Again I say control the forces that control you

An essential leftist belief is thinking that it is morally acceptable to do harmful things to people who have bad opinions. This is not the viewpoint of outliers but the natural conclusion you come to when you believe that oppression is the result of social constructs. If social reality is socially constructed then oppression is socially constructed, which basically means that the reason oppression exists is because people have the wrong viewpoint. Thus, anyone with the wrong viewpoint is an oppressor. This is why you would conclude that speech can be violence and violence might be an acceptable response to the wrong spoken words. This viewpoint is a complex version of the childish idea that magic is possible, and it seems that not all adults outgrow the belief that the spoken word can change reality. This belief is probably an also the opposite of Marxist since Marxism posits that everything flows as a result of material forces. If things are the result of social constructs then material forces are irrelevant. But this totalitarian viewpoint comes from Marxism, right? That's an interesting contradiction: a philosophy that says everything is rooted in material forces ultimately asserts that The Will is the basis for change. Of course I am speaking of Marxism as popularly conceived, I can't be bothered to wade through thousands of pages of actual tedious text. Since my viewpoint is that the purpose of a thing is what it does and not what it says it does there is only a marginal gain to be had by reading the actual text, since the actions of people who call themselves followers of Marx can be read textually. Textual Marxism is the Motte (reasonable argument) while actually experienced Marxism is the Bailey of the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy.

I continue to point out that the penalty for being annoying among humans is basically death. Nothing is more annoying than disagreeing with sacred cows. If leftism is the belief that having the wrong opinion makes you evil, then there is nothing more annoying than having the wrong opinion.

Over here at The Anti Puritan we believe that things really are the result of material forces—and more specifically technological forces. Thus, the viewpoint people have is mostly irrelevant and what really matters is controlling the technologies that control us. Small gains may be had at the margins by manipulating public opinion but real change is material in nature. But no one ever seems to get what I'm saying so let's talk about an example. 

Back in the day President Obama actually did something intelligent. He announced a program of nuclear disarmament and said that he wanted the whole world to be nuclear free. Now obviously this was a preposterous idea and if the world had actually succeeded in doing it then conventional World War would have made its return. But the words were not the point. The purpose of a thing is what it does and not what it says it does. In the case of Obama and his program, the United States went around buying up nuclear weapons material and then storing it underground. The result of this activity was to increase the price of that material. Bomb making material follows the law of supply and demand just like anything else. By increasing the price he pushed it beyond the ability of terrorists to afford. This made the whole War On Terror far less pressing. For those who lived through it, you might remember that The War On Terror was taking on an existential flavor. It was getting to the point where everyone sincerely believed that we might have to wage a holy war against Islam and convert the whole Middle East Christianity, or atheism, or something. That's what happens when you have cheap nuclear weapons that terrorists can afford. Do you understand now? An entire civilization and its priorities can change as a result of a price point for a certain weapons technology. Change the price, and you change the entire order of priorities of that civilization. That's an example of controlling the technology that controls you. It is one of the few examples since most of the time we just allow technology to go uncontrolled. 

Of course Obama will probably be known for his Cash for Clunkers program. This is where the government paid people to send their used cars to the junkyard. It resulted in a vast decrease in the number of used cars available for young people to drive and increased the cost of car ownership for at least a generation. You might say this also involved changing a material force that affects society. That's how it usually works when people change material forces: they change it only because of rent seeking. Most of the time when technology is limited it is so someone can be enriched. Right now there is a cure for cancer that involves removing white blood cells from a person's body, genetically modifying them to hunt tumors, and then reinserting them into the body. For whatever reason having to do with money and bureaucracy this technology has not gained regulatory approval, and millions of people continue to die every year from cancer. I guess chemotherapy drugs are just too profitable. Also, "medical ethics experts" have essays to write about how curing people is bad because genetic modification is literally Hitler or something.

There are entire leverage points that are unexploited for changing the world. Let us list some of them out: 

Nuclear energy: all wars in the Middle East, all concern over The Strait of Hormuz and the Suez canal, all motive public motive for supporting Israel would be irrelevant with enough nuclear energy. One wonders if Israel financed environmentalist movements that opposed nuclear energy. If I were Israel that's what exactly what I would do since American dependence on Middle Eastern oil provides the superficial pretext for constant intervention in the Middle East. 

Birth control and dating apps. Don't like the culture of promiscuity? There's two simple technologies you can cancel to abolish it. You don't even have to ban birth control, in fact the more effective option would simply be to flood the market with counterfeit sugar pills and then do nothing to stop it. You don't even ban it, you just stop doing quality control. As long as none of the counterfeits are poison you do nothing to enforce quality. You might even pass a law inhibiting the ability of drug stores to perform their own internal quality control on contraceptives. Basically, you intentionally wreck the reliability of the pill. That's way more effective than banning anything. All your birth rate discussion is downstream from the ability to control birth rates. No control means no need for the discussion.