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Notes -
IMHO Cthulhu swimming left is an oversimplification, especially given the general vagueness of the term "left". But accepting the premise, I'd say that the end of the Soviet Union doesn't necessarily contradict the overall trend so much as it highlights how utterly dysfunctional that particular implementation of leftism was. Functioning Socialism has never been tried!
In my view, Cthulhu swims towards concentrating and increasing power. Where leftism helps that goal, leftism it is. Where leftism sabotages itself so badly that it no longer helps the growth of concentrated power, Cthulhu sidesteps.
It's going to be circular reasoning from here on out, but what other kind is there. The transition from feudalism and monarchism to liberal, democratic capitalism was not because Cthulhu actually hates concentrating power, but because feudal societies were less efficient at generating power overall. This temporary liberalisation and individualization unleashed a great deal of economic and technological power, and Cthulhu is slowly working towards getting all that under control. Relent for a few centuries so that you can reap a greater bounty once the technology including social technology is far enough along to put all that power under the control of a more centralized will, again.
And the soviet union, like the dictatorships of the mid-20th century, was just plain bad tech. It was bad social technology. It didn't work well enough at generating power, even if it was better than its competitors and centralizing and controlling it, at face value. Cthulhu found out that reining in the individual via deracination, atomization and technological uniformization while maintaining just enough individualist liberty to keep up appearances allows him to extract far more power from them than from an overt collectivization.
I think this is close, but what Cthulhu wants is power without accountability. The biggest problem with feudalism was that the ruled classes knew who had power and if that power didn’t produce a good life for them, it was simply a matter of removing those bad rulers and putting someone better in charge. With modern administrations, the real power sits in agencies where the official government requires an agency to exist and follow procedures but the agency has the power to rule, the official government is there mostly as a whipping boy. You can rage against your elected representatives all you want, Cthulhu is happy enough to let you do so, because those guys are not Cthulhu. And that lack of accountability means longevity for Cthulhu, so long as the people don’t completely upend society or some outside force doesn’t overthrow it.
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