6 posts from 2009

I'm one of the many who has immensely profited from reading the English works of Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In honor of his upcoming 60th birthday, Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Mr. Stephan Kinsella, with the help of the Mises Institute, put together a 424 page festschrift. As such it gathers essays from a variety of scholars. I recently ordered it, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

It is perfectly correct to say that reading a book of Dr. Hoppe's is a life changing experience. They are filled with good erudition and, with their generally razor sharp analysis, present to you a powerful understanding of the nature of society, economically, politically, socially, and culturally. They will even likely change the way you look at society completely.

My personal congratulations to Dr. Hoppe.

The Tyranny of Liberalism by James Kalb is a provocative and profound book on the paradoxical nature of liberalism. As a political philosophy, it claims to be based on such things as neutrality, tolerance, and individual freedom. The upshot of a society adopting this philosophy, however, is a sort of "soft tyranny."

Although a man might disagree with Mr. Kalb on, for example, the absolutely necessary continuity between all of classical liberal thought and modern day left-liberalism, his analysis is definitely worth study. More than that, I would call it essential reading if you want to understand the current regime. Mr. Kalb also defends the importance of society sticking with traditionalist values very well.

What I want to do here is to highlight some of the general themes of the book, and offer some reflections. Besides just reading the book, I encourage you all to visit the author's excellent website. It contains many useful resources.

Subjectivistic and Atomistic Liberalism

According to our articulate author, classical liberalism made freedom the highest principle of life. But this, he says, "makes no sense" as an "ultimate principle of social life." (p 102) A man who has the freedom to engage in actions is a man who aims at doing something with that freedom. His personal actions are therefore subordinated to something. A man does not live a life purely for freedom. This, argues Kalb, is what classical liberalism largely ignored. Being such a narrow philosophy, it avoided thinking about the nature of man and existence. Liberalism instead slowly exalted individual choice and preference as the supreme standard of man's existence. Choice and preference thus became purely subjective, detached from the authorities of traditional wisdom and knowledge. Objective judgments were claimed to be imaginary and irrational. Ideals, distinctions, and the transcendent were slowly lost.

It was these standards that influenced and were, partly, interwoven with the development of the (erroneous) doctrines of social contract theory. Consequently, under liberalism, a government "had to base itself on the will of the governed. In the name of God and natural order, the will of man became the source of all authority." (p 16)

As choice and preference became purely subjective, all choices and preferences then started to be viewed as equal, and hence interchangeable, vis-à-vis each other. Freedom started to be looked at as something opposed to civil society. The liberalism, one might say, of John Stuart Mill ideologically took over liberalism's thinking. Religion, especially, was seen as naturally "aggressive" to the individual---since it has a non-subjectivist outlook and classifies certain lifestyles and choices as superior and others as inferior---and thus needed to be extirpated away from public life as much as possible. Maximizing subjective individual choice, as the essence of liberalism, demanded all institutional and associational arrangements be made subordinated to this liberal goal. It became an end to itself. This is why, Kalb writes, "we are now called upon not only to tolerate but to celebrate diversity of lifestyle and culture." (p 38)

It is for the reason that the actions of individuals and groups of individuals in civil society bring about affects on other individuals that the liberal concept of "equal freedom" views such actions as potentially against "freedom" because they influence (viz., delimit, indirectly at least) the actions of these other individuals. This ideology is what sees "anything anyone does that affects others [as] presumptively an unwarranted imposition and so an act of aggression." (p 102) It is, accordingly, traditional values that are seen as the primary evil. (Note, too, that interactions in civil society are generally communal/institutional. In a manner of speaking, "pure" autonomy of the individual is absent in this regards.)

This particular, and unhappily popular, view of "individualism" is one of the sub-themes in Dr. Theodore Dalrymple's In Praise of Prejudice. With the Central State monopolistically regulating practically all of life, and hence with it acting as the monopoly of authority, men start to think that if "There is no law against it," it must be an OK activity to engage in (which, from my perspective, is a reason not to have "law socialism"). This is the result of a liberal environment where, Dalrymple writes, "there is no other source of collective authority." Such a non-monopolistic environment is contrary to liberalism, and this is why the Central State has developed into a Managerial-Technocratic one with the task of modifying social-cultural behavior. It is therefore that Dalrymple (correctly) reasons that "radical individualism is thus not only compatible with the radical centralization of authority, but is a product of it." Kalb concurs: "In the name of autonomy, [liberalism] makes the state control everything." (p 103) In consequence, freedom becomes to mean the freedom to engage in liberal practices. Everything else must be shunned from public. A quick glance at what is displayed on TV and what is allowed in political debate will verify this. (For another example: public property must rid all references to Christianity.) So, the instability of liberalism's view that man is the measure of all things, and its subjectivism, atomism, nihilism, and so-called neutralism, turns it around 180 degrees to tyranny. And this tyranny snowballs, as its open-ended demands are implemented to greater depths.

The Inescapability and Necessity of Tradition

In the same way that the redistributionist State financially survives parasitically on the productive (market) end of the economy, the current regime which promotes cultural leftism survives parasitically on the healthy (traditional) end of civil society. Indeed, "The [parasitical] consequences," of the liberal State, writes Kalb, "include suicidally low birthrates, children growing up without parental care, immigration and social policies that presume that culture does not matter," etc. (p 149) The end game of this affairs is destruction, and that destruction will take the liberal State with it.

Genuine tradition, Kalb explains in the book, is a "step-by-step process" which "starts with basic functional patterns that establish themselves because they work." (p 197) Men imitate other men's successful patterns. We as individuals learn via example. And we depend on tradition as acting and living beings because our ability to grasp the full complexity of the world is impossible. It additionally serves as a "mutually supporting system" (p 198) by not only giving all of us a guide to how to live, but by creating a framework or social fabric that allows interactions. Furthermore, this brings about civilizational development (which is social by nature) by its effect of fortifying and strengthening interactions. (Just as a market economy wonderfully promotes diversity it promotes forms of traditional uniformity as well.) In sum: "We need tradition because we are social." (p 257) It is self-contradictory to say we don't.

No individual man, to repeat, could really function without some tradition backing the public ethos. To quote de Tocqueville: "If everyone undertook to form all his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated path struck out by himself alone, it would follow that no considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief." As has been said, "the species" is wiser than the dumb and isolated individual. In addition, man depends on tradition and societal prejudices because rationalism has limits (as, in my judgment, does tradition, by the way). A man's daily life cannot be individually worked out in a Euclidean-like way, and certainly no scientist could possibly engineer society in a rational way.

The complexity of tradition cannot be replaced or replicated by the managerial State. Prejudices, habits, and good commonsense must develop naturally, and be "tested," through the decentralized inner workings of civil society. "Tradition" that is state-made is therefore entirely artificial: "In fact, advanced liberal society is reproducing the errors of socialism---the attempt to administer and radically alter things that are too complex to be known, grasped, and controlled---but on a far grander scale." (p 12)

(In N. Stephan Kinsella's interesting article "Legislation and The Discovery of Law in a Free Society," Mr. Kinsella argues somewhat similarly that legislation, i.e., state-made law, cannot be centrally planned in a rational way because of the Hayekian "information problem." In this sense, could we not say that good-tradition is anti-legislation in character [versus anti-law]?)

Civilization's existence and stability depends upon its traditional framework. The scientist works on the shoulders of giants and he tries to increase our knowledge of the natural world to greater heights on those shoulders. (On this point, we can further say that progressive development relies on elites, who rise above the common man. And so, a healthy ethos---which authoritatively promotes traditional values---is necessarily hierarchical because men are unequal in relationship to each other.) The to-be poet learns about poetry by studying its tradition. The artist, too, does the same. A "pure" creativity is hence a myth. All genuine innovation, therefore, works through tradition. In contrast, much of the uninspiring (and often perverse) art of modernity, says Kalb, is ever more based on "a cult of creativity resulting from loss of confidence in goods that transcend." (p 303)

"Human rationality," Kalb writes, "involves making sense of our thoughts and actions by relating them to an overall understanding of reality." (p 193) It is here that man looks for "ultimate principles." These principles, which are independent of man's will, are transcendent. This transcendence fills man with reason to live and gives him a sense of identity. It gives man something higher to reach for. Without it, man is lost. But this also depends on faith, Kalb argues.

As a matter of fact, an interesting point that Kalb touches on that many others miss is how this relates to the sciences. Western Civilization, after all, didn't develop in a cultural or religious void. The scientific method, strictly speaking, cannot be tested using the scientific method. In a way, it takes its methods as true a priori (as it does with, e.g., mathematics and temporal causality). (All genuine science, in my opinion, has some sort of rationalistic basis to it. Even theology does.) One of the things that sets this civilization apart from others was Christianity (especially Catholicism), which had faith in a world of intelligibility, order, and universal principles (laws). Thus the modern idea that science and religion do not mix really is an odd statement. No doubt, it would have been odd to someone like Sir Isaac Newton.

But, then, a man might ask: Is that which is based on tradition always "right"? Does Mr. Kalb really provide a guide to a moral society?

Interestingly enough, in reviewing Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind, Richard Weaver saw exactly this as a problem with Kirk's work. The title of his review reads: "Which Ancestors?" And, in it, he asks: Which Traditions? For Weaver, the answer was to rationally examine the various traditions, which can conflict, and "to isolate intellectually their elements of value and of truth." "Yet this is a process disrespectful of tradition," he wrote, "in the sense that it transcends tradition and looks for some higher goals." Hence, for Weaver (and for me too in this case) we have to look for principles that transcend.

Now our thoughtful author does not think that tradition is to be "worshiped" as infallible. From his perspective, though, a bad tradition is generally discovered as going against other traditions.

The Managerial State and Its Tyranny

What defines [this liberal-neoconservative] regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs, sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. (pp 5-6)

Burke's "little platoons" of civil society, from the liberal perspective, are often viewed as inhibitions to the liberation of the "free" individual and therefore seen as something needed to be dismantled. Given that it's against equality, tradition must be done away with. Men possessing any genuine cultural attachments, too, must be destroyed, since they result in various forms of discrimination and exclusiveness.

This increase of "experts" managing more of society is followed by men becoming less able to manage themselves. It reduces the need for civil society ties. The abnormal lifestyle and habit is promoted at the expense of the normal, as the natural ties of civil society erode.

Take the family as a paradigm (an anarchistic institution, says G.K. Chesterton). Traditional ideals are what have maintained its existence. Planning and acting are involved in supporting the family. That's why it depends on a common public ethos of ideas for support. Its ideal further brings with it, Kalb explains in the book, "certain functions and obligations." (p 210) Order, continuity, and the continuation of human society are the result. As fathers (patriarchs), we know our natural roles. As mothers, ditto. As children, ditto. This is why identity (and stereotyping)* is important. The healthy development of the individual depends on the healthy family.

*(To take this to the extreme, imagine the ridding of stereotyping about the sexes. Wouldn't this demand that no one care about how we dress and present ourselves as a member of a distinct sex? Forgive me for being so bold, but logically consistent liberalism would turn the world into a hellhole.)

Thus the whole idea---based on the concept that everything is equal and interchangeable and that things operate in an atomistic-subjectivistic vacuum---of "gay marriage" makes no sense whatsoever. It, moreover, destroys the identity of family in the common public ethos. The result can only be the degenerating state of families, where functions and obligations slowly lose all value. "Family" becomes a disposable, no big deal thing. Today it is well-known what the current state of families is. And, paralleling this, traditional sexual restraint has been abandoned for animalistic "free love." Instant gratification, with (socialized) zero costs, is the raison d'être of modernity.

The welfare state, in particular, is used as a means of social engineering. As it "frees" us from a traditional setting, a vacuum is created and the government fills the void. Men become less dependent on each other, and therefore, Kalb (so rightfully) reasons, less civil and less social. "The welfare state,

makes us useless to each other. It separates conduct from consequences and undermines personal responsibility. It weakens connections between the sexes and generations by insisting that dependence on particular persons is wrong. It deprives personal loyalty and integrity of their place and function by making us rely on the system as a whole rather than on ourselves and each other. (p 120)

And the "liberation of women and of sex has deprived women of masculine support, feminized poverty, and turned girls into sexual commodities." (p 123) Other examples of this engineering are to be found in government's involvement in sex education to its subsidization of childcare. With these changes, government---and its managerial business allies---has ever more become a thought police as well.

"Reeducation programs, sensitivity training, speech codes, and other forms of thought control become a permanent necessity," (p 67) with forced liberal diversity. (But, a man might ask, if liberalism's goal is "diversity," why does it break down and homogenize? It seems, on the contrary, that liberalism is actually against true diversity.) My review here, seeing that language itself has undergone political correction, would be judged (by nonjudgmental judgmentalism?) as filled with incorrect and sexist words.

Given all of this, it is not untrue to say that the liberal State leads to speech controls. In Europe this has already been done. Kalb's analysis shows that it can logically lead to it. For instance, free speech can say things that go against liberal principles of inclusiveness. Since this is viewed as "oppressive," it must be regulated away. "Even liberals who support free speech agree with their more advanced brethren that politically incorrect speech is morally illegitimate." (p 118)

Some Concluding Thoughts

Contained in his wonderful book Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, Murray Rothbard wrote an essay on why someone should be a libertarian. For him, the answer was a "passion for justice." Along these lines, and with a recognition of human nature, transcendence, etc., I have to disagree with Mr. Kalb in a major way. I think we can construct a libertarianism that escapes his dialectics. One can be a "fusionist." And, while I'm sure he would disagree with me, I don't see a breaking away from all government power as categorically against a respect or recognition for traditional values.* Why can't a private (polycentric) form of law develop among various family households and other intermediate institutions? To me at least, the State is against good ethics and morality. It crushes virtue, and has every reason and incentive to do so as a monopolist of law-making. A private order, on the other hand, can more easily be kept in-check to the demands of culturally conservative values.

Be this as it may, Mr. Kalb has written a book I recommend to all. He defends a traditional conservatism one can respect.

He believes a path to a moral society can be developed. It takes all of us as members of families and communities to do our best to lay the groundwork. "The next generation," our author writes,

must be brought up to respect tradition and the transcendent more than the commercial, hedonistic, and egalitarian standards now dominant. This will not be possible unless home, school, local community, and alternative media provide a refuge of sanity from which a declining public order can be judged and found wanting. A change in orientation that begins individually and is initially perhaps backed mostly by words and gestures must grow into something far more social and comprehensive. (pp 268-9)

*[Robert Nisbet, although not an anarchist, was an admirer of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin. Though, I suppose this would be very confusing to some so-termed "left-libertarians."]

At Taki's Magazine there has been some recent debate and conversation over the issue of race, "race realism," nationalism, and white nationalism. Like Dr. Paul Gottfried, I am not afraid to talk about these politically incorrect and hence untouchable issues intelligently with intelligent people. And, unlike Mr. Justin Raimondo, I have no direct reason to disassociate with someone like Mr. Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance. If truth be told, once a week I generally scan the website's, typically thought provoking, links. Similarly, I do the same for the website VDare.com, which contains many themes that American Renaissance does.

My goal here is not to go through each and every point that has been made at TakiMag. Instead, among other things, I want to---extensively---show how cultural conservatism, properly speaking, can coexist with what is sometimes called "race realism" (as opposed to "pure white nationalism"), and why it makes sense to be a "realist" when it comes to race. I additionally want to show, more briefly, how cultural conservatism combined with race realism can peacefully live together with anti-state libertarianism, contrary to some of the discordant remarks made by Gottfried.

Some Relevant Articles: "Whiteout" by Jared Taylor; "The Limits of Race" by Paul Gottfried; "Nationalists Without a Nation" by Justin Raimondo; "What Do White Nationalists Want?" by Taylor; "Race, Christianity, and Anarcho-Capitalism" by Gottfried.

It is correct to say that I probably do not view race and racial-genetic inheritance as important, in degree, as Taylor does. The race of a man, or a given group of men, is most certainly not the whole of him, or them. Race is not even close to being "everything." At the same time, however, I would not go as far as Raimondo, who apparently thinks the individual is more or less unshaped, genetically speaking, by his racial makeup. He appears to view it as basically insignificant and null. To me, personally, this is a silly notion when you logically examine it. Albeit I am not an expert on the subject, nor do I desire to be one, the work of Drs. J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Michael Levin, Charles Murray, and others cannot just be dismissed as examples of "pseudo-science." That their work shows that you can make categorical and generalized statements about race is clear enough. One cannot, for example, deny the differences in average IQ rates or average crime rates. Neither, for example, can the documented statistics of serum testosterone levels being different among the races be denied. Or, for one more example, it cannot be denied that certain races are more or less susceptible to certain diseases. Why the differences appear is another question, of course. Why some men think that the differences are un-natural or a priori evil as against sameness, too, are separate questions.

Most men do not deny that one's family heredity is significant in shaping the individual. This shaping not only includes personal appearance but such things as intelligence as well. And this shaping is inborn, apart and separate from environmental factors. Understanding this gives explanation to why everyone cannot be a theoretical physicist or a mathematician. What is more, it explains that everyone cannot be a professional football player or basketball player. Now enter the topic of race into this paragraph's discussion. Race can be viewed, in some real sense, as a super-extended family. For this reason it seems improbable to say that race heredity does not, to some extent, have an influence on the individual.

At the time of the publication of The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Murray N. Rothbard (who, from what I am told, was "into" race realism), in an editorial called "Race! That Murray Book," wrote that "everyone, and I mean everyone [knows] in their hearts and in private" that there are "self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability" [emphasis untouched]. This book, he said, allowed (at least for a time) the subject to become open and "mainstream," without too much childish and irrational name-calling or false non sequitur and ad hominem accusations.

There is no denying that environmental factors are significant vis-à-vis the individual, but the same appears to hold true for inborn factors of heredity, as the works of Rushton, Lynn, et al. show. To repeat, it seems foolish to say that changes in the environment can make any newborn individual develop into a Sir Isaac Newton or a Michael Jordan. The individual, with his free-will or volition, can no doubt enormously affect his possible intelligence, his array of knowledge, his athletic abilities, and many other things. To boot, the young individual is immensely influenced by his family upbringing. But there is also an inborn range that limits his endeavors. I can work day and night, but I will not be a Newton or Jordan.

It actually makes sense to be able to make racial-collective judgments. The classic example is a man who has two ways to walk to his destination. On one side the man sees a group of white men and on the other side he sees a group of black men. Which side should he walk on for safety concerns (with all other things being equal)? The answer is obvious. The man's knowledge is finite and hence incomplete. His choices in walking to his destination are finite. Therefore, he must economize in these kinds of situations. Having collectivistic judgments, even of a racial nature, is for that reason rational. The probability of greater safety on the side which has the white men might turn out to be incorrect, of course. After all, the man does not know the individuals in question. But it is for that reason that it is rational to use collective reasoning, which on average holds true. The man who is 100% "color-blind" will more likely get into trouble than the man who is not.

In the very same way, it makes rational sense to make collective judgments on sex. The above example can be changed so as to have women on one of the two sides. Or, we can think about the hiring of a private bodyguard. Would you hire from a company that employed all women or one that employed all men? I hope it is needless to say, sexual-collective judgments make sense for an infinite range of examples.

In After Liberalism, the brilliant scholar Paul Gottfried writes that left-liberals "are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious,"

that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals.

Now Raimondo is right when he writes that each individual has a soul and is unique. I definitely agree with him on this. (Nonetheless, this does not inescapably mean that the individual is racially empty.) Respect for individual life is paramount. Those that say otherwise are on a slippery slope to despotism and tyranny. Taylor's unfortunate statement on the importance of not placing "libertarianism before the preservation of race or heritage" can thus be viewed in this light. That is to say, the word "libertarianism" can be substituted with the words ethics or morality. He argues, loosely speaking, that to save libertarianism one must abandon it. That for man to obtain a more ethical society he must, or might need to, leave behind ethics and become un-ethical. This argumentative reasoning is contradictive from the libertarian point of view. And, to note here too, if Taylor's philosophy truly is "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," then he is surely mistaken.

In Raimondo's article, he refers to Mr. Patrick Buchanan. Unless I am in serious, serious error, Buchanan would certainly not say that the individual is but an atom detached from his race or racial mixture. Moreover, again, collectivism is not per se bad or per se wrong. The world would exist in chaos if man could not make categorical, group, or collectivistic statements about things, man as a being included. The very fact that insurance can exist proves, economically, that one can make collectivistic statements. And, because it can be potentially used in insuring groups of individuals and their risks, it shows that we can make statements of a collective nature about man. As Dr. Hans Hoppe has spoken about, insurance, in itself, cannot say anything about individual risks (because otherwise these individual risks would not be insurable), but it can say something systematic (because otherwise the complete random uncertainty would have relatively no correlation and would not be insurable) about the risks of the group (and that's why these risks are insurable).

Please allow me to go on a slight tangent. Language, for example, we can, in many ways, call a nationalistic-collectivistic concept. A "concept," furthermore, that is non-relativistic so as to have an objective identity to be usable. It is not something that is "given" in the nature of the physical world but a creation in the minds of men. Thus it is social and cultural forces that are the forces at work that shape, both in a progressive and retrogressive sense, language. Clearly enough, language is hence a highly "conservative" thing. Naturally, then, tradition and continuity are intimately related to a society's language. In addition, it is based on the usages of generalizations and even stereotypes. (Richard Weaver, who I will come to later in this essay, said that there are those that dislike this unbreakable truth about language because "it is felt that 'typing' anything that is real distorts the thing by presenting it in something less than its full individuality and concreteness." But these men do not understand: "For it is true that the word conveys something less than the fullness of the thing signified, it is also true that it conveys something more. A word in this role is a generalization. The value of a generalization is that while it leaves out the specific features that are of the individual or of the moment, it expresses features that are general to a class and may be lacking or imperfect in the single instance ...  In order to make statements that will have applicability over a period of time or in the occurrence of many instances, we have to avail ourselves of these classifiers." [Source: In Defense of Tradition.]) Consequently, man cannot try to individualize and atomize language without destroying it. And, in turn, a large group of individual men cannot just "free" themselves from language by breaking their ties and roots with it. That would be suicidal for any healthy and productive society. That form of "individualism," or expression of individualism, is not something to be looked upon happily, to say the least.

This, and several other things, has an affect on the individual. There is no question about this. A man is not a blank slate. He grows up in some kind of social order. This social framework, to some undisputable degree, brings an order and structure to society (because otherwise no civilization would exist to speak of!). No individual reinvents the wheel. Defending a civilization, and wanting to enhance it, requires defending concepts that we can call "collectivistic" or "anti-individualistic." Many of these concepts are also generally built into what we can call "tradition." Defending a civilization means defending values and morals that are, in some fashion, "objective," "non-relativistic," and "non-nihilistic" (because, e.g., certain human actions lead to good results and some to bad!). Additionally, I would also add, this specific concept of collectivity does not necessarily deny methodological individualism (or libertarianism). This is because I am not saying that language, for instance, forms apart from the individuals that compose a society.

Now this tangential discussion is not as far off from the issue of race as you might prima facie think. What I briefly discussed was the importance of "cultural conservatism." At bottom, it is an understanding that there is a structure and order of society that is intelligible to man. It is an understanding that there are laws that govern nature, and that man has a nature himself. It is a seeing that there are "permanent things" or permanent truths about human existence. Conservatism is the recognition of the truth that society is not rootless. History, tradition, prejudice, authority, religion, and spirituality are all cornerstones to conservatism. Moreover, it is based on an understanding that, given that there is a structure and order of society and so forth, certain values that preserve and enhance a society must be defended. These specific things or values, that is, must be given "authority" in the associations, institutions, habits, beliefs, ideas, attitudes, etc. of men. They unite individuals into a vivacious society, with an enduring and transcendent moral order. (In contrast to this, it is, e.g., principles of relativism that destroy genuine culture. Principles, of which, that lead to the destruction of order and morality. They lead to indiscriminate thought and action, and thus the breakdown of society.)

If a discernible race can be viewed, in some sense, as a super-extended family which passes down certain genes, and if we grant that these genes actually have some meaningful impact on men (how couldn't they?), it then seems that it is not possible to defend a given civilization if one is to detach the specific people that make it up and have made it up in history.

Arguably, then, what has been called "race realism" is, or can be, perfectly consistent with cultural conservatism. An essential part of conservative values, incidentally, is the value of community. Since people live together in community, it is only to be expected that a community's characteristics would somewhat be defined by its ethnicity and race.

Is it so far-fetched to say that only the people of Western Civilization could have built Western Civilization (and likewise for other Civilizations)? And, if this is true, is it so far-fetched to say that the individuals of this grouping should think about defending this discernable collectivity of individuals (in terms of promoting good culture, trying to increase the low birthrate numbers, etc.)?

True, in today's world of political correctness it might be taboo to discuss differences between peoples, but intelligent men should not shun earnest discussion and research. As far as I can tell, this specific research is fully coherent (and is not in contradiction to methodological individualism or place man, necessarily, in a pure "materialistic" light, as Raimondo suggests). This research in point of fact helps to smash the ideas of egalitarianism, and other analogous left-liberal myths. The myopic idea to bring about a "utopia" of equality will, as this type of research shows, only result in the substitution of one form of hierarchy and distinctions with another. Because if it can be shown that intelligence is not entirely based on environmentalism, it can be said that leftist social policies will fail. This research can furthermore show that the culture of one peoples cannot just be transferred to another peoples. It is thus a blow to the dreams of Wilsonian imperialism.

According to the great Richard M. Weaver, a leading intellectual figure of traditional conservatism, the left-liberal view of man is of a "positivistic" nature. It is this that often leads to social engineering proposals. Since, if liberalism is correct about man, it does make some sense to say that the managerial state must relentlessly engineer civil society. As Weaver wrote in National Review:

The [left-liberal] attitude toward race stems from [liberalism]'s positivistic representation of man, which has always had one of its cardinal tenets the dogma that there are no real differences between people except economic differences. Remove the economic differences and all the others----racial, cultural, social, and moral----disappear. Thus the collectivizing of the economy can be depended on to obliterate the various differences... [Source: In Defense of Tradition.]

Studying racial differences should be just as much an acceptable thing as studying sex differences. Recently I read Dr. Steven Rhoads's excellent Taking Sex Differences Seriously. It presents an immense amount of scientific information that confirms a more "traditionalist" view of the sexes. (Though, how anyone could think that their differences are based on "social construction" is beyond me. The differences between men and women are mostly common sense.) So the sciences are on the side of the cultural conservative, and they should be treated accordingly.

Now, allow me to comment a bit on the issue of nationalism.

We have to remember that the world is no racial or ethnic monolith. Although "nationality" and "nation" does indeed exist in some organic and unifying sense, they are no monolith (and thank goodness). A Europe that became a stateless continent would still have "nations" in some fashion. France would still be France, in general, and they would still be speaking French, and equally for the other nations.

Sketchily and loosely speaking, we can define a nation this way: it is made up of a people sharing a geographical location that often is discernible by its features in some way; as a whole it is made up of a common people of a common race (the location of individuals of various ethnicities and races are not "randomly" located around the world, nor could they be); it has a sharing of temporal continuity of a people being at a given location with many customs and traditions; it contains a common language in widespread use; there exists a general self-awareness and patriotism among the people of being a part of a sort of distinct "nation" (even if there are no borders in the conventional sense of that term, as seen in certain secessionist-separatist movements).

To go over once more, this is not to say it is any monolith. Given the non-egalitarian nature of the world, different communities will be different from each other. However, I should point out, there is a difference between "multiethnic" societies and "multicultural" societies in our statist world, as Gottfried has defined these terms. The first term does not of necessity imply the second term:

Nothing could be more misleading to equate a multicultural society with a multiethnic one. . . At issue [in the Western world today] is not the coexistence of more or less tolerated ethnic minorities grouped together under an administrative unit or imperial jurisdiction but the celebration of state-sponsored "diversity." In the new multicultural as opposed to conventional multiethnic situation, the state glorifies differences from the way of life associated with the once majority population. It hands out rewards to those who personify the desired differences, while taking away cultural recognition and even political rights from those who do not. [Source: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.]

Thus, for example, desiring to use the multicultural regime for a force of "good" is a self-destructive desire. Multiculturalism specifically is used as a political and ideological instrument for managerial control, both directly and indirectly, against the culturally conservative principles of which I am writing about here.

It goes without saying that I want nothing to do with "white supremacists." As far as the term "white nationalist," it confuses me because it seems to imply the desire to make America "white only" (making it in reality indistinguishable from the former term). Obviously, I am not for this either. Yes, I want all of the best for whites but the same is true for all other races. (How can a man be a Christian conservative and say otherwise?)

If, as a few surely claim, there needs to be racial homogeneity "nationally"----as embodied in a centrally powerful State?!,----then the question logically is: why not worldwide? The thing that one must understand is that no racial conflict [see this & this], in any consequential sense of the term conflict, exists in the division of labor or in free trade. Different communities---with no forced integration---can peacefully coexist with each other. Moreover, freely trading with "everyone," in a manner of speaking, and discriminatorily choosing who you live next door to do not contradict each other. That is, "inviting the whole world" to come to your front door does not follow from you trading with the whole world. Neither does it follow that from a free market condition that genetic pauperization, i.e., dysgenic deterioration in the population, will occur. Such negative interactions must be differentiated with positive economic trade. Conversely, it does follow, by subsidizing births of the lower end of intelligence at the expense of the higher, from welfare state conditions.

To Taylor's credit, though, and as far as I know, he has only advocated as public policy free association (i.e., the elimination of all compulsory civil rights) and immigration restrictions (which some anarcho-libertarians have argued for).

Today's massive and unrelenting immigration that is occurring I do not consider a good or desirable thing. The work of gentlemen like Lynn only boosts my reasons for this. Not to mention, most Americans are not so wanting of this amount of immigration either. This makes me believe much of it is artificially stimulated via statism. (That's why the solution to this problem is not the central state. Ideally, it should be to uphold private property rights to the max.) With private property rights fully restored, and all property privatized, all "immigrants" would have to be granted permission to enter. In distinct dissimilarity with today, men would have full control and freedom over who could and could not immigrate or travel into and onto their roads, private neighborhoods and towns. With that understanding, it seems fairly apparent that a total free-for-all of immigration would not be present in anarcho-capitalism. That can only be the outcome of the central government running public property and controlling private property owners' (and their voluntary associations') right to discriminate.

As far as Gottfried's critical remarks on anarcho-capitalism, Mr. Keith Preston has written an interesting essay on his blog, "Why You Conservatives Should Give Us Anarchists a Chance: A Reply to Paul Gottfried." I suggest you all read it.

It is funny how Gottfried, in his first main essay on this subject, says that most "white nationalists I have met are libertarians," but then suggests that Raimondo's libertarian views are naturally atomistic and against thinking about any kind of collectivity, racial or otherwise. Well, as my analysis reasons above (despite how weakly perhaps), I reject this as erroneous: (non-statist) cultural conservatism combined with race realism has no necessary incompatibility with libertarianism. Neither is libertarianism per se against authority. As important, libertarians are the ultimate manumitters vis-à-vis the managerial and multicultural regime.

A private property society would be more compliant with a bourgeois society, one can argue. Private roads and spaces, for instance, would not be detached from the values of the local community. They could justly enforce rules against prostitution or whatnot. Just because a private law society would do its best to outlaw all violence against the non-violent does not mean that various forms of social ostracism would not exist against immoral activity. It also does not mean that (voluntary) positivistic law would not exist (which would, in terms of specific forms of this kind of law having very wide-spread support, put high pressure on those who do not comply to comply). You could additionally see small proprietary communities develop, which could range from religious monasteries, to (yes) collectivist, left-liberal communes, to distributionist-based communities, to racially homogeneous communities. And instead of a top-down and socialist monopolist of law and order, you could see the rise of a very diverse assortment of "intermediate institutions" handling these kinds of things.

Nothing, as a whole, in this appears to be absolutely anti-authority, or anti-Christianity. Neither does it suggest a free-for-all society where everything that is non-violent is encouraged and promoted.

One of the main things that has been lacking in today's world is an objective and non-subjectivist view of ethics and morality. Libertarianism provides an objective view of ethics. This makes it not antagonistic to having a sort of objective or traditionalist view of personal morality.

The question of "anarchist" feasibility is yet another question. Preston gives reference to many historical examples, and I will not repeat that here. With these examples, I do not view it as written in stone, as Gottfried does, that the feasibility and probability is zero (despite how pessimistic I can be). States collapse when the public stops supporting them. "All it takes" is a change in vox populi.

To finally conclude this lengthy essay, let me add that differences are what make the world an interesting place. But it is only natural that a man of a given culture and a given people generally prefers his own to others (just as he generally prefers friends of a like-nature). Notwithstanding this, he can respect, or at the very least peacefully tolerate, the variety of cultures and peoples in existence (and the non-monolithic nature of his own).

A man should want the very best possible for all men, of whatever society, culture, religion, race, or ethnicity. Society has no need for men that hate, or for men who are unable to discriminate between things, including between collectives and within collectives, to see the individual worth of an individual.

As a matter of fact, the "collective good" and the "good for the individual" are not set against each other. This provides elucidation to why individuals can peacefully coexist and cooperate with each other in a market setting. An individual, by himself, is weak and un-wealthy. Cooperation in the division of labor propitiously changes this. (Language, to use an example from above, is another perfect illustration of this.) The individual becomes better off---regardless if his working capabilities are little or great---by this peaceful participation and the collective whole of individuals become better off as well. Thus, correspondingly, various collectives, so to speak, become better off through peaceful economic cooperation with each other. Protectionism, on the other hand, can be called "anti-life" or "anti-existence" because it leads to conflict. The more complex and diversified a division of labor is under a free market, the more peace is required, and the more economically dependent we are on one another. It helps facilitate peace and friendship. The so-called "ideals" of protectionism, socialism, and the like, on the other hand, help tend to lead to war and hate. It starves and isolates men.

It is only the egalitarian mindset which wishes to ignore the obvious and is bent on unnatural oneness and sameness that is a logical ally to statism and oppression. It is a mindset that tries to impose on reality and the laws of nature. Equality is made superior to justice and liberty, and that is just tyranny.

(The Financial Boom was Bad [An Example of Not Allowing the Market to Work!])

The prophetic Mr. Peter Schiff, author of Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse (2007), talks at the Mises Institute's Austrian Scholars Conference.

I hope you have some gold under your mattress.

Oh, by the way, I wonder. Who has a better track record: Mr. Greenspan----or, maybe I should call him, Mr. Monopoly Man----or, say, the Austrian economists?

Hmm. What did Greenspan say in 2003 about housing and what did the Austrians say? Why, let's time travel back and read, how about, "Housing Bubble: Myth or Reality?" by Dr. Frank Shostak.

Or, even more generally, who has a better track record: The typical Keynesian economists you see on TV----who say they have the answer, even though they did not see this coming----or the Austrians?

***

Without Mr. Monopoly Man there would not have been any bubble in housing, as Dr. Thomas Woods says:

The housing bubble could not have arisen without the Federal Reserve. Had people started buying houses at unusually high rates, banks' loanable funds would have begun to deplete, interest rates would have shot up, and that would have been the end of it. That would have discouraged any additional speculation in real estate. But Alan Greenspan and the Fed could create money out of thin air, thus giving the banks more to lend and driving interest rates down, thereby perpetuating the destructive bubble in housing.

***

Despite the earnest intentions of those who call for a return to a "gold standard," perhaps they do not realize how severe this economic crisis is and is becoming (thanks to those in power who will not allow the market to rid itself of the various malinvestments that occurred in the artificial "boom"). Government with the gold standard abused it, more or less, from day one. Given its top-down and centralized nature, it was a system that was waiting to be abused. As a matter of fact, the prerequisite to have a gold standard is abuse, fraud, and anti-market interventionism! Because of this, nothing will suffice but the complete privatization of money production.

As Woods points out in his excellent book Meltdown, F. A. Hayek argued that this is exactly what needs to be done (read Hayek's "Toward a Free Market Monetary System"): "I am more convinced than ever that if we ever again are going to have a decent money, it will not come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because providing the public with good money which it can trust and use can not only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject. It is a business which competing enterprise can maintain only if it gives the public as good a money as anybody else. . ."

(At the end of my blog essay "Money and Civilization" I give a quick outline on how this can be done.)

And, do I really need to type this? (OK. I guess I do, given what President Bush on steroids Obama is doing.) Economic progress comes from capital accumulation; not spending. Read Dr. George Reisman's brilliant essay on that here.

***

A Note on Deflation and Inflation.

We all have to be careful with the terms inflation and deflation because they are defined differently by different people. But the best definitions are, as is usually the case, the classical definitions: Inflation is nothing but an increase in the money supply via fiduciary media (put bluntly: counterfeiting). Deflation is nothing but the decrease in the money supply. In this very specific sense, therefore, deflation is practically always a statist phenomenon. A recession or depression often sees some fiduciary media extirpated. (This is not a bad thing, for both ethical and economic reasons.) On the other hand, deflation qua the overall fall in prices (we'll call it: "definition 2") is more generally and often a free market phenomenon. (Though, definition 2 often follows definition 1 in a recession or depression.) For instance, imagine that we have a robust economy with a free market money that is by and large gold as its medium of exchange, with no fiduciary media, and thus a banking system based on 100% reserves. Naturally, then, man would see overall deflation in this very specific sense. Gold would of course increase, but extremely slowly as compared to the increase in the amount of goods being produced. Hence, purchasing power would go up, prices would go down, and saving and investment would be encouraged. This would be a magnificent thing. Deflation is not evil. In contrast, inflation qua the overall increase in prices is, ultimately and generally, a statist phenomenon. It would not be something we would see in a free society.

Some of his articles:

• "Fed Up"
• "Tooth Fairy Economics"
• "Washington and the Stimulus: A Parade of Blockheads"
  
• "Banana Republic, U.S.A."
• "Unnatural Disaster"
• "The Deck Chairs Are Fine Where They Are"
• "We Need Our Heads Examined, Says Harvard"
• "Government: The Cause of – and Solution to – All Our Problems" (MP3 Here)
  
• "Don't Know Much About Capitalism"
• "The Harding Way"
• "No, the Free Market Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis"
• "Beware of Obamanomics"
• "Question Authority (Unless I Say Not To)"
• "Response to the 'Market Failure' Drones"
  
• "Krugman Failure, Not Market Failure"
  
• "Should We Absolve the Fed?"
  

And visit his website.

***

Perhaps it was about ten months ago---although I am uncertain---that I turned my radio on to hear what Mr. Sean Hannity had to say. I could not take listening to his program for any longer than about five minutes. He was ranting on how the "fundamentals" of the economy are sound and then repudiated those who claimed that the economy was in a recession.

Of course today everyone will admit there is a recession. Statists like Mr. Hannity have been proven to be absolutely incorrect----whereas gentlemen like Dr. Ron Paul have been proven to be absolutely correct. (See, e.g., chapter six of The Revolution: A Manifesto.)

Unfortunately, I think one can say the exact same thing about the "d" word, depression. I.e., the establishment will be forced to admit that the "d" word is an accurate description of the situation. Things are going to be getting a lot worse, and we are just in the beginning of this.

Due to the State's monetary policies and due to the fascistic arrangement the banking industry and much of big business has with the State, many individuals and families have been living in a credit card illusion.

We live in a world of monetary socialism. It is with this arrangement, ever since the creation of the Federal Reserve System, that over 95 percent of the value of the dollar has been lost.

It's an arrangement that has encouraged debt, short-term thinking, and short-term planning. It's an arrangement that punishes thriftiness and other conservative work ethics. Thus I would call the Fed not only an anti-economic institution but an anti-social institution as well. (For a more extensive look into its anti-social nature, see "The Cultural and Spiritual Legacy of Fiat Inflation" in The Ethics of Money Production by Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Download PDF here.)

It's an arrangement that has also brought about various artificial bubbles, leading to unsustainable booms, which then lead to inevitable busts. This occurs when the Fed floods the banking system with credit, thereby lowering the interest rate.

But the only "natural"----versus artificial----way interest rates can lower is if man saves more. Briefly, this means that man has held off present consumption for the future; that he is saving and investing more in temporally lengthy projects. If the Fed, on the other hand, floods the market with credit (via the printing up of money from nothingness), this in turn artificially lowers the interest rate, despite the fact that man has not saved more. Temporal coordination of production in the economy is consequently distorted. Investments that receive the credit are made to seem profitable. In effect, such industries get subsidized as they are flooded with this new credit that was created from thin air. An artificial bubble develops (à la housing). But as this new money trickles through the market, the old consumption-saving proportions reassert themselves (which, to iterate, determine the "natural" interest rates) and those investments are then seen for what they really are; namely, hot air. They will no longer be profitable. Resources are not there to keep the "boom" going. People have not saved more. People, instead, wanted more present oriented things. And, furthermore, people were actually pushed into saving less (and hence consuming more) than they otherwise would be due to the lowering of the interest rate. But investors were being incompatibly pushed, by the artificial paper money stimulus, into future oriented things based on the illusion of freed up resources, with its large pool of savings, in the future. This is when a recession or depression occurs.

So, since today's artificial "boom" resulted in massive misallocations of resources into various temporally unsustainable lines of production (via credit expansion and hence an artificially depressed interest rate below what the market would have set it), it is only the bust that will get us on the correct course. More production projects were started up than could be completed. Thus technically speaking, the bust is not the problem; it was the "boom" generated by the Fed. Resources, capital, and labor must be able to move with the market---a market that is ridding itself of these government-generated bubbles.

It is accordingly imperative that the State not interfere with this adjustment process.

As Mr. Jim Rogers says, the unsound must fall and the sound must rise. And therefore, to repeat what has been said on this blog before, the government must allow the market's pricing system to rediscover what is truly sound and what is truly unsound, and allow men to act accordingly.

Politicians, no doubt, don't like to hear that.

Neither do they have a real incentive to listen. This is because a crisis is a great time for them to expand their power and wealth. Consequently, there is little reason to be optimistic concerning the future.

(But if they want to "do something," I do have some advice later in this blog entry.)

Moreover, these politicians propagate to the public false hopes that the State is savior. They act as if they can magically create something from nothing. This propaganda is truly sophomoric. The State has no wealth of its own which it does not coercively take from others in the productive economy. All it can do is redistribute wealth and override the market's free and voluntary interactions of men.

You can accordingly call the "stimulus" bill a wealth destruction bill.

If the politicians keep this up, they will be sending us into a deep and long depression.

***

We must keep in mind the big picture, always. Henry Hazlitt, one of the great Austrian school economists, was right. We must think about the seen and the unseen, the short-term and the long-term, individual groups and all groups. Only in this manner should we examine so-called government "solutions."

For example, the State can "create" jobs only by taking away jobs that would have been created in the market. You might see the government jobs and so forth, but you don't see that there has only been a diversion. Instead of those jobs employing resources and money to serve the direct needs of consumers, resources and money are being employed by these jobs through State dictate; independent of voluntarily paying consumers, independent of the market's profit-and-loss system, independent of the market's competitive milieu. Ordinary people are made that much poorer because they are forced to pay for these jobs, if they like it or not, and have that much less money to spend (or save) on what they want, employing who they want.

And what does it tell us that such "created" jobs are independent of voluntarily paying consumers? They must not be worth much to the needs of ordinary people. It must be wasteful. And, even if it is not, there is no way to tell, unless we subject such jobs to the market. Only then can we see if the costs are justified, i.e., if the costs of this labor are less than what this labor produces. In addition, only then can we determine if those jobs are serving the higher versus lower needs of people. The costs and expected profits can subsequently be compared and contrasted with other possible labor employments. This additional point is important, since we live in a world of changing conditions and uncertainty. Consumer demands are not static, after all. But State "created" jobs cannot engage in cost accounting and will be restrictive in movement as against a free market of labor. The maximization of wealth with a free market's labor mobility is non-existent and hence standards of living must be lower than they otherwise would be.

Such "created" jobs might even be completely destructive in every way, i.e., the costs might be greater than the output. (Even if they are not, there is no way to know if these jobs are serving the higher or lower needs of the public, as shown above.) Indeed, the State can "create" lots of jobs. It can have men build many bridges, if they lead to somewhere is beside the point. It can draft all young men into the military. [Hey, Mr. Obama, I thought we were getting out of Iraq?!] And so forth.

A free market, in contrast, allows rational calculation. It helps prevent labor (and resources in general) from being allocated to unwanted and uneconomic lines of production. This is because it is based on private property which allows for profit-and-loss calculations with a universal medium of exchange. What is more, activities in a free market are not only dependent on voluntary consumer demands, but are also in a milieu that is competitive. As a result, it helps divert labor away from their less wanted and less needed locations and into their more wanted and more needed locations. And, implied in this, the free market helps men cut down on waste and to economize to the conditions of what people demand and to the underlying reality of the finite supplies of goods and natural resources that are in existence.

However government has no such ability, by definition. Thus, government "created" jobs will be arbitrary in terms of real wants, needs, expenses, and resources. There will be general misallocation, and hence standards of living will be lower than they otherwise would be. Since such "created" jobs are not based on voluntary demand, their activities will be independent of the wants and needs of people. Thus, given such a non-market position, this labor's costs can be very high and its quality output can be very low. This will actually multiply due to the fact that such labor has no need to worry about competition. And, because the factors of production employed by such "created" jobs cannot be sold on the market, they will be independent of their capital value and hence there will be over and under utilization thereof.

The very same basic lesson of the seen and unseen applies to the wealth destruction bill in its multiplicity of schemes [see the link --- an essay by Dr. Woods]. All that it will do is override people's free choices and make people that much poorer. Dr. Woods calls it "tooth fairy economics." We all must remember: the State has no resources and it lacks the free market's ability to economize. If we are to come out of this economic downturn fast, we need the pricing system to sort out resources. All the State can do is distort that process and make this downturn that much longer and that much deeper.

***

Or, the State can try to inflate more as a "solution." Though all that would do is intensify bubbles and increase the pain at the end of the road. It would be an attempt to cure our problems by the very means that caused our problems (as I wrote about above). It would result in the unsound increasing and the sound decreasing. More than that, a redistribution of wealth would occur from the poor and middle classes to those special interests who received the new money first.

And, we should all be aware, it is perfectly clear that wealth is expanded by enlarging the amounts of goods (not money). Wealth, for society at large, is not increased by growing money on trees. Just as important, it is about increasing capital. That means saving is a good thing------despite what the mainstream media might say. Even at an intuitive level, it should be crazy to anyone when a talking head suggests that an individual, a family, a community, a society in financially difficult times should go on a spending spree.

And, to repeat again on this blog, men saving would actually make the recovery faster. Time preferences would have gone down and, hence, would put man closer to the artificially low interest rates. Less adjustment would be needed because "real" rates would be closer to the "fake" rates, so to speak. (See Rothbard on this.)

***

Though I am pessimistic, the only way that we all can avoid a long and deep depression is if government stops doing anything more than it has already done. Yes, there will be some major pain. But at least it would be over (comparatively) quickly.

Even better: it can cut its budget. And while this is a radical statement, I suppose, it is a much needed statement: money and banking must be uncut from the government; namely, it must be left to the private market. We need private money (which would most likely be gold and silver): private minting, private coining, etc. without a central bank, legal tender laws, fractional reserve banking, etc.

Furthermore, we all need to see the State as it really is. It's essentially a parasitic institution, and should be treated as such.

If a given activity is by definition theft and if it is unethical, then it is not possible to deny that this unethicalness of theft applies consistently without throwing out the first starting principles. An act of theft/murder/slavery/etc. does not become right because a man of the State is doing it. Socialism in all of its forms must be rejected.

***

I'll conclude this entry by saying that modernity has brought a de-civilizational decline in cultural and social life. Modernity might also, ultimately, do the same with material wealth. There has been, what you can almost call, financial stagnation and soon we may have a financial depression. The credit card illusion will be ending. On top of this, statism has become so powerful with its welfare-warfare apparatus that it will ultimately bankrupt itself (unless the market creates some huge innovation to keep it going longer, e.g., a new energy source).

Now I'm sure some would criticize me as a "naïve youngster." Though, all a man has to do is glance back at how the culture was, say, 60 years ago (even though he must take into account the problems of those years as well). Performing such a glance is not that difficult. Just look at the differences between the television shows back then and those of today.

An underlying error of my make-believe critic is to subconsciously accept a Whig theory of history and to be so orientated to what exists at present-------as if the present is detached from the past; detached from what it carves out for the future; and is King.

This overall attitude explains, I think, why so many men will not accept a statement like this: "The U.S. Empire will not last forever." It explains why many men think an economic depression "could never happen again."

It additionally explains why it is too difficult for many men to think about the future Death of the West. Today's ethos makes this thought about the future too shocking to be thought of as true: "Dying civilization?" "It can't happen here. ... That only occurred in the irrelevant and detached past. ... Open your eyes and see what is around you. The present is totality."

Man's present orientation, high time preference, and subconscious acceptance of the Whig theory of history, makes him go with a leftist and statist flow, and being part of that flow makes it hard for him to discern right from wrong. It makes him unable to see, for example, that the culture is in a major crisis, and that the West is dying. And, for example, it makes him unable to see that the current monetary system, with its high fragility, cannot last forever.

***

Some Previous Entries on The Paleo Blog:

• "Money and Civilization" (If you only read one, please read this one.)
• "Prolonging and Deepening the Recession"
• "Hazlitt: 'Saving the X Industry'"
• "Subsidizing Badness"
  

[Hmm ... I retired this blog? Oh, well... This subject is too important.]