Category Archives: Culture

The Dissident Right

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Labels are important in social discourse, as they are shorthand for a collection of ideas, arguments and images. It’s why the Left always makes its first assault on something by corrupting its labels. If they can anathematize the label, then they effectively discredit the people and ideas associated with it. It is a form of the aphorism often mistakenly credited to Stalin, “No man, no problem.” Similarly, social movements often first try to establish their name and symbols, before fully explaining what it is they are championing.

One reason the alt-right was easily smashed by the Progressive establishment is that they chose symbols that had already been anathematized by the Left and their team name had no intrinsic meaning. They would have been better off dressing as circus clowns, rather than prep school Nazis. They thought they could break the taboos against fascism by irreverently breaking the taboo, but instead they simply ended up playing a well-known role in the Left’s morality play. From there it became easy to demonize the name “alt-right.”

That said, if the term alt-right had a better definition, one that was both positive and intrinsically respectable, there efforts to break the fascist taboo by irreverently mocking it could have worked. The reason is the public would have identified them with a label having an established meaning that was separate from the cartoon version of fascism the Left has promoted for generations. Instead, alt-right had no obvious meaning, other than an association with Richard Spencer, who was quickly turned into the bogeyman.

It is why “dissident right” has a better chance as a label for an authentic alternative to the Progressive orthodoxy. The word “dissident” has both a literal meaning and an historic meaning. In fact, the idea of the dissident has emotional resonance in the West, as it is associated with resistance to authoritarianism. While “alt” is that key on your keyboard you use when things go wrong, a dissident is a heroic figure, stoically refusing to buckle to the authoritarian. It’s a word the Left cannot demonize without revealing themselves.

The trouble is, the label does not have a literal definition that is known to most people who use it for themselves or the larger movement. You see that in this post over at Counter-Currents by someone using the name Eordred. He runs through the various tribes that continue to operate outside of mainstream public discourse, but he struggles to arrive at a definition. It is only at the end that he makes a passing reference to the actual source of the term, coined by John Derbyshire a couple of decades ago.

The dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the shift on the Right, among the Buckleyites mostly, to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism. This was mostly due to the infestation of neoconservatives and libertarians. The neocons brought with them that old Marxist belief that society can be willed into any shape you like, regardless of the people in it. Libertarians, like Marxist, simply refuse to accept the reality of the human condition. As a result, the mainstream Right implicitly embraced the blank slate.

The dissidents were those who first dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy on human nature and human organization. Drawing on science, rather than tradition or religion, the dissidents made the correct point that human diversity is real. People, as we see them today, are not the result of historical forces, but the result of evolutionary forces. It turns out, and the evidence continues to pour in support of this, that human evolution is local, copious and recent. The observable differences are rooted in biology, not culture.

While the dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the drift into blank slate mysticism by the establishment Right, it is not reactionary. To be a reactionary is to be entirely controlled by the Left, which is why reaction has never been able to sustain itself as an authentic organizing philosophy. It is the cleanup crew after a spasm of radicalism has made a mess of things. The dissident right is not a reaction to radicalism. It is a promotion of biological reality. It offers an alternative foundation for political philosophy.

As far as being on the Right, it is because biological realism reaches the most of the same conclusions of the traditional Right, with regards to human nature and the human organization. The difference is that the traditional Right assumes those traditions, customs and institutions are the result of accumulated wisdom. The dissident right, in contrast, thinks of traditions, customs and institutions as evolved solutions to human organization that are peculiar to a people, because of their peculiar evolutionary arc.

In other words, go into any high school cafeteria and you will see the students self-segregating along academic class, social class, sex and race. This is not the result of accumulated wisdom in the form of custom or the result of tradition. It is not the result of mystical forces like white privilege or social constructs. It is the nature of humans to attract to those with whom they share fundamental connections, which are rooted in biology. Their hierarchical relationships are similarly rooted in their biology.

This difference in starting premise is what distinguishes the dissident right from the traditional Right and puts it at odds with some elements on the Right. Instead of defending tradition on philosophical grounds, it challenges the status quo on empirical grounds. It is why the Left is so frightened of what is coming from the human sciences. Their effort to anathematize these ideas by calling them “scientific racism” inevitably makes them look like vinegar drinking scolds, condemning Galileo in defense of superstition.

That said, this radical starting point could very well be why it cannot coexist with the traditional Right. There is a noticeable gap in perspective between those with an empirical world view versus those steeped in tradition and philosophy. When your starting point is an English biologist, rather than a German philosopher, the cultural differences are quite noticeable to both parties. The rationality of the dissident right may make it unsuited for political conflict, which is not about the right answer, but the right weapon.

The Strange Death of Neoconservatism

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Political movements usually end in one of two ways. One is they achieve most of what they sought and then fade away, having lost their purpose. Alternatively, they fail to achieve their goals, perhaps having been discredited or out-competed by a rival movement, then fade into obscurity. In both cases, they will kick around for a while, going through a stage where they exist as a racket, rather than a legitimate movement. They feed on the nostalgia of people, who originally supported the cause in its better days.

An obvious example of the former is the crusade to legalize abortion. Once the Supreme Court invented a right to abortion, the point of the abortion movement should have been satisfied, but they transitioned from that to an effort to normalize it. That was largely successful by the 1990’s, but by then abortion was good business for the people in the abortion rackets. They make money on the political end, as well as on the selling of baby parts side of things. Planned Parenthood is a multi-billion dollar business now.

The other side of the coin is paleoconservatism, which flourished in the 70’s and 80’s, as a response to the infestation of the conservative movement by former Progressives, calling themselves neocons. In many respects, the paleos were not a political movement, but more like antibodies released by the Right in order to ward off a virus. That virus, in the form of guys promising to radicalize the Right, won the battle and the paleocons were slowly purged from Right and from the Republican Party.

That brings us to neoconservatism, which was spectacularly successful as a political movement. What started as dissatisfaction with their fellow leftists in the 1960’s had come to dominate the Right by the late 80’s. Domestically, they normalized unlimited immigration and the financialization of the economy. On foreign policy, they successfully pushed through their freedom agenda, which was aggressive war to impose democracy on the Middle East. It is fair to say the neocons revolutionized American politics.

It is that success that has discredited the movement and its leaders. So much so, in fact, that one of the founders of the movement is now abandoning his creation. Norman Podhoretz, one of the godfathers of the movement, has announced that he is re-branding himself as a paleo-neoconservative. He not only confessed to supporting Trump, but now agrees with his old nemesis, Peter Brimelow, on the immigration issue. He still defends the Iraq war, mostly out of vanity, but he is now a war skeptic in the Trump mold.

Now, this does not mean the rest of the neocons are about to become Trump supporters or demand the rehabilitation of Pat Buchanan. Like a drug resistant virus, people like Bill Kristol, Max Boot and the other Trump-haters will still be with us. It’s just that their movement and its primary issues are on their way to the ash heap of history. Outside of the cheap labor lobbies, immigration has lost its appeal. A re-thinking of global capitalism is happening across the West and the freedom agenda is thoroughly discredited.

There are a lot of explanations for why the neoconservative agenda has crashed into ignominy. Some argue that the failure on the foreign policy front was due to an inability of neoconservatives to appreciate the cultural conditions required for democracy. Others, like Darren Beattie, take this beyond the foreign policy issue, and blame the neocons embrace of the blank slate. Like Marxists, they simply thought people were interchangeable, because they could be molded into whatever society needed.

A better answer lies in the words of Norman Podhoretz in that interview with the Claremont Review of Books. In it he says, “But in the army I got to know people from all over the country and I fell in love with Americans—they were just great! These guys were unlike anybody I had ever met in New York or in England or France.” That’s an odd thing for someone to say about his fellow citizens. It’s the sort of thing a foreigner says about his new neighbors. It also seems a bit forced, as if he feels like is required to say it.

Explaining his change of heart on Trump, Podhoretz says, “I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the anti-Semitism, because he was a protectionist, a nativist, and an isolationist. How did I know he wasn’t an anti-Semite? I don’t know—I just knew.” Later he goes out of his way to make that point again, that his quarrel with Buchanan was mostly about his alleged antisemitism. Therefore, he can change his mind on the entire neocon agenda, just as long as no anti-Semites are involved.

It is a strange confession from someone whose life’s work has been a multi-generational lecture about first principles. It is this flexibility on their core beliefs that is the clue about why neoconservatism has fallen into disrepute. They were never really motivated by anything other than tribal animosity toward the people they sought to replace. Podhoretz back-stabbed people like Brimelow and John O’Sullivan, marginalizing them within conservative circles, for no other reason than tribal animosity.

Another example of this is later in the interview, where Podhoretz relates an anecdote about the writer Henry James, who was no fan of Jewish immigration. Upon visiting the Jewish ghetto in New York, James allegedly said “Well, if these people stay, whatever language they speak, we shall not know it for English.” Podhoretz then says, with noticeable glee, that “the only people who are reading Henry James and indeed writing doctoral dissertations on him are the grandchildren of those people.”

Taken together, it reveals that neoconservatism was never a political movement centered on a native patriotism. It was a purpose built weapon for people who saw themselves as strangers at war with people they saw as hostile to their tribe. This not only allowed them to sideline critics by calling them anti-Semitic, it was an energy source to motivate the adherents to stick together and fight. Even today, as people like Bill Kristol descend into madness, the neocons hang together in their fight against Trump. They stick together.

Ultimately, it was not the tribal hostility that was their undoing. It was their unfamiliarity with the people over whom they sought to rule. It’s easy to think one group of strangers are the same as the other group of strangers. That’s why open borders made sense to the neocons. Guys like Podhoretz could learn to love Americans, but he could probably learn to love Guatemalans too. Similarly, the auctioning off of the industrial base made perfect sense, as the neocons knew nothing about the people losing their jobs.

Finally, the collapse of the neocons seems to comport with the theory of Ed Dutton, regarding the decline in general intelligence. The generation of Norman Podhoretz had a lot of smart Jews, who were motivated to climb to the top of society. Their children and grandchildren, in contrast, are like the ne’er-do-well heirs to a fortune. John Podhoretz and Bill Kristol are quite stupid compared to their parents. This decline in Jewish talent not only pulled down neoconservatism, but may be signaling the end of the Jewish century.

 

A Lack Of Imagination

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For people with an interest in history, the best part of travel is seeing the things that you recall from your history books. To stand on the grounds of some historic battle, imagining what it was like for the people involved, makes history come alive. Usually, the thing that surprises people is the smallness. You see the place where some great conflict was resolved and you’re suddenly struck by just how human it is in terms of scale. That’s when it hits you that it was real people engaged in real human activity.

That was my experience at Turku castle when I was in Finland. I’ve been in a lot of very old buildings, so I am used to the closeness of these places, but the smallness of the castle was impressive. From the outside, it has the desired effect. It is towering as you approach it on foot, which was surely the idea of the people who built it. It was supposed to be an intimidating fortification. The guys in side, after all, were the people in charge and they wanted everyone within eye-shot to know it and respect it.

Once you enter, perspective begins to change. In the late 13th century when the castle was built, Europeans had not caught up to the Romans, in terms of engineering and architecture. The arch was still a struggle, for example. As a result, in order to build up, it still meant starting wide. If you wanted a high wall, it had to have a very wide base. To have multiple floors, meant thick ceilings, tiny windows and narrow passageways. The effect, once inside, is almost claustrophobic. It was like living in a cave.

One of the stranger things you will see when you tour the place is young people constantly looking at their phones. At first I thought they were just texting friends or simply unable to pay attention. Instead, what I learned is they were looking at pictures on-line of where they were in the castle. In other words, reality was now their virtual reality and virtual reality was their reality. They could better relate to the images on their phones and the descriptions, than the actual place with the plaques describing the rooms.

In this story about the opening of Nero’s palace, there is a bit toward the bottom where they describe how you can experience the place with virtual reality goggles. There is a picture of people looking rather silly with the things strapped onto their faces. They look like prisoners in some sort of dystopian prison facility. As absurd as it seems, the people who created the exhibit think it is a winning idea. They are probably right. Young people will prefer to sit in the darkness wearing a headset than trying to use their imagination.

When I was a kid, people used to fret about young people watching television, rather than using their imaginations playing games. Most of these concerns were dismissed, as television was rather crude. I grew up with a black and white television until we got the fancy color model that was rather cartoonish in retrospect. No child was ever going to mistake the flickering images on the TV screen for reality or even a plausible replacement for what they could imagine. Television was just fancy cartoons at that stage.

We have come a long way and more important, the internet is far more immersive than television, because it is interactive. About a quarter of adult Americans are on-line constantly. Some of it is the requirement of work, but most of it is simply the fact that on-line is now as much a part of real life as real life. It’s no surprise that those young people in Turku would be confused by the inside of that castle and decide to use their phones to reorient themselves. They lack the imagination to do otherwise.

That’s the thing about imagination. It is a form of getting lost. To imagine things you have to wander off from what you know, using bits and pieces of what you do know to infer things about someplace you have never seen or create a place that does not exist. To imagine what it was like for people 500 years ago, you have to leave this world and wander off to a place you can never truly know. It’s like wandering off in a strange city. There is a risk involved, as you could imagine things that you don’t like all that much.

That’s another thing you see while traveling. Of course, we all see young people walking about with their phone right in front of their face. It’s easy to make sport of, because it is ridiculous to anyone over the age of 40, but it says something about the age. You’ll also notice fewer tourists just wandering around a city. They use their GPS to go from point to point, as if the in-between bits are static. Just wandering around is not only scary to modern people, it is pointless. They can’t imagine the purpose of it.

As the doors of the custodial state slowly close on us, you have to wonder if one of the consequences is a loss of imagination. Maybe that is just a function of us getting dumber, but the immersion in virtual reality may play a part as well. In fact, that may be why people are so sanguine about their infantilization. Their minds are so busy in the virtual world, they are oblivious to what’s happening in the real world. Notice the concern for on-line censorship, but the indifference to an oligopoly controlling the financial system.

On the other hand, maybe the apparent lack of imagination is simply an end point, in the Spenglarian sense of history. The escape into the virtual world is not an escape at all, but rather a new way to experience the same old thing. Virtual reality is like a rebooting of an old movie or TV series. The person’s on-line life is the same character they play in real life, just on a different set. Like old people reminiscing about the old days, we’re simply busying ourselves as we wait to be washed away by whatever comes next.

The Lie Machine

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On an August night in 2016, Russell Orlando Courtier got into a dispute with Larnell Bruce Jr. in the parking lot of a convenience store in Oregon. Authorities are unsure what caused the dispute or why it escalated into a physical escalation. All they know is it ended when Courtier drove over a machete wielding Bruce with his Jeep. Courtier was eventually arrested and convicted of first degree murder. He was just sentenced to life in prison, which in Oregon means he gets out in 30 years, assuming good behavior.

Now, according to the media, the attack was a hate crime. Russell Orlando Courtier is a 40-year old white man and Larnell Bruce Jr. was a 19-year old black man, who is dutifully described by the media as a teenager. They want you to get the impression that he was an innocent 13-year old out riding his bike when he was viciously attacked by this white supremacist. Larnell Bruce Jr. is Emmett Till, another unfortunate black body destroyed by a society that was built on and continues to promote white supremacy.

In realty Larnell Bruce Jr. was a hyper-violent serial criminal, with 16 convictions, including one for beating a child with a skateboard. At just 19-years old, Larnell Bruce Jr. was well on his way to either life in a cage or the local cemetery. In fairness, none of his crimes warranted him getting killed by another lunatic in a parking lot, but the arc of his life was leading to this end from the day he was born. The fact is, some people are born bad and they come to bad ends. That was the case for Larnell Bruce Jr.

For his part, Russell Orlando Courtier was not quite the public menace as Mr. Bruce, but he has been convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors. One of his convictions was for beating the mother of his child. Another was for attacking a man with a knife and another was for attacking a man with broken glass. During his time in the prison system, he joined a white prison gang. When he confronted Mr. Bruce, he was sporting prison ink from that gang and reportedly a hat with a white supremacist logo.

In other words, the real story here is that one of them miraculously made it to 40 without killing someone and the other managed to make it to adulthood. In a better managed society, the parents of Mr. Courtier would have been sterilized before reproducing and the parents of Mr. Bruce would not have been here. Eugenics gets a bad name, but it would have prevented these two lunatics from terrorizing society. In the case of Mr. Courtier, it would have prevented him from making another copy of himself.

According to the media, this is another example of white supremacists murdering innocent black people. The story will be entered into the various databases kept by groups that the lie machine relies upon to testify about these things. In ten years, no one will bother to look up the facts of cases like this. Instead, a ridiculous looking representative of an anti-white terror group will be allowed to include it in their libel against whites. Your children will be guilty, because two violent felons got into a beef in Oregon that ended in murder.

That’s how the lie machine works. The mass media contorts and manipulates events to fit into the narrative. The anti-white hate groups, like the ADL, then cherry pick their best work to include in their libel against white people. They are then invited by the media onto the various platforms to repeat their libel against white people. Other media platforms are assigned to cover these modern minstrel shows, so the lies go through the megaphones once more. Like an echo, the lie is repeated over and over and over.

This is highly orchestrated and coordinated propaganda by people who know exactly what they are doing. At the bottom of that news story is a video the news site put together. It has some clips of the family of the slain man talking about how much they miss the victim. There are images of the victim as a boy. The point of the video is to make you think the convicted man killed a innocent little child, rather than another hyper violent serial felon. Goebbels could not have imagined propaganda of this scale.

This is not simply bias. The mass media is a highly coordinated lie machine, purpose built to promote a blood libel against white people. Russell Orlando Courtier is a monster who should be in a cage, but people like Larnell Bruce Jr. are, according to the Obama administration, three percent of the population, but responsible for 30% of the homicides in this country. Yet, according to the lie machine, outliers like Courtier are the great threat to democracy, while the far more common and lethal people like Bruce are the victims.

It is a bit of trope now to point out that the anti-white bias in the media. It is so pervasive and common, it is now the soundtrack of our lives. That really does not get to the nature of the hatred these people have for us. A dinky little publication like the Oregonian invested hundreds of hours in order to promote this fake hate crime. You don’t do that unless the hatred is so consuming that it is the focus of your life. The fact is, these people are now defined by their hatred of white America. It’s who they are. It’s all they are.

Too Dumb To Make It

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In dissident circles, it is generally accepted that the West has lost its way due to two main problems. One is that the ruling class has embraced a set of ideas about human organization that are at odds with biological reality. Either from a desire to feel righteous or just from reckless disregard for their duties, they have embraced a set of beliefs about humanity we loosely call multiculturalism. The two roots of this belief set are the blank slate and egalitarianism. We are amorphous blobs with equal potential.

The other problem is that this desire to include everyone has allowed all sorts of barking at the moon crazies to gain positions of influence in the culture. These are the people who show up in the corporate human resource department chanting about the need make sure everyone holds the exact same opinions, all in the name of diversity. These are the people running around attacking statuary on the college campus. Fear of these crazies has damaged our normal mechanism for defending society from external threats.

At Our Wit’s End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for Our Future, by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie, offers an alternative explanation for why we are seeing the West in crisis. Ed Dutton is an English anthropologist who teaches at the University of Oulu in Finland. Michael A. Woodley is a British ecologist and intelligence researcher with the Center Leo Apostel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Both have written extensively about human intelligence.

Their book is an effort to track general intelligence in the West, against the backdrop of human accomplishment in the West. More specifically, they make the case that the West is getting dumber, even when adjusting for immigration, and the process has been going on for a long time. As a result, the West is following in the same path as prior civilizations that experienced a similar decline in general intelligence. Stupid people do stupid things and cumulatively, they eventually bring the whole thing down.

The book starts with one of those obvious examples that is so obvious, you wonder why you did not notice it. Fifty years ago this July, humans landed on the moon. The lunar program was started roughly a decade before and NASA went from having crude rockets unable to put satellites into space to sending people to the moon and bringing them back safely. To people alive in that time, it was an incredible moment, and one they assumed was the dawn of the space age, when man would traverse the stars.

Today, we cannot reach the moon. In fact, we struggle to hurl a probe to the moon. The Israelis are celebrating because their probe managed to actually hit the moon, rather than miss it entirely. NASA is no longer able to do much of anything and instead spends its time celebrating diversity. Whatever the reason, in this one area, the West is clearly not where it was fifty years ago. Instead of the moon landing being a launching point for the exploration of space, it was the peak of human ability to explore the stars.

Another obvious example they begin with, one that should hit home for men in their middle years, is the Concorde. If you were a kid in the 1970’s, the Concorde was the shape of things to come. Instead of six and seven hour flights across the continent or the Atlantic Ocean, flight time would be a few hours. Everyone was sure we would soon be hopping on super-fast planes to be halfway around the globe in a few hours. Instead, we stand in line for hours at the airport to get on planes no faster than fifty years ago.

These two great examples are the jumping off point to explain that we are not only getting dumber, but the biological process causing it. The book itself is actually a series of essays, grouped together into topics related to the main theme. It is written for a general audience, so even if the reader has little exposure to cognitive studies, the material is easy to follow. In fact, the book also works a great introduction for those curious about IQ and the ways in which science has for studying human cognitive ability.

For those with an interest in Roman history, the discussions of intelligence in the Republic, as well as the Empire, are very interesting. There are a great many theories as to why the Republic collapsed into autocracy and why the Western Empire collapsed. In fact, that’s the fun part of studying the Romans. Why they suddenly, so it seems, veered from consensual government to military dictatorship and empire is one of the great stories of Western history. It’s a great story full of amazing characters, both good and bad.

What the authors suggest is that a biological process was the root of the rise of Rome, it’s flourishing as a republic and then it’s decent into autocracy and eventually collapse. Their theory is a great addition to Joseph Tainter’s ideas about the collapse of complex civilizations. Taken together, it suggests Spengler’s observation about civilization is the result of people building social organizations that eventually become too complex for them to manage. Or, they simply become too dumb to operate what their ancestors left them.

Perhaps the most compelling example is their look at the golden age of Islam. Maybe it is because it is unfamiliar to Westerners, so we have no emotional bias, but the math presented to explain the rise and fall is revelatory. Not only does it explain the collapse of “high Islam” but it explains the rise of modern Islam. It opens the door to understanding this strange, esoteric civic cult that has taken up residence among the ruling elites in the West. It is a short essay, but very powerful in explaining their argument.

Now, the one complaint about the book is it really could have gone into great depth about some of the examples used to make their points. The section on Islam would make for a great 10,000 word essay. They only brush up against the phenomenon of religion rising, falling and then rising again in the late stages of civilization. It is a great example of a short book that the reader will wish was much longer. Usually, the opposite is true. Most books are too long and in need of a ruthless editor. This is not one of those books.

Finally, for dissidents, this book is a black pill. Most of us hang onto the hope that we can find a way to argue and organize our way out of this decline. The truth is, the West may simply lack the human capital to keep the plates spinning much longer. In other words, the die may have been cast a dozen generations ago when smart people started limiting their fertility and helping the poor make it too adulthood. The result being a steady decline in our IQ to the point where we are no longer fit to carry on as a civilization.

The Civil War

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America is a land that bans books, has political prisoners and condemns people to a form of internal exile where they cannot have a job or maintain a normal life. Ten years ago, if someone said Americans would lose their jobs because they liked something on social media, only the aluminum foil hat types would have believed it. Such things were considered impossible just a decade ago. In the 1980’s, these were the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union, which was why communism was considered evil.

Yet, here we are, seeing things we thought impossible not so long ago. This is a clip from a television show aired on one of the legacy networks. The video is a naked call for violence against whites. Even after all of the outrageous behavior we have seen from the ruling class the last few years, no reasonable person would have thought this was possible even a year ago. Even the Soviets at the worst were not exhorting people to commit acts of violence against enemies of the revolution.

Up until now, it was reasonable to think that the paleocons were right. The Left was using excited language in an effort to keep their coalition of non-white tribes focused on white men, rather than their many grievances with one another. That sounded logical and let’s face it, it is what most normal white people want to believe. After all, the implication of this line of reasoning is that the Left is struggling to keep it together. We don’t have to worry about facing them in a fight, as they will splinter and abandon the field.

The travelling partner to this line of thought comes from the principled conservatives, who are always ready to create a new set of conservative principles to excuse the excesses of the Left. Without acknowledging the paleocons, they implicitly accept the argument, but add on that the more sober minded on the Left will see the folly of their actions and begin to rein in their crazies, before anything serious happens. This is when they accuse the dissident right of harming civility and appeal to the Left for bipartisanship.

It’s not hard to see why normal middle-class white people find this appealing. They live ordered lives and just want to be left to live those ordered lives in peace. What they don’t want to see is violence in the streets and they certainly don’t want to be asked to confront those violent crazies on their streets. The Danegeld gets a bad reputation, but it is easy to understand the appeal in the moment. The current version is the Prog-geld, where the civilized concede a little bit of civilization, in order to avoid fighting the Prog.

This cycle where the Left commits outrages against civility and the white middle-class accommodates it, has led to where we are now. The people calling themselves the defenders of democracy tried to subvert the last Presidential election. The so-called social justice warriors celebrate a black movie star walking free after perpetrating a blood libel against white people. The defenders of open debate on the college campus, rush to suppress any opinion not on the increasingly narrow list of approved opinions.

That is an important clue. Spend time on social media and you see the people claiming to be the vanguard of the proletariat celebrating trillion dollar corporations stomping on poor guys holding the wrong opinions. The pampered Progressives in the ruling class imagine themselves to be the resistance against oppression. This justifies them using any means necessary to defeat their enemy. That video is a justification of preemptive violence, because they believe people like you are a threat to their well-being.

It’s why it is time think about what is impossible today, in terms of social breakdown, as it will most likely happen tomorrow. The blood lust of the ruling class for whites not obediently walking into the void, is now undeniable. Their response to the 2016 election was to declare war on white America. In their minds, it is a defensive war and they are fully justified to use any means necessary to win. There will be no point where they pull back, fearing they have gone too far. Instead they will always seek to go further.

Again, America is a land where books are banned, people are given long prison terms for holding unpopular opinions and the livelihoods of contrarians are destroyed. This is a land where gangs of roving mobs, financed by billionaires, commit violence against citizens without consequence. Now we have a major television network calling for violence against whites and celebrating violent acts against a specific person. All of this was thought to be impossible ten years ago. What impossible thing will tomorrow bring?

Horizontal and Vertical

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There are a lot of ways of describing the great debate in the West that has raged, off and on, since the Enlightenment. The most popular way is to frame it as Left-versus-Right, even though the definition of Left and Right has changed significantly over time. Another way is to view it as traditionalists versus progressives. The former resists change while the latter embraces it. Of course, there’s always the appeal to nature, about the natural order of human society, whether we are more like chimps or bonobos.

Another way to think of the great debate in the West, is to think of one side as the horizontal argument and the other as the vertical argument. Those on the Left start with the assumption that the natural state of human society is flat, where human societies are a lattice work of relationships among equals. Those on the Right look at human society as a hierarchy, where important social relations are between those above and below. To both sides of this divide, these arguments are mutually exclusive.

Starting on the Right, the argument against liberalism since the French Revolution has been focused exclusively on social hierarchy. At the bottom are the peasants, who serve a lord, who in turn is a vassal to a greater lord. This relationship continues up to the very top of both the secular order and the religious order. In fact, the secular and religious hierarchy are intertwined, reaching into the heavens. At the top is God, who is not only served by this hierarchical order, but created it and maintains it.

This hierarchical understanding of human society was the default until the Enlightenment, when both the secular and religious conception of human organization was challenged by a new conception of society. This horizontal conception sees all humans as fundamentally equal. They are equal to one another and equal before God. In fact, it is the Christian conception of equality before God that is the root of this view. If all men are created in God’s image, they must be equal before God, and therefore equal to one another.

In practical political terms, democracy is the tangible expression of the horizontal conception of human society. There can be no greater expression of social equality than one man one vote. This is why there is no room for Christianity within a fully democratic society. If God holds dominion over man, it means the inequality of man is the work of God, which contradicts the notion of universal equality. The egalitarian world view has no place for a transcendent God, so God had to be eliminated.

On the other hand, the peak of aristocratic rule was the ultimate expression and the Christian West. From the lowest peasant to the heavens, stretched an unbroken chain of vassal relationships. Every man in the chain answered to someone and everyone answered for someone. The exception were the peasants at the bottom were only responsible to their lord. Equality of any sort is pointless in such an arrangement, as even equals will have unequal duties and obligations.

To this day, both sides argue for their conception of the world to the exclusion of the alternative. In the reaction to the French Revolution, conservative thinkers focused exclusively on the need to for authority that could only come from hierarchy. Ultimately, a belief in God is what gave legitimacy and authority to all secular arrangements, as God was at the top of the nature order. As a result, they could accept no alternative to the old aristocratic order, where a monarch sat atop the social hierarchy.

Similarly, to this day the Left cannot accept that there may be a hierarchical relationship between people within a society. They have taken this to the extreme of denying basic biological differences between people, including differences between the sexes. In the French Revolution, holding up the severed head of the king was the ultimate expression of the equality of man. In this age, forcing boys to take hormones and dress like girls is the ultimate expression of sexual equality. The world is perfectly flat.

Both sides of this great debate are wrong to think each view of human society is exclusive of the other. A more complete view of human society includes both the vertical and the horizontal model. The horizontal is like a spinning disk with a tight core. That core exists around the vertical axis of hierarchy. The vertical axis is held in balance by that core. If the core collapses, the vertical wobbles and collapses. If the vertical becomes unstable, the core becomes unstable and the horizontal flies apart. Society disintegrates.

There are many explanations for why the old hierarchical order collapsed, most spectacularly in the French Revolution. The industrial revolution, changing demographics, increases in population and the rise of a middle-class are good reasons to explain some of what happened in France. The fact is, the vertical, that series of hierarchical relationships became unstable. Once the King was no longer able to pay his bills, fulfill his obligations, the logic of the system started to collapse. Without a king, there can be no hierarchy.

Today, as the West reaches the limits of horizontal organization, not only has the vertical axis of hierarchy been eliminated, the core itself is beginning to pull apart. Lacking the gravitational force of social hierarchy and the rituals and ceremonies to enforce it, the core is drifting away from itself. Instead of centrifugal force pushing dissimilar elements to the fringe, those foreign elements are free to pass through the core, increasing its rate of disintegration. As a result, the system is showing the same instability as 1789.

The question, of course, is whether there is a third conception of human society that will replace the horizontal once it dissipates. The argument from the Right is the collapse of the Progressive moral framework will inevitably lead to a restoration of the old order, where hierarchy defined social relationships. That’s unlikely as the ingredients that gave rise to the old order do not exist in the modern world. Modern western societies lack the human capital to make anything like the aristocratic order work.

There’s also the question of whether the West will exist after the collapse of the Progressive moral order. There is a strong case that the West is getting dumber, which explains the grip of multiculturalism on the ruling class. That decline in IQ is being magnified by the waves of low-IQ populations from over the horizon. We may have reached a tipping point from which there is no turning back. The future of the West may be Neolithic people squatting in the ruins of what used to be Western civilization.

If there is to be a next chapter to the story of European people, it will require a conception of society that acknowledges the hierarchical relationships that are natural to man, but also the interlocking horizontal loyalties and commitments that allows for a strong cultural core. That means transcending the crude materialism that sprang from the Enlightenment, but also acknowledging the limits of authority. That probably means a clear eyed understanding of the nature of man and his biological origins as a species.

We have A Word For That

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One thing you cannot help but notice, if you travel, is that English is just about everyone’s second language. In many parts of the world, their second language is almost as common as their first. In Iceland, for example, you hear as much English in the streets as Icelandic. The locals just seem to assume that people they do not know are going to prefer English, while people they know will prefer Icelandic. In effect, they have a public language and private language. This is something you see in many places.

It used to be that French was the language of diplomacy. It is where we get the expression lingua franca. Of course, long before that, Latin was the official language of global affairs. In the case of French, it was simply a matter of France being the dominant power on the Continent, so French was the language of diplomacy among Europeans, but not the rest of the world. Latin was the language of the Church, so while the whole of Europe was Catholic, it was a useful common tongue for diplomacy.

The rise of English is a slightly different matter. For sure, the Pax Americana has a lot to do with English becoming the diplomatic language of the West, but it does not explain it becoming the public language. That is probably due to the rise of global corporations in the last fifty years. Many European countries started teaching English in schools, because it would be useful in the workplace. American companies would be more inclined to hire a German who spoke some English than an Italian with no English.

Power and money are always good answers to most questions, because they are easy to understand and confirm things we like to believe about the world. We want to think that there are great benefits to being rich or powerful, like imposing your language and religion on those over whom you rule. There is certainly some truth to it, but it does not explain everything. For example, the prevalence of English in the Nordic countries is much higher than in France or Italy. The Germans have a lot of English speakers too.

Another possibility for why English has become the universal language is the rise of science and technology as cultural forces. English is extremely useful in science, because of its precision and flexibility. English is a not a language with a lot of words that have two very different meanings. For example, study and studio mean entirely different things. In French you would use the same word, and the context would make the distinction. Few words in English need context to have a full meaning.

The other thing about English is it adopts new words, either from other languages or out of the blue, with great speed. This post by paleontologist John Hawks is an amusing example of how the flexibility of language works with science and technology. Most languages do not adopt loan words very well. Instead, they have to take existing words and combine them together to get something like the meaning of the new word. German is hilarious with this. Lots of Zungenbrechers in German with new words.

It is possible that English is a better language for science and technology, where new abstract concepts are common. It is easier to invent a new word or borrow a word, like synergy for example, and imbue it with a definition that captures the new idea, rather than force the new idea into the old grammar. The word synergy was kicking around psychology for a century, before it was picked up by tech companies and turned into a catchy word to describe involuntary cooperation through the use of technology.

Of course, the implication here is that English evolved with people who were better at science and technology. It is certainly true that the Industrial Revolution started in England and first spread to northern Europe. It is certainly true that Northern Europeans remain the most inventive people on earth. This is probably just a coincidence or perhaps something to do with ecology, as everyone knows there are no differences between people anywhere at any time under any conditions. To suggest otherwise is bad.

Even so, the rapid adoption of English as the official second language in European countries with a common heritage is suggestive. These countries have also always had a high and low version of their languages as well. High German is thought to derive from the Suebi people. Low German, the various German dialects in central Europe, come from the other tribes. Perhaps having a public language and private language, a public custom and private custom, is the real root of this phenomenon, rather than modern technology.

Regardless of the cause, English is becoming the official language of the planet, even as the ratio of Europeans to everyone else rapidly shrinks. Communicating in English is more efficient and more accurate across the wide swath of humanity. There are exceptions at the fringes, but there always are. In the main, English is becoming the public language of the world. That means the elite of the future will be plucked from those with the cognitive skills best suited for mastering the complexity of English thought.

That is the part you can see in your daily life. There are South Asians, for example, who have a delicate mastery of English. There are others who are comical eruptions of misnomers and butchered grammar. No matter how hard they try, they just cannot think in English or even pretend to think in English. As a result, their mastery of the language is limited to mimicry. Since language is about communicating abstract concepts, these people will never be able to rise to the upper reaches of the cognitive class.

This is usually where the bad people bring up the phrase Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which then results in the usual suspects leaping from the bushes yelling “That had been debunked!” In truth, the strong version has simply been dismissed, because it does not fit in with the blank slate argument. Spend time around people, who speak English as a second language, you will notice that some are thinking in English, while others are just interpreting their native thoughts into English sounds.

It is pleasant to think that the dominance of English portends good things for native English speakers and their cousins in Europe, but the Suebi may be the better example. They left a lot of their culture, but none of their people. There are claims by some to be the decedents of the Subei, but there is no proof as of yet. Most likely, the Subei were wiped out by strangers who flowed over the borders.

The New Narrative

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Spend time in a small business that has stood the test of time, and you will learn the origin myths of the company and the founders. These myths will have plenty of truth content, but a lot will be fanciful or exaggerated. One reason is the story is inevitably told by the founder or his heirs, so it is self-serving. Another reason is the story is intended to give meaning and purpose to the people in the company. For an origin myth to work, it has to be inspirational and reflect well on the people in the organization.

People always have origin myths, of course. The most famous of which is the story of the Jews. The whole chosen people’s business is obvious nonsense. The flight from Egypt is at least plausible in some areas, but unless you are willing to accept that God is an indiscriminate child killer, it is a story that only Jews can believe. Still, the origin myth of the Jews has served them well for a very long time. These stories are central to Jewish identity, and it is that strong identity that has allowed Jews to prosper.

If a strong set of origin myths correlates to a strong sense of identity and a strong people, then the reverse is probably true. The lack of origin myths, or a declining interest in the origin myths, probably suggests a weak identity. Perhaps the people have yet to come to identify themselves as a people or they are going through some sort of transition in terms of how they see themselves. The old myths no longer work, because they do not fit the emerging narrative to explain how it is that these people came to be.

This longish post in Foreign Affairs by popular historian Jill Lepore is an interesting read for a number of reasons, not related to this post. The endless name dropping that torments writing in the humanities is a topic of its own. That is mingled with self-promotion, in the form of references to the author’s books. Of course, anything to do with American history has to have a few paragraphs of the usual blather about slavery and Jim Crow. That said, it is worth the time to read it and the related posts on the site.

Lepore is one of those useful bellwethers in that she tends to write what the intellectual side of the ruling class is thinking. A big part of being a popular academic is to be in good standing with the ruling elite. They like being told about their wonderfulness from academics, so flattery is a big part of the game. That offers a window into the minds of the people who rule over us. What posts like this suggest is that the people in charge are concerned with the fracturing they see from their position in the clouds.

That fracturing is predictable. Peter Brimelow predicted it two decades ago. Import tens of millions of strangers with strange customs into America and you are going to get conflicts between the locals and the newcomers. The fact that these strangers were imported to replace the natives, who were not consuming and reproducing at levels satisfactory to the rulers, certainly did not help. Add in the rise of identity politics as a way to control the population and the result was predictable. Pat Buchanan predicted this.

Lepore is correct that people need a narrative that binds them together and explains why they are a people. America had an obvious one until the Civil War. When New England conquered the rest of the nation, the national story ended and was replaced by that new story that put New England at the top, as the ruler of the rest. That held together into the middle of last century, when Jews updated the tale to insinuate themselves into the story and explain their new dominance in the ruling class.

That American narrative worked until the people in charge decided they needed a new people and flung open the gates to unlimited immigration. A fascinating bit in that Lepore article is that she starts her essay in 1986 with the historian Carl Degler and his warning about the abandonment of nationalism. That talk would have happened around the time the ruling class was opening the borders. The implication that Mx. Lepore does not seem to grasp is that the hostility to nationalism preceded wholesale immigration.

On the other hand, she is a clever woman, so she could very well have done this on purpose, as a way of injecting the idea into the bloodstream of her peers. The academy is so narrow now, it looks like a singularity from our perspective, but inside there is some room to maneuver. It requires a heavy dose of esoteric language and triple bank shot references to avoid detection. Perhaps that is what she is up to by starting with that Degler speech and then ending with a piquant quote from that same talk.

That said, if the intellectual class in the West, but particularly in America, had not drawn all of the wrong lessons from the two great industrial wars of the 20th century, the ruling class would not have set about destroying the fabric of their countries. Perhaps the Frankfurt School notions were a bad idea after all. There is no mention of this in the Lepore essay, but that an obvious implication once you read to the end. The finishing paragraph is a quote from Degler’s talk at that 19856 conference.

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians do not start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They will echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They will lament “American carnage.” They will call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They will adopt the slogan “America first.” They will say they can “make America great again.” They will call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.

Again, there is no mention of open borders and the unprecedented levels of immigration in this essay, as those things cannot be discussed openly or rationally in the intellectual class. Still, the essay suggests that there is some interest by cloud people in what is happening among the dirt people. They cannot bring themselves to address the fact that you cannot have a common story when everyone is a stranger. Instead, they keep talking about Hitler and the other wrong lessons they drew from the events of last century.

There is also the strange sense that these origin myths can simply be conjured and then imposed upon a people. The implication of this essay is that America needs a new one, so the people in charge better get busy creating one. The trouble is that white people are not allowed to have an identity, and the non-white ascendancy does not have much to point to, as far as their contributions to the national story. Lepore offers something from Frederick Douglas as a starting point for this new national narrative.

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.

That is no doubt inspiring to the cloud people, but it says more about how they see themselves than with the facts on the ground. It is also a negative identity, based on victories over demons that exist only in the imaginations of the rulers. It also suggests she or her masters would like to see whites written out of this new national story. In case it is not clear, “bigoted people among ourselves” is you paleface. Perhaps that can be a useful cri de guerre in the war with the dirt people, but it is not binding narrative.

The fact is that the rise of nationalism, populism and white identity politics is a result of decisions made long ago. The radicals killed the national narrative, because they said nationalism is a dangerous construct. Their solution was to destroy the nations of the West, which has meant destroying the national identities of the West. That has now devolved into a war on the native stock of the West. There can be no unifying narrative that includes the both the destroyers and their victims.

That brings us back to the start. That small business that gets gobbled up by a multinational cannot maintain its origin myths. The people in that firm can no longer identify with that story, because that story has come to an end. If they stick around, it is because of new reasons, less inspiring ones than those that bound them to that small business. That is what we see today in modern America. The old narrative has come to an end. It is time for a new one. The question is who will do the writing.

 

Revolt of the Machines

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One of the great unanswered questions in science is how the first building blocks of life arose from the primordial soup of early earth. It is believed that before even the simplest of life forms existed, earth was something like a thin stew that was getting thicker as more complex chemicals formed. At some point, and no one knows how, the first DNA molecules formed. The prevailing theory is that the first genetic molecule was a primitive form of RNA, which evolved into more complex RNA and then DNA.

No one knows how this could happen only that it happened. The proof of which is all around us, including in the mirror. Life exists and it is based in DNA. Further, RNA is created from DNA to put that information to work, like controlling the creation of proteins and performing other chemical functions. How DNA became the code of life, while RNA, its predecessor, became its tool, is a great mystery in science. It is the question J.F. Gariepy tackles in his book The Revolutionary Phenotype.

Gariepy or “JF” as he is known by his fans, is an enigmatic YouTube personality, known for his willingness to talk with anyone. He has had everyone from science deniers to holocaust deniers on his show, as well as lots of normal people. His YouTube career is recent, as until 2017 he was a neurobiologist and post-doctoral researcher at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. In this book, he endeavors to explain the origin of life 4 billion years ago and predict the end of DNA-based life on earth.

One of the challenges facing writers of science books for a general audience is that they must first simplify the presentation. It is not that the audience is dumb, but that they are unfamiliar with the jargon and unfamiliar with the way people in science communicate information through mathematics. A book full of complex proofs and splatter charts is not going to be popular with most readers. Gariepy gets past this first obstacle by sticking with a straightforward narrative format that is easy to follow.

The second challenge for science writers is to follow the old rule about essay writing that kids learn in school. The book should always be like a woman’s swimsuit; big enough to cover the important parts, but small enough to keep it interesting. This is probably a good rule for all writing in this age. Thanks to the internet and cable television, everyone’s attention span has collapsed. Gariepy gets past this hurdle, as the book is just 138 pages and written in a brisk style that makes for easy reading.

The question is, of course, does Gariepy deliver on his promise to explain the origin of life and how it will end. The answer is an unequivocal maybe. On the positive side, he does a very good job of explaining one possible narrative for how primitive RNA evolved into RNA and then DNA. He offers up an interesting theory as to how DNA came to be the master and RNA the slave, which is an important event in the history of life. The presentation here is a nice primer for the general reader on the basics of genetic theory.

What really works here is his use of simple concepts that he stacks together to explain more complex ideas. For example, describing the relationship between your genes and your body as something like the relationship between a machine operator and the machine, is useful in understanding why our bodies will evolve over time. Our body is there to serve our genes, so any innovation that is better for our DNA is adopted, while changes that are not useful are discarded. Our body is a vehicle for DNA.

The negative here is that the language and analogies do not always work. Using the office printer to explain how gene mutation works is clever but calling it a trickster printer will give the American reader the wrong impression. The same is true for his use of the phrase “fool replicator.” This is probably a language issue, as Gariepy is French. The word trickster and fool have different connotations to French speakers than they do to English speakers, especially Americans, who think tricksters and fools are immoral.

Another complaint about the book, and one of the trade-offs with brevity, is it assumes the reader has recently read Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins. In fact, it is probably a good idea to read The Selfish Gene before reading this book, as Gariepy refers to it extensively in the first third of the book. Again, this is the trade-off that comes from brevity and summarizing the material for a general audience. In this case, it is a minor complaint, and it does not ruin the book or invalidate his arguments.

The final complaint about the book is that he spends 80% of the text explaining the transition from simple RNA molecules to the complex DNA-based life. That is about 100 pages, which is a great short primer on a difficult to understand subject. The rest of the book is a dash to the finish line, explaining how the rise of artificial intelligence spells the end of DNA-based life. There is a strong impression that this part was rushed in order to get the book done and ready for sale. The book sort of ends with a thud.

Without giving too much away, Gariepy argues that RNA used DNA as sort of a bank vault for its code base. When it needed to copy itself, it did so from that copy stored in the DNA molecule. Eventually, the DNA molecule was able to replicate itself, without help from its RNA master. This set off a battle between RNA and DNA, which DNA won, turning RNA into its servant. This same process is about to happen with artificial intelligence, as AI becomes self-aware and able to self-replicate.

That sounds like the premise of a lot of science fiction stories, but it is both an interesting entry point to understanding artificial intelligence and the dynamic between environment, humans, and man’s ability to alter his environment. There is enough there for another book and maybe that is the plan, but Gariepy only gives it about twenty pages, and it felt very rushed. Given his YouTube audience, most of his readers are more interested in how life ends, rather than how it begins. They will undoubtedly feel a bit cheated.

Overall, the first half of the promise, to tell the story of how life began, works pretty well for the intended audience. It is not a research paper or a bold new hypothesis to explain the origin of life. It is more of a summary of current thinking in a style that the general reader can follow and understand. The second promise could have worked, but it needed a fuller treatment than what Gariepy delivers. Otherwise, it is a book worth reading, if you have an interest in evolutionary biology or the origins of life on earth.