, but Civil Rights law could only be passed by people already swayed by ideas of racial egalitarianism, or at least the moral good of pursuing greater racial equality.

‘Racial egalitarianism’ may well have been what they told themselves, the post-hoc justification, and they may well have become true believers in that justification, but as I suggested in the article Woods is responding to, it just so happens that the law they wanted chimed with their instinctual sentiments. It’s surprising Woods would overlook such sentiments given who was involved:

In this final case, data shared by Emil O W Kirkegaard recently shows that by the mid-1960s twenty-five percent of law faculty in America were Jewish. In case you’re wondering, an over-representation of 731% — that high verbal IQ working overtime, and legal fees are very expensive! These legally-minded Jewish elites did not help to institute looser immigration laws and the Civil Rights Regime because they had read John Locke or Michael Foucault or Karl Marx or F.A. Hayek or John Dewey, they did so because of what Pareto would call their sentiments, in other words, their feelings. This need not be anything more sinister than the fact that, as recent immigrants from a minority group, they would feel safer in a more diverse and less homogenous society. This was little more than a non-logical, non-rational feeling rather than a fully reasoned-out policy, which is why today the wisdom of such thinking is severely being questioned by Jews themselves. 

Unless you believe in some version of what Pareto is saying, then all arguments should be taken at face value as exercises in logical reasoning, but the fact is people do have underlying feelings, ethnic resentments, and a whole host of other intuitions and feelings which are then justified by arguments that give the appearance of being logical.

I appreciate this may be difficult for Woods and many of you to understand, but it is a much closer approximation of the psychological process that takes place rather than the one you imagine takes place. Even those reading this article will be motivated chiefly by non-logical, non-rational factors as to who they find more convincing: namely, do you like me more or do you like Woods more? In other words, you’re relying on an emotion and character judgement – what Aristotle would have called ethos – rather than the merits of either argument. But that is not what you’ll tell yourself, you’ll tell yourself that that you have come to your conclusions through reasoning, and – here’s the kicker – you’ll sincerely believe that. So, in other words, you emotionally felt something (e.g. ‘I like Woods, I trust him more, not sure about Parvini’), then almost automatically, your own internal BS-generating lawyer gave you justifications for that feeling, and then, through an (again almost automatic) process of Orwellian double-think you formed the belief that you preferred Woods’s argument because of this or that reason. This is how people think. It’s clear from the article by Woods that he does not grasp this concept. Let me quote from The Populist Delusion (pp. 27, 30):

This insight has since been underlined by studies in modern psychology such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow or Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Intuition comes first; reasoning follows as a justification for what one has already felt at a ‘gut level’. At a societal level these justifications manifest as ideologies, theologies, doctrines of all sorts, and these specific manifestations are ‘derivations’. However, the root of any given derivation will be a more general ‘residue’ which in turn has been generated by a ‘sentiment’. … All that the various arguments and justifications — for what are always, in the final analysis, non-logical faiths— show is that human beings have ‘an inclination towards rationality, not the fact of being rational.’

It is obvious Woods does not understand this or else he would not have ended his article by asserting something which the theory he is trying to refute already outright states:

Humans are not entirely rational, but neither can their behaviour be entirely reduced by some rational calculation to discrete computations of self-interest or power maximisation. We are a species driven by narratives and big ideas, and in a time where obvious truths are aggressively suppressed by a system increasingly incapable of justifying itself, it would be a ludicrous act of self-sabotage to abandon our greatest weapon: the truth.

None of this is denied by the theory, as the quotations above should make clear. That said, power does have its own logic, and its own disciplining mechanisms for those who hold it. For example, Power cannot stand rival castles and seeks to eliminate them. Let us take the example of Khomeini once more. Had he, for example, studied his Quran and concluded it would have been ‘un-Islamic’ to massacre the leaders of the other revolutionary groups after 1979, then there is a very good chance that one of those other groups would have seized power in the long-run. Strangely enough though, his studies of the Quran didn’t render that answer, they managed to give him the exact course dictated by the logic of power. Strangely, when Lenin and later Stalin studied Karl Marx, the course they chose to follow in the end rendered similar answers. So too Maximilien Robespierre. So too Hitler. How is it that the Quran, Marxism, French Liberalism and Nazism all led to the same answers? A Machiavellian analysis might simply say that Power tends to select those who come to such conclusions, while those who come to different ones are sidelined or eliminated. Whatever men think, cynic or true believer, whatever ideas they have, power has a logic. If Woods truly believes that our greatest weapon is the truth, then he’d do well to take this on board.