The death within

Jun 19th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
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revolt_of_the_egotistical_peasantsIn 1789, a cancer was unleashed on the world. It is the notion that the individual is more important than anything else, even reality.

This mentality, called radical individualism, has a tendency to cause people to group together into gangs or mobs whose only goal is to make sure the individual comes first.

Since that time, our fortunes have steadily declined. Technology, which we were developing anyway, has accelerated. And yet we still work all the time and live in constant struggle.

This is the death within. Our brains are wired to look for evil attacking us from behind a bush, but when it comes from within, we don’t see it until it’s too late.

A good name for the death within is Crowdism because it is essentially a social disease. We socialize by making other people feel important, and when we do this in groups, we form mobs.

These mobs them demand utter destruction of anything but the individual. All culture, gender, common sense, heritage, and even any superior ability or wealth, must perish so that the individual reigns supreme.

At some point they even attack individuality itself, because those who have more personality are unfairly favored, and demand conformity to speech and thought codes so we can all be equal.

Every political movement since 1789 — civil rights, progressivism, liberalism, anarchism, leftism, communism, socialism, libertarianism — explodes out of this one thought, which is that the individual comes first before all else.

When you understand this, you see modernity for the farce it is. It isn’t a new idea; in fact, it’s the oldest idea because it was around before civilization. We escaped this “new idea” by forming civilization and working together to achieve things like hygiene and regular nutrition.

History is a process of humans slowly emerging from the primordial muck, interrupted only by one giant screwup in 1789 and the 224 years since in which we have failed to out-think the lie and thus relegate it to the dust-bin of human failure.

If humanity does not shrug off this illusion, it will self-destruct.

Here at Amerika, we retaliate with a few ideas:

  • There is no equality. Crush their primal taboo, which is the idea of no hierarchy. We all have different abilities and most importantly, moral character. Some are stronger than others.
  • Bring back the monarchy. We trust in institutions and lists of rules to make our leaders honest. It doesn’t work. Instead, pick honest leaders, or people who are ahead of the rest of us in moral character and leadership ability.
  • Social Darwinism is a friend. Stop saving people from themselves. Stop welfare, stop subsidies, stop warnings. We don’t need save people from themselves. Let natural selection work for us.
  • Focus on nature. Our cities and even suburbs are designed to hide nature away. Instead, make sure everything is surrounded by forest so that people always know primal fear, and transcendental beauty.

Crowdism will always be popular because it appeals to a weakness in all of us.

The Greeks called this weakness hubris, which means a certain type of arrogance where we assume our preferences outweigh the logic of the universe. It is a fatal flaw.

Humanity will either conquer this momentary bout of illusion, or we’ll walk right back down that evolutionary path and become monkeys again.

At least in that case, our gigantic egos will be tempered by our inability to speak, and thus to lie, about our motivations.

Posted in: Socialization.

Conversation with a postmodern hippie

Jun 17th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
11 comments

postmodern_hippiesSo I was in this city diner, flat-footed and with nothing to do while I waited for things to happen.

This guy came in and stood in the light. The shadow fell over all of us. I didn’t move. People who come in with violence are moving quickly. People who come in to pose always think that they’ll scare you by gestures.

He sat down next to me, which was the only place away from the really old guys in the joint, and ordered himself some greasy plate. I could smell the cigarettes and Nag Champa roll off him. It’s what they burn, the hip types, to hide the smell of what might be going on, or hide that nothing is.

With his hair falling in his face, he ate without making eye contact, but he kept watching us. It wasn’t the paranoid type of watch. It was like a kid poking his Dad. Feel that yet? How about that? Mad yet?

I suppose his costume was designed to provoke unfashionable outrage. He had shoes, of the nearly invisible sandal type. A broad cloth brightly colored shirt that screamed a paraphrase of Potemkin peasant life. Jeans, with obligatory holes positioned like jaunty eyes and smile. A necklace of beads that was cleaner than anything else on him.

To him, I must have looked like an old guy. Not in my 20s, not trying to pretend that I am either. Functional clothes. No cover story, no hip lines, no paraphernalia. A human being without justification and without concealment. In a word, boring. An easy target.

Having just completed several days of negotiation on a lengthy project that involved us installing one thing to please the client, and another to please the shareholders, then billing the latter as some kind of “upgrade” to the former, I knew the value of silence. Silence is gravity. Noise interrupts gravity, makes the world flutter around the listener, and they feel safe. It’s like camouflage, hiding in the brush. Silence means you don’t know where the predator is and whether or not it has a bead on you.

Finally he broke. Explosively, he said, “Pass the salt.” This was not a query. I gave him the old guy eye, then picked up the salt and put it gently next to him. “T’n'u,” he said so quickly I thought it was a foreign language.

“Yup,” I said.

Another couple beats.

“Does it bother you that I’m here?”

“Nope,” I said. “It bothers me that you’re wrong.”

“What, that my lifestyle is bad?”

“No, just that it leads not to what you think it will.”

“That I smoke a boatload of sinsemilla?”

“No, but that you think it matters.”

“What is it then, old man? That I believe things that make you seem old and waiting to die? That you’re stuck in the past, believing in ideas as stale as history itself?”

“Whoa now,” I said. “What ideas are those?”

He gave me a list, starting with corporations and ending with gay marriage.

“Don’t forget making pot illegal,” I said. “So what do you believe?”

He gave me a list, starting with civil rights and ending with gay marriage, and legal pot.

“Oh, those new ideas,” I said. “You mean like the ones that my parents talked about from the 1960s, right? 1968 in Europe, 1965 here. All hell broke loose. They told us those ideas were new then.”

“But you know,” I said, “Those ideas weren’t new then. Even in the 1930s, there were a lot of people who felt that way.” I told him about the Cambridge Five and how trendy it was to be an intellectual Socialist back then.

“Oh, and even before then,” I said. “Around the turn of the century, you had Bohemians and artists raging all over the Continent, being different. And anarchists in the 1920s. In 1917, they took over in Russia, and they wanted all those things you do.”

I laughed. “New ideas. Shit, those ideas ain’t even close to new. Try back in 1789, when the French Revolution happened. Liberty, egalite, fraternity. No borders. Women in uniform. Support the rainbow folk, and all that. And even then it wasn’t new.”

“They were gabbing about that crap back in the Enlightenment,” I said. “They didn’t take it as far, but they hinted they could. And even before then, back when Rome fell, it was very trendy to think those things. And in cosmopolitan Greece, before they fell off the radar, they wanted every one of those things too. And in Babylon. And ancient Angkor Wat.”

“All the same,” I continued. “Because these things aren’t ideas. They’re imprints in reverse. You took what a healthy society would have, you turned it inside out, you claim it’s new and that we should do it or we’re assholes, and now you think you’ve got something on me because you believe these ‘new’ ideas.”

“Let me tell you something,” I said. “I don’t resent you. I don’t pity you, because only assholes pity people. But I know you’re wrong. Not think, know. I read history, I know human beings have never changed, and people have tried every damn thing you’re doing right now, all before. All failed. How do I know? If it worked, shoot, we’d never hear the end of it. There’d be whole Bibles, and Aeneids, and Kalevalas and Mahabaratas dedicated to your new way of doing things.”

But there ain’t, the silence said.

“So you don’t hate me?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I wish I could give you what I know. Years of my life were wasted by lies of all kinds. Some lies were simple stupid ones, like ‘Buy a BMW and do a ream of cocaine, and you’ll feel like God!’ It doesn’t work that way. Others are just big lies, like the stuff they told you.”

“And look,” I said. “I was your age once. For me then ideas were conversation. Fashion. Flattery. A way to make girlies think I was more special than the other guys of average height and average prospects. Something to talk about, since we didn’t know spit about the real world and we couldn’t admit it but we knew that.”

He shrugged. “Way to make it personal, dude.”

“You’re mistaken,” I said. “It’s not personal. It’s about the universe, which is many things that it does not seem to be, and very few that it does, but it’s one thing above all else: consistent. It does the same thing each time you do the same thing.”

“This ain’t personal,” I said, getting up. “This is about one dude in a lonely existence passing on some knowledge to another. Forget me, I wasn’t even here. Remember what I said, because every bit of it cost me blood, guts, pain and tears.”

I left him with his hashbrowns and resentment. The other old guys nodded. They had a mission: be silent. Be silent as the grave. Don’t give him something to lash out at. Put him in solitary confinement with his soul, and let him figure it out.

I hope he does.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: · · ·

Civilizations make rules, and rules are inferior to goals

Jun 17th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
4 comments

apocalyptic_cityConservatives see civilization as a collaborative goal, not a series of institutions. To us, civilization is not roads, government, corporations, etc. but the moral decisions and corresponding values made by a group of people that constitute their identity.

This is the mentality you would expect from someone who can make a civilization. Those people are fewer than one percent of any population, mainly because most people are so narcissistic that they make constantly delusional decisions. They are oblivious to the real questions of life.

Liberals easily confuse conservatives’ wariness about civilization for some kind of pseudo-anarchism or individualism. Neither of those are accurate. Instead, conservatives see civilization as being made up of individuals making moral decisions, not equal people-shaped robots who are regulated by rules.

Rules irritate conservatives. We like to have few of them, and to have them be streamlined and obvious so that people can remember them and derive them from basic principles. We do not like vast reams of regulations because these seem to only hamper growth, change, thought, etc.

Conservatives don’t go far enough. The entire concept of a rule-based civilization is nonsense. First, it removes the need that people actually agree and put active investment of energy into figuring out values and upholding them. They defer to written books and social institutions.

Second, rules put the onus of interpretation on the civilization’s leaders. It becomes their job to think of every possible way people can screw up, and ban them all. However, this Goedelian job is completely impossible, and this creates a mess of interlocking rules that encourage the miscreants to flout them and run free.

Finally, every rule creates a line that says “anything up until this conduct is acceptable.” This means that people immediately find a way to game those rules, and to profit off of their vagueness and the margins in their limitations.

A better solution is to have goals. Goals are not based on negative limits, but on positive achievement. If our goal is to have a civilization, we need to look at every act and say, “Did that get us closer to having a civilization?”

There’s always three categories: yes, no and neutral. Yes means it furthered the goal, and the person should be rewarded. No means it was a strike against furthering the goal, and the person should be punished. Neutral means it didn’t get closer to the goal, but didn’t move us backward either; it’s different from harmless, but in this wide band, neither punishment nor praise is warranted.

With this type of system, the onus of interpretation is on the individual. How will my act be seen? Well, guess I’d better measure that by effect and consequences, not by my intention or its social significance. At that point, mental health begins.

Even further, it keeps people oriented toward purpose in their lives. There is never a circular non-purpose; there is always a point and a direction. Life is an adventure, a quest. It is not the hubris of people who assume that because they are conscious, they are the goal of life itself.

A true conservative civilization might not have a government at all. It might not have any written rules. What it will have, however, is people who can independently interpret principles which are unique to it and define it. It will take its stand and come what may.

This not only works better, but is infinitely more satisfying than a society of details unrelated to any actual purpose except assuaging our fear by having a giant institutional complex which claims it’s looking out for our best interests.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: ·

Civilization consumes itself out of resentment

Jun 15th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
24 comments

a_city_upon_a_hill_in_stormWhat makes society so destructive?

Day after day, we see our elected leaders making stupid and terrible decisions — with the consent and often encouragement of the populace.

Most seem to at best treat it as an amusing sideshow, and at worst, attempt to sabotage it by choosing nonsense answers and ideology.

Much of this can be explained by stupidity, but the greatest stupidities occur in groups, and they occur not from biological stupidity, but from people following the trend/fad/meme/paradigm because they are afraid (socially) to deviate.

People often seem to be egging the whole civilization on to self-destruction. This, with their children near them while they’re talking about legacies and sustainability.

Some say it is mortality itself. People, knowing they are dead letters after a certain time, rage against mortality by retaliating against life itself.

Others point out that civilization is a weakness incubator because it is based on the notion of an in-group, and once we let everyone in, we have to support them. That means letting them make choices and escape the consequence of those choices.

Eventually, this becomes pluralism, where we assume everyone is equally important thus let them choose whatever reality they desire to live in, and then clean up and send the bill to all of us courtesy of all of us. We call that “socialized cost” which is sensible since really, it’s social.

But there is something more at work here. It may be because we are a leading society, or because we are a dying society. There’s a relationship between those too.

Most empires tend to peak shortly before their fall. Having gotten their acts together, they become highly efficient, and flood themselves with wealth. This separates individual decision-makers from reality, because they don’t cut their own firewood or grow their own food.

They either order other people around because they’re paying them, or convince them with salesperson language to do things for either personal profit (of the person being spoken to) or the “greater cause,” which if used most successfully is used to mask the personal profit motivation.

At that point, the empire is caught out in a state of believing its own press releases. It has no idea what reality is, and so it believes the hype. It thinks it can do anything, is “too big to fail,” and thus it starts gift-giving.

It bribes its citizens with rights, entitlements, bread and circuses. At some point, this causes it to be not a civilization with a single unifying principle (“We are Romans!”) but a commercial construct, i.e. I like living here because I have all these rights and money.

Even more, as the decay comes on, it comes on slowly. Most people think social collapse happens when the vandals are at the gate. This is convenient for them, as it allows them to do whatever they want without fear of consequences, up until the vandals arrive.

However, collapse really occurs silently. It occurs at that moment when society ceases to be unified by a single idea (“We are Romans!”) and instead becomes a place or thing that people use solely for their own self-interest. There is no loyalty there, nor any psychological benefit.

As a result, people turn dark instead, and instead of unleashing their constructive creativity, they become destroyers. Miserable, they destroy the civilization around them and consume it as it is consuming them. And because the virus that gets them is their own selfishness, they can’t stop until it’s way too late.

Take for example this:

In his monologue O’Brien mentioned the story out of the Census Bureau that deaths now exceed births among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S.A.

When they heard him say that, the studio audience broke out in cheers and applause.

I didn’t get up from my chair to go look, but as I recall, Conan’s studio audience is solidly non-Hispanic white. So they were applauding the decline of their own stock. – John Derbyshire, “The Joy of Ethnomasochism,” VDARE, June 15, 2013

That’s akin to people on the Titanic deciding that if the iceberg hadn’t done the job, they were going to go down to the hull and dynamite it, so the ship might sink.

If other nations held the clue to our future, they would have developed it there before coming here.

Our cognitive block here is the assumption that all people are equal, which means “identical” in the common parlance, and thus that we can just replace a whole bunch of our people with others and everything will be fine.

Even more, however, I think our people want to be replaced. They want to die. Just not now, but they want to know they destroyed this society. Because they hate it. They hate it for being weak, for being in a state of dying, for being a hateful place that sucks them in and makes them whores to money with no greater purpose.

So they go down to the hull and start hammering, blasting, even snipping away with toenail clippers, doing whatever they can to send the ship to the bottom. That way they can sit on deck as the cold water encroaches and say it was a shame that this “just happened.”

Just happened, as in was nobody’s fault. The rain just happened. Summer just happened. Social collapse? It happens by deceit and deliberate acts. Wicked acts, soulless acts. The acts of bitter people.

Look at an example of this mindset in action:

I suspect most trolls (and people who engage in e-debates in general) probably share a common personality type. They probably work jobs or live lives that are in someway unsatisfying. They want to feel special and crave attention and respect. They are highly dependent on the opinions of other people.

And this is really at the heart of the matter, a message board troll feels intense shame. It is shame that motivates him to shame others. – James Altucher, “Diary of a 5,000-hours-per-year Internet troll,” TechCrunch, June 15, 2013

It’s amazing how the truth is staring us in the face. Why do people sabotage and rage at others? Shame. Shame for being caught in this mess, for not having a way out, and for having their lives’ future course determined by it.

These people are better than the usual person, who compensates for a failing society by being as absolutely selfish as possible. Those are the true Nietzsche-described “last men.” They have traded their souls for trivial pleasures, like being the 400,000th person to climb Everest.

All of the suit and tie guy, grey world of city misery, ugly buildings and ugly jobs, boring meetings and dishonest people, interpersonal drama, passive aggression, etc. has a huge penalty. It’s the death of a thousand cuts. No act by itself is big, but together, they make civilization a hateful place.

And thus the last people who have the brains to notice this are conspiring day-by-day to destroy it.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

Detox

Jun 12th, 2013
by Søren Larsen.
31 comments

learn_to_love_existenceHow do you tackle something as overwhelming as the Kali Yuga of modernity as a single human being?

For a long time, I choose to be cynical about it. I would tell myself things like: “It’s a good thing that our civilization is collapsing. Most people are idiots anyway.” “We are just being punished for our monumental stupidity. We deserve no better” –- and so on and so forth.

But as time went by, I realized that this was nothing but psychological defense-mechanism. By being cynical and distancing myself from the reality of today, I subtly avoided facing it. Instead, I would dream myself away to far away times, past or future. To a society ruled by nobility –- a world where stupidity was not tolerated.

And why shouldn’t I?

After all, such daydreams were the only nourishment for that part of my soul which I still felt to be uncorrupted by the degeneracy of our times. As such, these dreams didn’t just seem innocent enough –- they felt like the only innocence I would ever be able to experience, given the current state of affairs. But oh, how wrong I was…

By permitting myself such dreams of healthier times, I was able to live with my cynicism. But both my cynicism and my ideals were nothing but painkilling narcotics. They were means for me to leave reality behind.

Because I felt doomed to live in a world that I would never be able to relate to and because I found myself adrift on a sea of stupidity, surrounded by halfwits and morons, I, in my mind, felt justified in saying to myself: “Things should be different than they are.”

Thus I was in fact saying to myself: “Because the world is as it is, I don’t have to accept it.” I was arrogantly passing a moral judgment on the world, thinking that I somehow didn’t belong here, in this world, among these people. I was better than that, I thought.

But alas – it is impossible to even conceive of one without one’s world. The mere notion of it is as absurd as an idea of “up” without “down” or “inside” sans “outside.” Without the world there can be no Self.

So why was I judging my world as I did? An obvious answer would be “ego” — that I was desperately clinging to a false notion of myself as being somehow “different” and unique. Even though this was undoubtedly part of the answer, this still isn’t the whole story. Something far bigger, more serious than just “myself” was actually going on.

I was running from the monumental pain and tragedy of our times.

Forgive me for sounding like a hippie or worse, but what I’ve slowly come to realize is, that I in fact feel a tremendous love and compassion for my fellow humans. That I have indeed always felt it, though it for a long time seemed too frightening for me to face it.

What am I getting at? It is hard for me to describe in words, because it first and foremost must be experienced: That there can be no great love of life without an acceptance of suffering and death. And I, in my former cynical misanthropy and dreams of better times, couldn’t accept the fact that modernity is nothing but the great human tragedy. That what we are living in today is nothing but the innate destructiveness of humanity carried to its logical extreme. I was running from my very love of life, of humanity and the world because I wasn’t ready to accept that this entailed an acceptance of all that I hated and despised.

Life is nothing but a journey towards death. If we are to find a bigger meaning in life, we must first accept death, so we can move beyond it. Only through acceptance is it possible to catch a glimpse of the bigger picture – something divine beyond the cycle of life and death. Something eternal.

So it is with the individual, and likewise, I’ve come to realize, with humanity.

If we are to move beyond the modern world with something of humanity left, we must move beyond our cynicism and mere dreams of better times. We must love today, and yes, even humanity as such, with all its stupidity, ugliness and cruelty. This means saying yes to it all, no matter how painful.

This is why I’ve decided to detox, and skip the dual painkillers “cynicism” and “ideals.” And now I’m finally beginning to see something truly meaningful and eternal beyond the ugliness of our times. And so, I invite you to join me – for what I am starting to see cannot be described in words. It must be experienced.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: · · ·

1968

Jun 10th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
6 comments

1968We all live in the shadow of the past because we are tied to the generation cycle. What people learn when they’re young is what twenty to forty years later they pass on.

1968 stays with us for a different reason. It is the ultimate form of the parent ideology that started in 1789 when we overthrew the kings, and figured that no matter what our competence level, as long as we are individuals we are autonomous. And if that forces society into pluralism, or a state where any outcome is tolerated because it reflects an underlying difference in opinion that must be maintained for us to be autonomous, then that social chaos is just the small price we must pay to all be free.

In 1789, the Revolutionaries in France threw out some ideas — equality, gender equality, internationalism, trade unions and subsidies — and made these the basis of a worldwide movement. Unlike previous thought, this was based in an ideal derived from what we “should” do, not a response to what is necessary.

This ideology grew over time, but it kept having to hide because each time it got power, unimaginable bloodshed and horrors resulted. The French Revolution turned into a murder fest, and thus unleashed on Europe a series of tyrants and wars. The Russian Revolution was just as bad and created instability in Europe and Asia. In the intervening century, wars followed wars as democracy tore down aristocracy.

In the 1930s, however, liberalism got its chance. The West was hopeless and miserable after the great fratricidal slaughter of WWI. People no longer believed in any of the old notions of reality. And then the great depression hit, taking a dispirited population of fatalists and giving them a material gripe. Many found meaning in the idea of fighting a great injustice, and decided socialism was the only “moral” solution.

They had to be quiet because as the true colors of Communism revealed itself, and socialist agitators blew up bridges across Europe, socialism was not popular. They had to take another route, so they adopted socialism as a social idea. It was no longer Marxism; it was a new notion of justice based on the simple idea of sharing what we had so everyone had some. This attacked the higher echelons of society where they were weak, which was in socializing with other people. These groups were generally internally-driven and thoughtful, not social.

World War II did not force their ideology underground, but mated it with patriotism. Suddenly, we were the right people because we gave everyone freedom, and we shared what we had. The Nazis were bad because they did not share, and did not support internationalism, which was basically a way of giving what we had to the former colonies. The powers that were adopted this new mantra of freedom/sharing without realizing how they were subverted.

The children of those who fought in WWII grew up in a new world. Liberal democracy was on top of the world, and yet the promises of equality were not yet being enjoyed. They went back to the 1789 template, and brought it around in new forms: civil rights, sexual liberation, drugs and acting bizarre. This made them feel like they were forcing the world into a new order.

1968 was the culmination of this wave. If you were born in 1944, you were 24 in 1968 — done with college, and not yet willing to enter a career. Entering a career meant becoming an adult, which meant accepting the waking death of life as social function in service to money. The new Socialists, who were now disguised as “progressives,” rebelled.

In doing so they created a kind of permanent ideology. Unlike others, this one is explicitly social. Are you nice? Then share the wealth. Fight for freedom. Make sure there is no social standard at all, and the exceptions become the rule, so that no individual is left out. Pluralism is the only rule, which means there is no right way and no right answers.

Almost fifty years later, we’re still living under almost this exact dogma. It has been accepted by the authorities, endorsed by the Establishment, and now is used to motivate us to do what it wants. In order to be accepted by society, we must prove we are good people, and we do that by slavishly repeating the ideology and working to make it real.

The tin drum is beat constantly even as social chaos overwhelms our institutions. Its advocates, trapped in its spell and paralyzed in the forebrain, cannot think of anything other than the post-modern equivalent to the Glorious Socialist Revolution. They repeat the message in entertainment, in news media, in the schools, through government agencies, etc. but most of all through conversation among friends.

In order to be part of society, you have to choke down this dogma and politely not notice where it conflicts with reality. The result is that as soon as you speak such an idea, you become weak because you’re endorsing non-reality. But this makes you weak like the others, so they accept you into their group. You can be weak together, and this makes you strong.

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

Shiba Ryotaro Meets the Gays

Jun 8th, 2013
by Avery Morrow.
2 comments

the_decay_within_is_full_of_stingsIn the 1980s, the famous Japanese novelist Shiba Ryotaro took a trip to America. His intelligent reflections on American and Japanese culture were turned into a book, Amerika Sobyou, which is still widely read today.

One of the chapters of this book that stands out for me is his interview with influential homosexual activists in San Francisco. Gays had not yet conquered the mainstream then, but they were well on their way, and Shiba saw in this an observation about the sort of country Amerika is. (The terms culture and civilization seem to be used in a Spenglerian sense here.)

I am here skipping over a biography of Harvey Milk, a tour of downtown San Francisco, and a discussion of the “Gay Athletic Games”.

As I’ve stated before, most countries have an accumulation of culture extending back to ancient times, and in the early modern period, laws were place on top of that culture. Japan, France, Korea, Denmark were not created out of laws, but rather began as organizations of people, and modern laws simply reordered those organizations.

America is the opposite. The law cast its net over a broad [empty] territory, and eventually immigrants arrived and pledged themselves to those laws, so that the country is nothing more than the sum of its laws.

Laws first, then people. As a simile, this might seem a little strange, but America is like an enormous gymnasium.

Taking customs to be one’s culture, the roof (laws) of the gymnasium exists to keep the rain and hail off the masses. This insistence on laws reveals the form of the country as a civilization. America is a country with only a civilization. Can someone coming from a country full of culture (customs) even imagine that? People like me, who live surrounded by culture (customs), have no need to write it down as laws. That is, we can live our lives without needing a civil lawyer to waste his life writing down all our practices. Civil cases, after all, are just about getting money.

In the case of Japan, most people go through life without ever needing the services of a civil lawyer. But America is the country with the most lawyers in the world. And many of the leaders in the gay rights movement are lawyers.

So, the gays want to preserve their lifestyle through law (they want to be underneath the roof of civilization), and move for political rights to do that.

I was thinking about this gay problem for a while. They’ve certainly been the victim of social discrimination, and I have sympathy for that.

“Naoki, what do you think about gay rights?” I asked. I was curious. “Do you think the gays are just seeking rights as another tribe under the American tent, like Hispanics or Puerto Ricans?”

Naoki gave me a look like, “well, duh.”

But I objected: “Isn’t it a little different, though? Gays don’t use the same tactics as ethnic minorities– and their motive isn’t economic success. Rather, they want their way of viewing life to be recognized as a valid lifestyle. That is, they’ve constructed a minority from inside their own heads.”

“I guess,” shrugged Naoki.

Chinese-Americans, for example, have a shared culture, and they come together through their belief in strong families. Gays could care less about strong families, but they have a shared interest in making friends who want to do “something you can’t do elsewhere”, and they want to be able to do this in peace. Doesn’t the gay pride movement reflect somewhat this common feeling among Americans of getting tired of living beneath this endlessly expanding space (roof) of civilization? It seems to me like it’s going to be impossible to sustain this civilization lacking a culture.

Again, I skip over many more pages, introducing the thoughtful creator of the Gay Games, to translate an anecdote.

People often tell Prof. [Tom] Waddell that homosexuality is immoral because God ordered Adam to procreate and fill the earth. Gays don’t have kids, so they are disobeying God’s law.

So the good professor said, “Okay, I’ll make a kid.” And he planned and discussed how to do it, then he actually did it. The mother was a lesbian athlete who he met at the Gay Olympics. He took me to the baby’s room on the second floor, but the kid wasn’t there.

“She’s at her mother’s house this week. We send her back and forth every other week.”

He showed me a picture of the mother. She had an intelligent and charming smile.

My strong impression while looking at this photo was, “this is extremely American.”

The two of them must have had a lot of discussion on how and why a child would be conceived. The professor, as he had just explained, saw this act as part of a realization of the gay rights movement and his ideology of liberation. Obviously his partner had to be made aware of those things, too. And after the child was born, they would have had to decide what sort of lifestyle they would raise her in. But the two of them were neither lovers nor a married couple, and there was no love between them.

What will happen to this girl when she grows up? [...] Making such important life decisions in this way from ideological purposes or to prove a political point demonstrates how America is a rationalistic nation, a civilization without culture. And when it comes to lawmaking, hard sciences, and economics, this is all to their benefit.

For the moment, that is.

Prof. Waddell died of AIDS in 1987.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: ·

Every land gets the government it deserves

Jun 6th, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
10 comments

lone_voice_among_the_sheepA popular refrain these days is, “No good deed goes unpunished.” People like to say this, and in normal conversation, it’s too controversial to decode it because it is so popular.

Let me tell you what it actually means: “I do good deeds, and I’m sick of doing it, because there’s no reward, but I still want credit for being good.”

Even taken a step further: “The problem is other people. I am a good person. Go beat up on someone else.”

Which boils down to: “It’s not my fault, I’ll call you back.”

Which ultimately projects as: “It’s not my job to fix this.”

Ah! We drill down into this simple phrase, and we see what people are broadcasting. In fact, it’s what they’re most commonly broadcasting. Not my job, not my job not my job. This lets them enjoy civilization without having to undertake any risk or difficulty for its upkeep.

In fact, the average germ floating around in your body just waiting to make you very sick is probably broadcasting the exact same thing. “It’s not my job to make this work, I’m just taking a little nutrition here and having some offspring… look at ‘em go! Welp, there’s the sneeze. Guess I’m on to a new host. Take it slow.”

The point here is that this is a social exercise, which is measured in self-image because that is how the individual manipulates political power, not an exercise in thinking. It’s not politics. It’s not reason. It’s not even ideology. It’s a silly chimplike animal preemptively defending itself by inventing a justification for its inaction and parasitism.

If you want to know why monarchs ruled with an iron hand, it’s this. If not given some goal and some social order, people revert back to being independent agents. Independent agency is incompatible with civilization as it turns individuals into parasites who take all that civilization has to offer, and then refuse to do their part upholding it.

Their part? Think of it this way: you either need a cop on every streetcorner, or civilians who mostly obey the rules and will at least report when someone breaks them.

We could live in a zero crime world. If people were as intolerant of each other committing crimes as they are of people parking in their reserved parking spaces, we’d have a situation where criminals were on the run constantly. But instead, people have a “it’s not happening to me” mentality and so they do nothing. Then they say “no good deed goes unpunished” to justify their lack of action.

A prime example hit the news today. After the last couple years, where we’ve had people protest at Occupy Wall Street, boycott for CISPA and the RIAA, get up in arms over Kony 2012, etc. we have a real crisis.

And the response? Nothing. Silence. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

The crisis is this: the Supreme Court, over the objection of arch-conservative judge Antonin Scalia, has ruled that the state can take your DNA if it arrests you.

You have nothing to worry about if you don’t do anything worth arresting for, they say.

But turn it around: if they want your DNA, they’ll find a reason to arrest you! Common sense; this is how people work. Jaywalking, unpaid library fines, even wearing brown shoes with black slacks. And having as many DNA profiles in that data bank as possible paralyzes those who might cause trouble, because then they’re certain to get caught. You can see Scalia’s point.

Somehow, all the useful idiots who were pledging to suicide if CISPA passed — a non-important bill that indemnified internet providers for giving information to the feds as they do routinely anyway and have for two decades — are not around to protest this. It must have slipped by while their favorite TV show was on.

This is why civilizations self-destruct. The people lose a sense of integrity and turn to self-pity. Soon you’ve got lots of experts at making excuses or working through surrogates, like donating money to bums or charities, and no one is watching the road ahead. The corrupt politicians realize this is money for the taking and they take advantage of it. Is it a crime to rip off lazy slovenly idiots? Probably not.

You are surrounded by people who are sure that someone else is to blame. They boil over with rage at the politicians who are screwing them over, ripping them off, destroying their future. And then when the beer is finished, their rant is over and they go back to life as normal. Why? It’s just easy enough to earn enough money to be totally apathetic and selfish. Society bought them off and they sold their souls. Every day.

Instead of looking for someone else to blame, look at the obvious: our citizens are inert and they are the nexus of power. Democracy has failed because the average person isn’t ready for the responsibility and never would be, or they wouldn’t be average. This is why the founding fathers restricted their voting audience to millionaire men over 30.

Over time, in spasms of self-pity, the housewives and beta males of America decided that they needed to be more “compassionate.” That, too, was a dodge, a social theory standing in for where a political theory was needed. And so now the citizens have indulged their worst traits and ignored the actual task before them, in fact have concealed it.

And no bad deed is punished.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · ·

Assorted glimpses

Jun 4th, 2013
by Gilbert Cavanaugh.
2 comments

absurdity_of_modernityFrancis Fukuyama,
A man of Hegelian dogma.
He would do well to read some Burke,
To give his Neo-Connery a final shirk.

Alex Pareene
Mocks Jonah Goldberg with a mind so keen.
But his loathing of John Derbyshire,
Fills me with fiery ire.

Ira Glass,
A true mascot of the New Class.
His voice babbles on beautifully,
Stuffing me with incredulity.

Jose Angel Gutierrez,
I loathe everything he says.
With any luck he will soon be fired,
And Paul Gottfried will celebrate, as he is now retired.

Guy Somerset,
The details of his identity remain a secret.
His writings are filled with righteous indignation,
The roots of which beget no explanation.

David Brooks
Is just about as smart as he looks.
When he dies Ross Douthat will take his position,
A far cry from giving The New York Times a benediction.

Subcomandante Marcos,
Ever dueling with those vicious narcos.
Perhaps he and Dr. Paul should meet,
And form a united front to eschew defeat.

David Frum
Left Canada and to America he did come.
A Republican who enjoyed the company of Andrea Dworkin,
Is naturally a darling in the eye of Aaron Sorkin.

Posted in: Politics.

A dialogue on The Jews

Jun 3rd, 2013
by Brett Stevens.
20 comments

Gentleman: Are you pro-Israel?

Me: I am pro-nationalist, which means I’m both pro-Israel and support the right of any ethnic group to exclude all others. This is a nuanced and complex view to a situation most prefer to make one-dimensional. The message I have for white people is to support and imitate Israel, as they face a similar struggle to our situation (invasion by third world horde).

Gentleman: This to me is a contradiction. Firstly the Jews are behind every agency destroying western civilization. Communism, for instance, is Jewish. In Britain every single pro-immigrant lobby is run by them. The principal so-called anti-fascist group in London is operated by communist Jews who are funded by the British Board of Jewish Deputies. Jews are behind the promotion of Africans and Africanized music and they are the principle promoters of degenerate art. They are behind the feminist movement.

You see these evil monsters as something to admire?

I loathe Muslims. However Israel must be the classic example of immigrants taking over someone elses country. If you support the Jews here you support, de facto, immigrants taking over our countries.

I get this question a lot. So, rather than type an answer into a medium for one person, I preserve my answer here.

It has three parts: Yes, I see a lot to admire about the Jews; further, I see an enemy you do not. No, I am not fooled into thinking that anything is equal or the same.

We should all admire the Jews. For over three thousand years they have preserved their culture, values, heritage, language(s), values, customs and religion. From this group of people have come many of the smartest and best minds of history, disproportionately so. They have survived more empires and disasters than people can name. During their exile, they compiled and preserved knowledge and made many contributions to its cultivation.

I don’t see a reason to hate them. If there is a cultural clash, I would blame internationalism (known by its other names: multiracialism, diversity, multiculturalism, homogeneity) for the clash, and realize that any two different cultures if put in the same place will come into conflict.

I see a different enemy. Jews are highly cosmopolitan, educated, and intellectual people. This means they are over-represented in all areas that appeal to these traits, including liberal politics (and, given the overtones of anti-Semitism on the far right, that some are even involved there is disproportionate representation). Thus we often confuse them for the underlying problem.

What is this problem? Normally I’d say liberalism, but I think liberalism is just one manifestation of the real problem. The real problem is individuals banding together into a collective for the sake of mutual social affirmation such that they do not need to participate in society, but can enjoy it without feeling obligated to it. People decide to be parasites in the name of freedom, and form a collective in the name of individualism. If we look at language as a one-dimensional set of categories, it makes no sense. Alas, language does not operate that way. It describes like the colors of a great artist’s paintbrush, and when you describe, you see how these things are simultaneously true.

Instead, I call this enemy Crowdism. It is individualism that compels people to form Crowds to compel others to tolerate unrealistic individualism. It branches into many forms after that: egalitarianism, pluralism, freedom, consumerism, anarchism, and even socialism, once those anarchists realize they need to compel society to pay for their keep and so they must justify that with pity for the weakest, which takes the form of class warfare, civil rights, multiculturalism, gay rights, etc. etc.

The real goal is to destroy the majority.

That is the enemy here: a type of behavior, an idea.

It is inherent to thought itself, and to individuality, a pitfall like any other screwup that we encounter. Alcohol is good but there’s alcoholism. Food is good but there’s obesity. Fun is good but there’s procrastination. On and on, South of Heaven…

The Jews did not invent this. We did. Among ourselves. With no hope from others. It, like other bad moral choices, is always there. It is always appealing. It is just a pitfall.

Blaming others makes us weak and puts us into a subordinate role, dependent on our new overlords. It also compels us to do things that are both morally disgusting and utter failures like the Holocaust.

That being said, I am a realist. I don’t expect any two groups to be equal, or compatible. Each needs its own space. Each has its own values, and the two don’t combine. I see the appearance of multiple groups as a sign that a civilization is dying.

However, that does not mean the group are to blame, and by blaming the groups, we avoid blaming the real problem. And thus we defeat ourselves, even if it feels good to have a tangible enemy to hate, someone we can force to pay for all the misery of the past, and a torture toy to amuse us with its wailing pain.

Posted in: Politics.

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