Note #1: There will be no more Taki posts. I decided to bring that to a close in order to focus on other things. There is only so much time and I was stretched too thin so something had to go. I want to focus more on the pay-per-view content which has a steadily growing audience. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.
Note #2: I have received a few suggestions about other platforms like Gum Road and Locals, which is a Rumble creation. I am interested in any feedback from people familiar with these sites. RamZPaul is on Gum Road and the Duran guys are on Locals, but I know nothing about these platforms.
Given the current trajectory, it is reasonable to think that in the not too distant future some alien race will be digging through the rubble of humanity trying to figure out what happened to this strange species. Just as modern archeologists dig through ruins of ancient societies, trying to figure out what happened, those aliens will be doing the same with earth. They will dig through whatever is left, things like buildings, tools and cemeteries, piecing together the story of man.
The thing they will not find among the decaying buildings, rusting vehicles and collapsed bridges will be piles of human rights. They will not open a door of some oddly preserved building and find a bunch of skeletons who had found shelter along with their sacred human rights. In fact, they will probably find no trace of human rights or any discussion of the concept. Given that most of our knowledge is now digital, these sorts of things will be impossible to detect.
The main reason for this is human rights do not exist. They are a thing that humans invented late in the history of mankind. People say that human rights are real and point to various authorities to support the claim, but rights are not real things. They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust. No other species has this concept so it is possible the aliens will not understand it either. It will be as alien to them as our entirely made up concept of human rights.
That is something to keep in mind when people of the so-called “new right” go on about the importance of natural rights. Here is an example from Michael Anton where he addresses the idea of historicism. This is the argument that all human thought is the product of its historical moment. Men in one period accept certain things to be true that men in a different period would not accept as true. Loosely put, mankind and its mental constructs are a product of time and place.
What we think of as conservative in North America rejects this claim. It starts from the assertion that all men come into this world with natural rights. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the pithy expression of this. The very loose argument here is that the natural world, including the human place in it, operates from fixed and observable rules. The laws of nature and nature’s god. From these rules we can tease out things like the rights of man.
A quite simple example is ownership. You are born into this world as the property of your parents who created you and raised you. At some point, you leave the ownership of your parents and become a free man. You own you. Because you own you, you must own your activity, your labor. If you own your labor, it stands to reason that you must own the fruits of your labor. Hence the concept of private property. Ownership traces to the laws of the universe, which is its authority.
There are similar arguments for all sorts of things we consider to be natural rights, like equality before the law and self-defense. Some of these rights have a strong connection to observation of nature. The right of self-defense is something we can see in all of nature, not just mankind. The right to a speedy trial and a jury of our peers takes a few leaps to find some root in the laws of nature. Regardless, the claim is natural rights are rooted in the authority of nature.
Michael Anton makes two important claims in his response to Paul Gottfried that are critical to the current crisis. One is that this idea of natural rights is not time bound as Gottfried claims, but universal and timeless. Even when we were not aware of them, we had these natural rights. The other claim is that America, as currently constructed, can only exist if it is structured around the concept of natural rights. It is the only way a disparate people can coexist in a single society.
The first argument is what is called a gratuitous assertion. The logic of natural rights may be timeless, but it has always rested on something that is not timeless and that is a Christian concept of God and man’s relationship to God. In fact, it depends on a specific version of Christian belief. Many Christians reject the idea of a universe defined by fixed and unchanging rules. Other types of Christian reject that we can understand these rules, even if such a thing even exists.
The very loose foundation of the natural rights argument is that God is perfection and therefore he created the world without making mistakes. This means he has no reason to tinker with the rules. They never change. Further, when he created the world he had a purpose, just as a carpenter has a reason to make a cabinet. The world as we see it is not just random pointlessness. It is a world created with a purpose by God and it operates by a fixed set of rules.
If you reject this concept of God, then you reject what naturally flows from it, which is why the concept of natural rights is a cultural artifact. It is peculiar to European people, especially those west of the Hajnal line. Eastern Europe does not have a strong natural rights tradition, because they have a different conception of God. Muslims have no concept of rights because Allah is unknowable. Islam accepts that the rules of the universe are unknowable and therefore unpredictable.
In other words, we have no evidence that natural rights are universal and timeless, because the foundation lies outside of the realm of proof. If you accept the narrow idea of God and the universe he created, the natural rights arguments make sense, but if not then these arguments are nothing more than convenient inventions. The reason the phrase “I know my rights” means nothing in China is the Chinese lie outside the timeline of the people who invented the concept.
This brings us to the second point, which is that the only way America can function is if we all agree on this mental framework. This is the social contract argument updated for a modern audience, the people who now live as strangers in their own lands. Instead of the claim that we voluntarily came together and agreed to live by a set of cultural and political rules in the same society, the argument now is we better convince the new majority that we have to live by these rules or else.
In this regard, Anton is correct. The demographic revolution is already leading to a cultural and political revolution. The only way America returns to something like its former self is if the new people embrace the old rules. If Nikki Haley, Hakeem Jeffries, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib embrace the logic of Thomas Jefferson, then maybe we can continue to function by the old rules. If they reject natural rights theory, then we will need new rules to accommodate the new people.
The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition. Whatever claims one wants to make about the universality of natural rights, it is clear that the new people and their enablers are not embracing the concept.
Inadvertently, Anton is confirming Gottfried’s central claim. What we think of as our natural rights are a product of a specific people living in a specific time. They are no more universal than conception of God. Natural rights may be more than just a fad, like powdered wigs or waistcoats, but they are tied to a people. Like all traditions, they live on in the memories of the descendents of the people who invented them and once there are no more descendents to carry on the traditions, they are gone.
The fact is, natural rights are a thing that come naturally only to Western people, so they are no more universal than blue eyes. Sure, some people outside of Europe will have blue eyes or green eyes, but most will not because the genes for these things dominate only among Europeans. The same is true for the European understanding of the universe and man’s natural place in it. Natural rights are the product of traditions peculiar to European people.
The unanswered question in Anton’s piece and the entirety of the movement calling itself the “new right” is this. What happens when the new people reject the Western tradition of natural rights? Should they be forcibly removed? Should they be compelled to change their ways? Maybe give up their old gods and go through a rigorous training in Calvinist religious doctrine? After all, the concept of free choice is part of the natural rights tradition. What if they choose to reject this concept?
That brings us back to where we started. If those visiting space aliens arrive and find natural rights, it will be because they find societies based on them. Those societies will necessarily be controlled and dominated by people who invented the concept and make it their purpose to maintain them, no matter what. Survival of the fittest is just as much a part of natural law as free speech. More so, in fact. In order for rights to survive, the people who created them must survive.
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The Chinese language makes no distinction between political rights and political power.
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When I first read your comment, I thought of this lack of a distinction as an inadequacy of the Chinese language. On second thought, this deficiency is efficient in that it ignores what is a distinction without a difference.
Even if thinkers like our Founders are correct that the Rights of Man can be deduced from observations about humans in the world, these rights don’t matter at all without Mao’s barrel of the gun. Well, talk of these rights matter only if they inspire people to organize and resist.
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Universalism cheapens everything. Look at old books and the phrase “an Englishman’s ancient rights” was something you could find in these debates because the people discussing it knew that rights were tied to people. Once you break the link between people and the concept, both the concept and the people lose their value.
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Your observation is why those old “At least I still have the Constitution” memes were so disarmingly funny.
I tried to link to one but they are almost entirely scrubbed from the internet.
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https: https://i.imgflip.com/2darr3.jpg
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Yes, maybe the best meme I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some doozies.
I liked it best when used in 2016 when a white guy was running from D.I.E. after attending a Trump rally.
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That’s simply because most modern people, especially our present Lords and Masters, being historically illiterate, and profoundly stupid, cannot understand the distinction between “rights” and “liberties”. Especially ordered liberty.
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You may be inadvertently supporting the relativist claim.
“Natural rights are a product of a specific people living in a specific time,” specifically “peculiar to European people.”
“The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition.”
One only needs to read the farce of the EU Human Rights courts to see how hackneyed and arbitrary any talk of human rights actually are, or just talk to someone fifty year ago versus today. It’s clear it’s based on sentiment and cultural norms more than any critical analysis.
Natural rights doesn’t fare much better. If the idea of Natural Rights was simply a philosophy that tried to ascertain effective rights a person had in a community that would put the person in good standing with the community and put the community at an advantageous standing with whatever environment they live in, it would have some credence, but this isn’t that case. If we lived in a Warhammer 40k world with evil aliens intend on genocide, any talk of property rights would be an absurdity. Such an idea is very sold when talking about settling vast swaths of unoccupied land though.
There’s an idea that believing in the existence of God necessarily requires the belief in Natural Rights, because of human dignity of something, but you see little of this in the Bible. As a general rule, The God of the Christians is perfectly fine with his followers being burned alive, stoned to death, etc. This is actually seen as a great good, as it proves the Elect’s commitment in the facde of terrible adversity. Never did I read how God intervened because a Christian’s “Natural rights” were violated. The right to bear arms is based on a general obligation to defense of one’s people.
What the Bible has lots of is not rights, but obligations. Obligations to your children, society, and, of course, God. You can’t have abortion not because of the natural rights of the baby, but the obligation of the parents to protect their children. You have property rights not because of a divine creed, but because the individual needs property to fulfill his obligations to support his family. Basing a society on being able to fulfill one’s obligation would solve a lot of the “rights creep” where health care, food, shelter, are now rights that must be given without question.
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Notice how we have “rights creep” at the same time we have the narrowing of rights. You now have the right to pretend to be an invented sex, something with no basis in reality, but you have no right to hear a wide range of opinions. You have a right to health care, but you no longer have the right to protect your children.
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Excellent point. “Rights” now are the religious dogma of the Ruling Class and change constantly. This mutability was the hallmark of most pre-Marxist tyrannies. Civic nationalism also is a quasi-religion although in theory it has the patina of immutability. It is both predictable and sad that Anton clings to the old faith like Emperor Julian praying to his ancestors as church bells chimed all around him.
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“It is both predictable and sad that Anton clings to the old faith like Emperor Julian praying to his ancestors as church bells chimed all around him.”
I feel like that going to my old Church as I drive by countless pride flags.
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Chet Rollins: Vital point about rights versus responsibilities/obligations. And I believe you are correct that the Bible does not discuss rights. Certainly one of the commandments is “Thou shalt not murder,” but even that has been muddied into incomprehensibility by centuries of convoluted interpretations.
“Many Christians reject the idea of a universe defined by fixed and unchanging rules.” AKA Catholics, to an extent
“Other types of Christians reject that we can understand these rules, even if such a thing even exists.” AKA Orthodox Christians
Western Christians (especially Protestants) love to codify, rationalize, and universalize everything. It is their way. Much of what ails us can be traced from the PQ, not always the JQ.
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Admittedly I have a bias, but the Catholics deserve credit for the idea of a universe operating by fixed rules. You can credit Protestants with expanding on the idea, but they could never have done this without the Catholic church. it was Catholicism that spread Greek thought and internalized it into the new religion.
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Given that Protestantism literally exists only as a response to Catholic excess, this does make sense.
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Don’t speak of your Protestant minister,
Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
For the foundation stone of his temple
Was the bollocks of Henry VIII
Brendan Behan
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Typical of the Irish to credit Protestantism to the English….
The Orthodox like to say that Roman Catholics internalized Latin thought, meaning adding legalism or rationalism to belief…where it probably shouldn’t be. Protestants took it one step further, basically allowing how your brain interprets the scriptures as being the highest authority. Every man a cleric!
The Greek and Russian East has been fine simply with the divine mysteries.
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“Catholicism that spread Greek thought and internalized it into the new religion”. how so? more so than the Orthodox church did, through Byzantium? in my mind, Catholicism is the antithesis of Greek philosophical tradition; obedience vs discussion.
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karl: I, too, used confuse modern conceptions of and untruths about Catholicism with the historical record. But reading “The Cave and the Light” by Arthur Herman gave me a much greater understanding of the development of philosophical and religious thought. And I’m not a Catholic . . . but credit where credit is due.
I guess with your qualification of “to an extent” it is relatively accurate. Catholics do believe in fixed and unchanging rules, but those are relatively few. Just like you don’t have to have an opinion on every question, the Catholic Church has not set a definite dogma on every theological issue. Limbo being one example off the top of my head (i.e., what happens to the souls of those who die without baptism through no fault of their own) – still an open question.
1
A certain Chinese philosopher noted that all political power flows from the end of a gun. While the Christian faith does involve more freedom than most others, Mao was correct.
In the now distant past of this country, rights weren’t violated because enough people were willing to start shooting oppressors. People think they have too much to lose now, but given the war, famine, and economic depression that our leaders are working on, we’ll be back to gunfire deciding things sooner than they think.
13
Saw a photo a while back of a citizen’s arrest of a sheriff who was trying to evict a widow at the behest of an insurance company. This was in the 1950’s. Doing this now would involve 100 FBI agents raiding those citizen’s homes and being brought up on domestic terrorism charges.
Violence has been monopolized by the State at a level rarely seen in human history and is making the second amendment more and more or a dead letter. Sure, you can shoot an attacker, but have fun rotting in prison for 10 years if he was diverse.
The citizen’s arrest in Georgia of Saint Arbery that lead to life in prison for even the guy who just taped the incident showed any real ability to defend one’s community is nonexistent.
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“citizen’s arrest of a sheriff who was trying to evict a widow at the behest of an insurance company. ”
Reminds of me of the famous “Grapes of Wrath” scene: “Then Who do we shoot?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8
1
While keeping the larder and armory stocked and stacked is key, all should consider adding bags of lime and a backhoe (or at least a trusted neighbor) to ensure you meet the new “Can’t Stand Your Ground” law.
Most Chinese (actually most non-Westerners) see Mao’s quote as plainly and stupidly obvious. Westerners think it’s backward, but only Westerners could possibly rationalize themselves into thinking that other things drive politics, like economic growth or human flourishing. It’s never power…it’s “public service”.
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You are assuming that the majority of the people WANT those rights. If a nation is defined by its people, then what kind of a nation now exists? There is a necessary commonality that needs to exist in order for a nation to exist. The USA doesn’t even have a common language any longer, never mind having an agreed upon set of values.
You will not see anything happen like you describe. We are so far removed from the courage necessary to resort to the gun. America is being actively purged of Americans. There are now enough non-Americans to take over all formerly American institutions and traditions. Don’t be surprised if Christmas is removed as a national holiday and replaced with something like “ghetto-day” or some sort of vibrant worship. July 4th has essentially been replaced with “joontennf” which gives the low IQs another opportunity to destroy things for a day.
The only possibility of salvaging our land is complete separation, but there are not enough whites who are willing to unite and make it happen. It is still hopelessly ingrained in them that diversity is good and that we can, and should, co-exist. IMHO it is foolish to believe that there is any hope for traditional America. It is a foreign country now and what we once had is never coming back. Seeing things like the black fat slob play Madison’s flute and the statues of saint Floyd everywhere should solidify this in people’s minds.
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Given Coonteenth has now official sanction (it’s a federal holiday) and is being promoted as an alternative to Independence Day, we’re perhaps further along than you suggest.
They have tried to replace Christmas with Kwanzaa, but so far unsuccessfully. Probably more owed to commercial factors than cultural/religious ones, unfortunately.
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Celt Darnell: Oh, Christmas will continue but may well be officially renamed ‘Xmas’ or Solstice day, so as not to trigger or offend anyone – the same way the juice gradually substituted BC/AD with BCE/CE. It’s the same, they say . . . but not.
Besides, tons of Hindus and Iranians and juice have Christmas trees – because ‘they’re pretty’ and considered a non-religious symbol. There’s a reason they light a national tree in DC but not even the smallest municipality can have a creche/nativity scene.
Keep the name but change the substance. Just another endless iteration of “Kill it, gut it, wear it’s skin suit, demand respect.”
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Here’s a nice marker for the death of the American nation: July 2, 2020, the day self-proclaimed conservative Republican senator Ron Johnson floated the idea to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth in response to the Floyd riots. That was when the savages won. Separation is the only hope now for the American people. It is happening informally but there is no appetite at the moment to formalize it. Will that day ever arrive? Events, dear boy, events–if they ever in fact happen.
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“It is still hopelessly ingrained in them that diversity is good and that we can, and should, co-exist.”
Ingrained very much so. When all the proof in the world is given that it’s not good, doesn’t work, and causes suffering on all sides, they are unmoved.
They simply respond that we’re not doing it right, but once we figure how to do it right, it will be the most valuable and wonderful thing ever.
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Well written piece. It seems to me that the concept of “natural rights” as well as the civilization that created them are slowly but surely heading the way of the Dodo – and they just don’t get it. The idea that the various and disparate people of the world would of course glom onto our current morality is hubris in the extreme. Just like Woodrow Wilson’s claim we had to “make the world safe for democracy”.
There’ll natural rights alright- for everyone other than the peoples who invented the idea…
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It was always preposterous to think that our culture would translate well to other cultures. I hadn’t thought about the natural rights angle, so I appreciate Zman articulating this problem. Another area to consider is the notion of justice. We have a culture-specific notion of justice that relies heavily on the concept of the individual and his/her rights. We consider ‘backward’ the idea that entire groups can be blamed for an individual’s crimes.
But other cultures and other peoples do not share this view. Even we used to have a group-justice ethic that became replaced by an individual-justice ethic. Now, as strangers in our own land, we are faced with the return of tribal ‘social’ justice exacted on our people indiscriminately and in violation of our ethical principles. One question is can we live as a minority group in our former territories without ending up utterly destroyed? Alternatively, could we relocate en masse to a more favorable location where we can carve out a life for ourselves in the new territory (the Aeneas option as it were)? Both scenarios present considerable difficulties, and other options may be preferable. But one way or another, we need to thread the needle for our survival.
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Iron Maiden: The very concept of individual rights and responsibilities is a product of a specific people/culture and thus concurrently proves the legitimacy of group virtues and guilt. No individual White today ‘invented’ the auto or the lightbulb or most conveniences of modern life, but there is no denying the historical and biological lineage of the inventors. Joint pride is normal and justifiable. “He’s one of ours” is a real thing.
Certain groups practice this consciously and deliberately – Juice as a prime example. Blacks simultaneously celebrate when one of their own achieves anything, and deny any community-wide responsibility when most of their own are demonstrably guilty of endless crimes and ethnic failure.
Jesus specifically taught both individual responsibility (i.e. no one’s historical guilt that someone was born afflicted in some way) and joint responsibility (Christians are to help and love one another and gather for corporate worship). It’s disingenuous to try to neatly divide the two ideas. I am certainly guilty if I commit a crime, but to what extent are my parents? Certainly blacks are genetically inclined to short-time preference and violence, but I don’t think anyone would entirely discount being raised in an erratic, chaotic, and violent environment.
It’s another version of genetics versus environment. I would argue ultimately the individual must suffer consequences or win awards, but that the group/culture/environment that produced that individual certainly bear some responsibility for both the good and the bad.
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SWPL
Stuff white people like. Without white people we won’t see many of the things white people like, thats just the way it is
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
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Maybe I’m missing the point of that website SWPL. I don’t know anything about “My so called life” since I’ve never watched it even though I was aware of it’s existence back then.
So I went to the list of things White People like and pretty much batted zero until I scrolled down to #1 – Coffee. Then that even went bust since “White people gotta have starbucks, which is ridiculous.
It left me where it found me, I’m as white as they come and I don’t get it.
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Its a ten year old site, its mainly a joke talking the piss out of a certain type of white liberal, but in the end its true that many things are SWPL, and if you have less white people, you will have less of the things white people like or value
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Fair enough.
Fair enough was all I wanted to say but “your comment was too short, go back and type some more stuff and filler.
Thank you, I actually do appreciate your response.
Mao Tse Tung said !!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWBjwgxEawo
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The idea of natural rights was specific to a certain subset of English-speaking white men at the conclusion of the English Civil War. Locke’s “Second Treatise” described, and the English Bill of Rights of 1688 codified, the political settlement of the civil war — religious toleration, free speech, right to bear arms, no taxation without representation, etc.
The Founders did not fight for universal human rights, they fought for the rights of Englishmen that had been part of English law for a century before the founding of the U.S.
In evaluating Jefferson’s appropriation of Locke, it is important to understand that the chief natural right is the right to decide which type of polity a people are going to live under. The specifics of how those rights — life, liberty, property — are going to be exercised in practice are not described in Locke’s theory. Consequently Jefferson and others saw nothing wrong with excluding Africans from the American polity; Africans had a natural right to forge their own polity in their own countries in Africa as they saw fit. Jefferson denounced the British colonial slave trade in the original draft of the Declaration for this very reason.
The argument contrary to Locke’s argument was Hobbes’s argument in “Leviathan,” written shortly after the beheading of Charles I and during Cromwell’s Long Parliament. Hobbes took a Maoist approach to the whole “rights” argument — “rights” are whatever the government that happens to be in power says they are, and the government must be a great beast, a “mortall God,” powerful enough to keep “keep men in awe” to prevent them from fighting over rights, religions, etc.
Needless to say we are in the process of making the transition from a 90% white Lockean America to a polyglot multicultural Hobbesian America… FedGov is already a Leviathan that does whatever the hell it wants, the Bill of Rights be damned.
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It’s been a while since I heard the whole Hobbes vs. Locke debate, so thanks for the reminder.
Credit to Z though. This article sums up so much of why we’re seriously f***ed.
It also lays out why, among natural rights, freedom of speech has been the first to go.
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Nice points, and I would just like to tack on a bit about their epistemology: Jefferson and Locke were empiricists. I think that Jefferson would argue for a “right(s)” government based on the idea of an orderly universe. An empiricist, at least during Locke’s era, would have to have faith in an orderly nature and universe; hence, Jefferson as a Deist. They have faith in a mechanistic, orderly universe. This inherently brings with it certain rules.
If we consider the enumeration of grievances in the Declaration, and the “in the course of human events,” there is a sense of orderly unfurling like a scientific observation. While the individual results may vary (same way observation of the sun varies on time of day and location), there are fundamental rules that guide the understanding. In listing the rights that have been violated, Jefferson is giving a treatise on how to observe a government in the same way one observes nature.
Both require an order outside the human mind – which of course is the fundamental basis of empiricism.
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And human rights, to be clear.
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Correct. The natural rights tradition in Western philosophy originates with the Scholastics and the attempt of Aquinas to reconcile Aristotelian empiricism with Christianity.
Locke in fact wrote an earlier work entitled “the reasonableness of Christianity” attempting to do exactly this. Throughout this entire tradition, however, there remained the belief that natural rights and Christianity were not obvious to everyone, but rather only to rational people and educated people as opposed to savages and barbarians. In other words, savages and barbarians had natural rights but were unaware of them due to their ignorance.
The overall point is that natural rights as we understand them are the rights of educated, enlightened, European white men who existed within a Christian society with varying sects but with basic underlying agreements.
Hobbes, writing at the time when the head of the Church of England was executed and replaced by the Puritan Cromwell, both of whom were disdained by papists, argued that there was no agreement on anything, and the only “rational” choice was to end the “war of all against all” where life is “nasty, brutish, and short” was to give the sovereign complete and total power to decide all things and enforce its decisions, so that some semblance of peace and order could be imposed.
The bizarre thing about our society today is that we rhetorically adhere to Lockean rationality and Lockean universalism while in fact imposing these ideas with brute Hobbesian force.
The U.S. Government transitioned from a Lockean republic of agrarian white men into a Hobbesian Leviathan when it decided to go kill hundreds of thousands of Southerners who were trying to exercise their Lockean natural right to secede.
We’ve been doing it to the rest of the world since 1917, when we killed Germans to force them to become “democratic.” When we they did exactly that and voted for the wrong guy, we went back again and killed some more. Then we imposed “human rights” on the Japanese by nuking their grandmothers and toddlers.
So ultimately Z is right — “natural rights” are a western, white idea, not universal. We use universal rights language to cloak our Hobbesian imperialism.
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Good.
F*** Taki. Used to be that next to this place… they had the best comment sections in town. Some of the visiting wanks were as much fun to read as the featured authors.
I’ll get by without Taki just fine.
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Agreed. When they did away with comment section, I quit reading – that is until Z started contributing. Now I can quit again.
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usNthem: At Taki Zman was casting pearls among swine. His level of philosophical thought and understanding of civilizational issues are in another league entirely than Steve Sailer eternally trying to quantify the qualitative, or David Cole celebrating himself and his based mestizos.
Ah, yes, the glaring irony of “Colorblind Civic Nationalism” is that it can only exist in a 90%+ white country.
The hubris of whites is that we assume that our view of the world is THE view of the world either emanating from God or nature, but most definitely the correct view. CivNats are nothing more than modern Yankee missionaries hellbent on spreading the word.
But they screwed up. Even the Puritan missionaries were smart enough to go to other people’s lands. CivNats invited those other peoples into our land – and we’re now paying the price.
Sure, the usual suspects took advantage of our nature, but we were an easy con. We wanted to believe that that those dusky foreigners would see the greatness of ways and thankfully accept our ideas.
Hubris lies at the heart of many a lost empire.
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So is just about every other dominant Western ideology. Libertarianism – completely a white man’s delusion. Woke-ism – well, perhaps there are others behind it, but it is only relevant in a mostly white society. Liberalism (classical liberalism and what we call liberalism today) – white person thing.
Come to think of it, ideology itself is more of a white person thing, and stronger in America than even in Europe. The rest of the planet is far more tribal, and practical. In Africa, Dictator A and Dictator B are fighting to see who’s tribe can win, and get all the resources, power, and women. Members of Tribe A and Tribe B kill each other until one side wins and takes power. It’s pretty simple, and not really ideological.
The CCP is not really ideological either, other than ensuring its survival by any means necessary, and getting “stuff” for its people. Even in the West, most non-whites preaching “woke” ideology don’t really care, it’s just their tool to get more “stuff” from whitey.
There are some things we can learn from this. Ideology doesn’t matter as much as tribe. You need to get in control of your tribe, slap down the weirdos and women, and then start getting “stuff” for your people. That’s it, simple as.
It’s hard to say what the future will look like, but it makes the squabbles between the “Left” and “Right” wing Europeans look more and more irrelevant. Re-arranging deck chairs while the Titanic sinks, so to speak.
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It is a mistake to classify it as an ideology I think.
It is more a semantic hacking of the internals of how people encode information.
There is no ideologilcal belief basis that forms a whole, there are only kafka self contradictory phrases that are used to place full formed stopping thoughts and slogans into the brain without any supporting cognitive process as to how they got there.
It is literally a spell system using linguistic techniques that directly alters the perceived reality of those susceptible to it.
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“Come to think of it, ideology itself is more of a white person thing, and stronger in America than even in Europe. The rest of the planet is far more tribal, and practical.”
Any “multi-cultural” society is tribal, and none more so than the United States. A segment of American Whites thinks magically and has deluded itself to believe it is special and will continue to live peacefully and comfortably. We very well may see the folks we call “liberals” react more sharply than CivNats when that delusion becomes impossible to maintain. They also are part of a tribe even now, whether they acknowledge it or not.
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>We very well may see the folks we call “liberals” react more sharply than CivNats when that delusion becomes impossible to maintain.
This has always been my little theory. Impossible to know if it’s correct, or the probability of it being correct.
Sweden was certainly interesting, the goodest of good whites. The “far right” party just barely happened to win a majority. We know that this doesn’t happen on its own, and the media didn’t freak out and downplayed it in the Anglo media, which suggests that a segment of the Swedish elite are looking to wind down the diversity experiment.
Conservatives are not anti-white, but they are also closer to every other non-white group. White Liberals (Yankees, Puritans, N-W Euros, whatever you want to call them) are the group that are way different to the rest of the world, and much different than us. It’s hard to understand how or why the operate in the ways they do.
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As a (regrettably former) strong civic nationalist, I find this perhaps the most distressing post of Z-man’s in the five years I’ve been reading him. I think this might be because it strikes so close to the heart of what’s gone wrong with us — that it’s so central to the loss of the nation, though society and civilization I grew up in and loved. I would say “God help us,” but that would be a call meaningless to more than half of the peoples now within out (failing) borders.
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EDIT (dammit): Hate phone typing — Don’t know how the “though” got in there; and should be “…our borders …,” not “out borders …” last sentence.
Give me a pencil, or at most an IBM Selectric over these efficient modern monstrosities for creating the written word.
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… I so agree with you; however it has given rise to a fun new discipline of interpretation of a written text: is this a typo, or is awkwardness, what key did the writer mean to hit but missed, how often did he look over what was just written and revise (so often chunks of text are left in) etc. Yet another challenge is closed caption interpretation – hilarious at times maddening at others …
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Indeed. As I sit here, I feel a profound sadness at today’s Z-man posting. Perhaps his worse “black pill” in memory. Heretofore one had hope that the loss of values one currently experiences was transient. That even if during one’s lifetime they disappeared, there was hope for resurgence. In short, that these values were indeed timeless and universal, not transient and situational. That if lost, such might be only temporary and would be found and adopted again.
But what if situational and genetic? Then indeed Humanity suffers an even worse loss as our race dies off.
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Always amazing how all the civnats and libertarians never batted an eyelid when it was pointed out that all the illegals coming over would eventually outvote and overwhelm them. The border hoppers were not carrying copies of Von Mises in their napsacks.
It wasn’t about principles, it’s NEVER about principles. It was about the short term economic gain of cheap labor.
An old story: for love (of God, family, country) or for money?
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“What happens when the new people reject the Western tradition of natural rights? Should they be forcibly removed? Should they be compelled to change their ways? ”
Nobody is going to do anything.
What remains of the Right is going to keep talking on the internet until they are put in a box six feet under.
The Right is going to fade away with a whimper, The Left will murder this civilization, and whatever emerges from the wreckage will be something completely different.
When the Legions left Britian, who at that time, could foresee the Saxons creating England?
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I don’t doubt the sincerity of civic nationalists who seem to believe that the phrase “ordered liberty” is some sort of magical incantation that will defeat their enemies, but your observation reinforces my suspicion that the leaders of Conservative Inc. are controlled opposition who are paid to waste the energies of their followers on fools’ errands until they can be easily crushed.
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Defeatism is not a sustainable evolutionary trait. For about a billion years now, the strong and smart have prevailed through all manner of adversity. This will be no different. Rather than whine the defeatist mantra, perhaps you would be better served to get stronger (sorry, no help on the smarter part, but you can acquire wisdom if you open your mind to it).
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“For about a billion years now, the strong and smart have prevailed ”
Totally true, and that is why I said what I said.
The strong and smart (in practical maters) are not the “Heritage Population”
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Evolutionary theory doesn’t say natural selection favors the strong or the smart. It just favors what survives. That is not always the strongest or smartest. The saying is “survival of the fittest,” but there is zero definition for fittest except “what survives,” so the phrase is equivalent to, accurately and meaninglessly, “survival of the survivors.”
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” the strong and smart have prevailed.”
No, whatever worked prevailed. Who’s smarter, a rocket scientist Olympian with two kids or a low IQ welfare recipient with 30 kids supported by the State?
Darwin is clear in his answer.
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Agree. West of the Hajnal Whites are an evolutionary dead end.
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If enough people start to develop an immune reaction to the media conditioning then there may be some hope, and that is particularly true for women..
Although given the current trajectory that seem unlikely a 99% do not even see it is their enemy and controller.
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Throughout this essay, my mind kept being drawn back to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” which is basically Spengler’s civilizational model converted to pulp sci-fi form.
The protagonist of that story might not have found evidence of the Elder Things watching TikTok, but he found the decline in culture you’d expect to find as a reflection of that.
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What “works” persists, and it’s always environment specific. The ancestral peoples of Northern Europe lived in a place of sharply changing seasons with harsh winter deprivations. Over time, the behaviors that “worked” in this unique environment became encoded in DNA. Post civilization, nurtured behaviors that also “worked” became transmissible to future generations via social mechanisms such as religious training of youth. Eventually, secular mechanisms of social indoctrination co-evolved and generally were applied across-the-board, not just in niches like religion. This occurred when multiple religions had to coexist in the same region. The concepts of natural rights and universal rights grew out of religious traditions and codification of laws respectively. Both persisted because they “worked” to keep the peace in mixed societies.
And all of this is downstream of biology and disease. When pathogens are killing a society, it’s not a matter of “correct belief” or even voting, it’s about basic survival. Health can only return when the pathogens are removed. It serves no useful purpose to debate civil liberties when you’re at risk of dying from late stage cancer. Priorities matter. Smarter, not harder.
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TomA, we survive as a tribe. So, it is worthwhile to spend some amount of time, while we’re not improving our own fitness and building a community, to try to persuade our tribesmen to stop believing dumb things, like the universal appeal of natural rights as our Founders conceived of them.
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Unfortunately, huge numbers of our tribesman are no longer fit for the current environment, and will need to be left behind by those of us who want to preserve an ‘us’. And worse, many of those who superficially seem to belong to our tribe are actually our worst enemies, and will need to be treated as such. Sentimentality is a trait that will have to be suppressed if we are to survive as a people.
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Not to get too philosophical, but the piece does seem to privilege the tangible over the intangible with respect to what is real. Concepts can be real though intangible. Words are “real” though intangible. I do agree that real or not, “rights” are only available to the extent the reigning society enforces them, and that is largely based upon the culture that creates and sustains that society. Change or lose that culture, and the enforcement of/respect for those rights disappears along with it. So, even if the rights are universal and eternal in a conceptual sense, they are very time bound and local in a practical sense.
Maybe I am just an incurable optimist.
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Word are as real as the concepts they represent. Gravity is a word with genuine weight because gravity is as real as anything can be in our conceptions of reality. Gravity would still exist even if we did not have a word for it. Latin has no word for volcano. Home had no good word for blue. These things existed before our minds could come up with words to capture the concept.
Right, on the other hand, have only ever existed in our minds. Unlike gravity or the color blue, it is a concpet that cannot be detached from the mind of the creator.
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This is perhaps the best piece that I’ve ever seen here. Well done.
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I like the idea of natural rights, because that’s my tradition, hard-won by people who fought and died for it. Lately it’s the writing-down of rights, and consequently the elevation of law above tradition, that bothers me. I wonder if there’s a link between universality, written law, and the Christian notion of the Word— or the earlier Hebrew law. Seems likely to me, but I haven’t put in the work to be certain.
The problem, seems to me, is that it reduces a people to an idea. Citizens instead of nationals, etc. Not that there isn’t some sense to it, but when you end up denying flesh and blood— an integral part of the organism— you’ve gone too far.
Then there’s the paradox of rank materialism in a time when we’re living in the matrix, navel-gazing and self-actualizing. Idk, maybe it’s because we’re missing a huge part of the picture. A bunch of spiritual cripples.
Ancient ideas, interesting trying to fit them to our time. Plenty to think on, for sure!
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What do people who believe in natural rights do if large populations are uninterested or unpersuaded by arguments for natural rights?
The only answer is to separate from the unpersuaded but the current natural rights advocates are unwilling to talk about this.
The sunny, optimistic talk of Reaganites who are so certain that everyone will be persuaded sounds stupid to me. When a GOP politician proudly states that, “I believe that the best days of America are still ahead,” I bitterly shake my head.
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Yeah it’s some old white man’s burden stuff. “This is our way, tough shit if you don’t like it” should be sufficient, probably would be if we were less idealistic, more worldly. It would be a good way of separating wheat from chaff.
I think what I’m getting at is that we wouldn’t be so keen to save the world if we weren’t so divorced from it. In other words, in the world but not of it.
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“when you end up denying flesh and blood— an integral part of the organism— you’ve gone too far.”
So very yes. Leftists espouse that humans are just a bundle of nurture rapped in skin.
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Modern society largely rejects the notion of sin from which the Christian religion offered redemption and salvation. So it is unsurprising that the values, rules and “natural rights” that allowed Christianity to spread and flourish will struggle to persist. What seems to remain universal is the innate religious drive. In a decidedly post-Christian society, the majority have recognized new “sins” such as patriarchy, racism and homophobia. And they have simply diverted their fundamental religious drive to identifying and redeeming or destroying the new sinners. For yesterday men, what was once right is now wrong; and martyrdom is once again a real prospect for the intransigent. But survive or die, there is no going back. Anton, of all people, should realize that this is Flight 93 writ large.
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In his own way, Michael Anton is more deluded than the National Review. Even if the cockpit were to be somehow commandeered, everything before that moment still would be irreversibly altered. Only the disembarkment point would change.
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” In a decidedly post-Christian society, the majority have recognized new ‘sins’ such as patriarchy, racism and homophobia.”
Not coincidentally the “new sins” are the things, the virtues, the TRUTHS, that stopped and restrained real sins.
“diverted their fundamental religious drive to identifying and redeeming or destroying the new sinners.”
The “new sinners” are of course the righteous, the good.
It’s a tale as old as time, really. In Russia, it was the sons of fantatic rabbis that often became the most fanatic atheists and communists.
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Mainstream conservatives love the notion that principles and belief systems matter more than people. They are loathe to recognize that principles and belief systems do not create themselves. Those principles/belief systems come from particular peoples and reflect the unique genetic patterns among those peoples. Until enough conservatives come to terms with that reality, conservativism will continue to be a paper tiger, more a farce than an ideology worth embracing.
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“The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition. Whatever claims one wants to make about the universality of natural rights, it is clear that the new people and their enablers are not embracing the concept.”
It has been game, set, match since at least the end of the Nineteenth Century and probably at the conclusion of the Civil War. As I responded to you below, it was both sad and utterly predictable that Anton clings to the old religion and similar to Emperor Julian praying to his ancestors as church bells chime in the city square. We live in a profoundly religious era, and the faith of civic nationalism is weak sauce compared to the fanatical dogma all around us.
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A right is something you possess that confers no obligation on another – free speech, free association, etc… An entitlement is something you possess that does confer an obligation on another – handicapped parking, welfare; that is, demanded by one, paid for by another.
Understood this way, an abortion is not a right since it obligates the unborn child to give up its life to pay for the mother’s entitlement to a better “quality of life”. It is called a right because those who want the power of life and death demand that it be so, not because it is.
The idea that “universal rights” are in the eye of the beholder makes sense when the history of its evolution as an idea is considered.
But for many, universal rights means all those things that you are entitled to. I have only met a handful of women who would consider an abortion an entitlement. I think our idea of rights vs entitlements is not universal. The world’s definition of universal rights is, “what helps me win, no matter what.”
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Interesting how when if came time to withhold communion from the congregations, due to the Chinese stiff cold, of which the vast, vast majority of churches did, all the preachers put on their bulletins the one line from Paul in Romans 13, which may as well have been written by the CCP. Even an Obama speech writer would have said “I love it but they won’t buy it in Peoria.” Of course Paul was wrong as he was eventually dragged away by authorities never to be hear from again. Was he rebelling? Was he in the wrong? Did he show them his nice letter?
The same preachers who take a dip in the eternal spring of “human rights,” especially the right to squat wherever they heck you want, from any continent, at any time, suddenly, when it came time to exercise their First Amendment rights, retreated into Romans 13. Even the right to eternal life by partaking in the sacraments was struck from theology itself. Not even the most backwards, dark ages European would even think of withholding this sacred right. Because the only thing more useless than the Republican Party is Christianity. If you think your rights are secure because America has a healthy dose of Christianity you can always look up old video of axes being swung at beer barrels a hundred years ago.
All rights as we know them come from an ornery, suspicious, and at least clever population that can suddenly fly off the handle and murder its leaders. Throughout history, this has been people from Northern Europe and subsequently North America. The history of natural government expansion and centralization is the slow, clawing back of those supposed rights.
Romans 13:
13 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.
6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7 Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
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Very fair, although another factor was certainly the make-up of the congregations, either young bug-persons or seniors terrified of the coof. They could have been defiant and opened their doors but a lot of the ministers/priests knew that their congregations would be no-shows as their true god is the glowing rectangle.
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This is a popular belief, but largely not true, at least in my own AO, the churches were not shut down by the seniors, but by the Karens.
The local Methodist pastor, for example, appealed to Wesley’s “Do No Harm” directive as his justification for masks, then shut-down, then ultimately jabs. He’s a guy in his 30s who bullied the Admin Council into doing things his way, not His way.
American Christianity pussing out when the shit hits the shinola goes back further than the coof. In the 80s and 90s they did a lot of complaining about abortion, but all of it fell far short of what you would expect of someone reacting to baby murder.
Even further back the protestant majority tolerating the immigration of dirty catholics to breed like rabbits and subject us to green dyed beer and lousy adaptations of Italian cuisine.
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Wow.
Nice find, JR, very relevant here.
Romans 13, 1-5. I will discuss with someone I admire, a very learned man, a scholar, a history major, my Pastor.
My country, right or wrong? My government is good because God says it is, or because it is good, God says it is?
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We can argue over natural rights and historicism, but what about “human nature,” “male/female” nature or (gasp) Nature in-and-of-itself? Are ALL our views historically and genealogically conditioned? Are there ANY truths, i.e., unchanging brute facts, on which we may agree? More generally, is this a random, chaotic, chance-based multiverse without a telos, or is there a cosmic order, a creating and embracing intelligence that animates ALL of existence? This strikes me as a fundamental choice we’re required to make between Being and non-being, where the latter cannot be.
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Ref Taki – I never forgave him and his miscreant daughter for taking away the comments section a few years ago.
ZMan is too good for them.
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Forgive me if this has already been addressed below, but I’d like you to elaborate on your assertion that there’s no such thing as list. On its face, it’s rather absurd, but maybe we’re working on different definitions.
Lust, by my definition, is simply the biological drive and desire to copulate when you see an attractive female. When you see an attractive female, it moves a little in your pants. There’s lust in simplest terms. Now men can chose to act or not act on this list based on a number of cultural or logical reasons, but that’s a different discussion.
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***Damn autocorrect…lust not list
Is it just me or has autocorrect and predictive typing gotten too aggressive and intrusive?
I feel like the setup I had on my phones from 2013 to about 2018 was far more helpful and effective than what I have today.
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The urge to copulate is a real thing, but the moral component is conceptual.
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The practical consequences of unbridled lust is a real thing, which nature knows well enough.
Which I think illustrates how today’s article got into a semantic tangle. A stimulating read as always, but I found little convincing or meaningful in it.
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I was thinking about the sin of lust, not the biological impulse. I should have been clearer.
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In diverse, vibrant communities, I believe they call it “muhdick”
Big mistake to leave Takimag, imo. It’s an edited organ, therefore has an aspect of legitimacy to it, which self-publishing can never have, no matter how ardent the fan-club. It is also a high-visibility platform (it is how I came to find this site) with some big names (whether or not you agree with them all the time) and connects to a wider ecosystem, such as The Spectator readership.
IMO also, pay-per-view is just going to lose more of your audience than you will gain – I for one refuse to pay for anything online. It’s not so much the cost (though that is an issue when there are lots of potential subscriptions you might want to make) – really, it’s just too much trouble. Constantly signing in or having to manage cookies would soon push me away. Visibility and ease of access is everything.
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It’s interesting that all traces of Z seem to have been removed from Taki.
He’s be un-personed.
What’s ironic is that the natural rights civilization seems to harbor the seeds of its own destruction. Owing to a misbegotten because overly capacious conception of human nature, the ostensible universality of natural rights provides in implicit argument for racial egalitariansim and unlimited immigration. If all human beings, irrespective of culture and location on the globe, inherently possess identical rights, what grounds are there for any culture or civilization to remain hermetic? On the contrary, it stands to reason that we really are one world and our political arrangements should reflect that reality.
But, as we see from the cultural forces that are ripping the West asunder, natural rights are anything but universal. What’s more, the West’s Power Structure, which is now postmodern rather than Enlightenment-based, no longer believes the natural rights bull. Not only does it not have the stomach to compel negroes to respect free speech and Moslems to acknowledge the equality of sexual deviants, it encourages them to do the opposite. The only people hanging onto natural rights theory on the domestic front are Civ-Nats, and the only people pushing it globally are the neocons. Everybody else has moved on, and that means culturally centrifugal forces, with all their considerable destructive power, now run unchecked.
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I agree that on earth in human societies, ultimately FORCE is the true power. There’s no debating this. That’s why in my ideal society, there is freedom of speech to give room for the few outsiders/geniuses lest they get smothered by conformity. But there is NOT such freedom for the civilization wrecking crazies who espouse trannies, DIE, feminism, porno, and all the rest. I say lock them up and throw away the the key. Because if you don’t and extend them good faith courtesy, they will get their foot in the door and inevitably take power and NOT return the favor to you; such is their nature. It’s just the way it is. One some things, there HAVE to be absolute red lines.
“They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust.”
You lost me on this one.
” Men in one period accept certain things to be true that men in a different period would not accept as true. Loosely put, mankind and its mental constructs are a product of time and place.”
Yes, but there is objective truth outside of mens’ heads. There is somewhere OUTSIDE of time and place. To adhere to the truth, to God, will lead to prosperity and happiness in a society. To do otherwise will lead to hell. We can observe the latter in real time.
Of course here on earth, God’s way would ultimately have to be enforced with force; as all authority on earth must be. I’d never argue against that. Doesn’t change the substance of my comment above.
“You are born into this world as the property of your parents who created you and raised you.”
Parents didn’t create the child. The woman does not know how to knit together the child in her belly, but it happens anyway. God did it.
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Scott Adams uses Locals and apparently likes it a lot. I subscribe and watch him there and have had very few problems with it.
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Lot so ungrateful comments here the re Taki Theodoracopulos. He has been calling a spade a spade since the 1980’s along with providing amusing tales of his travels and vices and also providing a platform for various writers. He should be given his due respect.