Category Archives: Reaction

Trapped in the Holiness Spiral

The leftist holiness spiral has been increasing as late. One activist explains how he sacrificed everything to win the holiness competition.

Activism is hard. Plain and simple. Being an activist is even harder. It’s long hours, empty bank accounts, angry girlfriends/boyfriends/spouses who are ready to leave you at any moment, family that doesn’t get it, making calls, receiving calls, logging contacts, selling a vision, rejection, empty promises, fulfilled promises, emails, press releases, signatures, counts, validation, databases, vendors, merchandise, rallies, public speaking, volunteers, supporters, haters, naysayers, politics, more politics, and people wishing you would just stop. Especially your doctor.
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After a year of this, I can say that I’m tired. This stuff consumes you in ways that I can’t even begin to describe. My life revolves around cannabis, reform, legalization.
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What people often forget, is that I’m a volunteer too. The last campaign took years off of my life, and several others. For at least the past year I’ve neglected myself, my personal life, and all the rest of the things I should be focusing on at this age. The ripe old age of 32.

Throughout the piece you can feel a vague, suppressed sense of disillusionment with the process that ate his life. Not surprising. Yet he continues to support activism. He believes that sacrificing everything in his life for easier access to chemical highs was worth it.

On the other hand, another radical activist is complaining about the holiness spiral of leftism. This activist hails from London in Ontario, not the real one, best known in Canada for confusing people with its name and being somewhere near Toronto. She is best known for her world-changing work of being arrested for spray-painting Pink Floyd references on other people’s property, then complaining that the arrests were political persecution.

Anyway, she points out something everybody knows about leftists, that they claim to care about the poor while shitting all over them, that they try to outholy each other, and that they suppress speech that they don’t like. She states she’s sick of it. Good for her, I guess.

Yet, even as she descries the holiness spiral, she says this:

That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form?—?far from it.

She can not escape holiness signalling even as she decries it. This ignores that the entire piece reads like a holier-than-thou lecture, as she paints other activists as less holy han herself for their holiness signalling. To be fair, it might no be easy to avoid sounding like holiness signalling when calling out the left as a leftist.

She also wrote a follow-up, which included this:

So, humour me for a second and let me tell you a bit about myself: I am a white working class queer female with a history of trauma. I have experienced intimate partner violence in many forms and I have been formally diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I’ve been hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and struggled with drug addiction in the past. I’ve been stalked, harassed and had the shit kicked out of me by police. Until I landed my current job, there were times when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, or if I would be able to make rent that month, or pay off the bills on time. While I’m doing better now in a lot of ways, and I am definitely not claiming to win the “Oppression Olympics” (spoiler: it’s not a competition to begin with), it is not only ignorant, but simply incorrect to assume that I am nothing more than a privileged white girl refusing to check herself.

Notice how she signals herself well in the ‘Oppression Olympics’, but makes sure to signal that it’s not a competition, thus making her more holy. Also notice how shitty her life is; I guess being a citizen journalist doesn’t pay so well and ain’t so good for the mental health. Why are leftists activists almost invariably mentally ill with have a history of abusive relationships?

Onto my point, for individuals, the leftist holiness spiral is almost impossible to exit from once entered. Those whose lives have been chewed up in the signalling continue to support it as only martyrs can. Even those who oppose the signalling, can’t help but keep up their own forms of counter-signalling. They have to show how holy they are by pointing out how they are above signalling it.

The need for status runs deep.

Institutional Capture

I’ve mentioned before that the left has, in the long-term, won almost every political battle of the last century. The one big area where the US (and just the US) has not been moving overly left is gun freedom. The main reason for this is the NRA, but the NRA wasn’t always as powerful or hardline as it is now.

In the second half of the 1970s, the NRA faced a crossroads. Would it remain an Establishment institution, partnering with such mainstream entities as the Ford Foundation and focusing on shooting competitions? Or would it roll up its sleeves and fight hammer and tongs against the gun-control advocates? Or flee to the Mountain West? The latter was appealing, and the NRA leadership decided to move the headquarters to Colorado and also spend $30 million to build a recreational facility in New Mexico called the National Outdoor Center.

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite.

“Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Carter, a longtime NRA board member, had arrived in Washington in 1975 as founding director of a new NRA lobbying unit, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA). His pugnacious approach, which rankled the Old Guard, was captured in a letter he wrote to the entire NRA membership to discuss the fight in Congress over gun control: “We can win it on a simple concept —No compromise. No gun legislation.”

The right is holding its own in this particular battle because hardliners captured the NRA (and then later recaptured it after a moderate pushback). This is how the left has always won, by capturing institutions: the academy, NGO’s, the media, the bureaucracy, etc.

If the right wants to win, it needs to figure out a way to take over pre-existing institutions. Making institutions is also good, but it takes a lot more effort. Conquering pre-existing institutions and their resource base is better.

The Neoreactionary Bargain

I’ve explained the theoretical core of neoreaction and made an introduction to neoreaction. But what it the ultimate goal of neoreaction?

Neoreaction was originally an intellectual exercise, a discussion of ideas. Because of this it had no real goal beyond theorizing. Moldbug wrote a general idea of the final goal of neoreaction in his Open Letter.

The end goal of neoreaction is formalized, privatized government. The Open Letter and Letter to France outline the steps a country’s elites should take to do this.

But how is neoreaction to achieve this?

The current social order is slowly(?) collapsing. The money’s run out, inflation and cheap debt are reaching the limits of their ability to mask insolvency, the natives are growing increasingly restless, low-level guerilla war is rising, and our culture and cohesion are breaking down. What can not last forever, won’t. Eventually this social order will be replaced.

What will it be replaced by?

One option is a slow limping decline/dark age. Another is simple collapse and anarchy, possibly an on-going low-level civil war. Another possibility, particularly in Europe, is Islam. A fourth possibility is a leftist singularity. The most likely possibility is a right-wing surge of the native population and the violent expulsion of the elites and invaders.

You’ll notice that all of these are bloody. Neoreaction wants to avoid this. To do so, we are building an ideological and, eventually, structural basis for a leader* to arise and implement the neoreactionary agenda by making a bargain with the elites.

The neoreactionary bargain to the elites will essentially be this:

Your regime will fall. It can fall to the leftist chaos, Islamic invaders, or right-wing populists, but it will fall. Any of those three groups will happily and ruthlessly exterminate you and your families, probably after torture, reeducation, work camps, rape, and/or enslavement. The leader knows that violent revolutions of any type tends to end poorly for the country and he also would like to avoid death camps and mass executions if possible. So he will make a deal.

If you willingly divest power to the leader, he will restore orderly government. He will expel the Islamic invaders, halt the leftist singularity, and placate the right-wing populists. Current higher elites will be allowed to keep some of your wealth (and your lives) as long as you obey the new order; lower elites and officials hostile to the new order will be retired on a modest, livable stipend and not be further harassed as long as you remain private. Some of the most criminal of the elites will have to meet final justice but it will be served cleanly and measuredly, there will be no torture, no camps, and families will be spared and treated well.

You can give power to the leader, who will formalize and privatize government, or you can try your odds with chekists, Islamic militants, and right-wing death squads?

This is the neoreactionary bargain to the elites: surrender power to a leader to formalize government and be treated well, or be exterminated by one of the populist groups.

****

Honestly, as one of the most prol of the neoreactionaries, the less charitable parts of me wouldn’t mind seeing our criminal elites meet right-wing death squads. I’d probably feel some primal satisfaction upon hearing of the fire-bombing of Yale and Harvard, the torching of the Federal Reserve with everyone in it, the decimation of Washington, and the staff of NYT and Gawker going for helicopter rides.

But Christian charity compels me towards mercy, so I hope they take the bargain.

Drafting Women

It seems that drafting women has come up among the GOP candidates for some reason. So, I’ll give my take on it.

First, women are far too valuable to waste on military activity, with the possible exception of a truly existential threat (such as both the Russians and Germans each faced from the other in WW2). Doug Wilson gets the right of it:

Once you have signed off on the nation/state conscripting your daughters to go serve in combat roles, whatever it was you thought you were conserving — thus allowing you to call yourself a conservative — has had a fork stuck in it and is done. Nothing really to conserve any more.

A nation that conscripts its daughters for its defense is a nation that no longer deserves a defense. We may have to fight later as a practical matter, but this is a matter of rudimentary allegiance.

In a civilized society, anybody proposing sending women to war would be sent to a penal battalion himself to die honourably for the motherland.

On the other hand though, Wilson is right. Our society is no longer civilized and no longer worth defending or supporting. There is nothing to conserve and we should stop acting like there’s anything left.

Most “military age” women voluntarily render themselves infertile, so it’s not like we’re taking them away child creation and rearing. They’ve willingly and enthusiastically removed their own civilizational value and made themselves as expendable as men. There’s no civilizational reason to protect expendable self-sterilized young women.

Rationally we should be drafting women. Women claim to be men’s equals, and equals don’t get defended. Equals have to carry their own weight, and in this case carrying their own weight means being drafted and sent to die in case of war. If we’re going to do this liberalism, we should do it right. Allowing women into the military but not drafting them is one of those unprincipled exceptions that Zippy likes to talk about. If women are allowed in the military like men, then they should drafted like men.

(And no, to unseeing tradcons, this is not men cowering behind women, women enthusiastically pursue equality).

On Wilson’s biblical argument, the case Wilson makes does not support the idea that women at war is objectively sinful, just imprudent. So, I will talk in practical terms, not moral ones.

As for the combat effectiveness, it is obvious to anybody who’s not ideologically blinded that women will lower the military’s combat effectiveness and that’s a positive thing (I hesitate to use the word good). America’s hard military effectiveness doesn’t matter. America has had few just wars, hasn’t had a truly defensive war in a long time, possibly ever (the Pacific front of WW2 and the confederate defence in the War of the States may have been defensive, although, the US did provoke Japan and the CSA was not the USA) and has never fought a necessary war at all as far as I can recall at the moment. There’s certainly not going to be a defensive foreign war any time soon, and definitely not an existential one.

As for foreign conquests, America also has the gear and numbers to utterly destroy any possible foreign enemy that it gets serious on. The only reason America loses wars is because America (purposely?) tries to fail. A loss of combat effectiveness simply doesn’t matter against foreign enemies.

On the other hand, the happening could occur in the next couple of decades, and where the military falls during this times will matter a lot. The red tribe (ie. the tribe I support and the one not wholly given to degeneracy) has the absolute advantage when it comes to capacity for violence, but if the military falls on the side of the blue tribe, things could get rough. So, a less effective military helps neutralize a potential threat to the red tribe.

As for the purpose of women in the military being to destroy masculine virtue and manly pride, that’s also a positive. The military is the enemy. It is a part of USG and is controlled at the top by the same people destroying the rest of our civilization. Even worse, it is an enemy filled with good people who should be the allies of us and civilization. Because of its association with masculine virtue and red tribe values, the red tribe disproportionately volunteers to support the institution controlled by those who hate them. As well, it is the most trusted institution in the US, acting as a bulwark of trust for the otherwise (rightfully) mistrusted fedgov.

We need to disillusion young white men of their allegiance to the military. White men shouldn’t be fighting the wars of those who hate them. The more we can destroy  the (undeserved) trust the military has among young white men and the less we white men think they can get manly pride from joining up, the fewer white men will volunteer to die in a on the other side of the world while forcing liberalism, sodomy, corporate rape, and democracy upon foreigners.

The same argument holds for lowering military standards. It is a foregone conclusion that military standards will be lowered so that women look equal on paper. This is not something to fear, it is a positive as it will further lower combat effectiveness and eat at trust in the military.

Finally, and more morbidly, having CNN and the NYT showing hundreds of body bags from whatever foreign sandpit we’ll lodge ourselves in next beside the pictures of formerly cute (now dead) young women may end up being a wake-up call for the country (or not, it’s hard to tell where our depravity ends). A little bit of accelerationism in this area could lead to awakening.

So, it’s horrific (but not objectively sinful) that we’re wasting valuable women in the military, but those women were wasting their value themselves, so corporately and civilizationally we’re not really losing anything. If we’re going to let them into the military, we should follow through on the base principles and draft them. The practical effects of this will be positive for those concerned with eventual restoration.

Purging Roosh

Continuing on in my run of alt-right posts.Yet another intra-alt-right battle has begun. The WN’s (mainly) are trying to purge Roosh because he’s a degenerate and not white.

First, Roosh is a part of the alt-right. You may not like that he is, or his part of the alt-right, but the alt-right is a catch all-term for dissident rightests, and Roosh is a dissident rightest.

Second, he can not be purged from the alt-right because there is nothing to purge him from. The alt-right is a loose alliance, not an organization. You could possibly ban him from the next NPI conference, because the NPI is an actual organization, but beyond that what exactly do you plan to purge him from? His own website? Twitter? You can’t purge someone from the alt-right because there is nothing there to purge someone from. The best you can do is ignore someone.

If you want to purge somebody, you have to establish your authority, create an organization, and establish legitimate ownership over the alt-right through that organization. After all that, then you can purge someone. Until you do that, talk of kicking someone out of the alt-right is meaningless.

Third, the white-knighting is pathetic. Why are WN’s going crazy about protecting white sluts from him? He’s not raping these women (and no, whatever feminists may say, drunken sex is not rape; stop acting like feminists), they are sluts who are willingly going to bed with him. If you view him as invading foreigner, you should be disgusted with these women, not white-knighting for them. If he is your enemy, you don’t defend women who “collaborate” with them, you shame them:

All that being said, Roosh is a degenerate. I read his book in which he makes it clear that he is, and I doubt he’d even deny he’s a degenerate. He’s a unhappy, lonely, empty person (that comes through quite clearly in his work) who has sacrificed everything for the pleasures of the flesh. He is not a model of behaviour anyone should follow and he should never be given a position of leadership in the alt-right beyond what he has carved for himself as a PUA. If you do have an organization, you probably shouldn’t let him influence it.

But as I’ve stated before, the PUA’s aren’t the problem, they are a symptom. I again reject the war people are trying to brew between the alt-right and PUA’s. In any decent society, they’d be run out of town with a bull-whip, but we don’t live in a decent society and our allies are few. The PUA’s are useful tools for reaching disaffected young men and inducting them into the alt-right. There has probably been no greater recruitment for the alt-right than then the red pill.

Strategically, we should just leave him and the other PUA’s alone and let them do their thing. The right people will filter through them into us. The rest can keep spreading herpes to club sluts until the restoration, after which we can suppress them like other degenerates. Until then, they’re too useful to go attacking for no good reason.

What is the Alt-Right?

As there was with NRx a while back, there is now some struggle over control of the alt-right label. The fight seems to be going on between the WN’s and everybody else, with the centrepoint on Roosh. The WN’s claim that alt-right is rightfully theirs and non-WN’s are entryists. I don’t particular agree with everybody shooting allies, so I’ll weigh in.

Depending on how you use the term, the alt-right label is somewhat valuable as per Google Trends. ‘Alt right’ dwarfs ‘neoreaction’ (and, to a lesser degree, Moldbug). Although, ‘Alt-right’ is itself dwarfed by ‘neoreaction’ (and ‘Moldbug’), while ‘altright’ is similar to neoreaction. ‘Alternative right’ springs up even before ‘alt right’ and is even bigger than alt-right.

The lefties at RationalWiki (one of the top hits for alt-right) think the alt-right is part neoreaction, but, as with almost everything, they are wrong. Alternative right started getting searches in 2005, a couple years before Moldbug started writing and well before the NRx boom.

The WN’s do have a decent claim to the name. Richard Spencer, WN and creator of Alternative Right has a claim at owning the label as he created was created in 2010 and his the first hit for the label and is one of the earliest uses I can find, but according to Google Trends, ‘alt right’ sprung into existence in 2007, while ‘alternative right’ came a couple years before that. So Spencer was using a label already in existence.

The alt-right has been hitting mainstream presses in the last few months, which makes searching for it’s origins difficult as their flooding the results. The mainstream articles seem to use neoreactionary, alt-right, and white supremacy interchangeably. So, in practice, to the greater world, we’re all the same, probably to the chagrin of everybody on each side. Although, this Quora post is the second-highest ranked on Google for the term and notices the distinction, so its not completely overlooked.

Despite the search troubles, I found some early stuff. The earliest use of alternative right’ I found was in the name of an address by paleoconservative Paul Gottfried to the HL Mencken Club in 2008. He doesn’t use the term in the speech, but the speech is named “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right”. In the speech he uses it describe post-paleo conservatives who are opposed to/outside of neoconservatism, libertarianism, and movement conservatism. The post-paleos he describes go beyond a single organization or ideology and he specifically includes vDare and Taki’s. He also used it again in 2009, where he uses it to refer to non-authorized dissident rightests. The second use I found was from Taki’s in 2009, in an article by Kevin DeAnna (founder of Youth for Western Civilization) which uses the term as a right-wing movement concerned with identity, virtue, and culture as opposed to the economic movement of mainstream conservatism. He also links it to the Ron Paul movement. DeAnna himself spoke at the HL Mencken Club (as has Spencer).

So, near as I can tell, ‘alternative right’ and therefore ‘alt-right’ most rightly belong to the group creating the HL Mencken Club. Their list of presenters is all over the non-mainstream right, including Buchanan, Derbyshire, and Sailer. The Mencken Club began in 2008, so there’s about a a bit of time prior to the Club that it was in use, but I can not find any earlier usages. I’m not sure what caused the one-off spike in 2005, or the surge in 2006.

By the best evidence I can find, ‘alt-right’ originally referred to rightests who grew out of the paleoconservative tradition and are dissidents against the neoconservative mainstream. The alt-right is inherently a catch-all term for those on the right who are outside mainstream conservatism and are attacking it from the right.

So, while the WN’s are part of the alt-right, do not own the alt-right and being alt-right does not mean being a WN. As well, both the DE and neoreaction are part of the alt-right, but the alt-right is neither.

Nationalism

As I’ve previously written, nationalism, or perhaps more approiately thedism, is good.

On the other hand, I am skeptical of white nationalism. Whites exist genetically as a grouping, although there are many sub-groupings within this that are more salient. There is some shared culture, but that is more an artifact of shared Christiandom than any particular intra-racial affinity.

I am skeptical of white nationalism simply for the fact that if I went and asked my Norse great-great-great-great-grandfather if he was of the same nation as a Spaniard or a Bosnian, he’d likely look at me in bewilderment. Individual European nations are different, with different cultures, different values, different Christianities, and different genetics; to proclaim a white nation, a white nationalism for all of Europe is as insane a project as the EU.

White nationalism is far too universalist a concept for me to accept.

That being said, there is always the old Bedouin saying, “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and my cousin and I against the stranger”. Because of Christendom, proximity, and genetics Europeans have enough shared culture to unite against a common threat of those with fewer shared ties, such as Islamic invasion, but the occasional strategic alliance against outsiders does not a nation make.

On the other hand, there might arguably be a white nation in North America (and possibly South America, but I do not know enough about their racial politics to comment). It’s possible enough intra-European mongrelization and cultural assimilation has occurred to make NA whites a separate independent thede (sort of like NA blacks are a separate thede), but I still doubt it. There are too many separate white thedes in NA who don’t particularly care for each other for white to be a true thede. Even after over 200 years of living together the puritans and cavaliers/reivers still hate each other.

Apart from that, while I say I support nationalism, that is because I do not have a better word. Nationalism grew out of Westphalia and the French Revolution, and is a part of the enlightenment and liberalization.  When it began, nationalism was the ideology of radicals and 1800’s nationalists were often the liberals, until Cthulu swam past them both. Nationalism resulted the destruction of local culture for a more universalist national culture and the end of traditional authorities.

Nationalism, or at least modern nationalism, is too liberal for me to accept as an ideology.

So I support unified communities, nations, and believe that generally each individual nation, whether based on ethnicity, language, religion, ideology, etc., should have self-determination and should govern itself by its own authorities in accordance with its own local culture.

Could that be called nationalism? Possibly, it’s the best existing word I can think of the top of my head. I attempted to use local nationalism on Twitter once, but that it was pointed out that is contradictory. Thedism would probably be more accurate for my views.

So, I’m a thedist. ‘Us’ should govern ‘us’.’Us’ should not govern ‘them’ and ‘them’ should not govern ‘us’.

Alt-right Ethics

Recently, I linked to a TRS post on why the alt-right needs to understand ethics. The writer was a consequentialist who advocated understanding deontological principles. I am not a consequentialist, as I made clear in the debates on Christian genocide I hold to divine command theory, a specific form of deontology, with a smattering of virtue ethics for resolving those areas where multiple goods collide. I linked to the post, not because I consider consequentialism correct but because of the call to understand alternative ethics systems when debating others to be a more effective debater and the posts general anti-nihilism, as nihilism tends to infect some parts of the alt-right.

My philosophical problem with consequentialism is it’s lacking solid base. Why is this particular good that we are pursuing good? Consequentialism generally assigns value to a good (pleasure, pain avoidance, utility, the white race, etc) and makes that value the sole source of morality, without generally given an objective reason for why that particular good is of greater worth than other goods.

In this particular discussion, the good being discussed is the white race (I’ve got a post on WN coming, sometime). But why is securing the existence of the white race and the future for your children such a good that any evil done in its advancement of it is worthwhile? Survival and thriving are good and I certainly support the continuing existence of the white race, but why are they good? Is being a low-melanin gene-controlled meat sack pumping out more low-melanin gene-controlled meat sacks and fending off higher-melanin gene-controlled meat sacks so your particular phenotype becomes dominant among meat sacks really the base good upon which all other good is measured and for which all evil is justified?

What makes your particular geno-/phenotype objectively better than their particular geno-/phenotype?  Would that good that makes your particular geno-/phenotype better not be a greater good then? So why not make that good your consequence? But that new good, why is it good? Then why is that not the good you pursue?

You either run yourself in circles, or you come to the point where there is no answer.

Here Gary argues against nihilism:

Another annoying thing was that Sargon asked that if blacks became majority and took over the US, would it then be morally wrong for blacks to enslave white people? This was not dealt with well. One of the people in the hangout even answered ‘no’ to this question, which is obviously moral nihilism. I’m not a moral nihilist, neither should you be. Of course it would be wrong, but not because it’s discrimination, but because it is slavery, and more specifically because the consequences that would arise from that slavery are negative. Slavery, again, is not immoral inherently. No action is, as we’ve already demonstrated. If the blacks, on the other hand, were to throw whitey out of their country then that would not be morally wrong because it would result in more stability and peace in that country. Of course that’s not really true since blacks are uncivilized savages who actually benefit from white presence, but it is true in the parallel where whites are the majority and Arabs and Latinos are the minorities getting thrown out.

He argues the slavery of whites is wrong, while slavery itself is not, because of the consequences, which he doesn’t spell out. ‘Consequences’ is so amorphous and undefined, that he’s undermining his own point. Also, consequences for who? I’m sure blacks would appreciate having white slaves. Without an objective standard by which to measure ‘consequences’ consequentialism is meaningless.

He speaks positively of stability and peace a little later on in that paragraph, but why are these values inherently better than chaos and war?

What makes these values objective?

You need an absolute to measure morality by or morality is little more than taste preference. It is nihilism gussied up.

It’s God or nihilism. Choose.

And God is a deontologist.

****

As a believer divine command theory my support for nationalism (or more accurately thedism, post coming some time) comes from the word of God:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

(Genesis 1:26-28 ESV)

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

(Genesis 11:1-9 ESV)

“The Rock, his work is perfect,
for all his ways are justice.
A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,
just and upright is he.
They have dealt corruptly with him;
they are no longer his children because they are blemished;
they are a crooked and twisted generation.
Do you thus repay the LORD,
you foolish and senseless people?
Is not he your father, who created you,
who made you and established you?
Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you.
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
But the LORD’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
(Deuteronomy 32:4-9 ESV)

God made man to spread over the world. He divided them so they to accomplish this goal and each nation was made to inhabit it’s own territory. He made them different and those differences are good.

****

Finally, on a tangent, the ‘murdering baby Hitler’ example is a poor poor way to compare consequentialism and deontology, for it adds time travel to the mix. The murder of millions of Slavs and Jews is an obvious moral wrong for which the death penalty would be a justified punishment. So, when you are ask if someone would be justified in murdering baby Hitler, you are not asking the question of whether it is permissible to murder babies if the cause is good enough.

What you are really asking is: is it okay to pre-emptively punish someone for an action they will certainly commit in the future, which is only obfuscated by the inclusion of harm prevention?

While this is an interesting ethical and philosophical question, it doesn’t necessarily draw a line between the two differing ethical systems. One could think of decent arguments for/against preemptive punishment on both sides of that particular divide.

Superior and Inferior

The Wright/Malcolm monarchy debate has ended. I’m late to the debate, but I’m not debating, instead I just want to comment on something Wright said and implicated a number of times:

I have never met anyone who talks like you before. Even the zany materialist Dr Andreassen, who thought himself nothing more than a meat robot, did not think himself my inferior. Quite the opposite.

Then you are a slave in spirit, if not in law. If so, there is nothing to discuss: for you are a man willing to have another decide your fate. If so again, I decree that, as a free man who outranks you, I have unilaterally decided you should enjoy, while in America, the rights for which I but not you are willing to die.

If you argue with my high handed decision, then you are either being presumptuous (as you say) or you are secretly possessed of the belief that you should be allowed to participate in the decision about your life as if you owned it, and were equal with me. But this would indicate that you believe yourself possessed of an inalienable right to equality. But If we are equals, and I am free, you are free. In which case you believe in an inalienable equality of rights. This is in directly logical conflict with the legal theory of monarchy, which holds that the civic power passes by inheritance, as a family property, down a bloodline set aside by law as superior to all others.

So merely by entering into this discussion at all, you cast doubt upon your position. Freedom is not something discussed between equals. Superiors need not discuss such matters with inferiors. The superiors merely decide. The inferiors show respect, show deference, and obey.

First, political freedom is not freedom true. Political freedom is the right of the mob to force their will upon the rest. Republicanism is only superior over democratic mob rule insofar as it is anti-democratic and explicitly hierarchical. Whether you are ruled by a king and ruled by a mob, you are still ruled, although, in the former you are ruled only by one, in the latter by all. Having laws outlining how you are ruled and a judge who “interprets” those laws, doesn’t mean you are any less ruled, it simply means you are ruled by an unelected judge rather than a king.

Second, no man is free. We are born into the world the subject of our father, become the subjects of our teachers, and are always the subject of the state, be it autocratic or democratic. “Freedom” is impersonal authority rather than personal authority. The “free man” wishes to be a servant without a master. To be ruled by a constitution (manipulated by politicians and “interpreted” by judges) is still to be ruled, only it is the rule of impersonal forces set in motion by faceless elites, rather than the personal rule of a known individual. The free republican wishes to be ruled by the Star Chamber rather than the king. Base anarchy is the only true freedom, and nobody wants to live in base anarchy because it means getting brained by the stronger man who wants to eat your venison and rape your woman. (Admittedly, the stronger man might enjoy himself, at least until he is no longer the stronger man).

Third, the consent of the governed doesn’t exist. You are born into a society and indoctrinated in its ways from before you can even speak consent, let alone meaningfully understand the concept. The ideas of your fathers control your mind before you are even capable of realizing it. The liberal may respond, ‘but I rebel against the ways of my fathers’, not knowing rebellion is the way of his fathers. The consent of the governed is the consent of a women not protesting because she has inadvertently consumed rohypnol.

Fourth, republican freedom is not a sign of superiority, but inferiority. The superior man’s superiority comes from the responsibilities for the burdens of others he bears. He is free to act only insofar as others trust him to act for them. The free republican man is free because he bears no responsibility for the burdens of others, only his own. Even the inferior man is superior to the free republican man, for the inferior man bears the burdens and responsibilities entrusted him by his superior. (Of course, it need not be said, the slave is lowest of all for he does not even bear his own burdens. Even so, a slave can still be of value and worth).

The defining feature of the free man is that he rules no one as he himself is not ruled. To call oneself superior to another is to deny one’s own freedom.

Fifth, being a subject is not being a slave. A slave obeys force. A subject obeys a man, an office, and a tradition.

Sixth, being inferior to one is not being inferior to all. Kneeling before the king does not imply kneeling before Mr. Wright. Relatedly, being inferior in one aspect does not make one inferior in all. The king may kneel before the priest come mass, but the bishop kneels before the king come court.

Order, Chaos, and Regimentation

Reaction is about establishing order. A reactionary society is an ordered one, an ordered society is a conservative one. A disordered society is chaotic. Civilization is order, chaos is barbarism.

Regimentation is not necessarily order. A communist society is heavily regimented, but also chaotic. There is not order. Our growing anarcho-tyranny is heavily regimented, disordered, and chaotic all at once.

Natural order flows flow naturally from the relationships men are inclined towards. Regimentation is artificial, it is unnaturally forced upon society rather than flowing from it.

Regimentation may be necessary at times: a soldier in the army is artificially regimented as opposed to the naturally ordered warrior of a warband, but an army of soldiers is necessary for survival, as the warrior has been made obsolete (for now, 4G looks to be changing that).

Just because something is lined up nicely in a row or is heavily controlled does not mean it’s ordered. In fact, it is likely means it is regimented chaos. Chaos requires regimentation, order does not. In fact, order may look disorganized to the casual observer who doesn’t know better.

Regimentation is not order.