The title of this blogpost refers to Mencius Moldbug's oft-quoted remark that Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he always swims to the left and I have no quarrel with Mr. Yarvin and in fact fully agree with what the phrase had referred to originally: that the Overton window in the USA-dominated world since 1945 and even more so since 1989 has been stumbling down the path to socialism. This piece is aimed at those who appropriate the phrase as part of the defeatist 'blackpill ideology', which is a branch of modern right wing thought established around the pseudo-profound idea that the values which one would like to see lived by are, in the long run, doomed. Judging by the character of the people who subsist on the blackpill, the ideology is, to apply a Marxist approach, the superstructure of an immorality or laziness which characterises them. Those people typically extol the virtue of chastity and the health of a society built around it while masturbating daily. They are likely to trumpet the importance of order, structure and hierarchy while living in a room that is not just filthy, but hinders their movement. The blackpill is an affliction affecting the link between ideology and action, between declaration and practice and it is something I would like to challenge with this post.

The mentioned self-appointed 'right-wing' theorists of history, often if not always without an historical education, will be quoted as saying that history, at least since the French Revolution, has witnessed the gradual movement of societies towards the left. This is, for the most part, a formulation that is in equal part trivial and unhelpful, but from the point of view of an historian wholly unjustified when pronounced to be a universal law. This is for the following reasons:

1. Unjustified selection of period under scrutiny
This formulation would only apply to continuous civilisation, without taking into account the not-unusual resets, big and small, that plunge a human population or what's left of it into state-of-nature like chaos that teaches them to either preserve the useful knowledge and institutions of the past or forces them to create new ones. 'The past 300 years' is by far not a period from which we can extrapolate general principles of history, dismissing the rest as 'premodern'. The same people would calculate the value of the FTSE index 100 years into the future without realising that in 100 years there may well not be a London.

2. Methodological blindness
'Left' and 'right' are necessarily defined from the viewpoint of the observer and retroactively ascribed to movements of the past. The resulting image will therefore be a distorting one, regardless of the ability to ascribe historical trends to synthetic formulations such as hierarchy vs. undermining hierarchy. Struggles in history were often between two hierarchies, both of which had the most 'right-wing, universalist' aspirations in mind, such as when pope and emperor battled for primacy in Christendom. While synthetic formulations are not unhelpful, they become distorting when applied unreservedly, especially when that leads to the rule appropriating and misconstruing information to reinforce itself instead of evidence suggesting a tendency.

3. Unconscious focus on the Anglosphere
This is a pretty trivial objection, but has to be voiced nonetheless. While the XXth century is a time of 'swimming left' for the anglosphere it would be hard to frame Russian or Persian discourse as swimming anywhere but right during that time. China and India are also unlikely to become pacifist nanny-states any time soon. It seems only the elites that speak English get infected by the mind-bug that Moldbug was referring to, suggesting that it is yet to be translated into other languages. Blackpilled goons might try to counter by noting that more and more people know English every year, to which one has to only ask how much longer will English be the global language? The petrodollar is no longer the only currency in which one can buy petrol and so English may no longer be the only language in which one can conduct business. As for the cultural dominance of the Anglosphere: cracks have started to appear in that as well. What profound piece of culture has the Anglosphere given us recently? A King Lear re-run? Black Mirror? Rick n' Morty? Parasite is a good film, fresh, not recycled. It is in Korean. Go figure.

4. Blindness to alternative narratives of historical change
While it is true that the USA and the West have swap left, this could be described as an Hegelian synthesis of capitalism and communism, a result of the the same Cold War that caused the West to fall into the US' lap. “Better dead than red” and “Better red than dead” positions have merged to become: “best to be a bit alive and a bit red also”. While I am pessimist about the fate of such an awful mongrel and do not wish it a long life, those who might want to save this or another culture ought to be reminded that they are free to band together and propose an antithesis to the current hedonist liberal green globohomo dogma. Be radical and active, use the wonderful tools that information technology gives you and become the antithesis, so that at your death you will see a world discussing and living by at least some of your ideas. This requires resolve, a quality which the blackpill inherently lacks.

5. Accepting the narrative of the enemy
The idea that eternal global communism is inevitable is, surprise surprise, a communist idea, at the heart of Marxist historical philosophy. It is a smart little instrument, again, to use Marxist base-susperstructure (psycho)analysis allowing communists to justify their madness as being correct in the future. Instead of delayed gratification, which is a right-wing (healthy) ability, manifested in the moral sphere by expecting judgement and justice and goodness after one's death, the communist reaches for immediate gratification before winning anything at all. The communist persuades himself that he is right because he will be right, that he has won because his side will win, allowing him to remain confident and committed to the cause. Understandably, infecting someone who does not share communist principles with such an outlook would lead to them developing a disease of will, a rancour leading to a malaise, cynicism, inaction and, finally, degeneracy as a means to suspend despair. All one would need to combat such an outlook would be to jump on a bandwagon heading the opposite direction: we might say the right will prevail in the long run as it is the definition of health and all twisted and mutant beings must die, even without that being facilitated by right wing death squads. The right might say that nature is on their side, start believing it and do what the right ought to do and reproduce, creating a family with a natural hierarchy, equipping their children to reach for other planets in the space cadet corp. etc. etc.

There are certainly other arguments which could be made against the crude pessimist determinism of the blackpill and I have merely outlined a couple of the more obvious ones, hoping that at least one deluded person will stumble upon this post and get slapped about by it enough to clean up their room.