Satan hides in our own eyes

Mar 11th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
1 comment

ukraine_riot_flames

Wherever I wander, there is always Satan, lurking in doorways and the shadows of obese people.

I am told by people who have degrees than I have toes that he is everywhere, in varied forms. Global warming. Inequality. Racism. Terrorism. Intolerance. The 1%. Haters.

No matter how far I wander, he is there. In a desolate and lonely field miles from civilization, the Coca-Cola can. The dumped 55 gallon barrel of who-knows-what. A skull, empty and sightless through the third eye opened in its forehead by a bullet hole.

Even those who are highly scientific know Satan and proclaim his works daily. We would be enlightened, except for the Koch brothers anti-climate change agenda. People deny the obvious cost benefit of a broad pool of payers, which reduces costs to the mean. People are just ignorant, and motivated by hate.

I have also run into those who claim inspiration by a literal Satan. Almost all of these have a simple message: society is lies designed to chain the strong for the benefit of the weak; deny these lies, which requires being a total pariah and stepping outside the bounds of normalcy.

And I, useless to the bone, ponder. Measure twice, cut once. But when the measurement is so abstract and yet so earthy at once, twice is an eternity. I continue to think as the stars coat the sky in glittering light.

On reflection, it seems to me that Satan is dead and always has been. He may have been a rebel angel, once, but now he’s a shut-in lurking in the depths of Hell, probably eating TV dinners and cursing at re-runs on a tiny television screen.

However, evil is with us. But the first illusion of evil is that it exists. That is to say: almost no one — barring a few mental cases — intends to do evil. Evil is a byproduct of them doing what is convenient for themselves by ignoring what is necessary for the whole.

For example, I sure would like five grand without taxes. I am fairly certain that if I go to the right (wrong) parts of town, nose around a bit, and meet the right people, I can get five thousand dollars a night for dumping toxic waste out in the country. They’ll give me a truck, half the cash up front, a warning and send me off. I could retire in a couple years doing this, and there’s almost no chance of getting caught.

If I were to ignore the fact that dumping toxic waste results in a great evil, which is a toxicity of earth and a blaspheming of the gift of nature and life itself, then I could partake of this easy cash. This is a black-and-white line, which it itself a Satanic opinion according to many people: you either ignore the whole for personal convenience, or you don’t.

It reminds me of the old joke. A man sees a pretty woman and asks her out, but she turns him down. Fortified with liquid courage, he returns and asks her if she’ll sleep with him for a hundred dollars. Indignantly, she says no. He then sheepishly admits that he’s very wealthy and wants to take her to the Seychelles for a vacation, fine food, wine and luxury, but he can only do it if she goes as his girlfriend. She agrees. He then says, “Well, now we know you’re a whore… and we’re just negotiating on price.”

It’s the same way with humanity. We are either whores to our own convenience, or not. The results of being a whore to our own convenience is like the result of whoredom in general, which is social breakdown and long-term effects that will destroy the health, hope and happiness of our descendants. We can blame Satan for it, sure. And most people will. But Satan is deaf, dumb and blind to these things.

Our great evil — the Satan that follows us like a nagging doubt — is our own illusion and the bad choices we make. It is not Satan who marks up our cities with graffiti. It is not wealth that makes people greedy and horrible. It is people acting for their own convenience at the expense of long-term consequences, which can only be expressed as ideas and are thus intangible.

Tell me, what is the value of children playing in innocence on a broad summer day in a beautiful and healthy world, where they can expect a social order that rewards the good and smites the bad? Contrast this to children playing in the filth of the third world, in a dysfunctional social order, where their future is blighted by toxic diseases and corruption. Those are your two choices. You either act for the bigger idea, or you give in to your personal Satan and condemn your society to third-world squalor.

Posted in: Ontology.
Tagged: · · · · ·

The pervasive insanity of modernity

Mar 10th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

horizon_on_fire

Imagine that you are explaining — and this always verges on justifying when faced with a questioning audience — modern society to a child.

You would gently mention how over two centuries ago, people decided that government was to blame. Thus they embarked on a reign of terror where they pulled whole families out of bed in the night and dragged them off to show trials and bloody public executions while crowds cheered. Then the same group of people spread war across Europe, expanding recklessly before being eventually driven back at great cost in lives, time and destruction.

How could this be? the child might ask. Because, as a child will note but a properly socially chastised adult will not, it sounds insane. And we celebrate it to this day as the beginnings of freedom and wisdom.

The problem with insanity cannot be explained by the young or middle-aged, but it is clearer to the old. They view it as a kind of contagion, something one works carefully to avoid because it always present, lurking in the dark corners of the rooms along with all the other germs, parasites and terrors we wish to avoid. An older and wiser person might observe that once you are forced to accept one insane idea as sane, you will find yourself looking for more insane ideas to declare insane and adopt. It’s the Stockholm syndrome, on a mental level; in order to survive with the first insane idea you must declare insanity normal and seek it out to prove to yourself that this condition is actually so.

Ever since the French Revolution, we have been trying to find ways to explain those events to ourselves as something good, when in fact they were the opening of an abyss. We try to find in them a principle we can support, in order to hide the principle we fear we detect in them. We hope to hide away our doubt behind emotion. And yet, we return to concerns: is mass murder really good? What about the fanatical war, that was almost identical to the events of WWI and WWII, which really slaughtered us? Killing children, and whole families, almost like The Holocaust. None of these things are good, yet we’re supposed to overlook that and welcome our new liberal overlords.

We are told that liberalism brought good reforms. It overthrew the monarchy, which we are taught to believe was oppressive and inept. It abolished slavery, which is considered the ultimate evil in our modern time. And it introduced a series of issues that are familiar to us today because our society is still beating the tin drum of these ideological imperatives: equality, women’s rights, end to social hierarchy, freedom, and a lack of social distinctions and exclusivity. But all of these reforms are from the perspective of the individual who wants zero restrictions on his person or desires. These are revolutionary reforms of license, meaning they remove from us social standards of behavior and reverse civilization itself, so that we as individuals can indulge our baser natures.

Since then, every movement and thinker (with a few exceptions) has followed the revolutionary template. Declare centralized order bad; demand people power; remove rules and thus open new areas for exploitation by social, economic and political forces. Following this template guarantees new territory is carved out of the carcass of the dying old order, and personal profit and fame to those who rush into the breach. It is again license, or personal benefit at the expense not of others directly, but of the social order that all depend upon. With each revolution, society dies a bit further and the general state of social order, hygiene, honesty, leadership, and public services declines toward the third-world level which announces the termination of society as an autonomous agency for all practical purposes.

And yet we keep on doing it because we have been taught that insanity is sanity and that mass murder and destruction of civilization are good if you have good intentions. Further we’ve been taught that good intentions are measured through others and that what is popular is right. Finally we are steeped in propaganda, most of which spread by the free will of others, that anything other than the revolutionary ideal is hatred, murder, destruction and primitivism — in short, all the things that the revolution is in itself.

Recently a movement cropped up calling itself the “Dark Enlightenment.” It has a simple core idea: the Cathedral, or centralized order, has demanded a false elite be created through political correctness. Thus the correct idea is to overthrow this false elite and replace it with people power. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the same old Revolutionary jive dressed up as a new enlightenment, which is why the movement is stagnating. The Dark Enlightenment, for all its posturing, is still a liberal notion, just like white nationalism is a liberal notion, and at this point, most new right and third front ideas are as well. It takes vast mental work and bravery to escape from the paradigm of our time because it is so pervasive and ingrained that it seems as natural as breathing.

In the “Dark Enlightenment” lexicon, the opposite of the Cathedral is the bazaar. Where the Cathedral is based upon idealized collective issues forced into consensus and acted on by institutions, in other words a classic top-down arrangement, the bazaar is bottom-up and non-organized. It is what happens when people get together and do what makes sense to them without deference to the elites. It sounds good until you realize that a similar justification was offered for the French Revolution.

I propose a more radical idea: the Cathedral is the result of the bazaar. In fact, the distinction between the two is nonsense. With the aristocracy, we put the best people in power and it was only because of their gentleness that they were overthrown. With the bazaar, we let individuals choose what they “think” is right, a term they conveniently interpret as meaning whatever they want to believe is true. Thus the bazaar always chooses insanity, and chooses leaders who are either insane, or who know how to manipulate the insanity and thus are heartless sociopaths who care not a whit what happens to their people.

Over and over, the cycle repeats. Our first step is to get outside of it, but we can’t do that by simply declaring war on it and demonizing it. We must actually think in an entirely different way, not a new way or an old way, but a logical way. This logic is different however in that instead of focusing, like ideology, on only one axis at a time (freedom/oppression), it must focus on the whole picture. How beautiful is your life? How elegant are your cities? How honest, alert, thoughtful, and genuine are your fellow citizens? What about your time — is it spent on meaningful things? Do you sense that your society as a whole is rising toward being a better version of itself, raising all of us with it?

For too long we have ignored common sense. The Revolution was murder, theft and cruelty disguised as crowd-pleasing platitudes like “freedom” and “equality,” which mean nothing outside of their ideological context. Our daily lives went from elegant and purposeful to pointless and appearance-driven. Even worse, we made insanity into a form of logic and have been applying it to problems ever since, which explains why they increase and we do not. The Dark Enlightenment is the latest dogma to fall into the comforting lull of this lifestyle, and it will not be the last. But for those who love life, and want to glorify it with a rising society and not more of the same, another way must be found.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · · ·

Vacation

Feb 24th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
38 comments

pelican

I’m on vacation for the next couple weeks, maybe more if time is needed. I relish interactions with the thoughtful people who post comments here, but I’m not sure I’m reaching enough of an audience through this method. Thus it may be time to take advantage of this vacation and see whether a void is created.

I hope you guys have a great vacation, too.

Posted in: Meta.

Civilizational compact versus social contract

Feb 22nd, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
7 comments

northern_lights

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
— F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The concept of society as a “social contract” will not strike anyone as a new idea. However, I posit that what we mean by social contract is in fact something different: the civilizational compact.

A social contract is an agreement between two or more parties for an exchange of duties. It is thus limited and finite, and reflects a transactional outlook which is by its nature adversarial.

A civilizational compact on the other hand is an agreement between parties to be bound to the idea of civilization. It is not a transaction so much as a collaboration, and it is not limited in time or scope. It is an agreement in perpetuity not to deliver specific things, but to make all things we do work toward the agreed-up goal.

The social contract takes a simple form. The first party gives X and receives Y; the second party gives A and receives B. But it does not address the boundaries of that exchange, such as the need to in all actions uphold the idea of civilization itself.

If life has taught us anything, it is that defining rules and transactions addresses only a subset of what must be done. We need a broader focus, like an agreement to create civilization itself.

When analyzed in this way, the social contract stands revealed as a begging-the-question fallacy. It assumes civilization exists and then, in the terms of civilization, states a contractual relationship. In doing so it opens the door to decay by not first and foremost insisting on a collaborative approach to keeping civilization itself alive.

The nature of contracts is such that over time they progress from broad interpretations to narrower ones. Our social contract has been whittled down from decorum, sensibility, sanity, grace and wisdom to a series of simple acts with no consideration of their impact. Go to job, pay taxes, don’t murder/rape/steal anything big and you’re OK.

Over the years we have reduced our view of society from participation in an ongoing effort to wrest civilization out of the chaos of nature, to a simple exchange where we each get what we think we want, and no one is responsible for the direction as a whole. Civilizational collapse? Genetic decline? Pollution? Ugly cities? Not my job, man. Ask at the union.

Salvation may come when we stop conceptualizing our role as a contract that works within a framework we already have, to seeing that this framework has collapsed. Thus we need to rebuild it. Thus we need a stronger accord than a transaction. We need (again) a civilizational compact.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · ·

The isolation of comfort

Feb 21st, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

comfort_of_isolation

Once upon a time, many years ago, one of our ancestors perched on a rock face above a verdant valley. He found his thoughts revolving around a simple question. As someone of healthy natural instinct, he loved life, but found it blighted by things like death, disease, and discomfort. How to fix those?

Several thousand years later, his descendants enjoy great victories in those three areas. Death by old age still stalks us, and some diseases are not vanquished, but for the most part, things like parasites and epidemics are things of the past. The greater killers of youth and adult alike have been driven away. Discomfort is no longer much of an issue either, thanks to soap, hot water, quality nutrition and modern housing. There isn’t much to complain about.

And herein is a fatal threat.

When nothing exists that people can strive for, they strive for themselves. This is usually interpreted in a social context, and produces people who want to be iconoclastic. They see only two options, where a real iconoclast sees three: you can be with the herd, against the herd, or take a path which is oblivious to the herd. Being against the herd has the problem of replicating what the herd does but in inverse, which means in the next generation, when people rebel against that, they replicate the herd. However it is the only option all but a few truly independent thinkers can see.

Thus you have a culture of anti. People who are comfortable because of America will hate America. People who are disease-free because Europe will hate Europe. People who face low risk of untimely death owing to their heritage will in turn hate that heritage. When society is a directionless herd, the only way to stand out is to turn on the herd itself.

Like most adult complexes, this situation is no different than its juvenile counterpart. If you watch young kids, you will see them seek to differentiate themselves. If everyone else puts their pants on their legs, there’s going to be a group of people who put their pants on their heads in order to make themselves distinctive. It is a quest to be noticed so that one has social power. It is also the civilizational equivalent of cancer that produces a phenomenon known as Crowdism, of which liberalism is one adaptation.

One reason that civilizations may cultivate enemies and have frequent wars is to keep their citizens from lapsing into total complacency and thus anti-culture. There is nothing like a fresh raft of body bags to issue that wake-up call; nothing like coffee in a trench, or the stench of death in the morning to re-awaken a sense of purpose. But even these fail, as eventually nations get rich enough to never directly fight wars, employing mercenaries and political manipulation instead.

The persistent enemy of civilizations is not ignorance but oblivion. People, locked into their individual perspectives, miss the broader picture. They fail to understand that most of this world is error and that almost all of it is hostile to comfort. It is only when a group of people labor for centuries to develop social order and technology that a small pocket of sanity, comfort and health is created. And this pocket is fragile, and is easily destroyed when people who are unaware of the struggle required to maintain it decide instead to spend their time being iconoclastic.

Religion was invented in part to discipline the most inner parts of human beings, the personality and soul. The primary technique of religion is sacralization, or returning a sense of finding the magic in life and a belief in more than is immediate, such as long-term good consequences being possible, the everyday deeds of people mattering, and there being a point to it all in that we may choose good (the minority) over evil, error and stupidity (the majority and default state of nature). When not disciplined in the soul, people become vain, pretentious and self-justifying — all forms of what the Greeks called hubris — and justify these with “dissatisfaction” and iconoclasm.

Spoiled children of the West, think hard on this point. What you have is rare. What wants to share it with you is everyone else, because their ancestors did not labor for this. What happens when you become iconoclastic is not that these others rise to your level, but that you fall to theirs. The tiny pocket of sanity is eliminated and replaced by the same old craziness. We cannot save the world; however, there is still time to save ourselves.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: · · · · · ·

Trashers

Feb 20th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
7 comments

abandoned_bridge_to_forgotten_wisdom

The Old Religions tell us that there is only one concern in the running of a civilization: how good your people are. If the people are good, moral standards are high and leadership is good, and the nation not only prospers but holds itself forth as sacred ground, and its citizens have a deep inner satisfaction.

In contrast there are others who teach us that method is all and that goodness has nothing to do with it. Write the correct laws, make the right public statements, and all will be fine, they say. But I suspect that underneath this amazing sales-job their actual motivation is different. It is a desire to enjoy the fruits of civilization without the commitment required.

The problem people face is that civilization is a contract to certain behaviors. Unlike most contracts, it’s not a matter of “do x by y date to z degree,” but a question of an ongoing assessment of end results. Every action we take must be a moral action. Every action must be analyzed. Nothing can escape. Or, small cracks emerge, and then widen themselves. This is why ancient civilizations were so “religious” and also vigilant. Good people make good civilizations. When bad is permitted to exist, good people lose heart, and civilization begins its slow but inexorable decline.

There are those who desire that decline happen. The reason for this is that morality is like surface tension. Once it is broken, it no longer holds. If you’re in a group of ten people, and one person starts getting away with acting in a bad way and facing no punishment, others will follow. The reason is simple economics: morality requires effort, a form o expense. Eliminate that expense and you have a higher margin, even if only more time for yourself and more ability to focus on your own thoughts, desires, whims, judgments, emotions, wishes and feelings.

The destroyers want to (1) do something bad and (2) not be punished for it so that (3) moral rules are suspended, and all are given license to do whatever they want. This may be having an affair with the neighbor, drinking more than is wise, stealing land from a nearby farmer, murdering a long time enemy, being able to take drugs alone, perversity or fetishes (which invariably recap some personal tragedy in inverse), or even just the most common evil, which is the pursuit of power in order to make the ego feel better about that which it can’t control. Like the fetishes, this usually relates to a personal tragedy in the past that would take a lot of work to overcome. It is easier to assume license and pursue a palliative vicarious substitute instead of fixing the problem.

Crowdism is the name given to this impetus. When one radical individualist decides he wants license to escape the moral code, which is essentially a prediction about what will or will not destroy civilization, that person bonds together with others and encourages them toward a radical proposal. If they mutually support each other in their demand for the benefits of civilization without the obligations, then they can achieve a group that holds the rest captive with passive-aggression. Their demand is this: we will form of a throng who will march on you, and you will be forced to either accept us or kill us, and then you will look bad for destroying the unarmed, defenseless and innocent. This is the passive aggressive origin of all protest philosophies, including pacifism, and it reflects a great sickness, which is the use of guilt through the appearance but not actuality of wrongdoing to control others so that license can be the rule.

The West has since the “Enlightenment” (a dubious sales job that name conveys) been in the grips of this mob. First they stormed the Bastille, then they took over Europe, and finally they tore down the USA in 1968. Since then, few dare oppose them, because to oppose them is not to have appearance on your side. Those who desire license always do so under the banners of freedom, equality, pity and inclusion. They will always style you as the fascist, the inegalitarian and the cruel. Thus to oppose them is to sign up for instantly being mobbed with people who will call you every horrible name and egg others on until the mob attacks you. That is the nature of mobs; they are groups of cowards who need each other’s permission to attack.

Currently, the mobs are raging in two places, Venezuela and Ukraine. In both cases they are claiming the same thing: government is oppression, and people power is good. In both cases, there are no good people involved. The government probably sucks, but this is because the people in the nation are morally unconcerned with doing the right thing, so picked government by convenience as if they were cheering on a football team. In Venezuela, the government was clearly bad in the way that all Communist states are, but what will replace it is a bazaar with even more decay on its side. In Ukraine, the government is clearly motivated for its own profit, but the crowds are demanding something even less reasonable. The result is idiots murdering idiots with no conception of why, and only a vague reason — an impulse toward anarchy out of selfish desire for license — that drives them to increasing levels of disorder.

The destroyers love disorder. Society is order; we’ll be iconoclastic and pick the opposite. Society likes morality; we’ll make a new morality where everything is OK. Their goal is to un-do the surface tension of morality that holds society together so their individual egos, which have absolutely zero idea what they want out of life, can be unconstrained. The problem with this is that it’s like the farmer who can’t cut down a tree and blames his axe without cause. These people are lost, morally adrift and without purpose, and since fixing that mess is difficult, they’ve opted for the path of least resistance and blamed external forces instead.

In Ukraine we are seeing a sad re-enactment of the past. Few now remember the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The United States and Europe funded a series of radio broadcasts on Radio Free Europe and other outlets which encouraged the Hungarians to demand “freedom.” More encouragingly, these broadcasts implied that Western aid or perhaps Western armies would be coming. The Hungarians were under Russian rule which was terrible government by its very nature, but there was no plan for what would replace it other than the usual feel-good platitudes. As a result, they were not joined by the majority of the population. As Russian tanks rolled in, the Western politicians realized this could become WWIII and backed down. The revolutionaries were defeated and many were killed after they were identified. Hundreds of thousands had to flee the country. The promises on the radio were lies.

In the same way, the Ukraine protests is based on a lie. One side wants to join the wealthy EU, despite it being ethnically different from the Slavic Ukranian people, which is what the other side recognizes when it wants them to join the Russians where Ukraine will again be assimilated into the Eurasian empire. In the meantime, like the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the Ukranians are fighting back by trashing the place. They are burning cars, piling trash, ruining beauty and acting passive aggressively. They are the trashers who destroy order so that license may rule. And for now, they are cloaking themselves behind promises of equality, freedom and justice, as all good con-men do.

But the promises from both sides are lies. The armies will not come. What the EU agitators hope will happen is that “people power” will depose the government and weaken ties to Russia. The people are blinded and delusional with idealistic dreams of things they don’t understand. In the end, no matter who “wins,” no one will win except the process of decay. And in that, the destroyers will triumph.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · · · · · ·

Against the Fouad Boutros Highway in Lebanon

Feb 20th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

ashrafieh-beirut-lebanon

The Association for the Preservation of Lebanese Heritage opposes the proposed Fouad Boutros Highway that would divide and expose a corner of Lebanon known for its serenity.

Like most things modern, this project seems to exhibit a pathological need to disrupt anything that is not already blighted with the same noise, pollution, crowding and manic disorganization as everything else.

The APLH statement is below:

The proposed Fouad Boutros Highway will not reduce traffic. Instead, it will redirect the traffic from Karantina into the ABC tunnel.

This change will both overburden the ABC tunnel with more traffic than it can handle and choke Ashrafieh with more exhaust and noise pollution.

The civil coalition of which APLH is part promposes the Fouad Boutros Park as an alternative. This plan will avoid vandalizing Ashrafieh with noise and pollution, and instead will:

  1. Cost much less.
  2. Boost tourism in Ashrafieh heritage neighborhoods
  3. Keep traffic and pollution away from Ashrafieh
  4. Increase greenery in the heart of Ashrafieh
  5. Keep small businesses unharmed by the highway
  6. Preserve the last heritage buildings in Ashrafieh
  7. and allow their restoration with the budget surplus

If we keep fighting traffic with more highways, all of Lebanon will suffocate under asphalt. Already we see the consquences of too much asphalt: winter has not showed up for the first time in decades, perhaps centuries; there is not enough natural growth to provoke water evaporation, condensation and precipitation (rain).

The DESERT is only a few paces away, and the more asphalt we create, the faster we DESERTIFY Lebanon. Act now. Yes to nature and heritage, NO to useless highways which will pollute Lebanese neighborhoods.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

Rationalism is the death of realism

Feb 18th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

climbing_the_mountain

Conservatism is like a mountain peak rising above the clouds. The light glints on it and we realize, surrounded by the ruins of the delusions of our fellow citizens, that conservatism gives us an option to certain failure. But we do not yet understand it.

As a non-ideological viewpoint, Conservatism needs a different form of study to be understood. Liberalism and ideology reward the memorization of talking points and arguments; conservatism requires an understanding more like biology or mechanics. Liberalism teaches thoughts, conservatism teaches how something works.

Conservatism will always suffer a disadvantage to liberalism because liberalism is at its core a very simple ideal. Despite people my whole life telling me how “complex” liberalism is, I find no complexity in it. It is the idea of egalitarianism and the mechanisms required to make that happen, and to make it appear as if it should happen. It is more a study in salesmanship than ideas.

On the other hand, conservatism is like that mountain peak. You already know the shape of the mountain upon having glimpsed the peak, because the peak recapitulates the shape of the mountain. A mountain is a natural phenomenon and thus cannot be understood in isolation, however, because it is interconnected with all else in the way of the organic. Thus a background in the philosophy surrounding the mountain is needed, while the mountain itself is grasped immediately.

As part of that philosophical background, this blog periodically attacks the — wait, are you asleep? wake up please — less tangible and immediate topics. Sitting through theory about how reality is put together may not be your bag, and that’s understandable, but it’s useful for putting conservatism into context. Some of our favorite targets are the thing-in-itself, the many notions of materialism, deconstruction and rationalism. Today we attack the latter.

This definition of rationalism perhaps works the best:

a view that reason and experience rather than the nonrational are the fundamental criteria in the solution of problems

Reason and experience will answer everything, we are told. And yet those things are ill defined. Who benefits from vague definitions? Those who want to manipulate them. In this case, “reason” has come to mean a prototypical force for deconstruction. It is yet another way of projecting human needs upon the world.

For example, reason tends to phrase questions in discrete and or binary ways. Is the house red, yes or no? In reality, the house is painted a shade of red, which means the whole thing isn’t red. It has degrees of red on the areas that are painted. It may even have some walls that are another color.

This becomes important when we reach questions such as “free will.” Do we have free will? That’s a yes/no question when really we should be talking about degrees of choice. Some people can make wider ranges of choice than others. They do not need perfect free will, only the ability to pick better over worse.

Rationalism encourages this kind of deconstruction, but also urges us to use justification. When asked for the reasons why we do things, we are forced to put our actions into reason form. This requires a justification, or an explanation relying on values the audience recognizes already. It does not actually explain why we think we did what we did, only how we use social logic to explain why we should have or could have.

Most people can’t handle even a fraction of this, and it’s cut short here, because it is both abstract and assaults one of the underlying notions to our society. It’s sensible to believe logic can help us. However, “reason” is “human reason,” or a projection of human needs onto the data, when we should do it the other way around and adapt as humans to what the data indicates is true.

Posted in: Ontology.
Tagged: · · · ·

Science defeats liberalism

Feb 16th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
5 comments

Pity circa 1795 by William Blake 1757-1827

“If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,” wrote William Blake in his Proverbs of Hell.

This proverb is widely misinterpreted as meaning that we can make a wise man out of a fool. That is not so; what it means is that a fool who tries new versions of the same foolish thing will eventually discover the truth of the thing he’s undertaking. It’s another way of saying we learn by error.

In 1789, with the French Revolution, the West formalized its enlightenment ideal: the human form comes before nature and God, and is the ultimate ideal.

Enacted into political form this notion becomes egalitarianism, or the insistence that all people are equal. A form of pacifism, egalitarianism exists to eliminate internal strife by making sure everyone is accepted everywhere.

This idea of equality is the foundation of liberalism and unites all liberal concepts into one. All people are equal; nature/God comes second.

But now something else must come second, or be politically controlled at least. That thing is science which, fumbling toward the light of truth, has uncovered some rather un-political/social facts.

Thus it’s not entirely odd — at this point in history’s cycle — to see an article entitled “The rise and rise of ‘neoracism’”:

New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.

This comes despite decades-long efforts to reverse attitudes that were used to justify the slave trade and the Nazi ideology.

This dovetails with what Amerika.org has been writing about for the past few years and what I have been writing about since 1997, which is that race is not a social construct, it’s a linguistic descriptor for a biological reality. See also The Race FAQ and The Nationalism FAQ.

But the fact is that science has recognized race with increasing frequency, and not just because genetics shows it. Race-targeted medicine is the opposite of what happened in Hitler’s camps; doctors are using it to improve survival rates among populations which do not respond well to a Euripid-normalized average. Race-targeted histories let people discover who their ancestors were. It’s likely we will find race useful in prescribing diet, lifestyle habits, and even educational path.

All of this is separate from the attack I make on diversity, which posits the following simple rule:

Diversity — of any type: ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic or other — increases internal division and distrust in a society, requiring greater degrees of institutional enforcement and thus ushering it into tyranny and internal collapse.

It doesn’t matter what the ingredients of diversity are. It’s the diversity itself that’s the problem. Even if it’s Swedish and Japanese, the mixed society is destined for fragmentation that will reduce it to tyranny, then collapse, and thus leave behind the shattered husk of a third world nation.

Our modus operandi for the past century has been to pretend that race doesn’t exist, thus pretend that diversity can work despite all historical evidence to the contrary, and thus to assume everything’s A-OK and we can continue shopping.

Not only has science taken a big fat swing at that illusion, but it has shattered another illusion, which is that our altruism is anything but a callow manipulative technique.

Most people would like to think that they and other people are fair in their dealings with others because of some inherent goodness, i.e. some form of altruism. In this new study, Fober and Smead suggest that the real reason people are fair with one another is because they fear being the victim of a spiteful action.

Spite, the researchers note, is the opposite of altruism—it’s when people cause something negative to happen to someone else, at their own expense. And it too, they add is a part of fairness, or at least in its perception.

In simple terms, egalitarianism arises from our desire to appease (or “buy off”) people who might be angry that we have more than they do.

It’s not an impulse of kindness, peace, love and happiness. It’s an impulse of fear. Similarly, the left’s paranoia about race is a form of fear, too. Fear that someone might be different and we might not all be on the same level.

Perhaps as Jonathan Haidt suggests, liberals and conservatives care about different things. Now we see the reasons behind why they care. One group wants to appease the herd, the other group to restrain its destructive impulse through values like loyalty, sacredness and authority.

As Blake said, even the fool will find truth if he keeps applying himself to the question. It’s worth closing with another epigram from Blake: “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.”

Posted in: Ontology.
Tagged: · · · · ·

Links list clean-up & media takeover

Feb 15th, 2014
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

swiss_countryside_small

Someone had mentioned that most of the blogs in the right-hand side list were defunct. While I hope that’s not true, it seemed that about a third were inactive.

I’ve pruned it a bit; it’s not personal, but I’d like it to be a reading list. My “loyalty list” is much longer and includes all of you. If you start publishing again, or even better want to write for Amerika as well, please just drop me a line.

In the meantime, the following is experimental:

***

In addition, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, moreso ruminating. I don’t drink alcohol, so it’s me with a mug of green tea and the pipe, smoking some mild tobacco as the sun sets and talking with my wife, who is more intelligent than I.

I was pondering recently the difference between the type of blogs I read and the stuff I see make it really big, with ten million people reading it. No, it’s not all tripe that gets successful because it tells comforting lies, although most of it has some of that. It’s simply clearer, simpler and indulges in two basic human needs: a need for control, and a need for identity.

Public conservative information like Drudge, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Fox News, Glen Beck, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan do not fall into the trap of blogs. Blogs by their nature are not doing the heavy lifting of reporting, but commenting on that reporting. As a result, they try to “add” something, which is usually either design flair or cerebral analysis.

I think those days are over. I am not saying to dumb the news down; rather, I’m saying that we of the new right, traditionalist, dark enlightenment, paleoconservative and crunchy conservative world — these terms are roughly conflatable differing only in degree, much like the different types of leftism — need to expand our message and put it in a form that people can use to cheer for the good guys. They need something they can rely on.

Our scheme so far has been to create a little alternate universe for ourselves where cerebral topics get discussed so that we can extend the argument to its logical conclusions, which point more to the hybrid of Nietzsche, Moses, Plato, Evola and volkisch philosophy that is the realist right.

I have a different idea: we should make what others have, but use it to enclose and include our ideas that do not “fit” in with what society creates. Instead of explaining ourselves in a cerebral fashion, we should adopt our ideas as a matter of attitude, and use them to create a prism through which to see all the news, not just our niche.

We are not a niche as in a basement jazz pianist who plays variations on the same six themes while drinking secondhand gin. We are a niche in that we are a viewpoint that is unique that can re-interpret all the news so that it makes sense, giving people’s need for control a place, and so that it weighs in the favor of the good guys, so that they have something to cheer for.

Our words are not just informative. They are a lifeline for people trapped in this Hell of modernity who need something to believe in, and whose hands itch to act even it for ten minutes of civilly disobedient flourish a day. We can expand our franchise by getting out of this niche we’ve dug for ourselves, and transitioning to a bigger, more aggressive version.

Posted in: Meta.
Tagged: · · · ·

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