Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a review of sorts of a book titillating the usual suspects. Sunday Thoughts is mostly about the various angles to the FBI raid on Trump’s villa last week. SubscribeStar users can find it here and Substack users can find it here.
When it comes time to write the obituary for Western civilization, the focus will not be on the forces of destruction, but the forces of distraction. These are the people who peddle utopian alternatives to the present, thus preventing a real opposition forming up to defend the West from its attackers. The West is not being destroyed by malevolent forces like Wokism, antiwhite radicalism and the concentration of wealth in alien hands, but by the forces preventing an organized resistance.
One of the primary examples of this is libertarianism. The real trick of this evil ideology is that it convinces the victim that he is responding with pure reason to the irrationalism of the rats gnawing away at civilization. In reality he is indulging in fantasy, every bit as ridiculous as left-wing utopianism. The difference is that Marx imagined a world where man was freed from his nature through cooperation, while Murray Rothbard dreamed of you being free from your community.
Libertarianism convinces the victim that cooperation is evil, so he not only eschews any sort of organized resistance, but he also works to prevent it. It is this last bit that allowed it to infiltrate conservatism and turn it into a cat’s paw. Twentieth century conservatism became the great defender of Progressive dominance, undermining any resistance in the name of individual liberty. The result is that otherwise good people volunteer to hang alone rather than hang together.
The true nature of the cult of libertarianism is clear in this review of the most recent Thomas Piketty book, A Brief History of Equality. The author of the review does not beat around the bush attacking Piketty’s ideas. Instead, he warns that it could persuade people to organize against the forces destroying their society. In other words, the crime here is not in being wrong about economics. The crime is in being wrong about politics by advocating against the status quo.
As is custom when critiquing libertarianism, it needs to be pointed out that the author’s revealed preference is for something other than libertarianism. He has steadfastly avoided the dreaded private sector, choosing a life in government, the academy and think tanks. One of things you will never find in the dreaded private sector is a genuine libertarian, because people who work understand that society is not possible without organization and someone enforcing the rules.
Putting that aside, the absurdity of libertarianism is that it starts by agreeing with Marx on human organization. Marx believed that what defined the human condition and drove the flow of history was economic relations. The human condition is defined by man’s economic relations with other men. This is not only the starting point for both Marxism and libertarianism, but the end point as well. Both seek the perfection of human relations through economics.
Of course, Marx was wrong about the nature of man. Humans are not defined by their economic relationships with other men. The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry. The things that define a people are not the product of economic relations but the product of their shared struggle as a people. Culture is the answer to the central question of human organization. “Who are we?” is answered by the traditions, customs and history of the people.
Put another way, culture is the shared labor of the people. It is not just the product of their current labor. Culture is the preservation and improvement of their ancestor’s labor in order top pass it to the next generation. Culture is the shared accretive product of generations of people. That is what defines a people and the individual, not the trading of goods between people. The Marxist and libertarians strip man of his humanity by reducing him to his transactions.
The Marxists and libertarians share something else. Both are a response to the individualism of John Locke. If God holds dominion over the world because he created it, and man was made in God’s image, then it naturally flows that man holds dominion over that which he created. You own you and everything you make because who you are is the product of your labor. This is the bedrock of Western liberalism. We are naturally free because we own ourselves.
Marx saw capitalist economic relations as the source of exploitation, which he defined as men compelled to labor for others. Contrary to popular legend, Marx was not opposed to capitalism, a term he popularized. He saw capitalism as a necessary transition phase to socialism. Eventually, the number of people controlling capital, thus compelling labor, would shrink to the point where people would overthrow them and restore their rights to their own labor.
Libertarianism makes a similar argument. Instead of the holders of capital compelling labor, it is the state. You will note they always avoid discussing who actually owns the state, but instead focus on how the state compels your labor. They tax your labor and force you to so that which you otherwise not do. It is only when the state is eliminated will you be free, because then you will once again own your labor. They land in the same utopia as the Marxist, just by a different road.
It is not hard to see why libertarians despise culture as much as the enemies of Western civilization despise it. Culture defines who decides. The culture of a people defines who makes the final decisions. The answer is always confined to people who are of the people. How those people are selected and by what right they make their decisions on behalf of the people is within that context. Both Marxists and libertarians hate this idea and always oppose it.
This is the great trick of liberal utopianism. One side explicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations in order to reach the promised land. The alleged opponent implicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations but claims to be a defense of those natural relations, which they define as pretty much the same as their opponent’s vision of man in his blessed utopia. In both cases, the goal is a world of pure self-ownership in which man has no debt to anyone but himself.
Whenever the final accounting of Western civilization is done, libertarianism will go down as the greatest hoax in human history. In the name of individual liberty, it commands the followers to build the gas chambers used by their alleged opponents to snuff out the defenders of Western culture. Without out that culture, what is left is a deracinated mass of individuals enslaved to the great ideological state, drugged by cheap consumer goods to avoid contemplating the banality of life.
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A good alternative to the libertarian economists is Heinreich Pesch, S.J., whose work is summarized here: https://distributistreview.com/archive/heinrich-pesch-on-solidarist-economics
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I have written about distributionism in the past. I did some posts on Belloc years ago. I should probably circle back to that material since it has been a long time. I must admit that I struggle to accept the leap of logic from natural law to natural rights. The chasm between the is of natural law and the ought of natural rights can never be closed, so I have some issues with distributionism.
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A lot to unpack today. First, I have never encountered anyone in my life that views cooperation as evil. And I don’t think that straw man actually exists. Ditto for the obvious benefits of organization. Most people engage in cooperative and organizational behaviors reflexively for the simple reason that it works in the evolutionary sense. Both lead to positive outcomes more often than not. And as for the idea of cooperating and organizing as a precursor to solving the big problems of society, I hope these efforts succeed. Whether it’s voting harder or forming a new dissident political party; by all means, go for it. I wish you success.
Is the probability of success 100%. Hell no! Most folks here have already given up on vote harder, and Libertarians failed miserably trying to create a new dissident political party, so no guarantee that will happen any time soon either. Is it therefore prudent to have a backup plan? Absolutely! Should this plan avoid the pitfalls of the past (hard lessons learned) and take advantage of modern technology to maximize the opportunity for success? Of course it should. Does pissing and moaning about the failure of Libertarianism increase your chances of survival in the coming Brave New World? Are you kidding me?
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I don’t know. colorblind civic nationalism might give libertarianism a run for its money in the destruction of the West, or, at least, the United States.
It’s a very seductive ideology for many whites. It agrees that culture is what matters, so we just need to get non-whites to accept our culture and everything will be fine.
But, like Marxism or libertarianism, colorblind civic nationalism strips away people’s humanity by never asking why our culture came about.
Civic nationalism offers whites the false hope that our problems can be solved within the system. “If our media or government would just promote goog values, we’d be fine,” they say.
And that keeps them from organizing against the system.
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If Libertarianism is all about opening up economic transactions without regard to culture or blood, it could be argues that civic nationalism is a child of libertarianism. The banning of covenant communities, discrimination in employment, and other measures was a vast opening of economic capital to everyone without regard to race, class, or religion.
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I think most of us here are libertarians inside. We just want to be left alone. We don’t have a desire for power or to run other people’s lives. We need to strangle that inner libertarian. We have to internalize the Chinese saying, “If the tiger gifts his teeth and claws to the dog, the dog will oppress the tiger”.
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I’m not. Mind you, I am mature enough to understand that rights and freedom come with responsibility and obligation. That is why they get completely stupid on subjects like drugs, sexual degeneracy, and other social ills.
> Of course, Marx was wrong about the nature of man. Humans are not defined by their economic relationships with other men. The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.
There’s a reason the powers that be have tried to dilute the primacy of blood and culture of a people in favor of a nebulous diversity and purely transactional relationships. They think they can dilute culture down to whatever is on Disney+ this month and remove all bonds of blood. Transactional economies are just the start, as their vision of a post-scarcity word will remove even that relationship.
This goes into the book review in Taki, where it’s clear their dream is an individual who has no unique characteristics, just a flat earth of people who all look the same, talk the same, and act the same. Whiteness is the current enemy, as they are still the most ascendant people, but eventually they will move to Asians with the same script to remove the top performers, then and start a slow genocide of the lowest performers of earth until they get to their ideal perfectly average sexless person.
Such an unnatural global people would reach their ideal an equality of sorts, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more spiritually dead world.
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Excellent post! The paradox of multiculturalism is that it culminates in the erasure of all distinct cultures; it would more rightly be deemed anti-culturalism. And the ultimate aim of elite-driven “diversity” is to render all us plebes (“dirt people,” in the wonderful parlance of Zman) a bunch of nondescript, racially and sexually ambiguous, consumer automatons of the global technocracy. The champions of such “diversity” therefore war against genuine diversity in a disturbingly Orwellian fashion.
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Butt hay–kno mor whi suprimissee
“The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.”
How did that work out for Cain and Abel?
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Another somewhat related problem with libertarianism is that it appeals almost exclusively to spergy, high-IQ White men. Sure, there may be a handful of women and nonwhites who get into libertarianism, yet they are so rare as to be unworthy of mention. Meanwhile, these White guys who embrace libertarianism are almost always race-blind. They buy into an extreme form of individualism that takes no account of easily observed group differences. They can’t or won’t even do a headcount of their own ideology to notice that ideology’s readily apparent demographic pattern. Most libertarians favor open borders, oblivious to the fact that an influx of third worlders will render the ultimate triumph of libertarianism even less possible than such a triumph is under our current demographics.
As Zman stated, libertarianism is utopianism and therefore isn’t really possible for any sizeable population no matter what the particular scenario. But let’s pretend for a second that it might be possible. Under what circumstances could it emerge and last? Only in a situation where the values of spergy, high-IQ White men define the larger culture. There could be no acceptance of “diversity is our greatest strength” or even so-called color-blindness. Such a culture would have to embrace an outlook on race that has practically no fanfare among libertarians. In other words, the extreme individualism that characterizes libertarianism is a self-negating force and just one of several elements that places libertarianism in the realm of fantasy.
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Another form of harmful distraction is to get bogged down bashing Libertarians for fun and sport. They are inconsequential in today’s political universe, so why waste endless keystrokes on them. If it’s just about the cathartic benefits of venting, there are a lot of other targets that are more worthy of disparagement. At some point, this kind of bashing just becomes bullying rather than enlightenment.
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You’re probably right that it we shouldn’t “waste endless keystrokes” on libertarianism or libertarians. That said, I didn’t think that I was “bashing” them. I merely intended to point out one specific element of their belief system that renders it unworkable. Libertarians are often quite intelligent and could potentially make for good allies to dissidents. In that sense, it might be useful for dissidents to point out the problems with libertarianism in an effort to help those potential allies to see the light. Of course, that is assuming that dissidents (and whatever allies/converts they manage to gain) have any chance of saving Clown World from itself at this point. That, I admit, may not be a realistic assumption.
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That’s why I focus on colorblind civic nationalism. That’s the official ideology of the GOP and what’s keeping whites from organizing as a group.
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Absolutely. Colorblind civic nationalism is likely the greatest impediment to Whites organizing as group. Nevertheless, libertarian individualism is also a problem in that regard. In fact, at the hear of colorblind civic nationalism is often a sort of libertarian individualism, however vaguely defined it may usually be. The two are seldom mutually exclusive of one another. To counter one tends to require countering the other.
Agree. Libertarianism is very much related to colorblind civic nationalism. However civic nationalism is more dangerous because it acknowledges culture; indeed, it appeals to whites because it says that our culture, our values, are the best and, sooner or later, everyone will recognize that.
But, like Libertarianism, colorblind civic nationalism demands that you remain an individual and most certainly that you abhor identity politics.
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A libertarian society would permit [near] absolute freedom of association.
See? Not all libertarian ideas are bad; we’re a big tent, not just unlimited immigration advocating pot-smoking child-rapers 😀
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1
Libertarianism doesn’t understand that the only people who want libertarianism are whites.
What do libertarians do when faced with a group that puts the group over the individual? What do individuals do with face with other individuals who play as a team?
You would need to abandon your individualism and play as a team. Thus, the libertarian utopia would last about a week.
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Look at it this way. We have a market economy. The libertarian believes that a total hands-off role for the government, except in ensuring “individual rights”, is the only acceptable way for it to operate. The left believes that a powerful government can use that market economy to advance its own agenda. Put the two side by side and it is just reality that the left’s policy of action will beat out the libertarian inaction every time. The only thing the libertarian can do when faced with this reality is whine and complain but also does not feel that he (and yea it is a he) can do anything because it goes against his principles. So, the left wins every time.
Libertarians are irrelevant, though, right? Not really – this is basically the way the cuckservative has operated since the Civil Rights Era. This is the way they still talk, even after decades of this going on. So, no, libertarian thinking is not really inconsequential, it is one of the sources of the cuckservative mind virus and must be vanquished.
Nope. People with rudimentary intellect will see right through libertarianism fairly quickly. I am content to let them hang alone; most are fakes anyway. Libertarianism is comprised mostly of virtue signalling to other stupid people and a means for the dull and vapid to pose as intellectuals and individualists.
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1
“I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
“Socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.”
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“Another somewhat related problem with libertarianism is that it appeals almost exclusively to spergy, high-IQ White men. ”
This is not a “problem”
Your mention of “big-L” Libertarian support of open borders (after all, limits on immigration would be government regulation, and we can’t have that!). This is (or was) an official plank of the party, as is (I think) opposition to age of consent laws. Those are two positions that I blame for me never joining, nor donating money to, the LP. The above notwithstanding, I continue to admire much “little L” libertarian thought.
I have always thought that was the Achilles’ heel, or some larger body part, of libertoidinism, that it’s an Anglo-Dutch dork-male fetish which will never be revered by women and the Global South, who have demonstrated the tendency to vote themselves new benefits. Of course very few libbies aren’t also race fantasists, they even considered gonads a self-determined free market free choice before the fad caught fire in the Obama years; so bringing up the demographic impracticality and non-viability of their ideology “does not compute” to them.
Because of “The Sixties” commie/Marxism was the #1 nuisance fringe religion most Westerners encountered in the culture, until the international proletariat had the wipe-out tutti di wipe-outs at the end of 20th C. Deep down every liebertarian knows his shtick will never be as fashionable as communism was, or could again be, and I think he seethes about this.
Well done, sir.
“When it comes time to write the obituary for Western civilization, the focus will not be on the forces of destruction, but the forces of distraction. ”
If they do write that – they will be utterly wrong.
What makes the destruction of Western Civilization unprecedented in world history is precisely that it is being done deliberately, purposively, top-down.
Christians know this already; but secular commentators who are prepared to ‘think the unthinkable’ and consider the simplest and most obvious explanation for the pattern of global and national policies, are also realizing that the driving motivations of those in power are actively evil.
e.g. Neil Oliver – a famous BBC TV presenter who has ‘gone rogue’ since 2020, speaking a couple of days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIpLwiaQRRk
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“Christians know this already…”
Methinks you haven’t been in a modern, “non-denominational” (where most younger folks attend) church recently. They are all about inclusivity, love-your-neighbor, import the world. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is their new, most-sacred hymn. They are all implicitly anti-White.
The modern Christians are a huge part of the problem.
2
These people are not Christians; they are spiritual cyphers who use “churches” as vehicles for their pernicious ideology. But you are correct in that the prelates who control the mainline denominations are part of the Power Structure and thus the problem. Rank-and-file Christians, on the other hand, want nothing to do with this perversion of the faith, and for that reason, increasingly stay home in droves on Sunday morning.
Zman, I read the Taki’s post first, and I thought this line was first-rate:
“Hamid is Pakistani, a people known for their obsequiousness, so his ability to flatter his target audience is natural.”
Exactly the right observation in a review of a book titled, “The Last White Guy” (or whatever—no sense looking it up). Honest question: did you slog through the whole book? Not that it matters; books like this are more of a business plan than literature: provocative (but obvious) title, plus an author with the right complexion. What’s between the covers could be anything after getting those two right. It’s a product to be bought, displayed, approved of, and left unread. And surely the reviewers of “major” outlets based their entire opinion (glowing, de rigeur) on the title, author photo, and a one-paragraph blurb that sets up the (childish) premise.
You’ll never read a bad, or mildly critical, review of such a book in the mainstream organs. Indeed, the reviewers pathetically vie to outdo one another in terms of their praise, as a display of virtue (and a tactic to cling to their jobs). When T.N. Coates was all the rage, one NYT review called his latest book “more than a must-read: it’s like water or air.” Some people will say anything for a buck.
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Made the mistake of reading the first couple pages from the sample on Amazon. As a writer, the guy simply sucks. The publisher doesn’t care, since, as you stated, they aren’t actually selling the books for people to read them.
1
Four questions:
1. did the populace of (what is now) AINO ever have a sense of shared culture and community?
2. if ‘yes’ to Q1; when and why did that change?
3. is it possible for disparate ethnic groups to form a shared community?
4. if ‘no’ to Q3; what does that portend for the continued cohesiveness of AINO?
5
I’ll take a stab:
1. Yes.
2. It started to end with the first great wave of migration in the late 1880’s. Common culture took hold again after the immigration moratorium of the 1920’s and was nearly restored by 1965.
3. It depends on the preexisting cultural differences. Germans meld into an Anglo culture quicker than Italians, who take longer but eventually do so. Different races cannot form a shared community, though,no matter how hard they try.
4. It’s over and has been over for some time. Much of the governmental and cultural madness is an attempt to prevent the natural racial groupings from splintering off, and that will fail even with police state tactics.
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did the populace of (what is now) AINO ever have a sense of shared culture and community?
No. Not even close.
The closest we came was from WWII through the late 60s.
Even then there were serious fractures that were papered over due to existential exogenous threats.
2
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“….what is left is a deracinated mass of individuals enslaved to the great ideological state, drugged by cheap consumer goods to avoid contemplating the banality of life….”
Thus, you will own nothing and be happy.
also sprach K Schwab.
I love Zman but his obsession with Libertarians is akin to a passenger on the Titanic complaining about the bartender’s excessive use of vermouth in the Martinis. The Bartender isn’t the guy who hit the iceberg. Rothbard didn’t get us into this mess and Libertarians are just a distraction. Let’s deal with the Piketty types (basically Commies) first; they are the major threat.
Serious question: Would or should the DR be happy with replacing the existing huge, coercive government/State apparatus with one reflecting the “cultural values” of the DR? I wouldn’t be overjoyed with this, even though I might be happier than I am now. I want a smaller, less coercive State no matter who is in charge. I doubt even the DR could all agree on governing tactics even if we all generally agree on broad cultural issues. And the smaller State is easier to manage and less dangerous.
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1
No, because in order for the DR to implement a counter-revolution (for any value of counter-revolution you want to imagine, from cultural to intellectual to political to physical) against its enemies, if will be forced to coerce a lot of people in a lot of different ways, because as much as I hate him, that Black Republican Lincoln was right-
“I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
It is a paradox that many in the DR have yet to come to terms with. In order to get to a place where we can return to a smaller, less overbearing and tyrannical government, we must utilize the tyranny and coercive power of large government to do so. Power first, then principles. Because that is how our enemies fight, and until dissidents become comfortable with that, we will be as effective as the Vichy Right is today.
7
I prefer a large, powerful state of, by and for my people, guaranteeing the continuation and flourishing of my people, to a weaker state controlled by Leftist villains. Quality is much more important than quantity. Culture is far more important than liberty.
2
by definition, the only people represented by a large and powerful state, are the inner party. and to a lesser degree, the outer party. just like we have now.
I could never enjoy “The Lord of the Rings,” because this obnoxious kid in school never shut up about it. It became impossible for me to pick up the books without it reminding me of him, so I had to beg off. Libertarianism sort of took the same hit. It was the philosophy for the kid who wore a fedora to school and for some reason wore fingerless leather gloves and didn’t know how ridiculous it made him look. They also wore t-shirts proclaiming their atheism, hoping you would engage them in debate when all you wanted to do was avoid them and their canned tamale body odor. I guess these guys were my Nick Gillespie. You rightly rail against negative identities, but this was a case of, whatever these guys were for, I was against.
Liberty is a negative category right and a relatively new concept. Naturally a slave wants liberty, but why would a freeman make liberty his principal? Alright, freedom from onerous taxation and things like that, but that only happens when you sacrifice some of your freedom in common with a lot of other people to put things to rights, and more importantly, keep those gains by fighting when the time comes. Most of the objects of that transitive “free from” would be everything a man holds dear, freedom from bonds of friendship, reciprocal obligations, ultimately meaning. If all these deaths of despair are based on a lack of meaning (as well as a lack of good jobs, good women, etc.) the libertarian utopia would produce even more bodies. “Dropping pack” is not a principle. The boomers tried it in the sixties and (to be fair) their parents, “the Greatest Generation,” fled their organic communities a generation before that, leaving the cities to the forces that still control them to this day. Sure, they were kind of chased out, but they also wanted to get busy with happy motoring, tract housing, GE products, and TV and more TV. That was their LSD. Still is.
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“Alright, freedom from onerous taxation…”
It’s not really taxes that is the problem. It’s that they take the money and give us very little in return. Instead of a community pooling its resources for efficiency, they take our money, steal some of it, waste a lot of it, give it to foreigners and most of the rest to operate a police state deigned to control us.
Other countries pay taxes and get services in return.
“The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry.. . . . .
Culture is the shared accretive product of generations of people. ”
So which is it, “blood” or shared accretive product? And, over time, aren’t both the blood and the shared accretive product likely to change over time? Humans have been migrating around all over the world since humans came into existence, sometimes displacing other humans, sometimes being displaced, or absorbed. Even if a population exists as an isolated uniformity over a long period of time there will be changes in its culture. Blood sports such as cockfighting and bear baiting, once very popular, have been effectively banned by governments as a response to public opinion. Practically nowhere are dogs now accepted as food, even in the Orient. Blood letting is no longer considered a valid medical technique. Attempting to preserve both racial “purity” and culture in a particular situation is as futile as the unlikely success of organized libertarianism. No group has had a better opportunity to maintain its racial and cultural identity than the Inupiat but they’ve failed.
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Right on cue. It’s the “muddy the waters” guy. What time is it in Tel Aviv, btw.
I see you choose to go with the “populations are always changing” schtick. Very nice choice. Of course, there’s always Lewontin’s “there’s more genetic variation with races than between races.”
I’m surprised you didn’t go with “What is white anyway? Are Turks white, what about Greeks? Where’s the line for white begin and end?” That’s always a popular choice amongst the professional trolls.
I’m guessing that you must really, really hate Israeli Jews, right? Or at least you find them the most ridiculous for trying to preserve their people. I mean, they’re the most open about it.
Your canned arguments and replies don’t fly around here. You’ll get way more bang for your buck at Breitbart or the other CivNat sites.
5
I often wonder about these people. Is it a compulsion to constantly invade and disrupt even the small areas outside the mainstream poison from some NPC programming, or is it a day job?
Both.
It’s their canned responses that’s the give-away. Not quite bots, but close.
Generally best not to respond but sometimes I can’t help myself. Also, they usually don’t like to be called out. They want to big, long debate on migration patterns or whether Turks are white or whatever.
Don’t know if they get paid extra for responses or whether their job is to muddy the waters. Either way, once you see the pattern, it’s pretty easy to pick them out. They’re like a salesman with a list of introductions and responses, except, of course, to a response about their sales technique.
I think Z is too harsh on libertarianism. Yet many faults he urges against it (and no doubt other philosophies) seem valid. Perhaps as with many concepts, the truth is somewhere in the middle? It’s human nature to tend to polarize issues. The born-again Christian is sure he must convert everyone he meets, lest they spend eternity in Hell The stereotypical blue-haired cat lady may really believe that the Democrats have all the answers, and that anyone opposing the WEF agenda in the slightest must be a knucle-dragging pickup-truck-driving banjo-playing Trump voter, fit only for some labor in a death camp somewhere. A Libertarian, presumably, must fight any and all government regulation.
Hard money writer Harry Browne, heavily influenced by free-market thinking, and who late in life even ran a few times for President as Libertarian, offered the following bit of wisdom in one of his many books: There is no idea so good that some people won’t take it to an illogical extreme. I believe that’s a very astute observation.
Would that libertarianism go down as the “greatest hoax in human history.” Methinks Z waxes a bit extreme here, but perhaps that may be forgiven since his oeuvre is primarily opinion. There are many contenders for the Hoax title, and in my “little-l” opinion, libertarianism is rather far down the list.
Isn’t it more likely that most, not necessarily all, of the numerous clashing worldviews may have something positive to offer? As much as we like our cherished philosophies, it’s probably closer to the truth that they have some ordinary rocks in the bag along with the gems. Unlike a theory that prohibits contradiction, such as a mathematical theorem or one from physics, most human philosophies need not be perfect in their entirety.
As the fable of the blind men meeting an elephant, each man’s description was partially accurate, but it missed the big picture.
Now I end with a funny quote from Philip K. Dick; that “reality is whatever doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it” is overworked. This, from a character who eschewed social contact, but he may not have been a Libertarian:
“But he had to have SOME contact with people…No matter how hard one tried one could not entirely suspend interpersonal relationships, desirable as it might be.” [from “The Simulacra”]. 🙂
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1
I tend to agree here. I am a former Lib. Never in 20 years as a Lib did I conceive of a Lib—or act as one, such as Z-man describes. However, as he describes a hardcore Lib, I now see why I am no longer a Lib.
As with *all* ideologies, there are short comings which begin to loom large when taken to an extreme. I resigned Lib when my latest Cato article (years ago) came out for yet again “open borders”—the essence of the idea being that we are all “labor units” that should be allowed to contract with the highest bidder for our efforts. Lib ideology not only ignored the obvious welfare state problem, but also the equality and culture (blood) problem among people.
However, there are still a few Lib precepts that I hold close and that I use to defend against our current “nanny” State. Government is not our friend, it is a necessary evil at best. However, the opposite extreme, Randian Individualism, is also a recipe for failure as well.
If I read Z-man’s commentary as perhaps implied, Lib/Marxism an absolute evil, then I disagree. Be pragmatic, take workable concepts as fits current needs, but do not toss the “baby out” as they say.
In a deracinated, atomized society, where law and justice is distributed unequally we’re headed towards jungle law. Libertarians, “rejoice”.
“I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I my brothers and my cousins against the world. That is jungle law. It is the way of the world when the world is thrown into chaos. It is our job to avert that chaos, to fight against it, to resist the urge to become savage. Because the problem with such law is that if you follow it, you are always fighting against someone.” – Nafisa Haji
(What will that world look like, when there are no “brothers”, only isolated consumers?)
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This is an interesting thesis, but a tough one to prove. The first problem is that libertarianism isn’t anything. You have the anarcho-capitalists whose creed is utopian. The most common fallacy today is expressed as, “live and let live.” This is libertinism, not libertarianism. Then you have quacks like Brendan O’Neill who is a communist libertarian. That is a contradiction worthy of an anti-racist scholar. Libertarianism is an empty can with a label that anyone can come along and define.
The reason for this is the same reason for the collapse of our civilization. It is the disappearance of men and the over feminization of all spheres of life. That disappearance has lead to the collapse of standards. I wouldn’t call this system libertarianism. To me, libertarianism is the legal and philosophical framework that the Founders discussed and put into place. They valued valor and virtue far above transacting. Noblemen freely associate and cooperate. Barbarians don’t.
Progressivism in its late stage morphed into consumerism. Consumerism is not libertarianism. Consumerism is reducing human beings into units of consumption and economic output coupled with a totalitarian world view insists that they must therefore be treated as such and for the greater good treated. Of course, the man behind the curtain of consumerism is that consumption is spending and thus exhaustive of wealth. This is therefore antithetical to libertarianism’s economic dimension which holds production and choice of action as sacrosanct. Libertarian economics is antithetical to this vulgar, virtueless, zero-sum consumerism world view.
Consumerism has no standard and cares nothing for virtue and valor. It is vulgar and reduces people to infantalism. The HBO TV series, “Entourage”, epitomizes this as does Hugh Hendry and Yarvin’s elites who cavort about to the incessant pounding of guzzling MDMA at Burning Man. Nineteenth century America was as close to libertarianism as one can get. These men built great wealth, but they had tremendous restraint and virtue. They built beautiful concert halls, civic centers, libraries … … They were great men who held the standard of civilization. They sought to live up to The Founding American creed of valorous and virtuous free people. They worked with the pioneers to bring civilization and construct its gorgeous marvels.
Today the consumerist money lords are Cretans who fly around on jets and float around on cities. Not only do they not sponsor monuments and cathedrals and works of great beauty, they actively fund its destruction. Their works or lack of them reflect the vulgarity of their creed and the vaccuousness of their souls. In civilization if a man wanted to make a statement about his superiority, he did it by commissioning a great work of beauty. Or, he displayed his valor by a successful hunt. The Cathedrals commissioned the entire people to marshall inspiration and effort across many generations. Today, these inferior lady-men just buy stuff with the proper label on it to cover for their puny, undeveloped souls that have been crushed by rap and techno music. Burning Man is the elite!?!? What a joke.
I needed to enlist the help of a young man for a chore this weekend. He is a nice kid but, sadly, a perfect representative of the consumerist. What matters to the consumerist is money. What doesn’t is how it is acquired and what one produces to attain it. As we drove I asked him what he did the night before. He said he went to a sports bar. I asked if it was cool and if he liked it. He, said no; that it was a bunch of white trash. I bit my lip refrained with responding with something like, “Well at least when they travel and regale their friends of a story, they didn’t do it with their daddy’s money.” I did not. Instead I said. “Well, what do you expect from a sports bar. Whether you are a dry waller living in a trailer drinking Coors or a Wharton grad in the Hamptons drinking martinis, watching sports will never be a rarified, distinctively cultured activity.”
He didn’t understand my point. Consumers are hollow husks of a human and consumerism is the great hollowing force.
One of our jobs is to raise the standard and see human beings and civilization as a people who can will themselves to glorious elevation across every dimension of being. That is The West. Consumerism is something else. It is a vulgar bazar somewhere in the East, sanitized by isolation. Its means of attraction is a psy-op called marketing whose sole enticement is an endless series of dopamine hits that mask a consumptions constant degradation. Consumerism destroys the individual. Civilization cultivates the individual and binds them together with a higher purpose.
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Consumerism is reducing human beings into units of consumption and economic output coupled with a totalitarian world view insists that consumption must be constantly increased along with the number of consumers by force of the state.
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It will be interesting to observe and experience just how consumerism plays out once the demographic collapse already in place really starts its march through civilization (or what we euphemistically term ‘civilization’).
I dare say it will not be pretty.
“The culture of a people defines who makes the final decisions. The answer is always confined to people who are of the people.” – Unless you’re white of course. Western countries can be riddled with etho-fiefdoms like the diaper heads in Minneapolis but don’t you dare get a clue whitie…
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White countries have been smashed by their own media.
Year after year they have worked to undermine the culture and induce a self-negating psychosis in the population based on simple repetition conditioning and flood the zone techniques.
No other set of nations has this.
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The most brittle parts of libertarianism:
Libertarians are generally anti zoning laws. Because of course who doesn’t want to walk into their back yard and have a Taco Bell right behind them. You don’t like hearing orders from the drive through? Buyer beware sucka. That’s what you get for buying a house with an empty field behind it. And if someone wants to convert their garage into tenement housing, well, F YOU, that’s private property sucka. If I wan’t to make my rental into a clown house that’s private property.
Their biggest blind spot however is the “right to free movement of people.” The philosophy is willfully blind and incapable of differentiating between, as what Pat Buchanan once said “a Zulu warrior and an Englishman.” So pack that dead weight into the country. And ironically, 99% of browns and blacks worldwide are either communist or borderline communist as they live and die in tribes.
Of course libertarians completely ignore and discount the price of labor. If you wash the country in 100 million new immigrants, and a framer now makes next to nothing. Well, that’s the real price of framing a house isn’t it. Framers were just overpaid for 200 years. We now have the real price of framing. The fact that Manuel’s angles are off by 10 degrees, well, it was sufficient to get the job done. All of society is made cheap and tawdry because of this, I would say, very (((transactional))) philosophy.