Critics of the modern age usually start from the assumption that the way in which the West is organized is fine. The problem is either the people, as in we have a rotten ruling class, or some set of defects that have been introduced into the system. The lament is often some form of “if we had only not done X.” This is usually accompanied by fingering some point in the recent past, like the 60’s. Recency bias has always been a major part of right-wing criticism of left-wing politics.
The underlying assumption is that liberal democracy will work just fine, if we can just get rid of those terrible liberals or go back and correct some mistake from the past. No one ever stops to wonder if maybe those nasty liberals and errors in judgement are a feature of liberal democracy, rather than a defect. Like Marxists or libertarians, the right has worked from the assumption that the right sort of citizen can be conjured or created, in order to make liberal democracy function as intended.
The truth is, the results we see around us, whether it is spasms of radical self-destruction or the suicidal flood of migrants, are all the natural result of liberal democracy. The troubles facing the West are not the result of some defect or shabby operators at the top. This is what you get from liberal democracy. As a wise once man said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
The reason, of course, is the underlying assumption of democracy. That is, all men possess the same set of talents. After all, if every man’s say in the running of society is equal to the rest, if it carries the same weight at decision time, then all men must truly be equal. Otherwise, it is a system that deliberately vests the incompetent with the safety and security of others. In other words, the democrat must either be suicidal or sincerely believe men are of equal talent in this important task.
This is the fundamental faith of modern liberal democracy. It assumes and demands that all people are equally capable of making decisions about public policy. This is why noticing any differences in people has become a crime. To note that the retarded, for example, lack the necessary agency to care for themselves, raises the question of who else may lack the necessary qualities to care for themselves. If you cannot care for yourself, how can you be trusted to judge what is in the best interest of others?
This is why we see campaigns by radicals to expand the ballot to children, criminals and the mentally feeble. They couch their cause in fairness, but ultimately what is driving them is absolute egalitarianism. To acknowledge that people are not equally capable of being citizens, means debating where the line is drawn between those capable and those incapable of citizenship. This is a slippery slope that can only lead to the upending of the assumptions of modern liberal democracy.
That is where any alternative right, or alternative anything, must start, as it is the only way to arrive at an alternative outcome. Democracy starts and ends with egalitarianism, which is a binary issue. Either all men are equally capable of active participation is society or they are not. There is no middle ground. Democracy chooses the former and must relentlessly work to make it manifest. This is the root of the current madness that has gripped the West. It is a denial of biological reality.
This is the place to start when contemplating an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, whether it is in the narrow domain of politics or the larger one of culture. If all people are not the same in the particular sense, then it follows that all people are not the same in the general sense either. Since a “people” is the sum of the traits and abilities of the individual components, then what we observe as national character is the result of those individual differences peculiar to the people of that nation.
This brings us to the other face of democracy, which is universalism. Every democracy, from the Greeks to the present, assumes that the only legitimate and moral form of government is democracy. After all, if all men in the democracy are equal, it must mean all men in every society are equal. The social contract instantly becomes portable, applicable everywhere. Therefore, anything but liberal democracy is an immoral and inauthentic form of human organization.
The Peloponnesian War was a defensive struggle to resist the rapacious aggression of the Athenians, versus the natural hierarchy of the Spartans. The Great War that devastated Europe was ultimately to impose liberal democracy. The Second World War was a follow on to defend liberal democracy from fascism, which was followed by a 70 year war to defend it against Bolshevism. The history of democracy is a blood bath to prove it works everywhere for all people.
If what we observe is true, that people are not all the same in the wholesale or the retail level, then the question is why? The egalitarians point to various forms of magic like racism, the environment and the tides of history, but all of these collapse under the least bit of scrutiny. If any of these claims were true, we would see evidence of it in the West, where tens of millions of non-Europeans have been imported. Instead, the evidence revels the opposite. The differences in people are natural.
It is these natural differences in people that must be the starting place for any alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. That sounds easy, but it is the great struggle of this age. It not only means standing outside the moral order, it requires questioning everything we inherited from the Enlightenment. That is what will divide Right and Left in the coming age. On the one side will be the defenders of the Enlightenment, and its egalitarian pretensions, while on the other will be biological realists.
Just as the Enlightenment struggled to escape the cocoon of the Middle Ages, biological realism is struggling for life today. Even sober minded critics of liberal democracy struggle to embrace it. Paul Gottfried, in his first post back at the venerable paleocon outlet Chronicles, makes this point about himself. He can acknowledge some of the points from biological realists, but ultimately he prefers to hug the shore of nurture, rather than sail into the sea of nature.
Yoram Hazony, the Israeli philosopher, wrote a book in which he wrestled with biological reality in his defense of nationalism. Chapter after chapter relied on accurate observations about human diversity. In fact, the foundation of his argument is that nations are different, because they are composed of people, different from the people of other nations. Yet every time he reached the obvious end point of his logic, he pulled back and started flapping his arms and howling about equality.
Hazony and Gottfried are realists, when it comes to ethnicity. Hazony is an ethno-nationalist, while Gottfried is a paleo-conservative. Neither man is naive about the realities of the human condition. Both struggle, however, to transcend their conditioning, which shows how powerful the egalitarian ethic is in the West. It can overcome not only facts and reason, it can make you question your own observations. The project to build a metaphysics around biological reality, therefore, is daunting.
The human diversity we see all around us, the diversity of outcomes, within regions and nations, as well as between them, is not an accident of fate. It is not the result of some dark magic or a conspiracy of one people at the expense of another. These differences are rooted in our nature. Human biological diversity is a real thing that describes who we are as a species. Man is not man without this great diversity, because we are the result of a long natural process of regional trial and error.
Because biology is real, that means sex is real, race is real and ethnicity is real. These are all real things, coming into sharper focus every day through the study of the human genome. The long journey from the dawn of modern man to the first civilization was not the same for all people. The resulting nations of people reflect the long biological journey made by each people. It also represents the natural division of labor, for creating life and for living it, between the sexes and between the talents.
The Enlightenment was the software needed to take Western man out of the Middle Ages, through the age of sail and the industrial age, into the technological age. Like all legacy code, it has reached the end of its time. The demographic age, in which Western man finds himself a minority in a sea of diversity, all creeping up on his natural habitat, will require new code. We need a new moral framework and to do that means deposing the current one and everything that it entails.
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ALL empires rise and fall, Z. Ours was a grand and noble experiment if nothing else.
With all due respect i think this misses the point. Labelling it as “noble” is the exact conditioning Zman was talking about.
Seeing as how we raised commoners to the level of the nobility, and vice-versa, I’m not sure how much your statement stands.
Yes, but it did NOT at first embrace radical egalitarian principles. That arrived four score and seven years later.
The original framing was not completely egalitarian in form. Voting was very limited – property owners, males, etc., not slaves, etc. The original form of democratic republicanism may have contained seeds of destruction, but the maturation of those seeds included a very bloody civil war and 250 years of constant pressure by “elitists”. Ergo, I disagree that Western democracy cannot survive because of its “egalitarianism.” Modern western democracy must die when the populace can not or will not reject the machinations of the elitists.
This essay is fantastic. The metaphysics of reality indeed. We have spent decades denying the real in defense of the democratic egalitarian ideal. I’m not sure this accurately summarizes the entirety of the Enlightenment, but it does demonstrate quite succinctly where we are now. That pervasive cognitive dissonance that makes many of us so uneasy is nothing less than the sense that reality is still out there, waiting to reassert itself as it always has and always will. How brutal and destructive the reassertion of reality is going to be is what I have nightmares about.
It is too bad that we cannot calmly, scientifically, and objectively discuss racial differences in public forums, much as a group of horsemen would calmly, scientifically, and objectively discuss the difference between breeds of horses.
Before the ink was dry on the Constitution are demise was certain. The founders knew it but what the hell can you do. Hope.
Now look at that freak show of candidates running for president. It is awfully hard to grasp how low we have descended. What is the expression, that politics is downstream from culture. Look how bad our culture was for decades and no in full decadent mode.
Well, out of the ashes something may come for the better. The other side of history.
Exactly. The anti-Federalists prophesied much of the demise, although they never could foresee the abject stupidity of trying out the E Pluribus Unum concept with barbarian hordes.
Bannon says sHillary is going to run…they might look this bad for a reason
Some British bookie has had the odds favoring Hillary as the nominee for over a week!
Whatever. Guess what? If she wins we’ll still have open borders, no E-verify, no visa tracking, ever-increasing legal immigration, endless wars and unprecedented censorship.. The money-printers will be doing overtime. Wages won’t keep pace with the ever-increasing price of housing and health care. A pox on both (“D”/”R”) their houses.
Every time I see the Dem candidates talking, I get an overwhelming urge to buy a farm somewhere very remote, stock up on livestock, non-hybrid seeds, guns, and ammo. And I am really not the prepper type, but they are what the end of a civilization looks like.
Drake you can come up here to the Bitterroot and be my neighbor…😉
“We need a new moral framework and to do that means deposing the current one and everything that it entails.” One thing I think should be kept in mind when trying to come up with new moral frameworks, codes, and replacements for our current system is: Would I be wiling to be at the bottom of this new system/society/framework? No wanna-be communist sees themselves as Tractor Factory Worker #3385, but a commissar or someone in the Inner Party. So if democracy, with ‘one man, one vote’ would have to go, would I be willing to give up my vote, as… Read more »
“The Great War that devastated Europe was ultimately to impose liberal democracy. “
Had to stop reading after that, this was not a motivation for the war in any way.
Did you have a stroke at the point? Get clubbed over the head? What caused you to stop reading at that point?
He saw your badthink against the Cult of Whig history, and he wanted to stop reading before he became complicit in your thoughtcrimes, Zman. I have seen cultists in the comment sections of other blogs declaring, with some kind of stupid pride, at what point the cultist “stopped reading” the piece in question. I think that the situation is analogous to the way the Japanese Shogunate used to demand that visiting Europeans stomp on a small statute of the Virgin Mary, in order to make sure that the white visitors weren’t proselytizing Catholics. Like those Roman Catholics, some readers will… Read more »
During one of the Crusades, in the midst of the horrific siege of Damietta, Saint Francis of Assisi (what an outrage that the present fake pope desecrates the great man’s name) resolved to visit the Sultan of Egypt, in order to preach the Gospel to him but also to seek out a diplomatic end to the siege. The Sultan graciously granted an audience to St. Francis. But the Sultan’s religious advisers, in order to undermine the mission, caused a carpet woven with crosses to be placed on the pathway to the Sultan’s throne. St. Francis blithely trod on the carpet… Read more »
Liberal democracy was neither the cause nor the result of the war.
Parroting the propaganda used to sell war bonds and motivate the cannon fodder is not interesting.
We can debate the causes. The results were pretty clear.
Woodrow Wilson’s shade would like to have a word…
Which one of Woodrow’s 14 points was “Liberal Democracy”?
Regardless, American involvement in WW1 was of secondary importance.
The claim that the Great War was for “Liberal Democracy” is a propaganda poster slogan at best.
I don’t think Satan plans to furlow him from Hell for that.
Really, Buck? Read the sentence again. It does not state/mean that the cause was to “impose” democracy, but the “result of” was. In support of this conclusion, I submit how any number of the governments of those European countries participating in WW1 exchanged their heritable monarchies for parliamentary governments. I include Russia as well, as they initially had committees of the people in charge, but that of course was undercut after Lenin died.
The participants in the peace treaties that ended the war were far more concerned breaking up the multi national central powers and establishing national sovereignty for the various ethnic groups rather than concern for the types of government each nation was governed by.
It’s not even that long. Here’s a really long essay that you can decide not to read to the end without looking lazy
https://joeportolano.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/pensees-notes-for-the-reactionary-of-tomorrow/
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, 1876-1925 When two augurs of the west are met together, they both know what liberalism is: a political trick: the trick with which the upstart society of the tiers état was able to swindle the tiresome, remaining plebs out of the promises of 1789. The augurs know what “liberty” means, that most seductive of the three catchwords with which the champions of the rights of man lured the deluded masses away from their dangerous barricades and shepherded them to the innocuous ballot box. When the Germans decry themselves as backward, they overlook the fact that… Read more »
Spot on.
Brilliant, Zman. As you note, this is where so many quail – and fail – refusing to accept the true social and political ramifications of HBD. Too many acknowledge some of its points but turn away in distress at others. Reality IS. Human differences ARE. No one’s feelings change this, but denial of these differences condemn us to the societal and civilizational destruction we live among today. I don’t share your soft spot for Gottfried – a huge part of his political makeup is insisting that only the eastern, peasant Jews were radicals, but the German Jews in America and… Read more »
“…the reality that not all are equally fit to govern…”
Our Founders realized that. The next generation, which included Jefferson, were swept up in the emotion of the French Revolution.
Very well said Dear Lady…
“The Enlightenment was the software needed to take Western man out of the Middle Ages, through the age of sail and the industrial age, into the technological age.” This statement is simply false. Your essay is quite insightful about how hard it is to overcome the biases that we’ve been brainwashed with, Clockwork Orange-style. Then you make the statement I quote above, which has no real basis in reality. The Enlightenment ™ was the pseudo-philosophy of the philosophes, who were just publicity-hungry middling intellects. The fact is that hierarchical societies, including monarchies and fascist states, are just as able to… Read more »
There may be a little bit of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” in Z-man’s alliteration wrt the enlightenment and technological progress. But the main points remain solid. As you note one of the most tyrannical societies of modern times, USSR under Stalin, went from an agrarian backwater to 1st world nuclear power orbiting satellites in a space of time breathtakingly short.
You either don’t know the definition of hierarchy or you don’t know anything about software. My guess is the latter.
The idea that the checks and balances of our republic will be honored, has been shown to have failed spectacularly. Argue the various reasons for that, if you want to. But the fact of the matter is that people will ultimately be ruled over, not governed by fair democratic representation, every time. The trick is to make sure that the ruler somehow represents your personal interests, even if contrary to the interests of others, not the other way around. That is why I suggested no partitions yesterday. This is a one-side-wins-all game, even if there are three or four or… Read more »
Dutch, agreed. We win, they lose…but even within our group, the majority of us are not capable of self government via democracy as implemented with universal suffrage. Suffrage must be earned and kept a prize that is worth striving for. So as we embrace HBD truths, we must realize that we as an ethnocentric group are also subject to such “laws”.
Amen to you both…When we get a chance to talk f2f I would like you to look over my proposal about suffrage and see where it can be improved…
Against my better judgment, I just looked at Gottfried’s article. Yet again he rails against the “grotesque” charges of racism and antisemitism he and others have been the target of for however long. Like most of his writing, it is inspired by personal animus. He is bitter – not merely at the broken system, which we all are – but at how his own career has been harmed and limited by the liberal right. He epitomizes the “but what about meeeee?” type that Vox Day so cruelly but accurately satirizes. And for Gottfried to claim identitarianism (what he refers to… Read more »
The checks and balances built into the governmental plumbing of our republic were supposed to serve to check the individual human ambitions to dominate and plunder. It turns out that this assumption was false. Ambition does prevail, and ambitious people will organize, tribally, to lord it over others and steal their stuff. Case in point, the current crop of Democrat politicians and their Republican sidekicks. Realism about the human condition needs to incorporate this phenomenon, and to brush it away as an anomaly is a certain sort of willful ignorance for what is right in front of your eyes.
Indeed. I was rubbernecking on Twitter this am (not a member) and the NT cucks are positively salivating for impeachment so their “dream team” of Pence-Haley can start a war with Iran. What the hell is wrong with these people?
The future of humanity is the clan. This is evident no matter where you go or who you talk to. The Kazakhs have an interesting system, where several families make a tribe, several tribes a clan, and several clans a horde. Each step up has less authority over the individual but more authority over their race in general. It organizes the mass of people while still keeping most control at the local, indeed blood level. It is not as valuable for political purposes now, but is a key social stabilizer/safety net in that part of the world. I’ve not had… Read more »
I’ve had some coffee, so here’s background on what I posted earlier. I’ve been to Kazakhstan twice this year, about seven weeks in total, and despite my sincerest efforts the intricacies of clan law are not to be revealed to outsiders. Nonetheless, I can describe the effects of it. It prevented inbreeding in small, isolated populations for millennia. It changed Islam far more than Islam changed it, to the point that the Muslim missionaries stopped bothering. More interesting is how it dealt with the USSR. Stalin, a man for whom the ends always justified the means, had no qualms about… Read more »
Nathaniel
I hear you Brother and agree with what you stated and my proposal is based on that for suffrage where the closer the issue is that you are voting on the more power you have to control it and the further away the issue is the less control you have in voting for it but also the issue that is further away will have way less affect on you…
Amen. Tribe is truth
The future belongs to the religious, fertile and tough just as it always does, If you want a truly powerful tribe, add brains. Start forming your tribe now and beat the rush.
Tribe — Clan — Horde.
We already have the theme song and (fun) video of this way of arranging ourselves. Here is the Mongolian band, Hu.
https://youtu.be/jM8dCGIm6yc
“Just as the Enlightenment struggled to escape the cocoon of the Middle Ages, biological realism is struggling for life today.” —- It’s not struggling, it’s just dormant. It’s dormant because enough people are paid to not see this reality. A mass bribery system, involving millions of people is in place to not see this stark reality. Trillions in deficits are run to NOT pay attention to this reality. Between governments, Federal state and local, , massive university systems, government contractors, tech unicorns, welfare spending, WIC payments, nonprofit grants, etc, the number of people who actually “make a living” is in… Read more »
Which if you are in a true Community when it happens it will affect you far less than if you’re not…The tech is out there right now that will let a Community that wants to be prepared be totally self sufficient if you’re in the right area…
JR and Lineman. While revealing about my lack of intellectual breadth, it seems governance tracks value exchange (bottom up) better than “experiments” in democracy. I’m intrigued by the challenges of scale in systems.
Lineman, finding such a resilient community (or one that can be stood back up quickly) is what I’m after…or invest in it’s development. I’m a polymath, which means I’m not really good at anything, but I get relational commerce. Proximity to producers of my needs is where I’m starting the hunt for said community. If you have other indicators, please let me know.
Self sufficiency is absolutely important. If you’re not self sufficient you would be a net drain on any community that accepts you. Everyone needs to bring something to the table. And there will be a lot of people on the side of the road with hands out. The good thing about where Lineman lives is that the cold weather would sweep away the worst ones. Where I live we don’t quite get the cold snaps to move people along, hence CA already has half the homeless in the country before we even have our big economic blowup. I’m going to… Read more »
A fine work on the ridiculousness of egalitarianism is Martin van Creveld’s _Equality: The Impossible Quest_.
https://www.amazon.com/Equality-Impossible-Martin-van-Creveld-ebook/dp/B00UVLE20W/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=equality+martin+van+creveld&qid=1569944337&sr=8-1
It is an antidote to one’s notions of egalitarianism.
Intellectual efforts to envision an egalitarian society require supremely asinine prerequisites: children do not exist, territorial integrity is assumed, no privation, etc.
Practical efforts to impose egalitarianism result in spilled blood. The volume dependent on how vigorously egalitarianism is pursued and how out of line with reality are egalitarians’ objectives.
That’s where women come in, because they generally aim for an “egalitarian” system, to ensure their independent place at the table (whether or not this is true at the granular, micro level can be easily debated, but that is a conversation for another day). They see men of color, gay men, and transsexuals as allies in their quest. The evil white heterosexual male is the enemy here, because he insists on hierarchy, generally by force and the pecking order. Three things come from this. The first is that many mothers encourage this gay male, gender fluid thing with their male… Read more »
Here’s the paradox: In their own world, women are rigidly hierarchical. In my very first week in school, I noticed the chicken pecking order and the dominant lead female and the other girls fawning around her. I didn’t get it…didn’t make sense. Therefore I was excluded. Update to now, I dropped the big local fiber arts women group because it got taken over by the dominant organizationally prone women who set the agenda and the tone that all women should be producing artworks, active and volunteering according to the lead females. I like small groups and don’t like being moved… Read more »
Women have been so brainwashed, we have forgotten, not taught, common sense in men-women relationships. “Until we understand the real differences in what compels our behavior, especially under stress, we’ll keep bringing out the worst in each other. And never experience the real beauty of both men and women.” Men are now viewed as adversaries. There is a woman teaching common sense ways to understand both men and women. Just an idea….. https://www.understandmen.com/ Firstly, I don’t look at my husband as a girlfriend. That’s what girlfriends are for. I look at him more as a space alien then set out… Read more »
In my wife’s line of work, she has to deal with women, squidgy men, and occasionally real men. We work together to get it right for her as the real men relationships are concerned. Similarly, I work with female subordinates and, occasionally, superiors. She guides me away from the counterproductive actions and traps I might fall into. We are a team, as far as that goes. Venus and Mars. There are two “between the wars” British shows out there. Mrs. Dutch loves Downton Abbey, and I steel myself to sit through it. I like Peaky Blinders, and she is fascinated.… Read more »
Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
“This is why we see campaigns by radicals to expand the ballot to children, criminals and the mentally feeble. They couch their cause in fairness, but ultimately what is driving them is absolute egalitarianism.”
I don’t think it’s that noble. The Left wants to expand the ballot for the cold, hard reason that children, criminals and the mentally feeble can be vote-harvested. Fairness and egalitarianism are the red herrings.
That’s also the point of third-world immigration.
This brings us back to the problems of “intelligence”, which no one adequately understands, and perhaps no one truly can. There are many kinds of intelligence, but no “intelligent people” in an absolute sense. Ask yourself this: if you had a major physics or mathematics problem would you not want Einstein to solve it for you? Of course. But does that mean Einstein is intelligent? Not necessarily. Would you want Einstein managing your retirement portfolio? Or running the country? Not so obvious now, is it? Speaking for himself the Booby would love to have Einstein tackle his physics problems (if… Read more »
Can’t upvote this enough, someone is not fully red pilled on HBD until they understand both the importance AND the limitations of “intelligence”.
Many progs have a reasonably high IQ…but this just makes them better at learning the rules of progressivism and navigating its complexities.
Similarly, the equality meme has certainly had disastrous effects, but that does not necessarily mean we must create a society which seeks to maximize inequality.
“Would you want Einstein managing your retirement portfolio? Or running the country?” That depends on the alternative. If it’s Biden/Warren/Harris, or anyone in the general population with an IQ below 90, I would choose Einstein every time.
There are many kinds of intelligence, but no “intelligent people” in an absolute sense. Intelligence – as measured by IQ tests – is a general quality: if you score high on an IQ test, you’re academically competent across the board. Idiots savants – people who are brilliant at one thing and incompetent at others – do exist, but they’re a tiny minority. Chance is, if you’re good at math, you’re good at most other stuff too. The trope about “multiple intelligences” is Commie nonsense, no actual scientist believe in it. There’s one intelligence: “g-factor”, as the boffins call it, or… Read more »
“Both struggle, however, to transcend their conditioning, which shows how powerful the egalitarian ethic is in the West. It can overcome not only facts and reason, it can make you question your own observations.”
I have not read them, but is it possible Hazony and Gottfried are faking a compromise with egalitarianism to avoid being crushed by backlash?
Yes, as long as the trapdoor of equality remains underfoot, the debates over how ‘our democracy’ should function are merely forks colliding over pie crumbs. The other dangerous aspect of equality baked into democracy is that it undermines the social mechanisms that an honest reckoning with hierarchy provides. Instead of people building communities around the reality of their fellow man, we get the Government lording down the Law that all men (and women!) are equal. Because the Govt is at once the official handicapper of the more capable and the caretaker of the less capable, communities can no longer function… Read more »
Nick Land is right about
womendemocracy.The Enlightenment was a consequence of the decay of a naturally evolved nobility. This decay was caused by the Reformation. Not its theological battle but by the collapse of the temporal authority of the altar. Throne AND Altar maintained a balance in how a natural nobility carried out their respective rights and duties. The Throne protected its charge from predatory outsiders and malicious insiders…The Altar saw to the needs and rights of the non noble castes and kept in check the overreach of the worst of the nobles. (The Reformation was the result of 3 centuries of steady rot within… Read more »
I think the enlightenment was more the result of excess human capital. The stock of smart people increased to a point where the West had extra to focus on esoteric topics. We appear to be heading in the reverse now, compounded by the flood of stupid people from over the horizon.
Reminds me of Pascal’s,
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Over and over, a central thesis reappears and becomes inexorable: the moral high ground is the lynchpin to all arguments regarding culture, politics and everything that issues from these. If your moral axiom (egalitarianism in this instance) rests upon observably false conclusions about human nature, all deductions subsequent will fail you eventually. This may be why for we dissidents the bread and butter of mainstream politics and cultural arguments has become so meaningless and irrelevant. Sitting in an airport, overhearing the rank hysteria over impeach orange bad man on CNN, one wonders at the at the impotent hours spent by… Read more »
Reality is on our side, but the problem is that reality doesn’t win hearts and minds; propaganda does.
And the fact is that if we want to win, we’re going to have narrativize, romanticize, and emotionalize (i.e., propagandize) our thing. Because the average person’s mind only receives information in these forms.
Normie hears the unwieldy term “human biodiversity” and starts becoming comatose.
Reality needs help. So, strange to say, we’ll have to be “propagandists for truth.” We have to tell people a simple and compelling (and, indeed, flattering) story.
Yes, people understand their world as a series of stories, internalized. We need to be compelling storytellers.
Yep, you don’t win with the truth, at least in the short run. Z correctly says that we need a positive identity, but I’d argue that before we can present Joe and Jane Normie with an alternative, we need to get them to stop believing in the current system; otherwise, they’ll never be open to even listening to an alternative. And to get them to doubt the current system, we need to show them its hypocrisy, immorality and hatred of whites. That may be negative, but it’ll work. Interestingly, Asians are the wedge into whites’ minds because whites can look… Read more »
Found this article relevant for the need of a new and healthy narrative. Unfortunately we have become herded cattle.
https://www.counter-currents.com/2019/10/american-cattle/
In response to UFO from yesterday:
“You had multiple children and not a single one gave birth to children? Are they past the child-bearing age now?
Goodness, America is effed.”
UFO….We are effed. My folks were Commies. They were only children. I am an only child. I had 1 child. This is your upsidedown pyramid of the Left. My girl had endless miscarriages. Life is relentless. So make up for my lack. Please be aware I made a long trek across the desert to get to this side of the divide. Children or not.
Yeah, I wasn’t blaming you for a lack of grand children or anything, it just struck me as sad to see the end of your genetic line. I plan to have ten or more white children, ideally. Living without children seems attractive when you’re young – more free time, more time to work, way more money saved… BUT in every scenario I run in my head, it’s awfully grim once you crest middle age and are staring down the last 20-30 years of your life, alone. High future time orientation, as the HBD crowd says. So sad to see young… Read more »
I read that Gottfried piece, and there were some revealing passages: 1) Despite his nod to dissident Right ideas like “the limits of pluralism [and] genetic influences on social behavior,” he is really just a another “creedal conservative.” He’s just offering a slightly different flavor from the one on offer from other “creedals” like Benny Shapiro and Yoram Hazony. Anyone can join who is “concerned with social morality, a sane non-interventionist foreign policy, and the taming of the egalitarian madness that is now subverting most Western societies.” He wants to “stand for something” rather than stand (and live) with someones.… Read more »
New best post ever!
It is frustrating to listen to Dissident Right types talk as though we just need to tweak the system a little bit and all will be well. They just want Liberalism circa 1980. Liberalism without foreigners. Liberalism is the problem. it has to go. However, that is very scary for many people, even those on the Right.
“The history of democracy is a blood bath to prove it works everywhere for all people.” succinct.
Everybody gangsta til the shoe on the other foot, yo.
It’s easy for people to say their race is better, or [insert X characteristic] is superior, but people seem to have a hard time squaring the moral bankruptcy of the elite with their superiority in other domains. It’s hard to acknowledge your own inferiority, and that undermines the ability of people to believe in hierarchy.
This is a heady essay – much food for thought. Maybe I’m unimaginative but I still think some of our Founders got a lot of things right, but they unfortunately didn’t take the conspiracies of their day seriously enough. The Anti-Federalists saw it but were sidelined; this was a regrettable turning point in our history. Today’s progressives work to build their brave new world with a wrecking ball to history. But dissidents need to go back to workable foundations – realistic assumptions – and stand on the shoulders of ancestral truth. This was the formula of Jefferson and Paine. In… Read more »
Actual fundamental science wins every time in our version of the future.
Meanwhile…
The left is now trying to challenge math.
https://www.k12.wa.us/sites/default/files/public/socialstudies/pubdocs/Math%20SDS%20ES%20Framework.pdf
Wow! That’s a new level of insane.
The founders created a republic instead of a democracy because they knew about the biological distinctions spoken of throughout this essay. They were influenced by the Enlightenment but not wholly controlled by it????? I dunno, Mr. Z; I do suffer from Dunning-Krueger Effect, but I have two cents and I keep spending it. I haven’t read you long enough but I wonder where religion fits in your thinking. I liked how you pointed out the possible events which might explain how we got here: The Sixties; Obama; WWII; Obama; One-Worlders Post WWII; Obama; 1913 the Fed; Obama; the amendments creating… Read more »
I think the embrace of radical egalitarianism, at least on the surface, was intended as a sort of drug for the masses. It’s like a controlled train-wreck that can no longer be controlled. If the lumpenproletariat think they are equal, they are more likely to remain quiet and enjoy the bread and circuses. But once they detect the Great Lie, they become “disquieted”.
The steam engine took us into the industrial age, not some gobbledygook from gassy European philosophers. Without that discovery by Watt and other hard nosed engineering types there would be no industrial age. As to what has destroyed our society, you’re wrong. You seem to believe that we have a functioning republic when we actually don’t. It’s been a oligarchy for quite a while. Most of our woes stems from our business community. The business community in America has always been in love with cheap labor. The Cold War put a kibosh on declaring war against the American worker for… Read more »
Add to that the cheap credit that entices the business community to always build out for growth, not sustainability in a zero economic growth environment. Then one has to get the growth through immigration and/or exporting the jobs. So business gets on the growth treadmill, and then has to buy into all the liberal pablum to keep the treadmill going.
“And in the space of 24 years managed to utterly ruin our country economically and demographically. it doesn’t even resemble what the country looked like 30 years earlier.” This is what I find so shocking. It doesn’t even resemble the country from 15 years ago. I am young. I can look at videos of my city from 1985, 1995, 2005… and it is almost 100% white people walking around. What happened? Even in my childhood during the early 2000s, there was barely a non-white person to be seen. In the center of a large urban city. And now, you go… Read more »
Same where I live here in the high desert of Southern California. In 1985 my town with almost all white,very low crime to the point you didn’t have to lock your door at night. The public schools were safe and good as well. By 1989 we started getting low income apartments and black trash from Los Angeles to inhabit them. And then came the crime increase. The city parks became drug dealing and gang hang outs no longer fit for children By 2005 the town was getting very brown thanks to our open borders.Our public schools became unfit for whites… Read more »
Great article, Zman. In a number of articles you’ve succinctly diagnosed the problem with liberal democracy. But I’m waiting for an article or podcast in where you detail your thoughts on what should replace the current orthodoxy, that is how a society that recognizes biological realities should be organized and structured. It’s one thing to diagnose the disease, which you’ve done well. But what medications and cures do you propose?
Here’s how I read the situation of liberalism: If liberalism had been able to succeed *without* enfranchising the masses, I think it would have done so. But the chief *political* successes of liberalism were always tied to expanding ‘the franchise’, whether electoral or economic. It seems to me that the Right’s position is that one *earns* the right to political power (franchise) by contributing to the ‘nation’ in some Right-approved manner, such as being a soldier or a mother. Liberalism got its *financial* backing by supporting private property and the accumulation of wealth. This created a moneyed elite whose *political*… Read more »
I doubt the new morality can come about until the limit to population is found. We’re currently too big to manage and certainly too big to be an actual nation even if only white people are counted. No real change can happen in such an anonymous society where nobody knows or trusts each other.