A grand post, the first of many
While it is likely due to the
peculiar nature of the milieu I inhabit, somewhere betwixt nationalists,
conservatives, and libertarians of various stripes, I do come into interesting
thoughts which I suspect lies outside of most relatively hermetical
conservatives, libertarians, or nationalists, who but hear theirs and the
typical liberal tripe fodder that dominates the citadel of the university and
media. I would still characterize myself as a libertarian antistatist at heart,
though I am more willing now than ever to admit the speculative nature of
antistatism. It’s an experiment worth trying, although one must acknowledge the
possible fragility of the institutions we envision.
I find myself rejecting a great
deal of the libertine baggage I once hesitantly or readily embraced to varying
degrees. To gain sufficient traction to manifest our will, a minimum standard
of decorum across society will have to be met. Rather like now, that means that
the possible images of some of a libertarian society where street merchants of
varying repute wander streets freely peddling their wares, and where drug
users, gamblers, and prostitutes and their clients likewise wantonly engage in
their vices is a vain hope indeed. There are designated dens of vice; not that
all men must be angels, or that vice is evil, but that aesthetics rather
matter. One would rather not step over spent needles, used condoms, and have to
wade through dodgy customers on the way to the market. This all means that the
status quo is not entirely dissimilar to what we would see, although I would
hark more to the nineteenth century or perhaps the early twentieth. There would
be ‘dry’ tenements and covenants or towns where alcohol is forbidden, ones with
mandatory disarmament except for explicitly approved staff, and so on for
various rules of conduct. It also implies, to me, that if any subversive
libertarian movement is to succeed, the libertines must take a subtle backseat.
This doesn’t mean that all libertarians must behave like perfect puritans, but
that when one operates under public scrutiny, one must keep private that which
discretion dictates breaks decorum. This does mean that the whole “Free Keene”
movement where idiots get out in public and annoy others without presenting a
cogent, consonant argument is wholly ineffective and needs to stop. Of all the
Free State folks in New Hampshire, they’re by far the loudest and least
regarded. Recognition isn’t necessarily negative, but when it tastes like piss,
it surely is. (This is borne out by the Colbert Report hit piece and the
subsequent reaction on them. May they be thrown to the dogs for good.)
Some of the above concepts are
nothing terribly new to well-read libertarians who’ve read Hoppe, but the
general message is something I endeavor to hammer home: even in a stateless
society, libertarians should expect only pockets of permissive 'gutter' law. The
overwhelming majority of the society will not be liberal in outlook in the way
one would expect, nor should they be. Even I would be inconsistent. I would live
in a racially exclusive area, ideally where only folk of at least
three-quarters European descent could work and live, where drugs and
prostitution would be legal but the public display would be restricted.
Additionally, as Hoppe also stresses, there are times when various means must
be employed to suppress anti-civilization forces, including violence if
necessary. Above all, maintaining cohesion and insuring prosperity is the
primary purpose of all the main institutions of state or that in lieu of states.
I have also diverged from orthodox
Rothbardian opinion on a number of issues. For a while now I’ve accepted that
empiricism is lacking in the hard line ‘Austrian’ approach, and that for
instance that sticky prices or indifference curves are even somewhat
contentious amongst some members is telling and I’ve also criticized the false
dichotomy between ‘economics’ and ‘economic history.’ I also suspect that while
neo-classicals and some Keynesians overdo the maths and fudged functions,
mathematics have a place in economics – certainly more than I believe most
‘Austrians’ have allocated for it. Curt Doolittle has expressed some of my
long-standing sentiments in better and more elaborate terms: Rothbard contorted
Mises’s system and ossified and compounded his errors, turning praxeology from
a minor hiccup into a cornerstone pseudoscience. The logical-deductive method
claims to yield knowledge that it cannot realistically give; the method is a
dead end for economics. Economics is an empirical science, and the problem
Mises was trying to solve as Doolittle sets forth (and seems plausible to me)
is that a substantial set of economics even now are pure abstractions. All true economics must be operationally
reducible to human behavior. At this point, Austrian economics is a historical
school, and praxeology being useless for generating economic insights beyond
the pale of what exists now, we ought refer to the existing corpus of knowledge
we have now simply as economics.
We will want to maintain a
high-trust society. History and recent evidence bears that wealth and stable
institutions come with a high-trust populace. This is engendered in the people,
built into the institutions, and strengthened resolutely there to the point
where violence becomes scant, institutions are resilient and in Nassim Taleb’s
words, antifragile. Yet another point libertarians fail to generally
appreciate: the importance of combating fraud and distrust generally. Even though libertarians are generally hostile
to most governments, this serves to illustrate the point. States in the west
can easily last 90 or 150 or more years on a single stable constitution with
relatively smooth continuity and some minor or major conflict inside the
country before a catastrophe inside or outside breaks the resolve of that
nation and it must reform or is absorbed into some other state. By comparison,
looking outside the West and Northeast Asia, it’s exceptionally rare that a
state based on a single constitution lasts more than 30 to 60 years –
basically, the lifespan of a dictator and the reign of the subsequent
generalissimo. If the state does last longer, it is generally with intensive
foreign aid propping the regime up. Even in Northeast Asia, constitutions are
less rigorously regarded than in the West. At any rate, the general pattern is
deplorable infrastructure, poor political institutions rife with graft and
corruption beyond the imagining of ordinary Westerners, and economies
perpetually saddled with debt, capital shortfalls, low growth, and the
consequent problems arising from those issues.
It is no coincidence that this is
divided rather neatly along racial lines. The largest problem area being in
Eastern Europe, and while I believe Eastern Europeans – Slavs largely – have
the potential for high-trust societies as demonstrated by their abilities in assimilating
in Anglo societies in small numbers, their extant societies in their home
countries from Poland going eastward tend to worsen. This is due to breeding
patterns noted on the Hajnal line. Albeit, even as wretched a position and as
exploited as the Ukraine is in and has been for some time, at least they’re not
in the same perpetual state of degeneracy and delinquency of, say, Albania or
areas in the Caucasus or which were once Transoxiana. Regardless, the most
functional people in the world are Europeans generally and Northeast Asians.
They are most readily capable of creating and maintaining high-trust societies.
Europeans are the progenitors and Northeast Asians mimicked the European
institutions to great effect. By replicating legal and economic structures,
they were able to bring wealth into the orient reminiscent of the West without
entirely sacrificing their traditional cultures. Middling in functionality are
Persians, Indians, Southeast Asians, some Turkic speakers (namely those in
Turkey), Arabs, North Africans, and Mestizos (American-Indians with European
admixture). These groups exist along a continuum, of course, with some proving
more success in assimilating Western-style institutions and high-trust
societies – the more remote Turkic and Iranic speakers, along with some
Southeast Asian Muslim populations and particularly degenerate Mestizo
populations fall somewhere between the bottom of this middle rung and the
lowest tier of functionality. The bottom rung of societal functionality
encompasses most Sub-Saharan Africans, many or perhaps most American Indian
tribes with little European admixture, and most Australasian aborigines. To
contrast against the West, the
bottom category, now frighteningly large, is home to commonplace violence and incredibly brutal warfare in comparison to
what goes on in the West; they also suffer stagnant economies,
low life expectancy, low IQs, and poor health indicators generally for large
portions of the populations inhabiting these regions.
Even when people from these areas resettle to the West, they carry with
them this genetic legacy; their ancestors did not vie for resources in the same
competitive environment as Eurasians, especially Europeans and Northeast Asians,
and they of course bring their own unique health problems to a health system
not suited to their needs. To turn around this hereditary situation is a
multigenerational task, and a damned long one at that which implies much
suffering and culling of the unfit to optimize the gene pool for the type of
environment established in the modern era. For anyone with eyes to see, it’s
merely a matter of course that the standard of care for a European or Northeast
Asian is going to exceed that for someone of a different race – the medicine of
the world has been produced largely for those of European and Northeast Asian
descent and everything else is marginal in comparison. We work for the good of
our own first, and when our own also proffer the most resources, that is double
the incentive.
My personal preference, and the
preference of most people as borne by their behavior, is for segregation along
relatively strict ethnic lines. I have no problem interacting with those from
lower trust races, and from high trust competitor races, but I prefer to live
in a society built entirely of Europeans. All jobs in the society and all
products within the society are made by Europeans, augmented by any trade we
can acquire with foreign elements, but endogenous products are entirely
monolithic and of a singular folk. Plenty of diversity develops from
subcultures organically without the need for importing friction and decay by
way of low trust racial competitors who undermine our people, weakening us in
the long term for short term comparative advantage. This should be recognized
as the norm for most places with a few exceptional areas set aside as
cosmopolitan centers, largely city-states distinct but anchored to proper
nations. Whether these nations are nation-states or develop into the
aforementioned speculative stateless societies is a matter of conjecture and
hope; I should like that at least a few of them do, but regardless, to sketch a
mental image generally, Europe would be for Europeans and at a lower level
fragmented into its constituent nation-states. Perhaps a few ‘melting pot’
city-states accept North Africans, Arabs, and Sub-Saharan Africans, although I
expect that their tolerance for degeneracy which threatens the social fabric
and criminally deviant behavior would be substantially lower than today. That
aside, the Netherlands would be almost entirely Dutch, and almost entirely
natively Dutch-speaking, and at least 95% European ethnically; Germany would be
almost entirely German, almost entirely natively German-speaking, and at least
95% European ethnically; and so forth for every European country barring
perhaps Albania and Bosnia. The United States would be an interesting case, and
the segregation here would entail either shipping the unmanageable Mestizos
back to Mexico, especially those with very low European admixture, or setting aside
some portion of the Southwest for them, and for blacks, either resettling them
in Africa or setting aside portions of land and cities separate from whites and
Mestizos for them as well. The majority of the country by land and by
productivity goes by rights to the white majority (while that majority lasts,
as current trends keep); for it was almost entirely by the European-American’s
labor of mind and body by which this country was transformed from grassland,
swamp, and forest into (that, and) farmland, cities, factories, and monuments.
Developing sociological evidence
supports this predilection. Racial and linguistic diversity in most places
tends to weaken the social fabric, decreasing charitable donations, increasing
delinquency, reducing church attendance and community activities, and other
aspects of social capital. In the long term, most of these places opt for
effective political decentralization (e.g. federalization, cantons, or
secession), one population migrates, one population replaces the other, the two
groups merge unequally, or you get a cataclysmic balkanization. Phrased
bluntly, low class stock breed low class civilization. Mexicans of primarily
American Indian descent transplanted into the US will ultimately tend to create
buildings and institutions strikingly reminiscent of Mexico, often even
reverting to Spanish. In Europe, the same applies to Arab, North African,
Turkish and Sub-Saharan African refugees and immigrants, largely Muslim in
background, who all fail to assimilate quite predictably to the Romance or
Germanic cultures they walk into and leech heavily off of the welfare systems
and expect a permanent welcome while creating little to nothing of value – but
appropriating for themselves community centers and churches as mosques!
Switzerland is a good example of political decentralization in practice
because, while a polyglot state composed mostly of German and French speakers
and a few Italian speakers, the Swiss are more or less a true nation with
genuine national traditions and national identity, even if French-Swiss have
more in common with Lorraine or Franche-Comté and German-Swiss have more in
common with Austrians and Bavarians. The US is increasingly a poor example
because there is no effective measure allowing for implicit regulation of the
people; consequently, we in the United States are flooded primarily by
Spanish-speakers, generally Mestizos of low European admixture. Antidiscrimination
laws and government measures catering to Spanish speakers combine with weak
immigration control to compound the problem. Once they’re here on this soil, it
is counter to law to avoid hiring them or to discriminate against them, despite
it being entirely rational to do so on any number of grounds.
Weakness such as this persists for a
few reasons. The first and least important reason Mexicans and Central
Americans pour over the Mexican border into the US is a decently large lobby
which represents several industries and the migrants and their families as well
as their constituent nations. This lobby throws money at political candidates
and represents a respectable voting block for parties willing to promise
amnesty or bills which increase quotas or relax immigration standards for the
target countries. Why is this least important? It’s easiest to fix
satisfactorily and hardest to eliminate altogether, because there will always
be border officials and senators in any government who could potentially be
bribed even if the incentives are aligned properly. Secondly, there’s the
obvious gradient of increasingly destitute countries. As wretched as conditions
can get in Mexico, frequently the states directly to its south are even more
deplorable in just about every way imaginable and people understandably want to
escape. Lastly, and most insidiously, is politically correctness and the toxic
insinuation of guilt. Europeans are supposed to be the guilty party for all of
modern history, the greatest sinners of the past thousand or so years, despite
also having delivered most of the greatest innovations in that same span.
Europeans endeavored before any other people in any mass organized fashion to
exterminate slavery; Europeans established secular states where people of
different faiths can worship separately without fear of reprisal (as long as
the faith adheres to the basic norms of society); Europeans initiated the
industrial revolution, and modern philosophy and science as we know it; before
your eyes are the fruits of European labor, mental and otherwise, whether it be
from calculus, geometry, logic, programming and computer science, rocketry,
materials chemistry, biochemistry, particle physics, circuitry, and so on.
Yet for this, according to a doctrine laid out by predominately Jewish
post-Marxist university intellectuals tenured in European and American
universities, Europeans are to be castigated? Jews, Northeast Asians, and other
groups contributed some small pieces to the vast and immensely impressive
scientific and technological progress of the last two or three hundred years,
but the lion’s share of progress in all things thus mentioned has been directly
from the Occident. As I’ve written before, it is this secular narrative of
white guilt that replaces the doctrine of original sin after the death of God
and the decline of the Church. Even the religious have become increasingly
bicameral and choose and sacrifice increasingly for either their religious or
political creed. Those with fire in their hearts and the conviction of God can
stare down trials and travails of man and emerge with their faith unshaken, but
for the rest, their faith bends for the sake of the political narrative which
has taken an increasingly important and increasingly religious bent. Some
churches now minister homosexual marriages willingly and offer various support
groups to single mothers and homosexual families which were previously shunned
or at the very least frowned upon, but which are now looked upon almost
glowingly, as if in the image of Mother Mary herself. Post-Marxism proved so
successful at infiltrating every institution in the west that it even
penetrated religious doctrine, including to the Holy Father Church itself. It
has become fashionable not only to disavow any sense of pride in one’s culture
and forebears, but to repudiate them altogether and to cast them into the most
shameful light possible – the most odious of men in history or all of
existence, recorded or not.
In truth, it is the generations of
men and women who have betrayed their own kin and ancestors who bear the burden
of the greatest shame and the greatest guilt. They – we – are in the process of
tearing apart high civilization for a lower form of regressive civilization,
inviting in backwards elements which threaten to move us into the darkness of
the past and undo that for which our ancestors worked and bled for. Verily it
is the worst fate to be spat upon by one’s own descendents for the crime of
hard work and ingenuity. What a sordid tale we spin to console ourselves that
Muslims and non-Europeans could uphold European civilization and values, even
if they wanted to and even if they should bother to try – neither of those
conditions being true, we won’t even be graced with being spared the indignity
of plausible delusions. Our revolution fever dreams are as vivid and to many seem
almost as beautiful as those during the French revolution, only not nearly so
many people are lucid now. Perhaps we’ll have a Romantic revival for our
troubles?
Sources for consideration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and_trust_within_communities
The Problem with Political Authority, Michael Huemer
The Myth of National Defense and The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, Hans Hermann-Hoppe
Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
Great Wars and Great Leaders, Ralph Raico
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