The poor you will always have with you

Dec 2nd, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
2 comments

the_poor_will_always_be_with_you

When we were kids, we learned that there was an easy touchdown to justify any action. That touchdown was “for the poor.”

If you get caught lying, cheating or stealing, just make a donation to the local soup kitchen. If you wanted funding for your project, claim it helps end poverty. To get elected, declare a war on poverty. To get in the newspaper, donate your allowance to the poor.

It is like a catch-phrase in our society, an equivalent to religion. The poor. Who are “the poor”? No one knows. They are like sacred objects kept in a sanctuary so that we may feed them and by paying, thus purge our sins.

For most of my young adult life, I operated like a marionette under this assumption. If something was for the poor, it was automatically 100% good and thus needed supporting. If I got lost in an idea, all I had to do was bring it back to benefits for the poor. It won debates, essay contests, friends and the interests of “women” (really: girls pretending to be women, at that point).

As I went through the Satan-falling-from-heaven mental apocalypse of realizing the depth of lies on which the social assumptions underlying our failing society are based, I was able to open my eyes and see that poverty, instead of being an exceptional condition which afflicts some, is a perpetual condition which affects those who act a certain way.

A new soup kitchen opened up down the street from the office. At first, a few dozen; later, hundreds. We’d catch them injecting, smoking and drinking intoxicants in the parking lots and alleys. I asked the question of an innocent child: if they’re poor, how do they afford drugs, alcohol and cigarettes?

No one seemed to be able to answer. The hundreds grew even more numerous. Soon other services cropped up, including a government office to help them fill out benefits applications. A job bank appeared, but was less successful. And yet, I was told to believe that these people were afflicted by poverty like a disease or unexpected hurricane.

It was at that point that I realized the value of the poor. They are not valuable to themselves; in fact, they’re barely able to make sensible decisions (tonight on Poverty Choices, “Heroin or Housing?”). What they are is useful to the wealthy and those who want to become wealthy through government.

Suppose I want a half-million per year job. I can set up a non-profit whose aim is simple, say, to educate the poor in condom use. It will get grants in the millions from government and corporations who got caught lying, cheating and stealing. The best part is that by failing, I succeed. If there are more impoverished homeless people with AIDS after the program than before, I haven’t failed… I’ve just showed how great the need is. It’s not that my approach is futile, but that I’m battling poverty!

I learned to be careful with these observations (not opinions). The worst were women, who sensed a faux pas and immediately used it as a chance to climb socially. “Don’t listen to Brett, he’s a Neanderthal,” they’d say. “By the way, I’m volunteering at ‘Condoms for The Mentally Challenged Homeless’ this summer. Know anyone who needs an art history major?”

Equally bad were those of a species of man which I’ve come to recognize but not name. These men are experts in having sex. I’m not sure they even procreate, but they have lots of sex. They do it through flattery and being clean, inoffensive and flattering to women. They play into the narcissism of many women which convinces them that they are the center of the world. Such a man treats a woman like that, until he has what he wanted. Then he makes excuses.

It was only later that I heard the phrase “The poor you will always have with you.” Was that from Faulkner? I asked. No, the Bible, they said. I shrugged: even if you don’t “believe,” the Bible is a compilation of ancient wisdom. And nothing has changed about poverty since the early days of humanity.

Our conceit that poverty is an affliction is an example of rationalistic thinking. We see it as an exception to what we desire personally, thus assume that’s the case for everyone. In fact, poverty is something those who are not impoverished cannot understand. I don’t attempt to. I instead simply observe it, instead of rationalizing and deconstructing like they taught us to in college.

First, the quotation is true. Poverty has always been with us. In every civilization on earth. Regardless of type of government. It does occur in different ratios… some civilizations are mostly poor. In fact, most are. Which leads me to the next point: poverty is not an exception to the rule, it is the rule. It is the default state of humankind. If you do not create something, you have nothing.

Second, poverty is a mindset. “Poor people have poor ways,” they said in Texas back in a time when Hollywood sneered at such things on the big screen. And yet it’s true. Heroin or housing. The poor dish out money on cigarettes, booze, drugs, hookers, lottery tickets and festivals. They don’t spent it on home improvement, self-organization or skills.

Or do they? Some escape; they were meant to, obviously. Most don’t. But there’s aid for them, which encourages them not to escape. It helps the rich to see the poor. It makes the rich feel richer, and the not-quite-rich feel rich. Even more, it’s a great way to distract when you get caught lying, cheating and stealing. Give the poor some donuts. It’s not “let them eat cake,” it’s different, somehow. We’re sure of it.

Third and finally, poverty is its own cause. Capitalism doesn’t cause poverty, nor do the rich. Poverty is caused by the choices of the poor. It existed before capitalism and the rich. Poverty is in fact not caused by anything. It is the state of absence of a plan for having wealth or subsistence.

The “War on Poverty” of liberal democratic government fame is a giant smokescreen. Poverty cannot be ended. We will always have it with us. What we can do is give opportunity to those who are willing to abstain from short-term pleasures (drugs, sex, booze, cigarettes, lottery) and plan/work for the future instead. And that is where the biggest concealment is occurring.

In a saner society, we would realize that poverty can be addressed by offering opportunity. It cannot be cured nor can we lift all or most out of poverty. They are impoverished because their personalities and minds are not ready for anything more.

A better option for everyone would be to have people work less and work in more different capacities. We could hire people, one per stretch out roadway, to keep the road clean. They would still be poor, but less so, and have more pride. But then we couldn’t use them for our own purposes.

Posted in: Politics.
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Liberalism is an obsessive pursuit of vengeance

Nov 30th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

billy_mays_here

The hardest questions in life are the ones that cannot be derived from needs. Responding to a need for food, space or power is relatively simple; figuring out what to do with your life is not.

One of the things that makes leftism so insidious is that it re-styles such reactionary concerns as existential or moral questions by using passivity. If you don’t know what to do with your life, liberalism has an answer: fight oppression.

By recasting the non-reactionary question “What should I do with my life?” as a reactionary question, e.g. “What should I do if I’m being attacked?”, liberalism creates a begging-the-question fallacy. You’re supposed to assume attack is real and you are really a victim.

Nonetheless, it is popular because it gives meaning to life and creates a perpetual well of excuses for failure and non-performance. Liberalism is also addictive because it polarizes the world into an us-versus-them question without the Other having made a single move.

This exists primarily to unite the collective. Collectives are, paradoxically, composed of individuals acting individualistically. If you want no oversight over your life, yet want the benefits of civilization, you want socialization and no social standards.

Egalitarianism fits into this model because by insisting that people are equal, we stop the process of penalizing people for being wrong. Instead, it’s simply a lifestyle choice, because if it’s anything else, we’ve removed equality.

We make exceptions for the most grotesque violations of the collective itself. You can’t kill, rape, maim or murder. However, because equality forces us to make exceptions for those who do unequal things, we’re already on the path to relativism. And thus even many violations of the collective are excused because to not do so would do something worse than murder or rape, which is damage the psychological notion that unites the collective itself.

Although most of us think we can recognize snake oil salesmen, it’s amazing so few of us recognize this in liberals. They come to you claiming they alone will do good things, lift up the downtrodden, and protect the pitied. Yet, it’s clear this is a justification for their own power, much like a salesman justifies the cost of his product by claiming it has miracle abilities to clean your rug, make your windows shine or clean your disposal.

With these traits, leftism is the single most powerful motivational system in the world. Even more effective than heroin, it tells you that your faults don’t matter and that if you join in it, you will experience success beyond the material. It is essentially a religion, and it’s not surprising its adherents treat it as such. Being able to consider ourselves noble crusaders for a higher cause does more than make us feel good about life. It releases a tiny squirt of endorfins in the brain that makes us feel invulnerable and perfect. It’s basically like being on drugs, but better, and can’t be detected by the law.

Thus people drug themselves on good feelings and don’t really care about the consequences of their beliefs. The problem is that at some point, the addiction comes due: when the claimed oppressor or victimizer does something, it must be punished. Not for acting in self-interest, but for not being liberal/egalitarian. Its existence refutes the ideology of leftism and thus as an exception to the rule, it must be destroyed. This motivates people more than anything else because our nervous systems are designed to respond to threats — such as fears, sadness, terror and anger — before considering positive ideas or comforts.

Liberalism motivates people toward a type of action that can only be described as revenge. Already feeling victimized, as this explains their need for liberalism, they sense an attack from those who do not conform. Then, they style the Other as a victimizer, and feel that it is the source of all failures in their lives. It is too convenient a container for all that goes bad in life, much like early humans blamed demons or scapegoats for their misfortunes. Feeling victimized, they then resort to restyling that reactionary hatred as a form of positive forward-looking work in the form of “We’re removing the snakes and rats so there’s a brighter tomorrow!”

It’s not surprising the greatest killings have occurred under liberalism. The nature of liberalism lends itself to such revengeful, petty and murderous acts. But more important than the killings is the fact that liberalism redirects your society. It no longer thinks toward goals, only reactions and who to blame for them. At that point, positive evolution is over and the long slow spiral downward has begun.

Posted in: Politics.
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Jonathan Bowden New Right audio and video torrent

Nov 29th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
1 comment

jonathan_bowden-new_right-small

Jonathan Bowden was an essential member within the British nationalist scene, most prominently perhaps for his involvement in the British National Party; however his output extends far beyond party politics. An erudite orator, Bowden spoke on a variety of subjects with an aim at illuminating a far-right perspective with logical precision and spiritual fervor that simultaneously appeals to traditionalists and modernists alike.

It is our great pleasure to spread awareness of this partial compilation, featuring 2.45 GB of audio and video, with speeches and interviews concerning a variety of subjects.

Highlights:

  • Julius Evola: Traditionalism and Perennialism
  • Savitri Devi: Living Paganism
  • George Orwell: 1984 and Modern Totalitarianism
  • Friedrich Nietzsche: Moral Inequality
  • H.P. Lovecraft: Literary Horror and Romanticism

https://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/7218222/New_Right

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Why diversity can never work

Nov 28th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

diversity_creates_social_chaos

Our position on this blog and prior statements by our writers has been consistent since 1997: diversity doesn’t work.

This is different from dislike or fear of the elements of diversity, such as “I don’t like black people” or “I think Caucasians are inferior.” It is not a critique of a specific diversity, but diversity itself.

It applies uniformly to diversity of religious, ethnic/racial, cultural, linguistic and even caste distinctions. The rule is that the less variation you have in your society, the healthier and happier it is.

A society which is unified requires the fewest rules, police and government interventions. Culture is a superior method for enforcing values because it does not require enforcers. Ordinary citizens enforce it by ostracizing those who do not meet its standards.

Without that culture, which unifies vital measures as disparate as values system and identity and social pressures, only government can enforce standards. What inevitably results is a Nanny State that makes many rules, sets up lots of detail-fixated bureaucrats, and grows like a cancer, enriching itself.

The problem with diversity is that instead of culture, it chooses anti-culture, or the culture of having no culture. It’s an extension of the idea of freedom, which is that you don’t have any positive goals, but share a negative goal, which is agreeing to have no goals.

A person in a culture afflicted with diversity — known also by its synonyms internationalism, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism — faces an ugly choice: they can either join the culture of non-culture and give up on their own values, or they can retain their own values and be socially ostracized or treated as a stereotype.

Diversity always leads to the same thing. Society simultaneously widens its tolerance while demanding more government interference to enforce basic rules. This becomes too much, and soon third-world levels of criminality, corruption, low hygiene and disorder descend.

Look at most countries on earth. Most of them are of mixed race, culture and religion. Over time, this became an anti-culture which settled on the lowest common denominator, which means that no one has much in common. People just want to get rich and escape such societies. There is no actual joy.

Some time ago, Robert Putnam came out with a study that was so toxic to prevailing attitudes in academia that he has spent the years since it came out fighting for his career. In it, he revealed that diverse societies increase internal alienation and distrust:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

Incorporating different groups means we cannot have a common standard of behavior. This means that we cannot predict society’s response to what we do, and if someone is offended, we lose big.

That translates to “take your toys and go home.” For most people, society has become hostile. As a result, they retreat to gated communities and let the lack of social standards trash public spaces, public expectations, culture and morality.

Total freedom would mean a society with no rules. That means nothing is a crime. Even more, it is means that nothing is shunned. The guy dumping toxic waste in the river may just be expressing his freedom, and if enough other people agree with him, he’s free to do it.

Even more, without cultural standards, people have no identity. Identity helps explain to ourselves and others who we are and what values system we apply. “I don’t pollute, because I’m from this place and I love it,” is a value conveyed only by culture, not government.

Recently, new research came to light which shows the mechanism by which diversity dissolves community and replaces it with alienated, atomized individuals:

However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.

There are two contrasting forces here: the need for homogeneity of values in order to build a community, and the desire for diversity. The two work against each other. The more homogenous a community, the less diverse it is, and the more diverse a community is, the less it really is a community.

When communities break down, what is left is the atomized individual. This person cares for nothing other than their immediate wants and desires. They have zero interest in the society around them except as it will impact them through say, higher taxes or fewer entitlements.

As a result, your chance at having a higher society breaks down. What is left is a group of selfish people held together by an economy and a political system but nothing less. This group actively penalizes civic interest and any behavior except individualistic isolation.

This results in a condition of extreme individualism, or narcissism. In this state, we are incapable of forming bonds with each other. Friendship, romance and citizenship are all means to an end, and there is no faith or pride, thus no long-term thinking.

If you wonder why the greatest civilizations are no longer with us, this is what brought them down. Like the apathy that afflicts large corporations, the entropy of volunteer organizations over time, or the stagnation of a social group, diversity is death.

Posted in: Politics.
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The knockout game isn’t what you think it is

Nov 27th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

happy_turkey_day_turkeysPress and government are alike in that they act after the fact and tell us what to think about what happened. They aren’t there before the tragedy happens, because it isn’t news or a crime yet, technically. They live on the other side of that thin line.

You shouldn’t be surprised that they are late to the realization that “The Knockout Game” is a popular way to express racial antagonism in the USA. In this game, urban youths (usually black) sneak up on a passerby (usually white) and punch them unconscious.

The Knockout Game is part of something so old that it’s surprising these people don’t recognize it from their Bibles or history courses. In fact, it’s amazing that anyone does not see it. The Knockout Game is provocation and our response to it will determine our future.

It’s important first to take a note of race here on this blog. We don’t have opinions; we make predictions. One prediction, grounded in 6,000 years of history, is that diversity — of any form: ethnic, religious, cultural or caste — is non-functional and destroys civilizations as trying to make it work consumes them from within.

The important takeaway from our analysis of diversity is that the problem is not x group or y group, but diversity itself. Diversity destroys because it forces a removal of values systems so that different values systems can “tolerate” each other.

It also causes antagonism. Unless perfect equality is achieved, there’s always going to be tension between those at the top and those at the bottom. If that splits along racial lines, even if it’s perfectly fair, resentment will occur and will never go away.

Thus the Knockout Games of the world are invented to exploit this situation. The people with money and power fear the chaos possible in citizen revolt, and so they’re willing to buy off their underclasses with welfare, bread and circuses and so on.

The Knockout Game, like other forms of mau-mauing, then becomes a way to demand more from the people with money and power. It’s a way of saying that the existing benefits aren’t enough, so cough up more cash and maybe the beatings will not resume. However, this starts a cycle from which there is no escape.

The primary cause of this cycle is the nature of poverty itself. We like to describe it as a disease, but that’s social flattery. Poverty is caused by inability. In some cases, it’s intellectual; in others, it’s merely the time-honored saying being proven true: “Poor people have poor ways.”

Why is it that every ghetto on earth is the best place to find drugs, booze, hookers and card games? How is it that even the poorest seem to have money for cigarettes and lottery tickets? Or even televisions and video game consoles? Poverty results from poor life decisions more than anything else, with a tiny (1%) minority of poor people being the result of a temporary setback.

Even worse, poverty expands to fill the space allotted to it by society’s handouts. When society creates welfare, poor people are incentivized (as economists would say) to stay home and reproduce. The more mouths they have to feed, the more benefits. We make them into parasites to neutralize them.

If poverty is allowed to expand enough, which only happens in wealthy societies, it eventually leads to revolution. This is because of The Knockout Game: poor people are trained by such systems to keep making poor decisions, and then to keep rattling the cages for more cash. At some point, there isn’t more, usually because of a recession or war. Then there’s no choice but for the poor to back down and look weak, which they’ll never do, or push onward to full-blown revolution, at which point they have to invent a mythos of their own oppression to justify the orgy of theft, murder and destruction that inevitably follows.

We know The Knockout Game from international politics. The biggest player is North Korea. Any time they’re short of cash, they do something insane, usually involving nuclear weapons. The rich nations of the West show up and buy them off, in echoes of Neville Chamberlain, which helps the Norks feed their starving Communist masses for another season.

The Knockout Game is also being played in American politics. It’s a fascinating insight into who the actual target — the perceived rich and powerful — are. Obama’s decision to close embassy in Vatican is ‘slap in the face’ to Roman Catholics, say the headlines. But that’s the point. It’s the Knockout Game. He’s going to keep on slapping your face until you give in and buy him off. But if you buy him off, he’ll just demand more the next round.

Another article discusses the ugly synergy between liberal acts such as fake hate crimes reports, knockout games and the 50% of Greek HIV patients who have infected themselves in order to get government benefits. There’s a parasitism cycle here and it corresponds to the knockout game. Offer benefits; create resentment; then be forced to make even more buyouts to avoid revolution.

Humanity has faced this problem in all ages: what to do about the differences between the haves and have-nots. Leftists, who argue from the individual, think we should pay out if anyone has less than others; rightists, who argue from consequences, think we should set up some form of quasi-meritocratic system that exchanges reward for labor/risk. An even older point of view sees this as a moral issue.

In that view, to which I subscribe, it’s amoral to hand people things when they need to show some participation. The more we hand out, the more parasites we create. The less we encourage poor people to change their ways, the more they stay poor. This way each gets what he or she deserves, and none are penalized in order to appease others.

This viewpoint is entirely compatible with Darwinism. Evolution demands we set up standards and reward those who meet them, and do nothing for the rest. This is how nature slowly refines simple species into highly competent ones: it rewards competence and fails to reward incompetence or mediocrity.

If there’s a takeaway on The Knockout Game, it is that the game itself shows us who the targets are. Who’s rich and powerful in America? Not our media and financial elites, but our normal middle class white people. Why: we are the majority. We are presumed to be in control. But most importantly, we’re the ones who will actually foot the bill for more appeasement.

This isn’t changed from any other time in history. If you look at the upper half of the middle class, you see slim, attractive, healthy, athletic and intelligent people whose biology reflects their Norse-Germanic heritage. That’s the American majority, and it’s what most people on earth want to be. But there’s only one path there, which is through evolution.

Most of those who are wishfully wanting to take part realize that. They will not be able to be from this naturally-favored group. Their next response is to demand money from it, to try to control and dominate it, and when they bleed it dry, to destroy it.

This pattern plays itself out throughout history. The weaker masses envy the stronger and end up murdering them. Evolution is reversed, and the poor get even poorer, since the cash cow middle class has gone away. France, Russia, Latin America, Eastern Europe… what’s left afterwards is an impoverished warzone.

On this turkey day, when we give thanks for what we have, we should remember how to make the hardest decision, which is to not be turkeys. We should take a hard-line moral view and reward only those who contribute, and give nothing to the rest. Their threat of revolt will be empty if we never become their sugar daddies in the first place.

Posted in: Politics.
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How sending women to work scuttled our economy

Nov 24th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
23 comments

jobs_are_jailsThe right fears theory because it is accustomed to the arbitrary abstractions of clever people who work very hard to justify the herd-instinct and its source, the individualism that conceals a fear of insufficiency.

However pure theory is often the best way to argue, because unlike facts, it cannot remain “spun,” or adjusted by the context of its presentation from logic to a “talking point,” or verbal meme that resembles a logical argument but is in fact rhetoric.

To start thinking logically in that way is against all that you’re taught. Opinions are opinions, but facts are real. Except that fact is often buried within the presumption of a certain ideological spin, so facts aren’t even facts.

One area to which we should turn our brains is the ongoing instability of our economy. For most of the modern era, the economy has been unpredictable and sometimes, it turns on us. A factor in this unpredictability is our leadership and tendency toward social trends, but another looms larger.

When we started sending women to work, we began doubling our workforce. This is great in theory but for employers only. More workers devalues the cost of any one particular worker because there are more alternatives. But then the question is what type of job is filled.

Every business can separate its employees into two general categories. There are those who serve a role in the production of the goods or services that make the business money, and then there are those in administrative or bureaucratic roles.

For example, if my company makes widgets, the factory workers, engineers, truck drivers, managers and purchasers directly contribute to the widget-making. However, the people filing paperwork, paying salaries, processing employee complaints, and ensuring compliance do not.

That is not to say that some of those staff are necessary. However, with more regulations, we need more of them.

When women were placed into the workforce, most of them took jobs that were not already filled. A good portion of these were administrative; not coincidentally, this category has swelled dramatically in the last fifty years.

One reason a category swells is because it can since there are not only people who take those jobs, but people who will depend upon them. Thus it seems cheap at first to hire more, and then more.

If you wonder how we got to the point where most jobs involved four hours of actual work per week, and 36 hours of attending meetings, filling out inconsequential paperwork, reading email, being on conference calls, etc. this is the source: the jobs themselves aren’t important.

When women entered the workforce, we needed to find a way to hire all these new people who would need the income. We diluted job roles in order to make room. This in turn made jobs boring, except for people who enjoy the social aspects of the job, which are all of the non-work parts of the job.

By insisting on this universal participation, we’ve changed jobs from having purpose to being a process of attendance and compliance. Even further, this has diluted productivity. We have made most jobs or most of jobs fully extraneous.

The result is that industry moves more slowly, and has a higher cost in those jobs which are not related at all to the production of widgets. This is the new norm, and most people are afraid to criticize it.

Posted in: Politics.
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Why Crowdists hate classical culture

Nov 22nd, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
7 comments

classical_cultureSince politics is designed around people cheering for one team or the other, it actually represents a backward or rationalistic logical state: you figure out what team you want to be on, and then invent reasons why that’s fair.

If you wonder why the left’s only issue seems to be civil rights, and the right’s only issue seems to be the economy, you’ve noticed this process in action. However, a broader division exists which is between humanists and realists.

Realists care about consequences. They realize that throughout all of history, we have seen every type of approach to problem-solving attempted in some form, and thus we can reasonably predict outcomes based on the type of action undertaken. Thus we pick actions by outcomes.

Humanists care about humans. Or rather, defending humans against reality. In their view, society should compensate where reality is upsetting or inequal. This requires the creation of an Ideology to make us march in lock-step toward the same goal, so that we can use that power to protect others.

Like all complex things, humanism takes multiple forms. First, it is an individual pursuit, where the self decides it wants to experience positive results no matter what action it attempts. The individual wants no rules, no consequences and no standards. Nothing between the self and the exercise of its whims, in other words.

The second form of humanism occurs when all those individualists bond together into a group. They’ve figured out the humanist principle, which is that if we create a human-only reality and enforce it through our actions, we can pretend consequences don’t exist. At least for awhile.

Crowdism is what results from humanism when its two forms converge. It is a denial of reality, and a manic commitment to band together and deny reality and punish those who do not, at the same time. Crowdism can appear in rightist or leftist movements, but all of leftism is based upon it.

Classical culture is a subset of realism. However, instead of aiming toward acceptable results, it aims toward beauty. Its supposition is that nature is a divine order, a brilliant design and a perfect system — given that part of the design of reality is that perfection doesn’t exist in material form.

In classical culture, all elements are in balance and harmony, and so there is no good and evil in the modern sense where we hope to remove “bad” so that only “good” remains. Instead, evil is measured as a degree of illusory intent and denial of reality/divinity called hubris.

Where Crowdist cultures focus on the individual as perfect, and reality as bad, classical culture views reality as perfected and the individual as attempting to reach that level of discipline of his own thoughts, feelings and actions. This requires a masculine diligence to putting all things in the right place so harmony and balance are maintained. This diligence is called vir, related to our modern word “virtue.”

crowdism_a_society_of_equal_personsIn 1789, the West formalized its prole revolution. There would be no hierarchy; the least would be the greatest and all would live in “harmony.” This turned out to be lies, and we now see that the ancients put some people on top — nobles — for a reason. Their judgment was better.

With the serf revolutions of the last 250 years, the West has reversed its fortunes from accelerating greatness to a decline that will land us in a third-world state marked by high levels of corruption, filth, neglect and mental/moral stupor. If we want to reverse our reversal, we must restore our practice of classical culture.

This fact is not lost on Crowdists. They know that their mortal enemy is any and all of the aspects of traditional culture: vir, avoidance of hubris, nationalism, pride, honor, the family, ethnicity and values systems. They want to destroy all of this so only the individual remains.

Our ancestors made a fatal error in considering this outlook anything other than a mental disease that needs to be cured with more sleep, ego-restorative activities such as volunteering and learning, and if it remained, death or imprisonment.

Posted in: Politics.
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Another take on millennials

Nov 21st, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

individualism_in_millennial_generationDecline takes the soul of a nation, and with it, perverts every institution into self-serving profit centers for those in it. Thus it’s wise not to trust the press, except where some individual has the incentive and character to accidentally tell something truthful.

This excludes the everyday stuff that a robot could report on, like election results, disasters, technology and the economy. These are often a case of dueling press releases resulting in he-said she-said articles.

But when a really sublime issue appears, trust the press to scatter and then to return to the issue with profit in mind. Each writer will pick a target group, say something that this group will either find flattering or a viable excuse for their failings.

In the case of millennials, this divides our press into roughly two camps. One panders to older people who hate millennials, and want to hear nasty things about them; the other panders to millennials who are feeling bad about themselves, and says nice things.

Reality is as always more nuanced. Millennials reflect the 1970s changes in education that fully kicked into force in the 1980s, culminating in Political Correctness (PC). This is not about the economy they face, but about how their values systems are constructed.

Thus when we’re looking at what millennials are like, we’re looking right back into 1968, much as when we were looking at Generation X in 1992 we were looking straight back into the mid-1940s when earlier generations developed their theories.

Most people in the press seem to be in total denial of this salient fact.

What are millennials? A new theory: millennials are the most obedient generation. Raised on a Me-centric view like the Boomers, they have a strong sense of what they must do to maintain that radical individualism — which they will do at all costs.

They see Ideology as the means of preserving their individualism, and so they are obedient to what they were taught as ideological values in school. In their view, there is a values system that all smart people agree on, and to get ahead, one must obey it, thus they treat it as a religion and make themselves fanatics.

Millennials accept that smoking is bad and working out is good, that PC is truth, that working hard to get ahead is a duty you owe yourself and others, that society is making progress, that racism is the cause of all ills, and that every citizen deserves entitlements.

In short, all of what 1968 believed, and all of what Soviet propaganda said. At the core of this are social beliefs, such as that if you have something, you’re a bad person for not sharing it with others if they ask for it. These are crypto-Socialist ideals in kindergarten form.

Unlike Generation X, who saw the disaster coming and became dropouts on the sidelines, millennials have never grown up with a functional society or tradition. They have Ideology. It protects them and their ability to be individualistic, so they will defend it to the end.

That’s exactly what the 1968ers hoped to create: automaton zombies who cannot intellectually conceive of a world beyond Ideology. Thus whether we complain about or praise millennials, it’s important to realize whose handiwork they have become.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, by David Brooks

Nov 17th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
2 comments


BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Simon & Schuster, 284 pages, $11 (2000)

david_brooks-bobos_in_paradiseThe maturation of the “Me Generation” who brought us the shift to liberal-leaning regimes across the West received little coherent exposition before this book. However with BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, David Brooks explicates the rise of Bobos — “bourgeois bohemians” — as a fusion of 1960s values and 1980s methods.

In exploring this fusion, Brooks carefully and humorously reveals the underpinning of the ideological motivation of these people, which is 1968 itself — albeit tempered with a taste for what we hoped won the Cold War, which is the cornucopia of the fruits of personal liberty and free markets. the “bourgeois bohemians” are actually hybrids of yuppies and hippies.

This group appeared in the 1990s and that is where Brooks centers his book. In his view, they came to power as a replacement for the old WASP hierarchy in America. While that ancient regime operated by knowing the right people, and having the right family, this new regime accelerates those who have the right education, the right careers and the right beliefs and lifestyle choices. Brooks shows us a new elite trying to justify itself with claims that it morally deserves what it has.

As Brooks ably and humorously reveals, however, the downside of being in this new elite is inanity and pretense. Inanity, in that the trends they follow are even more boring than those of the WASP hierarchy before them. Pretense, in that the constant moral posturing by having to play nice with conspicuous consumption creates a useless, posturing and haughty lifestyle that is still just as product-oriented as the lives of the middle classes that its adherents disdain.

Bobos turn out to be the parsons of the pubic region. Nearly gone are 1960s traces of Dionysian wantonness. Instead, “Play Safe” and “Play Responsibly” are the slogans that are repeated again and again in sophisticated sex literature. The practicioners talk so much about how healthy it all is you’d think they were doing jumping jacks…Today’s Marquis de Sades don’t want to create an immoral underground society. They’re not trying to subvert normalcy. They’re trying to join it. They want to win mainstream acceptance and so gain a respectable place in the middle-class world. (192)

BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There is a personal favorite of mine because it demonstrates how the individualism of the leftism spectrum — Communism, progressivism, Socialism, anarchy and liberalism are different only as a matter of degree — quickly leads to the type of blind obedience we see in panicked crowds, faddish trends and lynch/witch-hunting mobs. This isn’t deliberate behavior, but defensive behavior designed to justify an inner selfishness arising from a total lack of purpose. Brooks hints at this through numerous satirical examples and tongue-in-cheek comments.

Parts of this read a lot like Tom Wolfe and Bret Easton Ellis fiction that notice in excruciating detail the products that people use to compose their lives. For American Psycho‘s Wall Street bankers, the products are luxury goods and high-performance tools; in BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, as in A Man in Full and Bonfire of the Vanities, products are passive-aggression defenses of lifestyle. They aren’t there to be used, but to explain a life. In the case of the Bobos, it’s how they are morally superior and therefore deserve what they have.

Conservatives should read this book because it reveals the nature of what opposes us. Liberalism is after all a social mentality that spreads by threatening people with ostracism. You join the club, and you’re accepted; you don’t need to do anything else. But even liberals hate a flat hierarchy, so soon the club fragments as we see in this book. The “bohemian bourgeois” movement is a postmodern keeping up with the Joneses, where you’re not so much conspicuously consuming as consuming specific things so that a narrative about your lifestyle is created. As a result, it’s more cryptic and twisted like a hipster conversation consisting of namedrops only.

In this spirit we sometimes even reintroduce the old WASP styles into our eclecticism. The WASPs may have been racist and elitist. They may have been the establishment that we Bobos destroyed. But at least they weren’t consumed by ambition. So when we look at those calm beautiful faces in the Ralph Lauren ads, we can’t help feeling that they have something we long for. And so mixed in with our multicultural decor may be an item or two that could have come right out of the New York Yacht Club, maybe a faded leather chair or a dark wooden desk. The WASP Establishment is dead, and irony of ironies, the Protestant Establishment has been transmogrified into one of those extinct cultures destroyed by technology and progress. (97)

Underneath the laughs, BOBOS in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There shows us a society in deep trouble. It has lost its direction, and is trying to fill that void with ideology and lifestyle choices that exhibit that ideology, like Sovietism modulated into a consumerist ideology. Much like the millennials, the “Me Generation” who adopted this philosophy show a radical individualism that consists not of a desire to achieve things oneself, but to be part of the winning social group. This suggests in turn a society so fragmented that it has turned on itself, and people are looking for some reason to justify shutting out the rest and ignoring the certain path to collective doom.

Witty, imaginative and insightful, Brooks’ writing bounces lightly through these otherwise crushingly heavy realizations. Instead, he chooses to help us laugh at the irony of the hippies and the Gordon Gekkos of the world merging into a single voice, attempting to fill the void of a lack of purpose with pretense and purchases, and finding the emptiness of that approach as everpresent as before.

Posted in: Books.
Tagged: ·

How change happens

Nov 13th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

path_through_autumnThe panic is thick in the air. Even our least perceptive citizens are realizing that something is vastly wrong in the West. The more perceptive ones have noticed that it’s a terminal disease, starting in way we approach life itself.

One comment response by your average person is, “Well, what do I do about this?” They like to emphasize the difference between theory and action. However, one must come before the other, or action is discoordinated flailing.

Worse, there will be many who see in the call to action a chance for power, and they will very carefully re-direct that energy from an effective use to a use that serves their own purposes. Whether that’s another agenda, or self-aggrandizement, probably doesn’t matter.

The answers these people seek will not comfort them. In a modern time, we are accustomed to the notion of group action. Either “we” all get together as a private institution, as a government action, or as a Revolution, and then “we” apply some uniform fix that like a factor mold stamps unruly chaos into orderly, uniform and equal products.

That’s a disaster for any approach except deconstruction. It’s part of the decay itself.

What we seek, if we’re thinking clearly, is first to think clearly. Mental clarity is a rare thing; most people right now have zero mental clarity and live through the symbols defined by others because it’s convenient. They don’t plan, or act; they re-act. As a result, they repeat the same old patterns without noticing or even intending to.

Thus our first stage is to achieve mental clarity. Calm the mind, stop choosing our options based on what’s available that other people are excited about, and start making choices. The more people who do this, the more a wave of sanity sweeps the nation, and the less people blindly accept whatever the hive and televisions are chattering away about this week.

Then our next stage is a restoration of values. Right now we have no values because our old values systems got saturated with people using them for their own aims. Individualism tears apart anything intended for all; it’s the tragedy of the commons.

Finally, once we’ve got those decided, we need to set up a common identifier for this new way of life and choose leaders. The point will be to show it to others as an option, or a choice, and to have enough of them elect to do it that it either takes over or breaks away.

What’s working against us here is that most people are completely crazy. They hear crazy on television, and crazy from their friends, to the point that they can’t even identify actual issues. They are oblivious to consequences of actions. They think purely in terms of what is socially popular, and they demand that, even if the mechanics behind it create worse results.

At this point, politics itself is a poisoned well and thus any movement for change will have to be cultural in nature. It will originate from outside the pre-fabricated options that are convenient for the power structure. When it rises in power, it will take over, and its first goal will be to disenfranchise the crazy, delusional and morally lazy.

None of that is very popular. It’s not as easy as “support Party B, and all will be OK.” Paradoxically, it does include some of supporting Party B. To gain consensus, you need to reach out to others who are thinking along similar lines; we call these conservatives.

It’s easy to lament the failings of a party or group and to then call them fake, declare yourself true and break away. But that’s doing the work of your enemies by fragmenting your own group instead of building consensus.

What lies ahead of us is not as easy as a choice on a form. It is a personal discipline, for mental clarity and values, and then the steady process of spreading those through hard work and bringing enough people to clarity to make a difference. History shows us this number is about 2-5%.

When that group is united on a goal, they can then agitate enough for it that ordinary people see it as an option, and all other options will either compete on the basis of what it offers or lose members. This is how social, cultural, political and even economic chane happens.

You may have hoped for a nice tidy answer about joining a new party, overthrowing what exists and starting with a blank slate. That’s emotional logic, not logic. We need instead to remake ourselves from the inside-out, and that’s a more painstaking process, but unlike the other method, it won’t result in us repeating the same mistakes again like the last dozen generations have.

Posted in: Politics.

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