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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-291379042016-07-26T04:18:38.291+10:00The Social PathologistThe Diseases of Modern Life as seen through the Secular ConfessionalThe Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-16201821664668199502016-07-10T11:45:00.001+10:002016-07-10T11:45:11.370+10:00Programming Note

I was hoping to put up another post on Francis this week but unfortunately time has not been my ally.
I plan to resume again in another four to five weeks.

The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-77281202114635604152016-07-01T23:55:00.001+10:002016-07-02T08:25:13.506+10:00Francis on McCarthy

To repudiate McCarthyism, however, would be to accept not only the establishment but also the premises and agenda on which it operates, for the complex of public and private bureaucracies that compose the establishment is inseparable from the environmentalist, utopian, and social engineering functions that the premises and agenda of liberalism express and rationalize. The American Right, then, if it is serious about wanting to preserve the nation and its social fabric and political culture in any recognizable form, must continue to embrace Joe McCarthy and the kind of militant, popular, anti-liberal, and antiestablishment movement that he was the first to express on a national scale.
One of the best essays, in my opinion was Francis's take on Joe McCarthy. McCarthy is a much maligned figure in American history and undoubtably was a reckless man. However its important to remember that revolutions are not really started by intellectuals but by mortal, fallible men facing the contingencies of the time. The prayers that reach God are not only uttered by saints but also by "sons of bitches" and Joe McCarthy seemed more of the latter. Burnham didn't like him, though he was too smart to disown outright, claiming that he was "anti anti-McCarthy". Whittaker Chambers also wanted to disassociate himself from McCarthy, not because he didn't recognise the validity of his claims, rather the recklessness of his methods was likely undermine the long term anti-liberal cause. He thought him as a "rabble rouser" who "simply knew the that a tomato had been thrown and the general direction from which it came."

By all accounts, McCarthy was not a "nice" man. Francis writes;

He violated the rules of the Senate as well as the standards of common decency. He physically attacked Drew Pearson. He lost his temper, bullied witnesses, talked dirty, and drank too much. He insulted such devoted public servants and stalwart patriots as Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall. He tried to link Stevenson with Alger Hiss, and he made attorney Joseph Welch cry on national television. Perhaps worst of all, when journalists or other senators called McCarthy a liar, a criminal, an extremist, a homosexual, or a fraud, he paid them back in the same coin with his distinctive gift for invective. Joe McCarthy said and did all these things and more, and the evil that inheres in them lives after him and recoils upon us to this day in the hatred that attaches to his cursed name.
Francis recognises that McCarthy evokes a visceral hatred out of all proportion to the nature of McCarthy's "crimes", since many of the people and institutions that he did criticise were ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions of people. So why the hate? Francis writes;

The real reason for the hatred borne by the name of Joe McCarthy has little to do with the evil that is attributed to him or with his uncompromising anticommunism but rather with what he discovered about the forces—the people, ideas, and institutions—that by 1950 had come to dominate American government and public discourse and with what he communicated and exposed to the American people about those forces. McCarthy not only claimed that a communist presence had entered into the federal government but also that noncommunist or ostensibly anticommunist elements in the government and more broadly in the national elite were in some sense "soft" on or sympathetic to communism and, consequently, that they lacked the resolution to extirpate the internal communist presence and deal effectively with communism abroad. Even more, he suggested that the connection between the elite and the forces of subversion and aggression was in itself an indictment of the elite, regardless of whether its members were formally affiliated with communism, whether they had actually committed espionage or treason in a legal sense, or whether they verbally espoused opposition to communism. McCarthy, in other words, was not principally concerned with the issue of communism in government but with the relationship between communism and the elite, or establishment, and because his concern necessarily involved a militant challenge to and a rejection of the elite, it launched a massive political and verbal counterattack upon him, crushed him and the movement he created, and transformed him into the demonic embodiment of evil that moves among us even today.
Francis recognised that the changes bought about by the New Deal in the United States had effectively resulted in a displacement of America's traditional governing class and its replacement by a managerial class who, while opposed to the methods of communism, were quite sympathetic to its ends. This intellectual sympathy, rendered them "soft" when combating communism and in many instance instances, wittingly or unwittingly, helped further along the communist cause. Francis fully understood that liberalism--in the American sense--did not differ from communism by very much being simply a "softer" variant of it, a point that Francis further elaborates in the essay.

It's important to recognise significance of the liberal capture, especially in light of historical developments in the second half of the 20th Century, particularly with regard to the failure to contain Soviet aggression and the cultural collapse of traditional western society in the Sixties.

Liberals had captured all the key institutions by the early 50's, so it's no surprise that by the early Sixties, when the universities had started agitating for cultural change, the institutional pushback was not there. That's because the institutions were already in agreement with demands of the students. Mainstream America's attempt to push back against the tide was doomed to failure, since the institutions of government were against them. This also explains why relatively peaceful movement such as protests and civil disobedience were so effective out of all proportion to the efforts and why in a country like North Korea, where the managerial class is quite happy with the state of affairs, similar such protests are suicidal.

It also explains a lot of the conservative failure in pushing back the "left tide". Emulating the methods "left's success" i.e. protests and civil disobedience are likely to be ineffective, since the Left's methods are premised on having an elite that is sympathetic to their ideals. Conservatives, emulating their methods lack the pre-requisite elite support and likely to see their methods fail. But more importantly, conservatives using such methods are being diverted from more practical modes of opposition by using the civil rights paradigm as a model of resistance. If anyone doubts this the current institutional apathy in pursuing left wing groups who are violent towards the right are a case in point. Had a the roles been reversed, and a right wing group responsible, arrests would have been made. McCarthy was able to impress upon the public the extent of the liberal capture.

The elite's horror of McCarthy stems not from his failure to apply due process but rather the fact that he used their methods on them and was able to stage a populist revolt:

Nevertheless, it was not the minutiae of congressional investigations and the administration of federal laws and regulations that created McCarthy's following, nor did they significantly contribute to the hatred of him that the new elite exhibited. Had McCarthy announced, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, the discovery of Communists in labor unions rather than in the State Department, his speech would have attracted little notice. The State Department and the individuals whom McCarthy proceeded to identify by name were at the heart of the establishment and its agenda, and when McCarthy made bald assertions about their connections to communism, he was launching an attack upon the establishment that it could not ignore and which it could reciprocate only with hatred. Other criticisms of the elite from the Right—of its economic and foreign policies or of the constitutionality of its legal measures—did not challenge its fundamental legitimacy or its basic loyalty and integrity, nor did they generally suggest that the establishment was a distinct social and political, as well as an ideological, formation, implicitly and inherently alien and hostile to the mainstream of the nation[ED]. Hatred and destruction of McCarthy were the only possible responses to this kind of attack. Thomas Reeves says in his large biography of McCarthy that he is our King John. It may be more appropriate to say that he is the liberals "Trotsky", their Emmanuel Goldstein, their Jew. His very existence was a threat to their interests and power and was ultimately incompatible with their dominance in the United States.
While most people recognise McCarthy as a red "witch hunter", Francis makes the crucial distinction in recognising that McCarthy was a populist witch hunter who had, for the first time, managed to organise some sort of pushback against the managerial state. Intellectuals may have been able to put forward good intellectual arguments against the New Deal but McCarthy was the first to organise a populist pushback.

It was McCarthy's accomplishment to infuse into the American Right the militancy of a counterrevolutionary movement, and the large following he attracted tends to confirm that there was indeed what Chambers called a "jagged fissure" between the elite and the "plain men and women of the nation" on the issue of the relationship between the elite and communism. The militant anti-liberal and anticommunist movement that McCarthy was the first to instigate also underlay the Goldwater movement of the early 1960s, the Wallace following of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the "New Right" of the last decade. Every time these mass expressions of anti-liberalism have appeared, mainstream conservatives and the Republican party have hastened to take political advantage of them and use them to gain political office—as Eisenhower did in 1952, Nixon in 1968, and Reagan in 1980. Yet every time also, those who gained office have proceeded to ignore, to compromise, or actually to betray the constituency on which their officeholding was based. They have done so because they are themselves part of or closely connected to the elite against which this constituency is mobilized.
Francis casts McCarthy's legacy in a different light. While it is true that he was a flawed man, "the son of a bitch" was the first to politically challenge the liberal elite. Subsequent scholarship and particularly the disclosure of the Venona project have vindicated him to a degree, however Chambers assessment of him was ultimately correct; his faults and excess were ultimately his downfall.The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-54819774782451982302016-06-22T23:42:00.000+10:002016-06-22T23:42:43.780+10:00Francis on Chambers.

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

According to Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis was equivocal on the relationship of Christianity and Western Civilisation, and apparently he had grown lukewarm in his faith, so I was surprised to see Francis include Chambers in his narrow group of thinkers. Quite frankly, I bought the his book, Beautiful Losers, simply to see what he would say about Chambers, whom this blog has championed before. Francis, though clearly under the influence of Burnham's positivism, is perhaps one of the few understood the importance of Chambers thinking and the importance of his "witness" in the Alger Hiss, trial and of the seismic changes that took place in Conservatism as result.

The trial, and Chambers victory against nearly insurmountable odds of the managerial establishment, re-orientated Conservatism towards a more religious understanding of itself; gave birth to the McCarthy movement, which even though flawed, was the first example of populism against the managerial state; launched the career of Richard Nixon, helped expunge the Rockefeller republicans from the party in the Goldwater campaign and was hugely influential on the populism of Ronald Reagan.

His legacy lives on. Quite frankly, it's a surprise that he is so neglected given mark on history. Francis is to be commended for both recognising his importance and for keeping his memory alive. Still, reading Francis I was more of the impression that he "intuited" Chambers greatness rather than fully intellectually appreciating his significance.

Chambers, like Burnham, was an ex communist who eventually repudiated its ideals, and both men shared a common outlook which separated them from the "conservative tradition". Whereas Burhnam belonged to tradition of Machiavelli, Chambers intellectual lineage belonged more to the tradition of Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

Burnham's modernism alienated those traditionalist conservatives who were aware of it. Their minds tend to center on the more ethereal regions of religion, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics, rather than on the sociological analysis of political conflict and the geo-politics of global struggle, and they are not attracted to and are often repelled by a worldview that centers on conflict, power, and human irrationality. Whittaker Chambers, whose own mind reflected a tension between modernism and antimodern elements and who ex-pressed deep admiration for Burnham, nevertheless criticized him for his "prudent, practical thinking." "The Fire Bird," wrote Chambers, "is glimpsed living or not at all. In other words, realists have a way of missing truth, which is not invariably realistic." The "Fire Bird" refers to the classical myth of the phoenix, a bird composed of fire that, since it was consumed by flames as it flew through the air, left no body. Its existence therefore could not be proved empirically, by finding its body; it had to be seen alive or not at all. Chambers's meaning is that Burnham's worldview demanded empirical proof for things that by their nature could not be proved but were nevertheless known to be true by those who had seen—or felt or intuited—them.
Chambers recognised that Burnham's vision was limited by his positivism and that he had missed what the real fight of the 20th Century was all about, the battle between atheism and religion. Religion, Chambers recognised, motivated men for the sacrifices and struggles that were needed to sustain a culture, and a better arranged atheism did not provide any such protection, whilst Atheism collapsed eventually into Hedonism. And Chambers, staring about him in the glory days of 1950's America could see that the the atheistic managerial state was slowly strangling, and excluding, the motive principle that had sustained the West. Seeing beyond the gloss to the underlying substance Chambers wrote:

there is a strong family resemblance between the Communist state and the welfare state. The ends each has in view have much in common. But the methods proposed for reaching them radically differ. Each is, in fact, in direct competition with the other, since each offers itself as an alternative solution for the crisis of the 20th Century; and Fabian Britain has at last supplanted Soviet Russia in the eyes of political liberals when they look abroad. Nevertheless, that family resemblance is nerve-wearing, since all the minds that note it are not equally discriminating, especially in a nation that has only just become conscious of Communism and still rejects socialism. So, at every move against Communism, liberal views come unglued, and liberal voices go shrill, fearing that, by design or error, the move may be against themselves.
The beast could morph and Chambers was adept at recognising it's manifestations.

Cambers was contemptuous of liberalism and saw it as another morphed form of managerial atheism. Attempts to reconcile liberalism to conservatism misunderstood the nature of it and Chambers despaired the lack this awareness and the stupidity of many conservatives. Francis writes:

Yet if Chambers rejected twentieth-century liberalism, he was not much more sympathetic to the conservatives of the 1950s. He declined to attach himself in any way to Joe McCarthy, less perhaps from dislike of the man than a belief that McCarthy would eventually taint his witness. He was not comfortable at National Review and found preposterous the quaint dogmas of classical liberalism dressed up as conservatism. In a letter to Buckley in 1957, he called the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises "a goose," and Frank Meyer's self-appointment as the ideological gatekeeper of the American Right seems first to have amused, then bored, him. The ideas of Meyer and Russell Kirk struck Chambers as "chiefly an irrelevant buzz." Of Kirk's The Conservative Mind he asked, "if you were a marine in a landing boat, would you wade up the seabeach at Tarawa for that conservative position? And neither would I!" Only with Buckley himself and James Burnham did he seem to share anything like a common outlook, and at last he resigned from National Review, acknowledging to Buckley and himself that he was not a conservative in any serious sense but "a man of the Right."

What exactly Chambers meant by this term is far from clear, but he contrasted it with "conservatism" and seems to have identified it with a defense of capitalism. "I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative." Yet despite his identification with capitalism, almost nowhere did Chambers offer an explicit defense of it, and in both his letters to Buckley and in a National Review piece of 1958 on federal farm policy, he was perfectly conscious of the contradiction between capitalism and conservatism and the link between capitalism and the advance of socialism. Like most conservatives and like his neighbors in rural Maryland, Chambers saw the freedom I and independence of farmers threatened by federal regulation of agriculture. But he also believed such controls were "inescapable."
I think its important here to understand what Chambers means by "Man of the Right" which I don't think Francis appreciated. It's more a negative definition than a positive one. Chambers intrinsically opposed to the atheistic vision which was the hallmark of liberalism, but he was also opposed to the rag tag bunch of anti-Liberalists and traditionalist who were "Right" merely by being opposed to the left. Many of whom who hopeless aesthetes or nostalgics and other "right-materialists" who who saw man simply as an economic unit, or racial entity.

His evisceration of Ayn Rand singlehandedly threw her out of the conservative fold: A better managerialism is not what he was about. And the point that Chambers was trying to make by this statement is that it is possible to be anti-Left and to still be evil or stupid, which he though many conservatives were.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?
Like Burnham, Chambers shared much of his historical determinism, which in turn imparted upon him a spenglerian gloom. It also alienated him from Traditionalists who failed to recognise that late 19th Century was transformative in the scheme of human relations. Chambers' experiences in the Hiss Case lead him to the conclusion that he was on the "losing side", and much like a 19th Century physician, he could diagnose the problem but was powerless in effecting a cure. Francis writes:

The significance of Chambers's witness, then, is considerably diminished if it is mistaken as merely an account of Soviet communism and its Western stooges. His point throughout his writings in the 1940s and 1950s was that the roots of communism lie in the West itself and that they flourish because the modern age has chosen to credit the serpent's promise. That promise and its lethal consequences for the West were as palpable to him in the United States of Truman and Eisenhower as they had been under the Edwardians and as they were in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Only when the West had awakened to the falsehood of the promise could it bear what he called "that more terrible witness" by which it would destroy its external enemy and begin to purge itself of its internal toxins. But he had no expectation that the West would do so, and no suggestions on how to do it.
Whilst I think Francis gives Chambers an accurate appraisal, I feel that his own lukewarm religiousness rendered him partially deaf to Chambers' message. Francis was looking for a method or program, within the existing materialistic world view to right it and it was Cambers's contention that there was no solution within it. The only way out was by re-embracing religion. Burnham, on the other hand, seemed to take Chambers's witness more seriously, and by the time he had written Suicide of the West, Burnham had conceded that ideas, i.e. culture, were just as significant as material and historical determinism. Burnham's identification of liberalism as the solvent of the West owes a large part to Chambers influence, yet he would not fully embrace religion, whilst recognising its utility, till shortly before his death.

The point of Chambers witness is that there is no conservative or bourgeois revival unless we bend the knee to God. The best we can hope for otherwise is a Singapore or Japan, but perceptive observers of these countries realise that, they too, are dying. And even they, with their well managed managerial states, pale into insignificance, in terms of cultural output when compared to the glories of European civilisation.

Chambers's message is that the cause of the death spiral of the West is atheism. Atheists, of course, reject this message, but it's also problematic for Christians. Faith is not something that can be engineered. It can be shored up with logic and argument but the faculty which gives certainty to the propositions of faith is a free gift of God that cannot be commanded. Religious reactionaries, I do not feel, have fully recognised this fact or its political implications. Perhaps this is a future project for a religious neo-reaction.

With regard to NRx, Chambers diagnosis pretty much damns Moldbuggian NRx which, trapped in its atheism, is really just a better way of arranging things. If NRx wants to be truly transformative it needs to go Churchy. This will be a bitter pill for many.

It's true that Burnham made a huge impression on Francis, but as Francis lay dying from the complications of aortic surgery, he was visited by a Catholic priest who offered him the choice of a blessing or the Last Rites. The priest, by the way, being Antonin Scalia's son. Francis, like his hero Burnham chose the Last Rites. Perhaps Chambers made more of an impression on Francis than he really let on.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-5184831549006285342016-06-15T16:36:00.001+10:002016-06-15T16:36:54.950+10:00Francis on Burnham:IIIt's clear from Francis's writing that he felt that contemporary conservatism, in both its libertarian and "traditionalist" forms was incapable of dealing with the societal changes which occurred in the 20th Century. Francis felt the the libertarians had an "abstract" view of man which did not map onto reality and the traditionalists were still operating under the assumption that the fundamental nature of the world had remained unchanged. If Sam Francis was about anything, it was about the understanding of reality and how to navigate it, it was for this reason that Burnham appealed to him.

Burnham regarded himself as an empirical student of power. Power as it is actually wielded rather than is theoretically expressed and hence the strong influence of Machiavelli, Marx, Mosca and Pareto in his thought. His intellectual lineage put him outside the "tradition" of many conservatives who did not know what to make of him. On the other hand, Burnham himself felt that a conservatism which did not deal with the practical circumstances in which it found itself, and instead dealt with abstract principles only was an anachronism and destined to failure. Burnham's expositions of the ugly realities of power confused many who assumed that he was approving of them, which was not case. Burnham faced and stated realities regardless of how repulsive they were to himself.

The primary goals at which I aim in this column, as in most of the books and articles I have written, are fact and analysis. I do not accept any theory of class, national, ethnic, partisan, or sectarian truth. If conclusions I reach are true, they are just as true for Russians as for Americans, for pagans as for Christians, and for blacks as for whites.
For Burnham, historical and material circumstance had rendered traditional society obsolescent, in the same way that the internet is now rendering much of the media irrelevant, not by moral choice but by practical operation in the real world. And much like typesetters have become increasingly irrelevant, so too have the petit bourgeois capitalists in the modern world.

Yet the managerial regime did not evolve nor its elites become dominant in the economy, government, and mass society without a struggle. From the early twentieth century to the present, the social and political forces that resisted the formation of the managerial regime and the implementation of its agenda constituted a conservative, at times reactionary, influence. Small businessmen and entrepreneurs, the more parochial sectors of American society, lower middle-class elements, and groups that found the fiscal burden and social effects of the new regime a threat to their economic status and cultural identity provided the political base of the conservative resistance to managerial forces and ideas. The members of this base saw in the fusion of state and economy a threat to their own independent standing, endangered by the labor unions, regulations, and intervention imposed by the new managerial state in partnership with mass corporations. They saw their own values and institutions denigrated and undermined by the cosmopolitan ethic and egalitarian policies of the new elite. They suffered from the inflation and exorbitant taxation that financed the managerial state and from the crime and social dislocation that resulted from its social policies, by which the managerial regime subsidized an urban proletariat as its own political base. They were offended and often frightened by the globalist and, in their view un-American, international policies of the elite, which involved permanent intervention in world affairs, expensive foreign aid programs, the prospect of global war, and the renunciation of national interests in return fora cosmopolitan "one-world" that they regarded as both illusory and dangerous.
There's a lot to unpack in this paragraph of Francis's but I'm only going to concentrate on the main points.

Firstly, the battle is between the bourgeois and the current managerial elite.
Secondly, the strategy of the managerial elite is to squeeze the bourgeois middle by buying off the lumpenproletariat, who sell their votes to the highest bidder. This group are principally made up of the socially dysfunctional white and black lower classes in the U.S. who have been effectively "de-bourgeoised" by either genetic limitations or through adopting values which ensure their poverty. Kevin Williamson copped a lot of heat for his article in the National Review--(there is a lot I disagree with)-- but he inadvertently vindicates Burhnam's and Francis's analysis:

Nationalism may speak to a longing for lost national greatness, but in our own time, it speaks at least as strongly to the longing after — the great howling lamentation for — the ideal family that never was lost, because it never was formed. The Mikes of the world may be struggling to make it in the global economy, but what they really are shut out of is the traditional family. The current social regime of illegitimacy, serial monogamy, abortion, and liberal divorce has rendered traditional families optional, at best — the great majority of divorces are initiated by wives, not by husbands — and the welfare state has at least in part supplanted the Mikes in their role as providers[ED], assuming that they have the wherewithal to fill that role in the first place. Traditional avenues for achieving respect, status, and permanence are lost to them.

The strategy of the elites was to buy the votes of the dysfunctional class. The cultural revolution of the Sixties effectively increased the pressure on the middle from the bottom.

Thirdly, the values of the managerial elite are different to the values of the bourgeois and there is an active displacement going on. This is going about through active exclusion from the decision making apparatus, economic pressure and cultural ostracism. According to Francis, the elites are effecting the destruction of the middle class.

Burnham, due to his historical determinism, felt that the managerial revolution was inevitable but what perplexed him was, unlike previous revolutions in the West, specifically when bourgeois society replaced the medieval one and which resulted in even greater civilisational advancement, the current elite was presiding over a civilisation that was dying. Burnham saw that the Elites were not just presiding over a new type of society but they were presiding over a society that had lost the will to live.

Burnham, though born a Catholic had been an atheist for much of his life. He recognised the "utility" of religion for a society but thought it one of Sorel's "Myths" that kept a society together. He did not believe in the truth of it. In trying to explain the West's loss of the will to live he tried to frame a different theory, one that both he and Francis did not seem entirely convinced of but one which I feel has a fair amount of merit. Francis writes in the Political Science Reviewer;

In his last book, Suicide of the West, Burnham was pessimistic about this ability and about the very survival of non-Communist civilization. Yet he was somewhat evasive on the exact causes of the contraction and decline of the West.[ED] It is true that the causes of the decline were not the subject of the book and that Burnham narrowed the possible causes to a failure of the will to survive within the governing elite, a failure rationalized by liberal ideology but more deeply associated, as Burnham suggested, "with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury". He did not pursue this suggestion further, however, and indeed it is too large a problem to be treated in Suicide of the West.

It may be noted that Machiavelli had also attached central importance to the decline of religion and the rise of luxury as subversive forces in political society. Machiavelli had written in the Discourses, "there is no greater indication of the ruin of a country than to see religion contemned" and "in well-regulated republics the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor."' The decline of religion removes the principal unifying force in society able to rationalize sacrifices and suffering; the rise of luxury contributes to factionalism and the usurpation of the public interest by private groups and to the general softening and corruption of the physical and moral strength of the citizens. It is therefore not surprising that Burnham would have suggested these two phenomena as likely causes of Western civilizational decline, but he did not develop them.

Yet it is possible to reconstruct more clearly Burnham's views on the causes of the decline of the West and on the future of the West from the body of his published writings. Both problems in his mind were closely related to the internal structure and mentality of the Western governing elite. From The Managerial Revolution to Suicide of the West Burnham had predicted that the rising managerial elite would contain a heavy proportion of Class II residues [ED:Broadly analogous to alpha males, Class 1 residues are analogous to betas] and would be efficient in the use of force. Although he had regarded the totalitarian tendencies of the new elite as a serious threat to freedom and to the flexibilities that societal survival requires, he had praised the coming elite for its dynamism, its resoluteness, and its ability and willingness to seize leadership. In The Machiavellians he had written that "We may be sure that the soldiers, the men of force, the Lions, will be much more prominent among the new rulers than in the ruling class of the past century". In The Coming Defeat of Communism, published over a decade later, he again dwelt on the dynamism of the new elite and the decadence and vacillation of the old entrepreneurial class.

In Suicide of the West, however, he reversed this prediction and portrayed the managerial groups, under the influence of liberal ideology, as foxes, vacillating, unwilling and unable to use force, and relying on negotiations, propaganda, and opportunism. The correlation of liberal ideology with the managerial social forces was explicit, and it contradicted Burnham's earlier optimistic estimate of the new elite.

Although Burnham never explicitly accounted for his change of opinion, in Suicide of the West he suggested an explanation for the change that is entirely consistent with his earlier Machiavellian formulation of the theory of the managerial revolution. While it remained true that the social transformation has led to a greater presence within the elite of, and a greater reliance on, military leaders, the very nature of the managerial revolution, with its shift from small-scale, personal leadership to mass-scale, bureaucratic leadership, altered the character of the new military elite.

Technological change brings into the military force more and more persons exercising "civilian skills" (administrative, technical, scientific) that lack the in-bred immunity of the older, narrower military vocation to liberal ideas and values.

Two years later, in a highly controversial article in National Review on Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Burnham made the point more explicitly. Burnham praised McNamara, "a perfect exemplar of the top level of the new managerial class," for trying to "make the defense establishment as closely as possible an integral element of our advanced managerial economy." 'A Much of the criticism directed at McNamara Burnham saw as originating from traditional, entrepreneurial elements in American society and from traditional military types in the armed services. These critics were resisting the technical modernization of the armed forces as pan of their general social resistance to the managerial revolution and the new class that was leading it. Yet Burnham was not entirely laudatory of McNamara and the elite he represented. He cited a letter-perhaps apocryphal-from a naval electronics technician who commented that he had seen no proof that "McNamara & Co. have an intuitive feel for the use of force: they seem to be more foxes than lions."' Burnham, then, was aware that military leadership by foxes or Class I residues may lack the qualities of command, combativeness, and endurance that lions would exhibit. "There are things in war," Burnham commented, "not dreamt of by IBM's computers.

The point that Burnham was making was that managerial society, perhaps by its very nature, requires or finds useful the residues and psychic forces of the fox, not those of the lion. As he had written of the Class I residues in The Machiavellian:

it is this residue that leads restless individuals to large-scale financial manipulations, merging and combining and re-combining of various economic enterprises, efforts to entangle and disentangle political units, to make and remake empires. (MDF, 187)

These are precisely the traits needed by those who manage mass-scale organizations-whether economic, political, educational, religious, social, or professional in function. They are traits that lead to success in the mastery of technical and administrative skills; the use of language in argument, negotiations, and propaganda; and the disciplines of modern organizational life. The traits of the lions or Class II residues-fierce loyalties and hatreds, a capacity for violence or brutality, and a willingness to endure suffering and sacrifice-are not required by modern managerial society to any great degree. Thus, managerial society, even in its military organizations, tends to promote and encourage those elements of the population that exhibit Class I residues and to demote, exclude, and discourage those that exhibit Class II residues. It also has an affinity for derivations such as liberalism that reflect Class I values and ideas, and an aversion to derivations such as conservatism that do not reflect Class I values and ideas and to some extent reflect those of Class II.

Burnham's psychological analysis of the implications of managerial rule raises a dilemma. If managerial society requires for the control of its internal power structure the psychic forces that are efficient at managerial and verbal skills but have an aversion to force, then there is a contradiction between the internal requirements of managerial power and its external requirements, which demand skill in the use of force. Hence it is that the principal threat to the survival of a managerial society, in which Class I forces predominate, must come from outside it or from below, from Class II residues consigned to the lower strata of society. Pareto had made this contradiction explicit, and Burnham had quoted his lengthy statement of it in Suicide of the West. Burnham's final formulation of the theory of the managerial revolution in Suicide of the West recognized the importance of Class I residues in the governing elite, and this recognition implied a different estimate for the future of the West under managerial rule. Whereas Burnham's earlier discussions of appeasement, retreat, and decline had associated these phenomena largely with the decadent entrepreneurial elite, he now linked them with the managers. The implication was that the phenomenon of decline was not a passing phase that would be reversed by the new elite but a permanent feature of the dominant managerial class. "The decay of religion and the excess of material luxury' were not so much the causes of Western decline, in this analysis, as part of the syndrome of phenomena associated with an elite of foxes. Pareto himself had correlated the rise of religious skepticism and the increase of wealth with the accumulation of Class I residues in the elite.
Burnham's argument essentially is that as society becomes wealthier, it's managerial elite becomes less "jock" like and more nerd "like" with a commensurate inability to fight external attacks. Burnham wasn't the first to notice that rich societies goes "soft" and while I think this is only partial explanation for the decline, I do think it is one with considerable merit. On a variety of metrics, I think that there has been failure of masculinity in the West which I think partially explains the lack of its assertiveness and it's inability to combat simple threats, however the explanation is incomplete.

Burnham also recognsied that explanation was incomplete and had to include the embrace of Liberalism, a position he came with the help of Whittaker Chambers. He realised that Liberalism was the poison affecting the elites though he could propose no antidote and thus became pessimistic of the West's Future. The problem with Burnham's approach to power is that while it deals with how to best arrange society based upon the empirical observations of the past, it does nothing to to explain why that society should want to chose to live. But Burnham, presumably because of his scientific Atheism could never see religion as anything more than a "useful" social glue but which was ultimately "unscientific" and therefore beyond the scope of his analysis.

Whittaker Chambers did not make that mistake.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-63235856300776982772016-06-07T22:05:00.000+10:002016-06-07T22:05:24.971+10:00Francis on the Managerial Revolution.

Francis quoted Whittaker Chambers in explaining how the Managerial Revolution occurred in the U.S.

I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and law-making. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution.
While the revolution in the U.S. occurred peacefully, Burhnam felt that the type of society it created with similar in "structure" to ones being created in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Contemporary critics were horrified by the assertion and I imagine what beguiled analysts of the time was the fact the revolution as the U.S. was peaceful it was therefore fundamentally different in nature than from the totalitarianisms birthed in violence. But what these analysts failed to see is that with the changes bought about the by New Deal, the U.S. assumed the "structure" of a totalitarian society even though its "managers" weren't totalitarian. The checks-and-balances which limited government power still remained on paper but were practically were swept away through a variety of judicial and economic actions which neutered the constitution and vastly expanded government power.

Burnham, and Francis tended to view the "managerial" class along Marxist lines in the sense that class acted to self consciously further its self-interest and power, which in turn implied and ever increasing domain of "management" and hence an expanding government. While I do think that there is an element of truth in this, I feel this is a weak point of Burnham's analysis. At the time he was harshly criticized by both Orwell for this view--correctly in my opinion--and Burnham's thinking changed later in this regard, especially by the influence of Chambers. When Burnham wrote Suicide of the West, it wasn't the parasitic managerial class which was the issue as much as it was the "culture" of that class. Francis wrote;

The ideology of the emerging managerial regime in the United States came to be known as "progressivism" and later as "liberalism," though a more appropriate label might be "managerial humanism." The ideology articulated a view of man as the product of social and economic environment and thus susceptible to amelioration or perfection by a scientifically trained elite with power to redesign the environment. It involved a collectivist view of the state and economy and advocated a highly centralized regime largely unrestrained by traditional legal, constitutional, and political barriers. It rejected or regarded as backward, repressive, or obsolete the institutions and values of traditional and bourgeois society—its loyalties to the local community, traditional religion, and moral beliefs, the family, and social and political differentiations based on class, status, and property—and it expressed an ideal of man "liberated" from such constraints and re-educated or redesigned into a cosmopolitan participant in the mass state-economy of the managerial system.
Francis recognised that the nature of the class would in turn reflect the nature of the society, but Burnham's analysis felt that human dynamics and societal structure would relentless push society in an anti-traditional direction:

Despite the conservative, stabilizing, and establishmentarian appearance of consensus liberalism, however, the managerial system is incapable of stabilization. The dynamic of managerial capitalism involves a continuing erosion of the social and cultural fabric through the mass consumption and hedonism, social mobility, and dislocation that it promotes and through the obsolescence of hard private property, under the control of individual and family ownership, that corporate and collective property and governmental regulation encourage. The managerial state obtains its raison d'être from continuing intervention, activism, and social engineering, as became clear in the War on Poverty, the civil rights revolution, and the Great Society programs. The intellectuals, technocrats, and professional verbalists of the managerial intelligentsia and communications elite—what Kevin Phillips has called the "mediacracy"[ED:Cathedral]—are committed by their material interests and their ideological predispositions[ED] to the design and implementation of continuing social change, the rejection and destruction of the bourgeois constraints on their functions and power, and the defense and extension of the apparatus of the managerial system. The rhetoric of conservatism did not alter the basic reality of the managerial regime and its continuing revolution, and the reality came to the surface again in the utopian imagery of the "New Frontier," "Camelot," and "Great Society" of the 1960s and even in the planning of the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson and his advisers projected a "TVA on the Mekong" that would "solve" the environmental problems that, in their view, lay at the root of communism, and the "McNamara Revolution" in the Defense Department carried through the managerialization of war and the technocratic transformation of the military services. Few large corporations supported Senator Barry Goldwater's rather quaint evocation of bourgeois beliefs in the 1964 presidential campaign, and most corporate donations accrued to the Johnson-Humphrey ticket.• The "conservatization" of managerial liberalism in the postwar era was intended to legitimize the managerial regime by lending it the appearance of continuity and respectability and to check the tendencies of the ideological Left to push the regime beyond what the elite wanted and required, but it did not significantly slow or reverse the radicalizing and anti-bourgeois mechanisms of the regime and its system of social dominance by the managerial elite.
It's interesting here to see that Francis thought that "big business" capitalism worked synergistically with the managerial state to erode both traditional society, morality and the protective mechanisms for individual liberty. Francis also saw that the managerial elite could superficially appear conservative but was ultimately radical at its core and unless the managerial "structure" could be disestablished it would pose a continual threat to any nascent attempts of Conservative resurgence. He regarded the Reagan years as a failure and interesting illustrated how the managerial apparatus managed to deal with upstarts who wanted to change the status quo.

"Reaganism," then, was neither a continuation of the bourgeois conservatism of the Old Right nor one more installment of an eternally recurring William McKinley nor the culmination of a cycle in American politics by which one elite ousted another and then itself succumbed to corruption. It was rather an effort to wed or fuse those destabilizing movements, fed by resentment, fear, and frustration, which gelled in the New Right and the candidacy of George Wallace, with still-dominant managerial elements in the state, economy, and cultural apparatus. Those elements saw their institutional apparatus of power and the "consensus" that rationalized it jeopardized by an insurgency from the right as well as from the left in the 1960s and 1970s and by the whole unraveling of American society that their own efforts at social reconstruction had helped cause. So far from challenging or displacing an old elite, Reaganism simply allowed the leadership of the insurgent forces to crawl into bed with the managerial establishment and sample its favors, thereby effectively decapitating (or, to extend the sexual metaphor, emasculating the insurgency)[ED]

The formula worked as long as the Teflon President was there, and it has worked for his successor since Good Old Dutch was strapped to his pony and hauled back to his ranch. But it may not work much longer if recession and the economic woes Mr. Phillips discusses pop out of the political woodwork as they seem to be doing. What is surprising in Mr. Phillips's analysis is not his conclusion that Reaganism actually endangered middle-class aspirations but his neglect of the continuing power of the cultural and social frustrations he has so admirably penetrated elsewhere. In his 1982 book, Post-Conservative America, he predicted that what historian Fritz Stern called the politics of cultural despair"—racial, national, and social hostilities and dislocations—would coalesce with economic frustrations to yield a chauvinist, authoritarian, and perhaps overtly racialist political movement on the order of what occurred in Weimar Germany. In his present book, there is virtually no reference to that thesis despite its continuing relevance.
Here we are.

I think the important things to take from Burnham are;

Firstly, the Managerial Revolution transformed the U.S. (and other Western Societies) structurally so that they resembled societies with '"totalitarian" power structures.

Secondly, the "culture" of the managers, reflected the nature of that society and the nature of that totalitarianism. And contemporary events bare this out. As our elite culture drifts relentlessly leftward and atheistic the legal protections afforded to Christians have vapourised and a "soft Left" totalitarianism is taking its place.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-46355440682284515952016-06-01T22:30:00.000+10:002016-06-01T22:30:47.508+10:00Francis on Burnham.
The neglect of Burnham by liberal and even mainstream media is explained by many conservatives as the response to be expected from those whose incantations to the broad mind and the open mouth are belied by their contempt for those who dissent from their canons. Yet Burnham was also neglected by many conservatives, who knew him best through his column and his classic Suicide of the West, repeatedly reprinted since its first publication in 1964. George H. Nash in his monumental The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 acknowledges Burnham's importance in the emergence of conservative anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s, but neither Mr. Nash nor most other students of American conservatism have fully appreciated the significance of Burnham's political ideas or their potential for constructing a serious and critical political theory for the contemporary American Right.
By far, the greatest influence on thinking of Sam Francis were the writings of James Burnham. A communist in the 1930's and who was in contact with Trotsky, Burnham became disillusioned with Communism in early 40's and eventually turned hard right. Though, Burnham "turned" right, he was never really "at home" with the post war Right from a social and intellectual perspective. What set him apart from most of them was his "modernist" understanding of contemporary events.

Burnham did not generally socialize with the conservative movement. He was not a member of the Philadelphia or Mont Pelerin societies, rarely contributed to conservative periodicals other than National Review, and seldom or never participated in the seminars and summer schools of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or Young Americans for Freedom. His aloofness was probably in part a personal choice, but it also reflected an incongruity between his mind and that of the mainstream of American conservatism as it has developed since the 1940s. Burnham and his more percipient readers were aware of the incongruity, which served to keep him at a distance from many of his professional collaborators on the Right, while, ironically, causing the Left to concentrate its fire on his writings to a greater degree than on those of any other conservative intellectual figure of our era.
Burnham came to public prominence through the publication of his book, The Managerial Revolution. Matt Forney gives a good review of the book here, though I disagree with some of his thoughts. Even Orwell was impressed enough to write a rebuttal of it and the book and at the time earned considerable praise. And although Burnham's approach was strongly inspired by the Marxist analytic method, the book, in my opinion, needs to be seen within the same tradition of thinking as exemplified by Ortega y Gasset and Pitrim Sorokin. These thinkers recognised that a fundamental change had occurred in society at the end of the 19th Century as a consequence of religious collapse, technology and more importantly, the rise in population mass. Traditional conservative thinkers tend to ignore the latter two in their analysis of human history, seeing human nature as something apart from the material conditions of man and society. Richard Weaver once remarked that Ideas have Consequences but what's really important in the Burhnamite analysis is that the historical and material circumstances of man have consequences as well. And one of the things which impressed me with regard to Burnhams analysis is the notion that more people doesn't just mean a bigger society, it also means a different type of society. Quoting Francis:

The twentieth century, for the United States as well as for the rest of the world, has been an age of revolution of far more profound transformational effect than any the modern world has ever experienced. Perhaps not since neolithic times has mankind undergone simultaneous changes in economic, social, political, and intellectual relationships of such far-reaching consequences. Some aspects of this transformation are obvious and have been explored by count-less analysts—the rise of totalitarianism, the intellectual revolution precipitated by Einstein and Freud, the decline of the Euro-American civilization and the rise of non-white power centers, the evolution of a "postindustrial" technology and economy in place of agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Yet for all the theories, explanations, and accounts of the twentieth-century revolution, there is no better perspective from which to view this transformation than James Burnham's theory of the managerial revolution, formulated in 1941. Despite many flaws, inaccurate predictions, and overstatements, Burnham's theory perceives the essential core of the twentieth-century revolution and contains the elements by which the complex political and intellectual ramifications of our age can be explained. Although in a narrow sense Burnham's theory sought to explain the civilizational impact of the "separation of ownership and control" in the corporate economy and the rise of large corporations directed by professional managers rather than by traditional individual owners and partnerships, in a broader sense his theory applies to political and social, as well as to economic, organizations. The characteristic feature of twentieth-century history has been the vast expansion in the size, scale of transactions, and complexity and technicality of functions that political, social, and economic organizations exhibit. This expansion, which Pitrim Sorokin also noted under the label "colossalism," was itself made possible by the growth of mass populations and by the development of technologies that could sustain the colossal scale of organization. Just as business firms expanded far beyond the point at which they could be operated, directed: and controlled effectively by individual owners and their families, who generally lacked the technical skills to manage them, so the state also underwent a transformation in scale that removed it from the control of traditional elites, citizens, and their legal representatives. Just as in the mass corporations a new elite of professional managers emerged that replaced the traditional entrepreneurial or bourgeois elite of businessmen, so in the state also a new elite of professionally trained managers or bureaucrats developed that challenged and generally became dominant over the older political elites of aristocrats and amateur politicians who occupied the formal offices of government. Both in the economy and the state, organizations began to undertake functions for which a smaller scale of organization was not prepared and which the traditional elites of aristocratic and bourgeois society were unable to perform. A similar process occurred in labor unions, professional associations, churches, educational institutions, military organizations, and the organs of mass communication and cultural expression. In all sectors of twentieth-century industrial society, the growth of mass organizations brought with it an expansion of functions and power, a new elite wedded by its material interests and psychic and intellectual preparation to continuing expansion, and a metamorphosis of the organizations themselves as well as of the social and political orders they dominated.
What needs to be understood here is that Burnham recognised the rise of this class was not the product of some "conspiracy" or malignant design, rather he recognised that the rise came about through the complex interchange between commercial forces, technology and population. Changes which frequently, were enthusiastically embraced and forwarded by Conservatives as well. Take Capitalism, for example. The push for efficiency in capitalistic organisations doesn't just result in lower "overheads" but also selects for organisations which are highly centralized. What this means is that Capitalism in operation is synergistic with the centralising tendencies of the managerial state.* Likewise the current decline in the fortunes of the Press is less an intended outcome than and unintended consequence of technological innovation. It also illustrates why "turning" the clock back is not a realistic option since turning it back involves not only a change in values but a change in the material and technological circumstances as well

The evolution of the new order and its ideology was not, of course, the result of a conspiracy or a conscious design on the part of its founders, but rather the product of an almost irresistible process by which new technologies, new forms of organization, and new ideas joined together to challenge and replace old forms that were unable to sustain or accommodate the immense scale of human numbers and their interactions. Those who gained from this process—the new managerial elites—encouraged it instinctively from a combined sense of their personal and group interests and their unquestioned faith in their self-serving ideology.
The past is dead, hence Francis's opinion that any new Right will not be a rehash of the past--sorry Trads--but will rather be a new formulation, while different, will maintain a continuity with the old. Still the important term here is "self-serving" ideology, something I will get back to in the next post.

Burnham was a student of power and wanted to understand who, what and how to wield it. Burnham's analysis led him to the conclusion that power in modern society was situated in the "managerial" class, which acted for its own interests by co-opting the lower classes[Ed: and Minorities] to squeeze the middle class which it saw as its greatest threat. Particularly, it's bourgeois elements. It's interesting here to see that the problem is not just the elites but the proletariat as well. Francis recognised that the continual exploitation of the "bourgeois middle" would eventually radicalise it and motivate it to action.

Using Burnham's analytic method Francis felt that the best approach to attack the managerial state was for Conservatives not to "reach out to minorities", whom he felt would never bite, but to position themselves as representing the interests of the bourgeois middle. The failure to that would would leave a vacuum which would be exploited by a strong man who would.

Goodbye GOP. Welcome Donald Trump.

*(For those who have difficulties understanding, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong, rather that it has both positive and negative dimensions which cannot be seen by a simple balance sheet analysis.)The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-30373078364324671042016-05-27T21:49:00.000+10:002016-05-27T21:49:17.302+10:00Beautiful Losers. The Intellectual Triumvirate.

Firstly, I think it is important to fix Sam Francis to a particular point in the Political spectrum in order to fully appreciate his ideas. Whilst Francis wrote for many publications, he did not agree with the editorial tone of some of them, even those who popularised his ideas. Francis's writing offended a lot of people and he advocated positions which struck the sacred cows of political correctness at their very heart. As a result, he became persona non grata amongst "Respectable" publishing and he ended up being banished amongst the the extreme. The practical effect of this exile was that his opinion have been associated with their and thus his reputation has been besmirched. I think this is unfair.

Had Francis been born in 1920's America he probably would have been considered a moderate, even a liberal, but the passage of time has seen society culturally so shifted to the Left that by the time of his death he was considered a member of the lunatic right. Yet this was not his natural intellectual home. While he would of applauded Trump--and not for the reasons that most expect--I think he would have found the Stormfront Right abhorrent. He was a serious thinker and most of them are clowns.

Francis's proper positioning in the political spectrum is not within the Aryan Nation but within the Paleoconservative tradition, what Francis would call the Old Right. He was fiercely opposed to Neoconservatism and regarded most of the "official right" with some disdain. For him, the United States was a "concrete" thing; a geography, a nation, a people, a history. It most emphatically was not a "proposition". However unlike most of the traditionalists, Francis understood that many of the changes wrought to U.S. society were very unlikely to be undone:

If the Old Right stood for anything, it stood for the conservation of the "Old Republic" that flourished in the United States between the American War for Independence and the Great Depression and the civilizational antecedents of the American republic in the history and thought of Europe, and it is precisely that political construct that the managerial revolution overthrew and rendered all but impossible to restore. The Old Republic cannot be restored today because few Americans even remember it, let alone want it back, and even a realistic description of it would frighten and alienate most citizens. The essence of a republic, articulated by almost every theorist of republicanism from Cicero to Montesquieu, is the independence of the citizens who compose it and their commitment to a sustained active participation in its public affairs, the res publica. The very nature of the managerial revolution and the regime that developed from it promotes not independence, but dependency and not civic participation, but civic passivity. Today, almost the whole of American society encourages dependency and passivity—in the economy, through the continuing absorption of independent farms and businesses by multinational corporations, through ever more minute regulation by the state and through the dragooning of mass work forces in office and factory and mass consumption through advertising and public relations; in the culture, through the regimented and centralized manufacture and manipulation of thought taste, opinion, and emotion itself by the mass media and educational organizations; and in the state, through its management of more and more dimensions of private and social existence under the color of "therapy" that does not cure, "voluntary service" that is really mandatory, and periodic "wars," against poverty, illiteracy, drugs, or other fashionable monsters, that no one ever wins. The result is an economy that does not work, a democracy that does not vote, families without fathers, classes without property, a government that passes more and more laws, a people that is more and more lawless, and a culture that neither thinks nor feels except when and what it is told or tricked to think and feel.

To be sure, there are many Americans who resent and fear these trends, and sometimes they flex enough political muscle to gain a few more tax breaks, a handful of increased federal entitlements, or a tenuous and temporary relief from strangulation by the managerial octopus. Their discontents and fears, if properly mobilized, may revive an American Right and may eventually succeed in achieving some of its projects. But almost no one wants a republic or even knows what a republic is, and there can be no possibility of a republic in the United States again until Americans are willing to assume the burdens of civic responsibility and independence that republican life demands. The American Right—Old or New, Paleo or Neo—failed to persuade Americans to take up those burdens, as their ancestors took them up in Williamsburg and Boston, at Fort Sumter and Gettysburg, and those who identified with its cause are only a few of the Americans who will eventually pay the price of that failure. No matter how beautiful its ideas and theories, no matter how compelling a chart of the currents of history's river it drew, American conservatism was not enough to channel those currents into other courses. It is as a chronicle and an explanation of these beautiful losers in our history that these essays may serve.
Francis thought that many of the conservative intellectuals were too abstract and concerned with ideas more than the practical application of them. For Francis the most damning indictment of the conservative intellectuals was their ineffectiveness, and his aim in writing this book was too analyse this failure in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past. For Francis, a large part of the Traditionalist failure stemmed from a failure to understand that the material, social and economic conditions bought about by progress were likely to be irreversible and that nostalgic efforts to turn the clock back were a waste of time.

<insert here="" quote="">But even if it has a future, the Right will not be riding in a conservative vehicle, at least not one that would be recognizable to most of those who have regarded themselves as conservatives since World War II [Ed]. That vehicle has pretty much ended up on the junk heap of history, and in retrospect it is hard to see where else it could have landed. The meaning of the world-historical change that Burnham called the managerial revolution is that what the Old Right, in any of its philosophical or political forms, represented and championed is defunct. </insert>
This something I want to dwell on a bit more in a later post, but what Francis is saying here is the changes wrought on society by impersonal forces such a capitalism, population growth, affluence and technology are in themselves transformative of society. Traditional society wasn't just killed by choice, it was also killed by technology, specialisation and population growth. What Francis[and this blog] is saying is that traditionalists have failed to factor these "impersonal factors" into account in their visions of restoration. Reading the book, one gets the impression that while Francis values some of the thought of the old Right, he is dismissive of most of it because of it because it was ineffectual. Francis was extraordinarily well read and what I found interesting was his list of intellectuals who he felt offered a path to success for the conservative movement.

While the mainstream of Old Right thought continued to dwell on philosophical esoterica, the three Old Right conservatives considered in these essays—Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Whittaker Chambers—actually departed from the mainstream in formulating ideas by which a popularly based Right could mount effective challenges to managerialism and its liberal formulas. The thrust of Kendall's thought was toward what today would be called a populist strategy, and Burnham, though he seems in the 1950s to have advocated cooperation with what he regarded as the historically irreversible managerial revolution, followed a similar path from the late 1960s and 1970s. Chambers never showed any sympathy for the new managerial regime and recognized in it a domesticated form of communism that was less violent, but no less revolutionary, than its Soviet cousin. Unlike Burnham and Kendall, however, Chambers's response to the revolution was one of intensely personal religious withdrawal. Yet throughout Chambers's work, from his earliest essays and short stories, written in his communist period, through his last letters and articles, he dwelled on the material and psychic suffering of the common man, what he called in Witness "the plain men and women of the nation." Despite their differences, these three Old Rightists are perhaps the only major theorists of the first generation of the Old Right who made any significant contribution to the development of a body of ideas and a practical strategy that could bring the Right out of its philosophical clouds and political archaism and point toward a realistic and popularly based challenge to managerial power.
I had never heard of Kendall, knew a bit a Burnham and know Chambers very well and of the three Kendall seems the odd one out, however, nowhere is there a mention of Der Furher, Evola or Chamberlain. Francis was simply a cut above the rest. Of those three, the one with the most influence was by far James Burnham, whose studies into the nature of modern power provided both an analytical framework with regard to understanding the power of the Left and provided a intellectual tool by which strategies could be developed in order to combat it. The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-10900851036906358332016-05-19T23:42:00.002+10:002016-05-19T23:56:31.661+10:00Sam Francis: Beautiful Losers.

I've got to admit that while I had heard of Sam Francis before I really didn't delve much at all into his writings, and it was only a recent article and some commentary over at Radix which further piqued my interest in him, and I must admit, I've been mighty impressed. Over the last few weeks I've been reading some of his works and am of the opinion that the Dissident Right needs to pay much more attention to him.

It's a shame that Sam Francis died relatively recenetly, on the verge of the blogging revolution. Were he still alive, I imagine he would have carved his own niche in the Dissident Right and become a formidable force shaping it. I am of the impression that he didn't always agree with the tone or the official positions of many of the journals he wrote for, but given the state of affairs that existed prior to the widespread use of the internet, he was limited to writing for the increasingly few journals--on the margins--that would publish him. Journals which, frankly, I don't think were up to his standards.

His banishment to the margins, by the forces of political correctness, I imagine was their way of denying him conventional legitimacy and smearing him as a unbalanced and someone not worthy of serious consideration.

And yet he is.

Francis is different.

Unlike most conservative commentators who simply push for a reset to the past, Francis realises that this isn't going to happen, and if the Right wants to end it's near century losing streak its got to start doing things differently. Though coming from the Paleoconservative faction of American thought, Francis was heavily influenced by the writings of James Burnham, author of the Managerial Revolution, and this in turn influenced his analytic method when it came to understanding the sociological aspects of the liberal/conservative conflict. Burnham was an empiricist of power, both in an understanding how it was wielded and how it was gained. Francis took these ideas and placed them within the Paleoconservative context. He sought to apply these principles to analysis of the American conservative movement and his thoughts, I feel, are applicable to contemporary times.

However sophisticated and well expressed conservative intellectualism may have been in the years after World War II, its virtues did not assure it victory, mainly because there existed in American society and political culture no significant set of interests to which its ideas could attach themselves. Hence, post-World War II conservatism in its political efforts generally ignored the philosophical contributions of its highbrow exponents and fell back on the more mundane considerations of low taxes and small budgets, anticommunism and law and order; and the preoccupation of the Old Right mind in that era with an abstract and abstruse intellectualism helped ensure its eventual irrelevance. For the most part, any suggestion that the savants of the Right ought to have attended to the concrete social, regional, and ethnic dimensions of the human and American conditions rather than to their purely philosophical aspects was greeted with accusations of "determinism," though why it is less deterministic to say that ideas, rather than nonintellectual forces, are the major causal agents in human affairs has never been clear to me. The truth is that, for all their talk about social "roots," conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them.

Alienated from the prevailing intellectual and political currents as well as from traditional social forms that were ceasing to exist or cohere, the conservative intelligentsia was able to find explanations for and solutions to the civilizational crisis it perceived only in the most esoteric theory, and the "practical" applications of such theory often took the form of some species of romanticism or archaism--a pretentious medievalism, accompanied by antimodernist posturings and colored with a highly politicized religiosity; an attraction to archaic social and political forms such as the antebellum South, the ancien regime of eighteenth-century Europe, or the era of nineteenth-century laissez-faire; and a distaste for and often an ignorance of American history that derived from a mirror-image agreement with the Left-liberal understanding of America as an "experiment" dedicated to an egalitarian and progressivist proposition. If the intellectuals of the Right did not adhere to some form of archaism, they tended, like Whittaker Chambers, simply to withdraw from the world in despair and acknowledgment of defeat.
Sam Francis was not a Traditionalist. For Francis, the old ways did not work, the task was how to win, but before doing so, it was important to understand why the losses kept accumulating, hence his book Beautiful Losers, which is essentially both an understanding of the failure of the Conservative movement and some ideas to get it out of the cycle of defeat. The book is a collection of essays that he had penned for various journals with an accompanying introduction explaining his choice. Most of the essays are stand alone pieces but are unified in his "Burnhamite" analysis. Francis was acutely aware of the dissolution occurring about him and was convinced that the conservative approach had to change if there was to be any push-back.

Any objective look at the state of Western Society would show that there is not much further we can go in the slouch towards Gomorrah and given the relentless Left-ward drift of society. There's not really much more time left before the "right culture" of the West becomes a memory or effectively erased. New approaches are required.

It remains possible today to rectify that error by a radical alteration of the Right's strategy. Abandoning the illusion that it represents an establishment to be "conserved," a new American Right must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. The strategy of the Right should be to enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime, not to build coalitions with the regime's defenders and beneficiaries. Moreover, since "Middle America" consists of workers, farmers, suburbanites and other non- or post-bourgeois groups, as well as small businessmen, it is unlikely that a new Right will make much progress in mobilizing them if it simply repeats the ideological formulas of a now long-defunct bourgeois elite and its order. The more salient concerns of postbourgeois Middle Americans that a new Right can express are those of crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interests of the elite above them and the underclass below them, but at the expense of the middle class. A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite's underclass ally, can assert its leadership of alienated Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.

A new, radical Middle American Right need not abandon political efforts, but, consistent with its recognition that it is laying siege to a hostile establishment, it ought to realize that political action in a cultural power vacuum will be largely futile. The main focus of a Middle American Right should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime—within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it. Instead of the uselessness of a Diogenes' search for an honest presidential candidate or a Fabian quest for a career in the bureaucracy, a Middle Amierican Right should begin working in and with schools, churches, clubs, women's groups, youth organizations, civic and professional associations, local government, the military and police forces, and even in the much-dreaded labor unions to create a radicalized Middle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and understand how it can be resisted. Only when this kind of infrastructure of cultural hegemony is developed can a Middle American Right seek meaningful political power without coalitions with the Left and bargaining with the regime.

Eliot may have been right that no cause is really lost because none is really won, but victory and defeat in the struggle for social dominance have little to do with whether the cause is right or wrong. Some ideas have more consequences than others, and those that attach themselves to declining social and political forces have the least consequences of all. By allowing itself to be assimilated by the regime of the Left, American conservatism became part of a social and political force that, if not on the decline, is at least confronted by a rising force that seeks to displace it, even as the regime of the Left displaced its predecessor. If the American Right can disengage from the Left and its regime, it can assume leadership of a cause that could be right as well as victorious. But it can do so only if it has the wit and the will to disabuse itself of the illusions that have distracted it almost since its birth.
I imagine that Francis would have cheered the Donald Trump movement if not Donald Trump himself, though I image he would be more pessimistic of his success given contemporaneous circumstances in which his success is occurring.

I really both enjoyed and found this book thought provoking. Over the next few weeks I plan to put up a commentary on some of the essays from the book and offer my opinion on some of his analysis

Once again, I'd recommend it and I feel that every Neoreactionary should have it on his bookshelf. The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-89690092090138034422016-05-16T21:47:00.002+10:002016-05-16T21:47:47.934+10:00Potpourri.Just a couple of interesting things I found on my blog travels this week.

Firstly, a good YouTube video by Black Pigeon on the subject of the negative effects of multiculturalism.

Unlike the usual slouch towards and trying to establish a racial hierarchy, Black Pigeon avoids the subject all together and simply concentrates on the societal problems of highly diverse populations groups. Bit long but worth a view.

Brett Stevens put up a very good post which I felt dealt with the subject of racial diversity quite well.

In the South — otherwise known as the part of North America with culture and honor — we settled this by having separate neighborhoods. Whites live in one place, Africans another, Mexicans another still, and Asians somewhere else. Balance is maintained because each group rules itself.

I always offer up the question: if you are African-American, and you get pulled over by a police officer, what type of face do you want to see? The answer is African-American. Same as whites want to see white police officers, Hispanics a Hispanic police officer, and Asians a (rare, but committed when it does occur) Asian police officer.

The fact is, that if we have control over our own communities, we are not enemies but distant friends. I like the "distant friends" idea because it enables me to enjoy people without insisting they be like me. White standards work for white people… for others, well, who knows — it's up to them.
I'm not sure that the South "worked". To quote Roissy, Proximity and Diversity= War and even though there was state enforced segregation, the reality of running it resulted in a festering social wound. Still, what I like about Steven's article is that it doesn't aim at racial supremacism but simply the recognition that groups are different and that we can like people from other races whilst still wanting ethnic homogeneity.

Unlike most bloggers on the subject of the negative effects of multiculturalism, my criticism of it is not based upon racial superiority lines, rather its based upon an understanding of human nature and its hard wired cognitive biases for ingroup/outgroup distinctions.

On the subject of the Alt-Right, West Coast Reactionaries have put up a fantastic post with lots of links expressing concern with the direction it is taking.

The reason why it is important to consider how the Alt. Right is being seen by the outside world is because what the outside world will see depends on who is being the loudest. And going by how increasing numbers of outsiders are viewing the Alt. Right, it is not looking good.

It is not all "just a joke"; there are various spheres which comprise the Alt. Right, and some may lean towards irony and the like more than others, of course, but the network in its totality is coming to only represent such spheres. Do not get me wrong, there will always be hardline intellectuals in any community of this sort, but ordinarily they exercise a deal of influence and prevent their community from moving beyond their confines. However, the Alt. Right is growing in size rather exponentially due to the Trump phenomenon and the migrant crisis in Europe, thus it is impossible to maintain a single orthodoxy over the masses of anti-SJW teenagers.

Andy Nowicki also puts up a good post dealing on the subject (bit long though) but worth listening to. The smarter guys seem to recognise that the dissident Right can't be a "big tent" which takes in everyone who opposes the left.
The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-36098344118818138662016-05-08T22:00:00.000+10:002016-05-08T22:00:05.235+10:00The Left, White Nationalism and the 1488'ers

Perhaps the most interesting meta-political development over the past few years has been the rise of the dissident Right. It still in its early stages but it appears that several media outlets have begun to notice and no doubt, so enough, a concerted campaign will be mounted to to discredit it.

The traditional pragmatic approach of the Left, in dealing with it opponents, is to label them all as fascists or Nazi's wherever there is some doctrinal disagreement which they wish to emphasise. It needs to be understood that here the aim is not to logically justify that assertion as much it is to reinforce an association in the minds of cognitive misers, who are the majority in a democratic body politic. As readers of this blog will note, cognitive misers, think in terms of associations so Left psychops are intended to primarily work through the limbus and not the mind itself.

As advertisers have long noted, positive associations with a product are far more effective in selling it than a logical explanation of its virtues. What has hampered the Right in its battles against the Left is the traditionalist anthropological fallacy which saw people as rational actors instead of cognitive misers. The Right, in trying to combat the Left, has perused a strategy a logically refuting through data and argument on the assumption that ideas will prevail.

This assumption was wrong.

Sam Francis explains:

My conclusion that conservatism has transformed itself into virtual extinction will surprise and perhaps even anger those who favor the formalistic and normative approach, which does not easily stoop to considerations of social change and historical fluctuation and is reluctant to admit that some things, even ideas, fail. Regarding political events as the earthly manifestations of timeless abstractions, the intellectual mainstream of the "Old Right" from the end of World War II developed a highly sophisticated body of ideas and a highly articulate body of spokesmen to express them. Perhaps because they were too uxoriously wedded to Weaver's principle that "Ideas Have Consequences," most of the conservative intellectuals who subscribed to this body of thought always seemed to assume that it was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d'etat, after which truth would reign. [ED] I have never thought so, in part because I have less faith in the power of intellectual abstractions than most of my conservative colleagues. The historian Lewis Namier remarked that "new ideas are not nearly as potent as broken habits," and Burnham, describing Vilfredo Pareto's view of human rationality, wrote that "rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily 'rational animal.' In the tradition of Namier (who briefly studied under Pareto) and Burnham, I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organization, and psychic and social forces such as class and regional and ethnic identity than on formal intellectual abstractions and their "logical" extrapolations as the determining forces of history. Ideas do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is settled not simply because the ideas serve human reason through their logical implications but also because some ideas serve human interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for political, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.
The latest findings of cognitive science further buttress this view. The way to control the masses is not though the mind but through the primal limbic drives, and the Left, for all its talk of rationality, has recognised this fact, and pragmatically always concentrated its efforts on getting the proletariat to "feel the strength" of its arguments instead of logically assessing them. Hence the aim of the Left has been to positively align its objectives with positive limbic sensations and hence the importance of its ideas and its causes being cool, hip, compassionate and trendy are more than them being factually correct. And its approach, I believe, has gone a long way towards its triumph over conservatism. Conditioning, not argument, is the way to sway the masses. Orwell's definition of "bellyfeel" in the Newspeak dictionary makes this same point.

Conditioning, however, requires the co-opting of pre-existing tendencies of the human psyche and associating them with the product. Goebbels for instance, ordered that depictions of the Jews in German propaganda to always be in the negative and to associate such depictions with other negative imagery such as rats and filth. The idea being that the negative associations be strengthened by such methods. However, there is a limit the power of such a technique and German propaganda was quite clear never to show the Jews being mistreated in any bestial form or manner because by doing so you generate sympathy for your victim and the intention to demonise him fails.

Conditioning is one of the most powerful mind control mechanisms since it operates at the level of the modus operandi  of the cognitive miser: Associative Cognition.

The Left has always recognised that for the average Westerner, the Nazi "brand" is associated with the worst forms of evil in the 20th Century and therefore it has always tried to smear its opponents as Nazis. The idea here being not to prove the logical connection but simply to reinforce the association so that whatever their opponent stands for, their idea becomes associated with the negative emotional state that comes with contemplation of Nazism. Of course sometimes the association is so out of kilter that the slur fails, but the failure rests on a clear ability to recognise the mismatch between the slur and the target. But what happens if the distinction is not so clear?

Suppose the target is actually quite sympathetic to Hitler, suppose when you Google the target quite a few Nazi images show up, suppose your obsessed with the evil of Jew's, how clear is target distinction then?

It isn't and the Lefts claim gains traction.

The terrible thing about the Nazi's, is apart from their terrible crimes, is that they seriously weakened the West's capability of withstanding Leftist attack by tarring all the elements of their ideology with the stench of evil through association. Nationalism, did not produce the concentration camps in the First World War, yet post war it has become associated with it. Prussian Militiarism, which was honorable prior to the Second World War, through its association with Nazism degraded all further virile aggressive defence and the standing of the Military in the West. The Nazi's greatest legacy may be that they were able to weaken the good ideas of the West by association with the evil they wrought.

If, the dissident Right wants to bring back some of these ideas, things such as nationalism, ethnic homogeneity, virile masculinity etc, it needs to disassociate them from the associative links with Nazism that they have have established in Western Culture. The thing is that the Left wants you to think that all White Nationalists are Nazis and the the 1488'ers want you to think the same. They both have the same objective.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-1814763967139205402016-05-01T12:36:00.000+10:002016-05-04T08:17:03.626+10:00Human Nature and Political Society.

I've been meaning to reply to commentator Tom for a while now with regard to a comment he left over at this post:

Of course, homophily exists, but given the massive harm it causes to humanity as a whole, I see no reason to mold society to it any more than I see a need to cater to other natural emotions such as violent jealousy[ED].

There are a ton of human impulses that society suppresses, and because man is a product of both nature and nurture, such impulses are heavily modified by experience. I'm sure that if I wasn't raised in Toronto, a heavily multicultural city, I'd be slightly discomfited by my workplace where there is no majority race, I hear Arabic, Hindi and Russian spoken around me, and the clothing styles, while majority jeans and polo shirt, also include Hijab/Abaya and the occasional sari.

Nobody here (a programming shop) blinks an eye because this is what you see every day on the street.

Yes, there are fewer cultural touchstones with my coworkers, so I exercise some cultural homophily with my personal friends (we're all hard-core computer geeks from a variety of races), but surely homophilic tendencies are no basis for the structure of society.

Or should I be agitating for a society where everyone must have read the science fiction greats before getting citizenship?
Whilst I respect Tom's comments, the comment above is in many ways akin to the argument pushed by feminists that a woman should be able to wear whatever she wants and not expect to get sexually assaulted.

Let me explain.

Traditional human anthropology tended to divide nature into its rational and irrational components. The irrational components being our appetites, desires, biases and other tendencies which overarching reason was mean to regulate for our own good.

Now the problem with this approach is that the concept of "reason" was rather vague. The implicit assumption was that the "reason" of the philosopher was also the same "reason" of the prole. The problem, as modern psychology and cognitive science has demonstrated, is that while everyone is capable of reason, the "quality" of everyone's reason is not the same.

An aspect of psychology that is relevant in this instance, is that of Kohlberg's theory of moral development. In essence, Kohlberg demonstrated that people's motivation for moral action is varied. At the lowest--and most populous level-- moral action is based on the avoidance of punishment and the promise of reward and its only that and only at the rarefied level of the enlightened few that it is motivated by considerations of higher ethical principle. In other words, the reasoning of the bottom is different from the reasoning at the top yet the observed behaviour is the same.*

The other relevant dimension here are the latest findings from cognitive science which show that most people are "cognitive misers", even those with high I.Q., and that intuitive "logic" is default operating mode for most people.

When you meld these two findings together you find that most people's daily operations are intuitive in their nature and constrained by external factors such as punishment or shame rather than "considered behaviour modulated by rational deliberation". Sure, there are people like that, but they're in the minority.

It follows therefore that if you want the masses to behave properly, especially when asking them to act in ways which are profoundly counter-intuitive, pragmatically you need to have a strong policing force i.e. state retribution or strong cultural shaming mechanisms, i.e. institutionalised religion to keep people in line.

Expecting everyone to "reason" like a moral philosopher is based upon the assumption that everyone can. This of course is a rehash of the radical equality principle of all men and fails to recognise that some men are limited in reaching this level of cognition. (Note, it's one of the ways mainstream Christianity inadvertently laid the groundwork for Liberalism.) So anyone pushing this agenda is, in a way, furthering the intellectual supposition that all men are cognitively equal.

But suppose you do accept the fact that there is an inherent intellectual inequality amongst men, how then do you regulate public morality in such an environment, especially when asking men to act in a strongly counter-intuitive way? The only way to do so is by having a strong external apparatus, i.e. Church or State threatening to punish wayward behaviour. i.e. Big Brother. Furthermore, with the collapse of "cultural constraints" the void for regulating behviour needs to be assumed by the state, thus, radical liberalism necessitates a powerful state regulatory apparatus to provide a check against the intuitive tendencies of the masses.

This is a "high energy" state of affairs. The state needs to be constantly maintained and strong in order to keep society together, should the state falter the intuitive impulses of the masses will reassert themselves. In countries like the U.S., where there is greater degree of individualism and multiculturalism, when the lights go out and the police go on strike, anarchy starts brewing quite rapidly. On the other hand, in countries such as Japan, where there are strong cultural "policing" mechanisms, and more realistic understanding of human anthropology, failure of state does not necessitate a failing society.

The former Yugoslavia was a classic example of this. Comprised of six different ethnicities, most of which did not want to live with each other, the only way the state could be kept together was through a strong totalitarian regime. Interestingly, the people most able to "get along" where the educated "cognitive" types whilst the masses maintained their grudges. The failure of the policing state meant that natural demographic forces could assert themselves, the rest is history. Yugoslavia failed because it needed a strong state to force Croats, Serbs and Slovenes to be Yugoslavs and it was an example of trying to fit men to the model instead of fitting the model to men.

Stable "low energy" states are those which intuitively coalesce, where human nature is not taxed by its membership of them. A state based upon the "intuitive" emotions,experience and morality of the people is far easier to maintain than one which is pushing against human nature all the time. Catering for homophily which is near universal is different from catering to violent jealousy which is exceptional. Equating the two is wrong. A society which pushes against violent jealousy is going to require less "policing" than a society that pushes against "homophily" and is thus more stable.

Stable societies are build on an understanding of human nature and not a rejection of it. Still, there does need to be some regulation of its more primitive aspects but the approach should be one based on the minimal amount of intervention necessary, not wide scale social engineering. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why Puritanical societies go feral once the thumbscrews are released. Human nature only stand so much deformation.

When the feminists argue that a woman should be able to walk down the street wearing whatever she wants without being molested, they're uttering both a moral truth and an anthropological lie. It's akin to saying men should be able to transcend homophilous instinct. The problem with both both statements is that the fail to acknowledge the reality of human nature and and the human capacities to transcend them. If, however, this state of affairs was able to be achieved would necessitate a strong police state which would need to be maintained in order for there not to be a lapse into anarchy.

Stable societies are based upon the recognition of human nature as the foundation of them. Not asking too much of people means that when the pressure is put on society, it doesn't go bad. Furthermore, if you're going to police a society, you're better off doing it through culture rather than the police state. I'd rather a minister in a church hall than a policeman in my bedroom.

*Note, the relationship of demographics and Kohlberg's theory of moral development is complex. Since this is a blog and not a academic paper I've tried to keep things simple.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-79837003986338267402016-04-27T10:50:00.000+10:002016-05-09T23:06:36.826+10:00Sam Francis, Bill Buckley, NRx.

One of the books I've finally got around to reading is Sam Francis's Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. It's a book I'd highly recommend, in fact, its a book I'd insist that neo-Reactionairies include in their cannon because of the insights that it gives. I hope to make a few comments about the book in the next few posts, particularly with its relevance to the NRx but today I just want to make a brief comment on William Buckely, especially because there has been a lot of Buckley hate coming from the Alt-Right.

I, like Francis, have a mixed opinion of Buckley. His purging of the "lunatic fringe" from the Right, in my mind was necessary for its survival in the post war period, but on the other hand, he was unable to successfully reinvigorate it during his stewardship of the National Review and led its drift towards NeoConservatism. Part of the problem, in my opinion, was due to his attempt to create a "broad church" Conservatism, but in doing so, he gutted the core elements of conservative beliefs. The other problem, as I saw it, was that Buckley enjoyed being an "intellectual" and felt that intellectual argument alone would save the day. This as Francis points out, was a fatal error and contributed much to political neutralisation of conservatism. Still, given the broad front from which attacks were being waged upon it, Buckley should be praised for keeping any sort of conservative operation alive at all.

Francis recognises that whilst under Buckley's leadership all was not well with Conservatism but it also needs to be understood that Buckley was right in purging the conservative movement of it's more idiotic elements. Something NRx's should note.

[Buckley] forcefully rejected what he called "the popular and cliche-ridden appeal to the grass-roots" and strove instead to establish a journal which would reach intellectuals. Not all conservatives agreed with this approach, but the young editor-to-be was firm. It was the intellectuals, after all, "who have midwived and implemented the revolution. We have got to have allies among the intellectuals, and we propose to renovate conservatism and see if we can't win some of them around."
Yet while Buckley seemed cognizant of the "revolution" that had transpired and was, in fact, successful in attracting a number of intellectuals, he failed to see that the new intellectual class as a whole, which had indeed "midwived and implemented the revolution," could not become conservative. It could not do so because its principal interest, social function, and occupational calling in the new order was to delegitimize the ideas and institutions of conservatism and provide legitimization for the new regime, and its power and rewards as a class depended upon the very bureaucratized cultural organizations that conservatives attacked. Only if conservatism were "renovated" to the point that it no longer rejected the cultural apparatus of the revolution could intellectuals be expected to sign up.

 Moreover, by focusing its efforts in Manhattan, Washington, and the major centers of the intelligentsia and other sectors of the new elite, Buckley and his conservative colleagues isolated themselves from their natural allies in the "grass roots." While there was clearly a need for intellectual sophistication on the Right, the result of Buckley's tactic was to generate a schism between Old Right intellectual cadres and the body of conservative supporters outside its north-eastern urban and academic headquarters. Among these supporters in the 1950s and 1960s there flourished an increasingly bizarre and deracinated wilderness of extremist, conspiratorialist, racialist, and even occultist ideologues who loudly rejected both the Old Right mainstream and the Old Right's new friends in the intellectual and cultural elite, but who failed to attract any but the most marginal and pathological elements in the country and exerted no cultural or political influence at all [ED]. At various times in its history, National Review has found it necessary to "purge" itself of such adherents, and each catharsis, no matter how prudent, has rendered its "renovated" conservatism less and less palatable to ordinary Americans and more and more acceptable to the Manhattanite intelligentsia it has always sought to attract.
Here Francis teaches NRx an important lesson. Firstly, whilst NRx is not populist, it's going to be irrelevant if it's not popular. Simply being an intellectual exercise is not enough. Francis has more to say on the subject which I will comment on in later posts. But the other thing Francis realises is that Buckley's purges were necessary since many of the those attracted to the conservative movement were actually hostile to the "Old Right".

Buckley's three huge mistakes were in;

1) Trying to conform to the establishment.
2) Not having an adequate enough yardstick by which to measure a Conservative's credentials.
3) Purging the obvious psychopaths whist missing the more cunning snakes. i.e Neoconservatives.

It's the latter two points which worry me the most with regard to current developments in the dissident Right. Looks a bit like history repeating.

The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-22524567513611789192016-04-20T11:05:00.000+10:002016-04-20T11:05:13.734+10:001488 and the Alt-Right.Ramsey Paul put up a good video post a few weeks ago. It quite clearly explains the problems with the 1488 crowd and the Alt-Right.

Now some definitions according to me:

1) Dissident Right= All groups not represented by what is known as the mainstream Right. i.e. G.O.P, UK conservative Party, Australian Liberal party etc.
2) 1488= Supporters of the ideology of the Nazi party and its local variants.
3) NRx=NRx
4) Alt Right=?

Now, what I don't understand from the way the term seems to be used, is the Alt Right:

1) Alt Right = Dissident Right.
2) Alt Right = Dissident Right - NRx
3) Alt Right = Dissident Right - NRx - 1488
4) Alt Right = 1488 by another name?

From what I can see, in common usage amongst the Dissident Right, the term seems to be used interchangeably and without any specificity which I feel is a dangerous habit. As Ramsey Paul points out, with the increasing mainstream acceptance of the "Alt Right" there seems to be a concerted effort by the 1488 crowd to co-opt that moniker. In essence what the 1488 crowd are trying to do is associate themselves with the dissident right.

Cognitive misers--i.e. the average man--doesn't think in terms of concepts, rather, he "thinks" in terms of associations. And what matters for the hearts and minds of the proletariat is not what they think of you rather what they associate with you. It's a simple principle of advertising and that's why when they're trying to sell you a product the actors in the commercials are always attractive or agreeable. On the other hand when they're trying to diss a product, the users are always hopeless and unattractive.

Whether the Dissident Right likes it or not, the infusion of quasi Nazi imagery into Alt-Right websites is going to associate the Alt-Right with Nazism. Not by any logical act but simply by the fact of human biology. It's how our brains work. Advertising 101. Furthermore, the use by the 1488 crowd of dissident Right memes serves to further conflate the the distinction between the two.

Why the 1488 crowd wants to call itself the Alt-Right is up for speculation. I imagine a section of it wants to gain political legitimacy for its ideas by repackaging itself in a form that doesn't trigger previous associations with Nazism but if that's the case, it's doing a very bad job.

My personal view, and it appears to be Ramsey Paul's as well, is that the the role of the 1488 crowd is to discredit the dissident Right. (Note, when Ramsey uses Alt-Right he uses it in a way that excludes the 1488 crowd.) And I don't think that this is a conspiracy theory that's too hard to swallow.

There are some really, really nasty people in the NeoNazi groups which the authorities would be wise to monitor. But there is considerable documentary evidence that many of the groups themselves may actually be heavily influenced by law enforcement officials. Some reading:

Records show Feds used ultra-Right radio host for years.

Neo Nazi Rally was organised by FBI informant.

COINTELPRO

FBI Nazi Bikers Bust FBI Nazi Group

From the FBI's own website.

"Domestic right-wing terrorist groups often adhere to the principles of racial supremacy and embrace antigovernment, antiregulatory beliefs. Generally, extremist right-wing groups engage in activity that is protected by constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. Law enforcement becomes involved when the volatile talk of these groups transgresses into unlawful action.

On the national level, formal right-wing hate groups, such as the National Alliance, the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) and the Aryan Nations, represent a continuing terrorist threat. Although efforts have been made by some extremist groups to reduce openly racist rhetoric in order to appeal to a broader segment of the population and to focus increased attention on antigovernment sentiment, racism-based hatred remains an integral component of these groups' core orientations."
Given the Leftward shift of society, and given the Government propensity to weaponise its agencies against its political rivals, and given that the current administration is very hostile to right wing views, it is highly probably that many of the extremist Alt-Right-- in the 1488 sense--are either complete nut-jobs or agents provocateurs. It's also quite probable that there are attempts afoot to discredit the Dissident Right by association with the 1488 crowd.

THEY NEED TO BE PURGED.

I think it's a rather sad state of affairs that they've even been able to gain admission and illustrates just how poor the state of Rightist thought is at the moment. (Another reason why the Left always wins). As I've said before, how can socialism for white people only be considered Right Wing?

The task ahead is to delineate what is Dissident Right and what it is not, and to walk the tight-rope between the Mainstream Right and the Nazi Party.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-69483556621857063332016-04-13T11:35:00.001+10:002016-04-15T11:05:07.903+10:00Between a Cuck and a Hard Place.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

 Matthew 7:13-21King James Version (KJV)
My greatest fear for the dissident right has always been capture by Stormfront entryists. Unfortunately, this seems to have come to pass with the successful influence of Stormfront types who have successfully able to rebrand themselves as the alt-Right. As Ramsay Paul points out that the problem for the Rightist who finds the mainstream Right repulsive is that alternative positions or movements he might wish to entertain have become increasingly constrained by the infusion of the alt-Right into what was formerly intelligent NRx.

NRx, particularly Christian NRx, is the long term future for the Right. However it is now getting squeezed by the mainstream Right and the alt-Right. Mainstream Rightists like to label any Rightist who is outside their opinion window as a Racist, on the other hand, their mirror image, the alt-Right, likes to label any Rightist outside their window as a cuck.

As much as NRx is an intellectual movement it does need people. Not just in terms of thinking, but in terms of disseminating ideas, organising people and so on. It doesn't need to be a "mass movement" but it does need to be a real movement, otherwise it's simply pie in the sky ideas and will be without any historical relevance whatsoever. The problem is for NRx is not just diagnosis, the problem is how to move the world. The apparent current strategy, of being the last man standing, is in my opinion false. A collapsing society produces power vacuums and that vacuum is going to be filled either by NRx grasping power or someone else doing it. Power tempered by ideas is the ultimate imperative of NRx.

NRx is going to need people. Governance is not through ideas alone, rather it needs people who are going to implement them. Not the People-of-Walmart, otherwise known as sheep in the Bible, but shepherds. NRx seemed to provide a space where intelligent ideas could be discussed freely and a rallying point for those intelligent but dissatisfied people of the right. However, with the infusion of the alt-Right, thought policing--admittedly of different kind--has returned with methods of the SJW, driving away the intelligent people.
Racist is the term used by the Left for anyone who opposes their multicultural dogma, Cuck has now become the slur for anyone who opposes the Stromfront view of Race. There is quite simply no middle ground between the two groups. It's one set of puritans against the other. Dumb and dumber; the intelligent person just wants to walk away. The role of the Alt-Right is to proletise NRx.

For the Left this state of affairs is particularly fortuitous and sometimes you have to wonder if they bring out their alt-Right hitmen every now and then to discredit intelligent Rightist through guilt by association. Nothing, and I mean nothing, would benefit both Hillary and the GOP to see the Stormfront types endorse Donald and he likewise embrace their views. They are political poison.

Nationalism does not have to be toxic. The alt-Right makes it so. The reason why Victor Orban put Richard Spencer in Jail is because Victor Orban's racial awareness is not the same as Richard Spencer. Racial realism or more better still, group identity, does not imply a malignant racism. Yet the Left would like you to think so and the alt-Right want you to do so. They work in synergy and they're working to kill NRx.

For the record. I have no association with Ramsey Paul whatsoever. I've simply reblogged his post because I thought it was very good.The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-60109703936049368942016-04-12T00:03:00.001+10:002016-04-12T00:04:27.660+10:00Being anti-Left is not Right.Apologies to all as my work/life balance has been heavily skewed toward work over the past few months so posting has been light, however a post in today's infeed serves to highlight a point that I've been trying to make for a while now i.e The Alt-Right is not really Right.

Here's the post, go have a read.

All this, of course, hinges upon the meaning of what it means to be "Right". This is a very important point which isn't given enough time in NRx and clarity in this issue will help separate, as we say here in Australia, "the shit from the clay". Furthermore, clarity in this issue will help identify entryists and crypto rightists who are nothing more than Leftists in drag.

As mentioned previously in this blog, most people are cognitive misers and their primary mode of "thought' is through associations. For the cognitive miser, "Right wing" means having opinions that are not Left wing and therefore someone who espouse anti-Left opinions is automatically categorised as Right. This, of course, plays into the Left "frame control" by putting all their enemies into one "cognitive camp" hence the common claim that there are no enemies to the "right". The Right, in this instance, being defined by the Left.

What many of the "stupid Right" fail to realise is that the Left's has its own sectarian battles and by making the frame of reference the dominant Left party, all the non-dominant internecine parties on the Left have a high chance of being classified as right, simply by their opposition to the dominant sect of the Left. Furthermore, that risk of misclassification is greater if the Left sect espouses values which are sometimes associated with the Right. A notional socialist does not become right wing by embracing nationalism he simply remains a left wing nationalist.

It is here where we come to an understanding of the failure of the Right in the 20th C. It has defined itself as anti-Left instead of pro-something. Therefore there has been no standard by which to judge a movements "Rightness" except for its anti-Left credentials. Therefore it has formed alliances with groups who ultimately subvert it and as I currently see it, the role of the alt-Right is to subvert the Right. Here is a comment from the Radix blog which fairly well summaries the blog's position on several key philosophical points:

List of "AltRight" positions as declared here at Radix and in NPI speeches:
-Pro belief in global warming
-Pro-abortion
-Pro gay rights
-Anti-Christian
-Anti-business
-Pro big government
It's much more accurate to simply say, "AltLeft" as Counter-Currents has rightly done.
How do they fit within the Right schema?

They don't.

This blog does not position itself on the Left-Right axis, it positions itself along the Right-Wrong one. Truth with a big T is the primary concern of NRx, and I'm quite happy to accept propositions from the Left that are true and reject propositions from the Right which are wrong. As the cards stack however, the majority of true propositions can be found in the Right, and that's why this blog assumes a Right flavor.

The role of the Alt-Right is not concerned about truth, it is concerned about power. Racial consciousness is the only standard by which all other epistemology is judged. If God is not "racially conscious" then God can be ditched and his followers persecuted. For Christians, a "Right" which rejects God is no better than the Left, it's wrong. However it is a pernicious heresy and one that is very difficult to spot, especially for the cognitive miser of the Right.

The appeal of the alt-Right is that it does advocate some truths which instinctively appeal. The love of kin, the delight of manhood, the sense of brotherhood that they preach all appeals to the "blood" of the normal man. It's not these things that I criticise it for, it's its hatred of God and his people that damns the movement to burn in Hell.

There is no Western Civilisation without the baby Jesus.

(A little wiki primer for those who are still confused.)

The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-4681511109706424512016-03-20T07:44:00.001+11:002016-03-20T07:44:29.290+11:00Spread the word.The American College of Pediatricians has released a position statement on gender ideology and children. Titled, Gender Ideology Harms Children, it's highly critical of the whole thing and it's highly unlikely that any of the mainstream media will report on it. I imagine that SJW's will be baying for the signatories blood and soon they will be demoted or lose their jobs.

I think it's important that stuff like this gets circulated within the alternative media for a whole variety of reasons. Spread the word.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-4642495168569038182016-03-16T23:16:00.002+11:002016-03-16T23:17:39.972+11:00Trump Night (NSFW)Unlike most people, I'm not an enthusiastic cheerleader for Trump. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot about him that I like, it's just that I don't think he is THE ONE. I get the impression that apart from a few popularist positions and slogans there isn't much political substance behind him. Still, I admire him for the way he has handled the media, and the way he has damaged the GOP establishmen and the way he has shifted the Overton window on issues such as immigration and job protection, something which seemed distant but a year ago. Perhaps his greatest legacy will be that he has energised the Middle American Radicals, a group that has till now been pretty apathetic, where this goes, I don't know, but there's change in the wind.

He's had a good night tonight and I've enjoyed watching the GOP flail with impotence at him. It's been the most entertaining politics in ages. Meanwhile over at Megyn's.......

(Great political art. I'm sorry I don't know who the artist is, but I tip my hat to you sir!)The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-65666900204496460002016-03-14T23:31:00.000+11:002016-03-14T23:31:15.924+11:00Rethinking Race and Identity:IV

What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and behavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulation are identified: an automatic effect of perception on action, automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evaluation of one's experience. From the accumulating evidence, the authors conclude that these various nonconscious mental systems perform the lion's share of the self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual grounded in his or her current environment.

The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.

Of passing recent interest was the fact that the last known survivor of the Treblinka Concentration Camp, Samuel Willenberg, died last week. He managed to escape the camp and not get recaptured on the basis that he had a "non-Jewish Look" which helped him avoid suspicion. With this in mind, it's also ironic to think that some of the poster people for the Aryan Reich were later found out to be Jews or mischlings.

On the other hand, it's interesting to note that one of the greatest Germanic geniuses, Kurt Goedel, was beaten up by Nazi thugs because they thought he was Jewish on the basis of his looks.

After receiving his doctorate, Gödel became a privatdozent (unpaid lecturer) at the University of Vienna. Like many of the young scholars who later found their way to the Institute for Advanced Study from Europe in the 1930s, Kurt Gödel was brilliant. Unlike many, he was not Jewish, although he moved in circles of Jewish intellectuals and was sometimes thought to be Jewish. He had once been attacked as such by a gang of youths while walking with Adele on a street in Vienna.
Clearly, in the Reich, one's appearance played a large role in one's racial categorisation.

The Alt-Right like to advance the notion that "race is real", on the other hand, the Left like to think of it is a "social construct" both views, in my opinion are similar in that they contain a kernal of truth mixed with a large amount of error.

The notion of race is an interesting one. If we look at things from a biological perspective only, what constitutes the dividing line between one race an another. At what point does "white" stop and brown begin? While it is easy to recognise the extremes , it's the crossovers which are difficult. Stormfront tends to view as "White" as everything from continental Europe that is not Jewish. Strict Nordicists regard regard NW Europeans as the only true whites. Who is right? There really does appear to be a degree of arbitrariness in where the line gets drawn.

On the other hand, the notion that meaningful distinctions can't be made between different populations of peoples is only upheld by those who embrace a denial of reality. Pygmies are obviously different from Dutchmen, however, Pygmies and Dutchmen, can, if they want, breed and despite clear empirical differences they are still of the same species.

If we define "race" as populations of individuals with characteristics which distinguish them from the rest of the species, its apparent that the dividing line is then contingent on the parameters of distinction. Race is real only insofar as distinctions can be made and therefore race is a sort of construct dependent upon the parameters of selection; change the parameters and the membership of the race changes. If you make you definition of white very strict only very few are white, have a broader view and more people become white. There is no intrinsic dividing line rather it is contingent on the arbitrariness of the distinctions. It's this fact that gives the Left some quite significant legitimacy in the claim that race is simply a membership made on arbitrarily chose preferences.

The problem however, with this view, is that it rests upon the assumptions of traditional western anthropology which tended to view our actions as the consequence of deliberate choices, deliberatively made. Given this view, race was a deliberate cognitive strategy of inclusion and exclusion which was historically speaking, privileged on group over the other. Since the act was deliberative, it was fair game for moral consideration. In the Christian context particularly, this form of moral action was viewed in the negative.

But what if the distinction between "us and them" wasn't deliberative, what if it were automatic, a product not of rational calculation but of "pre-wired" cognitive autonomous neurological processing, felt in the conscious state as intuition. Would it be morally wrong? What if we have "functional modules" in our brain which automatically classify everyone and impart onto them either a positive or negative association bias without our willing control. What if the perception of race is a product of the Human Operating System?

There is a large body of evidence out there which shows that sterotype activation and racial categorisation is an automatic process which is seen in both prejudiced and unprejudiced individuals.( Unprejudiced individuals being better able to consciously suppress negative stereotypes however this fails under periods of stress or cognitive overload). Furthermore, the intuitive understanding of "us and them" seems to be present from relatively early on in our development and seems remarkably resistant to learned modification. Simply put, human beings seem to born with the innate capacity to self-assort on the basis of similarity and this selection operates unconsciously.

The phenomenon of racial awareness is not a will decision, it is a biocognitive response. Cognitive science research has shown that most men operate as cognitive misers, and it is at this level that the automaticity of thought exerts the most influence. System 2 and Reflective thought regulating the operation of System 1 when activated. But it needs to be understood that that the regulation of System 1 thought requires constant effort. A stable "multicultural society" is a society is a society that is only maintained by cognitive effort, since the default state is towards monocultural ones.

I think it was Xenosystems who recently called for an NRx entropic theory of society and I think the one way to approach the subject is that by considering the congnitive miser as the "lowest energy state".

Primitive human societies are possibly the lowest default state of human existence, where the overriding cognitive direction comes from "intuition" i.e. automatic thought. More complicated socieities require more intuitive override and are therefore less stable i.e. prone to collapse than the barbarians who really can't sink any further. That's not to say that all intuition suppression results in a complex society, it's just that complex societies require intuition suppression. Not all values which require suppressed intuition will produce complex societies, some values are just stupid.. The trick in generating a stable complex society is to have the right values with the least amount of intuition suppression. i.e. working with human nature.

Societies which work against human nature, are "high energy" societies which are intrinsically unstable. Multiculturalism is a "high energy state" which needs to be maintained with effort. If the effort becomes exhausted, the drift is to lower energy (system 1) tribalism and primitivism; where life is nasty, brutish and short. The trick at the moment is how to release the energy in a controlled state but all signs seems to point to uncontrolled fission in progress.The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-15968153040593510432016-02-24T10:40:00.000+11:002016-02-24T10:40:23.539+11:00Rethinking Race and Identity: IIIIn the movie, Terminator II, the opening scene shows the naked terminator walking into a bar looking for clothes. The majority of the scene is filmed as "through the eyes" of the terminator, and as the terminator strolls the room, data from numerous automatic subroutines is shown presenting itself onto its awareness .

Years ago, I was walking down a street with my family, in the Brooklyn district of New York, on my way to the subway museum. My wife and I were talking to each other trying to follow the directions on a map when suddenly an uneasy feeling came upon me. It slowly dawned upon me that lots of eyes were staring at us, and soon the realisation occurred that we were the only White people in a neighborhood where everyone else seemed Black. While most people were on their way doing their usual things, there were definitely eyes of contempt directed at us. Almost as soon as I became aware of our situation, my wife seemed to have become aware of it as well. An uneasy came upon us. Given that we had the children in tow, and the Subway was only about 300 meters away, we agreed that it would be better to nonchalantly cross the street and get back to the subway. We got there without incident. I imagine everyone has a similar story.

What was interesting about this situation, is that that the sense of threat posed to my family--assessed either rightly or wrongly--was first appreciated by an unconscious processing of the environmental situation and which eventually asserted itself onto my consciousness. Clearly, what had happened whilst my wife and I were walking down the street, talking about our day's plan, was that visual information from my immediate environment was being assessed by subconscious subroutines and a a threat analysis was being made, all without any deliberate awareness by myself. Eventually, the subroutine felt that action was required and impressed itself on my consciousness by eliciting a sense of unease.

Now the traditional approach to western anthropology divided man into rational and irrational, or more specifically, biological and cognitive but what's become increasingly apparent is that this anthropology is wrong, and division should be made along the lines of biological, biocomputive and cognitive elements. With the biocomputive layer being able to process information for the majority of time without our conscious awareness of it, only making itself noticed through the sensations of intuition, attention, attraction and repulsion.

If you think about a simple task such as walking, you'll realise just how complicated a task it is to accomplish in real life. Neurons must fire to increase the tension in some muscles and decrease them in others, balance must be maintained, objects avoided , speed maintained and so on. If these actions were the result of a conscious deliberative process they would overwhelm the mind, instead subconscious subroutines take care of all the work and walking simply becomes an issue of command. Robotics engineers looking at the problem have termed it Moravec's Paradox.

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

and;

Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge[Ed]. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.
Our conscious rationality rests upon a deep foundation of biocomputative processing of which were are largely unaware of. Now, most people instinctively grasp the fact that biologically automatic processes are involved in motor movements, but what needs to be recongised is that automatic processes are also involved in our perception and cognition which result in unconscious biases in our thinking. The influence of these biases are most marked at the level of System 1 thinking, in other words the thinking of the cognitive miser: the average man. These biases are not bugs but are features of the system, designed to ensure our long term biological survival in a primitive environment. For instance, the preference for blue, amongst Europeans may be "hard coded" in our DNA as a result of evolutionary--or whatever else--selection. It's not a learned behaviour.

The point of all this is for people to recognise that we are inbuilt with biases and preferences which are not deliberately chosen but which are "hard wired" into our biocomputative architecture. Sometimes our preferences are not a choice, but are a feature of our innate biology and therefore intrinsic to what it means to be human. Stereotyping, color association and homophily are examples of human biases which may provide a foundation for thinking about human relations in a way which avoids the pernicious affects of Darwinianism which has so plagued the Right in the 20th Century.

For those who are interested in scientific papers.

Link 1.
Link 2.
Link 3.
Link 4.
Link 5.
Link 6.
The Social Pathologisthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-27494378227427168192016-02-17T23:49:00.002+11:002016-02-17T23:49:29.902+11:00Rethinking Race and Identity:II
In the history of attempts to discover the causes of human behavior, the most widespread explanations are based on the assumption that human beings do what they believe is good for them. Thus, they are construed as "rational animals" capable of recognizing the value or utility of their actions.

At the same time, however, it is obvious that human beings do not always act this way; that is, under certain circumstances people behave in ways that do not reflect their values. To account for this phenomenon, to which the Greek philosophers gave the name akrasia (e.g., Mele, 1992), several strategies have been pursued. The first strategy assumes ignorance or lack of knowledge on the part of the actor. Socrates, for example, claimed that if people only knew what is good for them, they would act accordingly.

 A similar position is held by modern economists who imply that irrational decisions reflect a lack of appropriate information (Friedman, 1976). The second strategy postulates more than one set of principles that may control human action. For example, a behaviors may occur mindlessly (Langer, Blank,& Chanowitz, 1978) or automatically; that is, without directing much attention to the utility of an outcome, a person may act the way he or she has acted many times before. Such habitual behaviors were the focus of many psychological theories in which the frequency and recency of previous executions of a given behaviour were seen as primary determinants (e.g., Hull, 1943). The third strategy has been to understand human behavior as a function of drives. In particular, basic needs that are biologically rooted, such as hunger, thirst, or reproduction, are seen as major forces. Their strength may override considerations of utility and determine behavior in an immediate fashion.

 Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behavior

 Fritz Strack and Roland Deutsch

I think one of the great "fault lines" in Western Civilisation finds its origin in the Aristotlean influence upon Western Anthropology. This view held that what distinguishes the man from the beast is his capacity to rationalise. Furthermore, a dividing line was drawn between rationality and it's opposite, irrationality. But what's become apparent in a growing body of cognitive science research is that there appears to be an arational layer of high order neural processing which profoundly influences our rationality, and it's the failure to recognise this cognitive process which has been the cause of much grief.

Roughly analogous to Freud's idea of the id, the arational mind is the unconscious level of information processing, which, in essence, constitutes the brain's operating system. If you think about it for a moment, before you can "see" anything. Visual stimuli from the eyes have broken down into components such as movement, form, colour, texture and pattern, all of which happens without any rational activity on the behalf of the agent. Or take walking for instance, it's a pretty much automatic activity, with next to minimal conscious input, yet the decision to move forward, needs to be interpreted and broken down into a co-ordinated series of neurological and muscular actions in order to propel oneself efficiently without falling over.

Or sexual arousal? Why does the obese woman elicit a sense of repulsion whilst and nubile one a sense of desire? The sensation of desire isn't as a result of a rational deliberation, rather the unconscious mind takes visual data, processes it, evaluates it against some predetermined erotic metrics and then elicits the appropriate response. All of which, except for the sense of desire, occurring at an unconscious level. The sexual response isn't an example of rationality, its an example of arationality. The processing of information is automatic and without conscious deliberation.

The thing about the arational mind is that its operation seem to be hardwired, or biased, toward certain outcomes and behaviours and its the nature of these biases which give us the peculiarities of our human nature. Our mind is biased to prefer the beautiful to the ugly, to nubile to obese, sweet to bitter, nonthreatening to threatening, ingroup to outgroup, and so on. And it is these biases which express themselves onto our thoughts and it's there where we can chose to act on them in a rational or irrational manner. The important thing to recognise is that these biases operate, by and large, unconsciously.

The other thing to note, is that high order human rationality is not present at birth but rather develops and begins to mature--for some--in adulthood. Therefore, it is in early childhood, given the immaturity of rational thought, that our subconscious "software" is visible in its most undiluted form.

It's difficult to fully appreciate the fact that understanding and interpretation of novel phenomena is made within the framework of previous assumptions of how the world works. The great breakthroughs in science being more a re-evaluation of the assumptions rather than any novel data. Einstein's theory of relativity was more than just an explanation of data results, rather it was a profound shift in our understanding of how the universe works. Likewise, the current revolution in cognitive neurosciences forces a re-evaluation of our notions of cognitive anthropology.

Which brings me to the purpose of the previous post which whose purpose was to illustrate the famous Clarke Doll experiment. For those who are interested, the experiment has been repeated many times with similar results. Faced with the experimental data, the problem for the psychologists performing the test was how to explain the the preference of both Black and White children for light coloured dolls. It' easy enough to claim that the interpretation of the result--i.e that it was a product of racism--was the result of Left wing bias, but the problem is; How do you interpret the findings when your operating model of human cognition--due to the Aristotlean legacy--only admits irrationality or rationality?

If you assume that the kids start off as "blank slates," and that the kids are rational, your only logical interpretation of the experiment is that the results are learned. i.e. Children are taught to be discriminatory. There needs to be no left wing bias in order to interpret the result along those lines and science supports the Left.

I don't think people fully appreciate how much "blank slatism" and the rationality/irrationally dichotomy has facilitated the mass social engineering experiments of the late 19th and early 20th Century. The fundamental notion at play here is that human behaviour is all learned and none is innate, and therefore humans are capable of near infinite plasticity. In this framework, racism, like every other form of behaviour is learned and itt's this philosophical assumption which has underpinned all the social engineering experiments of the 20th Century and its a legacy which we, in many ways, owe to Aristotle and Plato.

Back to the Doll experiment. When researchers repeated the experiment in a remote Japanese village with little contact with both blacks and whites the results there were the same.

 First and foremost, Study 2 revealed the presence of early implicit and explicit race bias in our Japanese sample. These biases were robust at the earliest age tested, and were of similar magnitude to the biases exhibited by White American children. Thus, early race bias does not appear to be highly dependent on contact or exposure to outgroup members [ED]. This finding supports the notion, suggested by Study 1, that younger children's race bias may be a general response to group-level difference, rather than a focused response to a specific outgroup.
In other words the observed behaviour is not learned, i.e institutional racism, rather, the discriminatory behaviour is innate. (Hence the liberal mother's shock at the white childs KKK like behaviour her child in the previous video, she did not teach her child to be racist.) However, a good review of "child racism" literature shows that the concept of "race" awareness seems to only arise in late childhood. So what's going on?

What appears to be happening is, given the relative lack of development of higher cognition in children, children seem to be making their evaluations based upon innate arational subroutines which they are born with. Colour being one of the most primitive and earliest utilised method of differentiation. The "forced choice" nature of the Clark Doll experiment is forcing children to make a choice based upon pre-wired color associations and colour biases. In other words, the test is not a test about racism but a colour association test.. When forced, in an area of information ambiguity to choose, for children, color provides a cue for a response. And the the dark=bad, light= good is an innate response seen in children and adults. Link 2: The response is arational and innate.

The point of this is that many behaviours that humans exhibit aren't necessary rational but may be consequence of arational behaviours and biases which have their origin in the genetic code. We discriminate between individuals not because of any rational reason but because our "hardware" does it automatically. The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-72623634576139655512016-02-08T23:55:00.000+11:002016-02-08T23:55:20.164+11:00Rethinking Race and Identity: The Doll Experiment.It's late in the evening and I'm tired, so instead of this being a long argued post, I thought I put up two videos which will be the topic of my next post.

and this video.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-59456627827821661512016-01-30T22:17:00.000+11:002016-02-07T22:00:36.613+11:00Cleaning Out the Closet. II

Politically, the most interesting thing that has happened to the Right has been the growth of its dissident faction, the Dissident Right(DR), a faction disgusted with what passes as the mainstream or institutional Right. This dissident faction can be thought of as the overriding name for all the separate Right groups that are opposed to the current conservative status quo. It's not a unified force rather it's a collection of disparate groups that can be broadly categorised on how they approach the problems of politics and philosophy. As mentioned in my previous post the Dissident Right can be broadly divided into the "feeling Right" which is typified by the Alt-Right and the "thinking" Right which, I feel, is typified by Neoreaction.

Neoreaction, by its very nature, is an intellectual exercise and therefore is always going to be a minority position. As Stanovich and cognitive science have previously demonstrated, the majority of men are "feels" rather than "thought" driven. The Alt-Right, as mentioned in the previous post, is primarily a "feels" driven phenomenon and as the dissident right grows in numbers it is to be expected that the feels component will assume a greater significance. This is a problem.

Unfortunately, "feels driven solutions" are typical mob solutions, which tend to be violent,self-destructive and self-corrosive. Fascism (in all its variants) was a "feels" driven response to the problems of the early 20th Century and we all know how that ended up. The problem with the entryist invasion of the dissident right is that they are going to exert an influence on it simply by virtue of their mass, the task at hand is how to stop the mob from going stupid. This I feel is the role for NRx.

What distinguishes NRx from the Alt-Right is concern for the facts. The Alt-Right has no need for facts, it wants to embrace the myths, to be on the side of the God's and, in that way, resembles some of the worst aspects of the Left (who were on the side of the Angels in Vietnam, for instance.) For Neoreaction, empirical observations matter and NRx forms its opinions and insights from the due consideration of the them.The critique of universal democracy, for instance, is not grounded in a "preference" or bias for for other systems of government, or the myth of aristocracy, rather it comes from a considered understanding, based upon the empirical observations of the "average voter". If Neoreaction had a motto, it would be Solzhenitsyn's, "Live not by lies".

What unites all of NRx, in my opinion, is a concern for the Truth. We may quibble on points of the truth but real problem is in what divides NRx, and that is the scope of the truth. I don't think many in NRx fully appreciate that contemporary NRx has a very deep metaphysical problem, which is best explained by the fact that NRx can itself be divided into two groups: Positivist (+) NRx and Non-Positivist (-)NRx.

Positivist NRx is most typified by the Moldbuggian strain of NRx. This issue at stake here is the understanding of Truth and Reality. In +NRx what is considered a valid truth is defined within the positivist metaphysic, a metaphysic which is shared by both the Left and +NRx . +NRx is therefore, simply, an intellectually honest, and better form, of Positivism.

It needs to be understood that the Left is, in many ways, cognitively like the Alt-Right. It's largest contingent, the mainstream Left, is a culture which subordinates fact to myth,i.e the myth of radical equality, with "the feels" being the overriding imperative. However, there are a very few serious thinkers amongst the more intelligent Left, and the prevailing metaphysical system in which they operate is Positivistic. The serious Left have always had an ambivalent attitude towards the truth, being willing to subordinate it for a greater cause, but where truth is admitted it is always done within the framework of Positivism. Therefore what distinguishes the a left positivist from a NRx positivist is the willingness to be believe in dishonest propositions.

Therefore we can define Leftism as;

(dishonest) Positivism in error = Leftism

However, and this is the kicker, error does not always have to be deliberate, sometimes its unintentional. Thinking is hard, reasoning is flawed, frequently biased and honest mistakes are made. The logic however is inescapable;

(honest) Positivism in error = ? (hint, look above.)

See the problem?

What separates the two is malice not epistemology.

If you think about it a bit you get a bit of shudder when you realise that Moldbug is an unwitting plant.

Now, there's error and there's error. Errors in the physical sciences are unlikely to affect societal stability, errors in the our understanding of how humans interact are liable to be civilisation destroying. Things like sexual morality may have a more profound effect on societal stability than, say, how you arrange the political governance of a country. The point being, that you have to have the capacity and intellect to see the toxicity, if you're an +NRx who can't see it, your societal prescriptions will mirror the Left, in either of its Marxist or Fascist variants when it comes to such matters.

Good quality +NRx thinkers will make few mistakes and therefore have a better grasp on reality but the "honest", poorer thinkers are the epistemological equivalents of Leftists. No matter how good any +NRx thinker is, he is still stuck within the confines of Positivism and when +NRx goes "bad" it goes Left. +NRx is unable to escape Modernism/Leftism because their underlying metaphysics are its foundations. They are stuck in the Left Matrix and there is no way out.

The great divide between the past and modern world lay in our understanding of reality, Positivism was a reduction in recognition of the scope of it. The pre-moderns, and most of the world bar the West, holds the view that there is more to reality than can actually be "accessed" by our biological senses. Religion was the principal access path to these other verities and hence the importance of it in non-Positivist societies. Non-Positivist NRx, (-NRx) takes religion into account by explicitly rejecting the implicit limitations of Positivism and views religious insight as akin to empirical data. As mentioned in a long previous post, Faith is a sensory modality.

Relgious faith, particularly the religious faith of the West serves therefore as another dimension of information in the analytic of -NRx. -NRx doesn't reject the empiricism of Positivism, rather it sees its data set as incomplete. -NRx needs to be thought of not as anti-positivist, rather it is supra-Positivist. Science still matters, but so does the "faith" data. In -NRx there is NO conflict between faith data and empirical data, rather, reason aims to find a reconciliation with both since the truth is a singularity, incapable of contradiction.

It needs to be understood that Positivism's unrelenting march throughout the late 19th and early 20th Century came about because it was the first to consistently apply the principle of the primacy of empirical data over theory, despite its simultaneous reduction of the scope of it. It insisted on reason being "calibrated" to real world findings. Tradition and custom were unable to achieve this calibration and thus were pushed aside as Positivism "delivered the goods" in the form of technological progress. The tragedy of the 20th Century has come about because traditionalism was unable to deal with Positivistic success.

-NRx takes the principal of the primacy of empirical data over theory and incorporates it into a wider data set. -NRx is a sort of fusion between traditional concepts of the scope of empirical data with the positivist insistence on the primacy of data. It's a fusion product. This, however, puts -NRx explicitly against traditionalism, insofar as traditionalists elevate custom above the truth. This, itself is not a bad thing, given traditionalism's utter failure to combat the Left. New approaches need to be tried.

I personally don't think any political program on its own is going to work. What is needed is a spiritual renewal of the West but the traditional spiritual "institutions" have proved themselves unable to face the challenge of modernism. It is my hope that -NRx will act upon these institutions to instill a "bottom up" renewal of Western society, instead of a "top down" Franco like solution which has failed in the long run. Politics matters as well, but the primary task now is to reform the religious institutions of the West, still I feel -NRx has a role in stopping the "feels" right from drifting and becoming too crazy.

The pathogen that is eating away at the institutions of the West is not a lack of scientific knowledge but moral decay. Intelligent but corrupt officials destroy the efficiency of government, Hi IQ cads and whores destroy the institution of the family, Journalists lie, Doctors murder, Judges administer social justice instead of law, and everyone lies. That's why any revival of the West will primarily consist of a moral revival and not a technological solution. The excluded data set must be incorporated else there is no way out.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-54548794470948312732016-01-27T11:28:00.002+11:002016-01-27T11:31:21.400+11:00Cleaning out the Closet: II think 2015 will be seen as a watershed year for the Right. As mentioned in my previous posts, it was a year of mixed blessing and I thought I would try to take stock of the situation as now it stands now in what I would call the Dissident Right. I think it is important to distinguish between the Alt-Right and NRx since the two are different yet people seem to use the terminology interchangeably at times. The Dissident Right (DR) can be thought of as comprising of both NRx and the Alt-Right who are united, at least, in a rejection of what constitutes the post war Institutional Right(IR) .

Now, by DR, I mean the Right that has abandoned the post war conservative institutional consensus, in other words, what counts for "mainstream Conservatism" which is currently in its death throes iacross the Western World. The recent National Review edition against Trump is an example of the conservative consensus flailing about to keep the traditional constituency in tow. There seems to be global revolt of the rank and file against the institutional conservative establishment which increasingly fails to meaningfully distinguish itself from the Left. Furthermore, I think we've reached a sociological tipping point, in that extent of foreign migration (and its media coverage) has finally started to fuel a nativist backlash and, more importantly, the economic forces of globalisation have finally started to seriously impact upon the middle class. Globalisation, whilst it was putting out blue collar workers was not a really issue for the Right but now that its pernicious effects are being felt in Middle Class--(politically the class that matters most)--a serious revolt has begun to brew.

It is these rebels from institutional conservatism which I call the Dissident Right. Now, the DR needs to be understood as comprising of two main streams;

1) The "feeling" Right and,
2) The "thinking" Right.

The "feeling Right" is pretty much owned by the Alt-Right, by which I mean the Radix like crowd. This group "intuits" its political position and its rejection of the IR is more a case of the "feels" rather than the "thinks". It's essentially a romantic movement. In Richard Spencer's Political Theology, myth is more important than fact. The reason this is because any factual analysis of the "White" situation leads to uncomfortable truths. Truths which stymie the "racial awareness" renewal. In brief, the White goyim are bringing the misery down, on themselves by themselves. It needs to be pointed out that the SJW's who are currently pushing for more "diversity" are nearly all white white. Attribution of decline to external groups such as the Jews, whilst having some plausibility, are unfounded so in the end, any sustaining principle must be rooted in an intuitive myth rather than a cold hard fact.

This however is a political winner, at least in a democracy. As Sam Francis in his brilliant, From Household to Nation, observed, the average middle class person was nothing more than an affluent proletarian and therefore far more likely to be motivated by the "feels" rather than the facts. His essay is basically a statement on the importance, in a Democracy, of personal circumstances over ideology and he attributes the failure of the IR to the neglect of this fact. What has driven the shift to the DR, in particular the Alt-Right is, that over the past decade, the circmstances of the middle class have started to decline with a subsequent rise in middle class anxiety. The Alt-Right caters for this anxiety in a way that the sheeple can grasp. It doesn't argue rationally it persuades emotively.

Years ago, the mainstream media control of information would pretty much shut down any legitimate access to the Alt-right, but given the internet, that control has been lost and groups such as Radix have been able to package themselves--somewhat--as identitarians and not as Nazi's who are able to slickly articulate the problems of the middle class. Furthermore, by providing "low brow" intuitive solutions to problems, their appeal is slowly growing and it is this segment, because of its socio-intellectual nature, has provided for the most explosive growth in the Dissident Right.

The other area where it owns the field is in the ideology of identity. Make no mistake, there is a crisis of national identity going on throughout the Western World, bough about by multiculturalism, which is being suppressed by political correctness yet which yearns to find expression and is yet another reason for the growth of the DR. Other conservative movements simply do not come even come close to providing for coherent solutions to the problem, however its mistake is in placing the foundation of identity in biological race--with all of its Darwinian baggage and repulsive evolutionary "solutions"--instead of grounding identity in the natural biases of human nature.

But make no mistake, the Alt-Right is still a "mass-man" movement and therefore is a spiritual heir of the French Revolution. It is anti-NRx. It's a democracy/socialism/authoritarian system where the franchise is based on color. And therefore, it brings with it all the problems to culture and society that democratic Mass-man society brings. Many forget that it was "white" democracy that bought us this current civilisational mess. Furthermore, no matter how you cut it, given its nationalist, identitarian and racial emphasis, it's intellectual underpinnings are shared with the Fascist movement. Now contrary to popular belief, Fascism was a broad "Church" ranging from the mildness of the Action Francaise to the murderous Nazi and Ustashe regimes. I'm not at all suggesting that Alt-Right are Nazi's but it needs to be remembered that even though all not all fascists are Nazi's all Nazi's are fascists. All variants of Fascism share the same metaphyisics and what distinguishes them is in their different approaches to real world "solutions" to problems. Given this common metaphysic, the Alt-Right is a home where Identitarians and National Socialists can find common cause. As I see it, there is no corrective mechanism in the Alt-Right movement to prevent a virulent natsoc capture of it. Should this happen the movement would self destruct and drag any other associated movements down with it.

I'll deal with the "thinking" Right in my next post.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-58633642855917962332016-01-20T11:08:00.000+11:002016-01-20T11:08:30.434+11:00 A Post Worth Mentioning.

 Permissive attitudes towards morally questionable behaviour pave the way for destruction of your culture, people, and society.
The were several good posts written last year which I hoped to comment on. One, in particularly, was by Esoterictrad: It's the Degeneracy Stupid. It's a well written post which pretty much aligns with this blog's philosophical position. It also think it's one of the most important posts of the year since it succinctly illustrates the mindware contamination of NRx that has come about through Alt-Right entryism. This has been the most depressing development of 2015 but unfortunately, given the rise of the dissident Right, to be expected.

This seemingly obvious truth is in fact denied by what seems like increasingly large numbers of people who use the term 'Alt-Right' to describe themselves. Over the course of the last few years as the 'Alt-Right' has grown in popularity it has attracted more and more white men disaffected with how things are going. In such a liberal age many of these men are still largely sit within the Overton Window on many issues, it is only on a few where they have directly experienced the horrors of modernity that they branch out and explore.
and

Some of those men end up going further and head towards Truth, but the vast majority are more likely to end up making a truce towards the rest of the liberal attitudes. The Reddit subreddit "The Red Pill" which is a Game/sexual strategy forum explicitly forbids discussion of morality. There is a mod post announcing people must keep their morals to themselves.
As Esoterictrad points out, there seems to be this notion that everything will be OK if you fix up an isolated act of degeneracy whilst wallowing in an ocean of it. Let me illustrate what I mean. For years I struggled to understand why fornication was wrong. Why should God be so opposed to the private act of affection between two consenting adults, especially if no harm was done by it? It's taken me years to realise my formulation of the question was based upon a failure to understand the "extrapersonal" dimension of the sexual act. Sex is not simply an act that can be isolated to two people, but its an act with much wider sociological implications. Compartmentalising it is simply a poor way of thinking about it.

Family stability is partly a function of the prevailing sexual mores. Acceptable promiscuity facilitates family dissolution, it facilitates abortion, it facilitates the alpha harem and alpha widowhood with the subsequent negative effects of long term pair bonding. It disincentivises socially productive beta behaviour and promotes the dark triad of traits which undermine society. It moves the locus of control of sexuality towards the female instead of the male, undermining the intended sexual dynamic between sexes. Fornication, considered from a simply personal perspective, is probably not that bad, but when considered from a global one, it is a lethal poison. Getting people to grasp the global picture is very hard. Telling people to keep "your morals to yourself" keeps the focus on the local and not the global.

People seem to have a real problem grasping the "big picture" and instead focus on small issues all the will oblivious the larger problem which brings us to the Alt-Right. Esoterictrad on the subject:

The other area where people might run into the obvious lies of the left establishment is of course demographics and race. A great many people 'wake up' to the reality of race but never 'wake up' to anything else. They are essentially what should be known as the 'Alt-Left' – where everything is acceptable as long as it is a whites only society. Homosexuals of course have greatly appreciated this, because it means they do not have to face up to their sins. Here is a group of people willing to accept them because they shout about Niggers and Kikes just like them, but won't actually suggest they change their behaviour.
Bingo. These people simply can't grasp the fact that a whites only society can also implode. They're so focused on "white oppression" that they miss the bigger picture. They're essentially social justice warriors for white people only. I would urge my readers to have a look a Richard Spencer's Political Theology and tell me how his "myths" differ from the "myths' of social justice warriors. The common thread of both parties is a believe in the power of myth over truth; oppression by whites in the case of the Left SJW's and oppression by others in the case of the Right SJW's both parties are ambivalent when it comes to the matter of truth. Indeed, as Spencer so eloquently points out.

Indeed, knowing too much truth can be a problem.
The reason why the West is in such deep shit is because it doesn't realise just how bad things are. It doesn't help that people are openly advocating closing their eyes to the facts. Commentators are worrying about the position of the deck chairs, ignoring the hole in the Titanic's side. No one sees the bigger picture. The problem is one of faith and morals. In other words, it's the degeneracy, stupid.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-29137904.post-79961722686898097912016-01-12T11:33:00.002+11:002016-01-12T11:33:41.142+11:002015: Raisins and Turds.Another year has passed and I think it is worthwhile, from this vantage point, to take stock of the From from the perspective of this blog it's been a mixed year.

Firstly, the positives. As much as I deplore the rabble, any change in the zietgiest is only going to come about when a lot of people come on board. The "penetration" of Right memes has always been hampered by Cathedral control of public "idea space", and until recently, the Cathedral, through it's technological monopoly, has been able to keep control of the Overton Window. While its control over it has been gradually weakening, over the past year it seems to have taken a serious hit. Conservative bloggers have always been since the inception of the internet, but it appears that in the last year or so, the Alt-Right has achieved critical mass, especially in the U.S., as to be able to influence the tone of public debate. The emergence of the "cuckservative" meme an example in point. This is good.

Secondly, the amount of perversity, like morality, a society can abide with is limited by human nature. The extreme leftward push by the Cathedral and its operatives is finally starting to initiate some homeostatic mechanisms which are favourable to the Right wing ideas. People like to live according to their natures, and one aspect of their nature is homophily. Having a natural disposition toward homogeneous societies, no matter what they say to the contrary, the illegal immigration debacle in Europe--with its impotent response--has done more for the furtherance of Right wing ideas by activating some primordial response than any polemic or appeal to rationality by any Right-wing intellectual. This is good.

Furthermore, most people have an intuitive dislike towards homosexuality and an intuitive sense of protection for children. Whilst the gay agenda was orientated toward securing sexual rights I don't think many cared to push back, on the other hand, the push for the legitimisation of marriage and access to children seems to have triggered the beginnings of an "intuitive" counter-homosexual pushback in the community, particularly in France. This is good.

Furthermore, over the last few months I've also noticed comments popping up in unexpected places which seem to be negative with regard to the sexual revolution. People seem to be sick of the sexual degeneracy about them and there is a weariness about matters sexual. This is not to say that people want to turn the sexual revolution back, but there seems to be a growing awareness of the bigger picture of sex, especially with regard to relationship stability. This is good.

2015 Seems to be the year that mainstream "Conservatism" has died. Everywhere across the Western World there seems to be a fissuring and polarisation amongst the ranks in the Right. Merkel has effectively killed the CDU and what emerges is likely not to be very unpredictable. This is good, as the current custodians of the mainstream Right have destroyed it.

The other great development is Victor Orban.

The other development is the rise of Trump.

From a meta level, it appears that 2015 has been a year which has resulted in rightward shift in the Overton window. Especially in Europe.

Now the turds.

It's been great to see the explosion of the Alt-Right presence on the social media and in the blogosphere and I think 2015 has been the year of Alt-Right achieved Critical mass. But, on the other hand, a significant portion of the is growth has come about from entryism of "naturalist " Right groups. I'm using naturalism in the sense the Michel Houellebecq has used it and I think the aptness of the french terminology is particularly important given the cultural position of the Right at the moment. These entryists who are very active, seem to be pushing a racially aware form of progressivism. This is not good.

Following up of my reading of Houellebecq, I've spent the last couple of weeks chasing a rabbit warren of ideas by early 20th Century French authors, particularly Peguy and Blondel. What's quite eerie to note is just how much contemporary right wing thought resembles that of right wing thought in France prior to WW1. And if history is a guide, serves as a warning for what is to come.

At the end of the 19th Century, French Right wing thought was broadly divided into two main streams. There was the naturalist/Integralist steam which centered around the personality of Charles Maurras and there was a rabble of Christian humanists typified by men such as Peguy, Blondel and Claudel. Group one was a curious fusion of HBD positivism and Throne and Altar Traditionalism and called itself Action Francaise. To be fair, it had some good ideas but in the end, the organisation betrayed France by bending over and enthusiastically supporting the German occupation of it. They were active in the persecution of the French resistance, despite calling themselves the avowed patriots of France. When all is said an done, despite their religiosity and French patriotism they were simply racially conscious progressives. This version of the right shot itself in the head.

Group 2 on the other hand, fought the Germans, and inspired men like De Gaulle. They saw that setting the clock back wasn't going to work, neither were the mass-man ideologies of the time. They saw that Western Civilisation was in deep crisis, seeing the mass de-Christianisation that was occurring in Europe prior to Vatican Two. They diagnosed the problem as being that mainly of a crisis of faith, and a failure of traditional Western civilisation to recognise that modernity had changed the operating paradigms of society. To them the fundamental task was to respond to modernity in a Christian fashion and it was a question of how to deal with modernity successfully, not adapting it uncritically. This however was too much for Church leaders at the time who tacitly supported Group 1 and mildly persecuted Group 2. These guys were the spiritual fathers of John Paul II, Benedict and Francis. The guys who persecuted them were the Traditionalists.

Why the French situation is important is because it is being mirrored today in contemporary Right wing "idea space" and what has really depressed me is the Naturalist bent the Alt-Right has taken. The history of the times should be studied simply to show that the Naturalist trajectory is bound to end in failure. I don't want to repeat the same mistake yet it seems to be the way we're going. This is bad.

The other tragedy of 2015 has been the Catholic Church. It's this blogs primary contention that the Crisis in Western Civilisation at the moment is primarily religious in origin and nothing gets fixed until this issue is sorted out. Europe will die if Christianity is not revived and hence the Church's current "impotence" at dealing with the spiritual failure is the pressing issue of the moment. ( I know a lot of you Positivists think I'm nuts. It would be so much easier to implement a policy solution than a cultural transformation, yet it is the latter that needs to be done.) Protestantism is dying and Orthodoxy is static, incapable of change. That leaves the Church.

Vatican Two was supposed to sort this mess out, but it hasn't, primarily because the Hierarchy reformed ineptly and inappropriately. I think Francis recognises this and his hoping for some Divine solution. I think he is aware of the problem though doesn't have any solutions of his own. I think he was hoping something would come out of the Family Synod but nothing appears to have happened. The Church's spinning of the wheels is regrettable. This is bad.

For me, the overall strategic picture looks remarkably similar to late 1920's early 30's.

2016 is going to be interesting.

The Social Pathologisthttp://email@example.com