By The Intrepid in Nosideism — 19 Jul 2025

The Nuoc Mam Theory of Modern Politics

It’s quite fishy indeed.

On reductions, myths, and the tyranny of concentrated narrative

We are drowning in narrative concentrates.

Every side, every faction, every ideologue is in the business of distillation — turning messy, bleeding reality into aromatic ideology. History becomes not just a lesson, but an ingredient. You don't have to eat the whole fish of context. Just a drop of this sauce will flavor the entire dish.

Consider Rebecca Solnit's recent "obituary of tyrants" — a social media list cataloging the grim ends of dictators: "Hitler committed suicide. Mussolini was shot and then his corpse was attacked and hung. Pinochet died in exile, under house arrest..." and so on through twenty-odd despots, each reduced to their final scene. It's history as seasoning — a potent reduction of centuries of struggle into moral reassurance. Each bullet point whispers: they died, they lost, we win in the end.

Or think of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who drove across state lines with an AR-15 to "protect businesses" during the Kenosha riots. His story has been fermented into folk heroism by those who taste in it the essence of triumphant armed citizens. Never mind the tautological logic (protect property from protests about violence, with more violence). The ideological marinade is strong enough to overpower any inconvenient flavors.

Both examples reveal something crucial about our political moment: we've become a culture of reductions. Complex events get broken down over time until only the most potent essence remains, concentrated into drops powerful enough to flavor entire worldviews.

The Fermentation Process

Real nuoc mam — Vietnamese fish sauce — takes months of controlled decomposition. Anchovies and salt are layered in wooden vats, where time and pressure transform raw fish into liquid umami. The process eliminates everything except the most concentrated flavor compounds. What emerges bears little resemblance to its origins, yet somehow captures their essence in intensified form.

Political nuoc mam works similarly. Take the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the "Rooftop Koreans" — Korean shop owners who defended their businesses with rifles when the LAPD retreated from Koreatown. The original context was tragic and complex: decades of police brutality, intercommunal tensions exacerbated by economic desperation, institutional abandonment that left entire communities to fend for themselves.

But watch what the fermentation process produces. For the right, those rooftop defenders become pure iconography: proof that armed citizens are civilization's last line of defense. For the left, they're victims of a racist system that pitted marginalized communities against each other. Both reductions capture something true while leaving out inconvenient complexities.

The concentrated versions — the political nuoc mam — become more powerful than the original events. Most people who invoke the Rooftop Koreans couldn't tell you about the Latasha Harlins killing that preceded the riots, or explain the economic redlining that created the tensions. They don't need to. The reduction provides all the flavor they need.

Solnit's List as Moral Seasoning

Solnit's tyrant obituary exemplifies this process. It's not really history — it's a seasoning designed to flavor present fear with future certainty. The list performs a kind of temporal magic, collapsing decades and centuries into a tidy moral arc: tyrants rise, tyrants fall, justice eventually prevails.

But like all reductions, it leaves crucial ingredients out. The list abstracts away:

The duration of suffering — some of these dictators ruled for decades while millions died
The mechanisms of collapse — many fell to foreign invasion or elite betrayal, not popular resistance
The incomplete reckonings — Marcos "died in exile" sounds like justice, but his family returned to power in the Philippines
The persistent systems — institutions and ideologies often outlasted their figureheads

Most tellingly, it flattens the question of agency. Did these tyrants fall because history has a moral arc, or because specific people made specific choices to resist at enormous cost? The list suggests the former — a comforting mythology of inevitable justice that risks lulling people into passivity.

As one commenter noted about Solnit's compilation: "This 'obituary of tyrants' overlooks the collateral damage that went with each dead despot." It's the perfect critique of reduction — highlighting what gets lost in the concentration process.

The Rittenhouse Reduction

On the other end of the political spectrum, Kyle Rittenhouse underwent his own fermentation into folk heroism. A 17-year-old with questionable judgment and an AR-15 became a symbol of righteous self-defense — despite having no business being in Kenosha, let alone armed.

The reduction worked because it tapped into a pre-existing narrative marinade:

Property is sacred
Chaos is inevitable when liberals are in charge
A rifle in hand is nobler than an institution in retreat
When the state fails, patriots must step up

The connection to the Rooftop Koreans was explicit in right-wing discourse. Both became examples of the same principle: good guys with guns protecting civilization from barbarity. That the situations were completely different — Korean merchants defending their own neighborhood versus a teenager traveling to someone else's riot — got lost in the reduction process.

This is how political fermentation works: take a genuine case of justified self-defense (rooftop Koreans), extract the visual and emotional logic (armed citizens = order), then apply it to completely different situations (teenage vigilantes). The nuanced original gets transformed into concentrated ideological flavor.

The Problem with Concentrated Politics

Eddie Izzard once described Hitler's end as "Dead, in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire" — eight words that capture something viscerally satisfying about evil meeting its match. It's better theater than history (Hitler actually shot himself in a bunker), but it demonstrates the seductive power of reduction. Complex moral reckonings get compressed into poetic justice.

This is what we're doing to all of politics now. Every event becomes raw material for ideological seasoning. We're not arguing about what happened anymore — we're arguing about competing flavor profiles. One side tastes "inevitable justice," the other tastes "necessary order," and neither recognizes what the other is consuming.

The result is a political discourse that feels simultaneously intense and weightless. Everything is concentrated meaning, but nothing has substance. We're drowning in nuoc mam while starving for actual fish.

The Dangers of Reduction

Political reductions aren't inherently evil — we need narratives to make sense of complexity. But they become dangerous when:

They substitute for analysis. Solnit's list offers emotional comfort but no strategic insight about how tyrannies actually fall or what makes resistance effective.

They enable bad faith. The Rittenhouse mythology allows people to support vigilantism while claiming they're defending law and order.

They flatten moral complexity. When everything gets reduced to simple binaries — tyrants vs. resisters, order vs. chaos — we lose the ability to navigate ethical gray areas.

They become self-perpetuating. The more we consume concentrated narratives, the less tolerance we have for complexity, contradiction, or uncertainty.

Most insidiously, reductions allow us to feel politically engaged while remaining intellectually passive. Sharing Solnit's list feels like resistance. Defending Rittenhouse feels like supporting justice. But both are forms of emotional consumption rather than genuine political action.

The Antidote

We can't eliminate political seasoning — we need stories, symbols, and simplified narratives to navigate the world. But we can use reduction more responsibly:

Identify the concentration when you taste it. When someone offers a list, meme, or myth, ask: What fish was fermented to make this? What parts of the story are missing? Who benefits from this particular flavor?

Demand the whole meal occasionally. Complexity, contradiction, and history with the gristle left in. Read beyond the headlines. Seek out inconvenient facts. Resist the urge to reduce everything to your preferred narrative.

Use seasoning sparingly. Political reductions should enhance understanding, not replace it. A drop of nuoc mam can improve a dish, but it shouldn't be the only thing you taste.

Remember that reduction is a choice. Every concentration privileges certain flavors while eliminating others. Ask whose interests are served by particular reductions, and what alternative seasonings might reveal.

Conclusion: Beyond the Sauce

The tragedy of our concentrated political moment is that we're losing the ability to metabolize complexity. We want our history pre-digested, our morality pre-seasoned, our outrage pre-concentrated. But the most important political questions — How do we build justice? What does genuine security look like? How do we live with difference? — can't be answered with drops of ideological essence.

They require the whole fish: bones, scales, blood, and all. They demand that we sit with uncertainty, wrestle with contradiction, and acknowledge that most real political work happens in the space between reductions.

Solnit's tyrant list and Rittenhouse's mythology are symptoms of the same disease: our addiction to concentrated meaning in an age that demands patient attention to unconcentrated reality. The cure isn't to reject all narratives, but to remember that the best stories — like the best meals — preserve something of the original complexity, even as they transform it into something we can digest.

In a world of political nuoc mam, sometimes the most radical act is insisting on eating the whole fish.