Calculating the Plausibility of the "Long March Through the Institutions"

Jordan Peterson dogma deboonked?

An interesting question for exousiology is, given a young person with certain potential talents / innate alpha, what career path should they take in life to maximize their marginal influence with respect to their ideological commitments, such as Communism or implementing ubermensch world?

Assuming the fungibility hypothesis, that influence is independent of command, the answer would just be to maximize your income. However, this could be naive. Compare the positions of anthropology professor and airline pilot. A typical anthropology professor makes $70,000 per year while a typical pilot makes $200,000 per year. Cathedral theorists would say that the anthropology professor is more powerful than the pilot with respect to promoting racist policies, because the anthropology professor shapes public opinion on race for a living, while the pilot just flies a plane.

Whether they are right is neither here nor there — the answer depends on how memetics works, which is a topic we are currently studying intensely (if you would like to help fund this original research, which costs money, please become a paid subscriber).

The point of this article is that 100 years ago, an Italian Communist named Antonio Gramsci assumed the Cathedral Theorist position in some writings. This was picked up by Herbert Marcuse, who James Lindsay says invented wokeism. A popular narrative on the origins of wokeism is that the cultural marxists infiltrated the institutions, especially academia and the media (the Cathedral), and this caused wokeism, which specifically means Civil Rights, LGBTQIAPNZ++, feminism, and so on.

Recent Thuletide thread recounting this narrative

So the narrative goes like this. Once upon a time, there wasn’t wokeism. Then Gramsci and Marcuse told commies to infiltrate the cultural institutions. This caused commies who believed in Marcusian wokeism / wokeism in general to accumulate in these institutions. In turn, the institutions turned woke, and this caused general woke culture.

In other words, Gramsci & Marcuse answered the opening question correctly, and told the other Communists. Armed with the knowledge that they maximized their power by becoming anthropology professors, they became anthropology professors, while non-Communists with the same skills often become physicians, STEM professors, engineers, or capitalists, blindly letting the exousiologically advanced Communists control the culture, wondering why everything is so gay and shitlib.

But what proof is there of this narrative? What we have is this: the percent of conservatives in academia has dropped since the 1960s, wokeness has increased, and Herbert Marcuse vaguely told Communists to get jobs in a 1972 book.

Roughly, the percent of conservatives in academia in 1969, before Marcuse found out about the “long march”, was only 25%. This declined to 10% in 1999. In 2019, it was just 5%. Hm. Did that 5% difference between 1999 and 2019 cause wokeism? Was that 5% differences caused by Marcuse having a lot of fans and so much influence over those fans, even in death, that he makes just that many more Communists show up to professorships who would otherwise be living in a hippy commune or flying a plane? Does anybody even read Marcuse except for James Lindsay?

Let’s do some math. There are about 500,000 professors in the US. Let’s say there was about the same amount in 1969. We’ll say roughly 250,000 had to be hired from 1969 to 1999 to replace die off. Without Herbert Marcuse, this would included 62,500 conservatives, but because of Herbert Marcuse, it only included 25,000 conservatives. How big was the hiring pool? It would appear that a good estimate is that the hiring pool was 4 times as large. This means there should have been a million people who wanted to be hired, and 250,000 were conservative. But due to Marcuse, that 250,000 number was diluted to just 10% of the hiring pool. Thus 1.5 million Communists joined the applicant pool — more than were already there. They literally flooded the institutions, just to make conservatives a mere 10% in 1999. Marcuse therefore caused 50,000 Communists to pursue becoming professors per year, who otherwise wouldn’t have.

We now ask if Herbert Marcuse has sold that many books, specifically that many copies of the book where he densely states,

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.
The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions. They have long been an aim of the movement, but the lack of funds was greatly responsible for their weakness and their inferior quality. They must be made competitive. This is especially important for the development of radical, "free" media. The fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation.

?

Are there even more than 100,000 copies of this book in existence? And of those who read Marcuse, how many are Communists who also decide to become professors when they otherwise wouldn’t have?

The book in question has 12 reviews on Amazon. My book has 2 reviews and has sold about 100 copies. So Marcuse’s book has probably sold about 600 copies. That’s a few short of 1.5 million or 50,000 per year.

Also, how big is 1.5 million people over 30 years? Naively, we’re dealing with about 90 million people born between 1939 and 1969. So Marcuse has attracted over 1% of that population. But wait a second. The number of people with political agency, who want and have the ability to spend their life pursuing Communism as a professor, is very low. A good, charitable estimate is 5% of people. We could go even lower. But if we assume that Marcuse filters for agency, then he’s attracting people from a pool that is 5% of the size of 90 million. That’s 4.5 million people. We’re supposed to believe that he attracted 1.5/4.5, or 33% of the relevant people to his rotten ideology, with his dry and boring books? An excerpt from One Dimensional Man:

It is a rational universe which, by the mere weight and capabilities of its apparatus, blocks all escape. In its relation to the reality of daily life, the high culture of the past was many things— opposition and adornment, outcry and resignation. But it was also the appearance of the realm of freedom: the refusal to behave. Such refusal cannot be blocked without a compensation which seems more satisfying than the refusal. The conquest and unification of opposites, which finds its ideological glory in the transformation of higher into popular culture, takes place on a material ground of increased satisfaction. This is also the ground which allows a sweeping desublimation.

Artistic alienation is sublimation. It creates the images of conditions which are irreconcilable with the established Reality Principle but which, as cultural images, become tolerable, even edifying and useful. Now this imagery is invalidated. Its incorporation into the kitchen, the office, the shop; its commercial release for business and fun is, in a sense, desublimation—replacing mediated by immediate gratification. But it is desublimation practiced from a "position of strength" on the part of society, which can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens…

LMAO wow that was convincing, I’m a wokeist now. Desublimation, dude … this totally wasn’t astroturfed by people with real power. You could totally write like this today and take over a third of the people over 125 IQ and just conquer the country with this text!

We now ask how much marginal influence 37,500 extra Communist professors really have. Is it equivalent to one billionaire? Two?

If we make some memetic assumptions and say that what they’re doing is essentially just capturing the professor position, and then shilling Communism with it, that means they’re just taking their wage from the public and pumping all of it, their calories included, into Communism. A pilot, meanwhile, has to spend his calories on flying. Only his leftover earnings can fund Communism.

This comes out to about $2.6 billion per year going into Communism, that otherwise wouldn’t have. Again, we assume these Communists are 100% agentic. That’s a lot, but a single large billionaire, of which there are several, could single handedly stop the Communist plot, for instance by spending $3 billion per year funding conservatives to be (better, because truth) professors at new institutions. One billionaire wins over 37,500 Long March infiltrators.

Conclusion

We have discovered that Herbert Marcuse and friends would have had to have astronomically high influence over the politically agentic population in order to cause a Long March Through the Institutions. While the number of conservative professors dropped, a single new conservative billionaire spending his money agentically could compensate for that drop culturally. If the drop in professors were not due to systemic reasons, we might expect this compensation to occur. Instead, we see a very liberal billionaire class, even though the change in professors is probably not enough to cause this, assuming the fungibility hypothesis.

This suggests something more — either the road to power generally is favoring the far left for reasons not related to Herbert Marcuse, who was not popular enough to cause a Long March, or the left has generally grown, for either genetic or environmental reasons, meaning there are proportionally more leftists in power than before simply because there are more leftists in the base population than before.

I suspect dysgenics, ethnic immigration, and the accumulation of power favoring those with poor character more than before could all be at play. It is a good thing we have swept aside a false narrative, because it obscured the fact that more research on this is needed. If you would like to help the research effort, make sure you subscribe: