Monopolies of violence

Of course, new memes challenge the status-quo all the time. Laws and institutions protect the cultural order from chaos. They stage the public arena wherein politics can evolve society without breaking it — through conversation, criticism and compromise. Conservatives defend, progressives challenge. New memes override established memes when they win over enough conservatives with utility and replicability.

Ultimately, though, institutions protect ruling memes with violence, or the threat thereof. They trace what is fair game and what is to be punished. Violate their laws and their police puts you in prison. Theorists typically define states as monopolies of violence in territories: only their violence is legal.

To be sure, cultural order is worth defending. As networked values, norms and traditions, they cohere society. Within cultural bounds, strangers know what to expect from each other. At least, they don't hurt each other. Best case, the sky is the limit for collaboration. Without order, there can be no peace, productivity and prosperity — no humanity at its best.

The problem is that on a finite planet the prosperity of some typically comes at the expense of others. Whether within or in-between cultures, violence thus keeps rearing its ugly head. Because we fail to create cultural orders all of the world's strangers want to uphold.

History is written by the victors

Hierarchies are stories enforced as truth by those on top. Memes legitimising the ruling cultural order are glorified and force-fed in media and schools, those challenging it mocked and censored. All under the watchful eye of institutionalised violence.

What came before is told as a story with the present as just conclusion. This is how it was meant to be. What happened before was wrong, but because of this and that now things are finally right. History is reinterpreted. The course of history is a river that was meant to flow here. History has only one course and so it naturally legitimises all present policies. The present is the inevitable result. Doesn't make sense to not accept it.

• Class warfare Soviets. Capitalist conspiracy. Marxists explained history as the struggle of social classes for economic resources, whereby the capitalists had stolen everything from the workers through the scam of private property. Politics is reduced to the struggle between classes. Marxists proclaimed themselves scientists of history. They diagnosed that the fundamental problem was private property and capitalism. Workers of the world unite. private property brings conflict and thus stands in the way of humanity reaching their potential. Restore humanity to its unspoiled soul. For Marxists, historical progress followed from struggle between rising and falling classes, groups made and remade by changes in the modes of economic production. Each dominant political order was challenged by new social groups formed by new economic techniques. The modern class struggle was between those who owned factories and those who worked in them. Workers represented the forward flow of history.
• The Bolsheviks presented history as a struggle of classes, the poorer making revolutions against the richer to move history forward. Thus, the plan to annihilate kulaks was no a simple decision but a historical necessity. "We will destroy the kulak as a class," portrayed a kulak under the wheels of a tractor. A second kulak as an ape hoarding grain and a third uscking milk directly from a cow's teat. These people were beasts. Murder is thus justified.
• After the war, the part where USSR and Germany made a pact to destroy Poland was completely forgotten. Instead, it was the fascist west that attacked Russia and Russia that prevailed. This version of history persist until this day. "Denazification" look at Plokhy.
• Hitler explained history. Only the law of the jungle is real; the singular, brutal and overwhelming truth. The whole history of thinking otherwise an illusion. The only enemy thus was racial. Human activities are biological and don't know political boundaries. The essence of life was thus the strife of races over resources. Individuals, social classes were social constructs. The weak are to be dominated by the strong. Politics, reason, morality - capitalism and communism were illusions invented by Jews to deceive other races so they would be led astray from the racial struggle. The only morality was fidelity to race. Mass murder is thus in tune with nature. This is what Hitler meant by the Jewish world conspiracy. The strong should starve the weak but Jewry warped the universe with ideas so the fittest don't survive but strive. Germans are the master race who need to claim their position on top by breaking the order. Hitler's explanation of history was, in fact, that it was all made up. Facts are not important, will is. Hitler didn't care about all that humans were "supposed" to believe, do and stuff. The Bolsheviks were Jews in power who were now set on destroying all other strata of mankind.
• Jewish world conspiracy. Hitlerian.
• Russia-Ukraine
• Jim Crow America

To varying extents, of course. The less tolerance for alternative versions, the more totalitarian the order. As we've seen, tyrannical regimes burn books and people to make regime memes the only memes.

Liberal democracies, in contrast, fly the banner of free speech. Their meme pools are plural and more fertile, as ideas freely cross-pollinate. When meme gaps are small, social groups compromise and work together to advance society. When gaps are big, common ground crumbles and tribalism takes over. Politics decays into culture war, which may prelude a shooting war.

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." — Friedrich Nietzsche

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