Is aversion to discussion of sex a part of traditional Chinese culture? Seems odd given I'm not aware of any puritanical religions taking hold there.
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(The early Soviet Union moved from abolishing marriage in favour of cohabitation to actively promoting it; the official stance on abortion, IIRC, flipped several times; and while the equilibrium was extremely prudish—“there is no sex in the USSR”—the adult literacy campaign of the first decade was not above commissioning and printing a literal porn ABC if it got the job done.)
I mean, they are totalitarian governments, they are defined by asserting control over the totality of people’s lives. But the fixation on sex, in particular, seems to go beyond that, and yet it’s fairly universal among them.
(If you have read Orwell and Zamjatin [which, let’s be honest, are nearly the same book] but not Moscow 2042, I highly recommend picking that up as well—the bizarre sexual Zeitgeist of the ripe Soviet state is much more vivid there than in the “serious” dystopian works. Though I don’t really know if it’s readable without at least an extensive set of footnotes, and given that it’s supposed to be bitterly funny that might be missing the point.)
Sex is how workers create workers, a means of production. So of course they try to seize control of it.
Sure, you’re supposed to read the foundational documents, think the old state was evil, say the dictatorship of the proletariat is coming, etc., but more often than not you’re paying lip service to the person who is apathetically droning out a butchered retelling of the whole thing. Occasionally they are actual starry-eyed devotees of the idea, but just what that idea is is somehow less important than uttering The Idea in hushed and reverent tones. (I promise I was not going for this Arendtian twist, it just came out.) More often than not, though, a position of ideological enforcer is more indicative of skill in navigating a slime pit of backstabbing bureaucrats than anything else. (There’s a reason why career man is one of the vilest late-Soviet curses—now extinct, funnily enough.) Hell, the very name of the state is a sad joke—the eponymous sovjets (literally, councils [of workers and farmers], but supposed to be local governments rather than advisory councils) were all but neutered by the end of the first decade if not earlier.
So, no. I don’t expect that the proclaimed ideology has much to do with it.
(None of this is to be taken as a defense of 19th-century German political philosophy as a viable economic strategy, mind you.)
Basically, the kind of people who rose to the top of a system like the Soviet Union are control freaks, and they acted accordingly.
> What I sometimes call Marx’s Fallacy is that if we burnt down the current system, some group of people who optimized for things other than power would naturally rise to the top. Wrong. People who most brutally and nakedly optimized for power would gain power; that's what “optimize” means.
I was only saying that the surface implications of the “means of production” rhetoric don’t really matter once you have Lenin in power, because that rhetoric is not what drives his actions. I took your previous comment to mean that they did. (That is not to say that the whole Russian anti-autocracy movement since 1815 was a power grab, even if a pie-in-the-sky gentleman anarchist introducing and promoting terrorism in European polite society[2] sounds a bit bizarre to modern sensibilities. Recall the Russian Empire had a serfdom system essentially equivalent to domestic slavery up until 1861.)
Still, though, my original puzzlement in this thread is that sex, specifically, seems to have even more importance to control freak governments than would generically be expected given their control freak nature. Little importance is given to the citizens’ diet, for example, or clothing, and even art is hit and miss, but sex is somehow always at the forefront (even if nobody says the word). Maybe it’s human passions in general?.. I don’t know, I don’t see it.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...