ecosophia | Reflections on Entryism

One of the things I've been thinking about of late has been entryism -- the habit, very common in certain extremist political groups, of having people join some other, larger group with an unrelated focus in the hope of taking it over, or at least using it as a venue for recruitment and propaganda. I noted on this week's post over at the main blog that American secret societies, all through the years when they were large and culturally significant, had to fend off attempts at entryism, and noted with a certain wry amusement that the two groups most famous for entryism back in the day were socialists, on the one hand, and the Ku Klux Klan on the other.

I wasn't exaggerating. On the one hand, it took the Masons a long bitter fight in the 1920s and 1930s to identify and throw out Klansmen who had joined Masonry with the goal of turning the Craft (that's what Masons call Masonry) into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Klan. On the other, quite a few other lodge organizations had to engage in similar struggles to keep socialists from taking them over -- that's when a lot of lodges started making the Pledge of Allegiance part of the opening ritual; socialists hated that and usually wouldn't say it, which made it easy for them to be identified and rendered harmless in various polite but effective ways.

The irony? There are two groups of people who quite frequently pop up on my blog, either trying to post links to articles on their websites unrelated to the topic of the weekly essay, or trying to give my feet a tongue bath because they think they can then talk me into agreeing with their positions. You guessed it: it's either socialists on the one hand, or people from the racist right on the other.

It's interesting that this should still be the case a century after the examples I'd studied. Now of course socialism and racial politics both have ghastly track records -- between them, they're responsible for most of the major genocides of the last century and a half -- and that's got to be a problem for recruitment. Still, given the abysmal historical ignorance of most Americans, it shouldn't be that insuperable. Some sort of subcultural heredity? Or some other factor?

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Maybe so, but not all fringe groups engage in the specific behavior I'm discussing. Druids, for example, are way out there on the fringe, and yet we don't go in for entryism. I'm curious about what inspires these two fringe groups, more than any others, to engage in this specific behavior repeatedly over more than a century of history.

If, as violet and Robert suggest above, maybe it's because they lean in hard on the sex/death/violence buttons, and it's a Martial thing. You told me "Mars only cares about how much territory you can capture". And that is: all of it.

Anyone who is not a mate or a subordinate is a potential enemy, so you have to make sure you dominate everything you can get a toe into; ideologically or genetically. They're both obsessed with breeding their own true kind, and killing off rivals, but they work in different theatres. And since there are always spontaneous mutations, breeding unsanctioned by the alpha, and complicated genetic legacies, you'll never get to run out of enemies impure enough even within your own tribe. By definition you'll almost have to purge your own tribe first to create a better territorial barrier.

That, or put another way, that it takes one type of energy to cut apart to One True type, and another to bring together a group that will hang together willingly, and they only use the one: no nurturance.

Maybe it has to do with the level of evangelism associated with a specific group. Beer drinkers as a group mostly couldn't care less whether you drink beer or wine. But political/social theory groups have an extremely high interest in everyone else's political affiliation and try to change it. Maybe it is because the ideals tie back to core beliefs or because the political beliefs of the masses do have big impacts on everyone's interests, but it is just one of those areas that people evangelize about, especially the extremists.

So maybe it's not that they joined the group for the explicit reason of pushing their political agenda, but are actually interested in druidry or masonry and happen to be extreme on the political dimension and just can't help but to push their political agenda regardless of what setting they are in.

It is just a theory, and maybe naive - but I work in an area shrouded in government secrecy and I so often see outsiders attribute random dynamics to malicious organized conspiracies that I tend to try to find alternate explanations before believing conspiracies.

Both socialism and hard right have a view that they can create a perfect world if in power. They can only create this world when they reach a critical mass of enough people to take power. However, most people don't like them, so they need a teaspoon of sugar to make the mass deaths go down. The "shell" or marketing of groups that are already popular or seem legitimate serves that purpose, but small groups are easier to take over. Basically, "you can create utopia if you sell enough people on this, but it's a bad product, so take over other brands."

Druids on the other hand do not believe in a "perfect world" and do not need everyone to agree with them to do their practice. Same goes for all hobbies and personal practices.

Reflections on Entryism

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