Every society has a moral code, a collection of unwritten rules that govern the behavior the members toward one another and with the outside world. A moral code, of course, is a collection of rules reflecting the moral preferences of society. These things and activities are good, while these things and activities are bad. The authority for these preferences can be the gods, tradition or what the rulers prefer. Fashion, after all, is just the sartorial preferences of the people in charge.

Despite what conservatives insist, the moral code of a society is a top down affair, imposed by the people in charge. Their preferences start at their primary preference, which is to remain in charge. That means the preferences the rulers impose on their subjects reflects their interests, at least how they see their interests. It is not a perfect link as elite society is as subject to evolutionary pressure as the rest of society, but it is a good place to start in understanding the elite.

Since a moral code regulates behavior, we can look at behavior and do a bit of reverse engineering to get a peak at the code. What are the things the elites do that point to what they prefer and not prefer? It is not what they say, as people say what they think they are supposed to say. This is especially true of elites. What matters is what they do as this indicates what they value. One thing libertarians got right is the concept of revealed preferences. Actions are what matter.

For example, we have the constant lying from official Washington. They lie about everything to the point where it is the norm. No one is bothered to be outraged as it is just how the things are now. It is the line incorrectly attributed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but written by Elena Gorokhova. “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

Obviously, truth in the empirical sense is not important. Dig deeper and you see that the lying is mostly in service to narratives that define the world of Washington. In other words, they are not lying to deceive so much as lying to support a version of reality that is preferred at the moment. They see the truth and the lie as means to an end, judged only on the ends. What counts is the narrative, while facts are just props in the narrative structure, used only when needed.

What this tells us is the people inside the political system are not hostile to the people, but indifferent to them. The lying is not an effort to trick the people into supporting one thing or another, but mostly about internal considerations. Even the lies over Covid, which were an effort to shape behavior, were actually in service to the narrative they created around the virus. Immiserating millions of people was a happy accident, but never the point of their lying about Covid.

We have a couple of recent examples that are useful in understanding what truly matters to the elites. First is this case involving a couple of fringe goofballs using robocalls to mock black people. Americans receive billions of bogus calls, despite it being illegal, but these two warranted special attention. The judge makes clear that if they had mocked Irish people, for example, it would have been fine. They targeted black people and no one is allowed to mock the gods.

We have this case of four black people who drove to Mexico so one of them could get cosmetic surgery, but they got carjacked instead. Sadly, thousands of Americans are attacked by Mexicans around the border ever year. Of course, tens of millions of people from around the world stream over the border. This not only damages the lives Americans near the border, but it has ruined life around the country. This is cheered by the political class as the browning of America.

This case is different. You see, the four people involved are black and no one is allowed to lay a hand on our sacred black people. Lady Bugs Graham is now demanding we go on jihad against Mexico as retribution. Official Washington is suddenly ablaze with angry rhetoric about what is happening south of the border. Mexicans kill white people every day in America, but when they killed a couple of black people, they crossed a line in elite moral code that must be addressed.

Of course, anyone paying the least bit of attention could come up with a dozen such cases where elites are moved to action because an issue involves black people, but they are indifferent when it involves white people. Candace Owens is a millionaire because she tells white people they are good boys, very good boys. Even so, this Mexican case is threatening to change policy regarding Mexico. It is not just a show to signal their virtue to one another.

A century ago, Paris was gripped by something called negrophilia which is derived from the French négrophilie that means love of the negro. The beautiful people would collect African art and hang out at Jazz clubs. Much of it was driven by exposure to black troops from America and Africa during the war. The controlling factor was the desire of the avant-garde to feel trendy and separate from the bourgeoise. It was all superficial and eventually was replaced by new fads.

Today’s version is something more than a fad. It is not just a weapon to be used against the remaining white people. What we are seeing is antiwhite, but it is not necessarily hatred of whites that is the source of this new moral code. Instead, it seems to be a genuine worship of black people, as if they are magical beings. Our elites now think they will be judged by how well they take care of black people. Who will do the judging is never spoken, but that just adds to the mystery.

That last bit is important. Much of what we see from our elites fits the pattern of religiosity, but it lacks the explicit supernatural authority. They never say why they worship black people. They never point to an authority for this behavior. It is just assumed to be there at the center of things. Perhaps that is what gives it power in the minds of these people. Their moral code is now a mystery cult in which it is essential to not know why you embrace the moral code.

A million years ago in another context, John Derbyshire made the following observations about cults. “To those inside [a cult], it appears to be a structure of perfect logical integrity, founded on unassailable philosophical principles, while to those outside it seems to some degree nutty; to some other degree hysterical; and to some yet other degree a threat to liberty.” This sounds eerily accurate with regards to the worship of nonwhites by our ruling classes.

What we are seeing is the evolution of a cult of the elite, in which salvation is sought through the worship of that which symbolizes the antithesis of the West. This explains the extremism of these people. How can you be satisfactorily anti-Western? How can one be satisfactorily worshipful of black people? What is the outer limit of the rejection of biological reality? There is no answer to these things, so cult members keep looking for an even more extreme expression of these values.

Returning to where we have started, an objective examination of elite behavior reveals a bizarre moral code that is out of sync with reality. That gap between what they believe, their moral preferences, and reality, is the measure of their virtue. In other words, the way to understand elite behavior is to imagine a cult founded on the rejection of human reality and then that cult gains control of society. That is the condition of the West and it is probably not going to cure itself.

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Those of a certain age will probably recall when they were taught the difference between the great man theory of history and modern history. The former claimed that events were driven by individuals, while the latter stressed events. Those great men we read about were products of the events around them. If Napoleon had never been born, some other man would have filled the role. Therefore, history is about the narratives that shaped the people, including the great men.

A similar thing happened in content creation. In the middle of the last century, the content creators working for newspapers and news gathering organizations decided that the basics of events were insufficient. They needed to create a narrative to explain those events, to put them into proper context. In his book, Banana Sunday, Chris Munnion described how content creators would arrive in Africa with scripts, looking for quotes and images to complete them.

The scandal business has undergone a similar transformation. It used to be that when a famous person got into trouble, he did one of two things. Either he presented the facts in order to explain his behavior or he went away in disgrace. Then narrative creators came along to present a third option. They would create a story for the person to tell that would contextualize his actions in such a way as to make his accusers into the bad guys and himself into the victim.

That last bit seems to have had a mesmerizing effect on the managerial classes, as they no long respond to scandal in the old way. Joe Biden is as crooked as a ram’s horn but displays no shame nor an inclination to explain himself. Instead, the content creators in the media have created a narrative to contextualize his corruption as part of a partisan plot against him. In this age, facts are no longer important, because they are controlled by the prevailing narrative.

You see the power of narrative in this story about January 6th. It is about content creators suing for access to video of January 6th. “Without full public access to the complete historical record, there is concern that an ideologically-based narrative of an already polarizing event will take hold in the public consciousness, with destabilizing risks to the legitimacy of Congress, the Capitol Police, and the various federal investigations and prosecutions of Jan. 6 crimes.”

In other words, the claim here is that without the proper narrative, people may come to an unwanted conclusion about the events of that day. Most people would read that and think the content creators are afraid of having their lies exposed. That may be part of it, but the main reason for the letter is they think narrative is reality. They think Tucker Carlson will create a new narrative to supplant the old narrative, which is the reality in which all of them exist.

What we are seeing with our ruling class is they have come to think of their tall tales as reality, while reality itself is a conspiracy theory. In the case of January 6th, they think the insurrection story is real. In that story, cops were killed by an angry mob trying to overthrow the government. It is a conspiracy theory to point out that the only person killed was a white woman executed by a black man. The former is their reality, while reality is a reckless conspiracy theory.

We see the power of narrative everywhere now. The Ukraine war is a perfect example of how their own fantasies have supplanted reality. Content creators make up whoppers about how the Ukrainians are destroying Russian tanks with slingshots, while the poor Russians are forced to fight naked in the snow. Putin is a maniacal dictator holding together his rule with brute force, while his country crumbles. This is the reality of the people running the West.

Events on the ground have no bearing on the thoughts and opinions of the ruling class because they are excluded from the narratives. It is as if the people in charge think that if they tell the story the right way, with the right amount of enthusiasm, it will change reality to match the narrative. As we see with the Tucker Carlson story, these people think reality is literally a creation of their imagination. Whoever produces the best tale gets to shape reality.

This is what drives them to rewrite history. We get movies about Vikings featuring African actors because the past is just a story. That means they can change the past by writing Africans into Beowulf. You go girl can be the reason men walked on the moon, simply by creating a narrative in which you go girl wrote all the software used to get the astronauts into space. For the managerial class, these tales they spin for themselves are more real than reality itself.

As insane as it looks to the normal people on the outside looking in on these people as they create these whoppers, it is not without logic. In a world dominated by words, rather than deeds, a good story is better than a good deed. Look at the resumes of the people running the West and you find no one who has done anything in his life other than talk to others in his class. The resumes of these people are stories about themselves that contain no truth value.

Can a society run with a ruling class living in an alternative reality? Clearly in can for a little while, at least until reality intrudes on the fantasy. Perhaps the people who live in reality and make the world possible will keep on providing the energy to keep the system going. Maybe the system is on autopilot now. Alternatively, reality could be prepping for its violent return to the main stage of life and the storytellers are headed for a terrible end to their own narrative.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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An important insight of Karl Marx was that rights, as in individual rights established in the law, create inequality. The reason for this is obvious. People are not equal so left to their own devices, they will have different life outcomes. More important, since human society is defined by scarcity, this will inevitably result in the unequal distribution of the benefits of society. A rights regime will impact the distributive choices because the more talented will lay claim to a greater share of benefits.

Communism would solve this problem by first producing superabundance, so that those distributive choices were greatly simplified. Of course, superabundance is only possible when you eliminate gross inequality. This leads to Marx’s expression, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” This is a main difference with socialism, which seeks to close the gap between the rich and poor through redistribution of wealth.

This is all sounds quaint and a bit nutty in the current age, but it turns out these problems are going to be front and center in the diverse future. If you listen to the diversity warriors, most of what they are saying revolves around what Marxists would have called distributive choices. Instead of thinking about the distribution of benefits based along individual or class lines, like the communists, they think about the problem along lines of group identity.

The logic flows from egalitarianism. If all people are equal, inequality must be the result of something other than nature. Individual choice can explain differences in individuals, but what explains measurable differences in groups of people? The only option once you eliminate the obvious is the structure of society itself. The reason blacks, for example, are overrepresented in prison is the criminal justice system distributes justice unequally between the races.

This is what the diversity warriors mean when they talk about whiteness or white supremacy culture. These are the unwritten rules of society that benefit one group over other groups. Since it is white societies that make this form of madness possible, they naturally conclude that white society is the problem. As insane as it is, the diversity warriors are not irrational. From their starting premise, theirs is the only rational answer for why we have inequality in our societies.

This is why conservatives are worthless against these arguments. Here is a “conservative case for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” post in National Review that is a good example of the problem. The author thinks there is some accommodation within his conventional American view of politics for the politics of diversity. He assumes that these people will accept equality of opportunity, when in fact they view that argument as the problem they are seeking to eliminate.

This is the central problem of diversity. Scarcity is a permanent feature of all human societies, even wealthy ones. For example, there is a finite amount of health care in America, which means some people get less, maybe even no health care, while others get the heath care they need. Since there are still some market forces at work, rich people will get luxurious levels of health care. Dick Cheney, for example, was able to buy a heart for himself.

Further, Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally among people, so no two people are identical and no two groups of people are equal. Combined with the scarcity problem, it means there will be an unequal distribution of benefits between people and also groups of people. Even more important, the more diverse your society, the less equal the outcomes appear. The reason is there are lots of people with a grievance for not being in the top group of society.

The way to think of it is this. In 1950’s America, blacks were a little more than 10% of the population, while whites were a little less than 90%. There was a small percentage of Asians and other. In a world where 10% of the population has a racial grievance, most of the rest can safely ignore the complaints. In a majority-minority society, the majority always has a beef with the minority group at the top, so that minority group must always be on guard against the majority.

This is why the arguments in favor of natural rights or equal opportunity sound increasingly ridiculous to people who live in the world. To conservatives they make perfect sense, because their income depends upon maintaining these fictions. To the diversity warriors, these arguments are confirmation that they have the morally superior argument and therefore they are justified in pushing even harder. The conservative case for diversity is exactly what it claims.

Instead of letting nature take its course, the Marxists imagined an administrative state making the distributive choices. It was this managerial layer that would determine “according to his needs” issue. The diversity warriors have assumed control of the managerial state and the corresponding administrative state. They are now proceeding to remedy the equality problem. From each race according to their abilities, to each race according to their needs.

Of course, this has no better chance of working than Marxism. Unlike communism, however, this new egalitarian drive will not just make people poorer. It will unleash the passions of cultural differences that cannot be remedied. These differences are the product of thousands of years of separation. This is ultimately the conservative case for diversity. It promises to unleash 10,000 years of evolutionary differences within the confines of Western societies.

This is what makes American conservatism so evil. It is the sugary drink in which the poison of egalitarianism is dosed to society. The diversity warriors believe they are on the side of angels, while the so-called conservative know otherwise, but they choose to cash in on the madness. The simpleton who wrote that NRO piece is too dumb to get this, but his handlers surely know better. Yet, they volunteer to be the willing accomplices to the executioners of Western civilization.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.