Conquest's Second Law of Politics states that "Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing" or, as Modlug phrased it, "Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he always swims left." This seems incontrovertibly true, but why?

Right about now, you may be wondering why your bank, your credit card company, your grocery store, your university, hollywood studios, your streaming services, your social media, clothing stores, game developers, and Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, are all tweeting racial agitprop

As late as 2016, the democratic candidates all stood on stage and said some variation of "All Lives Matter" - today, this will get you fired from any respectable institution. What gives? Why is the left *always* on "the right side of history"?

Samuel Johnson famously said that "the first Whig was the Devil." If the left is chaos and the right is order then naturally things tend toward entropy over time, right? But human institutions aren't closed thermodynamic systems - there must be a mechanism causing chaos to emerge

To understand the mechanism, you must first understand what "left" and "right" mean. Some people say that this is a vestigial artifact of the French Revolution. In specific details, that's correct. But it doesn't explain why you can look at the Roman Republic and tell who's who

I submit to you that there is substance to the concept of "right" and "left." I say that being "right" means believing in the superiority of *evolved* systems and being "left" means believing in the superiority of *planned* systems.

The right is the philosophy of tradition, of religion, of hierarchy, of burkean incrementalism, of survival of the fittest, of primitivism. Each of these are in tension with each other on specific points, but they are all about the maintenance of evolved value systems.

The most fundamentally right-wing thinker is Nassim Taleb. #Lindy is a right-wing ideology. The rightist understands that the world is a strange and horrifying place and that the tools we use to navigate it were bought with generations of human suffering

We do not have complete theories of anything. All we have are heuristics. Man cannot produce absolute truth, it is the domain of God alone. The best that man can do in this world is "true enough." True enough to survive. True enough to be filtered until it becomes tradition.

The left is the philosophy of expertise, of science, of "progressing" past the beliefs of our hidebound ancestors, of individual freedom and self-expression outside inherited rules, of caring for those who cannot survive, of man as the beginning and the end of all things

The left believes that man is perfectible in principle. That man's ability to reason can produce better and more effective morality than what has been selected for over the generations. That the "rational" maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain is the whole of morality

If this were so wrong that anyone who embraced it died quickly and painfully, we wouldn't have a problem. But human societies are like commercial jets - they can glide for a long time before they crash. And in the meantime, you don't have to listen to those dreadful engines

So, back to our original question. Why does Cthulhu
always swim left? Because to *do* politics is an essentially left-wing act. To make changes to what has been selected for in favor of particular human interests is to trade the robust for the ephemeral.

Sometimes it's not a big deal. Plenty of beliefs are probably pretty arbitrary, and taken individually rather than as part of an interconnected system they may seem especially meaningless. But over time - and that is all that matters - the tendency is toward chaos and fragility

Democracy accelerates this process because it makes power (always desirable) contingent regular concessions to particular ephemeral human desires. But monarchies face this pressure as well. The gap between the interest of a person and the interest of a people - that is politics

And that is why you live in a time that offers you great somatic pleasures, but faces collapse on all fronts. Collapse of families, collapse of institutional trust, collapse of supply chains in the face of even predictable complications. All the result of Cthulhu's endless drift.

That's all.