Thursday, November 29, 2012

Dignity or Decline

 
A solid editorial that smacks both parties.
 
But, he should have brought out the implication that the Republicans are in a much worse position than they realize. The breakdown of local associations is virtually impossible to rebuild after a generation or two of absence. Welfarism caused the breakdown by displacing these traditional means of supporting the indigent, but removing welfare does not cause it magically to repair itself. If major government support were discontinued, a collapse into third world chaos would follow in large swathes of our great cities. The Democratic solution is to expand these areas of dependency, to render ever more of the population idle (but half-imprisoned) serfs on the DC estate. The Republican strategy is denialism and electoral defeat. This is a vicious cycle. And it only goes one way. As someone said, Cthulhu only swims left.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Some Race Psychology, the Jews, the State

In thinking about the perversities of human psychology, the last half-century of "white guilt" struck me as an especially extreme example. A large part of this process derives from the escalating social status competition among whites to prove their empathy and spiritual generosity. Beyond that I think there is a major current unmentioned: the deep pleasure the American Jews derive from stoking the racial antagonism between black and white--and from aggressively portraying whites as always in the wrong. The atavistic Jewish assumption that the Outsider (like the Jew) must be the victim by definition, but presumptively superior at bottom, plays out endlessly in favor of blacks in the Jewish dominated spheres of the media and academia. These power centers, source springs of contemporary thought, were overtaken by our Jews in the sixties, whereupon they assumed script-writing duties from the native strain of pseudo-egalitarians, the Brahmins, and became the marketers and arbiters of the West's new ruling ideology, cultural Marxism. This hardly surprises given that the European Jews invented this ideology and the Brahminate was led by the logical extrapolation of its own super-Protestantism to cede power to a people deemed, by themselves and the Brahmins, to be morally superior. And do I state anything more than a tautology in noting that this ideology serves Jewish ends? But, to be fair to the Jews in America, whether they merely pressed further the trend that the Brahmins had long since commenced or someway twisted or intensified it remains dubious. Whether the Brahmins would have continued thuswise and thusfar absent Jewish pressure and influence remains very much debatable. What is unacceptable, however, in a sense that does not depend on the answers to these issues of responsibility, is the prohibition on any criticism of Jews. They are the best propagandists around--the most powerful in the world today, since they ride the American tiger. To let them run loose without organized criticism or resistance, our modus operandi for at least 45 years, will unleash yet more national disintegration, and dissolution of tradition, strength, will, liberty, healthy moral perspective. A nation without a national religion, one which at least dominates the moral perspective of the elite, will always tend toward spiritual collapse. Cultural Marxism is not a true religion. It is propaganda, a web of words, a self-referential system, a circle of deceit ever-morphing into more destructive patterns of social organization, an open Jewish conspiracy from which only the Jews have any chance of gathering strength, and that only by dispersing the power of competing interests and shaping the competition to favor their particular talents (intellect, with all the advantages that confers in a highly complex propagandistic-bureaucratic-technological civilization, and ethnic networking). The hypocrisy is impressive: the Jews support policies which splinter America along ethnic lines and set the various ethnicities against each other, then proclaim themselves transcendent above the fray, immaculate and past criticism.
 
Given the propensities of the Jews in America and Europe, anti-Semitism among the masses is only surprising when absent. The range of knowledge, subtleties, distinctions, arguments, counterarguments, and context necessary to evade the temptation of anti-Semitism is not a trifling challenge. When the masses escape from anti-Semitism it happens simply through conformism, when conformity so directs them--though they are, of course, just as susceptible to follow conformity into it as out of it. To complicate matters still more, the Ashkenazi Jews give great evidence of superior intelligence vis-à-vis gentiles, which leads them to disproportionate leadership positions wherever they choose to apply their talents. Further, many Jews possess a keen consciousness of their position in the world, and it follows that far more Jews than gentiles will achieve a reasonably complete understanding of the two sides of the intricate argument about anti-Semitism. This means these astute Jews assume any outcropping of anti-Semitism must be pure stupidity or pure evil. They are wrong. It is easy for non-conformist people of average intelligence and average knowledge to descend into some sort of anti-Semitism, mild, moderate, or severe as temperament and circumstances may mold them. The Jews rely almost exclusively on their propaganda leverage to disarm these potential converts against them. But, is that sufficient in the long run? It seems that North America is the only place where significant Jewish populations are or were found that lacks significant anti-Semitism. Why wouldn't it be a better survival strategy for American Jews to ally themselves with gentile interests, rather than undermining them at every chance? Perhaps they think that this was the strategy that failed in Europe--a questionable interpretation in view of heavy Jewish influence over European Marxist organizations from their inception. Marxism was, after all, intended to destroy all European traditions and effectively did so where imposed.
 
Since I've veered from the white psychological response to blacks ("white guilt") into Jewish intellectual and political dominance, and from thence into the issue of anti-Semitism, I will note a few considerations of the latter made by other writers. The first two are by a Jewish convert to Catholicism.
 
With this take I generally agree, though I think he underplays the degree of Jewish influence on the left and the possibility that they've pushed us faster and further to the left than the Brahmins intended.
 
Auster's four part solution to the Jewish question in America looks quite sensible, except that it's an example of the characteristic conservative fallacy of thinking backwards, as if we could choose to enter the past rather than the future. But the values are respectable and he makes the crucial point that submission to the leftist strategies pushed by our Jews ought not to be undertaken for the sole purpose of dodging charges of anti-Semitism. If "the Jews as Jews" engage in destructive political policies, they must be opposed. This is not anti-Semitism; it is self-protection. It is a healthy immune system in action--the immune system does not care what a pathogen is called. Whether a policy is Jew-born, black-born, woman-born does not matter: if pathogenic, it must be killed. Auster also makes clear another major conceptual issue: "the restoration of a white gentile majority culture that believes in itself" would reinvigorate America and need not prompt the appearance of anti-Semitism or anti-Africanism, as our current elite seems to assume. I would argue, with Nietzsche, that it is weakness that produces hatred, not strength.
 
Speaking of the great man, I recall a couple of passages in Human, All Too Human. 

Section 475 The European man and the abolition of nations is my favorite example of Nietzsche on the Jews. It's preceded by a section that notes that in ancient Greece the polis, guided by the self-interested prejudice of the political class, was oriented in practice and in (Platonic) theory to achieve cultural stasis--an effort that failed in face of the countervailing tendency of the state to provoke the individual to an intensified pursuit of honor. He also asserts that if culture develops despite the educational constraints of the polis, it also develops without the polis. And for N. cultural achievement, the flowering of human creative genius, is the highest goal of human life. The first part of section 475 then discusses the gradual intermixing of the races of Europe, beginning with the intellectual and commercial elites. He also castigates the madness of nationalism and notes that its promoters are mostly small slivers of society and medieval political relics (odd, since there was little nationalism evident in the Middle Ages). An enlightened European, in opposition to nationalist trends, ought to declare himself "simply a good European and [ought] actively to work for the amalgamation of nations..." N. expects this to reduce the power of the state and favor cultural development. He then proceeds, in the Section's second part, to the Jews and their role in his projected Europe, which I quote complete from my melding of the Kaufmann and Hollingdale translations:
Incidentally: the whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. Therefore, the literary obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as the scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune spreads in almost every nation--and the more so the more nationalist its posture. As soon as it's no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind. Nonetheless I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they've had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical interpretation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: which in a certain sense means making Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek.
The following section explains why the visionary Judeo-Greek synthesis will soon cast the Catholic Church, for some still an ideal universalist institution, into "shadow and oblivion." For it was founded on fictions and reduced the fitness of its adherents and subjects--whereas what is to come will be founded on science and seek mastery of reality, not of illusions. I would note, though, that accidentally, by way of its severe prohibition on cousin marriages, intended initially to break down tribal allegiances, the Catholic Church, in this respect at least, increased genetic fitness and created the possibility of new, perhaps more civilized, social forms. Its overall effect on genetic fitness, by slandering sex and attempting to enforce celibacy upon a substantial proportion of the population, including some of its most capable members (eg, priests), is another matter of uncertainty.
 
Of course, Hitler and Lenin blew up the tracks and sent the train down a different way than realism or Greek-founded cultural unity. Both put their considerable force of will at the disposal of ideas N. strongly condemned and argued against. Following Hitler's war, the Western elite then succumbed to the advocates of "slave morality," Jews not least among them, but firstmost and foremost of the intellectual advocates and justifiers, having begun this project in earnest well before the war. This infatuation with the basest features and incarnations of humanity spirals ever further away from Nietzsche's dream of cultural apotheosis and the overman.
 
An earlier section (472) in the book considers the need for religion to sustain the governance of a state, and speculates at length on the interactions of democratic governance and religion, concluding that democracy slowly crushes religion, then the state itself disintegrates, leaving only private citizens and corporations--which happens as follows: The rulers and the priests traditionally are co-dependents, and cooperate for mutual benefit. The rulers need the priests because "The power that lies in the unity of popular sentiment, in the fact that everyone holds the same opinions and has the same objectives, is sealed and protected by religion..." But, among the rulers, this eventuates in a sense of superiority over religion--"which is why free-spiritedness has its origin here." In a democracy, however, religion breaks from governance and becomes autonomous. The rulers mirror the religious predilections of the people, preventing the cynical use of religion for power. Not being a lever of power, the rulers concede its manifestations to the preferences of the people and render it a private matter. Permitting personal interpretation of religion then intensifies religious feelings and splinters a unified religion many ways, as in the Reformation. Interreligious conflict and competition exposes the frailties of all faiths to the most observant; higher men become ever more irreligious. And these higher men are also the rulers, who will start to work to contain the power of religion, now tending toward anarchy, thus transforming the state from an institution sanctified by its priests to one opposed to them. The state is then disenchanted in the minds of the religious. So do the rulers become, in their competition with the religious, statists--"in which development they are secretly aided by the fact that, since their sundering from religion, hearts in these circles have felt a sense of emptiness which they are seeking provisionally to fill with a kind of substitute in the form of devotion to the state." This may be related to the origins of our present dispensation. He then sees two possibilities: an enlightened despotism if the religionists win; but if the statists win they may, "perhaps through schooling and education, in the course of generations undermine the propagation of their opponents and finally render it impossible. Then, however, they too will experience a slackening of their enthusiasm for the state: it will grow ever clearer that" there is no basis for a religious sense of the state. "Henceforth the individual will see only that side of [the state] that promises to be useful or threatens to be harmful to him, and will bend all his efforts to acquiring influence upon it." This will produce instability, alternating governments.
None of the measures effected by a government will be guaranteed continuity; everyone will draw back from undertakings that require great tending for decades or centuries if their fruits are to mature. No one will feel towards a law any greater obligation than that of bowing for the moment to the force which backs up the law: one will then at once set to work to subvert it with a new force, the creation of a new majority. Finally--one can say this with certainty--distrust of all government, insight into the uselessness and destructiveness of the short-winded struggles will impel men to a quite novel resolve: the resolve to do away with the concept of the state, to the abolition of the distinction between public and private. Private companies will step by step absorb the business of the state...Disregard for and the decline and death of the state, the liberation of the private person (I take care not to say: of the individual) is the consequence of the democratic conception of the state; it is in this that its mission lies...The prospect presented by this certain decay is, however, not in every respect an unhappy one: the prudence and self-interest of men are of all their qualities the best developed; if the state is no longer equal to the demands of these forces then the last thing that will ensue is chaos: an invention more suited to their purpose than the state was will gain victory over the state. How many an organizing principle has mankind not seen die out...To work for the dissemination and realization of this notion is another thing, to be sure: one has to have a very presumptuous idea of one's own intelligence and scarcely half an understanding of history to set one's hand to the plough already--while no one can yet show what seedcorn is afterwards to be scattered on the riven soil.  
The problem with the withering away of the state, whether envisioned by Marx or Nietzsche, is the same problem that Shaw laughed at: "Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you." Nations operate in contact with other nations. A healthy nation sees an ungoverned region as a standing invitation to conquer, unless it's not worth conquering (see, Somalia). Perhaps sufficient corporate determination to organize a defense could change this calculus, at least to the point that it becomes too expensive and (after warfare's damage to people and plant) unrewarding to conquer. Or, of course, the dreams of our elites could manifest, we could achieve one world government, which would then be secure enough, in theory, to wither away--there being no remaining policemen. Yet the furthest overreaches of statism, whether in the USSR or Sweden, do not disintegrate the state. It seems that, having won the domestic battles against religious and other conservative opponents, the Western statists at least have now reoriented their state religion to battle foreign threats to their statism and to invite in such threats as immigrants, deemed future converts to statism. For example, they wish to vanquish the Islamism of their immigrant masses, then go abroad as well to undermine that religion on its native soil. These statists are specialists in propaganda and they trust in its endless efficacy against all resistance. And they hit upon, even in N.'s time the centripetal social force of governmental welfare programs, now advanced to the stage of rendering most of the population materially dependent upon the state. Thus have they achieved a firm grip on the thoughts of the citizenry and on their needful resources. The people do not see the pointlessness of the state because they have become, in crucial ways, integral to it. They have come to believe that they are the state: l'Etat, c'est nous.  But, this notion of the disintegration of the state aside, most of Nietzsche's narrative played out as anticipated. Only the endgame presents more madness than he thought to project.
 
He follows this lengthy meditation with section 473 Socialism with regard to its means:
Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community...it requires a more complete subservience of the citizen to the absolute state than has ever existed before; and since it can no longer even count on the ancient religious piety towards the state but has, rather, involuntarily to work ceaselessly for its abolition--because, that is, it works for the abolition of all existing states--socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the  most extreme terrorism...Socialism can serve to teach, in a truly brutal and impressive fashion, what danger there lies in all accumulations of state power, and to that extent to implant mistrust of the state itself.
The tide did turn against the state in the seventies and eighties. Thatcher, Reagan, Deng, and Gorbachev rode or succumbed to this turn--though the causes extended the beyond the impiousness and moral depravity of socialist states. But, the economic motive, large as it was, cannot be cleanly separated from the moral climate. The dehumanization inflicted by socialist bureaucracy was enough to diminished economic output by process of demoralization. This was superadded to the unworkable attempt to use central planning to organize the economy, instead of financial incentives and market signals. Nietzsche once again underestimated the madness of succeeding generations, which managed to draw out the misery of hard socialism for as long as three generations, rather than consigning their failed experiments to quick deaths.

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading..." --Laurence Sterne. A good book of aphorisms, such as Nietzsche's permits one to revel in the surface delight that the whole thing is a series of digressions--though, when read closely, very little of it is truly digressive.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Thoughts on Labor Unions

I agree with all but two of the following quotes: Darrow was nuts, Brandeis was too idealistic in failing to see the qualitative differences between the leadership of labor unions and the management of private firms--which has never been equal and therefore never deserved equal power. Jevons has the deepest insight: the fact that it's the most deeply cynical is surely coincidence. 
 
I think Shaw missed his calling by the way: great potential as a sitcom writer.
 
 
All plucked from a collection in The Economist:
 
“Labour unions would have us believe that they transfer income from rich capitalists to poor workers. In fact, they mostly transfer income from the large number of non-union workers to a small number of relatively well-off union workers.”
Robert Anderson, writer, Just Get Out of the Way: How Government Can Help Business in Poor Countries (2004)
 
“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labour bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labour contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organised and that their organisations must be recognised by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.”Louis Brandeis (pictured), lawyer (1856–1941), The curse of bigness: Miscellaneous papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1934)
 
“All classes of society are trades unionists at heart, and differ chiefly in the boldness, ability, and secrecy with which they pursue their respective interests.”William Stanley Jevons, economist (1835–82), The State in Relation to Labour (1882)
 
“No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn’t actually fall down.”George Bernard Shaw, playwright (1856–1950), The Apple Cart (1928)
 
“If you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”Homer Simpson, character in The Simpsons (American TV series)
 
“With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organisation of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.”Clarence Darrow, lawyer (1857–1938), The Railroad Trainman (1906)