BreadTuber Thought Slime recently uploaded a video essay that linked together a lot of problems that I have with the state of American political discourse, and he forged those connections into a coherent argument that I think requires only a basic grasp of current events to track. It's a conceptual argument, presenting different viewpoints and showing how they interact when compared in specific ways, and the facts he uses are things pretty much all self-identified liberals and most urban and suburban conservatives would agree are true - or at least very easily looked up.
I showed it to Lady M this morning and she said it was "mind-blowing," so I copied the auto-transcript and cleaned it up below (I start at the meat of his argument and skip the Eyeball Zone). I highly recommend the video, it's only 27 minutes long and the transcript is so that you can come back to certain parts or read it without NSFW audio. Enjoy!
Transcription begins at approximately 4:20:
...his mind has been imprisoned. His imagination has been suppressed by the most insidious and ubiquitous brainwashing program the world has ever seen. It's called "liberalism."Wait, what the frick, Thought Slime? What are you talking about? Uh-oh, I bet some of you are probably confused right now. Particularly those that are new around these parts. You may have thought, based on your understanding of the left-right political spectrum, that as a leftist, I am therefore a liberal. You might consider values like LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, anti-racism, all things that I care deeply about, to be liberal values. You might be worried at this moment, I'm about to say some real conservative shit, because you've been taught that liberal and conservative are the boundaries of serious political discourse. And allow me to set your mind at ease. Shh, shh - find calm, my friend.
I'm not a conservative, I'm not about to attack liberalism from the right. I want to attack it from the left.
In fact, I actually think it's pretty incoherent for conservatives to attack liberalism, because I consider conservatives to be liberals - albeit much shittier liberals with generally shittier haircuts. Liberalism is a centrist political ideology that supports individual freedoms, in theory; representative democracy, in theory; equality under the law, in theory; and free markets, i.e. capitalism, in practice. On the surface, that sounds like a bunch of good things, with one bad thing thrown in for flavor. And I very much stress here, "on the surface," because I have my qualms about representative democracy, even in its most idealized form.
But there's a contradiction at the heart of liberalism: individual freedoms, equality under the law, and capitalism cannot coexist. Capitalism, by its very nature, creates inequality and undermines individual liberty. You cannot have equality under the law when some people can afford to mount expensive lawsuits, keep defense lawyers on retainer, or lobby policymakers to tailor the law to suit their interests. Congrats! Both you and Chevron have the same legal right to hydrofrack without worrying about whether or not you're gonna poison the local drinking water. And while that may be equality under the law in the strictest sense, it's not meaningful equality because it's designed to only benefit a select few people. The idea is that laws apply equally, but that doesn't guarantee that they represent people equally.
Likewise, you cannot have individual freedoms when your ability to survive is contingent on whether or not you obey your boss, whether or not you can pay your landlord, you can pay for your groceries, your power bill, whether you can pay for your medication. The very nature of capitalism and commodity production are fundamentally at odds with your ability to live freely.
The methods that liberals suggest to fix this contradiction have failed, time and again, and always will because they're not actually interested in solving the problem - which is capitalism - because that is fundamental to their worldview. They believe that these systemic injustices are natural and unsolvable, so the best we can hope for is a free market with strong regulatory practices, put in place by a vigilant state to keep the market in check. And that certainly seems reasonable when you compare it to the other solution that mainstream politics offers, which is... I don't know, fuck it, let's just do whatever we want, and it might kill everybody, but we'll make some money.
And let's not get it twisted: sometimes regulations do a real good job. Sometimes they have a very positive influence. Like for example, we don't use leaded gasoline anymore. Thanks, regulations! Of course, leaded gasoline was only sold in the first place because it was profitable to do so. So, in the absence of the profit motive, that's a problem that wouldn't have needed solving in the first place. But still, regulations did it, they fixed it. And I mean sure, the whole process got tied up in the courts for decades, because the only science on the effects of lead exposure in humans that these regulatory bodies considered as evidence, was conducted by people who literally worked for lead companies. But you got to give the system a little credit here, OK? It came to the right conclusion, and it only took... fifty years of delays while thousands of metric tons of neurotoxic chemicals were pumped into the atmosphere for no reason, poisoning the entire Earth. What were they supposed to do? People had only known that lead was toxic for a couple of thousand years. These regulatory bodies were on the cutting edge of modern Ancient Roman science!
And they've kept us safe ever since, which is why climate change is not poised to destroy the human race within, say, ten years. And just look how seriously our leaders are taking it! Like for example, there is this recent crisis where the Amazon rainforests in Brazil were just burning down, because the Bolsonaro administration is full of lunatics. And our leaders stepped up to the plate and boldly ignored it or didn't even notice. We're saved! (We're honestly probably all gonna die, I don't even know why I'm making this video.)
Liberalism sells itself as a means to keep capital in check: with democracy and regulatory agencies, we can leverage the power of the state to prevent richos from running rampant over everyone else. If you work within the system, you can affect change without the need for violence - without any of those messy revolutions that could backfire, that could make things even worse for you. Problem is, the richos have just as much ability to leverage that power against our interests. Which is to say, they actually have a lot more power to do that, because they can pay thousands of people to do it for them. They can fund entire political campaigns. They can bribe officials. They can bit-by-bit erode legal protections against cronyism and corruption, and let everyone else exhaust their political capital trying to win them back. Not to mention they're also signing your fuckin' paycheck, so how hard are you really gonna fight them, exactly?
We can't progress forward under capitalism, because there's always a dedicated cabal of rich ghouls trying to pull us backwards. And within capitalism, there always will be, because our interests conflict with theirs. That's why large corporations and billionaires managed to take over all relevant political parties, and carefully tailor their agendas not to interfere with the interests of the rich and powerful. All of the mechanisms that we would use to protect ourselves from the whims of the rich, become recuperated and controlled by the rich. That is a feature of liberalism, not a bug.
The purpose of liberalism - the reason an ideology, theoretically underpinned on the idea of placing limits on the influence of the rich and powerful, became useful to the rich and powerful - is that it functions as a mental filter: a way to place a limit on the possibilities one is able to imagine to combat injustice, by presenting a comforting illusion of control. You can vote for a candidate that represents your interests. I mean sure, there might not be one that represents your interests, but you can choose whichever politician you like to vote for, among the small pool of ones that matter. You're in control! Hey, are you concerned about the environment? You can buy the laundry detergent with the green cap on it. And it's got a picture of a mountain on it, so it's good for the environment. You're in control. Hey, are you worried about all the genocides your country is committing? Well don't worry, you can write a strongly-worded letter to your local representative, and a few months later you'll receive a form letter saying that they take this issue very seriously - and also, they spelled your name wrong. You're in complete control! Now, what you don't want to do - what nobody wants you to do - is act outside of the system. That's brash, that's dangerous, there's no way to control that, that's not serious political thought.
Destiny: Real quick, I probably would agree like, with most - like any - any slow reform that works, I'm always in favor of. So if you think flattening hierarchies makes people's lives better, or lets them keep more money or whatever, if you start subtly doing this in some factories and it ends up like empirically working, then I'm 100% in favor of that, and I would hope that most people would be as well, too.
Liberals are horny for the idea of "gradual reform." You can't make too big a change, who knows what will happen? All the changes you make have to be incremental and easily reversible, and oops! Wouldn't you know it, they got reversed by the next group of dingdongs in power. Now you've got to win them all back again! Round and round you go, and where you end up - everybody thinks it's pretty obvious, if you think about it for even a fu-
It's a stopgap that prevents the public from resisting when the government or capital act against their best interest. It quells discontent by funneling all political will into the directions that the system controls, and convincing everyone that any other expression of political unrest is illegitimate. Any civil disobedience which is successful, is revised in the history books until it appears as though it worked within the system - thereby demonstrating the system's flexibility and fairness. The Civil Rights movement, for example, faced severe state repression, were accused of being terrorists and inciting riots. But then a couple of decades later, when everyone can look back with the benefit of hindsight and realize actually, the Civil Rights movement ruled, all the textbooks say that everything they did that was successful was thanks to passive resistance. So if you want to fight injustice, you too should be passive. If the system can work for them - and you're just gonna have to take my word for it that it did, it definitely did work for them, it worked great - then it'll work for you, too! You just have to trust it, OK? And then you'll be fine, just don't rock the boat too much.
Any civil unrest which acts outside the system and is unsuccessful, becomes demonstrative of how only working within the established boundaries can be productive. Occupy Wall Street failed because these hippy-dippy kids failed to get the right zoning permits, and that's just not how you get things done in the real world. You want to resist the government, that's fine - it's your right, go ahead. Just make sure you fill out the right paperwork and get the government's permission before you start resisting them. Bit by bit, limits are placed on the liberal imagination, until they can no longer conceive of any sort of political action outside the boundaries of liberalism. It isn't simply that they disagree with other ideologies - though of course, they do. It's that they're completely unable to even picture a society (that isn't liberal) succeeding or being desirable to anyone. Therefore, the transgressions of any liberal government are just things that happened. They're just individual failures, they're not related to liberalism in any way. But the transgressions of any non-liberal government are proof that only liberal governments can work in the 21st century.
Take for example this baloney of a tweet where Destiny talks about how using the hammer and sickle flag means condoning the Holodomor. Any support for that system means tacitly being OK with starvation and genocide. OK. Well, what about [the Canadian] flag? Or [the US] flag? What about [the British] flag? Does flying these flags signify tacit support for slavery, genocide, colonialism, or manufactured famines? If the hammer and sickle are equivalent to a swastika, why aren't these, Dawg? And just side note: I think all of these flags are bad. But let's be real here, let's cut thru the bullshit. None of them are as bad as a swastika. And before I get accused of colonialist apologia, let me explain what I mean by that: while all of these countries have committed (and are committing) hideous atrocities, most people fly these flags because it's, like, the place that they live or were born. They don't really think about it that much. When you fly a swastika flag, you're announcing your intention to start murdering minorities. All of these flags have been flown while minorities have been murdered, of course - but only one of them is used exclusively to signal support for the murder of minorities. To pretend otherwise is to make excuses for the most dangerous right-wing goons on the planet - the type who are organizing, and rallying support for their murderous ideologies right now.
Liberals will always make the distinction between liberal nations, who may have done bad things; and non liberal countries, which are just essentially bad because they did bad things. To them, the crimes of liberal governments - up to and including ongoing genocide - are incidental to liberalism. But the crimes of other governments are essential to that style of governance. The upshot of this is that you can't really use any bad outcomes of liberal policy to argue with them, because they refuse to see the connection between the outcomes of liberalism and liberalism itself. Look at all those hungry people in Venezuela, a definitely socialist country. Well, it just goes to show: socialism doesn't work 'cause people go hungry. Yep, that's why we need capitalism, like we have here in my country. Oh hey, there's a homeless guy in my neighborhood, begging for change so that he can buy food. Don't know what happened there. I assume a goblin must have stolen his wallet.
[Eyeball Zone, his leftist promo segment, has been cut at 17:10]
Transcription resumes at about 18:10:
There's a very frustrating exchange between Non-Compete and Destiny, where Destiny asks how an anarchist factory would deal with a majority white workforce using its majority to force racist legislation on the entire group. American [Johnson] points out a number of ways that could be resolved theoretically, but ultimately concedes that no method of labor organizing can solve racism. And Destiny thinks this is a real slam-dunk argument: checkmate, anarkiddies, racism is still possible in a factory, even if you're anarchist. Checkmate. I mean, homeboy's not wrong to say that anarchist labor organizing alone won't solve racism. I mean, he's wrong to suggest that we think that (for the record, we don't). What he misses is, he never turns that analysis inwards, towards the society that he is defending.
Imagine a big factory making googaws: 70% of the workers are white, 30% are black, in this hypothetical factory that I've made up. In this made-up anarchist society, each worker has a commensurate amount of ownership and say over the way that the factory is run, and what is done with the googaws it produces. If the white workers decide to stiff the black workers, they'd have majority control, and they could do that. Pretty good example of a situation where collective ownership can run into problems. Good job, so far!
Now let's take a look at the same example in a liberal capitalist model. The decisions are no longer made by consensus, they're made by one dude: the boss. And since white workers outnumber black workers almost two to one, he's likely to be white, even if we don't factor in institutionalized racism. Now a white person gets to make decisions unilaterally. The black workers have gone from 30% control over their workplace, to zero percent, which is not exactly liberating.
Aha, dingdong! In a liberal society, I can ask government for help. You know, if the laws are on your side. And also the laws are enforced. And also you're not afraid of losing your job or being retaliated against. And also, your employer hasn't found a loophole, like just pretending that all of his bullshit is based on performance rather than race. And also, if all those conditions are met, there's really nothing stopping your employer from just screwing over all of their employees, rather than improving conditions for black employees.
If you live in a liberal democracy, you might notice that there's still systematic racism. The regulations that were meant to address this problem didn't fix it. Now, they've helped - and we're meant to treat that as sufficient. Giving direct control of the workplace to the worker, I would argue, would also (on its own) fail to solve this problem. But it would also likewise help a great deal. But that, somehow, is woefully insufficient. So yeah, this is a problem that could come up in an anarchist society. You know, if anarchists decided the only thing that we wanted to do was organize factories and then decide, Revolution: Done! No need to solve other problems, everybody, that - everything's gonna be fine. Good job, comrades, let's all go get - Popeye's. (Couldn't think of a funny thing they'd be getting, I don't know, is Popeye's funny? I don't know if that joke was funny.)
But even if it's a problem that could come up in an anarchist society, it's also a problem that has happened and is happening in Liberal societies right now. That's incidental for liberalism, but essential for the system he's critiquing, because he can imagine it. The system he's critiquing, by the way, doesn't exist - so we can say it has all sorts of problems. It's full of vampires! What if people's legs fall off?
Now, in fairness to him, we don't have data for what a hypothetical anarchist world would look like. We have some small data samples for anarchist countries, which seem to do pretty dang good, all things considered; but we'll never know until we try. At some point every economic system, every political system, every fucking idea was untried. Liberalism was a new idea at one point, and they fought bloody revolutions to install that. It's pretty convenient that after the fact, it became too dangerous to try new ideas without some arbitrary amount of data - don't you think? No, we just have to stick with our current model, because at least we have the data to know that it doesn't work and will destroy Earth.
And that's how the liberal mind prison works. It's a difficult problem to solve, because we're fighting against a complicit education system and mass media. Anyone can make a single compelling argument against a liberal. But can you make twelve years of compelling arguments between the key developmental ages of five and seventeen? Can you reinforce those compelling arguments with a complete hegemony over all mainstream political discourse? No, you can't. Don't say that you can, because you can't do it.
And look, I get it - even making a good argument can be difficult, because it's easy to get frustrated with liberal smugness, I just want to yell at them. Just fucking stop thinking this way. I don't really know how to solve that problem entirely, but I'd like to offer one suggestion: when arguing with a liberal (or anyone else for that matter), never justify your position without demanding that they also justify theirs. The purpose of this is simple: to demonstrate to liberals that their positions are not just the default. They're not just the natural way things are, they're a choice. They're an ideological position, just like anyone else's, that must be justified. Getting these wieners to consider that they even have a position is half the battle - getting them to recognize their assumptions about the world require justification, and can't just be taken as a given.
You can take them out of the liberal mind prison by forcing them to make their case. Now, they might remain liberal afterwards - in fact, they probably will. But it means they have to prove themselves to you, just as much as you have to prove yourselves to them. Passionately pleading our case, and letting them sit back and poke holes, lets them continue to imagine themselves as the judges of reasonability. It lets them play pretend like they know what is and is not realistic. It makes them the authority in the conversation that you must win over - and don't give them that. Make them justify themselves to you.
And here's - here's - here's a Thought Slime original you can have for free: if they start complaining about the death toll of socialism, whatever ridiculous number they believe that to be, go ahead and ask them how they feel about the fact that capitalism is leading us towards climate collapse and will literally kill all people in the world unless it's stopped. That's not a real easy thing to justify. There's not - well, OK, sure, it's gonna kill all of us - but I got an iPhone. Did you see Avengers: Endgame? It's pretty cool. Fans finally got to see Spider-Man and Rocket Raccoon together on the screen. Good. Top that. Socialists, what are you doing? What kinda movies you gonna make? Are they even gonna have Groot in them? Your socialist movies even gonna have Groot?
Didn't think so.
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