Right, no objection there. Scott Alexander outright dubs this observation Marx’s Fallacy[1]:
> What I sometimes call Marx’s Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what “optimize” means.
I was only saying that the surface implications of the “means of production” rhetoric don’t really matter once you have Lenin in power, because that rhetoric is not what drives his actions. I took your previous comment to mean that they did. (That is not to say that the whole Russian anti-autocracy movement since 1815 was a power grab, even if a pie-in-the-sky gentleman anarchist introducing and promoting terrorism in European polite society[2] sounds a bit bizarre to modern sensibilities. Recall the Russian Empire had a serfdom system essentially equivalent to domestic slavery up until 1861.)
Still, though, my original puzzlement in this thread is that sex, specifically, seems to have even more importance to control freak governments than would generically be expected given their control freak nature. Little importance is given to the citizens’ diet, for example, or clothing, and even art is hit and miss, but sex is somehow always at the forefront (even if nobody says the word). Maybe it’s human passions in general?.. I don’t know, I don’t see it.
> What I sometimes call Marx’s Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what “optimize” means.
I was only saying that the surface implications of the “means of production” rhetoric don’t really matter once you have Lenin in power, because that rhetoric is not what drives his actions. I took your previous comment to mean that they did. (That is not to say that the whole Russian anti-autocracy movement since 1815 was a power grab, even if a pie-in-the-sky gentleman anarchist introducing and promoting terrorism in European polite society[2] sounds a bit bizarre to modern sensibilities. Recall the Russian Empire had a serfdom system essentially equivalent to domestic slavery up until 1861.)
Still, though, my original puzzlement in this thread is that sex, specifically, seems to have even more importance to control freak governments than would generically be expected given their control freak nature. Little importance is given to the citizens’ diet, for example, or clothing, and even art is hit and miss, but sex is somehow always at the forefront (even if nobody says the word). Maybe it’s human passions in general?.. I don’t know, I don’t see it.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin