What if Communism and Fascism never existed
- Thread starter Unkown00
- Start date
are you suggestion that human nature is different?
If so sure could be, but the people would no longer qualify as human. More centered they would become even more like sheep, and this will always be exploited like happens today.
I assume WW1 happenend in this situation. To stop WW2 from happening at this point you need a different peace treaty, the ideologies would still exist simply under a different name.
If so sure could be, but the people would no longer qualify as human. More centered they would become even more like sheep, and this will always be exploited like happens today.
I assume WW1 happenend in this situation. To stop WW2 from happening at this point you need a different peace treaty, the ideologies would still exist simply under a different name.
IMO some idea of Socialism will rise when the Industrial Revolution happens, but that does not mean that the specific idea of Communism will catch on with any significance. Nationalism will catch on to an extent when widespread literacy happens, but that doesn’t mean Fascism will ever become signicant. Both ideologies ultimately claim to be operating in the name of the will of the people, so neutering the concept of the will of the people will probably help this endeavor. I would also say that the idea of any kind of real historical inevitability should be cut down.
Keep governance dominated by autocrats, kings, religious organizations, and mostly decentralized or with a central government that barely asserts itself. Don’t have governments operate by the will of the people, by egalitarian principles, by Rights, or attempt to standardize or centralize everything.
Have the local schools generally teach local languages, teach local religious beliefs, and enforce a sense of duty. Local communities that are generally open to outsiders that adopt their way of life, or tolerate outsiders if they bring something to the table and generally stay quiet about their disagreements. People who break local laws get punished by local government, and generally have the Kings support if need be. The Kings governments generally tax around 5% of their economies and get a bit more revenue from services. A normal Kingdom or Empire is multilingual and the aristocracy learn the relevant languages, alternate religious beliefs can generally self segregate or get their own courts for aspects of their religion, emerging merchants and industrialists have opportunity to intermarry with the aristocracy, the elite who violate the Kings norms can face punishment ranging from social ostracism to death depending on circumstances. Individual Empires and Kingdoms are one market and have just enough pensions and employees to make create additional lobbies of business and government employees strongly against any dissolution of their common market or pensions.
This kind of society is generally glued together by religion, loyalty to a King, the economy, maybe family values of some sort, and potentially a shared history.
Fascism is not likely to develop in this kind of system because hyper Nationalism and a near limitless state will sound like a strange idea in a society that is distinctly multicultural, where most have never heard of the will of the people, most people rarely encounter the central government, and where most people are as loyal to their city, village, religion, or king as they are their country.
Communes exist here, but are generally religious, uphold traditional social norms by threat of eviction, call for decentralized appoaches, and would not claim that the dominance of their system is a historical inevitability that will create utopia. These aren’t much of a long term threat to the general social order.
Anything resembling OTL Communism is heavily supressed and does not have ideas like popular will, the inevitable triumph of Democracy, a romantic view of the French Revolution, as strong a rise of secularism, and positive rights feeding it.
The paradigm the two ideologies existed in would be largely removed, but other aspects would still exist, so they might emerge as notable ideologies here as well.
Keep governance dominated by autocrats, kings, religious organizations, and mostly decentralized or with a central government that barely asserts itself. Don’t have governments operate by the will of the people, by egalitarian principles, by Rights, or attempt to standardize or centralize everything.
Have the local schools generally teach local languages, teach local religious beliefs, and enforce a sense of duty. Local communities that are generally open to outsiders that adopt their way of life, or tolerate outsiders if they bring something to the table and generally stay quiet about their disagreements. People who break local laws get punished by local government, and generally have the Kings support if need be. The Kings governments generally tax around 5% of their economies and get a bit more revenue from services. A normal Kingdom or Empire is multilingual and the aristocracy learn the relevant languages, alternate religious beliefs can generally self segregate or get their own courts for aspects of their religion, emerging merchants and industrialists have opportunity to intermarry with the aristocracy, the elite who violate the Kings norms can face punishment ranging from social ostracism to death depending on circumstances. Individual Empires and Kingdoms are one market and have just enough pensions and employees to make create additional lobbies of business and government employees strongly against any dissolution of their common market or pensions.
This kind of society is generally glued together by religion, loyalty to a King, the economy, maybe family values of some sort, and potentially a shared history.
Fascism is not likely to develop in this kind of system because hyper Nationalism and a near limitless state will sound like a strange idea in a society that is distinctly multicultural, where most have never heard of the will of the people, most people rarely encounter the central government, and where most people are as loyal to their city, village, religion, or king as they are their country.
Communes exist here, but are generally religious, uphold traditional social norms by threat of eviction, call for decentralized appoaches, and would not claim that the dominance of their system is a historical inevitability that will create utopia. These aren’t much of a long term threat to the general social order.
Anything resembling OTL Communism is heavily supressed and does not have ideas like popular will, the inevitable triumph of Democracy, a romantic view of the French Revolution, as strong a rise of secularism, and positive rights feeding it.
The paradigm the two ideologies existed in would be largely removed, but other aspects would still exist, so they might emerge as notable ideologies here as well.
xsampa
Banned
But wouldn’t industrialization have brought centralization? And didn’t industrialists marry aristocrats generally and still weaken the latter’s role?
I think you need to more carefully define your terms here. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define. For example, do you mean Italian Fascism, Clerical Austro-fascism of the 1930? Franco? Pinochet etc. If you would place all of these in the broad category of Fascism then I think it is difficult to develop a PoD where right-wing authoritarianism (which is basically the commonality of all of these) does not emerge. On the other hand if you defining it more narrowly (e.g. Nazism) then it become highly contingent. For example, if Hitler is killed in WWI, one could make a plausible argument that there is no Nazism in Germany (although perhaps something else unpleasant). The same basic issues apply to Communism. If you define Communism as anything deriving its basic ideas from Marx and/or promoting socialist ideas, it is difficult to imagine how you get away from this. Marxism seems an almost inevitable result of the industrial revolution. On the other hand if you define communism as Soviet Bolshevism of the Leninist-Stalinist variety, I would suggest this again become highly contingent. Kerensky very well may be able to capture Lenin in either July or October and keep the October revolution from occurring. Of course some other radical group (the SR's for example) may carry out a November or December revolution again returning to the question of whether the SR's would be "communist" or not.
Ficboy
Banned
Well getting Theodore Roosevelt elected as President of the United States (POTUS) as a Republican for a third term in 1912 would get him involved in World War I much earlier for his country at around 1915 after the Lusitania Incident. It would also turn the tide of the war earlier and lead to Germany's defeat in 1917 thus alleviating the Entente (Britain, France and Russia). It also stops Russia from falling to communism and becoming a democratic republic as well as no Nazism in Germany. Alternate History Hub has an entire video about this scenario.
For the most part, there is a degree to which communism or communist related ideologies are inevitable. Not in the sense of a whiggish reading of history, but in the sense that its hard for it not to come about when systemic analysis of class is applied. That and it existing in numerous places and styles for most of history. This could also be said to a latter extent with ur-fascism
That being said, I was wondering if you could further elaborate on what you want to explore out of this question. I mean WW1 seems to be implied as still existing, but thats several hundred years late for any such POD.
That being said, I was wondering if you could further elaborate on what you want to explore out of this question. I mean WW1 seems to be implied as still existing, but thats several hundred years late for any such POD.
I find two threads going right now that I think are largely stumbling on a lack of really broad and deep perspective on human nature. In this one, the nature of the error is to suppose that political and economic world views are completely arbitrary, completely malleable, that there is no reality principle at work posing certain questions necessarily.
Given the evolution of capitalism, to postulate a society or set of them in which no one, anywhere, takes the positions we can broadly label "Communism" is to actually postulate that what we label "Fascism" OTL has in fact triumphed without being contested. Which is preposterous.
Of course OTL, on a conscious level fascism emerged as a rebuke of communism, and as a third way, forward in the mentality of fascists, preempting the dreaded dangers of communism while also observing that liberalism as the root of both was not sustainable, at least in the views of both fascists and communists. If one supposes all these world views are arbitrary, then it makes sense to focus on preventing communism from gaining any social traction and voila, no fascism either.
But I think it goes far deeper than the personalities of individual philosophers and activists of the 19th and 20th centuries. I think that humanity evolved in a fundamentally egalitarian form of communities, in gatherer-hunter bands where what Marx and Engels called "Primitive Communism" was the rational and straightforward way of life, with no economically or socially sustainable viable alternatives, and that human mentality is deeply adapted to this. Then with the development of agriculture, it became possible for social subgroups to seize surplus production, and organize systematic institutional violence in deep violation of general human senses of justice, and leveraging such terror based social systems, sustain them and elaborate them, and because this was the framework in which rising productivity was embedded, prevail and set new norms. But the time frame in which this happened was an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. We are ill adapted to accepting this stratified and violent set of systems as proper and normal and are in a constant ideological state of discontent, seeking to resolve the unresolvable.
Fascism basically says "roll with it." Roll with social stratification, with violence and terror as a way of life, as the necessary and good foundation of society, with war as the natural state of humankind, embrace it and revel in it. Whereas communism, fundamentally, is the idea that actually, we, as an intelligent species, ought to be able to engineer a way to have our cake and eat it too, that a sophisticated society capable of sustaining all the advantages of culture and intricate specialization of skills enabling a highly productive economic machine can also be based on universal equality of all human beings, on a voluntary all for one and one for all ethic I think is deeply gratifying to fundamental human nature. That we recognize that human wealth emerges from human cooperation, and that a society with that cooperation organized on a just basis is superior to any other, more gratifying, more capable, and thus the hope of the future. That's communism.
So, we can have Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both die in their cradles, but the basic shape of the 19th and 20th centuries must nevertheless be pretty much the same. Some ATL leaders can emerge giving fascism a more apparently human and humane face and that particular label never apply--but these gentle fascists will face severe resistance as large publics recognize, with or without a coherent critical analysis of the evolution of capitalism as the current framework of institutionalized violence and systematic exploitation, instinctively and intuitively if need be, that acceptance of social stratification in the forms most useful to exploiters is submission to slavery; the basic steel of fascism as iron rule of power for power's sake must be exposed, and those who recoil from the terrible implications will belatedly perhaps invent the countervailing socialistic mentality of workers of the world united in a democratic paradigm.
Basically we can argue about what labels they will adopt, but not so much about what programs. Capitalism, in refining and reformulating the basic sinews of exploitation, allowing for far greater efficiency and also acquiring an ideological integument of apparent nobility, must force thought along these lines, and a choosing of sides.
Given the evolution of capitalism, to postulate a society or set of them in which no one, anywhere, takes the positions we can broadly label "Communism" is to actually postulate that what we label "Fascism" OTL has in fact triumphed without being contested. Which is preposterous.
Of course OTL, on a conscious level fascism emerged as a rebuke of communism, and as a third way, forward in the mentality of fascists, preempting the dreaded dangers of communism while also observing that liberalism as the root of both was not sustainable, at least in the views of both fascists and communists. If one supposes all these world views are arbitrary, then it makes sense to focus on preventing communism from gaining any social traction and voila, no fascism either.
But I think it goes far deeper than the personalities of individual philosophers and activists of the 19th and 20th centuries. I think that humanity evolved in a fundamentally egalitarian form of communities, in gatherer-hunter bands where what Marx and Engels called "Primitive Communism" was the rational and straightforward way of life, with no economically or socially sustainable viable alternatives, and that human mentality is deeply adapted to this. Then with the development of agriculture, it became possible for social subgroups to seize surplus production, and organize systematic institutional violence in deep violation of general human senses of justice, and leveraging such terror based social systems, sustain them and elaborate them, and because this was the framework in which rising productivity was embedded, prevail and set new norms. But the time frame in which this happened was an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. We are ill adapted to accepting this stratified and violent set of systems as proper and normal and are in a constant ideological state of discontent, seeking to resolve the unresolvable.
Fascism basically says "roll with it." Roll with social stratification, with violence and terror as a way of life, as the necessary and good foundation of society, with war as the natural state of humankind, embrace it and revel in it. Whereas communism, fundamentally, is the idea that actually, we, as an intelligent species, ought to be able to engineer a way to have our cake and eat it too, that a sophisticated society capable of sustaining all the advantages of culture and intricate specialization of skills enabling a highly productive economic machine can also be based on universal equality of all human beings, on a voluntary all for one and one for all ethic I think is deeply gratifying to fundamental human nature. That we recognize that human wealth emerges from human cooperation, and that a society with that cooperation organized on a just basis is superior to any other, more gratifying, more capable, and thus the hope of the future. That's communism.
So, we can have Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both die in their cradles, but the basic shape of the 19th and 20th centuries must nevertheless be pretty much the same. Some ATL leaders can emerge giving fascism a more apparently human and humane face and that particular label never apply--but these gentle fascists will face severe resistance as large publics recognize, with or without a coherent critical analysis of the evolution of capitalism as the current framework of institutionalized violence and systematic exploitation, instinctively and intuitively if need be, that acceptance of social stratification in the forms most useful to exploiters is submission to slavery; the basic steel of fascism as iron rule of power for power's sake must be exposed, and those who recoil from the terrible implications will belatedly perhaps invent the countervailing socialistic mentality of workers of the world united in a democratic paradigm.
Basically we can argue about what labels they will adopt, but not so much about what programs. Capitalism, in refining and reformulating the basic sinews of exploitation, allowing for far greater efficiency and also acquiring an ideological integument of apparent nobility, must force thought along these lines, and a choosing of sides.
How is the latter different than fascism?
The former is a different program, but in a Marx-free vacuum I'd think that instead of all the leftists flocking to Syndicalism, we'd get about a similar number of Syndicalists and a bunch of people reinventing OTL style socialism to communism spectrum ad hoc.
One possibility, if one respects Marx's basic analysis of capitalism as I do, is that this gets reinvented piecemeal, and largely by "respectable" mainstream academic economists, with certain key gaps that various leftist groups fill in. Mainstream academics will not want to conclude that all history is governed by class struggle, at any rate tending to make an exception for the modern liberal era as having resolved former glaringly obvious manifestations of class struggle. But unless one supposes that liberalism would settle down into a balanced dynamic not tending to concentrate wealth in a centralized fashion, which I think is a pretty preposterous assumption to make without a lot of explicit, deliberate state redistribution downward quite in contradiction with basic liberal premises, the various working class movements will have plenty of grievances to present to gainsay such happy conclusions.
What I'm labeling "communist" in the modern era sense is a deduction that since liberal capitalism tends to centralize ownership and hence direction of productive processes into global mega-enterprises, the way to progress is to roll with this tendency, force it to its logical conclusion of one global management, and seize control of that management democratically for the working classes. This contradicts the decentralization of syndicalism of course, so that is the key difference there.
It may be that a program along these lines--"put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket!"--might fail to gain political traction and energy focused on the pragmatics of building syndicalist socialism piecemeal, from the federation of grassroots based communal ventures, might be hammered out instead, forming a powerful Syndicalist faction that becomes the Reds of the ATL--quite probably they would in fact symbolically adopt a literal red banner as the successors of the radicals of the French revolutions.
But I believe the reason Marxist-Leninist Communism took center stage OTL had to do mainly with many grassroots actors agreeing in broad principle that this centralized approach was the straightforward way forward, and thus that Communism much as we know it OTL will dominate the left. Perhaps subtle differences in emphasis can make democracy and grassroots accountability within these movements effective despite the plain fact all these movements will be violently opposed by established power, which imposes militarism and paranoid security mindedness on them and thus lays the groundwork for abuse of power by Party elites pretty much baked in by the situation.
Meanwhile, instances of "Integralism" I have seen illustrated in AH threads, the only way I know them, plus casual references to this or that OTL regime as more or less Integralist leave me seriously wondering if anyone can lay out any important distinctions between this and the broad rubric of fascism with a small "f; obviously Italian Fascism under Mussolini was a very specific thing. I look at what fascism fundamentally is through a Trotskyist lens; he claimed that essentially, bourgeois capitalism functions best and most ideologically justifiably in a liberal regime, but that when the contradictions become too strong and obvious, the bourgeois must either throw in the towel to the Reds and throw themselves on their mercy...or discard liberalism in favor of reinforcing totalitarian state power organized around some ideological justification for sustaining the current class order. This means explicitly gainsaying the Enlightenment propositions liberalism claims as its basis.
By that kind of definition, it does not actually matter whether the ideological justification is one specific thing or another; all are inherently guaranteed to set the claim of equality before the law for the masses at naught. It doesn't matter if this is in the name of submission to a natural or God-given hierarchy of ordained leadership, under an emperor, a theocracy, a monarchial dynasty and noble classes, or some Leader claiming a special personal ordination by some unspecified Fate. It could be justified on crass propertarian grounds directly perhaps--Murphy's Golden Rule, whoever has the gold makes the rules adopted unironically and openly as natural meritocracy, or an alleged claim of "merit" on some other grounds. If such claims of supreme power are not in fact coordinated with and cleared by the capitalist major property owners we can expect them to be effectively dismissed in any society where liberal capitalism already is highly developed, so de facto all of them serve to shore up the privileges of property in general--though of course specific property owners might find themselves scapegoated and expropriated, probably while being killed or exiled in the process.
So in that broad context, is there any distinction between "Integralism" and "fascism" whatsoever? It seems to be a specific subcategory of the general fascist paradigm, not any kind of third thing, to me.
yourworstnightmare
Banned
Integralism is a more Reactionary take on a right wing revolution than Fascism. Integralism for example doesn't see traditional authorities such as the monarchy and the church as "nice symbols we can save if they play ball" but sees traditional authorities as the ones that should actually be back in power. Action Francaise was monarchist for a reason. Basically Integralism is less "progressive" than Fascism if that makes any sense. And a right wing revolutionary reaction to the revolutionary left is as certain to happen in some form that some kind of revolutionary leftism was bound to happen due to they way workers were treated in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
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I see the distinction, but in practical, quality of life on the ground (and higher up) outcomes, what difference does it make if a regime is "fascist" versus "integralist?" So the latter have the traditional kings and emperors to worship instead of some upstart corporal or turncoat former socialist. The revered monarchs are liable to be figureheads of cliques or of some shogun-like actual strongman hiding behind the royal cloaks. But in terms of substantive policy, what is the difference? The nature of the claimed legitimacy is broadly similar and anti-democratic on essentially the same grounds; if God has anointed the traditional dynasty to rule, why could God not just as well make some obscure corporal His Prophet?
yourworstnightmare
Banned
In many ways they are very alike, they are both far right revolutionary ideologies. The point is just because Fascism wouldn't exist, something very like Fascism would take it's place.
You can’t really prevent communism (in the broad sense - you can easily prevent Stalinism or any other ATL big-C “Communism”) from arising, at least in thought, if you have industrial capitalism. The idea of workers’ control of industry naturally follows from the fact of capitalist control of industry; class struggle was / is simply a fact of industrial life. On the other hand, almost all of the theory and practice of OTL Marxist communism is specifically Bolshevism, which was the most natural ideological outcome of the Russian Revolution, which itself was due to the magical combination of uneven development and massive, baffling incompetence on the part of the Tsarist government. You can even make the argument - and I do - that contrary to Marx’s expectations, it’s not highly developed capitalist economies (which have the resources to both buy off moderate socialist organisations and suppress radical ones) but rather “failed states”, of which Russia between 1905-1917 is a textbook example, that breed successful communist revolutions. So if you manage to get Russia to survive as an institution by somehow convincing the Tsarist authorities to add even a single carrot, like a constitution, to their wide variety of sticks, and ally themselves with liberal parties instead of pursuing the doomed, idiotic program of autocracy, you could undercut Bolshevism and see communism remembered more as an “aspect of history” between the mid-nineteenth century and about the 1930s than as a coherent state ideology.
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Optical_Illusion
Banned
If you saw Marx as someone like Darwin or Newton, someone who discovered a theory which was and must be true for the world to make sense, you could Marxism as inevitable.
But IMO, Marxism probably is not really like that - the whole schema of human history as fundamentally reducable to an economic, materialist history, characterised by socially revolutionary transformations at critical points of pressure and contradiction between "classes" within a "mode of production", with the latest capitalist mode to be superceded by a rationalized, centralized bureaucracy of the proletariat in which "to each the ability, to each the need" is the governing principle and social class is takento be the salient governing truth of individual identity... that whole schema is very specific and very much the product of a particular intellectual history. It's dependent on Hegel, it's dependent on the French Revolution, it's dependent on Marx's personal history, it's dependent on a tide of modernist faith in bureaucracy. There's nothing particularly about it which is simply true in any possible history; there's nothing about it which human nature will drive people to believe in any possible history (indeed, it's something of a fluke that anyone in our history believes in any of it at all, let alone the package together!).
It's far from a natural outgrowth of observation of phenomena, which can be easily divorced from the personal history of its founding figure, or the philosophical currents of its time. We can't imagine a world that makes sense where someone did not discover Newton's laws of motion, of evolution by natural selection, or even Ricardian comparative advantage. Those are fundamentally true and obvious aspects of reality which are essentially undeniable. But we can easily imagine a world without Marxism, as easily as we can one without Islam, or Christianity.
But IMO, Marxism probably is not really like that - the whole schema of human history as fundamentally reducable to an economic, materialist history, characterised by socially revolutionary transformations at critical points of pressure and contradiction between "classes" within a "mode of production", with the latest capitalist mode to be superceded by a rationalized, centralized bureaucracy of the proletariat in which "to each the ability, to each the need" is the governing principle and social class is takento be the salient governing truth of individual identity... that whole schema is very specific and very much the product of a particular intellectual history. It's dependent on Hegel, it's dependent on the French Revolution, it's dependent on Marx's personal history, it's dependent on a tide of modernist faith in bureaucracy. There's nothing particularly about it which is simply true in any possible history; there's nothing about it which human nature will drive people to believe in any possible history (indeed, it's something of a fluke that anyone in our history believes in any of it at all, let alone the package together!).
It's far from a natural outgrowth of observation of phenomena, which can be easily divorced from the personal history of its founding figure, or the philosophical currents of its time. We can't imagine a world that makes sense where someone did not discover Newton's laws of motion, of evolution by natural selection, or even Ricardian comparative advantage. Those are fundamentally true and obvious aspects of reality which are essentially undeniable. But we can easily imagine a world without Marxism, as easily as we can one without Islam, or Christianity.
I very, very strongly disagree with this, for the exact reasons that the thinkers you cite - Darwin in particular - came along at the precise time they did. Biological evolution by natural selection is an inherent fact of the universe, yes; but facts of the universe are not self-evident in human experience. Darwinism, the scientific theory that establishes the exact principles through which biological evolution occurs, is contingent on hundreds of social factors (unlike natural selection itself) that didn’t exist prior to the Industrial Revolution. At the most basic level, to use your own phrasing, Darwinism “is dependent on” the uniformitarian principle that geology had already established only a few decades before. The uniformitarian principle itself is dependent on aspects of 18th- and 19th-century science and philosophy, which are themselves dependent on aspects of society, which are together far too complex for you, I, or anyone else to claim absolute authority on. All we can really say - with absolute conviction - is that if you went back to the Middle Ages, say 1000 AD, and tried to explain Darwinism (or any other aspect of the modern scientific worldview, including social sciences), you’d get nowhere at all. To put it into needlessly controversial terms: biological evolution is “a fact”, while Darwinism is “a social construct”. The former does not depend on a particular arrangement of human society to operate, but the latter does.
Marxism is also a social construct, but the fact that it attempts to elucidate - capital - is not. Capital is a fundamental feature of the development of industrial society just as much as natural selection is a fundamental feature of life - that’s to say, it’s impossible to imagine a self-consistent world without those features in their respective contexts. You may believe that Marxism is an incorrect theory of capital, like Lamarckism is an incorrect theory of evolution (putting aside for a moment the non-biological processes of evolution for which Lamarckism is correct, like historical linguistics), or you may believe - as I do - that Marxism is insufficient, but you can’t disregard the fact that capital and class are inherent features of industrial society, and so Marxism as a social construct is only as contingent on its historical foundations as Darwinism is, since both are a product of social conditions. The fact that Marxism, as a social science, is reflexive - i.e. that it attempts to analyse the very society that it is dependent on - doesn’t change that.
As such, yes, the OTL “Marxism” based on Hegel and Marx is not historically inevitable. But “Marxism”, as an analysis of capital and class, is, so long as an industrial society analogous to that of Marx’s time exists. There’s a reason the first section of the Manifesto is titled “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, not “The Philosophy of Human Society”; communism arose from the relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, not from Marx’s own head or from inscrutable “fashions”. At a sufficient level of analysis there’s no such thing as fashion, and everything that has existed must have existed in some place and time in which it made sense.
I also disagree with you about Marx’s alleged “modernism” or “faith in bureaucracy” - I’m not exactly sure where you got the latter impression from in particular - but that veers dangerously off-topic.
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