The Answer To Death

Posted on October 8, 2024 by thezman

One of the first awakenings people have on the road out of the liberal mental order is the realization that libertarianism is nonsense. It is why you find so many former libertarians in the dissident space. Many of them started to see conservatism as a pointless trap, so they went searching for another answer and landed on libertarianism, only to discover that it was just a ridiculous version of conservatism. This sent them off on the journey that led them over the great divide.

While libertarianism has collapsed, conservatives continue to struggle with why their cause has slowly been marginalized, despite billions in funding. On the one hand, they have no answer for the post-liberalism that has swept the ruling elites. They struggle to even understand that there is a ruling elite divorced from the ballot box. On the other hand, they cannot bring themselves to join the populist reaction to the post-liberalism that is executing a revolution from the top.

Other than chanting about their principles, these people have had no answer for why they oppose the populists. Part of the conservative delusion is to assume that you are part of a temporarily out of work alternative elite. Once radicalism has run its course and everyone has returned to their senses, you will once against be a part of the cultural if not the political elite. Therefore, joining with those icky prols in the populist movement means abandoning the dream of restoration.

From Burke to the present day, this has been the personalized conceit of what passes for conservatism in the Anglosphere. On the one hand, the conservative is compelled to oppose radicalism in the name of culture and tradition. On the other hand, he must defend the system, even as it absorbs the values and principles of radicalism, because he imagines himself one day in the leadership of the system. The ratchet effect exists because conservatism exists.

At the most basic level, politics in the West has been driven by the internal political dynamic of the United States. That dynamic is a dance between those who operate on the assumption that the ends justify the means and opposed by those who argue that the means justifies the ends. The reason this has been a lopsided struggle in favor of the former is they have a wider range of action. To win, they just have to learn what the opponent will not do and then do that.

A good illustration of this is the Biden administration’s war on the court system in the person of Jack Smith. The courts knock down his spurious legal arguments, but he keeps coming back with new versions of the same arguments, always with the purpose of jailing enemies of the regime. Thousands continue to sit in jail after the Supreme Court shot down the legal claim against them, because as far as Jack Smith and his lieutenants are concerned, any means necessary is justified.

It is the one thing reactionaries understood. The antidote to people like Jack Smith is not obsessive rule following but a radicalism far more violent and deliberate than that practiced by Smith. You do not dig up the corpse of Cromwell and put his skull on display as a deterrent. You do so in order to get comfortable with what must be done to the next lunatic that slips thorough he defenses. In order to defend the law, one must go outside the law to destroy those who live outside the law.

Another way of thinking about it is the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee Marvin. In the film, set on the frontier, Stewart represents law and the order. Marvin is the frontier, the forces arrayed against the law. This is the central conflict of the story, which is settled when Stewart finally agrees to confront Marvin. Wayne, the man with a foot in both camps kills Marvin, but lets people think it was Stewart.

This is why conservatism is about to be run out of town. Like Stewart in the film, it has always refused to accept that the law is not the answer to the radicalism that seeks to destroy the very idea of law. Anyone or anything that rose up to face the radicals was met by the conservatives as a greater threat than the radicals. Imagine Jimmy Stewart having John Wayne arrested before the big fight. Conservatives imagine themselves as the defense of order, when in reality they are its chief opponent.

All is not yet lost for conservatives. Billions in financial support have allowed them to survive their audience leaving them. While the older generation is happy to sit around playing make believe until the sweet relief of death, the younger generation is looking around wondering if conservatism is worth saving. You see it in this interesting essay by someone calling himself Henry George. It is of the same tone you saw with libertarians a decade ago before they had their awakening.

All of those cultural sentiments captured in words by conservative writers over the years will only live on if the people moved by them are willing to fight. They can either be pleasing thoughts as you slip into the darkness of death, or they can be an inspiration to be far more ruthless and radical than the radicals who promise to condemn your culture and people to the dustbin of history. Some young conservatives seem to be creeping up to this realization.

In the end, the sentimentality that is conservatism is a luxury item. It can be indulged in times when there are no great threats to law and order. That law and order, however, must be ruthlessly enforced by those who cannot and will not allow their virtues to be turned into vices by the enemies of law and order. If conservatism is to survive it must transition from a comforting death into an inspiration for a violent revolt against radicalism and the societal death that leads from it.

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Generations

Posted on October 3, 2024 by thezman

Lost in the commentary about the vice-presidential debate is the looming generational issue haunting the political system. On the stage that night was a member of Generation X and a Millennial. J.D. Vance is not the first Millennial to enter politics, but he is the first one to enter the main stage. At forty years old, he would be the third youngest vice president ever, if Trump wins in November. Walz would become the first member of Gen-X to accomplish anything in politics.

Walz and Vance are good examples of their generation. Gen-X was known as the slacker generation, mostly because they were not politicized like the two waves of Baby Boomers that preceded them. They just wanted to do what they needed to do in order to get a decent job and enjoy their life. With the massive boomer generation ahead of them, ambition was pointless, beyond the personal. That is pretty much how it has played out for this relatively small cohort.

Tim Walz fits this profile. He kicked around in his youth, unsure what he wanted to do with himself as an adult. After a while he went back to college. He joined the National Guard because his father told him to join. He then got a job teaching because that was available and required the least effort. Serendipity got him into politics where good timing seemed to be his best asset. Like his generation, Tim Walz is a guy to whom life has happened, rather than a guy who attacked life.

In contrast, the life of J.D. Vance is like a well-executed battle plan. Millennials are strivers and box tickers. Encouraged from the womb by their mostly Baby Boomer parents and teachers to attack life with a detailed plan, this is a generation that started building a resume in kindergarten. Everything about their primary schooling was aimed at getting into a good college. College was about landing in the right career and their careers have been the accumulation of credentials.

That describes the life of J.D. Vance. One path out of poverty was the military, so he went into the military. That opened the path to college, so he went to the best college he could and got the best credentials he could get. Those credentials opened the door to a career in the swankiest of careers in venture capital. Unlike Walz, nothing about the life of J.D. Vance is due to chance other than his current position. One does not have much control over the choices made by Donald Trump.

The result of this generation gap was evident on stage. Walz probably would have arrived in his Elmer Fudd costume if they let him, for no other reason that it is more comfortable than a suit. He probably watched sports instead of prepping for the biggest moment of his life. Vance, on the other hand, was a machine. He crammed for the test because it is what he has done his whole life. He went to the debate to ace the exam and that is exactly what we saw.

You can expand this out to the top of the ticket. It is both symbolic and ironic that the race is between an old white guy who speaks for the America that is slowly slipping away and diverse girl boss who exists only in the imagination of the bitter, angry managerial class. Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country, so a good economy means everything is fine.

Harris is a ~~Baby Boomer~~ X’er, but her alien existence places her outside of what most people would understand by the term. She was born and raised outside of the country by parents who were not Americans. If a writing team from Hollywood took a break from ruining classic movies and were tasked with creating a story involving politics, they would make the star a diverse girl boss like Harris. She would be smart and sober-minded, however, miraculously always coming out on top.

The Harris as diverse girl boss from the movies can be taken further by the fact that she has never earned anything in her life. This is the way it works in film. Diverse girl boss never has to struggle and doubt like the traditional white lead. She is just given everything she needs by the writers. That is Kamala Harris. The biggest challenge of her life has simply been showing up without her dress on backwards. Now she expects to be handed the presidency.

The one thing missing from the picture is the hysterical female Millennial. Another feature of that generation is that strivers like J.D. Vance have had to navigate the hysterical female Millennial with a head full of feminist nonsense. Female Millennial hysteria as escapism is probably worth a book treatment. Much of the lunacy of the last twenty years has been driven by childish girls who became girl bosses rather than wives and mothers with a stake in their community.

The absence of this character from the current drama is probably the biggest white pill of this election cycle. Even in the unserious world of modern politics, the hysterical female Millennial is shunted over to the side when the adults are talking. In this regard, the rise of J.D. Vance could be signaling a return to normalcy once the Baby Boomers shuffle off to the shuffleboard courts. Perhaps the answer to the harpy all along was to simply ignore her while getting the job done.

One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself. One reason the media has been told to hate him is that he is seen as a traitor. This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class. This suggests that the new left and right in our politics are managerialism versus culturalism.

The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties. That means our politics and culture will reflect the sensibilities of this generation. The least ethically centered generation in American history will be defining the nation. Millennials are an end-justifies-the-means generation and maybe that is what will be required going forward.

The Lincoln Exception

Posted on September 30, 2024 by thezman

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The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.

We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.

When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.

Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.

The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.

Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.

This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.

We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.

The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.

What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.

In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.

This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.

Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.

Strange Days

Posted on September 26, 2024 by thezman

A feature of this age is that we are regularly presented with unusual events and then presented with an official explanation that is stranger than the event itself or given no explanation at all for what happened. In fact, you could describe the Trump era as a series of unexplained phenomena that either come with no official explanation or one so ridiculous no one accepts it. Trump is like a modern-day wizard in that his mere existence creates unexplainable happenings.

In this age of mass communications, we are more likely to experience rare events, because those rare events get blasted around the internet by people looking to profit from them, so that is part of it. On the other hand, the same technology regularizes rarity, so rare events should be less frequent. Just as soon as people start to notice some bit of weirdness, the authorities can flood the information space with a plausible explanation, so it is not just a feature of mass media.

For example, this summer a young man managed to get on the roof of the only building near a Trump rally and take shots at Trump. He did this despite Trump allegedly having the best personal security available to an American. For some reason, none of these crack security guys thought it was a good idea to guard the roof. Not only that, but they were also in the building and somehow managed to not hear a man walking around on the metal roof above their heads.

Just that bit of the story is explainable as incompetence. We live in the age of increasing incompetence, especially with the managerial class. Then we learn that the shooter, who was killed on the scene, is the only young person on planet earth without an extensive internet profile. He also happens to be a kid from a tiny town in flyover country that was in a Black Rock ad. Now we learn that an off-duty ATF agent in a suit was there taking pics of the corpse.

Any one of those points are farfetched at face value, but the lack of any explanation from the government makes the whole thing a one in a billion event. At least it should be, but now we have another one to pair with it. Last week we got Ryan Routh crawling around Trump’s golf course with a rifle. How he got there and how he knew Trump would decide to get in a round of golf that day is a mystery. Like the first assassination attempt, this one makes no sense on the surface.

To date, no one has bothered to explain how this penniless kook managed to travel around the world supporting Ukraine. No one has explained how he got to Florida and how he acquired the rifle. He is a resident of Hawaii, so he would not be able to buy a gun in the lower forty-eight. Why did he drop off a box of ammo containing a written confession to an associate months prior? Who was funding this guy and how did he end up in the bushes outside Trump’s golf course?

No one knows and the government is not talking. The same people who cannot shut up about disinformation and misinformation are perfectly happy to let speculation run wild on these two bizarre events. It is possible they do not know. Maybe they are as stumped as everyone else. They could just say they are as baffled as everyone else, but instead they now claim that Iranian hit squads are roaming the country looking for their chance to take out Donald Trump.

To make the Iranian stuff fit in with the bizarreness of the two assassination attempts, the secret police posted this story in their media outlet claiming Trump is nuts to think the Iranians are out to get him. Then in another media outlet, the secret police say they warned Trump about the Iranian assassination attempts. The one thing we know is that everything in the media about the government is written by the government, so why do we have these two conflicting reports from the government?

The general weirdness of these stories and the even stranger handling of them by the regime is not the main topic of conversation because they are not unique. They are part of a general pattern that has become the new normal. We still have no plausible explanation for the pipe bomb story the FBI put out during the election integrity protests of January 6, 2021. All we know for sure is someone planted them while the local police looked on from their marked police vehicles.

In fairness, that is not the only thing we know about the events that day. We have also learned that the Justice Department has been stonewalling investigations into what actually happened on that day. We know this because Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified to it this week. In fact, he volunteered it and promised to keep stonewalling until after the election. The strangest thing about this admission is that no one seemed surprised.

You could probably write a book detailing the bizarre occurrences we have seen over the last ten years since Trump arrived. You would not have to offer an explanation or a conspiracy theory to any of them. Just provide the known facts and maybe a few blank pages for official explanations. That really is the remarkable bit about what has been happening since Trump came down the escalator. It is not the explosion of anomalies, but the silence from official sources.

What this suggests is that maybe there is no general conspiracy at work, but rather a breakdown of control at the top. The reason no one can explain how in the hell that kid got on the roof of that building in Pennsylvania is no one in the regime really knows for sure who is working which caper. In other words, it is not a desperate effort to maintain control by the people at the top, but a breakdown of their own internal control mechanisms leading to seemingly random rogue behavior.

The Only Solution

Posted on September 25, 2024 by thezman

Yesterday the state of Missouri executed convicted murderer Marcellus Williams after a quarter century of legal wrangling. The case gained some attention because the defense managed to muddy the waters on the DNA evidence and therefore drag out the process long enough to get some of the principles to change their opinions on whether Williams did the crime. Of course, the real reason it gained attention was that the killer was black, and his victim was white.

The subtext to crime in current year America is that on the one hand, blacks commit crime due to living in a white supremacist society. On the other hand, when blacks commit crimes against whites, the whites must deserve it for perpetuating the white supremacist society that causes black crime. This is what makes up the social vengeance subculture at the heart of the social justice movement. In the end, it is all about getting revenge on white people.

The result of this or maybe the cause, it is not easy to know at this point, is that whites often appear to worship black people or at least want the world to think they hold blacks up as gods among men. The three dumbest members of the Supreme Court made sure the media knew they were opposed to the execution. As part of what we call the left in America, they need to let the rest of the hive know where they stand on every issue that involves race, especially when a black is involved.

Putting aside the racial stuff for a second, the case is a good example of the disfunction in modern America. The point of the death penalty is to exact revenge, on behalf of society, on the person who committed the crime. If it takes a quarter century to get that revenge and, in the process, the worst people are able to gnaw away at the justification for that revenge, then the point of the execution collapses. This is a basic function of human society, and we can no longer perform it.

The main argument against execution has always been that it is theoretically possible to convict an innocent man, so it is possible to execute an innocent man. This is why it takes decades in many cases to get to the vengeance part. Every conceivable question is addressed, even frivolous questions designed to stall the process. The point of the death penalty now is to make sure that there can be no possible chance that the person convicted of the crime is not guilty.

Even so, there are examples where there is some questions about the guilt of the person who was executed. Ironically, the best example is Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed for the killing of his three daughters in a house fire he was convicted of starting. Otherwise, the examples used for this argument are those who were eventually exonerated. Instead of proving the point about innocent men getting executed, it shows that it is close to impossible.

Obviously, this argument against the death penalty only comes into play when the person facing Old Sparky is black. The Cameron Todd Willingham case did not get the frumpy Supreme Court justices out in the streets to tell the world they would have granted a stay of execution. The media was not interested in his case. It is always cases like the one in Missouri that get the attention of the people who apparently think black people are gods who walk amongst us.

This Afro-philia that has become a feature of the culture might seem like bourgeois degeneracy, but it has had an impact on the death penalty. According to the anti-death penalty people, there are 2244 people on death row in America. This is a shockingly low number, given that we have over 20,000 homicides per year. Of those on death row, just 41% are black. Even more shocking, 42% are white. Amazingly, only 14% of death row inmates are classified as Hispanic.

What this tells us is we need to be executing many more black offenders, to not only get the current numbers in proportion to the well-known crime figures on murder, but to address the many years of discrimination against white murderers. Blacks commit far more murder in America than any other group and this has been true for generations, so they are grossly under-represented on death row. That under-representation is due to the general worship of Africans in the culture.

Afro-philia and Leukophobia not only warp the application of the death penalty in favor of blacks, but it also provides them with many more appeal options because the black offender draws more support. Black offenders spend more time, on average, waiting for their execution than white killers. The official explanation for this is black offenders have more complex cases, which is another way of saying they get far more legal help from people exceptionally good at undermining the system.

The Marcellus Williams case is a great example. He murdered Felicia Picus in her home during a robbery. He stabbed her over forty times with a kitchen clever, which means he hacked her to death. There was a mountain of physical evidence and witness testimony that pointed to Williams as the killer. The usual suspects swept in once he was convicted to trick people into questioning their own minds, in an effort to free another black killer from the justice he deserves.

Of course, the response is always the same. Blacks spent yesterday on Twitter bemoaning the racial inequity of the death penalty. Progressive whites joined in with their usual public acts of piety. Pointing this out results in the usual abracadabra words from the usual suspects. It is all so tiring and underscores the fact that there is no remedy to this other than peaceful separation. There is no solving the race issue because Afro-philia and Leukophobia are too powerful.

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Death By Openness

Posted on September 23, 2024 by thezman

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In the early days of the internet, people started to notice that there was another side to the mass accumulation of information online. The information piling up in databases and data centers was not just public information, but also what had always been assumed to be private information. Pictures of your home and maybe even you outside cutting your grass could now turn up in the public square, without you knowing it. Lots of things about your life were now public information.

Suddenly, a degenerate with free time could figure out things about you that he could not know in the past. Of course, this became a temptation for people to nose around in the lives of coworkers and neighbors. The more information that piled up online, the less privacy everyone could expect. Quickly we were moving into glass houses and subjected to the unwanted gaze. The only place where you can be free of the gaze is in your own mind, and even there the synopticon is hunting for data.

Of course, in typical American fashion, the same people gathering up your private information and making it public now sell services to keep your private information as private as possible in this age. On the other hand, people told by the state to gather your private information for things like banking are reckless with their security, so it is regularly stolen and published by gangsters. Again, in typical American fashion, the reckless people never pay a price for it.

We are quickly reaching the point where nothing is private and anything of private value will be stolen. One result of this is no one cares about the private. The rise of profilicity is a response to the collapse of individual privacy. Since no one has a private life, what distinguishes us is the public profile we create. This profile is just about disconnected from the person playing the profile. In other words, the collapse in privacy has eliminated the value in having private things.

It is tempting to blame this on technology, which is the mistake made by privacy advocates in the last century. In typical American fashion, they assumed there was a mechanical solution to a moral or spiritual problem. In the case of privacy, they assumed new rules to guard your privacy would prevent the people who laugh at the concept of a rules-based society from harvesting your privacy. Unsurprisingly, privacy has collapsed despite the rules.

The reason for the collapse in privacy in America goes back to the civil right revolution in the middle of the last century. When the ruling elites transitioned from a rights-based moral framework to the civil rights moral framework, they had no choice but to abandon the concept of personal privacy, despite claims to the contrary. This is why Europe has been much better at enforcing privacy laws. They never had a civil rights revolution, so they have not fully internalized its moral structures.

The way to understand this is to think about the moral spectrum in the political order of 19th century America. The “good” pole was where the state played no role in the decisions made by the citizens. People were on their own to sort things. The bad pole was where the citizens needed permission to do things. The concept of individual rights was not to carve out a free space for the citizen. It was to carve out space for the state to do the narrow purposes of collective security.

The civil rights revolution in the middle of the 20th century abandoned this old spectrum, which had been discredited, at least in the collective reasoning of the emerging managerial class, in the great struggle against the economic crisis of the 1930’s and the war on fascism in the 1940’s. What the civil rights revolution did was replace this old and largely civic moral paradigm with a new paradigm. The goal of which was not maximum liberty but maximum access.

The open society concept, popularized in America by Karl Popper and now George Soros, is the end point of this new moral paradigm. The new poles are openness, access, and diversity at the “good” end. The bad end is discrimination, which can only come through the mechanism of barriers to entry, so the ultimate bad thing in this new society is the locked door. The goal of the open society is to find every locked door and bust it down in order to maximize openness.

One of the immediate results of this moral revolution at the top was the end of public discrimination through the violent overthrow of the old segregation systems, in both the North and the South. What followed was pogrom after pogrom to breakdown every locked door that could be found in private America. Men’s clubs, for example, were forced to accept women or face endless litigation for discrimination. The Boy Scouts were handed over to pedophiles for the same reason.

Long before degenerates were googling your name looking for private information, the state was hunting around for locked doors on the assumption that there were private people collectively closing themselves off from others. If one wants to look for the logic behind the claim that nonwhites have a right to access white people, it lies in the fundamental logic of the open society. In a world where discrimination is the ultimate evil, everyone has a right to everyone, even their intimate life.

There is, ironically, a private benefit to this. Certain members of the ruling class benefit through the anathematization of preference. In a world where it is immoral for you to prefer not to associate with certain people, it is unacceptable for the masses to prefer that certain people not have access to power. At the same time, the ruling class as a whole benefits from the fact that it is close to impossible to organize opposition when everything must be done in plain sight.

The collapse of privacy is the logical outcome of the civil rights revolution and the synopticon that has involved to enforce it is a practical necessity. Humans are naturally self-organizing and naturally self-segregating. Unconscious bias is not just a weapon to compel submission to the new racial hierarchy but a way to condition the populace to question their own minds. A people who naturally feel in conflict with what they are told is the shared collective morality will remain docile.

Of course, much of the behavior from the ruling elite in the open society is designed to prevent asking basic questions, like who says discrimination is bad? Who or what is the moral authority for this claim? Why is diversity good? Why are my preferences less valid than the person on the television preaching about diversity? The collapse in individual and collective privacy makes it much easier to hunt down those asking these questions before they get too much of an audience.

The ultimate question is can such a system last? There is a reason why there are so few prison riots and history has not been kind to slave revolts. It is not just force that keeps the prisoner under control or the slaves from revolting. In every prison, inmates outnumber guards. Slaves always outnumber the overseers. What keeps them under control are the moral chains that tell them they deserve their position. A nation in such chains is as unlikely to revolt.

On the other hand, if the prisoners know the guards cannot rely on the state to protect them, the prisoners will begin to question the morality of their position. Similarly, if the social structures that make slavery possible collapse, then the slaves quickly overthrow their masters, even if it means their own death. One of the consequences of the open society is a deeply paranoid and conspiratorial ruling elite. They know more than anyone how near run things are for them.

The People They Desire

Posted on September 19, 2024 by thezman

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

In every organization of scale, and society as a whole, the focus of attention has shifted from things that are easily measured and understood in terms of practical impact, to things that are not quantifiable. At the same time, it is increasingly assumed and asserted that these intangibles are more important than the tangibles. The practical impact of inflation on the household budget is not important, but whether a political candidate can show they share your values is monumentally important.

You can see this change in how Harris and Trump present themselves. Trump has rattled off a list of things he says he will do if elected, like eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, which he says will boost the middle-class. These are claims that rest on the agreed upon math of economics. Harris, on the other hand, talks about her plan in soft, intangible terms. What matters to her, and what she thinks matters to you, is that she shares your values as a middle-class person.

Notice that no one ever tries to explain exactly what they mean by “share your values” or describe the actual values. Is it even possible to share the values of another person, since values are subjective? This sort of therapeutic language is deliberately vague, as it is entirely emotive. When someone says she shares your values, she is saying you are on the side of good and she is on the side of good. There is nothing more being communicated with those words.

This shift from the objective to the subjective goes beyond how the political candidates present themselves to the public. Increasingly, people and events are viewed not in practical terms but in the context of an evolving set of normative standards that have no clear truth value. What is “wellness” and why do we care? Ask ten people and you get ten answers to those questions. Wellness is a thing we believe exists and it is either good or not good and good is what we should want.

Another example is the reaction to the Israeli terror attack on Lebanon. Blowing up random people is supposed to demoralize Hezbollah. This is a claim that has been repeated, even by Israel haters. Why would anyone think this and so what if it gives some Hezbollah guys the blues for a few days? What is supposed to happen as a result of this case of the sads? Not only does no one know, no one asks. The practical issue is no longer of interest. It is all about the psychological.

The Ukrainians launched an attack on the Kursk region of Russia last month and according to everyone involved, the main purpose was to “psychologically impact Russian civilians” and embarrass Putin. Again, why would anyone think such a result was likely or would matter? Did they think Putin would delete his Twitter account and call off the war, because he got owned on the internet? The answer must be yes, as this has been a theme in the West since the war started.

What we are seeing is an orientalization of the culture. Saving face and losing face are things that we associate with East Asian societies. An important person is found to have failed in his duties, so in order to avoid losing face and shaming his family and associates, he kills himself in a ritualized fashion. His honorable choice in the end absolves him and his associates of his dishonorable behavior. This means behavior is controlled within this cultural construct.

In the West, this shame/lack of shame concept has been embedded into the binary politics of progressivism. Someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, is terrible at all of the practical things related to politics, but she upholds the honor culture of progressive politics, so she is an honored elder of our politics. Trump brings shame to the democracy and refuses to let himself be killed, so he deserves assassination. The fact that he is good at politics and is right about most things is irrelevant.

One reason for this is the feminization of the ruling class. Relations between men are controlled by honor and duty. Relations between women are based in shame, so as women have taken over areas of the ruling class, the values have shifted from a foundation in honor and duty to one of shame. In a world run by people biologically tuned to care about looking good, how things look is paramount, so it is no surprise that a feminized ruling class now cares about saving face.

Probably the biggest fact, however, is the ruling class of the American empire has not had to worry about the duties of a ruling class for a long time. By the end of the Cold War, the domestic stuff was on autopilot. As long as the Fed controlled the money supply, recession and social unrest were not a concern. The only remaining concern was relations with Russia and once the Cold War ended, foreign affairs stopped being a game controlled by adults.

That last bit is the important part. Along with the feminization of the ruling class has come the infantilization of politics. It used to be said that “politics ain’t beanbag” but now it is closer to dodgeball. Instead of serious men making decisions with practical consequences, politics is now a playground for adult children. The reason our politics reflect the language and attitudes of the academy, is like the academy, the political class is an adult daycare center.

This is why the information space is full of assertions about soft concepts like the morale of guerilla fighters in Lebanon or the political class of Moscow. It is also why facts and charts have no impact on public attitudes. Increasingly, the sensibility of the general public reflects the sensibilities of the adult babies who parade across the screen, pointing and jeering at one another. People may not get the government they deserve, but the rulers get the people they desire.

The Theater Of Politics

Posted on September 18, 2024 by thezman

The great exploding pager psy-op Israel pulled on Hezbollah yesterday is a great example of how the focus of all politics has shifted from the practical world of doing things to the virtual world of saying things. Owning the information space in an effort to win the information war has taken precedent over accomplishing real things in the world of real things, even when it comes to war. Every operation, even those with practical goals, has a public relations element at the center of it.

As is always the case, time will tell if the initial reports are close to reality, but there is no doubt that pagers were exploding, and Israel was responsible. The questions not asked by Western media, much less answered, are why Israel would do this and what did they think they would achieve by it? That is the first clue. The media and their audience just assume it is a good thing and will result in more good things. What those things are and why they are good is not a topic of interest.

It is a clever caper, for sure. The Israelis accessed the supply chain that delivers these devices to Hezbollah. They most likely bribed an official at the Taiwanese plant that makes these things. This gave them access to the shipment, which they then sabotaged with some form of explosive. Then they waited until the devices were deployed and sent the signal to them. The sheer cleverness of it is admirable, so it is easy to see why that is the focus.

That is the thing about this caper. It is mostly a public relations caper, with little practical impact on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Sure, Israel won the news cycle for a day or two and the Hezbollah side feels stupid, but by Friday any practical impact is gone, and everything is back to where it was pre-caper. Hezbollah now has a new step in the process, where they inspect their communications devices, something they should have been doing all along.

This is where certain people insist that it was a great scheme because it affected important people. The reality of communications devices is that the closer you are to one, the lower you are down the status ladder. Low level people display their device on their person because that is all they have. Important people have someone who manages the communications gear. You do not call Warren Buffett. Your people reach out to his people to set up a call.

That aside, the shift in focus from practical reality to the abstract reality of public relations is something we see everywhere now. Washington’s war on Russia has mostly been about winning the information war, on the assumption that losing the information war would have a practical impact on Russia. Instead, Russia has lost every round of the media war, often failing to attend the fight, but Russia has seen its economy boom and its standing in the world rise.

In fairness, the schemers in Washington were reasonable to think “wrecking Putin on social media” would be a big win. In their world, getting wrecked on Twitter can have practical consequences. We have gone through a decade of “cancel culture” where people lose their jobs and their lives for imaginary crimes like using anathematized words or holding impure thoughts. In a world where being cancelled is a serious concern, cancelling Putin makes a lot of sense.

That was certainly the thinking inside the Israeli brain trust when they were cooking up this exploding pager scheme. They surely understood that sabotaging pagers would have little impact on Hezbollah. On the other hand, blowing them up like this would make for great memes on social media. The sheer cleverness of it would impress their American audience, who they sense might be bored with them. This caper got the crowd back into their seats for more of the Israel show.

The Roman poet Juvenal famously criticized the Roman people for caring more about the “bread and circuses” than their freedom. This is often twisted around to mean that the rulers relied on bread and circuses to trick the people out of their freedom, but Juvenal was focusing his critique on the people. Radicals of the ideological age have made a similar complaint. Marx famously called the peasants a sack of potatoes because they could not be politicized.

This narcotic of entertainment that troubled Juvenal is now corrupting the political class of the West. They care more about the show of which they are a part, or the show being put on for them by others, than the practical reality of their position. The manufactured reality of politics obscures political reality, not because the political participants cannot see it, but because they do not want to see it. They prefer their manufactured, abstract reality, over the practical reality of their position.

This is why Israel invested in the pager scheme. They understand that practical arguments about the reality on the ground in the Levant will have no impact on Washington or the American public. Similarly, Zelensky understands that he has to keep producing new acts to keep Western politicians amused enough with Project Ukraine to keep the money flowing. Like a Hollywood producer, he tells his generals he needs bigger explosions and bigger drama.

Objective reality has always been the substrate on which human relations operate, so there has always been a gap between the human drama and reality. Human relations, especially politics, are more often than not about what we think ought to happen, rather than what we think will happen. However, necessity has always kept the gap narrow, but that seems to be changing. In fact, it seems that politics is often about broadening that gap between itself and reality.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it, so this turn from reality will eventually end. Israel cannot stay at war forever with its neighbors, no matter how good the show. The West cannot remain at war with the world, no matter how many times they cancel people they do not like. At some point the theater of politics, the theater of Western public life, must give way to reality and people who prefer reality over self-generated fantasy.

Narrative Doubt

Posted on September 12, 2024 by thezman

An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

Faith & Reason

Posted on September 9, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about bringing back penal colonies and exile to deal with crime, a post about how the fight with Old Scratch continues among the people we call the left and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.

This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.

The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.

Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.

For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.

The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.

As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.

It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.

That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.

Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.

The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.

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