Category Archives: Greatest Hits

Between Barbarians and Fanatics

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For most of human existence, the great conflict was between ordered civilization and chaotic barbarism. The Bronze Age societies had to contend with barbarians from the north. The Greeks and Romans had to deal with various barbarian tribes to their north and east. Medieval Europe had to deal with the Viking raiders and the Mongol invaders from the east. Then there were the Muslim invasions from the South that threatened Christendom. The story of the West has been the story of fighting barbarians.

By the time the West reached the Enlightenment, barbarian invasion was a thing of the past. In fact, it was inconceivable. The Nordic people were just as settled as the rest of Europe. Their days of raiding and pillaging were over. The idea of Asian tribes crossing through Russian into Europe was equally ridiculous. Of course, the Muslims had been beaten back and were no longer a threat. In fact, it was the West that was now heading south into the Middle East and Africa. The barbarians were no longer an issue.

Instead of organizing to keep the barbarians from coming over the horizon, it was the West sailing over the horizon to conquer the barbarians. The thing is though, all those years of organizing to defend civilization from the barbarians, however one wants to define the terms, meant a degree of internal vigilance. There could be no tolerance of internal actors and actions that weakened the social and political structures. Civilization was a near run thing so anything that weakened the West internally could not be tolerated.

The Catholic Church gets a bad rap for being intolerant of science during the Middle Ages, but that’s mostly left-wing nonsense. In an age when dissent could pull the support posts out from society, intolerance of troublemakers made a lot of sense. Of course, from the perspective of the secular rulers, a theological consistency, one that supported the order atop which they presided, was seen as essential. Anything that threatened the internal logic of the social order, even unintentionally, had to be treated very seriously.

That meant an extreme intolerance of religious fanatics. The post the other day about the Flagellants is a good example. The Church and secular rulers suppressed the movement because their fanaticism threatened order, by questioning the legitimacy of the Church. After all, if God was punishing people with the plague, that implied the Church was not on good terms with the Almighty. Throw in the fact the Flagellants were preaching about a coming age of bliss and it is easy to see why the Church suppressed them.

The point is, the West was good at policing the ranks for fanatics, because they had no choice. The very real threat from beyond the borders coupled with the fragility of the feudal order meant anyone coloring outside the lines was a mortal threat. As the alien threats receded, the need to impose a uniform intellectual order receded with it. While it resulted in a great intellectual flourishing in the West, it also let all the fanatics off their leash. The result is the West has been convulsed by fanaticism since the Enlightenment.

That’s how you have to look at radical ideologies like Marxism. These theories defy observable reality and imagine something that has never existed. There’s simply no way for a sober minded person to accept the idea of the worker’s paradise. Only a true believer is willing to commit their life to something that has never existed on earth. It is the same cognitive tool set that allows someone to think they can appeal directly to God or conjure miracles, simply because they believe. The fanatic is the fuel of radicalism.

In The Inequality of Man, the great natural scientist J. B. S. Haldane argued that fanaticism was a Judaic-Christian invention. That’s most certainly wrong, but he was not wrong to think it had been a feature of mankind for a long time. It is the fuel that drives a people to build a great culture. As we saw in the last century and now in our present age, it is also the fuel of great raging destruction. Other than allowing the rage of the fanatics to run its course, no one has yet to come up with a way to meet the challenge of the true believer.

That really is the challenge of this age. Lacking anything resembling a unified religion, our overabundance of fanatics are free to indulge in whatever is handy. One minute they are threatening order if gays are not allowed to marry. The next minute they are tearing down the borders, inviting in the barbarians our ancestors pushed over the horizon. It’s as if some strange mind virus is sweeping our societies, turning the afflicted into berserkers, beyond the reach of reason. As a result we edge closer and closer to collapse.

What’s happening in America, at least, is a replay of what happened in the Pennsylvania colony at the founding. The eastern part of the state was home to many fanatics, convinced they were part a project to immanentize the eschaton. To the west were the borderland people, living in the hills as pre-settled people. In between was where the civilized people lived, just looking to live peaceful, orderly lives. Eventually the middle aligned with the east to keep the hillbillies in the west from overrunning the middle.

To a great degree, this was true for the country as a whole. The emotional energy of the crazies, mostly located in the northeast, fueled the expansion across the continent. The Indians never stood a chance, not because of technology, but because the pale face was driven by a sense of destiny. It powered the northern conquest of the South and the expansion of America into a global power. It came with a price. Just as Pennsylvania is still dominated by Philadelphia, America remains captive to the Northern crazies.

That said, geography kept the crazies on their leash into the 20th century, with the exception of the Northern invasion of the South. As technology made it possible for the fanatics to extend their reach into every corner of the country, the threat of nuclear annihilation forced a degree of discipline on the elites. With that gone, the fanatics were free to run wild, pulling at every support beam and cable they can find. That’s where we find ourselves today. There are no barbarians at the walls, just our own fanatics.

If the West in general and American in particular, is going to survive this age, it will mean coming up with a way to control the fanatic. Perhaps it will mean finding a DNA test to look for the lunacy gene or simply change the culture to fear fanaticism. We were once willing to do what had to be done to ward off the barbarian.  Maybe we learn how to cull our herd in order to remove the crazies, no matter how unpleasant. Civilization lies between the barbarian and the fanatic. Both must be tamed if we are to survive.

The Seekers

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The book, When Prophecy Fails, is a classic work of social psychology written in the 1950’s based on a study of a UFO cult called the Seekers. This group was led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed that aliens spoke through her to warn of a coming apocalypse. She employed something called “automatic writing” to channel the messages from the people of the planet Clarion. Through her, they were telling humanity that a great flood was coming and the world would end on December 21, 1954.

The study documented the believers and how they coped with the fact the word did not end on December 21, 1954. What they found is that instead of the group realizing they had been duped by a lunatic, they quickly developed an explanation for why the great event had not occurred and came to believe that with the same degree of intensity they had believed the original prophesy. In the case of the Seekers, within hours they were telling themselves and the world that their faith had convinced God to spare the world.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind while observing the actions of the America Left. Whatever it was, today it is a cult. We tend to assume cults have a charismatic figure at the top, but that’s not always the case. Hassidic Jews are not led by a charismatic leader, unless you consider the Rabbi a cult leader. In fact, that may not be a bad comparison, in that Rabbis come and go, temporarily holding the position of sect leader. Progressives swap out their chief lunatic as well. Look at their list of three initial heroes.

In the summer before the 2016 election, the Cult was sure Hillary Clinton would be anointed as their new cult leader. They were so sure of it there were people quitting their jobs so they could prepare to move to Washington and serve the new ruler. Then disaster struck and the prophecy failed. Like the Seekers, they waited all night for a miracle, but there was no miracle. Also like the Seekers, the cult has cooked up an elaborate explanation, rather than accept the result. Russian collusion is a coping mechanism.

It does not stop there with the Progressive cult. They have a new prophecy that they are sure will come true on the first Tuesday of this November. They believe the magical blue wave will cleanse the Imperial Capital of the sinners, who defend the evil Donald Trump, by concealing the Russian hacking scandal. It’s why fiction writer Bob Woodward released his book this week and why the NYTimes ran the fictional op-ed. These are intended to be evidence at the trial of Donald Trump, when he is impeached and removed.

It’s also why Elizabeth Warren was out demanding they invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump now. After all, if it is inevitable, why wait for the election? As far as she and the other hormonal crazies in the cult are concerned, the impeachment and removal of Trump is written in stone. True believers always succumb to the Tinker Bell Effect, because they believe so intensely, they inevitably begin to see everything as confirmation of their deeply held beliefs.  Fanatics see only that which confirms their fanaticism.

You’ll also note that these periods of extreme mania come and go. When Trump fired Comey, the Left was apoplectic for a week. Comey himself was out there casting himself in the role of martyr for the cause. Then it passed and no one talks about him anymore, outside of grand jury rooms. When Trump met with Putin, there was another week of fevered lunacy in the Progressive media. This week’s spasm of fervor from the cult coincided with the Kavanaugh hearings. Next week, all of this will be forgotten.

What’s happening is the cult is responding to disconfirmation in the same way the Seekers handled it. Rather than reevaluate their positions or beliefs in light of obvious reality, they escalate their intensity as a way to pull the faithful together. Firing Comey showed Trump was not about to resign, as the cult believed. When he met with Putin, it annulled their Boris and Natasha fantasy. Now that Kavanaugh is obviously going to be confirmed, it undermines their belief that his own party is about to abandon him.

Another aspect of the Seekers is relevant here. Dorothy Martin came out of the same cult that gave birth to Scientology. She later went on to reinvent herself as Sister Thedra and start a new cult called the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Progressives have similarly morphed into different things over the years. You’ll also note that spiritual cults tend to be led by women or have a lot of high profile females.  The same thing is happening with the Progressives. It is hormonal woman shepherding non-whites.

All of this is amusing, but imagine a country with a powerful army and nuclear weapons being run by nutters like Elizabeth Warren. Imagine a situation room that looks like the editorial board of the Huffington Post. There are no obvious remedies to having the ruling class succumb to mass insanity. The big challenge is accepting it. The public can accept that their rulers are corrupt or evil. It’s really hard to accept that they are insane. The proof of that probably comes too late as the loonies have already pulled the roof down us.

Feudalism.Net

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There are certain words and phrases that have lost their formal definition in favor of an emotional definition, so the use of them usually says more about the person using them, than the object being described. Like “fascism”, the word “feudalism” was mostly a term of disparagement in the 18th and 19th century. According to scholars of the subject, the word “feudal” was first used in the 17th century, as in feudal order. It later came into more common usage via Marxist political propaganda.

Just because feudalism was largely used as a meaningless epithet, it does not mean it did not exist. Scholars generally agree that feudalism was “a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.” The lord owned the land, and the vassal was granted use of it by the lord. The land was the fief. In exchange for legal and physical protection, the lord expected service, usually military service, but also rents.

Marxists later pointed out that this system relied on the lord owning the one thing of value, the land. The person at the top of the feudal order had a monopoly on the one store of value and that gave him a monopoly on the law. The old saying about the golden rule is true. The man with the gold makes the rules. This is why as coinage made a comeback in the medieval period, kings took control of the mints. It was both a source a wealth, seigniorage, and a source of power.

A useful example of this is the decision by Henry VIII to dissolve the monasteries of the Catholic Church. By seizing church lands, which constituted about a quarter of the national wealth, and redistributing it to favored aristocrats, Henry fundamentally altered English society. He weakened the power of the old nobles, by filling their ranks with new members loyal to Henry. He also eliminated an alternative source of economic power and moral authority in English society.

Feudalism only works when a small elite controls the source of wealth. In Europe, as Christianity spread, the Church required lands, becoming one of the most powerful forces in society. The warrior elite was exclusively Catholic, thus they had a loyalty to the Pope, as God’s representative on earth. Therefore, the system of controlling wealth not only had a direct financial benefit to the people at the top, but it also had the blessing of God’s representative, who sat atop the whole system.

That is something to keep in mind as we see technology evolve into a feudal system, where a small elite controls the resources and grants permission to users. The software oligopolies are now shifting all of their licensing to a subscription model. It is not just the mobile platforms. Business software is adopting the same model. The users have no ownership rights. Instead, they are renters, subject to terms and conditions imposed by the developer or platform holder. The users are literally a tenant.

The main reason developers are shifting to this model is that they cannot charge high fees for their software, due to the mass of software on the market. Competition has driven down prices. Further, customers are not inclined to pay high maintenance fees when they can buy new systems at competitive rates. The solution is stop selling the stuff and start renting it. This fits the oligopoly scheme as it ultimately puts them in control of the developers.

It also means the end of any useful development. Take a look at the situation Stefan Molyneux faces. He has been otherized, so the Great Church of Technology is now in the process of having him expelled from the internet. As he wrote in a post, he invests twelve years building his business on-line, only to find out he owns none of it. He was always just a tenant farmer, who foolishly invested millions in YouTube. Like a peasant, he is now about to be evicted.

How long before someone like this monster discovers that Google and Apple will no longer allow him to use any apps on his phone? Or maybe he is denied access to his accounting system? How long before his insurer cuts off his business insurance, claiming the threat from homosexual terrorists poses too high of a risk? Federal law prevents the electric company from shutting off his power due to politics, but federal law used to prevent secret courts and secret warrants.

The power of the church in medieval Europe was not just spiritual. They owned vast amounts of land and could marshal tremendous resources in support of or in defiance of the secular rulers. In fact, this is the reason the Church acquired lands. What drives the tech overlords of today is exactly the same thing. Their desire to impose their moral order on the rest of us is driving them to monopolize the source of power in the information age. They are imposing a new form of feudalism on us.

The difference today is that this new religion is ill-defined and lacks the outward symbols to distinguish it from the rest of society. The rules of the new religion are always changing, making it impossible to predict. In the 12th century everyone was clear about who set the moral order. The local bishop may have been nuts, but he was predictably nuts. The new religion is formless. It is an anarcho-tyranny because it is an anarcho-religion.

The solution to this will not be the same as last time. There is no secular authority willing to challenge the power of the new theogarchs. Mark Zuckerberg went to Congress and lied his face off, knowing they were afraid to lay a hand on him. After  the 2020 election, social media will have banned Trump and his supporters. The solution is the oligarchs will have to fear the peasantry in real space. The same civil authorities that are too weak to oppose the theogarchs will be too weak to protect them.

Peisistratos

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In the late 7th and early 6th century BC, ancient Athens fell into crisis. As is often the case with the classical period, historians disagree about the causes. One issue upon which everyone agrees is that economics played a part. The wealthy families had become an oligarchy, owning most of the land. Debt-bondage was common. The collateral for loans in that age was the person. This meant that if the Athenian tenant farmers did not pay his rents, he and his children could be seized as slaves.

The way it worked is the farmer would borrow to finance the operations of the farm. If the farm did not produce enough to pay the debt, he would fall into debt bondage. In theory, he literally worked off his debt, so it was a temporary status. There was a special status in the law for someone in bondage for a debt, versus the normal type of slave. The reality was that debt bondage was becoming a permanent state for a large fraction of the population. The result was increasing social strife between the classes.

Rivalry between the leading families was also a problem. As is always the case when there is social unrest, some factions tried to take advantage of it and gain power for themselves at the expense of their rivals. in 632 BC, an Athenian nobleman named Cylon made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power. Many Greek city-states had seen opportunistic noblemen take power on behalf of sectional interests. Factions sought to gain control of the state, to gain an edge over rivals.

There were also regional rivalries that exacerbated the personal and economic turmoil of the age. The rural population had different interests than the urban population. Traders had different interests than farmers. Since most Athenians lived in rural settlements, and debt bondage was an increasing problem, Attika was increasingly resembling Sparta, where a small elite ruled over a large population of helots. This exacerbated the personal and economic rivalries convulsing Athens at the time.

Regardless of the causes, Athens was at a crisis point and fear of a tyrant rising to impose order, led the Athenians to turn to the wisest man in Athens. That man was Solon, a statesman, lawmaker and poet. He was of noble birth, but he was sometimes described as a self-made man, suggesting his family was of modest means. In 595 BC Solon had led the Athenian forces against the Megarians, resulting in a heroic victory. Allegedly, it was the power of his poetry that inspired the Athenians to carry the day.

By the time the Athenians turned to Solon, he was rich, a famous poet and a famous military leader. Solon was awarded temporary autocratic powers by Athenian citizens on the grounds that he had the wisdom to sort out their differences in a peaceful and equitable manner. His task was to find a way to resolve the factional rivalries. The result was a series of economic, legal and moral reforms that are remembered to this day as the Reforms of Solon. Once instituted, Solon gave up his position and left Athens.

The Athenians agreed to abide by these reforms for a period of ten years, but within a few years the old problems and rivalries were back. In addition to the old problems, the defects in the reforms created new problems. Some officials refused to perform their duties as described, while other posts were left vacant. The reforms worked if Solon was around to lend his name to them. Once Solon was gone, the result was worse than before the reforms. As a result, the people blamed Solon for the breakdown of order.

Eventually one of Solon’s relatives, Peisistratus, ended the factionalism by force, becoming tyrant and confirming what everyone feared would happen prior to Solon’s reforms. Solon was still alive, and he mocked the Athenians for allowing Peisistratus to seize power, by standing outside his home, wearing his uniform. Despite being driven into exile twice, Peisistratus was eventually able to impose order on Athens and he ruled as tyrant until his death. His sons succeeded him and ruled until 510 BC.

Solon gets positive treatment from history for having tried to preserve Athenian democracy and for having some success at curbing the power of the aristocrats. Aristotle credited Peisistratus with laying the foundation for the eventual rise of Athens. He changed the economy to be based on trade and he reformed agriculture, away from grains to olives. He did this by offering loans to farmers so they could make the transition. He also built a water system capable of sustaining a large population.

The lesson here is that reform is rarely successful, unless it is imposed by force. The reason is the status quo will always be preferable to those in power. Any reform through mutual consent must involve trade-offs that do nothing to alter the fundamental power arrangements. That was the defect of Solon’s reforms. While they temporarily alleviated the results of the power arrangements in Athenian society, they never attempted to alter them. The result of Solon’s reforms was nothing more than a pause in the factionalism.

This is something to keep in mind in the current age. The problems we see are not caused by errors in voting or mistakes in public policy. There is an underlying systemic problem that cannot be voted away. At the end of the Industrial Revolution, similar problems existed, but the political class was strong enough to impose reforms on the industrial barons and alter the power relationships in American society. That was possible because politics was a power center with the monopoly on violence.

Today, the political class is composed entirely of hired men, speaking on behalf of the interests that back their political careers. In fact, most are just actors, hired because they fit the right profile and look good on television. They have no power. This is the problem Trump is confronting as he tries to push through reforms. It’s not that Congress opposes these reforms. It’s that their paymasters oppose the reforms. He’s dealing with flunkies and errand boys. We don’t need a Solon right now. We need a Peisistratus.

Democracy Without Borders

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Steve Sailer is fond of characterizing the Democrats as the “party of fringes” as they make their primary appeal to minority groups. When they run short of minorities, they create them by finding a way to slice off some portion of the majority, declaring it an oppressed minority. The result is we have one party that is the default for the white majority and another party that is for none-whites. It is the circus acts attacking the audience members.

This misses a larger consequence of democracy. That is, democracies must always seek to expand the electorate. This is an easily observed pattern. In the 19th century, as the West began to experiment with limited democracy, the franchise was sharply limited to males of wealth. The vote was limited to men, usually over the age of 25, and limited to property holders. In the early years of political liberalism, less than 10% of the adult population could vote.

The franchise slowly expanded, even in monarchies. The German Empire had universal male suffrage by 1871. Italy expanded the franchise to all men over 30 by 1912 and then lowered the age to 21 in 1918. The British followed a similar pattern. Universal male suffrage became the norm, then it was female suffrage. Unsurprisingly, women voting got going first in Germany, the birthplace of every bad idea in human history, and then spread around the West.

In the United States, the presence of a large black population, as well as a sizable indigenous population, added another wrinkle to the process. The urban immigrant population of the early 20th was another group exuded from voting. Eventually, these groups were handed a ballot. Immigrants became a powerful political force, pushing aside the heritage population in major cities. Blacks have become a key part of the Democratic constituency, once granted full voting rights in the 60’s.

The history of liberal democracy since the late 18th century has been a steady expansion of the voting base. At each turn, various arguments have been put forth in support of expanding the franchise, but the one thing that has always been true is there is never a move to narrow it. After every reform effort, every crisis and every war, the arguments are always in favor of expanding the franchise. Today, the debate is over handing a ballot to children, the retarded and foreigners.

As much as some people wish to believe that open borders are motivated by greed, the real reason is something more systemic. An official open borders policy for labor is actually bad for employers looking to game the rules. That is the whole point of hiring non-citizens over citizens. The illegal, is less likely to fight back at exploitative employers. Open the borders and they become a part of the normalized labor force available to everyone.

The real motivation behind open borders is systemic. In a democracy, all fights within the ruling class take place within the bounds of democracy. One side, let us call them the reformers, wants to change things. The other side, presumably benefiting from the rules, resists these changes. Selling the status quo to existing beneficiaries is easy, because over time, democracy creates a prevailing consensus. This leaves the reformers at a numerical disadvantage.

The solution is to expand the voter base. Political reformers of the 19th century, looking to reform the legal and economic arrangements, could appeal to disenfranchised men, offering them access in exchange for a vote, if they could get the vote. Social reformers of the 19th and 20th century could appeal to the female vote, if they could get women the franchise. The last fifty years in America has been about creating a new voters, by expanding the franchise with race consciousness .

The fight over open borders today are actually a battle to expand the franchise by those seeking to push through a post-national agenda. Since the Cold War, the White House has been held by two progressives and a neocon, which is just a hyper-violent variant of progressivism. Despite a near total dominance of politics, the political center has not moved that much since the end of the Cold War. The consensus has the advantage of numbers, so the solution is to import millions of new voters.

The expansion of the electorate is a consequence of democracy. In the age of kings, the ruling class was narrow, closed and well defined. The interests of the king are the interests of the property classes. Disputes are narrow, as the ruling class is hierarchical, with the king having the final word. The ruling class of a monarchy has a motivation to keep the ruling class numbers small. Expansion of their class must necessarily dilute their power within the ruling class. No one wants that.

In a democracy, no one owns the state, so factionalism is the inevitable result of disputes over the proceeds of government. By the logic of democracy, the fights between the factions are adjudicated by the public through elections. Eventually, a consensus forms and the major factions find an equilibrium. The minor factions and the losers of previous fights have no recourse other than to undermine the consensus and alter the make up the voting public.

It is axiomatic that democracy must be short-term oriented. This is not due to greedy voters, as much as the nature of democracy. The people holding office are temporary office holders with no investment in their position. Therefore, their goal is to squeeze every drop from their position as quickly as possible, Hillary Clinton is the ideal politicians in a democracy, because she wants to auction off every asset of the office she holds, as quickly as possible.

When seen in the light of democracy’s inevitable expansion of the franchise, open borders make perfect sense as the next logical step in Western democracy. It is why the open borders advocates are endlessly chanting about “our democracy” requiring the free flow of people. Democracy starts as a system for the people, controlled by the people in order to chart their own path. It soon becomes a system that eliminates the very concept of a people.

The Corporatist Enterprise

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Fascism is word that no longer has meaning, mostly because the left has made it the catchall term for anything they currently oppose. Even adjusting for that, no two academics can agree on a usable definition of fascism. Paul Gottfried, who has studied the subject more than anyone alive today, makes the point that fascism was a lot of different things, even to its advocates. It was an anti-movement, a reaction to and rejection of things like modernity, radicalism, and liberalism.

That is not a fair rendering of Gottfried’s thoughts on the subject, but it is a useful starting point when thinking about historical fascism. The book Fascism: The Career of a Concept is an excellent entry point into a topic for those interested in a sober minded history of fascism. An aspect of fascism that rarely gets discussed in the current age is its corporatism. Fascists, particularly Italian fascists, were corporatist. Mussolini saw the state as something like an organism that transcended all institutions.

The most famous expression of this is the line from Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism, “everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.” The state not only provides the services expected of the government, but it also provides the spiritual purpose for those in the state. The individual exists only in so far as his interests as an individual correspond with the interests of the state. The state is an organism that defines the citizen.

This is often used as the description of totalitarianism, but that is not an exactly accurate comparison. Bolshevism, for example, was indifferent to the spiritual life of the citizen, only focusing on the political and material life. That is the striking thing about Italian fascism versus Marxist movements. It attempted to give purpose to the life of the citizen, beyond his material utility. Instead of viewing the citizen as an economic unit, fascism saw the citizen as a heroic part of the great struggle.

This spiritual appeal can be seen in the modern managerial state. Politics is becoming all consuming. You cannot watch a movie or sporting event without being barraged with messages about “who we are.” Trump sounds like an anachronism, because he talks about bread-and-butter issues, while the rest of the managerial elite focuses on esoteric topics like “who we are” and “our democracy.” By democracy, they mean the managerial system and culture.

It also shows up in the modern conception of the business enterprise. It is not enough to have a job. It must give purpose to your life. It must be part of the great struggle that helps you reach your potential in service to the great cause. You see that in this story about a firm that forces its employees to embrace vegetarianism. Read about the company and it sounds like a religious mission. It used to be that businessmen only wanted to make money. Now they are priests.

It’s why rank and file employees of new style companies like Constant Contact feel the need to moralize from their cubicle. The young woman doing this is not merely a bonehead functionary. She sees herself as committed to the cause of the company, which is a holy cause. It is not a place where she performs tasks for money. It is what defines her life as a person. Led by tech, the managerial enterprise is not just an employer to its hired help. It is the defining feature of their lives.

The historian Ernst Nolte described one aspect of fascism as “theoretical transcendence” which he called a metapolitical force. Fascism sought to go beyond what exists in this world, toward a new future that was free of the restraints on the human mind. It imagined a world that was free of class, poverty, ignorance, and material restraint. That is what the modern managerial enterprise preaches. They are not just selling a service. They are changing the world.

The bizarre nature of the modern enterprise, where it describes itself as a mission to change the world, is one result of democracy. It obliterates local institutions, leaving the citizen as a stranger to himself and his fellow citizens. The corporation fills this void by providing a structured environment where the employees share an identity and see one another as on the same team. The managerial enterprise becomes both the local community and the church for its people.

The trouble is that a business is primarily about making a profit. Social activism keeps running up against the profit motive. Short of state sanctioned monopoly power, the corporate enterprise must compromise its values in order to make a profit. This is why democracy must favor monopoly. You see this with media companies, where the government encourages collusion and combination. Amazon enjoys massive subsidies, as it obliterates all other forms of retail.

This dynamic between the growing cultural power of the corporation, and its greater dependence on the state for protection, results in a merging of the two. Walk around a government campus and you see the modern corporations. College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, not because the college has become a business, but because both are now part of the great mission. The line between the state and the private sphere no longer exists because it cannot exist for both sides to thrive.

This is why gun grabbers, for example, have turned to corporations to advance their gun grabbing agenda. The state failed to ban guns, so now banks, media companies and retail monopolists are stepping in to “solve” the problem. In the not-so-distant future, you will have the unfettered political right to carry a gun, but no one will sell guns because it is practically impossible. No “private” enterprise will do business with a gun maker or a gun retailer. Individual rights are worthless without individuals.

Thoughts On The Current Crisis

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Imagine you and a group of your friends produce what you think is a revolutionary way to improve the world. You are so sure it is a great idea, you and your buddies decide to overthrow the government so you can implement your idea. Now, even assuming your revolutionary idea is legitimate, that is a terrible way to go about changing the world. You and your band of nobodies lack the numbers and the moral authority to take over the government. The most likely result is you get arrested and locked away in a padded cell.

Now, a more rational way of putting your brilliant idea into action is for you and your group to go out and start telling people about it. In a prior age, this meant handing out fliers and knocking on doors to spread the good word. In the current age, you can start a social media campaign and create a YouTube channel, where you post informative videos on your brilliant ideas. Maybe someone with a big on-line following notices your efforts and joins the cause. Perhaps someone of importance gets interested in your ideas.

The point of raising awareness and getting people involved in your movement is to increase your numbers. One reason your plot to overthrow the state failed in the first paragraph is you lacked the numbers. If you get a million people to sign onto your cause, then you have a chance. Not only that, when it comes to changing minds, quantity has a quality of its own. People are much more open-minded to an idea that has a big following than one held by a tiny fringe group. Human beings are social animals.

On the other hand, numbers alone are not enough. Your revolution also failed because you still lack moral authority. In a country of 300 million, a million strong movement is still pretty small. The state will feel justified in using extreme force against you and your movement if they see you as a threat. Numbers are not the only reason you failed. The people in charge could operate in the knowledge that most people see them as the legitimate power in the country. Therefore, they can squash all threats.

Revolutions succeed because the prevailing order lost its moral authority. Even though the numbers that oppose them are small, the lack of moral authority means no one is willing to risk much to defend the status quo. The lack of legitimacy is why governments fall, religions collapse and cultures collapse. The Bolsheviks did not succeed because they had a better set of tactics or a plausible alternative. They toppled the Czar because the one thing everyone agreed upon is the old order had to go. Anything had to be better.

That means you and your band of revolutionaries does not really need a manifestly brilliant idea to change the world. If the prevailing orthodoxy has lost its legitimacy, even a mediocre alternative is enough. If you examine successful revolutions, the alternative on offer is usually quite vague and, in the end, totally impractical. It was more of a sunny vision, a promise of a better day, than a fully considered alternative moral order. It was just something that felt better than the discredited status quo.

The point of all this is that in the current crisis, the job of the dissident is to build numbers and delegitimize the prevailing order. When the alt-right got full of themselves and decided to it was time to start the revolution, they were squashed like a bug. The reason was they lacked the numbers, and they had done nothing to undermine the moral authority of the people in charge. To most white people, the riot in Charlottesville looked like a bunch of fringe weirdos making a nuisance of themselves. They deserved what they got.

Ultimately, revolutions that matter start with the small group and slowly grow into a larger group. That was true of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Iranian revolutionaries. It was true of the American revolutionaries. The small group grew into a larger group and then it became a sub-culture. Finally, it blossomed into a counter-culture that provided a home for the whole man, not just the revolutionary. Dissidents in America are in the sub-culture phase or possibly in the early phases of becoming a counter-culture.

Another aspect of successful revolutions is they are short on concrete ideas. Detailed plans can be analyzed and critiqued. Vague promises cannot. That is one reason Trump won in 2016. His promises sounded good, mostly because they lacked specificity. They were aspirations, not policies. That means the people spending their days working out the new legal code for the ethno-state are wasting their time. The timeless principles of today are just the rules instituted by the winners, after they won.

There are two recent examples American dissidents should study. The first is the Evangelical movement that started in the 1970’s as a response to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. They had unassailable principles and specific policy goals that arose from those principles. They had great organic organizations, their churches. They had money and manpower. They also focused on one party, hoping to make the GOP the counter to the Left. By the 80’s, the Evangelicals were a powerful political force.

They also failed to accomplish any of their goals. Their top issue was abortion, specifically rolling back Roe. They lobbied hard to get their guys into office and on the bench so they could get that ruling overturned. They had zero success. In fact, it is hard to find any aspect of the culture war they were able to win. If you had told Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the 70’s that their efforts would still mean gay marriage and trannies stalking little boys in public toilets, they probably would have lost their faith entirely.

The reason they lost is they engaged the ruling class on their terms. The Evangelicals agreed to play by the rules set by the ruling class. This ultimately meant supporting the ruling class institutions, like the political rules and the party system. Those things are designed to preserve the current order. In effect, the Evangelicals agreed from the start to defend and support the prevailing order. It was inevitable that their efforts would only lead to more of the same because they agreed to all of the assumptions of the prevailing order.

Another useful example is the NRA. Starting around the same time as the Evangelicals entered politics, the NRA decided to change direction. They became apolitical, supporting only candidates that were pro-gun. They stopped arguing about the efficacy of gun control as a crime fighting tool and started arguing about gun culture as a vital part of American culture. The NRA shifted from political debates to moral debates and captured the high ground by linking gun rights to patriotism and basic America concepts of liberty.

This is why the fight over guns has been the one exception in the culture war. The Left tried hard to capture the high ground, usually by standing on the bodies of dead kids, but they failed because the NRA always fights to hold the moral high ground. They never conceded the premise or the moral framework of the debate. When the Left says they want guns off the streets because of the children, the NRA says they want guns in the hands of parents, so they can protect their children and themselves.

The lesson for our thing is to first understand where we are in the process. Our job right now is to grow our numbers by promoting our ideas. Part of doing that is taking every opportunity to undermine the other side’s moral authority. Just as important, it means developing a genuine alternative to the moral order. A counter-culture has its own ethos, which means its own media, its own language, and its own comedy. That last part is important because what we mock speaks directly to what we believe.

Revolutions feel like they happen overnight, but they are the culmination of a long process that starts before the vanguard is out of diapers. The 60’s radicals would never have existed without the Beatniks and the drug culture. The Jacobins would not have existed without the salon culture that had developed in Paris. Radical politics are born of a counter-culture that provides the basis of an alternative moral order. For there to be right-wing radicals tomorrow, we must build the right-wing counter-culture today.

The Haunting

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A couple of years ago, John Derbyshire talked about the sexual aspect of what ails the West. He referenced this comment to Steve Sailer, in one of Sailer’s blog posts. No doubt others have noted that women in the West seem to be the driving force behind things like immigration. The angle is always that the women are ascendant because the men have grown soft. As Derb talked about in that podcast, the girls are inviting in the swarthy foreigners, because they are dissatisfied with their men.

That is appealing to men, especially older men, as older men are always sure that the younger generation is soft. When I was a boy, my grandfather would say, “In my day it was iron men and wooden ships. Now, it is iron ships and wooden men.” I am an old man, but not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail. It was just his way of saying that his generation was tough, while the younger generation was soft. The thing is though, this assumes that only men have changed.

Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but because the traditional sex roles no longer exist. This leaves them as free radicals, with the wacky fads out of feminism and gender studies, orbiting them like unpaired electrons. Women are like bees without a hive, so they become erratic.

Here is a good example. This woman is an angry lesbian. She has been a public nuisance for a long time, ranting and raving about homosexual causes. Self-identified lesbians are 1.3% of the population, according to the CDC. That is a small club, but not select enough, so she is now claiming her son is transgender. Like so many of our women, this woman is in a race to the most bizarre position imaginable. It is the need for attention, applied to inappropriate things.

The male side of this coin features a nostalgia for a lost future. It is a form of romanticism, where men imagine a past that led to a different present. All of those decisions by prior generations, have led to a present where there is no point to being man, because there is no role for men. The only place where men are needed is the military, but even there, the multicultural nags are ruining things. It is not a longing for the past, but a longing for a different present.

If you look at the various sub-groups within the Dissident Right, they are almost exclusively male. The alt-right certainly has a strong romantic streak. Their embrace of the fascist aesthetic was always based on an imaginary version of history. The PUA guys go the other way, embracing a cynical and callous view of women as nothing more than a game to be won. It is an absurd version of the alpha male. Weirdos like Patriot Prayer are trying to create a space for men to be men.

The result of all this is men and women are rocketing off in different directions, seeking something that fills the void left by traditional sex roles. The trouble is the current culture views traditional sex roles as toxic. That not only directs the search for biological fulfillment toward the wrong answers, but it also makes the right answer the polar opposite of what is acceptable. The result of this is blue-haired feminists screaming into the void and the cartoonish primal scream of the Bronze Age Mindset.

It is why polling on so many issues divide sharply between males and females, married people, and single people. That last part is probably the most important, as people living the traditional married life may as well be in a different country. The former have a point, while the latter are searching for one. The former see politics as a necessary burden, while the latter view it as the hunting ground for personal fulfillment. It is why Antifa is run by girls and the alt-right is run by boys.

Of course, the specter driving all of this was created in the bygone era, the one where the West still had its traditional social arrangements. The increasing animosity toward baby boomers has a lot to do with the fact that the young blame their parents and grandparents for screwing up the system. This is certainly true in America, where the boomers inherited a world of order and then set about destroying it, replacing it with a world of disorder and irrationality.

That really is the specter haunting all of us, regardless of our age. It all seems so unnecessary and pointless. What was so monstrous in the 50’s and 60’s that it spawned a generation hell bent on self-abnegation? That is the specter that haunts our age. It is as if the point of the cultural revolution were to create a society of people infected with the existential attitude. The result of the revolt was a people gripped by a sense of disorientation, confusion, and dread.

How Not To Be Boring

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There are few things worse than conversing with a boring person. I’m not talking about quiet people. A person who keeps his own confidence is often thought of as mysterious or complex. Their silence makes them interesting. A boring person is almost always someone who talks a lot, revealing that they are not very interesting. Boring people are such a menace, that there is a whole area of etiquette about politely getting away from the boring guy at a social event.

So, what makes a person boring?

More important, how can you avoid being seen as a boring person?

The first thing you notice about boring people is they never seem to have a point to their stories and anecdotes. Stories must have a point. No one cares about what you had for lunch, unless it was something bizarre or unusual. If you had a delicious turkey club for lunch, that’s not something anyone wants to know. Now, if the waiter stripped naked and ran screaming into the street after serving you that delicious turkey club, then you have a story with a point. That’s an amusing tale.

Your stories and anecdotes don’t have to be amusing.  What’s important is you have some reason for telling the story. This is a courtesy to the listener. By having a point, you are showing respect to the listener, whether it it by sharing information with them or making them laugh with an amusing story. When your stories are pointless recitations of mundane events, you are, whether you realize it or not, insulting the audience. At the minimum, you are wasting their time, which is just as bad.

You should also avoid unnecessary details. That story about the waiter stripping down and running into the street is a good example. If you spend five minutes describing the menu and the turkey sandwich, then thirty seconds on the naked man, you made an amusing tale into misery for your listeners. Sure, a little setup to the big reveal is a good way to create tension, but a little goes a long way. In a social setting, a good story is one that avoids extraneous details.

The easiest way to avoid loading up your sixty second story with ten minutes of tedium is to never explain the obvious. This is the most common error boring people make when telling a story. For some reason, they think they need to explain what everyone on earth has known since childhood. In the case of our turkey club, the boring person will actually explain what he means by turkey club or maybe even talk about the history of the turkey club. When in doubt, skip it.

Another way to avoid being the boring guy everyone avoids is to never tell a story that requires a back story. Boring people often start a story that should last three minutes, then veer into a long back story. For example, the they will veer into a story about how they met their lunch companion in the turkey club story. The result is a dull story about the lunch companion, plus a dull description of the turkey club. This is misery for listeners and is an unacceptable price for the pay-off.

The boring also have a funny habit of talking over people. They ignore the little things others do to signal to the boring that they need to stop talking. The boring are strangely competitive in their dullness. If you notice people starting to speak as soon as you take a breath, or they start looking at their phones, you are the boring guy. You are not going to improve this situation by talking louder or talking over any interruptions. Take the hint and wrap up your story.

A good way to stop yourself from being that guy is to always invite others to tell their story or comment on the topic of conversation. People will find your turkey club story more interesting if you showed interest in their lunch story. A little active listening goes a long way. It not only keeps you from droning on about the delicious turkey club, it makes you seem more interesting to others. Boring people are selfish people, in that they are only interested in their point of view, in far too much detail.

Finally, if it is a story you tell often and the listener is someone you know well, assume you told them the story, because you almost certainly did. Start with “If I told this before, stop me” or maybe, “I probably told this story before…” This gives them the right to stop you from boring them with the 80th retelling. This is a courtesy to the listener and it makes you seem more interesting. This is flattering to the listener and and they will think better of you for it.

The Immorality Of Immigration

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Every ruling elite has certain primary duties. These are obligations that come before anything else. Regardless of the form of government, the rulers  have to maintain things like public order. Being the tribal chief is useless if your people are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing laws and local customs.

There are other primary duties of the ruler, like organizing the common defense, that are universal to all forms of government. Then there are primary duties that are peculiar to a people or to a form of government. If the ruler is understood to be a god, then the ruler and his retainers have to maintain that myth.  In modern western countries, protecting property rights and enforcing contracts is counted as a primary duty of the state in order to maintain its legitimacy

One of the more destructive things to happen to America over the last half century is the sacralizing of immigration by the elites. The endless repetition of the nonsense phrase “nation of immigrants” has turned a temporary expedient a century ago into an essential element of the nation’s founding mythology. The fact that immigration is a violation of the state’s primary duty to the people is excused because the immigrant now has a superior place in the moral order.

In a country like America, one that allegedly is built on consensual government, citizenship has great value. In fact, the most valuable thing to a citizen of a representative democracy is his citizenship. The reason for this is that citizenship is an ownership stake in the country. In theory, the American government was voluntarily founded as an agreement among individuals, invested with the power to secure mutual protection and regulate the relations among its members.

If you had the option of selling your citizenship, let us say at some sort of auction, there would be no shortage of bidders. For example, there is no shortage of buyers for the EB-5 visa, which costs $500,000. That is right, you can buy citizenship from the US government. Your citizenship is something of value and therefore, the state has a duty to protect it, just as they have a duty to protect your property rights. This is a primary duty of government.

When the American government hands out citizenship to millions of foreigners every year, it is stealing the value of your citizenship and giving it to someone else. This is no different than a company diluting the value of its shares by selling additional shares. It is why open borders fanatics swear that immigration makes us all richer, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. They know it is essential that people believe this as even the sacred immigrant is not enough to justify theft.

The argument from open borders people is that immigration is not just holy and beneficial. It is perfectly legitimate. The trouble is, when 50% plus one vote to rob the 50% minus one, it is still theft, even if it comes after an election. This is why America is not a democracy and it is also why democracy was famously called two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. The very nature of democracy makes it an immoral form of rule because of the theft problem.

Additionally, a primary duty of the modern state is the maintenance of equality before the law. In fact, this is what makes the law legitimate. Not only do all citizens have a say in what laws are passed, but those laws apply to all citizens equally. The very nature of immigration violates this principle. Immigration steals from some citizens for the benefit of foreigners and the connected. This is true for quasi-immigration schemes like guest workers, as well as for permanent settlement.

If the primary duty of the state is to safeguard the citizens, including the value of their citizenship and maintain equality before the law, then immigration by its very nature is a direct violation of the social compact. It makes a mockery of the very idea of consensual government and sows distrust among the people. It is why all mass immigration quickly leads to a breakdown of order, because it erodes the legitimacy of the ruling authority, as the people see they are no longer willing to fulfill their basic duties.

That does not preclude all immigration. It is just that the bar is extremely high. In order to justify that which is naturally and always immoral, the offset must exceed the cost of the deed. Since this is impossible in the modern age, the open borders people have been forced to turn morality on its head, claiming the first duty of the state is to foreigners at the expense of its own citizens. It has turned America into a bust out where the value of your citizenship is stolen.