Thinking Backward

Posted on by

One of the hardest things to do when thinking about a subject is to start without a desired outcome. Most people start with the end in mind and work backwards, finding supporting evidence or constructing their argument. There is noting wrong with it, just as long as you are willing to change your mind when you stumble upon contradictory data or an alternative argument. That is hard, though, so most people do not do it. Ideologues stubbornly cling to their ideology, because it is easier than confronting their beliefs.

The funny thing is most people do not realize they are thinking backward. Even with the popularization of the term priors by economists, few people bother to examine or even consider that they are working within a moral framework. In fact, most people do not even consider the possibility of there being a moral framework. In America, at least, people who engage in publicize discourse at any level are almost always operating from the assumption they are freely exploring the full range of possible outputs and inputs.

The truth is, Progressives have imposed a moral framework on American public debate and most of their efforts are aimed at maintaining it. The four mortal sins of the modern age are antisemitism, racism, sexism and homophobia. There is nothing rational about these sins. In fact, these crimes have little support in Western history. All of them were cooked up in the 1960’s as the New Left seized control of public institutions. A quick look at Google N-Gram for their frequency in print makes this point quite clearly.

If you could go back in time and retrieve some of the most Progressive thinkers from a century ago, and bring them into the present, they would be baffled by the limitations on modern debate. Teddy Roosevelt would be baffled as to why Jews, blacks and women were even allowed to participate in public debate. The point here is that the moral framework in which we operate as modern Americans is entirely contrived and entirely new. It is as if we have been colonized by a minority cult imposing their alien religion.

Few think much about this as most of us have been born into it, but the way to understand the current troubles and the Dissident Right is to understand this point. Our public debates in the West are not about finding the right trade-offs to arrive at a sensible set of public polices. It is about public piety and defending the dominant moral framework. For example, when a guy like Sargon of Akkad decides to form a new cult based on Civic Nationalism, it is important to focus on what goes unsaid, rather than what he says.

Now, I have covered the limitations of Carl Benjamin in the past, but it is still useful to look through his new cult’s founding principles. What is missing from his laundry list of items, obviously plucked from libertarian forums, is freedom of association. The reason for that omission, and I doubt he thought much about it, is that freedom of association means the freedom to privately discriminate. If you are free to associate with whomever you like, you are free to disassociate with whomever you like, for any reason you like.

For guys like Benjamin and his followers, they have been marinated their whole lives in the morality of the Left. They just assume that private discrimination is immoral and always has been immoral. They assume it to be true in the same way people accept gravity. Even when they think about it, they quickly realize this road leads to heresy, so they change the subject. In the case of Benjamin, he is publicly in favor of laws against private discrimination. He thinks the Christian baker should be compelled to bake the cake.

The amusing thing with libertarians, but also the incoherent liberals like Benjamin, is that they will fly into a rage if you suggest ending abortion or oppose drug legalization. They demand the citizen’s absolute right of dominion over their body. There is one exception. A person is free to fill their body with drugs or hire someone to rip out their unborn child, but they have no right to position their body next to someone else without first getting permission from the state. The irrationality of that position never occurs to them.

The fact is though, individual liberty starts with freedom of association. No one has a right to be around you, which is the fundamental argument underlying the four mortal sins of Progressivism. Blacks have a right to associate with whites. Women have a right to work in your business or join your club. Jews have a right to join your golf club. Homosexuals have a right to be around your kids. Restore freedom of association and all of those conjured rights become irrational and unenforceable. Modern liberalism collapses.

That sort of forward thinking is strictly prohibited, so everyone is forced to think backward, starting with the “Four Isms” and then creating a moral philosophy within those limits. It is not hard to imagine Benjamin sweating over his manifesto, with the image in his mind of a purple faced racist standing in the doorway to block blacks, Jews, gays and women from entering his business. Liberals and libertarians are forced to defend liberty within the increasingly constrained space permitted within the moral framework of Progressivism.

That is the fundamental reason the Dissident Right exists. It is a rejection of that moral framework. The alt-right kids talk about being red-pilled, but what they really mean is they asked themselves something like “why do blacks have a right to be near me?” No one was able to provide an answer, other than “shut up!” What we are seeing is smart young white guys figuring out that the starting point of any sane society must be freedom of association. No one has the right to be around you or have easy access to your culture.

Group identity is the natural outgrowth of personal liberty. If you are free to be around whomever you choose, the group has the same right. If a bunch of libertarians wish to setup a town on libertarian principles and make adherence to those principles a condition of membership, they have the right. If on the other hand, everyone must seek permission to association with others, then there can be no individual liberty of any kind. Places where people must get permission to speak and move are called prisons.

42 thoughts on “Thinking Backward”

  1. Actually, anti-semitism is being supplanted by anti-Islam, and in fact, anti-semitism is now being appropriated by the fascistic leftists.

  2. Oh, boy, here we go again. Now it’s “libertarians don’t agree with freedom of association”.

    I can’t think of any prominent libertarians who believe people should be forced to bake cakes, or admit Jews to their clubs, or whatever. But I guess that gets in the way of this straw man you are building.

    The reason libertarians have a reputation of not fitting in socially, is precisely because they don’t go along with the general milieu, but argue (most of the time anyway) from principle. And freedom of association is almost never left out; that would make no sense. It’s just about the first corollary of “you own yourself”.

    Find me a link on lewrockwell, or mises, or antiwar – even on cato, those “beltway libertarians”, for that matter – arguing against freedom of association. Prove your point.

  3. Z,

    How do you build out a model of freedom of association that doesn’t bring no-go zones to America?

    Perhaps Detroit becomes our own Molenbeek?

    M

    • Private Property.

      The original and best “no-go Zone”.

      The denial of a man’s “freedom to associate” is a denial of his freedom to control his own life.

      That’s a property violation… “you might THINK that you own your body/life, but its’ ME who is gonna determine how you use them”.

      We used to call it slavery. Now, it’s known as Social Democracy.

  4. The TR reference was reminder of the (perhaps apocryphal) quote from William Jennings Bryan during his tenure as SoS under Wilson. After being informed of the latest coup in Haiti, he apparently remarked “imagine that , n–grs speaking French”. A different world indeed.

  5. It amuses me how some people have such a hard on for libertarians like they are some kind of looming threat to civilization when they are, what….less than one percent of the voting public? Almost as entertaining how GOPe in 2012 told libertarians how totally insignificant they were right up until their liberal newenglander had his ass handed to him by the weakest sitting president since Carter, then suddenly it was all the libertarians fault. I guess everyone needs villain to shake their fists at.

  6. There has been a long polemic on youtube between the “sceptic community” that Sargon/Carl Benjamin belongs to and race realists with the youtubers “The Alternative Hypothesis” and the biologist “Jean-Francois Gariépy”. It ended with “sceptic community” lost and some closed their channel. Carl Benjamin/Sargon has been criticised by the “The Alternative Hypothesis” on his view that individualism is the solution to identity politics a few days ago. It can be seen here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VoRG8K9iz0&t=99s

  7. The most maddening and enraging thing about the liberal violation of freedom of association is that they just assume non-whites are clamoring to bask in their warm and sanctimonious glow. The only reason black or brown people would ever want to be around a manlet like Chris Hayes or Lawrence O’Donnell is that they like the culture that honkies create. They don’t like the honkeys. White liberals are too patronizing to ever consider that blacks find them about as appealing as Bull Connor found the blue gums of a Negro latching onto a public water fountain. I remember in my mostly black high-school that one of the more tolerant Negroes named Tucker told me once, “I don’t fuck white bitches, ’cause they gross. You can see they veins through they titties and shit.” Jared Taylor is right: the problem will take care of itself if we stop lying to ourselves and each other (Trump, for all his faults, is basically a racial heliocentrist pointing out the obvious to the lunatic priest class). And yes, white kids understand this better than older white people (look at the reaction to Trevor Noah’s “takedown” of Trump on Haiti on YouTube; people aren’t buying the Colbert-Stewart shtick anymore). Old white people are dying off, and so are their outdated anti-racist, blank slate ideas. Their grandchildren are in for the fight of their life, though. You can’t pretend you’re Atticus Finch defending an innocent Negro when the Negro you’re defending is trying to kill you.

    • I don’t believe this is true. I think the MEDIA’s focus on the Vietnam War was used to push a lot of Americans towards Neoliberalism, but even so, it was always a minority. Which is why they had to change the demographic and keep a vice-like grip on the narrative. Even in the 50’s, you had a large number of Northeast liberals that postured about how much they were proponents of civil rights for blacks (“They like to be called negroes!”), but as long as there weren’t any in their neighborhood and few on TV, they could pat themselves on the back about how enlightened they were. The war and the youth culture that were to come, so that even younger fools would get involved in neoliberal politics, were useful in promoting “fresh new ideas” to heal all the divisions in the country. There were none! This was a deliberate Hegelian dialectic that allowed (((the elite))) to create a problem so they could solve it and introduce concepts that the media could spin in the direction they wanted. If the so called “Greatest Generation” was really the greatest generation, they would have started paying attention to how they had been played before and after the Kennedy assassination. At that time, Whites were still the great majority and the only ones that had skin in the game. And there women and children still sided with the men. By the time Carter was elected, they had ceded too much ground. They thought that by supporting Reagan, they could turn things around. They couldn’t and its gone downhill from there.

  9. “If on the other hand, everyone must seek permission to association with others, then there can be no individual liberty of any kind. Places where people must get permission to speak and move are called prisons.”

    Does anyone see the path to recovering the freedom of association that doesn’t involve pulling down the current order, with attendant bloodshed and casualties? There’s no doubt something I’m failing to consider, but the Constitution seems to be a bit inert at this point, of not much use for governing more than one culture.

    Is anyone else clicking on the Google button and being told that Google refused the connection? I certainly didn’t cancel it.

  10. The people you describe in this post are more than just irrational, or in the more extreme cases, insane. They are the soil in which tyranny grows. Once you internalize that government is an effective instrument with which to force others to bend to your will, then it is a small step to use that immense power to establish dominion over all the non-conformists and graduate to physical oppression (or worse). And the assumption that you can talk these people into reasonable restraint is suicidal. A better use of brain power is to clearly define the threat and then plan what you will do when they come for you.

  11. think that antisemitism got dropped from the Big Four. All Alinskyite social fasscists hate Israel & support the slaughter of jews.If you’re a Jew walking around Paris is probably more physically dangerous than walking around Berlin in the 30s. Just because the EU hasn’t starting chucking jews & conservatives into barbed wire camps doesn’t mean they are not going to start & probably sooner now than later

  12. “It’s as if we have been colonized by a minority cult imposing their alien religion.”
    No, it’s not “as if”. It is.
    That minority cult is Jews.
    And they imposed it by becoming influential in academia & the media.
    Then they used those institutions to determine our society’s moral code & status allocation. As well as systematically discredit, deconstruct and stigmatize every competing morality & status allocating institution. Beginning with the Church & the family.
    The solution is to create new institutions that disseminate a more healthy morality & allocate status to those who uphold that morality.

  13. “Few think much about this as most of us have been born into it…”
    —————————————————————————————-

    I was raised on it. The women in my family were loud, domineering and willful and if I had problems with it the men dealt with it and I was forced to bow down. I lived like that for years until one day, my newly minted lesbian SJW daughter came home from university and I was expected to bow down to her too.

    I wanted to. I really did, to go along to get along – but I couldn’t do it anymore. I realized that the women in my family were fuggin nuts and getting worse. Now even they seem to be seeing it, what with 72 ‘genders’ out there and more on the way. It ain’t right – none of it. “Shut up, they explained” didn’t cut it anymore. “FU,” I replied one day – and that was it for my extended family.

    Yannow I was shocked when my wife dragged me into a reasonable church one day. I had been brought up to think of God and Jesus as being right up there with Santa Claus and the elves, and the bible was a pile of codswollop meant to control stupid people. But after a year of actually listening to good Christian men and reading the bible for myself – I got ‘red pilled’ a completely different way. The women in our church are wonderful. The men are boisterous and happy. They are everything my modern ‘family’ was not.

    Not to hijack your forum, Z – but if your fans were raised as I was, I would suggest a good start at a proper ‘red pilling’ starts with a rudimentary understanding of modern Christianity and its ideology. So far it is the best foundation for men to make themselves better people. I personally am going to stick with it and see where it goes. It looks much more promising than where I’ve been. I know with whom I wish (and need) to associate with – and queers, socialist Joos, and ethnic turdies are nowhere on that list.

  14. “It’s not hard to imagine Benjamin sweating over his manifesto…”

    Hope it caused a serious episode of psychotic depression at least. I’m surprised he bothered, as so many no longer keep up pretenses. Like that Ohio Rep’s twitter feed you shared on Gab (https://twitter.com/RepTimRyan). The guy sounds more like one of Thulsa Doom’s high priest loons than a political statesman. Preaching “Morals, Values and Principles” and very little about law, statistics and the business of government.

  15. Dammit. Proof that the NAP is for pussies, since pussies can’t enforce the right to be left alone.
    Nor defend a territory to make the NAP possible.

    (NonAggression Principle)

    • Ok, so what’s a good word for “2×4-splaining”?

      As in, “No, the 2×4 to the forehead isn’t the explanation, it’s just to get the donkey’s attention.”

      Whapsplaining?

      Use in a coherent sentence:
      “…since the NAP is for pussies, as the Zman whapsplained to us.”

      One way to get red-pilled, for sure.

  16. Interesting. At least 2 of the “mortal sins” replaced their opposites, which used to be mortal sins. The sin of racism replaced miscegenation, and homophobia replace homosexuality. Not sure that’s progress.

  17. Z Man;
    Am I the only one to notice that the upward inflection in all three indices of The Four Pillars of PC (love your formulation) occurs during the reign of Bush I (GHWB) 1988 – 1992_? This was after a semi-leveling off during the Reagan Years. Possibly this uptick was the result of the ending of ‘Greatest Gen.’ anti-Prog pushback,* leading to the incipient formation of the Uni-party under GHWB. Or a successful Prog second effort: Cause or effect_?

    As I recall from that time, for us Anti-Prog Boomers it was all too easy to bask in the warm after-glow of the Reagan Years and ignore the many signs that Bush I & Co were pretty OK with the March of the Progs., many of whom were their kids, after all. The Cold War was just over, business was brisk and our military bestrode the globe. We supposed it was all due to our collective virtue, I guess.

    We are, God willing, once again starting into another period of pushback. The underlying conflict is, as you say, a religious one at bottom.

    *As students in the ’60s we kept waiting for so-called ‘Greatest Gen.’ anti-Prog pushback at the U’s but didn’t see it. What we did see was s lot of elite scurrying to exempt their particular individual scions from LBJ’s excellent Vietnam adventure. This allowed the infection to fester.

  18. “Our home prices discriminate so we don’t have to” is basically what dictates how modern liberal elites think. Essentially, they are enabled by their wealth to associate freely with only the highest quality minorities. This builds a statistically incorrect perspective of minorities and a misrought moral persuasion by proxy by means of an incomplete factual picture. Force those leftists to live among low quality blacks and send their children to school with them, and you change the picture.

    That why I am in favor of settling an unlimited number of refugees in San Francisco.

    • Having lived there a number of years I can tell you first hand most of the Bay Area wealthy do not live in downtown San Francisco. Students, workers and Asians do. There is already a massive homeless epidemic plaguing the streets but the wealthy tech elite and hipster yuppies don’t care, they don’t drive through the Tenderloin. The drugs come to them.

      • 2 A.M., a stroll through Union Square, peering at the hyper-stylish displays of Tiffany’s… accompanied by none but the shuffling hordes of the walking dead. Ye gods. Those street zombies.

      • Had about a five year streak when was embroiled in a bunch of tech replacement projects so was in and out of Silicon Valley on a regular basis. Sometimes got stuck at the Four Seasons over by the 101, but since the weather was nice would walk through residential Palo Alto to meetings downtown. Observed a lot. Always seemed the strangest place on earth. An utter barbell economy. Nothing but people who had made it in tech and the people that made them salads and coffee and lived way way further down the peninsula. Nothing in the middle.

    • Shut off the funny money and all those liberal elites won’t be able to afford to distance themselves from the results of their actions quite so easily.

      If you really trace back where a lot of liberal elites make their money – it is all connected to some way, shape – or form – to the government. Which is another way of saying that their livelihood is removed from your pockets thru threat of governmentally applied violence.

      Dig deep amongst the “End The Fed” crowd and you’ll find they realize the width and depth of this problem.

      EVERYTHING in the world runs on money. Why do you think the Jews love it so much? Cutting off our enemies money supply should right up there at the top of the list for any legitimate effort to destroy the progressive left.

  19. Isn’t it curious the peak and decline of the word “sexism” occurs right at the point of the Monica Lewinski affair. No sexism to be seen here, rubes!

  20. “If a bunch of libertarians wish to setup a town on libertarian principles, and make adherence to those principles a condition of membership, they have the right.”

    This is where the rubber meets the road. This is why the Tenth Amendment was such an excellent move. Not just setting up a town. You could set up a State! If you wanted to outlaw homosexual public displays (You’re never going to be able to get rid of it. Just keep it in the closet.), or abortion, the States have/had that right. If you didn’t want negroes to be part of the body politic, so be it. The “Union” made it a reality that citizens of one State could travel in another, but they were not a citizen of that State. If, on the other hand, you band together and want to create a flaming faggot, “diverse” State, knock yourself out. And I don’t know anyone on the right that would oppose this. Well, cuckservatives, sure, but not any real conservative. It is only the left that opposes such freedom. Libtards cannot allow anyplace to exist that does not allow their stupidity, since side-by-side comparisons would be possible.

    The left is like a parasitic organism. If they are not allowed to latch on to a productive host, they cease to exist rather quickly. People want results and if your results are inferior to what someone else has, they will start to notice and then complain. When your society can only exist if it is productive, you have the choice of either being productive, dying, or moving somewhere else. If your freedom of movement is held in check by someone else’s freedom of association/nonassociation, your parasitism is exposed and your hosts will separate from you. The left is able to bypass your rights by open borders and out-breeding you. But, they can only out-breed you by being subsidized by productive people, hence their subversive march through the institutions and imposing their immoral ideology on those that would prefer to have nothing to do with them. When you can control the flow of information and the courts, you can neutralize those that disagree with you.

    Now, I don’t advocate assassinating those who are obvious traitors. And I believe something in them believes in the “morality” of what they do. But, I do not understand why there has never been anyone that has made it their mission to disappear Federal Justices that impose their own opinions, and also a movement to “educate” those media shills whose purpose is not to reveal the truth but to disguise it. I’m pretty sure that neither Federal Judges or Talking Heads will continue to do what they do if there is a Star Chamber that punishes them for subverting their country. Let’s be honest: they are not the most manly of men and do what they do under the cover of darkness. If there is a penalty for that, two of the main prongs of the left’s encirclement strategy would be eliminated. Just sayin’.

      • Yeah, I don’t advocate assassinating anyone. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. No, really, just kidding. Maybe…..

  21. If antisemitism is one of the mortal sins now, it soon won’t be. Look at the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel agitation on college campuses and among the hard left wingers. Import some more Muslims, keep allowing them to control discourse and pretty soon Harvard University will start publishing Der Stürmer again.

  23. Would add that human sacrifice in all its forms is the bedrock belief of the left. An abortion is an act of human sacrifice. The extra judicial banishment of any individual who dares question the sins mentioned is sacrificial. It’s a long list….

    We must begin to call them out on this – accuse them of their belief in human sacrifice and follow up with obvious examples

    • Excuse me but no, abortion is infanticide which is common to most human societies throughout history. Its not a big deal and nor is eugenics which again is common through history, defective or unwanted offspring were often disposed of

      There are some on the loony left who have a reverence for abortion rights as the pedestalize women but its not some ancient religious ritual to Moloch

  24. Yes. Freedom of association. Of course.

    Totalitarians historically claim association is up to them, not you. It is not surprising that the left is still trying to reverse the outcome of the cold war. This is their way of saying that they won and you’d better conform, or else.

    Trump has shown us the way out – call their bluff. Because, in fact, they are bluffing.

  25. Guys that thought that a Jewish vs. nonJewish struggle and that a struggle between races defines and propels history, and who were emphatically on the nonJewish and White sides in these struggles, created the labels “antisemitism” and “racism” in the 19th Century — they were proudly labeling themselves.

    Obviously the labels “sexism” and “homophobia” have a different kind of origin.

    I don’t know what’s going on outside of NYC, but I can assure you that in NYC and NYC colleges there’s not the slightest bit of agitation against or worry about “antisemitism.”

Comments are closed.