He rains down fire, brimstone and pro-free market slaps in the face. He quotes Jesus to them: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (but then mistakenly seems to say that this is from the Sermon on the Mount – it’s not, it’s from Luke 12:48, but that’s just a minor quibble).
Category Archives: Philosophy
How the Culture Battles Were Lost
The War Continues
Rapid Cultural Decline and What Comes Next
Western Civilization changed the very nature of life - and is the only civilization worth talking about
Whenever the public was in a frenzy about something or other, my friend Herman Kahn (look him up) liked to quip, “There are only two important things that have happened since the dawn of history—and this isn’t one of them.” He was referring to the Agricultural Revolution around 5000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution. It’s good to keep things in perspective…
[. . .]
The thing to remember is that Western civilization is built on a certain set of values and virtues that have given the world something unique in history. Before the rise of Western Civ, people everywhere in the world survived by piling sticks and stones on top of one another and grubbing for roots and berries, freezing in the winter and starving in the spring, expecting an early and likely violent death.
Western Civ changed the very nature of life. It is, in fact, the only civilization worth talking about. China may have given the world Taoism, martial arts, and General Tso’s Chicken. India developed yoga, and curries are tasty. But on the whole, Ayn Rand was right when she said East minus West equals zero.
We’re now undergoing our own Great Cultural Revolution. It’s much more serious than what the Chinese attempted in the ’60s. Why? Because a whole complex of destructive ideas have now captured the apparatus of most governments, academia, media, entertainment, charities, and large corporations. The public has been both subtlety and overtly indoctrinated for generations. It’s not easy to reverse a trend this large.
Let me give you the dozen things that made Western Civilization and America not only unique but vastly better than any other country or civilization in history. I’ve listed 12 concepts. These things are the essence of Western Civ—and are unique to it. Ask yourself if attitudes towards them haven’t changed radically in recent years. Ask yourself if the trend towards collapse of the West hasn’t accelerated since then.
- Free thought has been replaced by Political Correctness, and it’s discouraged. We’re approaching the stage of Orwellian thought crime.
- Free speech is subject to cancel culture at universities, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and society in general. In totalitarian societies, free speech is cause for imprisonment or worse. We’re headed in that direction.
- Free markets mean the freedom to act. They’re gone as an ideal, replaced by socialism as a goal. Regulation is now considered essential by most people.
- Limited government has been replaced by State control of almost everything.
- Individualism is seen as bad, or at least antisocial. Identity politics is preferred. You’re not an individual so much as a member of a race or a party.
- Rationality is white and therefore racist. Science, logic, and fact are replaced by superstition. Group think is the new secular religion.
- Liberty is seen as a danger. Snowflakes need shelter in safe spaces for fear of being triggered.
- The concept of Progress is dangerous because it leads to inequality, and no one should be left behind.
- Privacy has been replaced by Transparency. God forbid you might have a secret. Everything is monitored. The Chinese Social Credit system is becoming a model.
- Property Rights—Fuhgedaboudit. You’ll own nothing and better be happy. On the bright side, your masters may give you food, housing, education, meds, and a Guaranteed Annual Income—if you’re obedient.
- The classic Rule of Law is gone, replaced by thousands of micro rules. Everything that’s not obligatory is forbidden.
- Industry & enterprise are evil since they lead to “greed,” inequality, and using the planet’s resources.
Statists and collectivists have largely succeeded in corrupting the public’s attitudes towards the twelve things which made the West unique. The trend is accelerating, and trends tend to stay in motion until they reach a crisis. Once they reach a crisis—it’s called a revolution in the case of a country, or a collapse in the case of a civilization—things usually get even worse, at least for a while.
[. . .]
My guess is that for years to come, we’re going to see a serious devolution of civilization everywhere. The world has become top-heavy with the fruits of civilization. Hundreds of millions rely on those fruits, with no clue about how they came about. Meanwhile, the roots of the tree that produced them are rotting.
As a result, we could be looking at not just a historic financial meltdown, accompanied by a really serious economic upheaval, with wars and serious shortages. But an overthrow of traditional cultural norms, social chaos, and political totalitarianism. Of course, mankind has survived all that for at least five millennia so far. And I suppose we’ll handle this as well. There will just be more unpleasantness and inconveniences than usual in the decade to come….
From Finite World to Infinite Growth
The Malthusians decided in their hubris and arrogance that because they couldn’t see a solution to a problem they’d defined, that solution did not exist.
Tom Luongo has written a piece called “From Currency Resets to Limiting Infinite Growth“
In it, he writes:
In a recent article on this blog, I did a quick and dirty takedown of the globalist talking point about infinite growth in a finite world. That gaslighting was at the core of the conflict in the big story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe of films, which centered on Thanos coming to bring balance by destroying half of the life in the Universe.
Davos has gaslit two entire generations of westerners in the Malthusian talking point that you can’t have infinite growth in a finite world. All of their economic dogma is predicated on this.
It doesn’t matter that this talking point is predicated on an inane premise, truth is, after all treason, at this point in the economic and cultural cycle. But, to try and explain quickly for the slow-witted. GDP growth is not necessarily real growth. It’s just spending. It says nothing for the quality of the spending or whether, in real terms, the people spending the money are materially better off than they were at a previous point in time.
What isn’t measured by GDP is VALUE. Value is what we crave, the ability to plan further into the future, using our ingenuity to find better mousetraps to build and more efficient, and yes sustainable, ways of deploying scarce capital and time.
When you have a monetary system and regulatory regime designed to thwart that to stop growth then you have the world we live in today. That infinite growth is a subjective, not objective, measure…. not in GDP terms but in the ‘alleviation of human misery’ terms.
Davos absolutely doesn’t want this because a world where everyone gets maximal value for their time is a world without our need for them.
Thanos in the Marvel films makes the same mistake Davos and Huxley made, deciding in their hubris and arrogance that because they couldn’t see a solution to a problem they’d defined, that solution did not exist. This justified their acquisition of power unlimited to re-make the world in their image.
I liked his conclusion in particular:
At that point you will then see what the real growth rate of the world is. Gary North used to say that prior to the early 1800’s the real rate at which wealth compounded was ~1% annually. Then something changed and it doubled to 2% and that scared the bejeesus out of the elites because too many people were getting rich too quickly to need them to look out for their interests.
Now you know why the Club of Rome began in the 1850’s, why central banking was so bitterly fought over here in the US then. It’s why Marx’s insane ideas were adopted by those with generational power. It was to STOP our growth as a species, not keep it from destroying the planet, but their system of unearned privilege.
What Exactly Did the Reformation Reform?
Article by Frank van Dun
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century reformed nothing but it changed everything. It was a crucially important factor in the demise of Medieval Latin Christendom and its rapid transformation in what we now know as Europe or, more generally, the West. Philosophically and religiously it redefined and revolutionized Western civilization, for, what characterizes a civilization is not so much what people do (which is pretty much the same always and everywhere) as what they conscientiously believe they ought to do: its fundamental scheme of justification and rectification — in a word, its conscience.
Continue reading here.
The Science of Evil
Michael Rectenwald's Review of "Political Ponerology"
“Political Ponerology” is the title of a book on the science of evil, written by Polish author Andrew M. Łobaczewski and first published in 1984 (!). US academic Michael Rectenwald has read it and written a review on mises.org. He starts by saying:
This strange and provocative book argues that totalitarianism is the result of the extension of psychopathology from a group of psychopaths to the entire body politic, including its political and economic systems.
He goes on to say:
Łobaczewski made the bold claim that he’d uncovered “the general laws of the origin of evil.” If true, the book was on par with Newton’s Principia in the physical sciences, while being of greater practical importance. And he approached this domain from the disciplinary perspective of psychology. Such an “individualist” methodology had been dismissed as mere “psychologism” in my own and many other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Łobaczewski’s insistence to focus on individual psychological disorders to understand the unfolding of “macrosocial evil” seemed mistaken to me initially, but this approach accords well with Joseph Schumpeter’s methodological individualism, which became a hallmark of the Austrian school. My assumption had always been that one needed to study political ideology and economics and that political ideology and economic theory explained nearly everything one needed to know about how and why totalitarian evil comes about.
Continue readingThe True Causes of the Ukraine-Russia Conflict
A very good succinct presentation
Included are videos with Ukraine- and Russia-experts John J. Mearsheimer, who is a Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Jim Rickards, who is, according to the author of the article, “one of the most astute experts on geopolitics today. He is a lawyer, best-selling author and investor. He is an advisor on capital markets to the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.”
The world in one picture
With fearmongering to slavery
The Ukraine War: Arguments for Non-Intervention
While humanitarian aid is called for, intervening to support one side against another would be wrong
Alan Bickley has written about the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine from a UK perspective. Here are some quotes:
A nation is a partnership across generations. Where the use or possible use of armed force is concerned, those now alive in a nation, and particularly those governing the nation, have no business acting as they feel personally right. They are not the whole nation. They are not the agents of the nation. They are its trustees. Their duty is to act in a manner that does not endanger the nation now, or harm the interests of the following generations. We can regret that our ancestors did not consult our interests when they acted as they did in 1914 and 1939. This does not lessen our obligation to avoid acts or courses of action that will bring similar harm to our descendants. Risking the hostility of a great power because it is doing things we dislike inside its own sphere of influence is no part of any legitimate agenda for those who sit above us as our trustees.
On the matter, though, of democracy. The Ukraine strikes me as just another post-Soviet mafia state. In February this year, its President banned three opposition television stations. Last May, he had one of the opposition leaders put under house arrest. In 2016, The Huffington Post described the country as “a known hub for human trafficking,” and reported how its orphanages were doubling as brothels. I could supply a mass of further detail. I think this will do, however, to raise doubts of its propriety in the present case, even if we accept the generality of the claim that we have some duty to defend those countries that are democracies against countries that are not.
Ukraine and the Global American Empire
International "System" versus National "Politics"
Blogger eugyppius has posted a very insightful analysis of the unfolding drama and tragedy in Ukraine.
He quotes Rolf Peter Sieferle from his book “Finis Germania”.
Rolf Peter Sieferle, one of my favourite thinkers, wrote about the fundamental conflict, between the globalists on one hand, and the unaligned people like me and unaligned countries like Russia, in more abstract terms. For him, the clash is between “politics” and “system”:
Politics belongs to an older stratum of existence, ordered in terms of the state and of history, crystallised in statesmen, leaders and ideologues. It has programmes, values and goals. What is required are virtues and commitments directed towards a super-ordinate whole. The last resort of politics is war – the willingness of the individual to sacrifice himself for a higher cause, for his community.
System characterises newly emerging orders of higher complexity, which successively displace politics. Systems organise themselves without focus, without values, goals or programmes. Their only maxim is freedom and emancipation for individuals. Virtue and sacrifice are anachronisms. Wars are nothing but catastrophic conflicts that must be prevented through skilful management. Order is created by objective, autonomous constraints, not by a normative orientation. The structures of systems are as inescapable for individuals as a magnetic field is for iron filings. They do not “know” anything about it, but they conform to their predefined paths. The most important processes are not controlled and can hardly be grasped theoretically.
System has largely prevailed in advanced “western” countries. Yet the rest of the world in many ways still thinks politically. This strikes the West as anachronistic fundamentalism. …