Frankly? I call bullshit on this. If you google "fifty Stalins" the entirety of the search results for it consists of people referencing or riffing on Scott Alexander's NRx FAQ. You could not possibly have heard this phrase without having been exposed to it one way or another. I wasn't going to say "and it seems highly suspicious that you're misleadingly quoting the FAQ now that it's been taken down and people can no longer access it", but, well, now I am.
Really this is such a perfect example of the motte and bailey employed by most reactionaries in defending their notion of inequality that I couldn't have asked for a better strawman. Literally nobody disputes the idea that things are different from other things, and that differences on scales of measurements exist. Not even the world's most extreme postmodernist refuses to accept the fact that you are weaker than a strongman or less intelligent than me. Nobody in the world believes that human beings are literally identical in all things.
What people object to is the part where you say that "therefore, people who are perform better on these particular scales of measurement which I have arbitrarily selected as being the most important should have power to rule over those who do not". More broadly, while both your post and the OP are presented as a straightforward defense of the concept of differences existing between things (the bailey, where you profess exceptional courage in defending a concept accepted by every human being over a few months old), the actual meat of what you're arguing is a much less self-evidently true combination of the following:
- Certain nebulously defined qualities such as intelligence and moral character/virtue are correctly defined by some particular scale of measurement you believe to be correct (IQ or some sort of Christian ethics, respectively)
- These particular qualities are what makes some people better than other people on an absolute scale, rather than merely in whatever particular quality is being discussed.
- These particular qualities entitle people to rule over others, and not other qualities such as artistic talent, compassion, altruism, etc.
- Moreover, these particular qualities entitle people to rule over others in a reactionary political system, generally characterized by immense and unaccountable power being given to a class of hereditary aristocrats
- All liberals and leftists reject the basic concept that some human beings are different than each other in any way.
- Because of this, liberals and leftists cannot accept basic goods such as beauty and strength
- Society ought to be organized around promoting concepts such as beauty and strength, and in particular ought to be organized around doing so instead of pursuing "nihilistic" goods such as hedonistic pleasure or preference satisfaction
I have neither the time nor the patience to argue against all of this, and frankly all of this stuff has long been addressed by many, many people who are much, much smarter than me, so I just want to note a couple of things before I leave.
1.) The vast majority of liberals and leftists don't reject the entire concept of beauty and strength, and I say this as somebody who actually believes that they should. The OP goes on about how leftists have turned abandoned strength for celebration of weakness, but a quick glance at almost every leftist doing that shows how these celebrations of "weakness" are in fact celebrations of the strength demonstrated by one's ability to endure through hardship or to be honest about one's weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Both of which are things that even the most reactionary person on earth would probably accept, in some sense, as "strength". One can believe that the particular ways that leftists do this do not, in fact, actually reflect strength, but the idea that they don't value it at all seems rather laughable.
Likewise, the idea that liberals and leftists are against the entire concept of beauty is just... rather laughable? Every leftist artist who argues that the western conception of beauty ignores the values of underrepresented minorities/cultures/etc. is inherently accepting the concept of beauty as something to value, and merely arguing that what our society believes to be beautiful is not actually beautiful. You can believe they're wrong if you want, but they clearly have, and value, a standard of beauty. It just happens to not necessarily be the same standard of it as yours.
2.) The nihilism that you identify as an inherent characteristic of "liberalism" and "leftism" is in fact a quality of urbanity and urban communities, an observation that was noted as early as the 20th century by Simmel and so forth. More rural leftists, up to and including the USSR, were just as disdainful of what they saw as the nihilistic decadence of Western society as you are, if not moreso, to the point where the CIA promoted modern art specifically as an example of the creativity and artistic diversity of developed Western society which the authoritarian communists, obsessed with promoting the classically beautiful image of Socialist Realism, could not understand. The immense concentration of the city undermines communitarian values and traditional hierarchies as people lose strong interpersonal connections and attachments to their neighbors and their superiors, the fast-paced nature of city life naturally prioritizes the material over the spiritual and reduces the power of traditional values, and the spread of access to knowledge encourages people to seek answers in human works rather than the supernatural and undermines the wonder of things such as beauty and belief.
You may very well defeat leftism, a transient political movement that is currently extremely politically weak, but the unending march of urbanity and urbanization brought about by technological progress that rewards concentrations of people, economies of scale, and the widespread distribution of knowledge and communications is inevitable. You may defeat your present enemies, but the way of life that you cherish--the communitarian, traditional values and stable hierarchies of rurality--is already dead. Your children will die sad, creaking deaths as they watch the last vestiges of the world they knew slip away forever.
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