This is a great post. I resonated strongly with many of these sentiments, particularly the bits about how winning power makes you less left-wing (although this is perhaps a matter of reverse causality, or maybe bidirectional causality) and I will be thinking about it for a while.
One quibble:
> My simplistic theory is: “The left hates power and the right hates weakness.”
I dunno if leftists will see themselves in this either. I think we/they would instead say that we hate the *powerful*.
In practice, this tends to mean hating power (as you noted), but I don't think it feels that way from the inside.
Interesting, to me it genuinely feels more like hating *power*, or rather the fact that in the state of nature some people win and others lose and the winners can subjugate the losers. I feel much less like I hate the powerful, and I honestly feel like the version of this hatred that’s directed at people is much less constructive. But maybe you would have seen yourself more in the alt I considered: “the left hates the rich and the right hates the other”
Hmmm I wonder. I think most IRL leftists (disregarding the terminally online) understand full well that power is required for their goals: that's why they're always talking about revolution, right? They don't hate power entirely, they just hate what they would have to do to get it, and accordingly what powerful people have done to acquire and retain it.
Personally, I think my disdain for the powerful is less about their power and more about what they do with it. If more powerful people were empathetic and focused on promoting human flourishing, perhaps I'd feel differently about them. But the nature of capitalism is such that people who do not obsessively focus on building and maintaining wealth do not remain wealthy for long, and so those who remain on top are those who are committed to doing so at the expense of other values. But I'm also not a very good leftist (if I am truly a leftist at all), so maybe take this with a grain of salt?
Hmm I think this is not just the nature of capitalism, but in fact the nature of all systems of selecting the power. It’s even more true for systems more common in the past like violent combat. I think capitalism selects for some of the best elites of any system we have, which is a big reason why I’m not actually on the American left.
I mean, agreed about all systems of selecting power. I'm fully with you on the principle of holding leftist sentiments constrained by practicality. But IMO one of the ways to constrain the power of the most power-hungry is a random giant wealth tax that kicks in over some stupidly large number like, I dunno, a billion dollars.
(Unrelated, but I suspect that there must be some way of getting the information-aggregating benefits of markets without accepting the downsides of capitalism. Markets > central planning, but do markets have to imply infinite profit generation? I'm not convinced...)
Agree with you that there could be lots of interesting mechanisms that could potentially decouple the profit accumulation effect from the information distribution effect, especially enabled by AI.
But disagree on the wealth tax, both for the standard economist arguments (distorting incentives to invest, capital flight) and because billionaire philanthropy is one of the only mechanisms society has for helping with important moral problems like factory farming and x-risk that are too avant garde, long-term, or technical for governments to effectively address.
I think this framework fails at the extremes in a way Caplan's does not. For example, Maoists really hated markets but they certainly did not hate power (I mean, they hated when *other people* had power but so did far-right authoritarian movements). When I read Marx for example, I see his hatred of market power but his love of state power -- there are of course anarchist leftists who hate both types of power but they are generally a minority of what we consider to be influential leftist radicals.
Yeah I think that’s fair! I don’t know much about Maoist history, but I’d guess the sentiment that it harnessed among people was a lot more anti-power and idealistic than the way the party operated in practice? In other contexts I feel like there’s a dynamic where the left tends to argue for projecting power / dominance using the rhetoric of liberation and equality, while the right tends to argue for mercy / equality using the language of strength?
I thought about the alternative slogan “The left hates the rich and the right hates the other,” which I think addresses your objection here and also my original objection to Caplan’s slogan (that it felt kind of random and overfit). But that felt less charitable on both sides and set up these reflections less well :)
I think any sort of radical group has to be “anti-power” in some sense, the question is what power they perceive to legitimate. In general leftists are less likely to see power resulting from market forces as legitimate, which aligns with Caplan’s thesis. It kind of seems to me like what you are pointing to in this article is more like being anti-competition than anti-power? It feels plausible to me the left is durably more anti-competition than the right (competition of course can be considered to be both pro- and anti-power depending on the context -- hayek for example who is generally considered on the right focused explicitly on how competition limits power).
Yeah, in my view the left (at least the emotional strand within humans that the left draws its power from) is against "survival of the fittest", against "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must," against the sense that it can ever be "legitimate" for one person to have more than an another, in a much broader sense than markets. Markets are only the most salient arena of competition in our modern world, and when other theaters of competition and domination were more dominant I think there was a broader "spirit of the left" that opposed that.
I see this as analogous to the "care" and "fairness" axes of Haidt's moral foundations framework.
On Caplan’s theory, “the left hates markets” has always seemed the weaker leg while “the right hates the left” has increasingly struck me as quite insightful. At least in the modern era, I’m inclined to think it’s more predictive than “the right hates weakness”. Low brow right wing media is suffused with overt antipathy towards the left, and high brow right wing writers seem obsessed with trying to find respectable intellectual foundations from which they can safely criticise left wing positions.
Another great post, Ajeya! You may not remember me, but we were both on the staff for 61A at Berkeley at some point. I distinctly remember walking somewhere in north side (perhaps after some course event?) and you explaining effective altruism to me. That stuck with me, and after college, I revisited it and then found the rationalist community, etc, etc.
Anyway, this and several of your previous posts have strongly resonated with me in a way that feels really meaningful. I want to keep this short, so I’ll just leave it at that for now. Thank you for putting in the time to write here and share your thoughts :)
Really interesting. I think power vs weakness as the organizing opposition points is pretty good as a one dimensional description! And it resonates with me that as I've gotten older and gained experience in leadership and trying to get things done with a group of people that some elements of the left strike me more as childish than noble or visionary.
Though your note from your conversation with your apple friend set off my alarm bells in the opposite direction. I don't necessarily disagree, but to me there is a whiff of the company/organization/movement man there that's common in the valley. Something like the opposite failure mode of the problematizing leftist who can't deal with actually getting something ambitious done.
Lastly, you gotta rethink the wealth tax! I'm something of an evangelist for Piketty's program for a modern leftist political economy. His framing of capital circulation as a way to learn from the failures of the past while not succumbing to pro-capital myths is, to me, quite compelling. I think it has gotten lumped together with dumb-left ideas amongst the broader demo where EA and adjacent SF folks generally sit for self interested reasons, not principled ones.
Yeah I admit I've been trying to get said friend to quit Apple and do more helpful things for years!
And yeah the wealth tax thing was a cheap shot at the random one-time 5% tax coming to the CA ballot (which honestly I haven't looked into that much, maybe I'm wrong about it!). I don't feel strongly about optimal tax codes, not something I've thought about a ton.
Well it's never too late! I quit data/ML at Nike 1.5 years ago after years to try to transition into technical AI safety mid career (I'm 44). Different topic, but tough road. The AI safety world is young and insular and hard to break into from Portland, especially as a leader!
The wealth tax thing I admit is tricky. The political support comes mostly from the anti-power left instinct you named. But if you think honestly and systemically about it, there are definitely serious risks for growth and innovation if not done carefully. Those two sit in some tension for sure. But then again, I would think that as someone who resonates a lot with how you described your own "boring" political and philosophical orientation.
Great post - I've been thinking about it a lot. Particularly the quote: “Sure, you can leave if you need to. But it’s not noble that you couldn’t handle the work of gaining and wielding power. It doesn’t make you a better person.” This is a conversation I felt like I've had with a lot of my very left wing friends.
However, on: “The left hates power and the right hates weakness.” I think this is worth positively inverting to "The left loves justice and the right loves excellence." Both are chasing an ideal and are willing to sublimate their own desires to this. There is a place for the weak in right wing societies but it is venerating the excellent. The other side is a kind of tall poppy syndrome in left wing groups.
There's an extent to which I think EA squared that circle by centering excellence in pursuit of the good. Framing it as a project in which, most who try, fail. Perhaps elitist but it does attract a different kind of person that those seen in other do-gooding projects.
At least since Trump has come to dominate the Republican Party, I think that it has added an important wrinkle to the “the right hates weakness” and “the left hates power”, and that it is easiest to see this with regards to gender. I think part of the vibe that has attracted young men to the right is that the right has as an ideal a world where those young men have agency, and views that as important. Whereas the left, generally speaking, has a negative view of people who it views as privileged as having agency as part of a world view in which it views power (by some people) as bad. But the conservative view seems more universalistic in that it sees agency as good for all people to have (though there are definitely people on the right who view it as negative for women to have agency). The point being that the concerns of ordinary people on the right are more oriented around ordinary people having more power, which is more of a different emphasis than on the idea of tearing down power but not incompatible with it.
I don’t really identify much with the right hating weakness and think the reason why might be the same accusation you leveled at Caplan.
In fact, if I think of my most right leaning friends, most of what they seem to care about involves unpunished crimes. It’s not that criminals are weak, and you wouldn’t say that that is why the right hates them. It’s that criminals are stronger than the weaker people who didn’t sign up to fight them.
If left hates power, why does it see it as the sole force relationships in the world are predicted upon? And why has it historically advocated for that same power? The argument seems to be something like: "yes, power is awful, but we're the good guys, though".
Yes, a common mindset on the left is to be obsessed with power differentials as the root of all evil! You can hate something also need it and use it, and navigating that is a core tension for people who have this mindset.
The common mindset you describe sounds very narcissistic. Being perfectly willing to use a tool for my aims shows that my (simultaneous) claim to hate it as the root of all evil is actually BS. I might as well just say that I believe power (= coercion) is my only principle, and that the only reason why things so often go wrong is that, of course, other oppressors are not as enlightened as me. "Ah, if only I were in charge..."
I think that that proposal of an AI guardian for a child is completely impossible. Either it is merely a different parent, or it is covertly following the values of another power, or it is an unmoored nothing.
(I would generally view such a thing if actually existing as an assault by secular liberalism upon my rights.)
I agree with a lot of the stuff about power and how holding it tends to make you make compromises you wouldn't otherwise make.
To a first approximation (it's always very complicated), I think left and right, at least here in the USA, are coalitions that assemble around the Democratic and Republican parties, likely as a result of our first-past-the-post political system. The underlying groups change in size and that causes realignments.
For example, the whole anti-immigration bloc has greatly increased in size, which has led to a huge swing against immigration on the right, which used to want more immigrants to work in their businesses. The popularity of critical theory on the left has caused a lot of people who primarily identify as their demographic markers (in prior generations they would have tried to assimilate) and that shapes the left's move from labor-based socialism to... identity-based whatever you call the recent thing.
It’s so easy to hate power because of how is more often than not used against the collective good. And the system itself selects for people that exploit it. But taking yourself out of the equation only strengthens their relative power or influence.
Unfortunately, it seems there is no way to build the leviathan without swimming in the sea.
New York mayor Mamdani seemed to have figured this out. He gained and wielded power, but remains humble and down-to-earth, so leftists still love him and even Republicans like Trump (who hates weakness) seem to respect him.
I don't think the left hates power, I'd say they hate inequality, and those in power increasing inequality, such as billionaires who don't give away most of their wealth etc.
I recently chatted with a friend who mentioned that some of the "infighting" among the left is the point--we're actually trying to figure out how to work together and live out our values, whereas conservatives just fall in line and don't question things. I like that philosophically, but at the end of the day we're not prioritizing building power and winning (as you touch on).
To your point, I don't necessarily think the left hates power, I just think that the left prioritizes other things (like fairness and justice) over power. And I find myself coming to the same conclusion there--that philosophically that's sound, but ultimately we're not prioritizing building a movement and winning anything.
This is a great post. I resonated strongly with many of these sentiments, particularly the bits about how winning power makes you less left-wing (although this is perhaps a matter of reverse causality, or maybe bidirectional causality) and I will be thinking about it for a while.
One quibble:
> My simplistic theory is: “The left hates power and the right hates weakness.”
I dunno if leftists will see themselves in this either. I think we/they would instead say that we hate the *powerful*.
In practice, this tends to mean hating power (as you noted), but I don't think it feels that way from the inside.
Interesting, to me it genuinely feels more like hating *power*, or rather the fact that in the state of nature some people win and others lose and the winners can subjugate the losers. I feel much less like I hate the powerful, and I honestly feel like the version of this hatred that’s directed at people is much less constructive. But maybe you would have seen yourself more in the alt I considered: “the left hates the rich and the right hates the other”
Hmmm I wonder. I think most IRL leftists (disregarding the terminally online) understand full well that power is required for their goals: that's why they're always talking about revolution, right? They don't hate power entirely, they just hate what they would have to do to get it, and accordingly what powerful people have done to acquire and retain it.
Personally, I think my disdain for the powerful is less about their power and more about what they do with it. If more powerful people were empathetic and focused on promoting human flourishing, perhaps I'd feel differently about them. But the nature of capitalism is such that people who do not obsessively focus on building and maintaining wealth do not remain wealthy for long, and so those who remain on top are those who are committed to doing so at the expense of other values. But I'm also not a very good leftist (if I am truly a leftist at all), so maybe take this with a grain of salt?
Hmm I think this is not just the nature of capitalism, but in fact the nature of all systems of selecting the power. It’s even more true for systems more common in the past like violent combat. I think capitalism selects for some of the best elites of any system we have, which is a big reason why I’m not actually on the American left.
I mean, agreed about all systems of selecting power. I'm fully with you on the principle of holding leftist sentiments constrained by practicality. But IMO one of the ways to constrain the power of the most power-hungry is a random giant wealth tax that kicks in over some stupidly large number like, I dunno, a billion dollars.
(Unrelated, but I suspect that there must be some way of getting the information-aggregating benefits of markets without accepting the downsides of capitalism. Markets > central planning, but do markets have to imply infinite profit generation? I'm not convinced...)
Agree with you that there could be lots of interesting mechanisms that could potentially decouple the profit accumulation effect from the information distribution effect, especially enabled by AI.
But disagree on the wealth tax, both for the standard economist arguments (distorting incentives to invest, capital flight) and because billionaire philanthropy is one of the only mechanisms society has for helping with important moral problems like factory farming and x-risk that are too avant garde, long-term, or technical for governments to effectively address.
I think this framework fails at the extremes in a way Caplan's does not. For example, Maoists really hated markets but they certainly did not hate power (I mean, they hated when *other people* had power but so did far-right authoritarian movements). When I read Marx for example, I see his hatred of market power but his love of state power -- there are of course anarchist leftists who hate both types of power but they are generally a minority of what we consider to be influential leftist radicals.
Yeah I think that’s fair! I don’t know much about Maoist history, but I’d guess the sentiment that it harnessed among people was a lot more anti-power and idealistic than the way the party operated in practice? In other contexts I feel like there’s a dynamic where the left tends to argue for projecting power / dominance using the rhetoric of liberation and equality, while the right tends to argue for mercy / equality using the language of strength?
I thought about the alternative slogan “The left hates the rich and the right hates the other,” which I think addresses your objection here and also my original objection to Caplan’s slogan (that it felt kind of random and overfit). But that felt less charitable on both sides and set up these reflections less well :)
I think any sort of radical group has to be “anti-power” in some sense, the question is what power they perceive to legitimate. In general leftists are less likely to see power resulting from market forces as legitimate, which aligns with Caplan’s thesis. It kind of seems to me like what you are pointing to in this article is more like being anti-competition than anti-power? It feels plausible to me the left is durably more anti-competition than the right (competition of course can be considered to be both pro- and anti-power depending on the context -- hayek for example who is generally considered on the right focused explicitly on how competition limits power).
Yeah, in my view the left (at least the emotional strand within humans that the left draws its power from) is against "survival of the fittest", against "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must," against the sense that it can ever be "legitimate" for one person to have more than an another, in a much broader sense than markets. Markets are only the most salient arena of competition in our modern world, and when other theaters of competition and domination were more dominant I think there was a broader "spirit of the left" that opposed that.
I see this as analogous to the "care" and "fairness" axes of Haidt's moral foundations framework.
On Caplan’s theory, “the left hates markets” has always seemed the weaker leg while “the right hates the left” has increasingly struck me as quite insightful. At least in the modern era, I’m inclined to think it’s more predictive than “the right hates weakness”. Low brow right wing media is suffused with overt antipathy towards the left, and high brow right wing writers seem obsessed with trying to find respectable intellectual foundations from which they can safely criticise left wing positions.
Another great post, Ajeya! You may not remember me, but we were both on the staff for 61A at Berkeley at some point. I distinctly remember walking somewhere in north side (perhaps after some course event?) and you explaining effective altruism to me. That stuck with me, and after college, I revisited it and then found the rationalist community, etc, etc.
Anyway, this and several of your previous posts have strongly resonated with me in a way that feels really meaningful. I want to keep this short, so I’ll just leave it at that for now. Thank you for putting in the time to write here and share your thoughts :)
Really interesting. I think power vs weakness as the organizing opposition points is pretty good as a one dimensional description! And it resonates with me that as I've gotten older and gained experience in leadership and trying to get things done with a group of people that some elements of the left strike me more as childish than noble or visionary.
Though your note from your conversation with your apple friend set off my alarm bells in the opposite direction. I don't necessarily disagree, but to me there is a whiff of the company/organization/movement man there that's common in the valley. Something like the opposite failure mode of the problematizing leftist who can't deal with actually getting something ambitious done.
Lastly, you gotta rethink the wealth tax! I'm something of an evangelist for Piketty's program for a modern leftist political economy. His framing of capital circulation as a way to learn from the failures of the past while not succumbing to pro-capital myths is, to me, quite compelling. I think it has gotten lumped together with dumb-left ideas amongst the broader demo where EA and adjacent SF folks generally sit for self interested reasons, not principled ones.
Yeah I admit I've been trying to get said friend to quit Apple and do more helpful things for years!
And yeah the wealth tax thing was a cheap shot at the random one-time 5% tax coming to the CA ballot (which honestly I haven't looked into that much, maybe I'm wrong about it!). I don't feel strongly about optimal tax codes, not something I've thought about a ton.
Well it's never too late! I quit data/ML at Nike 1.5 years ago after years to try to transition into technical AI safety mid career (I'm 44). Different topic, but tough road. The AI safety world is young and insular and hard to break into from Portland, especially as a leader!
The wealth tax thing I admit is tricky. The political support comes mostly from the anti-power left instinct you named. But if you think honestly and systemically about it, there are definitely serious risks for growth and innovation if not done carefully. Those two sit in some tension for sure. But then again, I would think that as someone who resonates a lot with how you described your own "boring" political and philosophical orientation.
Great post - I've been thinking about it a lot. Particularly the quote: “Sure, you can leave if you need to. But it’s not noble that you couldn’t handle the work of gaining and wielding power. It doesn’t make you a better person.” This is a conversation I felt like I've had with a lot of my very left wing friends.
However, on: “The left hates power and the right hates weakness.” I think this is worth positively inverting to "The left loves justice and the right loves excellence." Both are chasing an ideal and are willing to sublimate their own desires to this. There is a place for the weak in right wing societies but it is venerating the excellent. The other side is a kind of tall poppy syndrome in left wing groups.
There's an extent to which I think EA squared that circle by centering excellence in pursuit of the good. Framing it as a project in which, most who try, fail. Perhaps elitist but it does attract a different kind of person that those seen in other do-gooding projects.
At least since Trump has come to dominate the Republican Party, I think that it has added an important wrinkle to the “the right hates weakness” and “the left hates power”, and that it is easiest to see this with regards to gender. I think part of the vibe that has attracted young men to the right is that the right has as an ideal a world where those young men have agency, and views that as important. Whereas the left, generally speaking, has a negative view of people who it views as privileged as having agency as part of a world view in which it views power (by some people) as bad. But the conservative view seems more universalistic in that it sees agency as good for all people to have (though there are definitely people on the right who view it as negative for women to have agency). The point being that the concerns of ordinary people on the right are more oriented around ordinary people having more power, which is more of a different emphasis than on the idea of tearing down power but not incompatible with it.
I don’t really identify much with the right hating weakness and think the reason why might be the same accusation you leveled at Caplan.
In fact, if I think of my most right leaning friends, most of what they seem to care about involves unpunished crimes. It’s not that criminals are weak, and you wouldn’t say that that is why the right hates them. It’s that criminals are stronger than the weaker people who didn’t sign up to fight them.
If left hates power, why does it see it as the sole force relationships in the world are predicted upon? And why has it historically advocated for that same power? The argument seems to be something like: "yes, power is awful, but we're the good guys, though".
Yes, a common mindset on the left is to be obsessed with power differentials as the root of all evil! You can hate something also need it and use it, and navigating that is a core tension for people who have this mindset.
The common mindset you describe sounds very narcissistic. Being perfectly willing to use a tool for my aims shows that my (simultaneous) claim to hate it as the root of all evil is actually BS. I might as well just say that I believe power (= coercion) is my only principle, and that the only reason why things so often go wrong is that, of course, other oppressors are not as enlightened as me. "Ah, if only I were in charge..."
What if you hate weakness and power? Does that make you a left-libertarian?
I think that that proposal of an AI guardian for a child is completely impossible. Either it is merely a different parent, or it is covertly following the values of another power, or it is an unmoored nothing.
(I would generally view such a thing if actually existing as an assault by secular liberalism upon my rights.)
I agree with a lot of the stuff about power and how holding it tends to make you make compromises you wouldn't otherwise make.
To a first approximation (it's always very complicated), I think left and right, at least here in the USA, are coalitions that assemble around the Democratic and Republican parties, likely as a result of our first-past-the-post political system. The underlying groups change in size and that causes realignments.
For example, the whole anti-immigration bloc has greatly increased in size, which has led to a huge swing against immigration on the right, which used to want more immigrants to work in their businesses. The popularity of critical theory on the left has caused a lot of people who primarily identify as their demographic markers (in prior generations they would have tried to assimilate) and that shapes the left's move from labor-based socialism to... identity-based whatever you call the recent thing.
I struggle with this a lot.
It’s so easy to hate power because of how is more often than not used against the collective good. And the system itself selects for people that exploit it. But taking yourself out of the equation only strengthens their relative power or influence.
Unfortunately, it seems there is no way to build the leviathan without swimming in the sea.
I am left wing but love power. I just think left wants to change stuff right wants to return to the past or don’t change stuff
New York mayor Mamdani seemed to have figured this out. He gained and wielded power, but remains humble and down-to-earth, so leftists still love him and even Republicans like Trump (who hates weakness) seem to respect him.
I don't think the left hates power, I'd say they hate inequality, and those in power increasing inequality, such as billionaires who don't give away most of their wealth etc.
I recently chatted with a friend who mentioned that some of the "infighting" among the left is the point--we're actually trying to figure out how to work together and live out our values, whereas conservatives just fall in line and don't question things. I like that philosophically, but at the end of the day we're not prioritizing building power and winning (as you touch on).
To your point, I don't necessarily think the left hates power, I just think that the left prioritizes other things (like fairness and justice) over power. And I find myself coming to the same conclusion there--that philosophically that's sound, but ultimately we're not prioritizing building a movement and winning anything.