In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?
At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.
This conflict is right there in the founding myths. The colonists rebelled against the symbol of hierarchy and innate inequality, the King of England. They did so on the grounds that all men have the same rights. It is right there in the powerful opening of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest celebration of egalitarianism ever written, but written by a man who was the gold standard of both the natural inequality of man and the necessity of hierarchy.
This contradiction is right there in the life of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of aristocratic stock, born into a wealthy family. He was living proof that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. He supported the redistribution of land to the poor, despite the fact he was a wealthy planter and slave owner. Despite the reality of his life, he was also capable of expressing the egalitarian spirit in such powerful and direct language that it continues to haunt the nation he helped create.
Modern America, the Global American Empire, is the product of the innate American egalitarianism, but also the willingness to use violence in the unequal relationship between America and the rest of the world. The regular speeches we hear from politicians about America’s role in the world would be familiar to Thucydides. On the one hand those speeches are a form of the funeral oration of Pericles and on the other hand the frank dialogue with the people of Melos.
The present crisis of America is the product of this great contradiction. In his majority opinion in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice John Roberts struggles with this very question. Much of the opinion, in fact, is a recitation of how the country has struggled with this question. Often, Roberts laments that the court has failed to live up to those ideals of equality, but then he acknowledges that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.
In his discussion of Plessy, the case that established the doctrine of separate but equal, Roberts argues that despite the intent and the remedies to address defects in the doctrine, the result was institutional inequality in education. Roberts writes, “the
inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent.” The remedy was to scrap it entirely in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.
Note that in a 237-page decision lamenting the history of discrimination and challenges in addressing it, the central problem lies in just one sentence. You cannot derive equality from inequality. If Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, a truth not only visible to the casual eye, but supported by mountains of data, then the equality of man is impossible and any effort to achieve it is folly. Despite this immutable truth, the court continues its quest to reach the egalitarian paradise.
Right there is the beating heart of the current crisis. For going on three generations now, the moral arbiter of America society, the Supreme Court, has demanded that we press ahead with a project it knows is impossible. The moral regime that makes the open society as the highest good and discrimination as the worst evil, which grew from the Brown decision, is all about finding, at long last, some way over or around that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.
The moralizing is clear in the text of the decision. Roberts often blurs the lines between legal discrimination and general discrimination, because to make such a distinction suggests the latter is acceptable under the right conditions. Instead, the starting place is the assertion that discrimination is always immoral, but for now certain exceptions must be made until we work out a few things. Affirmative action, for example, is a temporary fix until equality is achieved.
Think about how many social problems could easily be solved by simply acknowledging that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. If the court said that Harvard is a private college and so it can admit who it likes for any reason it likes, this case never sees a courtroom. Public universities, on the other hand, must admit everyone that meets the objective criteria for admissions. Debates over college admissions would vanish instantly.
Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible. The belief in the equality of man is too powerful with the managerial class. John Roberts and his staff wrote 237-pages of text to cover over “it is folly trying to derive equality from inequality.” Since the middle of the last century, all efforts have been mustered to defeat that simple truth, but it remains that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.
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Seems to me the problem in the USA (and the rest of the Western empire) is not about acknowledging the inequality of people within the same ethnic group — I think most everyone is fine with that. The problem seems to be acknowledging inequality between different ethnic groups. Even in the face of incontrovertible statistical evidence of differing crime rates, educational levels, career trajectories, family formation, and so on. And since the evidence cannot be faced up to, the alternative is a sort of magical thinking: inter-ethnic inequality cannot be there, and so it must not be there. It can… Read more »
Exactly. The problem isn’t our inability to acknowledge inequality; it’s our inability to acknowledge inequality among various races. This returns to my point that the founders screwed up for not answering the basic question of any organization: Who are we?
Right?
The progs/Marxists/libs want to claim that the, “the American people,” are everyone on Earth.
If that were true, then no one would be an American person.
I at least partially disagree with this. The managerial class believes in equality among all individuals, perhaps with only minor exceptions. We spend enormous resources on this fantasy.
The fundamental belief in equality (and magical thinking) is what drives universal education, for example. It is deeply ingrained in education. If a kid fails a grade, the problem isn’t the IQ or work ethnic of the kid, it’s that the school somehow failed him. Given the right method of instruction, there is no subject he cannot master. This is why they always attack the concept of IQ.
Racial differences are the key issue in the problem of Equality. The Founding Fathers ASSUMED a European Christian population of Good Moral Character, not the Camp of Saints which is currently washing up on our shores.
Agree with your comment and can’t add much to it. Differences among racial groups have a strong genetic basis that no amount of environmental manipulation can overcome.
Yep, and let’s face it, there’s one particular ethnic group that all this equality/inequality crap is based on, period.
Well, sort of. The biggie are the Blacks, but not all would be *well* if this were solved. Compare Hispanics and you still double your crime rate as compared to Whites. Sure there is confounding with SES and such, but it’s there if one simply looks back to their homelands. I won’t even comment upon Middle Eastern immigrants.
Their actions belie their professed belief. The magical thinking is to a large degree mere rhetoric.
Every empire, over time no longer serves its citizens. They are supplanted by international interests, same happens with the corporations who conquer the domestic market. Fighting over cultural issues is just cover, an excuse to keep the charade of “democracy” semi believable. The rich care not about abortion, or your 4.0 GPA average from state school rah rah rah, they just want you to accept the way things are and shut up. We often find ourselves asking, why would you promote stupid? The answer is because you’ll spend all your time fighting the stupid, while they continue to loot anything… Read more »
Spot on. People, I think, have started to realize that following the laser pointer is a waste of time.
This is as My Cousin Vinny said, “Dead on balls accurate!”
Not only is the inequality not real to them, but they explain away all of the differences in outcome as White racism. There can be no other reason.
Every race seems to have its “race hustlers” or “grifters”. They of course, need to promote racism to guilt Whites into forking over the loot. But there is also, it seems, a fairly universal reason to put the blame for inequality on racism—refusal to be held accountable for one’s place/status in society. Much easier to blame others than look within yourself for solution/cause.
Perhaps just as important is the inability to acknowledge the inequality of sexes; i.e., men and women are interchangeable except for reproductive plumbing and secondary sexual characteristics. Advancing women into positions for which they are completely unsuited leads to a lot of unhappiness and is one of the major reasons for the cratering fertility that the Z-man mentioned last week. It may, in the long run, prove more pernicious than the failure to acknowledge inequality between races.
America could have withstood the race-grievance scam. But it cannot withstand feminism, the turning of all females into Special Class Citizens superior to males. That one will finish you.
Good catch. Race inequality is perhaps *secondary* to sex inequality in or national “tale of woe”.
“…a sort of magical thinking: inter-ethnic inequality cannot be there, and so it must not be there.”
Or alternatively, “the absence of evidence is *not* evidence of absence”.
They won’t even admit race exists, let alone differences across race. Pay attention to the way they talk about it. Most of them deny race altogether or define race as skin and other superficial physical differences. But these minor differences just happen to coincide with race making it easy to “see” race. They appeal to our sense of fairness based on this ridiculous assumption. “What if you had more melanin and were black?” This leaves out that if you were black, you wouldn’t be you. We’ve been cursed with having our racial diversity being between Europeans and Africans as opposed… Read more »
Removing/abolishing the concept of disparate impact would go a long way in helping matters.
I always interpreted Equality as Equality under the Law. As in, no exceptions to the rules, using nepotism, bribery or judicial legerdemain. An equal public playing field. So that those who were born without means, yet who were worthy could rise in a meritocratic fashion.
Enforcing Equality beyond that is tinkering with Mother Nature. Pure Idiocracy. Our current leaders put Diana Moon Glampers to shame.
Yes. The underlying assumption of the “ glory days” of the Civil Rights movement was that race “ inequality “ was a white man’s problem. Once we “ leveled the playing field” of any exterior barrier, the natural equality of the black minority would naturally emerge. Decades on, it didn’t.
It simply doesn’t exist, whether by “ nature or nurture”.
And Jefferson knew that too.
“a white man’s problem”
Yes. I’ll add that there was a further assumption held by white reformers was that the non-white races shared the reformer’s desire to see each person as an individual, not as a member of a competing tribe. The white reformer expected that the other races would reciprocate the desire to move past a world of competing races, which didn’t happen.
Whites were like pacifists who threw away their weapons on the assumption that every other competing group wanted a world without fighting, but no other group threw down their weapons.
I remember seeing a commercial for one of those for-profit colleges that said something like “talent is distributed equally, opportunity is not.” I remember being totally shocked that someone would say something so dumb, even in an advertisement. It’s so obviously untrue and silly that we might as well say that we are all born with zebra stripes. Yet, I looked on the internet and found that this is actually a pretty common saying in certain circles. It seems like something people say to signal they are part of the group, but as with every other thing taht these people… Read more »
‘Talent is distributed equally’ is a religious phrase repeated by adherents of the Church of Prog. They ignore the evidence of reality before them — that talent is distributed very unequally — and choose instead to believe a convenient lie. Cult behavior.
Yeah, here it is right from Harvard. Accepted as a truism:
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/talent-is-equally-distributed-opportunity-is-not/
Points to NBA.
Jamestown is the oldest English colony in the New World. It was founded on the belief that Englishmen would continue to live as they always had, but in the New World. It is the foundation of The South and Red State America. Both the plantation owner replicating a facsimile of the medieval manor and the hillbilly vanishing into the mountains come from these men. A decade later Puritans arrived a few hundred miles north (and on the other side of the Dutch). They would create a city on the hill cleansed of the Old World and its Catholic Church. A… Read more »
Yes people forget that there were two ‘foundings of America’.
It’s funny how the 1619 Project dummies didn’t realize Jamestown was founded in 1607.
Going further back, the Spanish founded St. Augustine, FL in 1565.
A return to the right to free association would solve some of the problems we have created. The Z man has written about this and our original states practiced it, the people of Pennsylvania or Maryland were free to be different than the people of Rhode Island or Massachussets to the point of excluding people whom did not accept the state religion of those states.
We had it at the beginning, we need to return to some form of free association rights again.
Free association with no immigration. The free association isn’t going to be that great in a Camp of the Saints America.
Agree
But that’s forced association. It’s go-gooders being allowed, nay, directed to force their proclivities on others. Same with the faggot parades and all the rest of the insanities of the leftists.
Only White people are not allowed to have free association. Every other group can associate with their own people in any way they see fit. I just read an article about how Indians are pushing back against anti-caste discrimination laws. They want the ability not just to come here, not just to bring over their entire family down to the 18th cousin, not just to bring over all the people of lower caste so they can rule over them with an iron fist, but also the ability to do so legally – and they’re doing it. It’s only racist if… Read more »
Agree, but the founders also screwed by not answering the ultimate question of any organization: Who are we?
They never laid out just what was an American, or, at least, they didn’t make it explicit. Yes, they said free white men and our posterity, but they never addressed it directly. In their defense, they probably didn’t see the need.
We are a country that can’t answer that basic question, which means that we aren’t a country.
The first immigration act indicates the Founders knew full well who we are, and likely assumed (wrongly) it was so glaringly obvious that it didn’t merit terribly much explication.
True. It shows that words on a piece of paper aren’t a magical defense against a people losing their way.
It’s the people, not the paper.
Yes, the founders screwed up, and now we’re constantly scolded with, “that’s not who we are!” “Who we are” is now something the founders wouldn’t recognize.
I disagree a bit. Aspirational equality, for want of a better term, was supplanted by legally enforced non-discrimination only after World War II. As you point out, profession of the creedal variety prior to that point was more ritualistic than a reflection of actual belief. Even as much as I loathe the Puritan, when you read the works of abolitionists, to cite on example, they almost all fully expected blacks to be repatriated to Africa. The professed beliefs were not sincerely held, in short. The transition to the current fantastical legal regime actually started with KRAMER, which ended restrictive racial… Read more »
How does the next stage of forced busing factor into your optimism? By that I mean, dumping tens of thousands of aliens, not just from your own country but from anywhere in any part of the world, into your home town, countryside … … It certainly ends all talk of an experiment and opens things up as another historical case of malevolent despots resettling a new people to dispose of the old ones. It is not at all clear that being rid of Mayorkas, if we are even rid of him now that he is slithering back to HIAS or… Read more »
Equality before God and the law. That’s basically the American ideal put forth by the Founders. Stuff like equal outcomes and affirmative action is just a load of old bollocks, not what Jefferson et al intended.
It sure is a wild coincidence that the solutions proposed by these equality obsessed Europeans always has the effect of ethnically cleansing the West of Euro blood. Its like africans wanting to live authentically, they don’t explicitly think to themselves they want to reduce civilization to dust but that is always the end result of them acting on their genetic will. Some of the founders like Jefferson & Washington believed islamic goatfuckers would be a great fit for America so long as they believed in God & were hard workers, respectively. Some things just never change. Well except the White… Read more »
It goes back to Luther’s Sola Scriptura: the idea than anyone, without knowing Greek or Hebrew, nor which texts are canonical because a canon is extra-Biblical, can read the Bible on his own, including Luther’s tendentious translation that omitted James, Revelation and other books, and come to the divine truth infallibly.
I think it starts with monotheism. In a world of competing gods, there are competing moral frameworks. In a world of one god, there must be one set of rules for how that god wants us to live. it then follows that those rules must apply equally to all men.
That competing moral framework is exactly what we’re witnessing now with the end of the GAE. The rise of China, Russia and even Iran isn’t just geo-politics or economic; it’s a competing moral framework for how to organize a society and what a society finds good or bad. Russia’s belief in traditional values is as much a threat to GAE as the Oreshnik. China’s belief in no immigration hurts GAE as much as its manufacturing capacity. That Russia and China can exist, prosper and, especially, stand up to GAE is proof that their moral framework is a good as the… Read more »
Absolutely. The moral alternative in the end is the main threat. The Russian Orthodox Church is a state religion, and it has seen what happened when the Anglicans dissipated.
lol. But because monotheism is true, this is simply a claim that the problem is reality. I happen to agree with that claim.
I don’t think it starts with either religion or scriptural interpretation.
It starts with the discovery and exploration of the Western Hemisphere, and the effect this had on the minds of men. Had Europeans stayed in Europe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
The idea of land without end led to the prideful notion that natural limits, which everyone had heretofore recognized, could be transcended.
1492 began this most Faustian of all baragains.
In Islam, apparently, if you can’t read the Quran in Mohammed’s Arabic, you haven’t actually read it.
Is such much different from the Bible? Much of what I read wrt arguments of translation (into English) are just that—quibbles over what the language being translated is expressing. Particularly Ancient Greek.
So, is there a system that acknowledges these natural inequalities and works with them? Given that might makes right in any environment, what would work best?
Or maybe I am asking the wrong question. We should be asking something else. What is good for our people? What is good for Whites? Most of the problem with “discrimination” immediately resolves itself. Or am I taking the wrong direction here?
It isn’t the wrong question as much as the wrong sequence. The first question is how to end the current system, or more accurately since it is imploding, how to speed that along to our advantage.
Good question, but I would point out that we brought the schism with us, the southern migration from Jamestown and the Chesapeake was founded by men firmly grounded in reality, while New England was settled by religious outcasts and their ilk. Unfortunately the “Idealists”won the inevitable war and are now leading us over the cliff into Brackens’ Buffalo jump.
Not so sure there is a particular “one size fits all” system. It is more the quality of the people running that system, and what safeguards can you put in to get/keep those types of people in power. A meritocracy type system seems closest, but who would sacrifice for a cold meritocracy? You can’t really get a away from blood and soil – its simply built into human nature. Seems that one safeguard would be a strong freedom of association right. For too long, FOA has given way to “equality” when they clash – it needs to be the other… Read more »
You can’t lay this on Jefferson — he believed in natural aristocracy, one of virtue and talent, versus the artificial aristocracy of family status. The problem arose when men who on their best days aspire to mediocrity want to include themselves in this natural aristocracy.
Roberts is one of millions of such. Midwits believe that they are of the natural aristocracy simply because they hold a government office. They are Federalists. Or maybe their hangers-on. You see around you not the detritus of Jeffersonian “equality”, but of Federalist hogwash that the virtuous are elevated to office.
Jefferson was well aware of this problem. His words in the Declaration have been misused entirely out of context. Jefferson’s 1813 letter to John Adams deserves to be quoted at length: “…I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There is also an artificial… Read more »
Beautifully written essay! But my understanding of the Harvard case is a little different….Justice Roberts and the majority relied on US law, which generally forbids racial discrimination based on race for schools receiving Federal money…Private schools not receiving such cash are free to do what they want….Harvard, of course, gets loads of Federal money..The Court has carved out narrow exceptions for limited periods of time and specific purposes, which certainly would not characterize Harvard’s admissions policy, which admitted 1400% more blacks and 500% more jews than a race blind policy would admit..(The previous contrary decision relied on Sandra Day O’Connor’s… Read more »
Which colleges/universities are not receiving federal money? At a minimum, you are going to have students with federally guaranteed loans (personally, I don’t think that should count as “federal” money since it will ostensibly have to be repaid).
I can’t think of single one (Rice University used to be for White males only, funded by a trust – but then it wanted to dip into the federal trough).
Mark Twain said it best-
“Every civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction.”
They didn’t believe in the equality of all. They demanded equality before the law, because Britain did not hold them as equals under the law. Even that was aristocratic. They were not lords and so they were not treated as nobles by the law. To get farm boys and trappers and Hessian mercenaries and blacksmiths to sign up for their revolution they promised them freedom and equality before the law. America’s problem was it became a mercantile empire that thought, ‘Hey! we can just import more people to do more jobs and we can keep growing!’ Now look at the… Read more »
People need to be brought to the yoke— to be civilized. It’s an ocean of blood that’s gone into it, if we’re being honest. Lots of high-minded justification required to mask the fact. Hierarchy tends to the big— it wants to get bigger, imperial. Justified, it becomes its own cause. We’re a people with a long history of resenting the yoke, long before we became Americans. Our egalitarian streak also apparently needs high-minded justification, also became its own cause, also, strangely, ended up in the same big place. There’s that idealism again, wanting to be big and universal, always asking… Read more »
You will be ruled over. The question is by whom.
“Maybe good enough to say we don’t like being ruled over, will only tolerate as much as we have to,” Certainly, but it should be (to me) a bit more nuanced. No one—Whites anyway—argues for legalized killing (murder). Whereas just about everyone seems to hate HMO’s. Why? Laws can broadly be divided into two types: “mala in se and mala prohibita”. The first in general are morally repugnant (White morality) and most folks are in general agreement as to the importance of prohibition and the laws enforcing such. The second are what’s inflicted upon us by an overweening bureaucracy (which… Read more »
I’ve never heard a discussion of to what extent Jefferson had a relationship with Robespierre.the Rights of Man sure sound like Jefferson wrote it.
Excellent. The Enlightenment notion of equality, which never meant equality, of course, and never could, has been an engine of positive change but in the end, the anti-natural assumption at the heart of it now produces nothing but misery and insanity.
I realized that 15 years ago on reading Kurt Vonnegut’s (1961!!!) Harrison Bergeron, when it became clear that the natural inequality of man could only be overcome by an ever metastasizing police state. Which we now have.
I’d say it’s more accurate to consider the real problem to be, not so much that Nature distributes her gifts unequally, but that she does not distribute them randomly. I think the American project could happily manage a random distribution of gifts, but because blacks are a cursed race, they will always be greatly underrepresented in any endeavor not involving running, jumping, or chaotic violence.
Thus their claim that the very nature of a White society and a White society’s rule are by their nature, racist. They are entirely correct in this claim
‘Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible.’ Sadly, correct. Facing reality would cause Hurt Feewings doncha know, and already Hurt Feewings will get you a long jail term in Britain. Equality exists exactly nowhere on Earth or in heaven, and yet is the spiritual and legal cornerstone of America. Not a good plan. One man is not equal to the next; this isn’t the business of ‘Mother Nature’, because she doesn’t exist. It is the business of God the Father, who bestows His gifts AS HE… Read more »