"There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now High Chancellor... He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
—— V for Vendetta
Introduction
In 1848, Karl Marx penned the famous line, "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism..." Over a century later, not only has this spectre avoided the dustbin of history, but it has arguably evolved into the most virulent cognitive virus in human history.
Growing up, I possessed an almost instinctual aversion to Marx—whether it was the early Marx who preached essentialism, or the late Marx who degenerated into a false prophet of historical determinism. During my middle school years, I held onto the belief that my brain operated a mental container, one that could be paused and destroyed at will. After all, amidst the pervasive propaganda of political indoctrination classes, polarized media, and social platforms, anyone with a modicum of reason would attempt to build a sandbox in their mind.
That was until one day, while reading a news article about the algorithms in the food delivery industry, I caught myself subconsciously evaluating the business model using the rhetoric of exploitation and class. Container escape.
We often harbor a dangerous illusion: assuming that our brains can function like running Docker, neatly isolating these grand narratives in a sandbox labeled "just playing along." We tell ourselves, "I know this is brainwashing; I'm only doing it to cope with exams, work, and socializing. I don't actually believe it."
But a container escape is never just a myth. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of cybersecurity knows that when a host machine suffers from misconfigurations, kernel vulnerabilities, or component flaws, a container escape is entirely possible.
Human thinking is divided into intuitive and rational thought, which we refer to as System 1 and System 2. System 1 reacts rapidly but is highly susceptible to various cognitive biases; System 2 focuses on logical reasoning but is energy-intensive. The two systems constantly invoke and shape one another.
When the host machine's cognitive kernel is outdated, riddled with logical loopholes, and lacks a lucid intellectual weapon to counter it, this virus named "Marxism" will inevitably breach the sandbox. Through the sleeper effect, repetitive stimulation, and emotional hijacking, it silently degrades the signal-to-noise ratio of the underlying code, ultimately rewriting System 1.
System 2 is highly energy-consuming. It is simply unrealistic to rely on System 2 at all times to suppress System 1. What I can do is engage System 2 through reading, thinking, and other cognitive processes to feed System 1 with better intellectual nourishment.
Living in a society that still utilizes this theory as its foundational fabric, or even forcefully indoctrinates it, our brains face a constant risk of contamination. I do not believe the brain can perfectly quarantine this poison. As long as you don't actively dismantle it, its lexicon (exploitation, alienation, antagonism) and its path-of-least-resistance victimhood narrative will breach your defenses like a relentless flood, bypassing System 2 and corroding System 1.
You cannot kill a spectre by covering your ears. I intend to pin it down on the dissection table to see whether its insides contain scientific truth, or teleological theology.
Dissecting the Spectre
"What more can we expect of a man who attempts to predict the future of mankind, than the irresponsible answers of a soothsayer?"
—— Karl Popper
I was about to watch Nightcrawler and asked Gemini for some viewing pointers. In its response, I caught a word that made me uncomfortable: "alienation." Obviously, this is problematic. To claim that something is alienated presupposes that this entity has a constant, representative, and distinguishing essence from beginning to end—a baseline reference. In other words, an essentialist fallacy.
I pressed Gemini on the origins of the word "alienation." Originally, in medieval theology, it described the estrangement of man from God, or man from the divine. During the Enlightenment, Rousseau used "alienation" to describe individuals surrendering their natural rights to form a social contract. Then, the word gained immense traction. Hegel used it to describe the process of the Spirit moving toward self-understanding: alienating itself, overcoming alienation, and returning to itself. Feuerbach used the word to critique religion, arguing that man creates God, only to be dominated by Him in return. And then Marx stepped onto the stage, proposing the so-called alienation of labor—man's alienation from the product of his labor, from the act of producing, from his "species-essence," and from his fellow man. As for the Frankfurt School attempting to pry open Marx’s coffin to tack on new definitions to alienation, that is a story for another time.
So, what is the baseline for alienation? In the eras of Aristotle and Plato, it was believed that scientific inquiry must penetrate the essence of things to provide an explanation. In other words, one had to answer what the State is, or what human nature is, before addressing derivative questions. This inevitably assumes an immutable, universal essence.
The problem is: when has humanity ever possessed an original, sacred, natural essence? Eating raw meat and wearing no clothes? Presumably, Marx yearned for such a life.
In Sartre’s existentialism, existence precedes essence—this is the fundamental difference between human beings and objects. An artisan first conceives the concept, purpose, and manufacturing method of a paperknife (its essence) before bringing it into reality. For humans, the situation is reversed: a person first exists, and then defines himself and acquires his essence through his actions, choices, and experiences.
Humans are not pre-programmed. There is no such thing as fate or human nature that dictates what I must become. I am the sum of all my choices. If I am an honest person, it is because I have chosen honest actions, not because I possess an innate essence of honesty.
Modern science has long abandoned the quest for essence, turning instead to nominalism. Only concrete, individual things truly exist, while general concepts (like humanity or justice) are merely names invented for the convenience of communication. In Sartre's application of nominalism, he rejects "universals" and the idea of "human nature." Since there is no "blueprint of man" in the mind of a God, there is no universal "human essence." He argues that the concrete supersedes the abstract, rejecting Hegelian grand narratives, and viewing abstract concepts that attempt to encapsulate everyone as an erasure of individual freedom. He believes language has limitations that can confine a free, fluid existence.
Incidentally, Sartre proposed three corollaries that I quite admire. Absolute freedom: man is condemned to be free; this freedom is not a right, but an inescapable predicament. Absolute responsibility: every choice must be borne with full responsibility; one cannot blame innate nature or external circumstances. Anguish and nausea: the realization of freedom and responsibility induces anguish, while recognizing that the world itself is a heap of contingency and meaninglessness produces nausea.
Ironically, in his later years, Sartre attempted to compromise with the spectre. He wrote the Critique of Dialectical Reason to synthesize existentialism and Marxism. In his effort to reconcile absolute freedom with historical determinism, he merely tangled himself in a logical dead end. Quite clearly, it is impossible to simultaneously believe that existence precedes essence and that class determines essence.
Entering his later years, or his so-called mature period, Marx regressed from a philosopher into a false prophet. He abandoned the examination of individual complexity and, wielding extreme reductionism, forcefully flattened the emergent, non-linear, and complex social phenomena of all humanity into the crude dimensions of class struggle and economic interests.
Marx's "historical materialism" reduced humanity's intricate thoughts, ideas, legal, and political institutions into ideological superstructures built entirely upon economic conditions. He insisted that the thread of all history must be traced back to the economic relationship between humans and their material environment, leading to an excessive economic reductionism in his methodology.
Marx proposed the formula: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Regarding this, Karl Popper pointed out in The Open Society and Its Enemies that this is a grossly oversimplified reductionism. By attempting to explain all political conflicts exclusively as clashes between exploiters and the exploited, Marx completely ignored internal contradictions, religion, and other non-economic factors, forcefully fabricating a binary opposition. This clever fool was blind to all contingency and non-linearity.
Marx's most fatal fallacy lies in his attempt to construct a historical determinism with a preordained, perfect endpoint (communism). He believed he had discovered the natural laws governing the evolution of human society, asserting that society would inevitably march along a predetermined path through unavoidable stages.
Popper profoundly exposed the theological underpinnings of this theory. Genuine scientific predictions are strictly conditional, whereas historical determinism offers unconditional historical prophecies. Marx elevated historical inevitability to the status of an omnipotent God, replacing the "chosen people" of Judaism with the proletariat. When a theory prophesies an inevitable endpoint, it is already saturated with teleological coloring.
Even more terrifying is its forfeiture of "falsifiability," the baseline of science. In Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper established the demarcation criterion between science and pseudoscience: a theoretical system can only be called scientific if it possesses the capacity to be refuted by experience or observation—that is, falsifiability. Originally, Marx made specific prophecies: the misery of workers under capitalism would continuously deepen, and the middle class would disappear, swallowed by the proletariat. However, when historical facts (such as the rising living standards of workers under democratic intervention and a burgeoning middle class) falsified these prophecies, later Marxists—namely the Frankfurt School—refused to admit the theory had been debunked. Instead, they invented ad hoc hypotheses like "imperialist exploitation" to forcefully rationalize it.
This shameless logic of remaining invincible implies: if it succeeds, it is historical inevitability; if it fails, it didn't align with the doctrine, or it was disrupted by external forces. By insisting on proving itself eternally correct no matter what, Marxism completely stripped itself of scientific empirical significance and degraded into pure metaphysics. When a theory refuses falsification and claims a monopoly on the inevitable endpoint of history, it slides into unquestionable theology.
The Heavenly Road to Hell
"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."
—— F. Hölderlin
Marxism painted a flawless utopian blueprint for humanity, but upon violent collision with reality, this blueprint not only failed to deliver a kingdom of heaven on earth but instead engineered countless tragedies. The root cause lies in extreme rational hubris blatantly violating the laws of human complex systems.
Labor Value?
Marx's theory of exploitation and his prophecy of capitalism's collapse are built upon the Labor Theory of Value. He attempted to determine objective value based on the labor time required to produce a commodity. This remains a remarkably crude explanation.
Following the Marginal Revolution in economics, marginal utility theory—the subjective theory of value—shattered the intrinsic value theory. Value is not determined by the objective labor time congealed within a good; rather, it is determined by the subjective needs of individuals and scarcity in specific situations (i.e., marginal utility). If you are dying of thirst in a desert, the marginal utility of a glass of water vastly exceeds that of a diamond carved over ten thousand hours. Value is never congealed labor time; it is individual demand in the here and now. Karl Popper also noted that Marx's value theory utterly fails to adequately explain market phenomena. Even if one entirely discards the so-called labor theory of value, the law of supply and demand is sufficient to explain the logic of market operations. Marx's attempt to use static labor value to measure a dynamic economy was both naive and absurd.
The Bed of Procrustes
In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb recounts the Greek myth of Procrustes, a rogue innkeeper who intercepted travelers. His inn featured an iron bed. When guests stayed over, he would amputate the limbs of those who were too tall, and violently stretch those who were too short, forcing everyone to fit the exact length of the bed. Because Procrustes secretly kept two beds of different lengths, no one ever serendipitously matched the bed, and thus no one was spared.
Human society is not a machine that can be disassembled and reassembled at will; it is a highly non-linear, complex network system full of contingency, chaos, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Profound complex systems are riddled with highly interdependent yet imperceptible elements and non-linear responses.
What truly brings prosperity is bottom-up self-organization and emergence—what F.A. Hayek called the spontaneous order based on free competition. Because modern industrial civilization is astonishingly intricate and entails too many factors, no single individual or central authority could ever oversee the whole picture. Free competition is the only way to effectively coordinate these efforts. Attempting to artificially construct a system often triggers a cascading, uncontrollable chain reaction, reducing or even eliminating predictability, and spawning massive Black Swan events.
Yet Marxism and its ideological spawn arrogantly attempt to replace spontaneous order with top-down design and central directives. In essence, they are trying to forcibly strap the complex, ever-changing human society onto the Bed of Procrustes, chopping off the "excess" parts to make reality fit their rigid, linear, utopian theory.
They fail to understand the fundamental law of complex systems: The antifragility of a system at the macro level often relies upon the fragility of individuals at the micro level. The restaurant industry thrives precisely because it constantly undergoes trial-and-error to cater to public tastes; the price of this is that every individual restaurant is incredibly fragile, with an astronomically high failure rate. The short-video ecosystem prospers at the expense of countless bottom-tier creators acting as the bedrock of trial-and-error. To borrow Joseph Schumpeter's term, this is Creative Destruction. The death and elimination of individuals is the very nourishment that keeps the system vital. The system can never predict the future; it simply transfers the risks and costs of trial-and-error onto its constituent parts.
Marxist central planning, on the other hand, tries to immunize every single cell from death. By forcibly intervening to prevent restaurants and creators from failing, the system halts its own metabolism, inevitably leading to systemic stagnation and collapse. Confronted with this mechanism, the truly rational approach is not to smash the system, but for individuals to lucidly adopt a Barbell Strategy to manage risks, rather than expecting an omnipotent utopian government to underwrite their lives.
Iatrogenics
When a central planning authority attempts to orchestrate everything, they demonstrate utter ignorance regarding the system's information entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. Market prices are the sum total of individual supply and demand. Forcibly eliminating the market and free competition equates to cutting off feedback loops and stripping the system of its regulatory capacity.
Naive interventions aimed at making a system "smooth" often strip it of its natural ability to handle volatility—a phenomenon known as iatrogenics (healer-caused harm). For example, children subjected to unnecessary surgeries often face shortened life expectancies. Marxist social engineering is simply iatrogenics scaled up to a societal level. As Popper observed, utopian engineering—the attempt to comprehensively reconstruct society according to an overarching blueprint—lacks sufficient factual knowledge and empirical grounding. Its actual consequences are entirely unpredictable and frequently inflict unbearable suffering upon humanity.
Why Nations Fail
Depriving the grassroots of spontaneous trial-and-error and forcibly implementing central planning inevitably leads to a political consequence: totalitarianism. Hayek astutely noted that "the movement for economic planning essentially demands a dictator in the economic sphere." Because implementing central control on a massive scale requires coercion, dictatorship is the most effective instrument for suppressing dissent and enforcing "the ideal."
Following this logic, Lenin's Vanguard Theory takes the stage. It proclaims that workers cannot spontaneously develop socialist consciousness, only trade-unionism. Therefore, a small elite who have mastered "historical inevitability" must lead the masses toward communism. Tsk tsk, what a grandiose excuse for dictatorship. Such an arrangement rapidly devolves into extractive political and economic institutions, exactly like the Soviet Union and North Korea.
Under extractive institutions, a narrow elite monopolizes all power, naturally building an economic system to extract resources at the expense of the vast majority. Extractive institutions are terrified of creative destruction because it introduces instability that threatens the existing power structure. In the short term, a government might generate rapid economic growth through command-allocation of resources and manpower, but this process is fundamentally capped. Having suffocated innovation, growth cannot be sustained, inevitably spiraling into stagnation and collapse.
The obsessive drive to build heaven on earth almost always uses the harshest totalitarianism and the most rigid extractive institutions to dig the abyss to slavery and hell with its own hands.
The Cognitive Matrix
"Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
—— George Orwell
The question remains: why do so many highly educated individuals firmly believe in Marxism despite its gaping logical flaws? To answer this, we must abandon the notion that the mental container can ever maintain perfect isolation. When a theory is meticulously engineered as a cognitive virus, it doesn't need to debate System 2 with reason and logic; instead, it attacks System 1 through linguistic frameworks and emotional hijacking.
Newspeak
The most brilliant propaganda tool of totalitarian ideologies is the reshaping of language. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity), the language we use largely determines our mode of thought and our perception of the world. Just as Orwell depicted, the totalitarian regime of Oceania created "Newspeak"—eliminating and altering vocabulary so that citizens become incapable of critical thought, because the very conceptual words required to express rebellion have been eradicated.
Marxism and its derivative political discourses have spawned a highly contagious lexicon: exploitation, surplus value, class enemy, struggle... Wittgenstein once noted that the logical structure of language marks the boundaries of meaning, and in his later Philosophical Investigations, he proposed that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Totalitarian propaganda repetitively deploys these words within a specific "class struggle" context, stripping them of their original objective meanings and creating a semantic void devoid of empirical backing. Though logically flimsy, they are emotionally incendiary. Once this lexicon takes root in the mind, heart, and soul, the boundaries of thought are securely locked within a predetermined cage.
To remain conscious in a Matrix rife with censorship and Thought Police, one needs reverse-engineering tools at the metacognitive level. How do we identify common sense that might have been obscured? Shift time and space—find statements that are only deemed "incorrect" in the present moment. Discard censorship—seek out viewpoints that you have no empirical evidence to refute, but your intuition screams, "You can't think that!" Observe the "moral guardians"—figure out what specific words make them furiously leap into action, desperate to cancel and silence, rather than casually dismiss.
When you hear untouchable dogmas like "All stereotypes are prejudices" or "Childbirth is systemic oppression of women," pay close attention to the counter-voices that get slapped with labels like "misogynist," "reactionary," or "cold-blooded." Identify the groups that hold a slight upper hand but are simultaneously terrified, and predict what language they will ban. In this cognitive warfare, keeping your mouth shut and offering a polite smile is the physical defense against pointless arguments; but daring to silently entertain any "terrible, evil, politically incorrect" thought in your mind is your true psychological immune system.
Firing
The arrogant psychological defense of "I don't actually believe it" completely ignores the ruthless laws of neuroscience and physics. As long as we are chronically exposed to this environment, the contamination of System 1 is physically inevitable.
In the realm of neuroscience, Donald Hebb proposed "Hebbian theory" as early as 1949, explaining the mechanism of synaptic plasticity: when two neurons are repeatedly, persistently, and simultaneously activated, the efficiency of their synaptic connection increases. Simply put, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." When an overwhelming barrage of slogans, political classes, news, and commentary constantly pairs "capital" with "evil," or "spontaneous order" with "exploitation," the brain's associative memory network is forcefully rewired by this mechanical repetition, completing unconscious associative learning.
Even more despair-inducing is the psychological phenomenon known as the "sleeper effect." When people receive a persuasive message accompanied by a "discounting cue" (a low-credibility source, such as state media propaganda or certain internet trolls), it initially suppresses any change in attitude. However, the "dissociation hypothesis" points out that over time, the brain's memory separates the message from its source. The recipient eventually forgets who said it. The memory of the alarming source becomes difficult to retrieve, but the ideological conclusion is retained as an independent piece of information.
The enemy troops have retreated, but the Trojan Horse, belly full of soldiers, is already inside the city walls.
The Omnipotent Narrative
From an information theory perspective, the destructive power of this ideological virus lies in its drastic reduction of the signal-to-noise ratio. It exploits cheap availability heuristics to prevent people from engaging in complex probabilistic and logical judgments.
Faced with a highly complex, non-linear real world, Marxism provides an "omnipotent" explanatory framework—essentially, a "narrative fallacy." It packages all convoluted social issues, political upheavals, economic fluctuations, and personal misfortunes strictly into "capitalist exploitation" or "class fault." In The Black Swan, Taleb highlights that humans crave patterns, primarily because we need to reduce the "Kolmogorov complexity" of information to make it easier for our brains to store. The narrative fallacy caters directly to the brain's intellectual laziness of forcefully imposing causality to reduce complexity.
This omnipotent theory, which seemingly explains everything, tricks people into believing the world is less random than it actually is, ultimately mass-producing the IYI (Intellectual Yet Idiot). Taleb calls these people "fragilistas." Spewing theoretical jargon and academic buzzwords, they try to "lecture birds on how to fly." They overestimate the reach of their own understanding, genuinely believing they can comprehend and design society using a few simple causal chains. Smug in their ivory towers or bureaucratic institutions, these IYIs are entirely oblivious to the real world's randomness, antifragility, and emergent orders. In the end, they not only become hosts for the virus themselves, but they attempt to shove all of society onto the catastrophic Bed of Procrustes.
The Mutated Virus
"The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom."
—— Lord Acton
Although orthodox Marxist economics—with its labor theory of value and the prophecy of inevitable proletarian triumph—bankrupted itself against the harsh wall of reality, we absolutely must not underestimate this ideological virus's capacity for mutation and contagion. As long as inequality exists—and it factually always will—Marxism will never stop mutating. The poison sells remarkably well because the pain it claims to treat is real. It has shed its outdated economic skin, extracted its core, and mutated into the malignant tumors currently plaguing Western society.
For the sake of clarity in the ensuing argument, I will bring my conclusion forward. It is not difficult to see that identifying Marxist variants is incredibly simple: they are saturated with binary oppositions, victimhood narratives, hostility toward spontaneous systems, and the glorification of "rebellion is justified." Any theory fitting these four criteria is an incarnation of that very spectre.
The Schools in the Abyss
The modern mutation of the Marxist virus originated with the Frankfurt School. Confronted with the reality that capitalism didn't collapse but instead flourished, these intellectuals felt profound disillusionment. As Georg Lukács mercilessly mocked Adorno and his cohorts: they were merely residents of the "Grand Hotel Abyss." They luxuriated in the supremely comfortable material life, exquisite dining, and artistic entertainment provided by capitalism, all while comfortably gazing over the edge of the cliff, critiquing the so-called "abyss" below. (Ah, how strikingly similar to my mockery of Lulu Miller in my previous blog post).
These armchair intellectuals of the Frankfurt School attempted to dictate what constituted "true needs" versus "false needs." The ideological nakedness of these "clever fools" was thoroughly exposed in Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Unable to comprehend how bottom-up complex mechanisms generate top-level emergence, Marcuse tried to negate the localized judgment of individuals, reducing everyone to brainwashed "one-dimensional men." He realized that the Western working class, driving Fords and drinking Coca-Cola, was living quite well and had been "bought off" by material consumption, losing their revolutionary spirit. The original "proletariat" no longer wanted to rebel. What to do? Marcuse overtly declared that hope must now be pinned on "minority groups," "marginalized groups," and radical intellectuals, injecting radical ideologies to nourish oppositional behavior.
This is the direct genesis of the political correctness that runs rampant today: since an oppressed class could no longer be found, new "victim" groups had to be artificially manufactured. Historian Christopher Lasch's commentary hits the nail on the head: the Frankfurt School and their successors disdain engaging in rational political debate; instead, they habitually use psychiatric categorizations to condemn their opponents. This tactic absolves them of the arduous responsibility of logical argumentation, allowing them to instantly strangle dissenters on moral grounds.
To Hell with Darwin
If the Frankfurt School invented the assembly line for manufacturing victims, then the radical feminism that emerged in the 1960s is one of its most extreme variants. These masters of "find and replace" simply copy-pasted Marx's class struggle template, forcefully replacing "capitalists oppressing workers" with "men oppressing women."
The theoretical foundation of radical feminism is anti-intellectual and defies basic natural logic. They proclaim that the root of all society is the patriarchy, and that men's rule exploits women. Its representative, Ti-Grace Atkinson, claimed that "the need men have for the role of oppressor is the source and foundation of all human oppression." This narrative sounds remarkably familiar. Hand me The Communist Manifesto and the Ctrl+H shortcut, and I could do this job too. In their narrative, even the physiological differences and reproductive divisions forged by natural evolution are twisted into a "political punishment" designed for men to take advantage of women. Radicals like Shulamith Firestone clamored that the ultimate goal was the complete eradication of cultural distinctions between the sexes, even viewing heterosexuality itself as a political institution that must be destroyed.
This narrative is breathtaking—it can be crowned the pinnacle of narrative fallacies and represents an outright destruction of the baseline of human cooperation. Over the long course of evolution and spontaneous order, what men and women formed is a non-zero-sum game based on complementarity and trust. Yet radical feminism attempts to forcefully flatten gender relations into a life-and-death "zero-sum game." By framing the family and reproduction as the malignant tumors of an oppressive structure and seeking to subvert a spontaneously evolved system, human society is stripped of its fundamental cornerstones of reproduction and trust.
More Efficient, More Insane
Following the logic of seeking new hosts, the virus continued to fracture, spawning today's Identity Politics and Eco-Marxism.
Identity politics perfectly inherits the totalitarian core logic of dividing the world into "us vs. them." They force complex social individuals into narrow identity labels—race, sexual orientation, gender, body size—and whisper to every group: "You haven't succeeded because you are being exploited by that other group." This not only caters to the brain's cognitive laziness for simple causation (the availability heuristic), but it utilizes a cheap narrative fueled by resentment to highly efficiently partition an otherwise free, contract-based society into countless hostile camps.
Eco-Marxism, meanwhile, packages "Nature" as the ultimate victim. They argue that capitalist expansion is the sole root of poverty, war, and environmental degradation. Rejecting incremental improvements driven by markets and technology, they wave the banner of absolute environmental righteousness, insisting that the capitalist system must be overthrown. This is nothing more than painting the "Red" into "Green"—at its core, it remains an intense hatred for spontaneous economic order. And what do these people actually do? They throw soup at Van Gogh paintings, block highways, and sabotage infrastructure...
Old Wine in New Bottles
In recent years, this cohort of left-wing intellectuals has coined a new term: algorithmic alienation. They claim that in the platform economy (such as food delivery riders and ride-hailing drivers), algorithms and artificial intelligence have become the new "digital capitalists," alienating workers into mere cogs in the system, mathematically and precisely extracting their surplus value.
This sounds incredibly trendy. But strip away the technological veneer, and it is nothing but Marx's early "alienation theory" and later "exploitation theory" resurrected in the digital age. They deliberately ignore a fundamental truth: the algorithm and platform economy are essentially the evolution of the market's spontaneous order in the information age. They have drastically lowered transaction costs, providing countless grassroots laborers with low-barrier, highly flexible employment opportunities. The relationship between the worker and the platform is a two-way, free-contract relationship. The IYIs hiding in their ivory towers screaming about algorithmic alienation are, once again, deploying their rigid, linear utopian theories to prune a vibrant, non-linear complex network. They do not actually care about the delivery riders; they simply need a new class enemy.
To Kill That Spectre
"Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind."
—— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The battlefield for killing Marxism does not lie in the political arena, but in individual cognition and choice. We must shatter the superstition surrounding grand narratives, historical inevitability, and collective ideologies. Historical determinism, which attempts to prophesy human destiny and discover the iron laws of social evolution, is pure superstition. No scientific method can ever produce unconditional, long-term historical prophecies. Human society itself is a massive "Level Two Chaotic System"; not only is it constrained by infinite variables, but it alters its trajectory purely because of the predictions made about it. History itself possesses no meaning or endpoint; only we can endow it with purpose and meaning.
Since there is no inevitable perfect endpoint, we do not need—and must remain highly vigilant against—any utopian social engineering that attempts to treat society as a blank slate for redesign. Any endeavor to comprehensively rebuild society according to an overarching blueprint inevitably leads to the absolute centralization of power. For the sake of an ethereal, ultimate "good," it will mercilessly sacrifice concrete individuals, unavoidably substituting reason with violence, and steering straight toward a hell on earth.
The true way forward lies in piecemeal social engineering. It does not pursue an ultimate utopia, but pragmatically focuses on resolving the most pressing, concrete social evils of the present, such as alleviating poverty, unemployment, or disease. This incremental reform allows for small-scale trial-and-error within the existing institutional framework. Should a specific policy prove flawed, it can be rapidly adjusted without triggering irreversible catastrophes. Only through this rational trial-and-error can society achieve genuine betterment while averting violence.
Beyond macro social engineering, what is needed even more is individual cognitive immunity. The primary task is to nourish and protect System 1 in our brains. Kahneman pointed out that System 1 is autonomous, fast, and emotional; it operates on a "What You See Is All There Is" (WYSIATI) basis, making it extremely vulnerable to emotional heuristics and cognitive ease. All varieties of brainwashing poisons and extreme ideologies precisely attempt to bypass the rational System 2 to hijack the rationality and intuition of System 1. Therefore, we must maintain perpetual vigilance. When facing sensitive social contexts and major judgments, hit the brakes on your thinking, awaken System 2 to engage in logical deduction and self-monitoring, and outright reject blind conformity to irrational emotions and victimhood narratives.
Simultaneously, in the face of a non-linear and contingent world, maintain a profound reverence for Black Swans and refuse to be duped by the linear predictive models concocted by experts. In Extremistan, Black Swans dictate the course of history.
The reason the spectre was able to haunt Europe and eventually infect over half the globe is that the human brain inherently fears the unknown, desperately craving an ultimate algorithm to cure all ailments. But true courage lies in confronting this real world—riddled with contingency, chaos, and absurdity—and shouldering one's absolute freedom and responsibility on the ruins devoid of God and historical inevitability.
Modern civilization flourishes not because we discovered the ultimate algorithm leading to utopia, but because we established a dynamic network that permits errors, embraces mutations, and continuously allows order to emerge within non-zero-sum games.
And to kill this spectre is not to declare the end of history, but to protect the host machine from being forcibly formatted, allowing us to continue running forever, with vigilance, within the narrow corridor of liberty.