Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Nothing Sacred

2023-08-30T12:05:00.002-04:00

Since 2001, suicide rates increased by around 40% and religious identity fell by 25%. These seemingly random statistics are data points in a web defining America’s postmodern malaise.

Within a generation a nation that had been a global model of a modern society has imploded. Old demons like racism have come roaring back in a country that is more divided than ever. Another civil war, once a farfetched science fiction tale, now seems almost inevitable. In nearly every statistic that touches on our social bonds, America has become a disaster area.

From individuals to our families to our cities to our nation, we are coming apart. Suicide rates, drug overdoses, urban collapse, crime waves, hate, violence, fear and economic decline are everywhere. The majority of Americans don’t believe that the future holds anything better.

There are many explanations for what is happening, but a basic one is that we are the plane plummeting from the sky after all the rivets holding it together had come out. The rivets were those things which politicians blather about, the ones that hold us together, and without them we are defined only by those things which divide us. We’re separate parts falling down to earth.

Religion was a fundamental unity. Commonalities of faith allowed America to weather crises like the civil war or the civil rights struggles because underlying the anger were shared values. We no longer have shared values and while religion is not the only issue, it is a major indicator.

The deconstruction of country and faith left us with little more than accidents of geography, social class, race, tastes, politics, and the other things which divide us as our defining identities.

The moral motive force of a deconstructionist society in which nothing is sacred is to be defined by what we are against. Negative outrage, rather than any drive for the good, came to be the highest value. After the fall of Communism, the leftist ideology that transformed the country lacks any credible vision of a better world. The feeble gesturing toward Europe’s health care or China’s rapid trains quickly give way to a movement that is defined by its hatred of what is.

The class warfare conspiracy theories, tales of oppressed workers, strikers battling with the bosses, bomb throwers sabotaging capitalism, revolutionary vanguards overthrowing kings is where the moral passion of leftists always lay, but in the past this had been dismissed as a temporary stage. Now the violence and hate have become not the journey, but the destination.

Anti-racism contends that racism will exist as long as whiteness does. Wokeness holds out no hope of a better world, only a resistance that destroys the old but, even if it eliminates all the white people or heterosexual males, will likely never be freed of the intellectual residue of whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisness and other thought crimes yet to be revealed.

Wokeness is an admission inherent in the long failed drives toward ‘True Communism’ in Russia, China and other totalitarian red states that utopia will never arrive. All leftists can do is sign up for an Orwellian perpetual cycle of purges against the enemies of their ideals.

That sort of ‘Oppositionism’ was the inevitable consequence of trying to actively realize an impossible ideal and then, out of the throes of its failure, defining the movement around a perpetual hostility to conservatives and traditionalists with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Oppositionism is what remains in a society where nothing is sacred and all that’s left is hatred of the other. If nothing is truly sacred and there is nothing higher to aspire to, then what defines us is what divides us, and we no longer need to know who we are, only what it is we hate.

The madness of oppositionism leads Democrat moms to take their toddlers to drag shows and buy them copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Anti-Racist Baby’ board book because these are the things that the people they hate now hate and so it’s incumbent on ‘progressives’ to embrace them.

At the rate we are going, if conservatives came out against child sacrifice, there would be a line all through wealthy woke suburbs to deliver their children to Moloch. In a society where things like human life and the innocence of children are sacred, such things would be inconceivable, but in a ‘nothing sacred’ society, what appears sacred must give way to what we hate.

Nothing sacred, certainly not religion, but not even that which even the most primitive barbaric tribes value, like the protection of women and children, can stand up to the power of hate.

And the need to destroy what we are to differentiate ourselves from that which we hate.

A generation ago, few college women would have been willing to throw away the hardwon feminist privilege of female sports to cater to a handful of mentally ill men. But the combined forces of woke identity politics and, almost as importantly, conservative opposition made it a tenet of faith that men who say they’re women have transcended biology and questioning that is a hate crime.

The postmodern moloch of wokeness asks of its followers that they sacrifice what is most precious to them, children, born and unborn, masculinity, femininity, athletic opportunity, honor and morality, in order to not only signal their virtue, but to differentiate themselves from the hated other tribe that they have been cursed to temporarily share parts of the country with.

The ancient pagans castrated themselves to worship the ‘goddess’ while the new pagans castrate themselves to reject toxic masculinity, traditional gender roles and everything that they have been taught is evil. The end result of people who define themselves by the rejection of what they hate is that they lose themselves and destroy their bodies and their souls.

That is what is happening to America.

The idea that some positive unifying vision would emerge in the twilight of religion was always a delusional fantasy. Religion was replaced by cults of personality, like that of Hitler and Stalin, and more contemporary examples, by a cannibalistic consumerism, and by a politics that pervaded everything.

Leftists promised that their politics could realize what religion only promised in exchange for total commitment and submission. Their failures cost a hundred million lives as a down payment. With the theoretical underpinnings in ruins, the politics is still everywhere, its promise is the destruction of everything else. Only when everything is gone, something better might emerge in some undefined fashion. But no one holds out any real expectation that it will.

This is oppositionism at its starkest, with no hope and no future, only the ruins of victory.

A sacred society is working toward something while an oppositionist society is nihilistic, existing for the destruction of its enemies, hoping and dreaming for nothing except death. Oppositionism cannot win because it has no concept of what victory even looks like. It barely bothers to dwell on the subject because deep down it has despaired of man and doesn’t believe that it can win.

The decline of religion, of the conviction that there is a ‘sacred’ worth building and protecting, has left behind passing emotions, mob movements, and outbursts, but nothing that endures. The sacred conviction of one moment, as in the aftermath of 9/11, is discarded when a new outrage comes along. And in oppositionism, there are always new outrages and convictions.

A sacred society is not a call for a theocracy, the coming together of the church and state is unhealthy for both, but for the importance of what we believe in. Movements, like wokeness, that cannot even summon up a plausible conception of the positive tend to form in societies that have lost the knowledge that life matters and that there is a higher purpose to our existence.

The sacred imagination looks in awe beyond the horizon in search of what moves us to be more than we are, while the oppositionist imagination is bent on dividing us to justify its cynical view of human nature. To the sacred, we are children of a higher power, while to the oppositionist we are biological meat machines driven by genetic predestination and crude impulses that are easily manipulable to those with the cleverness and the daring to impose their will on us.

That is the unexpected but fundamental breach between the sacred and the radical: is man free or a slave, was he made for better things or to be part of a mob, can we rise above ourselves?

Answer the question and you understand the movement, its nature and its misery.

Why shouldn’t biological slaves denied the hope of sacredness or transcendence destroy themselves? Why should they believe that tomorrow holds anything better than today? The icebergs are melting, capitalism is collapsing, extinction is coming and mankind will vanish. What’s there to really stay around except spite and violence against the other tribe?

Religion, true ideals, redeem us from this barbaric despair. Oppositionism, when its grandiose promises have failed, plunges societies back into that despair, and offers nothing more than the opportunity to burn it all down in a final funeral pyre in the ultimate act of social suicide.

This is the final end, individual and communal, of a society in which nothing is sacred.

The outcomes of civil wars are measured not only by what is destroyed, but by what is built. Out of a civil war between loyalists and rebels, came the United States of America. As we approach the precipice of a civil war, we may wish to consider what construction would arise from it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Politics and the End of Private Lives

2023-07-06T22:40:00.001-04:00

Cancel culture, like most of our contemporary cultural revolution, began in China.

In the aughts, rural Chinese migrated to massive mega-cities whose impossible population densities were matched by the growing interconnection of the internet. While three quarters of China’s population is now on the internet, in 2006 it grew by a quarter to encompass only 10%.

In these cramped quarters, physical and social, there was no room for the individual.

The Chinese internet, unlike its American counterpart, was always centered around social media which is one reason why TikTok is eating Facebook, Twitter and YouTube’s lunches. It was also always mobile. Chinese commuters on public transportation tapped in their grievances against neighbors, friends, family and random strangers. And mobs formed to take sides.

What we call cancel culture, the Chinese called “internet hunting” by “morality mobs” who were enforcing a street-level Confucianism in Maoist fashion by destroying the lives of the offenders.

It took Americans another decade to catch up to China. Cancel culture is more overtly ideological than internet hunting, but they are the common phenomenon of leftist mass societies where people inhabit anonymous collectives, displaced by technology and the collapse of definable communities, they form ad hoc groups to enforce social codes and burn witches.

Communist societies pursue collectivization to eliminate personal spaces. The Soviet Union pushed its peasants into collective farms and its urban residents into communal apartments to root out the very idea of the personal. Early Soviet apartments had no kitchens and the planners initially intended to have everyone eat in public kitchens and use their homes for sleeping.

The social web is much more stifling than any Soviet communal apartment. A family might have been stuck with one bedroom, but at least they had a door that they could close. The internet has taken down all the doors. Making the private public is a core leftist program. The old hackers claimed that “information wants to be free”. Information is less free than it ever was, but people’s lives have become public property. The ‘free’ public services of Google, Facebook and others offer convenience in exchange for information. Family life and political participation leave a trail. Disputes spill out into their ugliness into social media. From the media to social media, everyone is invited to judge the private lives that have become public commodities.

It took Americans longer to collectivize the personal than it did the Chinese. And we did it in a typically individualistic fashion. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, when collectivism came to America, it did so by flying emojis offering character creators, personalized algorithm suggestions and relevant ads. Americans became the same under the guise of expressing their differences. That sameness refracted through the illusion of collectivist mass cultural expression is not at all coincidentally at the heart of identity politics setups like the LGBTQ movement.

Cancel culture politicized the personal. But for it to work, we had to give up our private lives.

In a collectivist society, everyone is either a model citizen or a problem. Individualism is an offense against the system. That is what the Chinese, whose version of the ‘Ugly Duckling’ has the swan dying because of his differences, innately understood. It was what China’s morality mobs and internet hunters foreshadowed to Americans eagerly signing up for Facebook.

When people make their personal lives public, they hand them over to the Left

Defeating cancel culture requires restoring private lives. Soviet citizens in the grip of Communist terror understood that they could survive, not only physically but morally, by creating spaces where the state and its enforcers could not reach. At the end of the film ‘Brazil’, the protagonist, being tortured by the state, escapes into his imagination. Such is the power of inner lives.

Engaging with cancel culture on its own terms feeds the beast. Like every totalitarian system, cancel culture is nourished by consuming the lives of others. And those lives must be accessible. The more we live our lives in public view, the more of us it consumes and the more we normalize the idea that life is a collectivist enterprise to be pored over by others for their entertainment. What began with reality television has culminated in professional influencers whose existence is a facsimile of reality and whose gravitational pull warps our sense of reality.

Private lives are not just a stylistic choice. The American Revolution was fought over, among other matters, because the colonists refused to be feudal peasants who were expected to open their doors and quarter British soldiers in their homes at the demand of a king. Contemporary Americans assume that they are obligated to let officers of the state, not only the police but a long list of inspectors and authority figures into their homes, and have made their homes and lives into just another node on the internet for everyone to pass through when they please.

Inhabiting public lives has not made us any happier. Statistics show a sharp increase in depression and suicide rates for teens beginning with the popularization of the smartphone. Critics and experts point to the devastating impact of phones on public happiness, yet fail to boil it down succinctly to what adults understand, but teens never had a chance to experience.

Like the child stars and teen musicians of another era, a generation has come of age and another is coming of age without any sense of what living a private life is even like. The personal is naturally public. Life feels only lived if someone else is watching. Without audiences, life appears unreal, and yet with the eternal audience of social media, it is truly unreal. To be public is to give up the self. Teenagers, who have the greatest need for privacy and the least ability to maintain its boundaries, are the greatest victims of the violation of private lives.

Cancel culture is only the most visible manifestation of that, along with elevated depression and suicide rates, and a general anhedonia, an inability to be happy, because happiness on any level other than the animalistic is impossible without a private self. Teenage girls are the most dependent on social networks for their sense of worth and are the most likely to lose their sense of who they are to them. Transgender mutilation is a massive phenomenon among teenage girls for the same reason that body dysmorphic disorders tend to hit them harder. When you lose your mental sense of self, hurting your body becomes a desperate effort to exercise control.

Politics did not cause us to dive so far down a technological rabbit hole that we left western civilization behind and found feudalism waiting on the other side of the singularity, but the destruction of individuality opened the Overton window for totalitarian movements. By trading the private for the public, we erased the lines between the personal and the political. A revived leftist movement under the flag of wokeness made politicizing the personal into its mission statement. Giving up our wealth, our homes and our children to it was nothing. The true sacrifice was to give up our morality, our reasoning and our souls to the madness of the trending topic.

We ceased to think and we became receptacles for mass messaging in a way that no people, not even during the worst days of the twentieth century, had ever become. We no longer thought, we echoed, and we stopped acting and reacted, and let the postmodern dancing sickness that had once infected medieval millenarians take us on a crazy jig down the street.

The best defenses against public madness are private lives, against mass culture, the pursuit of individual creativity, and against mindlessness, thinking for ourselves. We are on the cusp of a world in which culture will be mass produced by AI, tailored by algorithms and primed to persuade us of anything as long as it has enough information about us to form a profile.

In the face of that inconceivable collectivism, we can become ourselves or lose ourselves.

Private lives, and their vital tools, thoughtfulness, modesty, integrity, religiosity, reason, humility and common sense, are the anti-virus software against a virus of a scale we can neither imagine nor survive intact as reasoning civilized beings. They are the barriers, the doors we can close on a system that needs us to give up everything we have in order to rule over us.

This is not monasticism: it’s individualism. We do not need to retreat from fighting or making a difference. But what we must do is fight without losing the selves that we are fighting for.

What, in the final analysis, are we fighting for? More than a single election, we are fighting for a world in which we are the kings and queens of our homes, where our children are safe from the predators who have become emboldened in the age of identity politics, where we do not have to account for choices to the oversight of the state and where we are free to think and believe.

We are fighting not just for a nation, but for the right to our private lives once again.

In a totalitarian state, the private is public because the people are the property of the state whereas in a free society, the public is private because the state belongs to the people.

America was founded as a free society and has become a totalitarian state. Its monolithic institutions, state, corporate, academic, nonprofit, claim the right to control everything about their subjects from birth to death, a thousand forms and agenda items put the personal at the disposition of the public. A new revolution will make the personal, private once again. It is a revolution that can begin with us when we do not answer a question, fill in a form, turn over data or share our lives or scrutinize the lives of others who are not our family or our friends.

The act of living private lives carries with it a moral power that can transform a culture..

Even in the most totalitarian societies, people can draw lines between the public and the private. Acts of quiet defiance serve to restore norms and limit the power of the state. There are many walls worth building. One of them is the wall between the private and the public, the personal and the political, between our homes and the system, and between ourselves and the state.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

The Religion of the Left: Sacred Destruction and the Search for Lost Gods.

2023-06-08T15:34:00.001-04:00

“Abortion is sacred,” Planned Parenthood declared. Biden told Dylan Mulvaney that banning transgender child mutilation is “immoral”. The head of the Public Religion Research Institute preaches about the “sacred work of white discomfort” in defense of critical race theory.

It is a mistake to think of the Left as a secular movement. People don’t throw their lives away for a set of ideas. They don’t turn on their parents, societies and entire way of life over abstractions. Only something that touches their deepest selves and offers them that sense of purpose and meaning in a broken world that religious people call revelation and holiness summons that fire.

That leftists don’t believe in a central deity is confusing to monotheists, but what they believe in is far older, a hybrid of primitive mysticism, laboriously revived by western romanticism, and theoretical acadamese nurtured by over two centuries of dilettante students, professional radicals and assorted megalomaniacal cranks who litter the history of socialism.

What these two strands of the western leftist worldview have in common is their conviction that there is an underlying sense of order, found in sociological patterns or energy auras, theories of race or tarot cards, that explain everything and that by mastering them we can transcend and fundamentally transform the universe, and everything in it, including our societies and ourselves..

This is the continuum linking paganism, academic theories and conspiracy theories.

Where leftist theology starkly divides from western and eastern monotheism is in the notion of divinity not as a central intelligent point of being, but as a hidden meaning scattered throughout existence to be decoded by human intelligence and spiritual striving. That is why leftists were attracted to eastern religions before dumbing them down into New Age mysticism.

To the Left, there is no God, but we all have the potential to become gods by mastering the secrets of the universe, whether that means technotopian transhumanism or becoming one with the AI gods they intend to create, forcing everyone into an ideal society that will unlock human potential, or figuring out the right energy patterns to usher in the age of aquarius. While seemingly very different approaches, the various utopian strands of leftism speak to a common yearning that pits them against the traditional beliefs of the societies they aspire to overturn.

The Left’s intellectual pursuits are primarily aimed at analyzing how power is distributed in a society. These academic and journalistic critiques build up to justifying its own power grabs. And the Left excels at analyzing and seizing power because power is its only source of meaning.

Much as ISIS leaders boasted that their brutal executions and mass rapes were their forms of prayer, politics is the religious practice of the Left. It has become the only truly meaningful expression of its beliefs after its social experiments in implementing its way of life through cults, communes and private arrangements fell through. Such side projects have been replaced by a white collar movement embedded in the managerial class of governments and corporations.

This movement is animated by a culture war in which all morality is reduced to power. The redemption of the nation and the salvation of the planet depend on a leftist takeover implemented by a white collar cult that has put its career aspirations and wealth at the service of leftist dogma in return for the conviction that the professional aspirations and privileges of its members are redemptive. An Ivy League education, an academic position, and a corporate executive’s office are no longer just personal achievements, but a moral crusade.

Mimetic movements like the Left take on the characteristics and eventually become the thing they are imitating. After spending all that time working from within the system, they have become the system. And the system has become them. Bureaucrats and CEOs have adopted the protective coloration of leftist virtue signaling to cover their many sins much as leftists adopted the protective coloration of government and corporations to cover their agenda.

The bloated ranks of government, academia and corporate monopolies merging into one blob is a symptom of leftism. The Left always thinks in terms of systems rather than people, of rulesets rather than values (despite devoting a good deal of its cultural propaganda to asserting that it does the opposite, but the easiest way to understand leftism is to invert every one of its claims to find the truth) and it is turning societies into hives of systems and rules.

But systems are leftist forums of religious experience and moral fulfillment. A leftist church is any institution and its service is a collective takeover of that institution. But the momentary triumph of the takeover is never enough. When these systems fail to achieve their utopian promise through technocratic rulesets, as they always must, they come to serve their primary purpose of destroying everything that sinfully exists to clear the ground for a glorious tabula rasa, a blank page,and a new form of man, for a new creation.

Each leftist failure serves as evidence that not enough of the past had been destroyed to make way for the future. That is why killing or sexually mutilating children, or racism, are sacred.

Much as to ISIS and Islam, destruction is sacred, so it is to all radical movements.

When construction fails, the only path forward is through destruction. Communist dictatorships drove millions out of cities or farms, controlled everything they read and thought, and when that failed killed millions. Declaring war on whiteness or deconstructing sex are more precise and intimate forms of destruction meant to also usher in a new future.

The “right side of history” requires completely remaking mankind. And that’s an ugly business.

Construction is tedious and the Left isn’t any good at it. Building systems and rules is different than actually creating anything. What the Left excels at is taking over existing systems by exploiting their weakness. But when the Left is actually able to build its own systems and rules to implement its own agenda, it discovers that the systems and the rules don’t actually do anything. Leftist bureaucracies ossify into pointless exercises once they no longer have enemies to defeat. When the USSR was stalemated by the Cold War, its Communist Party lost any reason for being and collapsed under the realization that it had no function except stealing.

The most reliable way to kill the Left is to give it total power, but deprive it of external ambition. In real life, George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia would not have lasted for generations, let alone centuries, its dedicated sadists and fanatics, as embodied by O’Brien would have killed each other off, as the Bolsheviks did, leaving behind a cowardly bureaucracy with no vision.

The fanatical sadists are overriding the normative impulses of the professional managerial class that the leftists have become in America, as they did in the Soviet Union. Riots or mutilating children remind them that they’re not just diversity deans or think tank experts, they’re the radical vanguard of a movement that is going to achieve what all religions have failed to do.

Abortion, mutilating children and racism are sacred acts because they promise to break through the complacency of the system, the routines of a suburban lifestyle, the commute, the meetings and the minutiae of inhabiting the system with orgies of blood and pain. Like Pol Pot murdering everyone wearing glasses for being westernized, the leftist system strives to transcend itself through ritual acts of destruction in the hopes of finding the secrets of the universe.

Transgender experiments on children began out of a conviction in human malleability. If men can become women, then they can perhaps become more than men. Eliminate sex roles and the family structure, and it becomes possible to imagine an entirely new form of society. And, less ambitiously, destroying western civilization is a prerequisite to building a new civilization.

What does a post-civilization look like? Like the surgically mutilated post-men and post-women, like the children never born, like ex-Soviet ghost cities and mass graves from China to France, these are the evil dreams of things that never were because they could never be.

Religion without god is a dream that slowly becomes a nightmare, cults of personality, human sacrifice and the search for meaning where there is none. Madmen create their own patterns, they find their own truths in the burning sun and in hallucinogens, and then write them in pain and terror on the bodies of their willing and unwilling followers searching for a reason to live.

The Left is not, as it believes, a new story, but a very old one, and though it prides itself on knowing many things, true and untrue, about the world, the one thing it does not know is that which men of religion and philosophy make a point of knowing, the knowledge of the self.

Leftists correctly believe that the world is filled with meaning, but what they fail to understand is the meaning of that meaning, believing that within those patterns are the secrets to absolute power, when what actually lies in those patterns of meaning is the One who made them.

Denying that truth, they worship power and then blood, they search for paradise and find death.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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We All Live in the Internet's Flatlands Now

2021-01-31T19:12:00.004-05:00

In Flatland, a mathematical satire, a being who exists in two dimensions experiences the arrival of a three-dimensional being as the extrusion of a flat surface into his world.

These days we all live in Flatland.

The internet connects and accommodates us at the expense of flattening our reality. Networks are based on common standards. To connect different things together is to reduce them to the lowest common denominator. The internet hasn't made our culture richer and deeper: it has simplified us.

The flattening effect of the internet equates and simplifies everything. Its standards lower the barriers and in the process eliminate the complexities. This isn't a simple dumbing down. To dumb something down is to lower access, but to also offer the possibility of following that to a more sophisticated understanding.

What is pervasive about flattening is that it eliminates the third and fourth dimensions entirely.

In the physical realm, the third dimension provides depth. In the realm of culture and ideas, the third dimension is composed of the principles that allow us to measure the depth and truth of an idea by comparing and contrasting it with other ideas using a set of consistent principles.

Think of the façade of an old western movie. Striding down the street, past a saloon, a general store, and a stable, it looks real enough. But when you enter the third dimension and go inside, there's nothing there but wooden fronts. That's the flatlands that the internet has enabled us to build our culture around.

Without the third dimension, all ideas appear to be equally intellectually valid. And then we pick and choose whichever ones appeal most to us on the emotional and instinctual levels of narrative and identity.

Narrative and identity are compelling and vital. They form the two-dimensional matrix that defines who we are. But when we access the third dimension, we enrich the bright line of our identity and the second dimension of narrative height that connects our identity to a larger story, by measuring it against reality.

A two-dimensional reality reflects our inner self. Without that, we don't exist. But without the third dimension, we lose the ability to make a meaningful impact on the external reality of the world.

The internet and the culture it spawned are entirely concerned with identity and narrative.

The 'flatness' of the internet is the key to its most magical ability which is the transmutation of identity and narrative that appears to allow people to transform who they are and reshape reality with words.

But this magic only works in the unreal world of the internet. The more of our society is routed through the internet, the more obsessed it becomes with harnessing the power of identity and narrative, transmuting it and policing its boundaries, allowing people to believe that the borders of sex, of religion, and of all of reality can be reshaped through determined intentionality. This is classic magical thinking.

But the internet is built for magical thinking because it is a virtual realm, not a true physical reality.

Within virtual spaces, consensual realities can govern. That is why utopian ideas sprang from the virtual spaces of academia, of bohemian circles, and from the sheltered members of upper class households who were convinced that reality had become fluid, when really they were just detached from reality.

The internet is the ultimate virtual space. Its flatness allows everyone to build a consensual reality. And since we are thinking beings who inhabit reality through the language of our minds, that consensual reality appears encompassing and transformative even when it isn't really changing anything except us.

What's missing is context.

The computer pioneers envisioned an artificial world governed by the rules of its code. Its flatness is an extension of the flatness of machine logic and of the flatness of intellect detached from experience.

Human beings, unlike computers, are not detached intellects. Any project that would preserve the intellect while detaching the body would result in something alien, inhuman, and dangerous.

The 'Singularity' of Ray Kurzweil in which man merges with intelligent machines will never happen. But we have merged with machines by trying to inhabit a space meant for machines and run by the logic of programming, rather than experience and intuition. The cultural singularity is all around us.

That we can't see the singularity is its biggest symptom.

We react to shocking events, like the election, as if they were unexpected, when in reality they were all around us, but we could not see them because like the square encountering a sphere, we have become limited to a two-dimensional world and we encounter events as if they suddenly appear from some unseen third dimension into the flatness of our world. And we try to understand where they came from.

The world has not become more irrational. We have just lost two out of four of its dimensions.

When we weigh and measure ideas based on consistent rules, rather than wishful thinking, we access the third dimension of depth. And when we test these third dimensional hypothesis against their results over the course of time, we holistically integrate them into the fourth dimension and arrive at some measure of truth. But when we remain in a two-dimensional world, then we just know what we know.

An example of this reality decay is the transforming of the term 'fact-checking', once used by the press to describe its own rigorous process of checking its own facts, to mean narrative attacks on Republicans. When the media checked its facts, it provided its own narratives with greater reality and depth. And when it redefined fact checking to mean attacking the opposition, it traded access to a third dimensional reality for intensified narrative force in its own two-dimensional world.

This is a problem that's not unique to the process, but bedevils science, politics, and every field that once set out to reach good decisions by measuring them against reality, but that now just bloviates.

Without the third dimension of reality and the fourth dimension of time, there is goodness, but not truth. There are moral ideas, but none that we can measure and test. Everything becomes political, we say, but that really means that everything is run through an ideological filter that takes politics on faith.

Life becomes guided by political ideas the way it was by religious ideas in a less secular time.

The unexpected events coming in from the third dimension are reduced to mysteries and then conspiracy theories. Instead of dealing with reality, we explain contradictions with more mysteries. When faced with a crisis, we rarely take the real 'red pill' and question our premises, instead we take the 'blue pill' and question our principles, convincing ourselves to let the discredited premise ride.

A flat world has little room for principles, but plenty of room for premises. When we question our principles, it does not disrupt the flatlands of the internet where all ideas are equivalent. In Flatland, a white woman can turn black, a man can become a woman, a Jewish teen can become a white supremacist, a suburban Asian-American teenager can join Hamas, and we can all be anything we want.

When narrative and identity are just coats we wear in a medium where they are meant to be fluid and interchangeable, adopting new ones is an otherwise painless process in self-dramatization.

The millennial insecurities of a generation that grew up on the internet are expressed through transforming identities to cash in on narratives. The square shifts into new lines all the time.

The Flatland of the internet is an unstable two-dimensional world that destabilizes identity for the sake of narrative. And the premise of all those narratives is that we must not reconsider that process.

The richest gift of the third dimension is that it can allow us to weigh and measure our choices, and to reconsider our premises and our decisions. In a two-dimensional world, there is no escape. The Flatlands of the internet appear to allow us to escape, to transform and become someone else, but that, like everything else that takes place in a virtual space, is just another mental illusion.

People don't escape by becoming someone else. Only con artists do. The internet has enabled a growth industry in con artists and in catfishing, in people pretending to be another sex, another race, another age, to be doctors, lawyers, and generals, but human beings can't change who they are, by changing who they say they are. This is another area where we differ from the flat code-based conception of reality.

To change, we must rethink the choices we made that brought us here. We must question our premises.

Without that third dimension, we can't change. And, worse still, we have no idea how to change. The 'flatness' of the internet has led to a culture that easily sheds its principles, but never questions its premises. It seeks dimension by following a shifting line on the ground, instead of looking up at the sky.

The 'flatness' of the internet polarizes, it rewards hot takes, extremism, and anything that stands out.

'Flatness' selects for ideas without dimension or depth, that have surface appeal because they reassure us that our two-dimensional world is already full of color, life, and meaning, and we don't need anything else.

The internet is a powerful and compelling tool. But when we cease to use it and instead inhabit it, then the tool becomes the master, and the master becomes the tool. We don't have to live in Flatland. And when we weigh and measure ideas, when we examine them and turn them over, then we gain dimension. The more we do that, the less surprised we are when unexpected events seem to happen.

To inhabit the internet is to exist in a world of shifting narratives that make it difficult to contemplate reality on its own terms, rather than on those of the stories that people tell us and that we tell ourselves.

We are not bodiless minds. Our lives are grounded not only in the matter of the "leettle gray cells", but of our bodies, of our lives and our families. The way we make decisions when shopping for groceries or a home, when fixing a car that doesn't start, or an injury that doesn't heal, is the basic skill set of encountering the third dimension, weighing options, measuring them against the risks and rewards, and making a decision based on those rules and on experience, rather than on the narratives of Flatland.

We can be as real and as true as we choose to be. And when we seek the truth, our narratives grow stronger. When we test what we believe against reality, we emerge with stronger arguments, better plans, and a way of thinking and living that is not subservient to the virtual spaces of an unreal world.

The internet is Flatland. It controls much of our world. But it doesn't have to rule our minds.

Allahu Akbar is Why Muslims Kill

2017-11-09T13:28:00.000-05:00

Allahu Akbar. You hear it everywhere these days.

Special agent Scott Wickland said that he heard cries of "Allahu Akbar" before the Benghazi attack. And then the guards ran for their guns.

In Nice, France, the Islamic terrorist who killed 86 people and wounded over 400 by running them over with a truck, shouted, “Allahu Akbar”. In New York, the Islamic terrorist who was trying to imitate him, also shouted, “Allahu Akbar.” The 9/11 hijackers had the same message, “Allahu Akbar”.

“Allahu Akbar” has been present at virtually every major recent Islamic terror attack in the West.

But according to the New York Times, “Allahu Akbar” is an “innocent” and “innocuous” expression. According to one of the Times’ sources, “You see a reallу beautiful woman” and “уou go, ‘Allahu Akbar.’”

If all those shouts of “Allahu Akbar” in Paris, London and New York are caused by Muslim terrorists encountering attractive women, their reaction of choice to an attractive woman is a killing spree.

“Allahu Akbar” is not “innocent” or “innocuous.” It’s at the core of what makes Islam violent.

To understand the violent history of “Allahu Akbar”, let’s climb into a time machine and go back to the year 628 and to a place that will one day be known as Saudi Arabia. It’s hot out here in the desert. Temperatures from the spring to the fall routinely cross the hundred degree mark and keep going.

We’re in Khaybar. It’s a desert oasis maintained by the Jews. If being in 109 degree heat has got you down, you stop by the oasis, and have a cool drink of water and some dates. Then you keep going. Out here trade runs through the desert and the oasis is a gas station. If you want to choke off major trade routes, you go after an oasis. And that’s what a cult leader whose followers today terrorize the world by attacking its travel routes, airline hijackings, pirates preying on ships, train and bus bombs, was doing.

Muslims call what happened next, the “Battle of Khaybar”. Like most Muslim battles, it was a treacherous ambush and a massacre. And it helps explain why there are no Jews in Saudi Arabia today. Nor do Muslims regret this act of ethnic cleansing. Instead they celebrate it. Muslims still threaten Jews by chanting, “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud.” "Remember Khaybar, Jews, Mohammed’s Army Will Return."

And “Allahu Akbar?”

That’s what Mohammed shouted as he realized that his surprise attack had been successful. "Allahu-Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed.” He boasted that any nation attacked by Muslims would suffer a similar fate. And then he “had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives”. Mohammed also picked up his own sex slave. “Safiya was amongst the captives. She first came in the share of Dahya Alkali but later on she belonged to the Prophet.” Safiya’s husband had been murdered. Like their ISIS successors, the Prophet of Islam’s band of killers and rapists took the women as slaves.

That’s where “Allahu Akbar” originated. And that’s why Muslims still shout it at terrorist attacks.

Allahu Akbar does not mean “God is Great.” It means “Allah is Greater”. What was Allah greater than at Khaybar? Allah was greater than the religion of the Jews because Mohammed was able to defeat them.

In Islam, a religious war is also a religious test. Muslim victories demonstrate the supremacy of Allah.

Despite the incessant claims that Muslims, Jews and Christians all worship the same god, the Koran tells Muslims something very different. “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. These are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!” (Koran 9:30)

The preceding verse commands Muslims to "Fight those who do not believe in Allah" and “who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture until they pay jizya and submit."

Those who “were given the Scripture” are Christians and Jews.

Jews and Christians had “taken Rabbis and monks to be their lords besides Allah”. The Christians had taken “Messiah, the son of Mary” when they had been commanded to “worship only one Allah.” (Koran 9:31)

Jews and Christians were “Kuffir” and “Mushrikeen”. They had taken “partners” in addition to Allah. Christians and Jews seek to “extinguish the light of Allah” (Koran 9:32). Allah had sent Mohammed to make Islam supreme over all other religions. (Koran 9:33). Jews and Christians obstruct the “Way of Allah” (Koran 9:34) Muslims are encouraged to make Jihad against non-Muslims (Koran 9:38). Those who refuse to carry out Jihad will be punished by Allah (Koran 9:39).

When Muslims defeat Christians or Jews, they prove that Allah is superior to Jewish and Christian beliefs. And that the teachings of Islam are superior to the teachings of their religious enemies.

“Allahu Akbar” originated with Mohammed’s attack on the Jews of Khaybar. When Muslim terrorists shout it today, they are declaring that they are about to prove Allah’s superiority by killing non-Muslims.

“Allahu Akbar” isn’t merely associated with terrorist attacks. It’s the reason for those attacks.

Muslims kill non-Muslims to prove that, “Allahu Akbar”: that Allah is greater the religions of their victims.

“Allahu Akbar” is the motive for Islamic terrorism.

A typical excuse is that Muslims will use “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate a good event. What this excuse misses though is that Islam is a supremacist religion. And Muslims believe that the good event that they are celebrating is due to being the only ones who truly worship “Allah”. That’s a common religious belief. And they are entitled to it. But the problem is that this relationship rests heavily on Jihad.

The Islamic mission is to make Islam supreme over all other religions (Koran 9:33). If Muslims aren’t striving to defeat other religions, then “Allahu Akbar” rings hollow. Islam does not primarily offer an internal religious experience that transforms the believer, but an external collective experience that transforms the world. Jihad, the acts of terror we see on the news, are that religious experience.

“Allahu Akbar” is the supremacist core of Islam. Mohammed offered a religious experience that merged desert banditry and conquest, whose sacraments were the murder of the enemies of Islam and the rapes of their wives and daughters. The horrifying Islamic rituals of ethnic cleansing, rape and torture demonstrated that, “Allahu Akbar”. That Allah was greater than the dead men and raped women.

The Yazidi girls who were sold as sex slaves to ISIS fighters, as the Prophet Mohammed had done, describe their Islamic captors intimidating them by shouting, “Allahu Akbar”, and recall the Islamic rapist of a 12-year-old girl saying that it brought him “closer to Allah”, of a 15-year-old girl calling it a “prayer to Allah” and of the rapist of another 12-year-old girl describing her abuse as “pleasing to Allah.”

The official ISIS publication praised Allah for enabling its Jihadists to capture non-Muslim women.

“I write this while the letters drip of pride. Yes, O religions of kufr (non-Muslims) altogether, we have indeed raided and captured the kāfirah women, and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword. I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home.”

How can raping children be a prayer to Allah? Because, “Allahu Akbar”. Being able to rape non-Muslim girls is a matter of “pride”. It shows that Allah, the god Muslims worship, is superior to their religion.

When ISIS Jihadists rape children or when an ISIS Muslim sympathizer runs over people in New York, Berlin or Nice, it’s a prayer of praise to Allah. And the prayer is, “Allahu Akbar.”

The more non-Muslims are killed, abused and enslaved, the more the truth of Islam and the supremacy of Allah are proven with the screams of the wounded, the dying and the families of the dead.

This is Islam. This is what it was in 628. That’s what it is today.

“Allahu Akbar” is a mandate to kill non-Muslims. A Muslim terrorist taking a gun, a knife or a truck and attacking non-Muslims is living out, “Allahu Akbar”. He’s showing that Islam is superior.

“Allahu Akbar” isn’t something he happens to say while killing you. It’s why he’s killing you.

Moderates and Radicals in Islam and the Left

2016-08-12T14:23:00.001-04:00

The core strategic problem we face is two conflicts with two ideologies that operate subversively until they are in power. That is, instead of stating their agenda openly, Islam and the left operate as false fronts maintaining a friendly moderate image while pursuing a far more radical agenda.

The distinction between moderates and radicals is at the heart of the debate about Islamic terrorism. Much as it used to be at the heart of the debate about Communism and its fellow travelers. Everyone will concede that there are indeed radicals, if only ISIS and Stalin. What they will deny is the extent of the complicity and, more significantly, the fact that the radicals were pursuing the same ends as the moderates, an Islamic Caliphate or a Communist dictatorship, only more rapidly and ruthlessly.

The thing that must be understood is that moderates do not disavow radicals. Rather they bridge the gap between the radicals and the larger society, justifying their ends, and eventually their means, while pretending to disavow them. Radicals reject any dialogue. Moderates emphasize dialogue.

Moderates will verbally reject the means with which an end is pursued. Accordingly they will reject terrorism. They may even claim to reject the ends, such as an ideological dictatorship, but they will, in good fellowship, ask you to accept their premise which inevitably leads to the acceptance of both the ends and the means.

For example, moderates on the left and in Islam will ask you to accept that terrorism is caused by American foreign policy. Once you have accepted this premise, then you have partially justified terrorism and paved the way for accepting an "Arab Spring" that eliminates the consequences of American foreign policy by properly Arabizing and Islamizing the governments of the region.

Likewise, if you accept the premise that Israel's presence in its '67 territories is driving terrorism, then you have signed on to everything from BDS to the destruction of the Jewish State.

If you concede that crime and violence are driven by class and racial inequities, then you accept that the only way to end this "class war" is massive taxation and wealth redistribution through government intervention that addresses the root cause.

That is not the way it seems to most people. And that is why the "moderate" strategy works so well.

Once you have accepted the moderate definition of the root cause, you will inevitably be forced to accept the radical remedy. This is true across a spectrum of lower level policies. For example, accept that homosexuality is genetic and gay rights become the inevitable and inescapable outcome. That is how the root cause defines the outcome. And this is how moderates achieve radical goals.

Moderates convince you to accept their premise of the root cause. Then they argue for sensitivity to the radicals whose motives have suddenly become understandable. Finally they argue for a settlement in which a compromise is reached that will allow the radicals to achieve a moderate version of their ends.

The Muslim Brotherhood takeovers of the Arab Spring are an example of a compromise to avert Islamic terror aimed at creating a Caliphate. The ultimate outcome is the same, but the moderates dress it up as a kinder and gentler alternative.

And this is the core strategic problem that we face.

The radicals are not any kind of serious physical threat. We could destroy ISIS easily if we chose to unleash our full force against them. The same is true for every single Islamic terror group in the world. And, for that matter, their state sponsors too.

The real threat is always the subversion of the moderates. The challenge then becomes the need to expose the false facade of the moderates. This leads to a push-pull struggle. The moderates cry that they are being unfairly victimized by hateful people. There are shouts of red-baiting and McCarthyism, profiling and bigotry. Their critics are paranoid and unhinged. The moderates even assert that there is something ugly and "Un-American" about asking them to account for their agenda.

And this is really the core argument made by the two allied subversive ideologies. It is "ugly" to expose their views, to quote them, to bring them to the surface. It is intolerant. It's not the way that respectable people should behave. And the moderates, who pose as respectable people precisely to play on the weakness of the middle class for being respectable, understand that this is the ultimate weapon.

Respectable people do not accuse the friendly Imam on the block of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood or promoting Jihadist texts. They do not accuse the cheerful teacher in the school whom everyone likes of pushing anti-American views on her students. That is not respectable behavior.

And moderates, who pretend to be respectable, excel at pushing the respectable shame button.

It doesn't matter if it's true. It's ugly to discuss it. That is respectability simplified. It's much better to talk about how much we have in common, to speak about how we can unite and make the world a better place. And the moderates have plenty of ideas in that regard. All of them involve accepting their premise of what the world's problems are and how they can be improved by a series of proposals that would culminate with mass tyranny and murder.

There are actual moderates of course.

The majority of those on the left aren't harboring secret plans to build gulags. They would find the idea horrifying. Likewise many Muslims in Western countries don't support Islamic terrorism.

They are moderates, but only in the sense that they have not yet signed on to radical ideas. Not in the sense that they would fight and oppose them to their very last breath. They are mostly moderates out of a lack of conviction rather than a surplus of it.

Subversive organizations operate through incremental radicalization. The average American liberal of twenty years ago would not have supported half of what he vocally advocates for today. Even Obama and Hillary were against gay marriage when they ran for office. In a few years they moved from opposing a policy to threatening to prosecute those opposed to it. That is how the left works.

Obama and Hillary always had a consistent position. The leadership of the left had one. It was the ordinary rank and file liberal who might have been in the dark until the whistle was blown and the herd stampeded toward the next policy abyss. A year ago those same liberals might have felt uncomfortable with the notion of men using the ladies room. Today they would fight a civil war for it.

The process operates the same way across a spectrum of policies. The left keeps its more moderate followers in the dark about its real goals. Then once the stampede begins, the moderates who derive their sense that they are good people from following the ideas of the left, quickly fall in line.

The same is true of Islam. Plenty of Muslims would not be happy with an immediate transition to ISIS. But plenty are willing to back the more incremental attempts to build a Caliphate through political Islam in Turkey or through the Muslim Brotherhood. Their moderation, like that of many Germans in WW2, consists of an unwillingness to know what dirty deeds are being done.

The moderates bridge this gap both for their rank and file, and for the outsiders who have to be fooled into accepting their premise in order to accept their ends. Their greatest weapon is respectability. When cornered, they insist that they are just nice people who want to make the world a better place. And their critics are bigots, nasty people, who don't want everyone to get along and spread disunity.

And doesn't everyone just want to get along? Isn't that nicer and better? Isn't it a good thing that there are passionate young people who want to make the world a better place?

The chief ally of the moderates is this sort of middle class respectability. The moderates paint their critics as radicals who have no solutions. When in fact they themselves are radicals with a final solution. And yet combating this sort of happy talk remains our greatest challenge.

Yet it is also a passing challenge.

Middle class respectability is a function of a sense of security. When that sense of security begins to implode as a society experiences chaos, the middle class stops clinging to respectability.

And then the real conflict begins.

We may well be approaching that phase. Economic decline and Islamic terror are leading to a radical break with respectability. We are entering a radical age in which the moderates take off their masks and radicals of various stripes gain great influence and openly recruit for their cause.

This will be a shattering experience for many. It will be a very ugly one in many ways. And yet the only way to avert it would be to expose the false moderates who are driving this process for what they are. And this is exactly what those who have the most to lose from a radical rise refuse to do.

None of this is a new phenomenon. History is repeating itself.

In the City of the Decadents

2016-04-13T15:58:00.002-04:00

Civilizations go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.

We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty's worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West. Vigorous civilizations are a rarer breed. They change the world. But don't last.

America used to be vigorous when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. It is growing decadent. And decadent civilizations fall to barbarians.

The barbaric civilization is purely crude. It runs on kinship. It is pre-rational and its guiding ethos is self-esteem often misspelled as honor. It has no notion of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It is incapable of recognizing inconsistencies in its code because truth is whatever it feels at a given time.

The barbarian has no morals. He obeys tribal codes that he does not understand, but accepts. Fairness exists only relative to his own interests. Empathy is foreign to him. He holds life cheaply and kills casually. He loathes outsiders and obeys no universal laws. His tribe is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery. And he assumes the world works the same way.

He cannot and will not interact with a more advanced civilization on any terms other than these. Cunning barbarians may learn the languages of more advanced civilizations and even ape their values for their own purposes, but they never adopt them. When a barbarian speaks of democracy, he means power. When he talks of religion, he means the worship of his own power. When he prattles of morality, he does not mean universal laws, but anything that impinges on his own power.

To the barbarian, all values are reducible to power. They are his gods, his religions and his laws.

The decadents are obsessed with filtering hierarchies of ideas and people. Their societies have grown too complex, too full of ideas, cultures and interest groups. The management of this unmanageable plenitude occupies all the energies of their fading civilization. They are the miser with the fading memory still struggling to count his gold. Decadents have too much of everything and no idea what to do with it except to squander it in fits of misguided and destructive impulses.

The decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively. Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are buried between equivocation. Decadents don't believe in objective truths and so they cannot have universal laws. Instead they mire them in so many legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is always in violation of some obscure law. Life depends on a lawless dispensation from the law. Justice is impossible. Corruption is mandatory. The only way for the decadent civilization to function is to bypass its own safeguards through corruption, black markets and lobbying. This is true in all things.

The crucial task of the law is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished. This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.

This holds true in every other area of decadent life.

Interpretation is what the decadent civilization does best. While vigorous civilizations discover new things, decadent civilizations endlessly categorize and re-categorize them to accommodate intellectual fads. Decadents compulsively seek new systems of organization. The computer age is the glorious final era of the decadents who finally have infinite ways to manage infinite information.

What they lack is any way of distinguishing what is worthwhile in both information and systems.

The decadents are great categorizers. They know where everything should belong. They employ armies of bureaucrats to operate vast filing systems which never quite work as planned. They spend fortunes on intricate information systems and yet the more speed and storage space they have, the less they seem able to filter worthwhile information from the morass of junk clogging up their time.

The decadent civilization is convinced that if it can amass enough information, its interpretations will be superior, but its information gathering techniques and its interpretative techniques are both fatally flawed by an inability to focus, by ideological obsessions and structural corruption. Scientists may have more rapid access to more information, but their community is more intellectually contaminated leading to worse results. Similarly, corruption undermines information gathering efforts from the start.

Vigorous civilizations understand that a process must be kept clean by open debate. Decadent civilizations operate corrupt closed processes while convinced of their own innate superiority. Decadents and barbarians both believe that they are always right and that the outcome will reflect that. They learn to forget setbacks or blame them on others. This is why they frequently fail.

The vigorous civilization is confident and skeptical. It understands the importance of mistakes in getting the right result. Decadents and barbarians don't acknowledge mistakes. For barbarians, it is a matter of honor. For decadents, mistakes violate their confidence in their cultlike baseless theories. Unlike vigorous civilizations, their path to truth is constricted by their own intellectual corruption.

But decadent civilizations are also less interested in discovering new things than in disproving old things. The middling talents at the helm rewrite history while justifying their misrule by denouncing the achievements of their vigorous ancestors. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, they point out their flaws to obscure their own worthlessness.

Where the vigorous civilization disproves the old through its achievements, the decadent civilization considers the disproving of the old civilization to be an achievement in and of itself. Where the vigorous civilization outside its parent, the decadent civilization is still stuck fighting "Daddy".

If you examine our achievements today, they have much to do with the supposed social progress we have made since the fifties. Much of this progress is a matter of outlook, rather than in reality. We are better because we are morally superior. Not because we actually do more.

Despite the disdain for the past, decadent civilizations struggle to do more than deconstruct and then helplessly imitate the past. Chaotic deconstruction of past creative arts is followed by retro copying of them, first ironically and then earnestly. Nostalgia becomes the central industry of a dying civilization mired in irony and incapable of mining its own culture for creative energies.

The central cultural critique becomes updating older works to more politically correct forms. A classic character is remade black or gay. Problems with diversity or sexism are tackled. The critic becomes a commissar whose job is to sanctify the transformation of an old politically incorrect work as politically correct. That is the role of the social justice warrior.

All this energy makes it appear as if there is cultural ferment when nothing is actually being produced. Instead older works are being "cleaned up" in keeping with new social values by a civilization that frantically chews up the past in a desire to forget the problems of the present.

People living in decadent civilization have a greater need for entertainment due to leisure time, extended adolescence and the breakup of the family. But their lack of meaningful work, family engagement and adult responsibilities leaves them less able to produce it. Instead they become children putting together pieces of stories that "Daddy" once told them while taking the credit.

Decadents confuse criticism and curation with creativity. They develop great sensitivity to everything from literary styles to foods. In a decadent society, everyone is a cultivated critic, but these critics value style over substance. Their criticism is a cultural signal rather than a mastery of technique.

The decadent civilization is obsessed with taste as brand. It is sensitive to subtleties, but fails to see the large flaws in a work. Its creativity is microscopically innovative and macroscopically a failure. Its subtle refinements cannot compensate for the lack of vision. It has style, but no substance.

In a decadent civilization, everyone can be a critic or a collector of something, even as no one actually produces anything new until there are more critics and collectors than creators.

The decadent civilization spends much of its time and effort in a battle against apathy. It is forever "raising awareness" about something or other. Its sophisticated messaging however creates apathy as quickly as it erases it. Its messaging becomes more short term and more hysterical. Everything is a crisis and every message is pitched at the shrillest possible level. And the worst crime is not paying attention to its noise.

The outrage of today is quickly forgotten by the outrage of tomorrow. The organizers dream of sustaining awareness for real change only to dive into the next round of short-term messaging.

In a decadent civilization, life becomes a constant political battle. Everything is politicized and nothing is personal. The individual is constantly being trampled by mobs in the forum.

Barbaric and decadent civilizations are both so dishonest that they are incapable of seeing their own lies.

The barbaric civilization simply does not understand the concept of a fixed truth. The minds of its people are capable of understanding it as an abstract notion, but not of holding it in their minds on a specific subjective matter of interest to them. A barbarian can understand that stealing is wrong, but not that robbing you is wrong.

A decadent however can understand that stealing from you is wrong, but not that stealing itself is wrong. The decadent civilization does not have fixed truths. Its people are trained to apply mores to subjective situations, much as barbarians do naturally. While barbarians can evolve from the fixed truth to the fixed value, the decadents have devolved by rejecting the fixed truth.

Fixed truths have been deconstructed and routed through a complex array of relativistic values. A decadent understands that murdering this baby right here is wrong, but can be taught that it is acceptable to trade parts of dead babies. For decadents in an information society, definitions are very important. Decadents and barbarians have an empathy that is triggered by cultural signals.

For barbarians, these signals are honor-shame kin-based. For decadents, the cultural signals are group-based signals that are routed through complex intellectual justifications. These justifications create their own unrecognized hypocrisies. Both operate on the moral blindness of herd logic.

Groups are politicized and every moral code is routed through an identity politics based on insecurity. There are no morals, only sides. Responses are emotional to shortcut rational reasoning. Decadents function like barbarians, convinced of their own superiority with no self-awareness of their flaws.

A major difference between vigorous and decadent civilizations is objectivity and long term thinking. Decadents are incapable of either while vigorous civilizations thrive on both. If decadent civilizations could engage in long term thinking, they wouldn't be doomed. If they could engage in objective reasoning, they wouldn't be slaves to the media machines under a lawless tyranny.

The barbaric and vigorous civilizations speak little of sex and yet have high birth rates. Decadent civilizations are obsessed with sex and have few children. Perversions multiply in decadent civilizations, especially among the elites, who have the fewest morals, the most wealth and the greatest need for new taboos to violate. This is not a cause. It is only the symptom.

Gay marriage, like so much else, is the symptom of a decadent elite that confuses its own power and privilege with civil rights, that wants to legalize its illicit behaviors even though it only embarked on them because of their illicitness. In its perversity, it must find new taboos to violate each time an old one becomes socially accepted, before then embarking on a civil rights struggle to make its latest taboo socially acceptable.

Barbarians have large families and a tolerance for limited personal space. They speak loudly, are more casual about the deaths of their children, and view success in terms of power. Decadents speak softly, have a high need for personal space, have small families while obsessively controlling and coddling them and view success in terms of their own unattainable happiness. Vigorous civilizations have medium sized families, speak loudly, view success in terms of personal accomplishment, are not too concerned about personal space and value their children while allowing them to take risks.

Decadents want emotional rewards without commitments. As a result they are constantly unhappy. They pursue happiness as if it were a quality that could be permanently obtained through the right techniques, rather than a shifting response to the rigors of daily life. The more decadents do this, the more unstable they become, obsessively self-medicating and attempting to otherwise set the conditions of their happiness by controlling its application, and blaming others for their failure.

The more deranged decadents search for those who deny them their right to happiness by failing to accept them, reward them or otherwise please them until they find meaning only in attacking others. Behind their venom is narcissistic self-pity, they are searching for revenge against a cruel world when they are the authors of their own unhappiness.

The decadent civilization senses inwardly that it has no future. It becomes obsessed with apocalypses. Its people are always fixated on the next great threat to their health individually and the next great disaster that will bring their civilization to its knees. While vigorous civilizations boldly stride forward into the unknown, decadents are nervous and unsure. They veer between comfort zones and ritualized displays of destructive behavior that accomplish nothing.

Vigorous civilizations pursue meaningful risks. Decadent civilizations pursue meaningless ones. For a vigorous civilization, adventure ends with an accomplishment. For a decadent civilization, risk is the accomplishment.

The decadent civilization obsessively manages risk. Its layers of government are mainly dedicated to that task. Accomplishment in a decadent civilization becomes a difficult task because of the many lawyers of corporate and government risk management standing in the way of getting anything done.

Fear is the true currency of the decadent civilization. A corrupted fear that is used to expand a vast bureaucracy that claims to manage risk, but in reality manages who is allowed to circumvent it. Groups are stampeded into accepting new tiers of fear government and fear authority based on the risk that something might happen. And yet the source of the fear is never dealt with.

A vigorous civilization rushes out to deal with threats. A decadent civilization imprisons itself out of fear.

Decadence in a civilization can be reversed. While the barbarian civilization must evolve upward, the decadent civilization must undo the damage that is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. Unlike the barbarian civilization, the decadent civilization has most of the same infrastructure, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only its ideas have become corrupted. And ideas can be healed.

Barbarians advance by absorbing transformative new concepts. Decadents however must unlearn their new concepts by recognizing them for the dead ends that they are.

The Tribal War with Islam

2016-01-11T12:22:00.000-05:00

All wars are wars of equals.

That's true in the sense that each side attacks the other in terms of how it defines itself as an entity. States try to destroy other states. Religions fight other religions. Ethnic groups and races engage in genocide. They do this even when the other side does not see itself in the same terms.

The United States tried to fight guerrillas and terrorists as if they were modern states with their own industrial military organizations protecting their industrial core. This tactic made no sense in Vietnam or even Iraq because that wasn't the enemy we were facing. But states are built to fight other states. Tribes are built to fight other tribes. Religions are built to fight other religions.

The modern multicultural super-tolerant western state of this century takes stock of its strongest point, and decides that it's not the old industrial machine, which destroys the environment, its traditional heritage, which is problematic, or its problem solving skills, which are too technical, but its values of super-tolerant multiculturalism. And so it wages war on those insane terms.

The old Western model of war was brutal and efficient. Protect the industrial plant. Use it to churn out more military hardware. Smash the enemy. The new Western model of war is protect social harmony. Create more diversity. And the enemy will eventually be drawn into our global harmony.

When liberals take every terror attack as an opportunity to lecture us on the vital importance of not losing "our values", they are in their own warped and useless way waging war.

In the 20th century, war was distilled down to an industrial core. In the 21st century, the anti-industrial rebels who want to de-industrialize manufacturing while industrializing society, have distilled all that matters down to their values. In their confused world order, the terrorists are attacking "our values" and we in turn must attack "their values" with our superior "values".

Barely half the country accepts their construct of what "our values" are and they have no idea whatsoever what "their values" are, but they assume that just as our values are "our values" so too "their values" are also "our values". This is the sort of thing you do if you're an ideologue.

And also it's a natural human shortcut. It's human nature to assume that people different from you are just dumber, nastier versions of yourself who have the same basic goals and organization as you do.

Ideologues are most likely to assume that everyone agrees with their premises, but just hasn't been shown the right textbooks. And these days ideologues and their textbooks dominate everything.

To the left, Islam is an inefficient sort of Socialism dependent on medieval superstition and lacking modern idea. To Muslims, the left is an inefficient sort of Islam that's missing Allah, Mohammed and the Koran. It's all just a problem of explanations and textbooks.

The left plans to defeat ISIS with "our values" by which it means showing how effective our social harmony is, which it isn't, by refusing to actually fight Islamic terrorism. Eventually the Jihadists will give up their reactionary ways as the ordinary Muslims realizes that he has the same interests as the rest of the great rainbow coalition does. This hasn't even worked too well in Europe.

The left is a purely ideological entity and so it has reduced our countries and cultures to the transportable "our values". Despite Islam's ideological reach, it's not purely an ideological entity.

At the ground floor, Islam is tribal. The Iraqis viewed us as the American Tribe. Tribes raid each other. Their members lash out and kill each other over insults. They count coup on each other. They steal and humiliate each other's women. Tribes are nomadic and they are concerned with honor.

Tribes from Iraq, Syria and North Africa can come to Europe, set up their own territories, pile up loot and then humiliate the native women for New Year's Eve. And then laugh at the impotence of the European tribal authorities.

The Islamic no-go zones are seen primarily as religious, but they are also tribal. Islam incorporates both. Islamic migration also expands tribal territories. It's always been that way.

And this is also how Muslims fight us on a tribal level. They attack the honor of the European tribes. But it's not as if the Merkel government or any of the other European Socialist governments have any concept of honor anyway.

While European Socialists attempt to integrate them with "our values", the ungrateful integratees show that the systems have no honor on a tribal level and are not worth taking seriously.

Beyond the tribal, is the religious. In Islam, religion remains limited to the most primitive level of "My tribal deity Allah is stronger than your deity because we beat you up."

This is literally what Allahu Akbar means.

To the representatives of the secular West, religion is identical with "our values", which is to say that it contains nothing religious about it, certainly no claims which require divine validation or unique truths. Their religion is a spiritual background noise which affirms the essential position that we should be nice to each other while providing support for any leftist position of the moment.

No meaningful dialogue is possible between Allahu Akbar and "Our values" because the two are not speaking the same language except in one sense, both insist on absolute submission. But the left's demand for submission is based on the absolute moral superiority of "Our values". Islam literally means submission, but its moral superiority is a revealed truth based on Islam's military victories.

Islam is right, because it won. It won, because it's right. There's your cycle of violence in a nutshell.

Islam sanctified the tribal raid as a religious act and turned the dead into martyrs. That's Jihad. Terrorism incorporates both the tribal and the religious. Islamic missionary activity in the West also targets dissatisfied minorities, potential fifth columns, in the same manner as the original Arab Islamic conquests did. Even here, Islam unites tribal and religious tactics.

The final element of the tribal war is organizational. It is here that Islam attacks "Our values".

Tribes are forever quarreling. They are weakest at their points of mutual association. This is how Mohammed originally got his start. Islam expanded initially more through clever games of divide and conquer than military strategy.

To the Muslim mind, we are a series of fragile tribal associations. That is also how we appear to the "Our values" left. The "Our values" crowd thinks of the threat in terms of "radicalization", but the real threat is "integration". Mohammed did some of his best work by undermining from within.

To undermine a tribal association, you have to be a part of it. Then you have to raise grievances, find other dissatisfied allies and eventually promise them better treatment under Islam.

That's what Mohammed did. It's what his followers are doing today.

This is where groups like the Muslim Brotherhood play the long game while ISIS plays the short game.

The left's multicultural vision made this mess possible. It's also making it worse. The left despises tribal thinking and yet its entire political infrastructure is built on rewarding it. All Islamic organizations have had to do is built on the left's own work, joining its coalitions as Islamic groups, and then working to hijack them. The growing takeover of #BlackLivesMatter by Muslim groups is one example of the phenomenon.

Our enemies are not states and they will not fight us as states. To the extent that they are tribal, they will fight us as tribes. To the extent that they are religious, in a primitive sort of way, they will attack us that way. But the real problem is that we are no longer states either. Instead we are in the grip of a mystical deluded cult that squawks of "Our values" while tribalizing and dividing us to push through discredited economic and social policies. They have opened the gates to a cruel, backward enemy.

And in doing so, they have brought a tribal war into our own homelands.

The Progressive Panopticon of Political Correctness

2015-12-16T23:36:00.000-05:00

Around the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon.

Bentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as "subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government". He demanded that force be used to "teach this rebellious people" that "there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King".

After the "Peace of the King" failed in the United States, Bentham turned to his obsession with the Panopticon. The Panopticon would be a prison in which all the prisoners could be watched all the time to achieve, in Bentham's words, "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

Bentham's Panopticon never worked, but the internet has made the Panopticon and its ability to obtain "power over mind" a reality. In a "quantity hitherto without example".

Social media has made private discourse public. In the Wilson days of WWI, when hysteria was at its peak, people could be arrested for private conversations. But that was the exception, not the rule. It was only in the worst Communist societies that informants were so rife that private discourse was almost completely stifled. But the internet shreds the line between public and private.

The new informer doesn't file a report at the local KGB office. He participates in a social media collective which among its hobbies plucks some obscure "problematic" remark out of the social stream and turns its speaker into a target for a mob. A lynch hashtag is born and someone loses their job. All of this is done with the self-pitying catastrophic crybullying so typical of social justice warriors who scream that they're the victims even while they're gleefully destroying someone else's life.

It's no coincidence that this foul habit emerged out of Communist China where morality mobs targeted petty offenders on the internet in collective shaming rituals that sometimes escalated into violence or suicide. The Communist dictatorship that gave us the Cultural Revolution helped give birth to its hideous CyberStalinist offspring which enforces political correctness through bullying.

Social media made the surveillance society possible. Even in the early days of the internet, the metaphor of the Panopticon was revived to predict its future. Art students still continue to churn out laboriously pretentious projects involving surveillance cameras and faceless mannequins. But it's the voluntary participation in social media that provided material for surveillance.

The old internet was anonymous. The new internet was data hungry. Nearly every major dot com is built on collecting and making use of information about people. Google, Facebook and a hundred other companies offer free products in exchange for personal data. Free apps for smartphones are built on gaining access to your address book. Everyone is trying to build the biggest and most comprehensive database for selling ads and manipulating user behavior.

That is where the Panopticon really begins. Surveillance without intervention is voyeurism. Surveillance with intervention is tyranny. The awareness of surveillance changes behavior. That was the fundamental idea of the Panopticon. Surveillance alone was power. To rephrase Focault, "we become the principle of our own subjection." The awareness of surveillance changes how we live.

All tyrannies understood that to control people they had to follow the Panopticon's model in which the people were to always perceive themselves as being potentially under surveillance. It was the perception that mattered more than the reality, eliminated the difference between private and personal, transformed Homo Sapiens into Homo Sovieticus (or Homosos in the dissident jargon), a self-righteous hypocrite, a politically correct criminal to whom Doublethink was natural.

Social media makes it easy to impose collectivist virtue signaling behaviors. Get a rainbow avatar to celebrate gay marriage. Retweet this social justice clickbait to show you're outraged at the thing that "the internet" is outraged by. Demonstrate that you engage in goodthinkful social justice thoughts and are guiltfree of crimethink.

The echo chamber, the political bubble, is also a Panopticon. Herd behaviors are rewarded. Dissent is punished. No one is quite sure who on their friend list might turn on them, denounce them for some "problematic" remark or lack of enthusiasm for a cause, cripple their social networking, their careers and their social life. Panic in the herd is routine. A social justice social media message is somehow wrong. A joke turns out to be offensive. The 21st century Winston Smith begins to breathe hard, apologizes for his political error and vows to educate himself on proper intersectionality principles.

He edges closer to the telescreen which is always watching him and always shouting at him to pay attention. It's the "paying attention" that matters more than the message.

The less you think, the safer you are. In a politically correct society, every idea is potentially "problematic". The safest attitude is to pass on approved ideas in exactly the terms which they were uttered. Any independent thinking or deviation even in support of the cause is dangerous. It may be "Problematic". It may be "Doubleplusungood Crimethink". It's safer just to retweet. To express ambiguous outrage and support for whatever is on the timeline Telescreen. To just appear to be part of the collective "outrage of the internet", to shame someone else for Social Justice Crimethink.

Instead of being shamed yourself for some problematic social justice offense.

Orwell's 1984 envisioned the Telescreen as a Panopticon erasing the privacy of the home.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." But social media and social justice warriors make for a much more efficient erasure of not only personal space, but mental space.

Thought Policing is the goal of Political Correctness. Crowdsourcing it makes it possible for a small number of angry activists and their amateur imitators to terrorize a large population.

The left has always understood the supreme value of controlling discourse. The media manufactured a consensus, shaping public opinion by creating the illusion that its view was public opinion. When Obama says that X "is not who we are", he is manufacturing our consensus and imposing his value system as our own. Push polls, personal perspective and man-on-the-street stories help reinforce this artificial consensus by personalizing it. But the media was always a basically crude tool.

Most Americans get their news from the media, but distrust its biases. Jon Stewart and his imitators radicalized the media by making bias into the news and eliminating the line between entertainment, editorial commentary and information, even while castigating the media for exactly these habits. The media eagerly embraced Stewart's savaging by turning up the bias and virtue signaling to eleven.

But in a Panopticon, the guards are meant to see all the prisoners, but never to be seen. The media is always seen, but can never see in. The media could speak through its Telescreen, but its Big Brothers couldn't listen in. It could not force the public to participate in its discourse. Often the public just tuned out the more bothersome media agendas.

Social media can see in. It avoids the problems that the NSA and any government surveillance program faces trying to sift through a ton of data by crowdsourcing it to the activist informer. Everyone can be the KGB now. Everyone can not only love Big Brother, but be Big Brother.

At least for 15 minutes or so.

The left's ultimate goal is the total politicization of society by eliminating personal space. The USSR originally did not want to build kitchens in homes, because it wanted workers eating in cafeterias. The kitchen is a private family space. A cafeteria is a public space that could be controlled. Even when the cafeterias failed, families were kept in collective apartments where dozens of people lived together in mutual hostility and distrust. In such a space, nothing is private or personal.

To totally control the individual, it is necessary to completely eliminate his personal spaces, his capacity for authenticity and individuality. In such an environment, every man becomes a convict, a prisoner of a social collective, a drone in a hive and a cringing beast in a frightened herd.

That is the Panopticon. It's the world that political correctness is building for us. It's made possible by technology and the eagerness of the crybully to put up a new iron curtain for his safe space.

Political correctness politicizes every area of life from food to literature to entertainment to clothes. Nothing is apolitical and therefore nothing is personal. The individual cannot be allowed to exist. He must join the collective. No government has made the Panopticon work perfectly, but the collective can.

The left is simply the war of an ideological collective against the individual. It is the war of the political against the personal. It is the war of power against freedom. It is the war of the progressive Panopticon against the mind of man.

A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization

2015-08-02T01:31:00.000-04:00

Civilizations normally go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.

It's easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty's worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.

Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.

The barbaric civilization is the simplest of all. It runs on kinship. Pre-rational, it operates on explosions of emotion. It has no concept of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It holds life cheaply and kills casually. It loathes outsiders and has no universal laws. It is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery.

The decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively. Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are so mired in legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws do not mean what they say. Instead they must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is always in violation of some obscure laws. Life depends on a lawless dispensation from the law.

The crucial task of the law is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished. This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.

This holds true in every other area of life.

Interpretation is what the decadent civilization does best. While vigorous civilizations discover new things, decadent civilizations endlessly categorize and re-categorize them to accommodate intellectual fads.

The decadents are great categorizers. They know where everything should belong. They employ armies of bureaucrats to operate vast filing systems which never quite work as planned. They don't cure diseases. That's what vigorous civilizations do. But they do spend billions on medical record systems that never seem to be compatible with each other.

Decadents have a great deal of information and no idea what to do with it. The great task of decadent civilizations is a futile effort to organize all the information they have so that they can make use of it. The internet is the ultimate such mechanism and it is largely a failure as such. It has many entertaining and useful aspects, but it is actually becoming more disorganized with time, rather than less so. ObamaCare is another information organizational failure. So is the VA.

The decadent civilization is convinced that if it can amass enough information, its interpretations will be superior, but its information gathering techniques and its interpretative techniques are both fatally flawed by an inability to focus, by ideologically obsessions and societal corruption. Scientists may have more rapid access to more information, but the scientific community is more contaminated leading to worse results. Similarly, corruption undermines information gathering efforts from the start as projects are diverted to crony contractors by corrupt politicians.

Vigorous civilizations understand that a process must be kept clean by open debate. Decadent civilizations operate corrupt closed processes while convinced of their own innate superiority.

Decadent civilizations are less interested in discovering new things than in disproving old things. The corruption of the decadent civilizations handicaps its advancement. The middling talents at the helm rewrite history while justifying their misrule by denouncing the achievements of their vigorous ancestors.

Where the vigorous civilization disproves the old through its achievements, the decadent civilization considers the disproving of the old civilization to be an achievement in and of itself. Where the vigorous civilization outside its parent, the decadent civilization is still stuck fighting "Daddy".

If you examine our achievements today, they increasingly have much to do with the supposed social and intellectual progress we have made since the fifties. This progress is relative. It depends on how we view the fifties rather than what we actually have. Worse still, much of this progress is in outlook, rather than in reality. We are better because we are morally superior.

Despite the disdain for the past, decadent civilizations struggle to do more than deconstruct and then helplessly imitate the past. Chaotic deconstruction of past creative arts is followed by retro copying of them, first ironically and then earnestly. Nostalgia becomes the central industry of a civilization increasingly incapable of making its own culture.

The central cultural critique becomes updating older works to more politically correct forms. A classic character is made black or gay. Problems with diversity or sexism are tackled. The critic becomes a commissar whose job is to sanctify the transformation of an old politically incorrect work as politically correct. That is the role of the social justice warrior.

All this energy makes it appear as if there is cultural ferment when nothing is actually being produced. Instead older works are being "cleaned up" in keeping with new social values by a civilization that frantically chews up the past in a desire to forget the problems of the present.

People living in decadent civilization have a greater need for entertainment due to leisure time, extended adolescence and the breakup of the family. But their lack of meaningful work, family engagement and adult responsibilities leaves them increasingly less able to produce it. Instead they become children putting together pieces of stories that "Daddy" once told them while taking the credit.

Decadents confuse criticism and curation with creativity. They develop great sensitivity to everything from literary styles to foods. In a decadent society, everyone is a cultivated critic, but these critics value style over substance. Their criticism is a cultural signal rather than a mastery of technique. The decadent civilization is obsessed with taste as brand. It is sensitive to subtleties, but fails to see the large flaws in a work. Its creativity is microscopically innovative and macroscopically a failure. Its subtle refinements cannot compensate for the lack of vision.

In a decadent civilization, everyone can be a critic or a collector of something, even as no one actually produces anything new until there are more critics and collectors than creators.

The decadent civilization spends much of its time and effort in a battle against apathy. It is forever "raising awareness" about something or other. Its sophisticated messaging however creates apathy as quickly as it erases it. Its messaging becomes more short term and more hysterical. Everything is a crisis and every message is pitched at the highest possible level.

The outrage of today is quickly forgotten by the outrage of tomorrow. The organizers dream of sustaining awareness for real change only to dive into the next round of short-term messaging.

In a decadent civilization, everyone is always fighting a political battle, while the real changes are orchestrated by power groups behind the scenes and presented as fait accomplis to a bewildered public.And most of what is debated is a distraction from what truly matters.

Barbaric and decadent civilizations are both so dishonest that they are incapable of seeing their own lies.

The barbaric civilization simply does not understand the concept of a fixed truth. The minds of its people are capable of understanding it as an abstract notion, but not of holding it in their minds on a specific subjective matter of interest to them. A barbarian can understand that stealing is wrong, but not that robbing you is wrong.

A decadent however can understand that stealing from you is wrong, but not that stealing itself is wrong. The decadent civilization does not have fixed truths. Its people are trained to apply mores to subjective situations, much as barbarians do naturally. While barbarians can evolve from the fixed truth to the fixed value, the decadents have devolved by rejecting the fixed truth.

Fixed truths have been deconstructed and routed through a complex array of relativistic values. A decadent understands that murdering this baby right here is wrong, but can be taught that it is acceptable to trade parts of dead fetuses. For decadents in an information society, definitions are very important. Decadents and barbarians have an empathy that is triggered by cultural signals.

For barbarians, these signals are honor-shame kin-based. For decadents, the cultural signals are more complex group-based signals that are routed through complex intellectual justifications. These justifications naturally create their own unrecognized hypocrisies. Enemy civilians killed in a Republican's war are a horrific atrocity. Those killed in a Democrat's war don't exist.

Groups are politicized and every moral code is routed through an identity politics based on insecurity. There are no morals, only sides. Responses are emotional to shortcut rational reasoning. Decadents function like barbarians, not because they are barbarians, but because their minds have been wired in complex ways by brilliantly dishonest men in academia to reduce them to barbarians.

A major difference between vigorous and decadent civilizations is objectivity and long term thinking. Decadents are incapable of either while vigorous civilizations thrive on both. If decadent civilizations could engage in long term thinking, they wouldn't be doomed. If they could engage in objective reasoning, they wouldn't be slaves to the media machines under a lawless tyranny.

The barbaric and vigorous civilizations speak little of sex and yet have high birth rates. Decadent civilizations are obsessed with sex and have few children. Perversions multiply in decadent civilizations, especially among the elites, who have the fewest morals, the most wealth and the greatest need for new taboos to violate. This is not a cause. It is only the symptom.

Gay marriage, like so much else, is the symptom of a decadent elite that confuses its own power and privilege with civil rights, that wants to legalize its illicit behaviors even though it only embarked on them because of their illicitness. In its perversity, it must find new taboos to violate each time an old one becomes socially accepted, before then embarking on a civil rights struggle to make its latest taboo socially acceptable so that one day it's gay marriage and the next it's men in dresses.

Barbarians have large families and a tolerance for limited personal space. They speak loudly, are more casual about the deaths of their children, and view success in terms of power. Decadents speak softly, have a high need for personal space, have small families while playing helicopter parents and view success in terms of their own unattainable happiness. Vigorous civilizations have medium sized families, speak loudly, view success in terms of personal accomplishment, are not too concerned about personal space and value their children while allowing them to take risks.

Decadents want emotional rewards without commitments. As a result they are constantly unhappy. They pursue happiness as if it were a quality that could be permanently obtained through the right techniques, rather than a shifting response to the rigors of daily life. The more decadents do this, the more unstable they become, obsessively self-medicating and attempting to otherwise set the conditions of their happiness by controlling its application, and blaming others for their failure.

The more deranged decadents search for those who deny them their right to happiness by failing to accept them, reward them or otherwise please them until they find meaning only in attacking others. Behind their venom is narcissistic self-pity, they are searching for revenge against a cruel world when they are the authors of their own unhappiness.

The decadent civilization senses inwardly that it has no future. It becomes obsessed with apocalypses. Its people are always fixated on the next great threat to their health individually and the next great disaster that will bring their civilization to its knees. While vigorous civilizations boldly stride forward into the unknown, decadents are nervous and unsure. They veer between comfort zones and ritualized displays of destructive behavior that accomplish nothing except the illusion of freedom.

Vigorous civilizations pursue meaningful risks. Decadent civilizations pursue meaningless ones. For a vigorous civilization, adventure ends with an accomplishment. For a decadent civilization, risk is the accomplishment.

The decadent civilization obsessively manages risk. Its layers of government are mainly dedicated to that task. Accomplishment in a decadent civilization becomes a difficult task because of the many lawyers of corporate and government risk management standing in the way of getting anything done.

Fear is the true currency of the decadent civilization. A corrupted fear that is used to expand a vast bureaucracy that claims to manage risk, but in reality manages who is allowed to circumvent it. Groups are stampeded into accepting new tiers of fear government and fear authority based on the risk that something might happen. And yet the source of the fear is never dealt with.

A vigorous civilization rushes out to deal with threats. A decadent civilization imprisons itself out of fear.

Decadence in a civilization can be reversed. While the barbarian civilization must evolve upward, the decadent civilization must undo the damage that is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. Unlike the barbarian civilization, the decadent civilization has most of the same infrastructure, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only its ideas have become corrupted.

And even this deeper corruption is largely limited to the elites and the professional classes, while the rest of the civilization has experienced only a surface corruption that is easily wiped away.

The difficulty is however structural. A decadent civilization becomes more top-down with each year. And the source of the corruption is at the top. Removing the source of the corruption requires either removing all or almost all of the elites, and sizable sections of the professional classes as well. Or a campaign of ideas that transforms them as fundamentally as they were transformed.

Either is a daunting proposition. Both require a fundamental transformation, but the former transformation is structural, a revolution that changes how a civilization is run, displacing elites across all the tiers of society, while the latter is a revolution of ideas.

This Culture War We're In

2015-04-01T15:36:00.000-04:00

How are wars won?

To win a war you don't need to kill every soldier on the other side. What you need to do is destroy the other army as an organized force. You destroy the ability of the officers to command and the morale of the men. You destroy their perception of the worth of their side and of their own self-worth.

All wars are culture wars. To win you must destroy the values of the other side. (That is one reason why we're losing to Islam no matter how many times we beat them on the battlefield.) You must destroy their sense of purpose and the values instilled in them to break them as an organization.

That is what the left has been doing to us.

This culture war we're in is slow and subtle. It's not always as loud and as obvious as the counterculture was. The purpose of the counterculture was to shatter the dominant culture. Once that was done, the culture could be slowly cannibalized at will until the counterculture became the culture. And then it was no longer about freedom or free anything, those were the disruptive tools used to drive youth recruitment with a facade of anarchy, and it became about conformity and control. This culture of conformity and control is still being sold as 'rebellious' when it's just the establishment.

We no longer have a culture. We have a counterculture that occasionally masquerades as the culture.

But it's not over yet. A culture war destroys the culture of the other side because that is the source of its values. To completely destroy the other side, its values must be destroyed as an abstract, its organization must be destroyed to prevent those values from being conveyed and the individual's own values must be destroyed, in that order.

Destroying the values of every single individual is the most difficult part of this project. Destroying values as an abstract idea is the easiest. That's why the left has made its greatest gains there.

Abstract ideas can be torn down. It's not hard. Any college freshman can tear down a set of ideas, honestly or dishonestly. Indeed much of the purpose of modern education is equipping students to destroy the ideas and values of their parents (but obviously not those of their educators). What is difficult is using that to destroy the culture that is based on those ideas.

This is not an intellectual debate. People are defined by their values. They gain strength and identity from those values. To defeat them, you must devalue their sense of self. You must convince them that what they saw as worthwhile is really worthless. That will destroy their resistance and individualism.

The left attacked our culture in order to destroy our communities and then finish us off as individuals.

Americans believe that they are exceptional because their country is exceptional. So the left eagerly swarms to argue that America is not exceptional, except maybe that it's exceptionally bad.

Americans believe that individuals succeed with hard work. Obama and Elizabeth Warren bray that "You didn't build that."

Americans believe in religion and family. The left sets out to destroy them by proving that these institutions are evil and oppressive. Religious leaders are pedophiles. The family is setting for abuse that makes gay people feel bad. When the dust settlers, the only 'good' religion and family are the kind defined by the left. Having destroyed the existing system of organization, the left replaces it with its own. That is the ultimate goal of a culture war. Not mere destruction, but absolute power.

The culture war begins by attacking abstract ideas. Then it attacks organizations. Then it attacks people.

By attacking the ideas, it undermines the organizations based on them so that it can seize control of them or destroy them. Once that's done, it controls a sector of society and begins enforcing its conformity agenda on individuals. Much of that is underway. The war is drilling down to the individual level. We are approaching the tyranny threshold.

At the individual level, the goal of the culture war is to destroy your will to resist them. The left has many tools for doing this.

It will shame you. It will bully you. It will cause you to despair. It will convince you that your cause is hopeless. It will urge you to turn on each other. It will use your children against you. It will show you that what you believe in is a lie. It will make you question your sense of right and wrong.

All of these serve their evil ends.

The most important thing to understand about this phase of the culture war is that the left's goal is to break you as an individual, to take away your values and to replace them with their own. If it cannot do these things, it will try to destroy you and even use you as a cautionary tale to warn others.

This war may be fought with social media or in classrooms, it may be fought by bureaucrats with pens and by movie stars in front of cameras, but it's not all that different from a conqueror and his army of brutes riding into a village and enforcing his own rule of law. The forms are different, but the underlying dynamic is the same. We are being conquered. And we continue to resist.

The left is not fighting this as a war of ideas. It attacks the area of least resistance with whatever slogan or argument is most convenient at the time. Don't debate its ideas. Indict its hypocrisy. It mocks the values of others, but demands that what is sacred to it be off limits. This is a weakness. Don't defend your own values. Attack its values. You aren't the establishment. You lost. You're the rebels. Be rebellious. They are the owners. Wreck what they have made without counting the cost.

The left is not an organic entity. It is a pyramid of organizations and institutions. It needs the support of billion dollar entertainment and media industries. Its community organizers need jobs with six figure salaries. The left is destroying a civilization that it cannot survive without. It is an artificial entity that is weak and vulnerable in ways that the organic systems it has declared war on, such as the family, are not.

The left is not human. It is a system.

It is a system of control. A system of organization. A system of indoctrination. Destroy the system and the left dies. Destroy the flow of wealth and the control of ideas and it withers.

Like every system, the left seeks to control organic human institutions. It fancies itself superior to them when it is actually a parasite living on their backs.

There are only two possible futures. Either the left will destroy itself. Or we will destroy it.

The only question is the human cost of the struggle. We have already gotten a taste of the cost of their tyranny. It will get worse and worse. Ask a citizen of the Soviet Union in 1933. But resistance is not simply about winning fights. It is about the struggle of the mind and the struggle of the soul.

Winning is not always about beating the enemy. Sometimes it is about maintaining who you are despite it. It is about surviving in gulags and concentration camps. It is about passing on your values despite the totalitarian state growing around you.

It is a spiritual resistance. It is a resistance of the mind.

We are reaching the point where the left is running out of Republican "organizations" to fight. There is no conservative organization on a large scale. Only a hollow business party, its crony capitalist attachments and its stunted media. The left will have to fight people if it wants to completely win.

It will have to stamp out all opposition to secure its totalitarian rule. That is what it's doing now.

Above all else, maintain your own values and your own sense of self-worth in this conflict. The left cannot win until it has destroyed your morale. To win this war, it has to finish the job of breaking the society by destroying any sources of resistance that might coalesce into a new organization.

That is why it was so threatened by the Tea Party. That is why it is so obsessed with destroying and controlling decentralized religious groups. The remnants of the establishment are no threat to it. The Republican Party and mainstream leaders don't even know there's a war on. They've already lost.

The left has outmaneuvered GOP commanders. They still have plenty of troops, but no initiative. Their command lacks flexibility. They don't know how to use their forces and they're still playing by outdated rules of chivalry that the other side does not follow. They're a 19th century European cavalry formation and the left is the Viet Cong. They have long ceased to be a threat to the left.

What the left is worried about is that some of the remnants of the army that they shattered will gather together into new organizations with new tactics and strike them hard using guerrilla tactics. It's not afraid of the conservative establishment. It remains worried about a populist right that stops worrying about being nice or following the rules and hits them unpredictably and remorselessly.

It wasn't afraid of John McCain. It was afraid of Andrew Breitbart.

You are a cultural guerrilla in a war you never chose. You are an anonymous soldier who has been betrayed by his leaders. And you are a much bigger threat than they ever were.

Armies like fighting other armies. Armies are predictable. A Republican Party is a slow-moving elephant. It isn't a threat. It's easy to see where it's going and what it will do. It may win a battle or two, but it can't go far and it will quickly tire itself out. It has small goals and is satisfied with holding ground. It isn't interested in conquest.

No one likes fighting guerrillas. They're hard to find and you can never set aside your worries and enjoy the spoils of victory when they're around. And the left wants to enjoy its spoils of victory.

To destroy guerrillas, you either have to hunt them all down or destroy their values, the things they value, the hope that moves them forward and the goals they aim to achieve.

The left is good at tearing down a culture. But its swath of destruction creates cultural guerrillas who carry their culture with them. Men and women whose values cannot be broken by pop culture and social media mobs. When those men and women form families and communities, they become the counter-culture. And the final phase of this culture war will be between them and the left.

Either they will win. Or the West will die.

A culture war is a war of values. It is a war of worth. The left seeks to destroy you by degrading the things that you value. It knows that it cannot dominate you as an individual until you abandon your sources of strength. Your weapons are those strengths. Your values are your resistance. Even if you cannot organize, to endure is also an act of resistance. To hold on to your values is a victory.

This culture war we're in will not be won tomorrow, but it may be lost tomorrow. Cultures have vanished before and been forgotten. The culture that produced the airplane, that stood on the moon, that changed the world, does not deserve be buried under a cringing crawling horde of commissars.

But we do not get what we deserve. We get what we are willing to fight for.

Wars are not always won with bullets. Armies are expensive. Causes take momentum to maintain. Cultures can outlast organizations. And it is an organization that we are at war with.

The left does not have an authentic culture. Its counter-culture culture is a machine of destruction, a clumsily slapped-together assemblage of tools for cracking open, destroying and dominating people. A collection of lies and excuses, smears and bad habits, laced over with cultural appropriation and the fetisihization of the minority 'Other' as its sole source of spirituality.

It has no tradition. It has no heritage. It has no culture. It's a virus, not an organism. It is utterly worthless and, like a virus, will not survive the destruction of its host.

It is our task to outlive it, if we cannot defeat it. It is our job to maintain our culture against its attacks. And it is our mission to expose it for what it is, a phantom made up of a million excuses for power. Its weapon is to destroy everything that gives us a sense of worth because it is a thing of no worth. It has nothing. We have everything. Its activists are a zombie army trying to fill their maws with something by destroying us because they have nothing. And they will always have nothing.

The left isn't strong. It's weak. It isn't moral, it's completely amoral. It isn't replacing our culture with something better. It's replacing it with an engine for destroying our culture. Once that's done, it will collapse as thoroughly as its regimes always have because they had nothing to keep them going.

It's not our cure. It's our disease. It's not a culture, it's an anti-culture. It's not a people, it's a system. It's an organization and those can be taken apart.

We are in the same place that the left was a century ago. We lack its organization, but we don't need its artificial organizations. Our organizations are organic. To win, they have to completely dominate us with their organization. If we can maintain our organic organizations, our families, our communities and our religious and cultural groups, our arts and our skills, then we will have the natural building blocks for a resistance against them. Our lives are a natural resistance.

By being who we are in the face of their oppression, we become cultural guerrillas. Only our ability to maintain our organic organizations will make an ongoing resistance possible.

There is no party. There is no movement. We are all there is. And we had better make the most of it.

Our family is our army. Our religion and our convictions are our organization. Our mind is our weapon. Our battle is keeping these alive. Every battle we win organizes us, radicalizes us and builds us into a movement, a resistance of conviction and an organization of principle.

We are a human movement. Our resistance to the system defines us. Our victory will be a human victory. We will defeat the system by staying human, by keeping our families and our faith.

We will destroy the system by refusing to be controlled by it. We are not planning a revolution. Our lives are the revolution.

Our Consensus Rulers

2014-06-29T00:35:00.001-04:00

Every society is ruled by a consensus. The consensus rarely comes from the bottom up. Usually it's imposed from the top down.

The consensus is what the people running things believe. It's their equivalent of common sense.

The United States is not run by the voters. It's not run by the people. It's run by a consensus. That consensus is what the elites think is true. That consensus is not exactly the same among Democrats and Republicans, but it does overlap in significant ways.

The first point of the consensus is that bigger institutions are better because they are smarter. This isn't limited just to government. It also encompasses the corporate world. And the merger of governments, corporations, academics and non-profits into one large conglomeration of consensus.

The movement of executives from the non-profit, to the political to the corporate spheres, in no particular order, is really how our society is run. Even when each group remains in its own sphere, they make interdependent decisions with companies and government institutions acting as executive leaders and treating non-profits and academics as the expert class.

Pull back and we're run by a single giant corporation whose leadership is very complicated and competitive, but whose leaders come from a common culture and who call on the consensus for their ideas.

Using elections to shift that consensus is very difficult because at the top the consensus extends across both parties and much of the governing of the consensus is not subject to voter review.

You can elect Congressman Y to represent your interests. But the system isn't run by Congressman Y. It is highly unlikely that Congressman Y will ever be president. Even if Congressman Y becomes a Senator, he will have to win over donors whose worldview is a product of the consensus. If he manages to make it to the Senate without accepting the consensus, his legislation, should any of it make it past the Consensus Senators, will then be dumped into a pile managed by Consensus regulators and Consensus Federal judges who will reject it if doesn't meet the Consensus.

That's the interdependency of the Consensus. It's a single massive system made up of individuals who are diverse in demographics, but share the viewpoints of the Consensus or shut up about it.

Making the Consensus bigger has made American government and business extremely inefficient. It's why we can't seem to get anything done anymore and our only products that matter come from the occasional young visionary who challenges the system with a new company. But it also makes it very hard to beat.

The Consensus is constantly increasing in size. The growth impoverishes America, puts it deeper into debt and makes it less competitive. But it also makes the Consensus unchallengeable. The parasite is killing the host.

The second point though is that the Consensus is a parasite that thinks it is the host and that Americans are the parasite.

Maintaining the Consensus requires unhealthy doses of contempt for the people. The central article of the Consensus is that it can make life better by controlling people. It's not an idea that can be sustained without believing that most people are basically inferior.

Considering that the Consensus does draw from an elite, Ivy League grads, aggressive businessmen and financial geniuses, it's not extraordinary that its members would think this way. And yet the country's Founders, who were also the elite, believed in crowdsourcing politics long before the existence of Wikipedia. Meanwhile today's elite, heavily spiced by the Dot Com crowd, dismisses the idea of allowing the people to run their own lives.

The shift from Power to the People to Technocracy took place after the Constitution, otherwise our founding documents would look a good deal more like those of some Latin American banana republic that promises everything from government day care to weight loss health clinics. But Technocracy has been in the driver's seat for most of the 20th Century.

The members of the Consensus extrapolate from their own leadership skills and success a chilling contempt for the ordinary person and a certainty that he can and should be manipulated. It never occurs to them to think otherwise. Their experiences with their voters and their employees only reinforces their certainty that the ordinary person is unfit.

The various layers of government bureaucracy, from the DMV clerk to the local cop, share this same certainty. The more regulations they have to learn, the more their jobs seem to be those of experts coping with the ignorant masses. They become natural members of the Consensus because they have to know ten thousand regulations to do their job and the irritating public doesn't know any of them.

The expert class of the Consensus expands with each regulation and freedom contracts with each regulation.

The voter isn't in charge of the expert class, because the expert class deems itself superior in knowledge and expertise. Voting becomes a ritual that the expert class finds irritating. And the number of expert classes are constantly growing. Unionized expert classes form powerful guilds immune to outside pressure. Academic expert classes control much of public life through ideas that are filtered down into public policy.

The ordinary American is no longer in charge of anything, including his own life. He is an employee and client of the Consensus. The two terms are largely interchangeable in this context. He works for a vast paternalistic force which gives him money and takes his money, but manipulates the entire system around him so that he lives within a company store that encompasses everything from his grocery shopping to his health care.

This is Unamerican, some might say, but the Consensus is Unamerican.

The members of the Consensus are not nationalists. They are not patriots. They are too "smart" for that. To the extent that they celebrate America, it is not for its history or its people, but for its "ideals". These ideals are, like regulations, existing apart from culture and capable of applying to anyone anywhere.

America can be "transplanted" anywhere was the firm belief of 20th century progressives. The Iraq War was only the latest reminder that it really cannot. But we're still fighting nation building wars on the premise that any people anywhere can be turned into good citizens with a dose of the right ideals.

The Consensus isn't for America. It's for the world. It cares as much about Americans as it does about Guatemalans or Pakistanis. Its members vacation and live around the world and see themselves as human beings first and members of a people or a nation second. They have a "higher citizenship" in humanity. They will take what is good about America and apply it elsewhere.

What do they believe in? What are their ideals? They believe in efficiency. They believe in justice. They believe that everything can be constantly improved until it is perfected in a perpetual process of social evolution. They are not religious. Their religion is that of the factory floor. Their faith is in their own godhood as experts. They believe that man came from apes and that someone has to see to it that he behaves like a good ape, rather than a bad ape.

Their faith in their own efficiency is vastly misguided. Like their 20th century forebears, they love the taste of efficiency, the design and sensibility of it, but they pay little attention to how well it works. They will inefficiently spend vast amounts of time and effort to improve something by a fraction of a tick.

A kinder word for their obsessiveness would be control freaks.

Green Energy's obsession with efficiency is largely this sort of madness in which vast amounts of effort are expended to save a fraction of the total of that effort. But the Consensus dislikes mess. It thought that landfills were messy and wasteful so it championed recycling and it made money from recycling without there being any actual need for it.

If the Consensus were a person, it would be the sort of man who would spent ten times as much on a device because of the pointless ad copy beneath it that appears to give it status and polish. Except that it's really our money that the Consensus is spending.

The Consensus is liberal. The Republican and Democratic wings of the Consensus don't differ on whether they are liberal, but how far to the left they are willing to go. They all agree on being socially liberal on gay rights, the right kind of drug use and abortion, while cracking down on obesity, smoking and the wrong kind of drug use.

The distinctions there are class signifiers and the Consensus is all about class.

Despite some of the anti-corporate talk, the Consensus is very much corporate. Its anti-corporate talk is invariably either empty populist rhetoric or a power play among members of the Consensus. The Consensus likes bright and shiny things. Its favorite companies are government subsidized or investor subsidized and make no actual money, but promise to make money someday.

The members of the Consensus look down on actual money as vulgar. They believe that money should be used for higher purposes. Even their successful businessmen are often dealers in intangibles. They rarely engage in anything as vulgar as making things. Instead they manipulate data, financial or personal, they provide services to companies you have heard of, even though you have never heard of their companies, they manipulate the economy and markets, and make fortunes. And they feel, often rightly, that their money is unearned and that everyone else should feel the same way.

They don't think of themselves as Socialists. They think of the word as outmoded. An "Othering" label that is most likely to be used by Tea Party members or a Bircher. They may be Socialists, but they wouldn't use the word. No more than a doctor would call himself a Bonesetter or a gay man would call himself a Sodomite.

They see themselves as modern, sleek and efficient people who rely on expert knowledge to advance society. They don't leaf through dusty copies of Marx and have never heard of Fourier. They accept the premises and most of the conclusions of Socialism without ever being aware of the origins of the theories they embrace. This is typical of the Consensus. It is unknowingly and unthinkingly left-wing.

The Consensus' executives like to believe that they accept the "correct" conclusions. They are big on science and even bigger on pie charts. The policies that they like convince people to change their behavior for the better. Socialism to them sounds like radicals with awkward glasses screaming at people about agriculture. They don't see themselves having anything in common with that nonsense.

Its executives dabble in politics without understanding the ideas behind their policies. They have nothing but blind spots and their greatest blind spot is believing that their superiority will prevent them from making mistakes and makes them better able to make decisions about people's lives. It is this very certainty that has made them such excellent puppets of the left's Consensus expert class.

The Consensus can only be beaten in a war of organizations and ideas. Like every other ruling class, it has to be challenged and exposed as an oppressive failure, membership in it has to be reduced to an abusive joke. An elite only falls to revolution or to national contempt. Most Americans already hold government in contempt, but they do not understand that what they hate about Washington D.C. is really the Consensus. What they find ridiculous about national waste and petty tyranny is really the policies of the Consensus.

What is wrong with America is the Consensus. The only way to fix it is to shatter the Consensus.

The Muslim Suicide Convert

2014-01-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

Both of the suicide bombers who struck in Russia were Muslim converts. They follow a long string of Muslim terrorist converts, including the murderers of British soldier Lee Rigby who were sentenced last month and Terry Lee Loewen who plotted to car bomb the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport that same month.

Muslim converts engage in terrorism at a higher rate than Muslims. It's gotten so bad that converting to Islam is almost a form of suicide.

The popular theory is that Muslim terrorist groups use converts because they blend in better. But in most Western countries, screening by race is nearly illegal and in even in targeted countries where it isn’t, there are usually many members of Muslim ethnic groups in most major cities.

There are four reasons for the rise of the Muslim Suicide Convert. Muslim converts are gullible, fanatical, suicidal and expendable.

Let's start with the last one first. Muslims usually come from tribal cultures with extended family groups. Despite its claims of transnationalism and multiculturalism, Islam is an ethnic religion with the descendants of Mohammed elevated over everyone else, the families in the region of his first conquests elevated over other Arabs, Arabs elevated over non-Arabs, Asian Muslims over African Muslims and African Muslims over Western converts to Islam.

A convert to Islam is lowest on the totem pole because he has no family group. In a tribal society, not having a family connection makes you an outsider and expendable. A Muslim who Jihads himself to death creates a hole in the tribal network of arranged cousin marriages, illegal business arrangements and other extended family support structures. A Muslim convert was never part of the network unless he married into it. And even then he can easily be unplugged because he has no common ancestry with them.

In a Muslim country, he can be killed without having to pay blood price. In a Western country, he can be sent off to die without the "tribe" of Pakistanis or Egyptians who built the mosques and hired the Imams who converted him and convinced him to kill non-Muslims being affected by his death.

He is expendable.

Converts are not part of the family networks of the Muslim settlers in their Western diasporas. That makes them useful cannon fodder. If they are captured, the mosque denies all responsibility and blames the internet even though most mosques and Muslim student groups host those same speakers who "radicalize" converts over the internet at their own facilities and events.

Muslim converts are also suicidal.

The act of conversion is a form of death. It destroys the entire cultural and faith background of the individual. It cuts him off from his family, his people and his way of life. Conversion can be constructive, but it should never be forgotten that it is also destructive.

The Muslim convert has been trying to kill himself all his life to some degree, to destroy the essence of what he is to overcome that perceived flaw preventing him from being happy and living a worthwhile life. Islam is his drug and alcohol abuse, his meaningless sex and his cult. It is how he punishes himself hoping to find redemption in self-destruction and meaning in the sacrifice of the self to the first utterly devouring and consuming thing that comes along.

Converts to Islam often discuss feeling empty. They expect Islam to fill the void within them and when it does not, they are told that the failure is theirs.

The Muslim convert finds Islam in a search for fulfillment and then still feeling unfulfilled, seeks out its "purer" forms whose commitment to Jihadist violence is more overt. The violence of their rhetoric and the force of their commitment briefly feel like fulfillment, but then dissatisfaction sets in again. Told to blame himself for this final failure, the Muslim Suicide Convert is encouraged to make his final kamikaze run hoping to find the meaning and fulfillment in the afterlife that evaded him in this life.

Muslim converts have personal problems that they try to treat with Islam the way that sufferers from conventional diseases try to treat their illnesses with phony cures. Muslim clerics promise that Islam will solve the personal problems of non-Muslims and non-Muslim societies, but like so many criminal gurus, they are peddling phony cures that kill the patient.

That is one reason why Muslim converts are fanatical. Another reason is that they have no baseline. Converts plunge into another religion and culture as into deep water.

Muslims have learned to make the necessary compromises with their fanatical religion that make their lives livable. That is why most of them do not go out and blow themselves up; instead they undermine Western societies in slower and steadier ways through demographics, disinformation and political influence.

The Muslim Suicide Convert seeks an uncompromising purity. He rejects the compromises that Muslims have learned to make over the centuries. Seeking the core revelation in a religion of death; he finds that revelation only in death. The truth of Islam is in its killing fields. It preaches war for power and paradise. The Muslim convert who searches for its essence finds a grinning skull in the desert sands and hurries to emulate its terrible example.

Finally, Muslim converts are gullible. The natives of every land have games that they play with tourists, relying on their unfamiliarity with another culture to mislead them and trick them. Muslim converts are strangers in a strange land, slowly learning a foreign way of life and pathetically eager to be accepted by another culture. It is all too easy for Muslim clerics to lead them down the garden path to the suicide bomber’s paradise by offering and withholding affection until they are willing to do anything to belong.

Muslim Suicide Converts are enlisted in a war the way that men have been enlisted in wars throughout the ages with appeals to patriotism, strategic shaming, tales of outrageous atrocities and myths of incredible heroism. The Muslim clerics, like so many military recruiters before them, tailor their pitch to the disposable people who are least likely to question orders and the least likely to be missed.

Muslim recruiters thrive on campus for the same reasons as cult recruiters and leftist academics.

The modern university is a good place to find insecure young people questioning everything that they believe in and unsure of what to do when they have destroyed everything they were and found that their impulse to ridicule and tear down everything does not fulfill the human need for something to believe in. It is where young men and women seeking to find something beyond their limits, experimenting with and becoming someone they are not and feeling inward guilt and loss at the abandonment of their old selves and their old values can be hunted and trapped.

Into this universe of doubt, the Muslim cleric intrudes with his false offer of certainty, with the air of the victim, the badge of the underdog, the mysticism of the east and the romance of the grass, that like the terrorist flags that wave among it, always grows greener on the other side of the world.

Westernized Muslims are urged to recommit to Islam, to steel themselves for the coming conflict between the civilizations of the sword and the microchip, to purge themselves of Western culture, embrace the black flags and atone for their beers they drank, the girls they kissed and the songs they sang with the death screams of sirens and the blood of their non-Muslim friends and neighbors.

The seduction of the non-Muslim runs more slowly but surely. The dissatisfied and unhappy, those trained by a liberal culture contemptuous of its own values and traditions to instinctively value non-Western spirituality over their own "materialistic" and "imperialistic" religions, are lured in.

The children of an intellectual tradition that taught them to reject absolutes of any kind as the worst sin of the mind, embrace with fervor an absolutism that calls for their deaths and the death of the world. They kill and die, destroying their own bodies poisoned by their infidel heritage and in dying, inflict as much harm as they can on the infidel society whose destruction their cult seeks.

The Muslim Suicide Convert embraces his role as the vanguard of a spiritual world order, destroying the oppressive materialism of the world to make way for the superior rule of Islamic law, believing that he can only overcome his own materialism by destroying his material substance and the material substance of the society that nurtured someone as unworthy as him in the ultimate act of submission that throbs with the death drive of the Islamic religion of submission

Only by destroying his physical being and the physical being of his society, does the Muslim Suicide Convert expect to achieve the transcendence of his physicality and the fulfillment that the gross substance of his flesh barred him from. His suicide is also a national suicide. It is the extension of the national suicide, the act of profound and terrible self-destruction that brought the Muslim preachers who worked on his mind into the country and into its universities.

The Muslim Suicide Convert, like his Islam-friendly liberal society, kills himself and his society to atone for its materialism, reaching instead for a material paradise of virgin demon women, young boys serving wine and rivers and hills made of the bounties of seventh century Arabia, drowning his guilt in death and his hope for eternity in the innocent blood of his victims.

The crime he commits is not his alone. It is not only that of the Imams who turned him, who preached at him and poisoned his heart. It is not only that of the Saudis and Qataris who funded them, the Muslim diasporas who try to have it both ways balancing Western materialism and Muslim terrorism in ways that profit them most and the scowling men who ushered in his final stage of life in some dirty apartment in a failed industrial town or basement mosque where sellers of cheap food gather on their rugs and gossip about their cousins and their governments.

It is also that of the political leaders who welcomed in the Islamic cultural engine of destruction that has been assembled and turned on its cities, sputtering to life with clouds of black smoke, belching out mosques and mega-mosques run by the grimmest men of the theological academies of Mohammedanism, religious feuds and warriors, bombs and beheadings, restarting the process that filled the desert with armed riders and corpses.

No suicide bomber acts alone. It is not only his hand or the hand of the remote handler or that of the distant oil-soaked states, Sunni and Shiite, glaring across the Persian Gulf at each other.

It is the hand of his own leaders, his politicians, his teachers, his clergy and his entertainers who do this terrible thing.

It is everyone who advocates for Islamic immigration while covering up its crimes, who calls for more tolerance and more mosques and more Islamic law and then rushes to the scene of the bombing before the blood and tissue of the innocent victims of Islamic immigration have hardly been scraped off the sidewalk to announce that Islam had nothing to do with this act of Islamic terror.

They have made the process that led to this terrible moment possible and it is they who flock to the scene of their own crime to cover up the innocent blood spilled by their own immigration policies.

The Muslim Suicide Convert is the spawn of a Muslim Suicide Convert leadership and a Muslim Convert society. The individual convert sees more clearly than they do the consequences of their actions and the darkness that waits on the other side of the door that they have opened. He knows that death is on the other side of it and he walks toward it into the act of destruction and self-destruction that his political and cultural leaders have made possible while averting their eyes at the moment that the ticking bomb that they have allowed to be imported and assembled in their country explodes.

President Obie

2014-01-02T08:44:00.002-05:00

In 1967, folk singer Arlo Guthrie played a song on a left-wing New York City radio station that was supposed to sum up the cultural difference between the culture and the counterculture.

On one side of the moral equation in Alice’s Restaurant you had Office Obie and the nameless army officers who were rulebound fascists and on the other side you had the easygoing hippies who believed in community, hanging out and letting things slide. Culture would drag you into court for littering with twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs as evidence while counterculture would shrug and invite you to dinner.

Culture was bureaucratically and violently absurd. Counterculture was humanely lovingly absurd.

That's still the image that the left likes to wear like an old pair of jeans. It's still just a bunch of easygoing fellows out to build community and take on Officer Obie’s senseless repressive rules. But then the counterculture became the culture and the left became Officer Obie.

Or President Obie.

If there's anyone who's going to drag you into court with twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs as proof; it's going to be the Officer Obies of the EPA. Except that a straightforward thing like littering would be much too sensible for environmental enforcement groups to bother with. They're more likely to arrest you for collecting rainwater on your own property, making a guitar out of unfinished wood or cleaning up trash from your own property.

EPA Administrator Al Armendariaz, whose fiefdom included five states, told staffers that his philosophy of enforcement was borrowed from the Romans. "They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them."

Compared to the Officer Obies of the ruling counterculture, the original model seems like a humanitarian and the soul of reason. If you ran afoul of Officer Armendariz, or Caesar Armendariz as he liked to be called, you would be very lucky to come away with nothing more than a twenty-five dollar fine and a few hours in jail.

A mere two decades after Arlo Guthrie began singing about being arrested on Thanksgiving for littering by Officer Obie, John Pozsgai was sentenced to three years in jail for “discharging pollutants into waters of the United States" for the crime of adding topsoil to his land.

And you can be sure that the evidence for the legal case which went on in varying forms for twenty years consisted of a lot more than a mere twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with a paragraph of text on the back.

There's a folk song in there alright, but it's not one that a liberal would listen to because every progressive who grins when hearing Arlo joke about a federal case being made out of throwing some garbage off a cliff would want to hang him in real life.

Bill Ellen, a Vietnam veteran and conservationist who ran a shelter for injured wildlife, spent six months in jail for making duck ponds based on a 1989 reinterpretation of environmental law which stated that land which had water on it for seven days was considered Federally protected wetlands.

"That's as close as you can come to restitution for them, the ducks," the judge in the case declared. The judge has since retired to a more fitting post as a member of the Governor's Advisory Panel on License Plate Reader technology. There's probably a folk song in that, but no one would ever air it.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane F. Barrett called it "a premeditated environmental crime" and declared victory even though Ellen was only sentenced to six months in jail instead of three years.

"It might be true that five years ago Ellen wouldn't have to go to jail. But we're living in a different world now," she admitted.

And that different world is the world that progressives have made. They have made America into a nightmarish place that would horrify even Officer Obie. A place where you don't just go to jail for trashing public property, but for cleaning up your own.

Ellen's own Officer Obie has moved on to be the Director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. Despite donating a few thousand dollars to Obama, she has yet to get the US Attorney gig that she had her eye on.

Doubtlessly though President Obie is sure to find a place for any legal eagle who can try to send a Marine Corps vet with two young children to jail for three years over a duck pond.

But the final Officer Obie touch was yet to come.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reviewed the case and declared; "That Ellen believes that an offense of this magnitude is trivial or unimportant ironically exemplifies the need not to foreclose punishment by imprisonment."

The need to sentence a man to prison for a trivial offense because he believes rightly that it is a trivial offense is the definition of irony only behind the Iron Curtain. But in a more fitting definition of irony, the judge responsible for writing that decision lost his shot at a Supreme Court spot because he couldn't stop talking to the New York Times about being considered for the Supreme Court.

The justice of the Officer Obies, Judge Obies and President Obies may be blind, deaf and dumb; but sometimes a higher court than the Supreme Court intervenes with its own judgement.

The different world that U.S. Attorney Jane F. Barrett gleefully inhabits where a man may be sent to jail for a duck pond wasn't made by Officer Obie and the culture, but by the counterculture. If the laws of the culture made sense but were guilty of overreach, the laws of the counterculture are all overreach with no sense. The laws of the counterculture are every bit as addled as its art and its literature.

Seven years after Gibson Guitars worked with Arlo Guthrie to reconstruct Woody Guthrie's guitar and sell reproductions of it, a gang of Officer Obies burst into its Nashville factory with guns drawn looking for wood. And they did it again two years later accusing Gibson of making guitars out of wood that was not finished by Indian workers.

Both times the raids happened under the regime of President Obie who is the living culmination of everything that the counterculture hoped for. And what they hoped for was Officer Obie writ large with a teleprompter in one hand and an infinite rule book in the other.

The laws of the culture were rational. The laws of the counterculture are emotional. They exist because someone demanded them vehemently enough.

The pursuit of that humane and caring system instead gave us a system that sends men to jail for the unrepentant manufacture of duck ponds. It turned every Federal employee into Officer Obie and made Officer Obie in his various guises as environmental crusader, financial regulator and political activist with revolving door roles in government agencies into a progressive superhero.

The counterculture heroes aren't rebels anymore. They are the protectors of the values of the counterculture who suppress opposition by dissenters who don't want to buy health insurance, uppity photographers who don't want to take pictures at gay weddings and free spirits who build duck ponds without the proper permits.

In the culture, laws were made by men and carried out by professionals who understood the laws they were executing. In the counterculture, laws were made by activists and then modified by regulators and bureaucrats so many times that both the aforementioned trials involved extensive debates over what law was broken, whether it was broken and whether the law that may have been broken even existed.

In the counterculture the sheer morass of laws, regulations and interpretations of both means that there really is no law, only whim. No one ever knows what the law is. They only know whom they want punished and why.

Ridicule a law enough and it stops applying. Demonize a defendant enough and he is guilty. Truth is nothing. Emotion is everything. The humanitarian creativity of the counterculture was egotism dressed up in philosophy. It wanted what it wanted. And what it wanted, it got.

ObamaCare or ObieCare is based on a million regulations that no one understands holding up an oppressive system based on wishful thinking that can't work. President Obie is the perfect leader for an ideology that wants its fascist overreaches and abuses of power cloaked in cheerful grins and empty talk about sharing and community whose practical implications are defined in implementable legalese on Page 2809, subparagraph 81b, footnote 311 which no one has read.

Under the liberal Officer Obies, you can't get what you want at Alice's Restaurant. Not unless it meets State and Federal regulations, has listed calorie counts and doesn't contain any transfats. You can't get the health plan you want under ObieCare and you can't get much of anything else either except a lecture, a reeducation program or a prison term.

The Left is Too Smart to Fail

2013-12-22T22:20:00.002-05:00

The infrastructure of manufactured intelligence has become a truly impressive thing. Today as never before there is an industry dedicated, not to educating people, but to making them feel smart. From paradigm shifting TED talks by thought leaders and documentaries by change agents that promise to transform your view of the world, manufactured intelligence has become its own culture.

Manufactured intelligence is the smarmy quality that oozes out of a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni and the rest of the gang who tell you nothing meaningful while dazzling you with references to international locations, political events and pop culture, tying together absurdities into one synergistic web of nonsense that feels meaningful.

There's a reason that there's a Tom Friedman article generator online. But it could just as easily be a New York Times article generator that sums up the hollowness of the buzzword-fed crowd that is always hungry to reaffirm the illusion of its own intelligence.

We all know that George W. Bush was a moron. And we all know that Obama is a genius. We have been told by Valerie Jarrett, by his media lapdogs and even by the great man himself that he is just too smart to do his job. And it's reasonable that a genius would be bored by the tedious tasks involved in running the most powerful nation on earth.

But what is "smart" anyway? What makes Obama a genius? It's not his IQ. It's probably not his grades or we would have seen them already. It's that like so many of the thought leaders and TED talkers, he makes his supporters feel smart. The perception of intelligence is really a reflection.

Smart once used to be an unreachable quality. Einstein was proclaimed a genius, because it was said that no one understood his theories. Those were undemocratic times when it was assumed that the eggheads playing with the atom had to be a lot smarter than us or we were in big trouble.

Intelligence has since been democratized. Smart has been redistributed. Anyone can get an A for effort. And the impulse of manufactured intelligence is not smart people, but people who make us feel smart. That is why Neil deGrasse Tyson, another obsessively self-promoting mediocrity like Carl Sagan, is now the new face of science. Sagan made science-illiterate liberals feel smart while pandering to their biases. Tyson does the same thing for the Twitter generation.

Self-esteem is the new intelligence. Obama's intelligence was manufactured by pandering to the biases and tastes of his supporters. The more he shared their biases and tastes, the smarter he seemed to be and the smarter they felt by having so much in common with such a smart man.

Obama Inc. built his image around the accessories of modern manufactured intelligence, premature biographies, global reference points and pop culture. This marriage of high and low with an exotic spice from the east embodies modern liberal intelligence. Take a dash of pop culture, mix it with an important quote, throw in some recent technological development that promises to "change how we all live", mention your time in a foreign culture and draw an insipid conclusion.

That's not just the DNA of every other New York Times column, TED talk and important book by an equally important thought leader sitting under the floodlights at your local struggling chain bookstore with its portraits of great writers on the wall and the tables groaning under unsold copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, Malcolm Gladwell, Candace Bushnell and Khaled Hosseini.

It's also the DNA of Obama Inc. It is its assumption of intelligence through compassionate self-involvement, progressive insights derived from an obsession with the self and the sanctification of Third World references, real or imaginary, invoking the spiritual power of the Other, the totem of alien magic, to transcend the rational and the pragmatic. It is upscale Oprah; egotism masquerading as enlightenment, condescension as compassion and soothing quotes as religion.

Once upon a time, bright young American men went to Europe and wrote books about the world. That was our notion of intelligence. JFK did it and was widely praised for his intelligence. Today bright young American men and women go to the Third World and write their books about the world, mining the compost of their Flickr accounts, Tumblr updates and Twitter feed for deep thoughts.

Intelligence to a modern liberal isn't depth, it's appearance. It isn't even an intellectual quality, but a spiritual quality. Compassionate people who care about others are always "smarter", no matter how stupid they might be, because they care about the world around them.

An insight into how we live matters more than useful knowledge. Skill is irrelevant unless it's a transformative progressive "changing the way we live" application.

Obama and his audience mistake their orgy of mutual flattery for intelligence and depth. Like a trendy restaurant whose patrons know that they have good taste because they patronize it, his supporters know that they are smart because they support a smart man and Obama knows he is smart because so many smart people support him.

The thought never rises within this bubble of manufactured intelligence that all of them might really be idiots who have convinced themselves that they are geniuses because they read the right books (or pretend to read them), watch the right movies and shows (or pretend to) and have the right values (or pretend to).

Smart is surplus when you have Gladwell sitting under a full DVD set of The Wire prominently displayed on your bookshelf right alongside a signed copy of The Audacity of Hope.

Marxists thought that Marxism was smart. Progressives measure intelligence in progressivism. Its only two qualities are "world awareness" and "progressive future adaptation".

Obama hit both these qualities perfectly with his Third Culture background and the appearance of modern technocratic polish. Not just a politician, but a thought leader, he had the pseudo-celebrity quality of their kind, able to move smoothly from a celebrity panel about Third World microfinance, to a Jay-Z concert to a fundraiser for DIY solar panels for India to a banquet for a political hack.

Everyone who encountered him thought that he was smart because he made them feel smart. And that is the supreme duty of the modern liberal intellectual, not to be smart, but to make others feel smart. Genuine intelligence is threatening. Manufactured intelligence is soothing. And those intellectually superior progressives who need to believe that Obama is smart in order to believe that they are smart cannot stop believing in his brains without confronting the illusion of their own intelligence.

Manufactured intelligence isn't smart. It's stupid. It's as stupid as building windmills for sustainable energy in places where the wind hardly blows, as stupid as calling inflated budgets "investments" and as stupid as believing that a man is smart because he can reference poverty in the Third World.

It's easy to tell apart fake intelligence from the real thing. Manufactured intelligence fakes "smart" by playing word games. It constantly invents new terms to provide the enlightened elites with a secret language of Newspeak buzzwords that mean less than the words they are replacing. The buzzwords, Thought Leader and Change Agent, quickly take on cultist overtones and become ways of describing how the group's leaders would like to use power, than anything about the world that they describe.

Manufactured intelligence is a consensus, not a debate. It's not arrived at through a process, but flopped into like a warm soothing bath of nothingness. It's correct because everyone says so. And anyone who disagrees is clearly stupid and lacks awareness of the interconnected ways that the world synergistically works. And probably doesn't know science, Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson either.

Real intelligence is the product of constant debate. It is forever striving to overthrow the consensus and willing to challenge anything and everything. It uses a specialized vocabulary only to describe specialized phenomena, rather than replacing existing words with new words to describing existing phenomena in order to seem as if it understands the future better by going all 1984 on it.

Finally, manufactured intelligence is self-involved. It mistakes feeling for thinking. It deals not with how things are or even how we would like them to be, but how we feel about the way things are and what our feelings about the way things are say about what kind of people we are.

Liberal intelligence is largely concerned with the latter. It is a self-esteem project for mediocre elites, the sons and daughters of the formerly accomplished who are constantly diving into the shallow pools of their own minds to explore how their privilege and entitlement makes them view the world and how they can be good people by challenging everyone's paradigms and how they can think outside the box by climbing into it and pulling the flaps shut behind them.

Perpetual self-involvement isn't intelligence regardless of how many of the linguistic tricks of memoir fiction it borrows to endow its liberal self-help section with the appearance of nobility.

Liberalism isn't really about making the world a better place. It's about reassuring the elites that they are good people for wanting to rule over it.

That is why Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for having good intentions. His actual foreign policy mattered less than the appearance of a new transformative foreign policy based on speeches. Gore promised to be be harsher on Saddam than Bush, but no one remembers that because everyone in the bubble knows that the Iraq War was stupid... and only conservatives do stupid things.

Liberal intelligence exists on the illusion of its self-worth. The magical thinking that guides it in every other area from economics to diplomacy also convinces it that if it believes it is smart, that it will be. The impenetrable liberal consensus in every area is based on this delusion of intelligence. Every policy is right because it's smart and it's smart because it's progressive and it's progressive because smart progressives say that it is.

Progressives manufacture the consensus of their own intelligence and insist that it proves them right.

Imagine a million people walking in a circle and shouting, "WE'RE SMART AND WE'RE RIGHT. WE'RE RIGHT BECAUSE WE'RE SMART. WE'RE SMART BECAUSE WE'RE RIGHT." Now imagine that these marching morons dominate academia, the government bureaucracy and the entertainment industry allowing them to spend billions yelling their idiot message until it outshouts everyone else while ignoring the disasters in their wake because they are too smart to fail.

That is liberalism.

The Conspiracy Theory is the Conspiracy

2013-11-19T10:27:00.001-05:00

Sometimes a conspiracy theory exposes a conspiracy. Sometimes the conspiracy theory is the conspiracy.

JFK assassination plots are the only conspiracy theories to be widely accepted by the general public. The moon landing filmed in a studio, the Lincoln conspiracy or the World Trade Center being blown up by lasers from outer space never gained much credence because they lacked mainstream backing. Conspiracy theories ordinarily remain on the margins. The JFK theories were too important to the liberals who were really running things to allow them to die out.

There are probably more Americans who could tell you the ins and outs of the "magic bullet" than can recite the Bill of Rights from memory. More books have been sold about the Kennedy assassination than about any of the real government abuses taking place today.

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination brings with it the usual weighty tomes, speculative articles and nostalgic reminiscing by liberal baby boomers about the utopia that might have been.

John F. Kennedy long ago stopped being a politician and became the collective egotism of a certain type of liberal of a certain age. He had become an unreal figure long before he died, composed of wishes and progressive fantasies, photos with cool celebrities and generational gloating. His death made that unreality permanent, relegating the real man to a Camelot of collective liberal fantasies.

The JFK assassination became a liberal martyrdom in search of a conservative inquisitioner. Oliver Stone's JFK was a laborious effort to connect the martyrdom of a liberal icon to the despicable conservative villains that the narrative of this political theology demanded.

The gnostic elements of martyrdom usually involve the revelation of spirituality in the mortal flesh. But JFK, like Obama, had always been more than mortal, a creature of flashbulbs and film, a messiah of a new generation and a new age. It was his opponents who represented the prosaic materialism of money and steel, three-piece suits and conservatism, who had to be exposed and outed.

For the Kennedy martyrdom to have deep spiritual meaning, it had to have come at the hands of those who represented everything that opposed the values of the Cult of Camelot. And so a vital element of JFK worship, like O.J. Simpsonism had to be the search for the real killers. And like O. J. Simpsonism, the real killer had to be searched for because everyone knew who the real killer was.

Camelot was a messianic age of political transcendence that had been aborted forcing us to live through more cycles of materialistic history. The political messianism of JFK was as doomed as that of Obama or any other liberal savior. Unlike Obama, it conveniently ended in a martyrdom which excused a generation of liberal failures.

The revolution didn't fail. It was murdered. The endless search for the real killers was not done to find them, but to perpetuate the martyrdom myth. The search could never be complete, the conspiracy theories could provide no closure, though the lynching of Nixon, for daring to try and make JFK's liberal legacy work helped put to rest the ghosts of Camelot for many angry liberals.

Most conspiracy theories have two purposes; they make the world seem like an orderly place in which everything happens for a reason and they sell books. The former is another reflection of the death of religion. The search for secret knowledge, a battle between the powers of good and evil for the soul of the world, is secularized and politicized for a materialistic spirituality.

JFK was the martyr of the new America that was being born. That America would be a chaotic place where madmen would do what they pleased, where the planners would fail and anarchy would rub shoulders with tyranny, meaning would be lost and those who pursued it would lose their minds and laugh their insanity for the entertainment of the masses. And that was just the seventies.

Three years after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, an engineering student and another former marine would climb a tower at the University of Austin and open fire. The killing spree would become a starting point in an accelerating trend of mass killings.

The murder of John Lennon, another liberal icon, in the first year of a new decade that closed the door on the chaos of the counterculture, would be a death undignified by any larger meaning. From Charles Manson to Jim Jones, these were the mad horrors spawned by a damaged culture where the monsters and madmen were suddenly the only ones who understood the rules.

Kennedy was killed in a more innocent time when it was still possible to deny that the wave of change was not ushering in a brave new world, but the destruction of a culture that had kept the worst human instincts in check.

The Cult of Camelot sought a deeper meaning in his death because the alternative would have been to recognize that the world was not an orderly place and could not be made so by planning. And it sought to disguise the truth about his murder.

JFK was not killed by some miasma of right-wing hatred, by a confederacy of Cuban exiles, CIA agents and Sicilian mafia bosses.

The directions in which the JFK conspiracy theories point reveal what they are trying to hide. John F. Kennedy was not murdered by a miasma of hatred on the right, but on the left. Before liberals became leftists, leftists had a propensity for killing liberals. And Lee Harvey Oswald was as far to the left as you could go.

There was never really any disagreement about Lee Harvey Oswald's politics. The media has avoided the issue by not talking about it while characterizing him as a screwball who wasn't happy anywhere. That much is true, but Lee Harvey Oswald was a militant Socialist screwball who defected to the Soviet Union and plotted the murders of people he considered "right-wing".

The piles of conspiracy theories shove him to the side as an excessively convenient killer. But Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a continuum of left-wing terror in America. The murder of JFK was a bridge between the explosions of violence in the twenties by anarchists and by the Weathermen in the seventies. Oswald was part of the leading edge of left-wing violence in America.

Like so many radicals, Oswald was bored and shiftless. The reality of the Soviet Union with no revolution, just factories to work at, did not appeal to him. Instead he drifted back to America, a weapon in search of a target. The actual murder may have shocked the nation, but it would not be very long before left-wing violence would once again become part of life in America.

All this is far more consistent and far more dangerous than any of the alternative explanations. Worse still, it's simple. And even worse, it's obvious. Which means that it can't possibly be true.

JFK was not killed by a military-industrial complex or a vast right-wing conspiracy. No group of men in suits sat around a table plotting his death. The forces that killed him were the same political ideas of the left that led young American men and women to cheer for the Viet Cong, plant bombs and wage war against their own country.

To understand why JFK died, you must understand the Weathermen and Leon Czolgosz who murdered President McKinley, you must understand the Atom Bomb Spies and Sacco and Vanzetti and a century of left-wing sabotage and terrorism in America.

It’s much safer to talk about magic bullets, than magical thinking ideologies that promise that a workers’ paradise is only a bomb away.

Conspiracy theories rely on finding the inconsistencies and unanswered questions that can be found in just about any event if enough threads are pulled on and enough experts with magnifying glasses crawl over the evidence. They suspect the simple, even as they replace it with byzantine and the complexity, replacing logical answers with to the unending search for the unanswered question. They stare at the static of the television screen, at the Heisenberg Effect of unanswerable questions, at the details that shift close up, and it becomes their obsession and their faith.

The conspiracy theorist has faith that life has meaning. It is a secular sort of faith and its faith object is not divine, but malignant. The meaning of life is malicious. It operates the way it does because evil people behind the scenes refuse to allow for any coincidences or random chance. No sparrow shall fall because a dozen secret agencies are always monitoring it from space.

It is a faith not in good, but in evil.

Kennedy politics had been meant to be optimistic, but the assassination accelerated the liberal reversion to the underlying pessimism and paranoia, the sense that life was doomed, that people had to be rigidly controlled to keep society from coming apart.

The assassination was a warning, not from some secret organization, but from the consequences of the ideas of the left. Instead of searching for Cubans in the CIA, liberals should have looked in the mirror instead. The chaos and violence they were afraid of was not coming from some secret organization, it was coming from inside the movements of the left.

It still is.

The real Kennedy conspiracy was an effort to suppress the basic truths of what had happened and to replace them with a recursive loop of conspiracy theories that could never resolve anything while convincing everyone that the basic truths of what happened could be safely ignored.

The conspiracy did not cover up the work of the secret organization that killed JFK, but the secret organizations of the left whose ideas led to his murder. The real JFK conspiracy concealed the deeper secret that the left is destructive and that its ideas carry a dark wind of chaos and violence.

The left cannot make history come out the way that it wants to, but it can always lie about it. Its myths of the past, dreams shattered by vast right-wing conspiracies, swallowed up by the greed of the 80s and 00s, are tawdry attempts at refusing to learn the lessons of history so that it will be given the freedom to repeat its terrible mistakes.

Lee Harvey Oswald was the stepchild of the left's destructive ideas on society. The same madness that led to Guyana and the bombing of the Pentagon had its day fifty years ago in Dallas.

Government is Magic

2013-10-27T23:14:00.000-04:00

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It's hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that "progress" makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

If the government can't build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn't like to squeeze for extra cash.

The Navy had to be cut to the bone and the Benghazi mission had to make do without security so that a Canadian company which began employing a classmate of Michelle Obama's could score over half a billion to build a broken website. Obama mocked Mitt Romney's criticism of his Navy cuts by telling him that we don't fight with bayonets and horses anymore. Bayonets and horses are outdated. In our glorious modernity, we spend fortunes to build websites that don't work instead.

Modernity has to be built. It has to be constructed brick by bit by rivet by cable by people who know what they are doing. Modernity without competence is as worthless as the ObamaCare website which looked pretty enough to give the illusion of technocratic modernity, but didn't actually work.

Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year... and build them well.

Those aren't things we can do anymore. Not because the knowledge and skills don't exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We can't do them for the same reason that Third World countries can't do what we do. It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the culture gets in the way.

It's our very hollow modernity that gets in the way of our truly being modern. We can no longer build big things because the ability to implement vision on a large scale no longer exists. We can still do impressive things as individuals, but that's also true of Kenya or Thailand. And in China, they can carry out grandiose projects, but those projects have no vision or competence.

We used to be able to combine the two by competently implementing grandiose visions, but our "modern" culture is the roadblock that prevents us from working together to make the great things that we can still envision individually.

Our modernity is style rather than substance. It's Obama grinning. It's the right font. It's the right joke. It's that sense that X knows what he's doing because he presents it the right way. There's nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It's why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.

The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the "right things" not because they led to the right results, but because we had decided that they were the right things. There were many competent people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.

And we're right back there today. The entire process of ObamaCare was the opposite of going from Point A to Point B. It was the least competent and efficient solution every step of the way. There was no reason to think that its website would be any better. The process that led to it being dumped on the American people was completely devoid of any notion of testing or outcomes. It was the right thing to do because... it was the right thing to do. It was cargo cult logic all the same. So was its website.

Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was "good". Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.

This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it's why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.

Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won't work because you want them to, they won't work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.

That's modernity. It isn't glamorous. You can see it in black and white photos of men working on old planes. You can see it in the eyes of the astronauts who first went to the moon. You can read it in the workings of the men who built the longest suspension bridges, laid undersea cables and watched their world change. They were moderns and their time is done. They have left behind savages with cell phones who make decent tinkerers, but whose ability to collaborate falls apart in large groups.

The difference between savages and civilized men isn't that savages are dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid. It's the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a civilization.

Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can't build anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors, not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.

We have not yet been reduced to savagery, but our incompetence increases in large groups to such a staggering extent that it often seems not to be worth the trouble. Individual geniuses can occasionally carry large groups on their shoulders, micromanaging them, terrorizing them and motivating them, the way that tribal chieftains do, but without that singular personality the whole thing collapses.

The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government will magically make everything work.

Because government is progress. Government is modernity. Government is magic.

The cargo culters on the islands, who once witnessed the might and power of the American military during WW2 make American flags and uniforms, they build airstrips and wooden control towers, and wait for the planes to land and make them rich. They don't understand why these things should work, but they do them anyway because that is how they remember it happening.

Our own cargo culters invoke FDR and JFK, they talk about the New Deal and the Great Society, they make grand promises and roll out big programs, and then they wait for it all to work. They don't understand themselves how or why it would work. But government is magic and the appearance of a thing is just as good as a real deal.

Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you're competent.

There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don't need engineers or competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.

In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and the money can be printed forever because government is magic.

Using Cultural Technology in the Culture War

2013-01-12T23:57:00.000-05:00

We often talk about a culture war, but we don't usually talk about what that means beyond protests over movies and art exhibits.

Culture is programming. The culture war is a programming conflict. Ideas are code. They're viruses. They're memes.

Our form of code is communication. A man alone isn't an island, he's one of those feral wolf children that sometimes turn up in abusive households or backward countries. And those children are never fully human because they are missing something basic. They have never been shaped by talking with another member of their species.

The communication that we engage in, through reading and talking, comes to define who we are. It programs us with concepts and ideas, which we bash up against other concepts and ideas, both very sophisticated and very simple.

Brainwashing is the hostile takeover of a human mind. The most effective way to brainwash someone is to take a lonely individual and embed him into a peer group which bombards him or her with love and acceptance that is conditional on accepting an idea or belief.

That is how cults do it and it works frighteningly well. Governments attempt to replicate it on a national scale, but it never works as well as it does in a compartmentalized cult or ideological cell. And as a history of Communist groups around the world shows, the two can be very hard to tell apart.

The second most effective way is to take that individual and place him at the disposal of people who have complete control over him. This is how police extract false confessions on a regular basis, sometimes even without meaning to. And at the opposite end of the law enforcement scale, this is how Stockholm Syndrome works.

People adapt to the group. Unlike animals, we are verbal creatures. We depend less on non-verbal signals for flocking behavior and more on direct communication to tell us where the group is going and what we are supposed to do to fit in with it. That is why controlling communication also means control of the group.

Cultural programming is a simple thing.

Like Pavlov's dogs, people are programmed through emotional control points. Empathy, guilt, love, hate, fear, pride, etc. Instead of associating a ringing bell with food, an idea, attitude or worldview is associated with a particular emotion or set of emotions.

Suppose you want to program your test subjects to hate guns. The simple way is to keep showing them dead kids and guns together. And that's something you can see on every television news hour. Children are a primal control point. It's a button that everyone overlays a message on. In this case, the message is that guns kill but government can keep you safe.

Programming isn't debating. Not in the conventional sense. It's about instilling responses that are emotional, even if the subject convinces himself that they are actually the result of his own careful consideration of an issue. Those responses then short circuit any more reasoned approaches with an emotional response overlaid with a 'shortcut' message.

A 'shortcut' message is code. It encompasses a larger idea in an easily accessible form. Think of it as an anti-virus program for the meme. Once the meme has been implanted, it's used to defend against any competing ideas. An anti-gun meme might be, "Do we care about kids or about guns?" while a pro-gun meme might be, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

People have open idea receptors. The meme's goal is to flip those receptors from open to closed by bonding with the idea receptors. From, "I want to learn more about this" to "I already know what I think and this is it and I don't want to hear any more about it except if it reinforces my beliefs."

The goal of cultural programming is to create an automatic response system for a set of ideas that operates below the conscious level. This is the automatic response system that we farm out work to that we don't want to waste time consciously dealing with. It's a sub-program running on the mind that we have conscious control over, but, like viruses on a computer, whose existence we are not always aware of. The task of a cult deprogrammer lies in removing all these subprograms, these automatic responses, to free the person within by engaging their core emotions and intellect.

If you have ever tried to win an argument with someone who fundamentally disagrees with you, only to realize that it is going nowhere, the reason is because you are spending as much time arguing with his sub-programs as you are with him. Eventually both of your sub-programs argue with each other and it becomes a festival of cliches. Deprogrammers, police interrogators and other people in a line of work that requires them to get past automatic responses focus on engaging the core person through their emotions while bypassing the sub-programs as much as possible.

Sometimes these sub-programs are consciously programmed by us. We program ourselves to get up at a certain time. We program ourselves to avoid foods that are fattening. We program ourselves to like certain people that we dislike, and to our surprise it works if we are really serious about it. But we're not the only ones programming ourselves. We are also being programmed.

Culture is programming. The moment we link up to other people, we begin getting signals that trigger other signals. This is communication that eventually sets up automatic responses that become the sub-programs that run in the background. We learn to ignore certain people and pay attention to others. And the same goes for the ideas that they communicate.

Mass culture is the same thing, except much bigger. It's a mass group signal from something that isn't a group. NBC News is not a peer group, but its mass broadcasting power makes it seem like one. Lean Forward is flocking information. So is Forward! even if it is, lemming-style, over a cliff. People automate enough of their behavior so that they can be programmed to do stupid and evil things.

People have murdered babies while following orders. They have jumped off cliffs while undergoing training teaching them to obey unquestioningly. Once the sub-programs run, you can build your own army of suicide bombers programmed to go off when they are told to, even if the programming code is in an ancient book known as the Koran. Once you convince an individual to outsource the decision making to a subprogram that is programmed by an outside authority, then you have something that begins to resemble a killer robot that is aware of what it is doing, but does not feel entirely in control of it..

Mass culture however is a slightly different kind of programming. Its form of communication is the ancient one of the narrative.

Human beings are natural storytellers. We tell and receive stories, both real and fictional, and respond emotionally to them. The basic story has a protagonist who seeks to accomplish a worthwhile goal and an antagonist who seeks to prevent him from accomplishing that goal. Mass culture programs people by providing narratives in which the protagonist mirrors its goals while the antagonist has the goals of an opposing philosophy.

Narrative is how we identify with others. The stories that other people tell us enable us to form deeper bonds with them. Mass culture programs ideas by maximizing identification with the hero of the story and by extension with his ideas using existing archetypes.

The plucky underdog struggles against the powerful evil man is a theme that most people can identify with. In mass culture, the plucky underdog becomes an environmental crusader fighting an evil corporation. But to flip things around, he can just as easily be an inventor with a brilliant new technology fighting the EPA. It's the same story with different masks and the choice of masks reveals the agenda of the programmers.

Programming associates the archetype with the idea until the idea becomes shorthand for the archetype so that when we think plucky hero, we think environmentalist or social justice crusader. And while we may not think that way, a generation of teenagers has grown up with that archetype. Association is one of those sub-programs that runs in the background, sorting and classifying items according to their perceived relevance. Manipulating associations is one of the simplest forms of programming.

The narrative forms the personal and tribal identity. It tells us who we are individually and as a group. When media types talk about "Explaining America to itself", they mean using mass media to define tribal identity through narrative. Their choice of narrative is meant to form specific associations. Run enough stories about America's racism and that becomes the association. Run enough stories about America at war and we become a nation of soldiers.

Associations alone do not brainwash an individual. What they really do is shift his affinities. That is what advertisers do with commercials, which don't immediately convince customers to buy a brand, but build up positive associations with that brand so that when you think of Coca Cola, you think of Santa and polar bears and traditional Americana, or modernism, new generation and fun when you think of Pepsi. But ideologies are after bigger things than just influencing your preferences.

Affinity shifting prepares people for brainwashing by making them receptive to the actual ideology. It breaks down their boundaries and opens their minds to a more complete program. A trojan in a computer just opens the door for other malicious programs to get in and take over. The goal of any ideology is to open a door. Once the door is open, by any means, a lot of other things can come inside.

True brainwashing goes beyond just running sub-programs. Its goal is total identity reprogramming. Identity reprogramming means that the individual must adopt a new identity that is based on the ideology so that the individual and the ideology are inseparable and the identification is so total that the individual becomes willing to die for the ideology. Then the individual is no longer running "Communism" sub-programs covering a set of responses to domestic repression and foreign capitalism, but he has achieved total identification and has actually become "Communism".

Before this can happen, the sub-programs must begin running linking his emotions to automatic responses. People program most naturally in response to personal experience. A liberal is a conservative who got a drug test. A conservative is a liberal who got mugged. The association generates new sub-programs. Conservatives are associated with authoritarianism. Liberals are associated with crime. Arguments between the two are handled by sub-programs running on the emotions generated by the original experience so that the experience has become the ideology.

Radicalization is the process by which the sub-programs become the program and the individual experience becomes the generalized collective experience of the group. The radical leader embodies the ideology with his ego. The radical follower subsumes his ego into the ideology. The two are no longer responding to the ideology as a function of their individual or group interests. The ideology is now the group and there are no more individual interests. There is only the program whose perfection of purpose will achieve all their goals in some unspecified way.

Purity of purpose is the difference between the program and the sub-program. Sub-programs are never pure of purpose. They are subservient to the individual and the group. Programs are the pure purpose. They are subservient to nothing. Not even the death of the people running them.

The sub-programs become the program as they take more and more of the core functions of the program.

The core functions are how we do things and why. The sub-programs allow us to cope with the external. The core programs are the motivations for the things that we do. Sub-programs automate existing motivations and associate them with ideas.

An environmental sub-program tells us we should vote for Democrats to avoid being killed by pollutants, taking an existing motivation, the avoidance of harm, and linking it to an idea. An environmental program however tells us that we should die sooner to avoid being a burden on the planet. This reprograms a natural motivation, survival, and replaces it with a new group motivation that is suicidal, on individual terms, and even for the species, but that runs on hijacked emotions.

A programmed person does not own his emotions and therefore he does not own his motivations. The program decides what he will feel and in response to what. The program can make death seem beautiful and self-defense seem horrible. It can make children seem vile and the murder of children an act of empowerment.

At the start, the program runs by associating a person's interests with its goals. By the end, the person is utterly incapable of identifying or defending his own interests and the emotions once associated with his interests are welded to the program's goals.

Collectivism occurs when mass culture hijacks group communications. By transforming group identity through programming, mass culture can promote any number of horrors from genocide to mass suicide. People can be taught to kill themselves for the survival of the group ideology. Martyrdom being the idea so compelling that people will die for it.

Collectivism offers the individual immortality and transcendence through the destruction of the self. By accepting the program, the individual becomes more than the self, he becomes the group. With the program he transcends his flaws and takes on the imagined strengths of the collective. His identification with the group is so total that he does not fear death. As Muslim terrorists chant, "You love life, we love death."

The ideology is not truly the group, it is an idealized version of the group that becomes a substitute for the group, even to the point of a willingness to destroy the group for its idealized version. Think of Japan in WW2 or Western liberals today who care more about the moral high ground than national survival. The idealized group is so transcendent because it is elevated above all individual and group limitations. It is impossibly perfect and destined to fail.

By hijacking group messaging, mass culture falsely conflates the ideology with group welfare and survival, so that, for example, being American comes to mean following international laws of war, supporting immigration and international democracy, when it really has nothing to do with any of this. But by associating America with a set of values, in the hope that those values then come to be shorthand for America, the absence of those values then comes to be defined as the death of America. Those values become the things that we would rather let America die than allow it to abandon.

Programs like these penetrate trojan style, by pretending to be something that they are not. Educational systems disguise Liberalism as Americanism. The ideology gets inside by pretending to represent the group. Ideological programming is conflated with group flocking behavior. Once a sub-program begins running, then group interests become overwritten by ideological agendas. That is what happened to many minority groups in America, including the Jews.

The left has always excelled at using cultural technology like this in its culture wars. It studies the mechanics of how people can be convinced of something with far more intense interest than any car salesman. It is not interested in winning the debate, but in rigging the debate. It does not want to convince you that it is right, but to change you into the sort of person who innately understands that it is right.

It is trying to program you. It has been doing so since you were born. It will go on doing it every time you turn on the television or set foot in a movie theater. It will do it through your interactions with those who are already running its programs or sub-programs. It will target you demographically, by race, sex, income level, regional area and so on and so forth. It will combine all the information it has about you with all the information about what types of arguments will work best on someone like you and it will hit you with them over and over again.

This election was a warm up. For the first time, the left had the backing, money, power, expertise and technology to really do what it has always wanted to do in this country. And it worked. The left is not any good at policy, but it is very good at controlling people. Like the world's worst car company, they can't make a car that works, but they have a hell of a sales staff.

We are in a culture war and that means it is time to understand the nature of that conflict. For the left, American identity and any other kind of identity, just scroll through the many options on the rainbow coalition of the Obama campaign site, is a program to be overwritten by their program using their cultural technology. Resisting that effort requires awareness and learning to use those same tools to fight back by spreading awareness, building mental anti-virus programs to fight infection and virus programs that attack the mental programs and sub-programs of the left.

The Civilized Savage

2013-01-06T23:51:00.001-05:00

"They hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train/And though it's smoky and crowded they're too civilized to complain."

"Bongo, Bongo, Bongo", Danny Kaye

The difference between the civilized man and the savage is that the civilized man follows the rules and the savage does not. A civilized man is quite capable of killing one, a hundred or even a million, so long as he is first outfitted with a uniform and a set of regulations telling him when and where to kill. A savage kills as he lives, without the need for rules and regulations.

The civilized man is bound by interdependent social compacts that control his survival. The savage does not depend on a social compact for his survival. He depends on himself. Even when his survival derives from the same system as that of the civilized man, he feels no sense of obligation toward that system. He exploits it, the way that he would exploit a honeycomb in the forest or kill the last mammoth without worrying what will happen when it is gone.

The modern civilized man with his giant and tiny screens full of information that tell him not only who won and who lost, and make him laugh and cry, but also update him on the latest social mores so that he can maintain his civilized status by staying in step with the march of progress, has learned to live by the rules. More than that he has learned to believe in the rules. The rules feed him and move him up the ladder where he will be able to buy more giant and tiny screens to stay in step with civilization.

The savage advances much more slowly up the ladder, even when he lives next door to the civilized man, but this is of little concern to him. The civilized man is concerned with advancement while the savage is concerned with sensation. The civilized man wants to better himself. The savage only wants to be himself. For the civilized man there is only the past and the future, but no present, but for the savage there is hardly any past and no future... only the eternal carpe diem moment of the present.

The civilized man builds trains, roads, telegraph poles, skyscrapers, fiber optic lines, satellites and organizations to link together and control his civilization. Faster communications and transportation make it possible to link together larger areas, economically and politically. Civilization expands and grows denser at its centers and increasing amounts of resources are diverted from the tasks of progress to the chores of administering impossibly large territories.

As forward progress slows, the civilized man begins to fidget aboard the iron train. Looking out at the lush jungle, he begins entertaining thoughts of becoming a savage again. For the most part he knows that he cannot actually turn savage. The awareness that he will have to give up his comforts to turn savage is embedded too deep within him. The savage does not understand that going feral takes twenty years off his life expectancy and kills half his children. And even if you explained it to him, he would not care for the savage does not believe in the future, only the present. It is this knowledge of the future that burdens the civilized man who longs to turn savage. It is this knowledge that he is determined to destroy to be able to escape once and for all from the iron train and into the jungle.

There are simple and effective ways of destroying that awareness of the future. The easiest is to use the pull of sensation to bury the mind in the present. Drugs are one way to accomplish this and sensuality is another. Constantly rushing into danger or burying yourself in noise will do it too. So long as your mind is forcibly tethered to some sensation, whether it is the aching receptors of the brain crying out for the new drug of choice that they have bonded with or any other part of the nervous system that is overloaded and whose overload cripples memory and long-term thinking, then you can simulate the state of mind of a savage.

Simulation through stimulation is ineffective. The civilized man does not properly turn into a savage, instead he becomes a hybrid, too civilized to be a savage and too savage to be civilized, with one foot chained to the iron train of progress and the other in the damp earth of the green jungle.

The civilized savage is the dominant figure of the latter quarter of the past century and of this century as well. This creature is a chimera of contradictions. He is a high tech back to nature fellow. He builds entire industries dedicated to harnessing the sun and the wind. He drugs himself with legal and illegal cocktails of chemicals to get in touch with his inner emotions.

Most contradictory of all, he believes that the sum of civilization lies in dismantling the military and industrial infrastructure that makes civilization possible and replacing it with a trillion dollar social organization that will reproduce some natural primitive order, as defined by the proverb, it takes a village to raise a child, a proverb that like the rest of his ersatz savagery he invented himself.

To become truly civilized, the civilized savage believes, one must become a savage, one must learn from the savages how to be civilized, by embracing civilized savagery and leaving behind the civilized savagery of imperialism, nationalism, capitalism and all the armies marching off to war and smokestacks belching smoke.

Social progress, to the civilized savage, is the only progress there is and he associates it with dismantling, what he thinks of as the artificial elevation of capitalism and the middle class, and restoring everyone to savage equality through a vast collection of government agencies. A village employing millions of people just to teach civilized men how to become savages by taking away their responsibility for the future.

In "the village", there are no fathers or mothers, parents do not care for their children and children do not look after their parents. There are no husbands or wives. Everyone is forever young, or pretending to be, and forever keeping it real, in the moment where no one has money and everyone has all they need, where no one works and everyone earns, where there is no past and no future, only right now.

This 20 trillion dollar subsidized fantasy of control freaks who imagine that they want to get in touch with a natural way of living has become the barometer of progress. Progress has come to be defined as the end of civilization.

The civilized savage is searching for authenticity under every plastic bush and ceramic turtle. He is all about keeping it real in an air conditioned studio surrounded by four kinds of flavored water. He wants to cut loose with a designated driver, hold an orgy with protection and build an artist's colony with social security benefits. Too stupid to be civilized and too smart to be a savage, he lacks the survival skills of either group. He cannot make it in the jungle,and on the iron train his only function is contributing creativity to the leisure of a mechanistic culture. Without the middle class that the civilized savage does his best to stomp out, he would quickly become as extinct as the mammoth.

What the civilized savage lacks in useful skills, he more than makes up for in creativity. Straddling the boundary between the immediacy of the savage and the foresight of the civilized man, he is able to blend both, combining ego and technique, emotion and rational order, to be a talented performer, a charismatic speaker, an ingenious artist, an evocative writer and a startling poet. In addition to this he is capable of starting all sorts of businesses, so long as those businesses involve finding a new way of catering to the leisure needs of the public or cashing in on government social spending. When the train grinds to a halt, then the passengers need to be fed and entertained, and so these are among the few growth areas of a society that is otherwise stuttering to a halt, bringing wealth comes his way.

The civilized savage sabotages the train and then opens up a snack food stand by the side of the road serving soylent green. He unionizes the railway workers, convinces them to spend the next month on strike, throws together three films about the dangers of rail travel, contributes the profits to a special fund to enable the victims of motion sickness to sue the railway and then runs for office on a platform of making the trains run on time, when what he really means is making sure that the trains never end up running at all.

Civilized men don't know what to make of the civilized savage. He is at once a repulsive and appealing figure to many. And even when the civilized savage oppresses them, they do not rise up against him, because they are too civilized to complain. Riding the train is a privilege of the social compact and they will keep riding it, mostly in silence, so long as they believe that the social compact of their civilization provides them with a measure of security. While the savages kill and riot, their civilized brothers clutch guns and wait silently hoping that tomorrow the track will be fixed and the trains will run again.

The rise of the civilized savage is a harbinger of the end of a civilization. But there is such a thing as the natural rise of a civilized savage, which is the sort of thing that took place in Rome, and his unnatural rise due to the careful plotting and planning of an entire ideology which found it useful to promote decay by empowering the civilized savages who were naturally drawn to it. And while the natural rise of the civilized savage may not be averted, the unnatural rise does not represent a national moral failing, but the outcome of a plan.

The Western civilized savage has hijacked civilization to serve the ends of savagery. The longer this state of affairs goes on, the more difficult it will be to get the train going again. But getting the train going again is the best way to shake off the savage appeal of the jungle. It is only when people see that true social progress is possible by harnessing the forces of industry and culture to move forward, that the claims that the civilized savage makes about social progress come to seem as ridiculous and antiquated as Soviet propaganda posters.

There is no way to defeat cultural defeatism but through success. The trains must run or the jungle awaits.

Muslim Multiculturalism and Western Post-Nationalism

2012-09-23T00:15:00.001-04:00

Responding to the Sydney Mohammed riots featuring bloodied police officers and Muslim children holding beheading signs, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, "What we saw in Sydney on the weekend wasn't multiculturalism but extremism."

Muslim extremism is multicultural. It is the essence of their approach to multiculturalism. Only through, what Gillard calls extremism, do an Egyptian, a Pakistani and a Malay have anything at all in common with one another.

Immigrants from different nations can move to a nation and accept a new national identity. Hundreds of millions of Americans and Australians are the result of such an arrangement. The immigrants can meet up at folk culture festivals where they partake of each other's national foods or they can stick to their own foods-- it doesn't make that much of a difference except for when politicians running for office gain 40 pounds eating bratwurst, pizza and bagels and drinking Guinness at campaign events.

When there is a strong national identity, either former or present, there is rarely a conflict between religious identity and national identity. Those conflicts have usually been settled in the past in some uneasy, but final way, that allows everyone to believe what they want to believe without turning that belief into the defining form of national identity. That way one can be a good Englishman without being a member of the Church of England or a good Frenchmen without being a member of the Catholic Church. Arriving at that point was not easy, but it ended the religious wars of Europe.

Muslims do not have a strong national identity. Their nations are a hodgepodge of military dictators, colonial leftovers and tribal alliances. Their societies are "multicultural" in the sense that they are composed of numerous hostile ethnic groups, tribes and families who are united only by a common religion. This unity is fragile, but it is the most common form of unity that they have and they value it far more than national identity.

To the Muslim, his nation is a fleeting thing, a historical accident by a colonial mapmaker digging up ancient names and drawing lines that cut across the lines of ethnic and tribal migrations, but his religion, though he understands very little of it, is a fine and great thing that has long preceded the nation and means far more to him than the nation does.

Even Muslims in moderate countries poll as identifying more with Islam than with a political faction or national identity. That is why what happened when Muslim democracy was unleashed on the Muslim World was completely inevitable. Muslims chose the one form of identity that they could agree on. It was an identity that excluded Christians, but democracy draws a circle around the largest number of people and outside Lebanon and Israel, those people are all Muslims.

Muslims bridge multiculturalism through religion and they do not accept any form of national identity that is not based on religious unity. That is what the Arab Spring really meant.

Syria, the big sticking point in the Arab Spring, is the place where Islamic unity was impossible because of a split between Sunnis and Shiites, leading to a religious civil war. A similar civil war has been burning in Iraq for ages, occasionally suppressed, before flaring to life again. The successes of the Arab Spring were in countries like Egypt, where Sunni Islamists could count on the support of a majority of the population.

Now when those Muslims are shipped to Europe, America, Canada or Australia, they are expected to become Englishmen, Americans or Australians. But they can't become any of those things because they were never really Pakistanis, Moroccans or Egyptians.

The Pakistani immigrant is a Muslim speaking one of Pakistan's 80 languages and belonging to one of its major ethnic groups (unless he's a descendant of the country's African slaves). The facade of his national identity are just that. On the order of things that he loves or will die for, his country ranks well below his family, his ethnic group and his religion. This does not change when he moves to the UK, especially as Britain is several steps below Pakistan in his estimation, and his estimation of that country was already rather poor.

The Muslim immigrant does not trade one national identity for another. What he does is bring along his local ethnic identity and his global religious identity, and unpacks them both in Sydney or London where he is a member of an ethnic community and a religious community. On top of that he may be an Australian, but he is an Australian in the same way that Sunnis and Shiites are Iraqis or Syrians. All that means is that he will pay taxes, fill out forms and curse the local government officials for being incompetent blockheads, instead of the ones back home. And when his religious identity is at odds with his national obligations, he will do exactly what Sunnis in Syria or Shiites in Iraq have done. He will choose religious identity over national identity.

This concept should not be a particularly foreign one to Gillard. It is likely that she feels a similar identification with fellow progressives in Europe and America, that Hassan feels for his fellow Muslims. Like Islam, progressive politics provides a shared transnational identity based on common goals for an ordered world ruled by an ideal system. Gillard may even feel a greater identification with European Socialists than with more conservative Australians.

This state of affairs is a symptom of the decline of nations. Gillard and Hassan are both consequences of post-nationalism, as are Obama and Morsi, or Hollande and Ahmed in the banlieue. These leaders pay lip service to national identity, but imagine a world without national borders and divisions. That is something they have in common with Muslims, who see nations or borders as abstract entities in the same way that their leftist enablers do.

Gillard subscribes to a post-national identity, and Hassan to a pre-national identity. This is only a technical difference that matters as much as the location of the endpoint of a circle, but in the practical sense they are members of dramatically different identity groups with their own incompatible forms of multiculturalism.

The left's post-national identity is based on a secular political multiculturalism. Islam's post-national identity is based on a religious theocratic multiculturalism. The left has heresies that it prosecutes as hate crimes and Islam has heresies that it prosecutes as blasphemy. Gillard would understand, though condemn, a riot based on some offense to gay rights or aboriginal rights, as an offense against her brand of multiculturalism. The Mohammed riots may be more understandable to her as an offense against Muslim multiculturalism.

The problem with going post-national is that it turns out to be pre-national. Destroy the national identity and you revert to the religious identity, and before you know it, you have a holy war and a theocracy on your hands.

Progressives have been always too stupid to understand that the consequences of their progressivism in undermining the current, more advanced, phase of human society is the restoration of reactionary social and political systems. In Russia, the Bolsheviks toppled an intermediary government and restored a Czar named Stalin and feudalism under the name of collectivism, to the proud cheers of the world's leftists at the progress they were making. In the Arab Spring, they brought back Islamism and they have brought it back in London and Sydney, and Paris and New York as well.

The left destroyed Western national identity and brought back the holy war, but due to Christian and Jewish secularism and Muslim immigration, instead of Catholics and Protestants fighting each other in Paris and London, it's Muslims rioting in the streets and demanding an Islamic theocracy to rule them. And why not? If rule no longer derives from the people or the nation, but panels of judges and rooms of bureaucrats, then the Islamic version is as legitimate as the Socialist version.

Western government that deny both democracy and nationalism are acting as leftist Mullahs, enforcing their beliefs on everyone else. This is their multiculturalism and it is just as backward, reactionary and corrupt as the Islamic version. And why shouldn't Muslims demand that if they are going to be ruled by a philosophy of the way things should be, then it might as well be their own? The only counterargument that can be offered to is that they are foreigners, but it is not an argument that the progressive left can make after championing immigration and the death of nations.

The West was made post-national and then filled with pre-national peoples. Those pre-national peoples are competing to carve it up into tribal fiefdoms and into a theocracy. What Muslims are doing is extremism, in the same way that advocates of a united Italy or Germany were extremist. They are trying to assemble the tribal fiefdoms into a common Muslim multicultural identity in the same way that they tried to do across the Middle East, Asia and parts of Europe.

Extremism is not the issue. Not unless Gillard were to admit that transforming Australia into a Caliphate where women and non-Muslims have no rights is moderate when done politically, but extreme when done by force. The issue, as in so many conflicts, is identity and organization.

The multicultural Muslim world has imported its own competing form of multiculturalism to Europe, Australia, America and Canada. So far its multiculturalism appears to be more potent than the local secular variety because despite being a third-rate bastardized version of Christianity and Judaism, with some tribal customs and pagan elements mixed in, it's still more vital than the thin gruel that the progressives feed their people to keep them occupied while they dig deeper into positions of power.

Most people, Muslim or non-Muslim, do not find an identity based on celebrating every possible identity particularly meaningful or rewarding. Western multiculturalism is a tourist identity that has no content of its own. It is self-nullifying void, the jaded palate of a decadent society constantly searching for novel experiences and exotic flavors. The native elites find touring cultures and sexual identities to be a rewarding experience, but the immigrants are not so bored and jaded, so decadent and comfortable, that they want to play tourist. What they want is a multiculturalism that is based on one similarity and Islam gives them that.

The West can return to national identity or it can fight a holy war between Islamist Multiculturalism and Progressive Multiculturalism. What it cannot do is avoid the conflict. That is a lesson that Gillard and all the Gillards of the West still haven't learned and by the time they do realize it, it may be too late.

The Mirage of Moderate Islam

2012-08-19T23:59:00.001-04:00

Travelers across the vast stretches of the Arabian Desert have been known to get lost and, in their thirst and exhaustion, hallucinate oases with palm trees and flowing water. Western policymakers lost in the vast stretches of madness that define the Muslim world are even more wont to hallucinate the oasis of a moderate Islam to take refuge in. Whether you're dying for a drink or a way to reaffirm your reality, a mirage is sometimes the only way you can find it.

Moderate Islam is a mirage, a projection by desperate Westerners of their own values and culture onto an entirely different religion and culture. It is a mirage that many Muslims are eager to uphold, in the same way that desert merchants might sell goblets and bowls of sand to passing travelers foolish enough to confuse water with dust. And, like travelers who think they are drinking water, when they are actually swallowing sand, it is a deception that will eventually kill the deceived.

When the Western cultural elite look at Islam, they see what they have to see to avoid falling into crisis mode. Like the traveler who would rather choke on sand, than face up to the fact that he is lost in a desert, they would rather keep most things as they are, even at the cost of the extinction of the nations they preside over, than confront the full scope of the threat surrounding them. A threat that they had a hand in nurturing and feeding in the name of goals that seemed to make sense at the time.

It is easier to segregate a "Bad Islam" composed of a tiny minority of extremists from the generally "Good Islam" of the rulers of the Muslim world and the waves of Muslim immigrants washing up on their shores. This segregation has no objective reality, and is nothing but a psychological defense mechanism against experiencing the full reality of a disaster. From the Titanic to World War II, there are numerous similar situations in which the people in charge chose to ignore a growing crisis at a horrific cost.

The two primary paradigms through which Western political elites see Islam, are that of tyranny on the right, and that of the evils of Western foreign policy on the left. Bush employed the former when he defined the problem as being one of tyranny, rather than Islam. Having defined the problem in terms of a majority of "Good Muslims" oppressed by "Bad Tyrants", Bush tried to liberate the former from the latter, only to discover that there was a good deal of overlap between the two. Under Obama, we have seen the left implement its own construct of Islam, as popular resistance movements against colonial oppression, who are reacting to the evils of American foreign policy. This knee-jerk Marxist formula goes one worse than the Bush Administration by defining terrorists as "Good Muslims" and moderates as "Yankee Puppets".

But the only item of true significance to emerge from the contrast of these worldviews is the revelation that American political leaders from both sides of the spectrum still view Islam in terms of the old Cold War struggle between Communism and Capitalism. Like many generals who fight every war in terms of the last war, the political leaders of the West still see Islam in Cold War colors, which prevents them from seeing it for what it is.

While Islam shares some common denominators with Communism, as well as Nazism, it is also a quite different entity than either one. For one thing it is not Western in any sense of the word. It does not rely on a centralized leadership. It has had over a thousand years to seep into the culture of the regions it has conquered. That has made Islam into an identity in a much more profound way, than Adolf or Vladimir could have ever managed with their own crackpottery.

Islam predates the political movements such as Communism and Nazism that arose to fill a vacuum of faith in a secularizing West with dreams of racial and economic utopias. It is the original sin of the East, a ruthless religion based on stolen beliefs and stolen property. Its moment of religious transcendence was not that of the law or the spirit, but the sight of tribal rivalries uniting under a single green banner. The banner of Islam.

The powerful appeal of Islam has been rooted in that dream of unity, an idea that is hard for more civilized peoples to understand because they take unity for granted. Yet any European need only turn to the fierce struggle for an independent and united German nation in the 19th Century, or for an independent and united Italy around the same time. An eventual outcome in which both nations ruled by nationalist regimes faced off together against England and France during WW2 could be traced back to that false sense of destiny which papered over national insecurities with blood.

But nationalism requires meaningful national identities, while the Muslim world only has artificial borders drawn by colonial administrations, differences in Arabic slang and bitter familial rivalries. Despite the best efforts of Arab Socialist autocrats like Gamal Abdel Nasser or Saddam Hussein, the vaunted unity of the Arab nation failed to materialize. While Nasser admired Hitler and Hussein admired Stalin, neither was able to turn their respective countries into anything even as barely functional as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Instead, Nasser got by on Soviet aid and Saddam Hussein on oil money.

Glance at a map, and you will see the Muslim world defined in terms of borders and politicians, but, as Allied troops along the Afghan-Pak border are discovering, the actual Muslims on the ground define themselves in terms of tribe and family, not nation. The Muslim world is a hodgepodge of dispossessed ethnic groups crammed into artificial nation states created by the UK and the UN. Nation states that have a vote at the UN, an embassy off Turtle Bay and little tangible reality.

If that sounds farfetched, consider that there is an actual debate among foreign policy experts over who really runs Pakistan. Many European observers of Turkey have a similar debate going there as well. Most of the Muslim world is run by families, like the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Some are run by dictators who took part in military coups and hold power using the military and the secret police. These are the only forms of stable government in the Muslim world that matter.

Without a dictator or a powerful ruling family, or clique of them, civil war follows. Yemen has been torn apart by such tribal civil wars for a long time now, the latest phase of the war is being conducted with the participation of Al Queda. Anwar Al-Awlaki, the infamous Imam, did not join Al Queda merely out of anger or ideology, he did it because his Awlaki family is allied with the local Yemeni Al Queda. Think about that for a moment, and you begin to see the byzantine maze of loyalties and alliances in the vast desert of the Muslim world.

Empires and kingdoms combined church and state in order to insure that there would be no contradiction between religion and the authorities, that the will of the king would also be the will of god. Mohammed tried to make the same leap in the multicultural environs of Mecca, eliminating all religions but the one he had newly created in order to glue together the warring families and tribes. That act was and is the essential basis of Islam. Everything else is borrowed glamor from the other religions that he had subjugated and destroyed to make way for Islam.

For Muslims, that initial bloody butchery is the only true act of religious significance that matters. Because for a brief shining moment, the internecine quarrels were brutally suppressed, and thousands of backstabbing desert tribesmen came to see themselves as something larger and greater. Of course that false unity collapsed back into warring families and tribes. Which has made it all the more of an unattainable dream. It is why Jihad is the ultimate religious act for a Muslim, and why the Caliphate is the great religious goal.

In the face of this understanding, any talk of a moderate Islam is nothing but a farce. To Muslims, Islam is what the Thousand Year Reich was to Nazis and a United World is to socialists. A perfect form of global unity that must be achieved at any cost.

A moderate Muslim might pursue such a goal "peacefully" through Dawa or missionary work, but successful Muslim mass conversions have taken place either directly or indirectly through the sword. Even Muslim missionary successes in the West take place in the context of Muslim terrorism. There is no Islam without the sword, because it has no meaning or identity without violence. A non-violent Islam is nothing but a collection of tribal mores and borrowed religious ideas. It quickly recedes to the secular and the cultural, driving the Islamists to revive its core ethos through acts of violence and terror.

This is what Western political and cultural leaders do not understand. The Right is correct that Islam, like Communism, can be weakened by capitalism, but it cannot be destroyed that way. Because Islam is not incompatible with business; it originated among merchants after all. The fruits of capitalism can help secularize Islam, but not without empowering the very same type of merchants who helped create it. That is why American capitalism has helped create the terrorist threat by enriching the new rulers of Mecca, the House of Saud, which has expanded its own power by funding a new Islamic invasion against its best customers in the West. And so history repeats itself again.

The Islamists have shown that they can quite effectively exploit Capitalism and Democracy to further their aims. Capitalism brought down the Soviet Union, but it could not give Russians a meaningful identity. Instead, it financed the rise of a new Russian totalitarian regime of KGB bosses and oligarchs who had grown wealthy on the profits from Western business. Even Communist China has shown that it can incorporate Capitalism and only become more of a threat by doing so.

The fundamental error conservative American political leaders made was to assume that Capitalism and Democracy were absolute forms of good, in reality they're simply tools and prisms which different cultures use to express their potential in different ways. The Bush Administration showed the limits of applying Cold War rhetoric to Islamic realities. Or treating 1.5 billion Muslims as the demographic equivalent of 1500 nuclear bombs, without ever admitting the attitude behind the diplomacy.

The Left, however, is even more wrong, falling back on its old habit of treating all enemies as resistance movements against capitalism, globalism and all the isms that they associate with First World nation states. If the Right is still echoing Ronald Reagan, the Left is still stuck on the Philippine–American War of the 19th Century. And while the Right has shown that it can learn, the Left has only shown that it can shout the same self-destructive thing even louder. The Obama Administration is an exercise in national self-hatred. A ritual purging for the sins of Western success similar to an anorexic vomiting after every meal.

If the Right has some ideas for dealing with Islam, the Left has decided that Islam is right. There is no logic behind this, but that of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", along with unhealthy doses of orientalism and the fetishization of the Noble Savage.

American foreign policy triggers Muslim rage, as do cartoons in Europe, Jewish housing in Israel, Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, British female tourists in Dubai, a teddy named Mohammed in Sudan, and countless other "irritations". But none of these excuses is the true cause. The chief cause of Islamic outrage is that these displays of anger allow Muslims to feel a sense of power. Anger empowers small men, whether they are beating their wives or blowing themselves up in cafes. The excuses, "She made me do it", "She shouldn't have walked in front of the TV" or "She should have had dinner ready", are just that. Excuses. The real cause is the sense of power that comes with the anger. The sense of suddenly being larger than life. That anger is its own cause and its own reward. And that is what Islam gives to the Muslim. The Jihad. The Caliphate. Anger in the name of Allah.

In America, Democratic and Republican leaders primarily differ on how tiny that "tiny minority of extremists" really is, and who's to blame for their extremism. The reality that their entire view of Islam is based on a mirage is not something they are willing to accept. But to talk of the Taliban or Al Queda without speaking of Islam is as absurd as discussing the Gulags without mentioning Communism. It means that not only can the problem never be solved, but it can never even be addressed. Because we have never stated the cause.

Instead, we try to fight Islamic terrorism by cultivating alliances among the constantly churning factions of governments, militias, warlords and tribal elders, hoping to use them-- only to be used as pawns in their own games instead. That is what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has happened among the Palestinian Arabs and the Yemeni government, in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and anywhere else we try to apply Western policymaking.

The Muslim world has technology, but no civilization. Western nations have given to the Islamic East, the appearance of nationhood and the fruits of industry, without ever acknowledging that they were tossing pearls before swine. A pig wearing a pearl necklace is still a member of the porcine family. Only now it is a well-dressed pig. We have dressed up the Muslim world, but underneath it is not so different from the warring tribes that Mohammed tried to glue together with Islam. And that is why Islam retains the power that it does. Islam does not have a separation of Mosque and State, because there is really no state, only the mosque. The great dream of over a millennium of a transcendent global Muslim unity. A Great Leap Forward across the chasm of tribal savagery and into a Caliphate, which will undo all the achievements of all other peoples, and demonstrate once and for all that the Muslim is supreme over all the rest of the world.

How the Left Wins Elections by Transforming Nations

2012-07-17T22:59:00.002-04:00

Elections are won by demographics. No soup company blindly dumps cans of its newest "Turkey Coconut Bouillon with Nutmeg and Omega 3" in Aisle 6 of the supermarket without testing to see what demographics such a hideous concoction might appeal to. Will the product appeal to lesbian single mothers, divorced Asian firefighters or eccentric Latvian millionaires? Politics is no different.

A political party has its base, definable groups who groove to its message, who eat up the red meat that its candidates toss their way. It has the demographic groups which will always vote for it and those who might swing its way. It knows them by race, gender, age, class, sexuality, home ownership and a thousand other statistical slices of the pie. It has those numbers broken down by states, cities and neighborhoods so that it has a good estimate of its chances in a given place and time based on the demographics of the people who live there.

This kind of information is helpful for winning elections-- but showing up to play the electoral hand you're dealt is for suckers. And by suckers, I mean conservative parties.

Breaking down the demographics is like looking at the cards in your hand. Once you've done that, the only remaining variable in a static game are your opponent's cards. With election demographics, players can see all the cards everyone has. That makes the game static. Hands will inevitably be won or lost... unless you can draw some new cards.

The most obvious way to play the demographic game of thrones is with gerrymandered districts. A gerrymandered district is shaped to include a majority of the winning demographic leading to a nearly automatic victory for the party. It's the political equivalent of stacking the deck.

Gerrymandered districts are of dubious legality, except when shaped to create a majority minority district, in which case it becomes an obligation under civil rights laws. This stacks the deck, creating permanent sinecures for some horribly incompetent politicians and permanent seats for the Democratic Party.

But that is just a matter of rearranging the cards in the deck. What if you could bring in cards from outside the deck? What if you could change the value of some cards? Then you would be on the way to being the best card sharp in Washington D.C. or London or Paris.

Sure you could win elections by creating a few gerrymandered districts, but you couldn't win a country that way. To do that, you have to change the national demographics.

Suppose you were running our fictional soup company and you discovered that "Turkey Coconut Bouillon with Nutmeg and Omega 3" isn't popular with key demographics. The only people who like it are unemployed Pakistani immigrants, lesbian single mothers and divorced Asian firefighters.

Sure you could take a shot at putting out another flavor, but damn it, you like this one. And you also spent your entire advertising budget for the next three years promoting it, and thanks to your ad campaign, everyone now associates your company with "Turkey Coconut Bouillon with Nutmeg and Omega 3". And if people don't like it, then your company is doomed.

You could try to change people's minds, or you could try to change the demographics to ones that favor your soup. To do that, you would have to bring in a lot of Pakistani immigrants, create a poor economic climate, promote divorce and homosexuality, and create some public sector jobs.

Luckily, no soup company can do that sort of thing. But governments can.

That's the neat thing about governments, if they want to change national demographics, bring in more immigrants, create more single-parent families and more unemployment; they can do all those things easily.

Suppose, for example, that instead of running a soup company, you are a UK Labour politician. They say you're bright, and while that may be debatable and some time later the very people who said it will spit in disgust at the idea, but you are young and you can see the writing on the wall. After Thatcher, there's no future for the kind of cheap labor radical who threatens to take the workers into the streets at every opportunity. The working-class vote that your party identified with is on the way out. And even if it wasn't, it won't survive the leftward drift of your party.

Fortunately, you don't run a soup company. You run the United Kingdom and what you do is open up the doors to bring in as many Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and that sort into the country as you can. And that way you can create a demographic that will support you, even when the native workers won't.

Not that this sort of thing could ever happen. A political party could never decide to use its power to import huge numbers of foreigners to displace its domestic base and create a new demographic picture more favorable to its political ambitions. Except that is exactly what happened in the UK.

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

It also happened here, with the indefatigable work of a champion swimmer and legislator in the Senate with a rather famous last name. It's happening in quite a few places. And not only with immigration. The demographic cards are being shifted, new cards are being palmed, and some cards are having their value altered.

Suppose that your statistics show that unemployed people are more likely to vote for you than the employed. Then your goal would be to shift as many of those who ordinarily wouldn't vote you from the ranks of the employed to those of the unemployed. And once they were on benefits, they might just come to support you, even though you were the one who maneuvered to deprive them of their employment.

That sort of thing is childishly easy to do if you happen to have a government and a party with extensive partnerships with progressive non-profits and powerful think-tanks and foundations.

Say that workers in factories were 40 percent less likely to vote your way and 80 percent more likely to disapprove of your core "Turkey Coconut Bouillon with Nutmeg and Omega 3" agenda, while only 19 percent of unemployed workers who used to have jobs in factories vote against you and only 56 percent of them are against your core agenda-- and they don't even care much about it anymore because their lives have been turned upside-down and they're not sure of anything anymore.

There's an easy answer. Just start shutting down factories on any pretext. Accuse them of pollution, increase their costs, tax and inspect them to death, and make dumping foreign products on the market easier with the complicity of conservatives who are too stupid to understand the game being run on them; and do everything you can to transform the domestic working-class that used to be your base, before you went too far left, into unemployed men sitting bitterly drinking beer while wondering what happened to their country.

Suppose that your soup is called Barack Hussein Obama. In a 2008 taste test, 39 percent of working- class white men chose your soup. But in 2012, only 29 percent are willing to choose your soup. That's a problem, when people choose their government... but not a problem when governments choose their people.

Got cattle with hoof-and-mouth disease? Kill the cattle and the disease goes away. If working-class white men are a problem for you, then you have to make sure that they don't have a future and create a country with fewer white men who haven't gone to college, and fewer white men overall. And then the problem is solved.

Can't win elections with your current agenda in a country with the current makeup? Dream big, plan even bigger. Drag everyone into college, import the right sort of immigrants, make divorce as common as possible, kill jobs. Don't start now. Start doing it forty or fifty years ago. Turn Leave It to Beaver into Modern Family and suddenly the liberals will stop looking like commie egghead freaks and the conservatives will start looking like square robotic freaks who keep talking about someone they call "God", something they call a "Traditional Family" and something they describe as "Jobs."

Bertolt Brecht once wrote, "Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government's confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"

Brecht's sarcasm is now literal truth. Western governments are dissolving their peoples and electing other peoples in their place. Democracy allows peoples to elect governments, but power also allows governments to elect a people. The left has decided that it can win the demographic game of thrones by changing the demographics. And it's right.

The terrain of the battlefield often determines defeat and victory. The left changes the terrain, while the right keeps trying to fight on the new terrain. And the only way to do that is by going to the left. The right still wins elections, but the left is winning the war for the future. It is shaping the electorate demographics that favor it. To win the future, it doesn't have to win every election; all it has to do is keep changing the demographics until either the right cannot have any hope of winning any more or until the right is so far left that there no longer is anything that can be described as an opposition.

Demographics is destiny. The left is reshaping countries to match its demographic targets. It is turning nations into one great gerrymandered district composed of populations that are more likely to support it. It is doing this using immigration, economics, social policy and every tool at its disposal. And if conservatives don't start understanding the demographic game of thrones, then they will lose the war.

The Progressive-Traditionalist War

2012-06-18T23:05:00.000-04:00

The main weapon that progressives wield against traditionalists is their ability to break down the values that make up their worldview by challenging norms of behavior and thought, with the goal of using cultural friction to slowly replace traditional values and mores with their own.

This is a weapon that progressives have explicitly disavowed using against Islam. In Europe there are some hesitant attempts at promoting integration, but it's a fitful self-doubting effort that consists of the authorities telling everyone who listens that integration is moving along smoothly, while the No-Go Zones grow, black ghosts haunt the alleyways of major cities and the mosques go on crying Jihad from minaret loudspeakers rising above European capitals.

There is the occasional burqa ban, a nervous ban placed on the most extreme of the extreme clerics, an occasional investigation of a school that teaches that infidels are animals to be killed, and a cautious warning from some putatively conservative politician to the Muslim community that things have to change. But none of them adds up to anything.

The left, which excels at attacking traditional values, has signed a pact with Islam. Not only does it refuse to undermine Islam's religion and values, the way that it undermines those of everyone else, but it actively promotes Islamic values and traditions as morally superior to those of its own society.

The reason for this is simple strategy. The progressives of the left in each society are at war with their own traditionalists. American liberals are at war with American conservatives. European liberals are at war with European conservatives. Liberal Christians are at war with Conservative Christians and Progressive Jews are at war with Traditional Jews.

This war isn't always as overt as it was in the Soviet Union, or as it is in Cuba or Sweden. It's a quiet war marked by "artistic statements", by the school curriculum and the late-night newscast, by laws that transform public spaces into government spaces and private spaces into public spaces, and put the whole thing under government regulation whose overriding purpose is behavior modification.

Despite their many victories, the progressives have numerous disadvantages in this war. They are a minority dependent on front groups and divide-and-conquer politics. Rarely are they able to openly state their agendas and beliefs, because, if they did, they would be stoned on the spot. Instead, they have to worm their way in, presenting a false front of moderation, and slowly move their agenda through its outer stages to its inner core.

The left is up against common sense, which is just shorthand for the traditional way of thinking. And traditions exist because they are natural; right or wrong, they are organic, embedded in human nature and the way that people live their lives and draw their conclusions. Its Utopian schemes put it up against the human animal, so that the left has to ride the body politic like a bronco buster fighting to stay on a mutinous steed. Much of its rank and file doesn't know this, but its leaders and planners are well aware of how precarious their position is.

But there is also a more practical angle. Demographics. The progressives tend to have a lower birth rate than traditionalists. If values were transmitted on a generational basis, by now they would be deader than Disco. To compensate for their demographic disadvantage, the left reproduces by insinuating itself into the educational system. The Cuckoo's reproductive strategy is to plant its eggs in the nests of other birds to be raised by those birds, but the reproductive strategy of progressives is to raise someone else's young as a member of their species, while getting paid for it by the taxpayers.

This demographic disadvantage makes it vital for progressives to attack tradition, because it is also the only way that they can reproduce. Their reproductive strategy is entirely dependent on disrupting the ability of fertile groups to pass on their values to their offspring.

There are parallels in biology to this behavior. A number of species compete for territory by interfering with the reproduction of another species. The fertility limitations of liberals make it an ideological imperative to disrupt the reproduction of more traditional species.

The progressive attack on a society's values, when successful, leads to a national disintegration and a splintering into an apathetic middle and a traditionalist right. Fertility rates fall across the board, but are still fairly high in traditionalist circles. The left, facing a demographic threat, redoubles its attack on the values of the traditionalists. They are invariably painted as savage, backward, violent and a threat to society. They are depicted as abusing their children, all the better for the progressives to take away their children or closely monitor their educational practices.

Progressives may succeed in converting some traditionalist children into their own kind, but traditionalists are, especially after a generation or two of the left's cultural imperialism, much more hardened to this sort of campaign than their ancestors were. They are purposefully intolerant, unwilling to listen and contemptuous of the greater culture around them. They have also learned that if they don't insulate their children, that they will almost certainly lose them.

Human beings adapt. Sheep may always go on being eaten by wolves, but humans who are preyed upon learn defensive strategies. And offensive strategies too. As all good leftists know, revolutions produce their own reaction. A polarized society split between progressives and traditionalists is a conflict that the left cannot win without dealing with the demographic angle. And there is no way to deal with it, without either a One Child program or importing an even higher-reproducing population that is allied with the progressives.

High-reproducing groups tend to be traditional, so that the only way for the left to outmaneuver the traditionalist reaction it helped create, is by importing other traditionalists.

Islam isn't the only group on this list, but it is the leading group, especially in Europe. Its asset is that it has a high birth rate and it votes left-of-center. It may be innately traditionalist, but that doesn't matter to the Eurocrats because they don't care what Muslims do in their own communities and they don't think that it will apply to them.

The United States armed the Mujahadeen against the Soviet Union. European progressives use Muslim demographics against European traditionalists. And their American counterparts, who are less dependent on Pakistanis and Algerians to pad out their voting rolls, are beginning to get with the program.

What would be the quickest way to get a border fence between the United States and Mexico? If in the next election, 70 percent of Mexicans in America voted for the Republican Party, there would be a 100-foot-high concrete fence across the border, topped with poison-spiked barbed wire and at the foot of it, rabid dobermans prowling around. And it would be up, with the acclaim of the media, no matter who was in the White House.

Want to end Muslim immigration to the UK? Just get a stunning majority to cast their ballot for the Tories, while chanting that they support the monarchy, want lower taxes, drastic cuts to everything and an end to all global warming regs. And in a day The Guardian would be running columns denouncing Islam. And the same is true across Europe and around the world. Including Israel, where the left-wing parties are hopelessly dependent on Arab votes-- often on a pay-per-vote basis.

Progressive parties depend on Muslim votes. Their immigration policies selectively import groups that they have a high confidence rate of voting for them. Higher-reproducing alien traditionalist populations can demographically compete with or even out-reproduce native traditionalists, which helps keep the progressives in power and even seduces them with a vision of a country where they will always be in power for all time.

Slave owners in the Caribbean would release snakes to kill escaping slaves. But snakes have a mind of their own, and they don't just bite the people they are expected to bite. Soon they had taken over the island, and the plantation owners were dying of snake-bites. So they imported mongooses to kill the snakes. Then, when the mongooses proliferated and became a pest, they had to import more snakes to kill them.

The Red-Green alliance is a pact between low-fertility leftist reds and high-fertility Muslim greens. But what happens when there are so many greens that they don't need the reds anymore? What happens when they actively begin to prey on the reds, instead of only casually, as they do now?

The progressives tried to solve their demographic problem by making a pact with traditionalists from outside their culture, region and religion. They didn't mind that they were filling their cities with a feral population because their own reproduction strategy didn't depend on numerical survival, but on ideological control over the surviving population. Losing a few hundred or thousand of the natives a year to snakebites would make the rest more compliant. Chaos would strengthen the authorities and make their divide-and-conquer politics easier to implement. A feral population requires a police state and stirs up constant conflict that can be manipulated and exploited in a hundred different ways.

But what happens when the snakes take over the island?

To stave off domestic traditionalists, the left relied on an alliance with traditionalists with higher birth rates and beliefs that were much less compatible with the progressive way of life. The imported population was much less susceptible to conversion, much more violent and bound to eventually take over. And they were doing it all with the tireless aid and patronage of the progressives who had dealt with their escaped slave problem by filling Europe and America with snakes.

What kind of people, you might ask, do things like this?

The kind who run up trillions in debt and insist that they are spending their way out of a recession.

The kind who starve the peasantry and then force the survivors into collective farms, where they barely have enough food to get by... and expect a bountiful harvest.

The kind who use unions to show off their own power, stage strikes for political influence, drive the companies overseas, then unionize government workers, demand unsustainable benefits, and watch the economy implode.

The kind who shoot or imprison every independent thinker and then wonder why their society is stagnant and entirely dependent on technological and cultural leftovers from free societies.

The kind who outlaw firearms and self-defense, dismantle law enforcement, celebrate riots and then spend millions analyzing why the cities are decaying.

The kind who build windmills where there is no wind, who destroy rights to protect rights, who fight wars in the name of peace, who build international communities that are somehow supposed to possess more decency and law than its individual constituent members, and who drill holes in boats because they are more environmentally sound that way.

Evil destroys itself because it carries the seeds of its own destruction. It is not just destructive, it is also self-destructive. Evil is cunning, but it is also stupid. It is ruthless, but it is also cowardly. It loves plans, but it cannot distinguish its own fantasies from actual events. Like an unstable element, it is forever at war with the forces threatening to tear it apart, until they eventually do, but not until the damage has spread.

Evil cannot survive naturally, only unnaturally. It destroys itself, so that it cannot naturally reproduce, but instead it has to infect others. It can only survive by spreading the disease of its own instability. And it will do anything to survive, even as its attempts at survival not only doom it, but everyone around it as well.

Progressives tried to balance out the instability they created by importing alien traditionalists to battle their traditionalists. But the demographic growth of traditionalists, alien and native, leads us to two kinds of societies. The kind run by native traditionalists and the kind run by alien traditionalists. And which one it will be almost entirely depends on how much power the progressives have had and for how long. The longer the progressives have been in power, the likelier the country is to fall to alien traditionalists, who will have no mercy on them.

The Great Identity Crisis

2012-06-06T22:47:00.000-04:00

A moral crisis tends to go hand in hand with an identity crisis. It's when you don't know who you are that you're most likely to take refuge in a political or ethical identity that provides you with the comfort of a false sense of superiority. When all other identities fall apart, you can always rely on being the better man, the better nation and the empty space with the moral high ground.

Societies that go multicultural tend to experience identity drift and take refuge in a self-definition based on values. Who are Americans? As generations of presidents on the left and right have told us, they are people who believe in American values. What are American values? They're the values that Americans are told they need to believe in, in order to be Americans. Like tolerance, immigration, free trade, and respecting the right of anyone to be a member of the Communist Party or the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a time of crisis, nations and peoples have to choose to survive. But what is survival? Proponents of a values-based identity have argued that survival means the survival of our values. If we take Measure X against an enemy, whether it's outlawing the Communist Party or waterboarding Islamic terrorists, then we have "killed our values" and we are no longer Americans. It doesn't matter then whether an act saves millions of American lives, if it means we destroy our values, then we have killed the only worthwhile thing about us.

Physical identity and values-based identity are in conflict in a time of crisis when the question is asked, do we want to survive or do we want to be morally pure. A values-based identity appears to be superior, but it is actually the product of an identity crisis. And a nation or a people with an identity crisis is vulnerable because they no longer know who they are. Their identity has been replaced with an identity based on their superior values, values that require them to die rather than give up those values. And if they have forgotten who they are, then they are too afraid to risk their values-based identity by fighting back.

The problem is not a unique one. For example, Jewish assimilation dropped the 'peoplehood' aspect leaving behind a values-based identity. When liberal Jews express their identity, it is values-based, built around "Tikkun Olam", or "Social Justice". That opens up a hole for someone like Peter Beinart to crawl in with a crisis of Liberal Zionism, a conflict between values-based identity and Jewish survival.

Would you rather live as Jews or die as liberals? The determining factor here is whether you have a Jewish identity. Without a Jewish identity, there is only the posturing of values-based identity, and giving up the high "ethics" of bending over backward for the bad guys seems a lot like the death of the only identity such miserable people have. If all that matters about Jews is their "ethical values", then to step down from the moral high ground by bombing a terrorist stronghold is suicide.

The first question is; "Who are you?" That's a question that is asked to individuals and to nations. It's asked directly in the form of a national dialogue, and it's asked indirectly in the choices that are made in a time of crisis.

The second question is; "What do you live for?" The answer to this question is determined by the first question. What we live for derives from who we are. Self-knowledge gives purpose, and purpose gives self-knowledge. A lack of identity is also a lack of purpose. And a lack of purpose betrays a lack of identity. A nation adrift has lost its identity; it lacks direction because it has no starting point.

A thing that does not exist for its own sake has no existence. It has no existence, because it is not survival-based. It is well and good to dedicate yourself to higher causes and beliefs, but if they do not begin with your own existence, then they have no more substance than you do. You can volunteer for a thousand causes, but if you don't care whether you live or die-- then you have nothing to contribute to them.

After September 11, American leaders were asked who they were and what they lived for. And their response was to spread American values around the world. And that was what they sent the military to go out and do. In the memory of the dead, they create more dead, as sacrifices on behalf of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. This obscenity was described as making the world a better place.

And yet how can you blame them? What else were they supposed to do?

America was under attack, but what is that thing called, "America"? Is it an actual physical place or is it an idea of free enterprise, democracy and universal tolerance? And who are the Americans? Is Anwar Al-Awlaki an American? Of course, he was born here and he has the right papers, doesn't he?

If Anwar Al-Awlaki is an American and the people who died on September 11 are Americans, then this is a conflict between Americans. And it can only be settled by the legal system. To recognize an outside enemy, you have to be able to delineate a border between the "outside" and the "inside", and you have to reach for a physical identity to describe what belongs inside the organism and what belongs outside it. Otherwise, you have nothing left but values and legalisms.

If we accept that definition, then the left is correct and this is just an internal conflict between Americans and other Americans, who are extremists, Resident Alien Americans, Undocumented Americans, and Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, who just don't know that they're Americans yet. If to be an American, all you need to do is be born here or happen to have the right papers, or believe in free enterprise, democracy and religious tolerance for Dhimmis, then this is truly a global American civil war within the body of the Pax Americana.

An identity crisis leads to a values-based identity, and a values-based identity leads to a compulsive need to spread that identity to others. Islam is an example of an extended identity crisis and a values-based identity. Its adherents resolve a conflict between their practice and values by projecting it onto the infidel Other and then kill themselves to destroy that Other. Liberals do the same thing. Only their choice of tactics and orientation is different.

An individual or a nation in the throes of a values-based identity crisis is a "zombie"; its identity requires it to feed on and infect others. It is wholly other-oriented, whether in a friendly or hostile way. It strives to fill the gaping hole inside its own being by infecting others with its ideology. It is always insecure because it does not know itself. It is suicidal because it has no reason to live. Its existence wholly derives from its ability to spread its own species of insanity as widely as possible. Since it lives for this purpose, it must also die for it. This is the meaning of a human disease.

The loss of identity is a frightening thing and it can happen in any number of ways. Sudden change, national transformation, catastrophic war, contact with superior outsiders, technological revolution and a thousand other things. It is seductively easy to turn to a simple verity, the meditative chant that says identity derives from some form of moral and ethical superiority. It's child's play to link this up to national exceptionalism, without considering that national exceptionalism has no meaning without national survival.

In times of crisis, repeating "We are the good people" over and over again is no defense. And even before a crisis, it invites attack. It is tantamount to a refusal to defend yourself and makes it absurdly easy for an enemy to turn your own values against you. It then becomes all too depressingly easy for a nation to conclude that it would rather die than violate the absurdly dainty standards it has set for itself as proof of its own superiority.

A nation's self-worth is grounded in its accomplishments. As its accomplishments diminish, it either begins to live in the past or adopts a values-based identity that allows it to believe that it is better than the nations who are actually building, forging and making their future. The cycle feeds on itself until fossil nations remain, too good to lift a hand in their own defense. Such nations do not survive long in the natural order of things, but the twilight of the world wars left behind a Pax Americana that saw its stronger and more vital colonies protecting the mother countries from the consequences of their own degeneracy. That allowed them to rot in peace, while being colonized by their immigrant conquerors. Now that the colonies are degenerating at a rapid rate, the day swiftly approaches when there will be no one to protect the mother countries.

No nation or people can endure, founded on the belief in their own goodness, in their own ethics and their own superior values. Not only is this unforgivably arrogant and suicidal, but is a thing that has no existence. Physical identity is the heart of any group. When the group attempts to transcend its conflicts through a values-based identity, it either falls back onto physical identity or develops an identity crisis that eventually destroys it.

Israel's Peace Disease

2012-05-07T22:29:00.001-04:00

For the last twenty years Israel has been swept into an obsession with few parallels except to the Dutch Tulip economy. Except instead of tulips, its commodity of choice is an even more insubstantial thing, the faint promise of peace.

Peace fever is the disease consuming Israel as surely as the Black Death took Europe. If the Dutch traded fortunes for flowers, the Israelis have traded away most of their territory for worthless pieces of paper that last about as long as tulips do. Mostly, like Madoff's investments, after they wither and die it turns out that they were never worth anything to begin with.

Take the Camp David Accords, greeted with insane romantic fervor in Jerusalem and European capitals, but resented and despised by Egyptians because they were a reminder of how their army had failed to destroy Israel. It was a worthless accord that gave Egypt a vast amount of territory in exchange for maintaining a status quo that it had no choice but to maintain after losing multiple wars. With the fall of Mubarak, it was revealed that the Accords were never more than moonbeams and fairy dust. A puff of Arab Spring and they are gone.

Camp David was an illusion, but the Oslo Accords are a delusion. A tulip economy where Israel doles out fortunes in money, land and power in exchange for the promise of peace and an end to the violence... tomorrow, always tomorrow. The most devastating impact of the delusion isn't on the cemeteries where children lie side by side with soldiers, on the broken homes and synagogues of Gaza, or on the tightening circle of terror around Jerusalem. As with all delusions, its most devastating impact is on the mind.

The conflict has formed into two camps. The Muslims are pro-Palestine. The Jews are pro-Peace, which means they are both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. They are for Israel and for the terrorists trying to destroy Israel. What does being pro-Peace actually mean? It means believing above all else that peace is possible and that it will come riding in on a white donkey in our time, if we just want it badly enough.

The last twenty years have been hard on the illusion of peace. As the violence goes on year after year, it has become necessary to assign blame somewhere. There are the Dershowitzes who say that Israel wants peace; but that it lacks an amenable peace partner. There are the Friedmans who say that both sides lack leaders who want peace. Then there are the Beinarts who blame Israel for not seizing the opportunity to make peace.

Only one of those positions is logically supportable within the context of the peace delusion. If Israel lacks a peace partner, then why not abandon the whole peace process, reclaim the territory, expel the terrorists and restore order? If both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are hopeless, then what is there to negotiate when neither party wants peace? Blaming Israel is the only internally consistent position for a peace advocate because it avoids coming to grips with the futility of negotiating with terrorists.

The only way to sustain the peace delusion is by blaming Israel. And that very act concedes the hopelessness of the Palestinian Authority and the farce of negotiating with it. Why blame Israel? Because Israel is democratic, it has a vibrant opposition, it is peaceloving, it is capable of change. Israel is everything that the people it is trying to make peace with aren't.

Blaming the terrorists opens up a hopeless catalog of violence, corruption, incitement and madness. There is no way to catalog all that and still honestly go on believing that peace is possible. To browse MEMRI or PalWatch is to confront the tragedy of life and let the illusions and delusions die as all folly does when exposed to the light. The only way to keep the lie of peace alive is by blaming Israel.

The peace disease infects its victims with self-hatred as the only way to keep the pathogen alive. And the disease has no end. There was a time when Arafat was the guest of honor among peaceniks; now it's Hamas. Peter Beinart is busy explaining that Hamas really isn't that bad once you get to know them. Forget the genocidal Hamas charter, the wunderkind of the anti-Israel peace camp says, just pay attention to a few selected excerpts from their interviews with the foreign press.

And why not? It's what the peace camp did with Arafat and that worked out great. Why not do it with Hamas? What's the worst that could happen?

The internal logic of the disease is inescapably consistent. We had to believe in Arafat in order to believe in peace. Now that our peace partners have expressed a preference for Hamas over Fatah, we have to believe in Hamas, in order to believe in peace. To believe in peace we have to believe in a peace partner to have peace. We have to believe that there is hope for peace with every terrorist, that the lack of peace is our fault-- not theirs.

The one thing that sufferers of the peace disease have to believe above all else in order to remain consistent is that Israel is at fault. Any deviation from that is an inconsistency. That inconsistency is why the pro-Peace, pro-Israel side can always win on the facts, while still losing the debate. They can lay out their case against Fatah and Hamas in all its glorious detail, the incontestable facts, the quotes and the documentation, and then they finish with an absurdity that unmakes their position. Israel still wants peace. Yet, if half of what they say is true, then who is there to have peace with?

The other side is not bogged down by such contradictions. Their consistent narrative is that Israel has repeatedly avoided sincerely making peace. Whatever Israel has done, does or will do is not enough. It can never be enough, because if it were enough, there would be peace. And there is nothing that the terrorist populations can do that is too horrifying, too repugnant or too great a breach of faith. If they trade in Fatah for Hamas, then the Beinarts will dutifully pop up to introduce us to the newly peaceful Hamas and the same old intractable Israel.

Why then should the Palestinian Arabs make peace with the Jewish ogre and its checkpoints and walls, its bomb-sniffing dogs, law of return and settlements? They shouldn't is the implication. The terrorists have every right not to want peace with us; it is we who must prove our good faith and our humanity. It is we who must strive to prove ourselves worthy of even sitting across a negotiating table with them.

Sick? Demented? Twisted? All of the above, but also completely logical. If you are going to be delusional, then it is best to be consistently delusional. Why be neurotic, when you can be flat out insane? Why settle for a second rate phobia when you can go for full on schizophrenia? Hope and faith often dance close to the level of madness. Sustaining misdirected hope in the face of reality requires a great deal of faith or delusion.

Delusional does not mean stupid. Highly intelligent people are more likely to be deluded because they have a greater capacity for imagining and then rationalizing the delusion. A stupid person would assume that being shot at marks the end of peace negotiations. It takes a highly intelligent person to rationalize the shots as not an attack on him, but on the negotiations, which are the only way to stop the cycle of violence.

Some financial observers have hypothesized that the problem with our economy is that it is run by highly intelligent people. They may have a point. Stupid people can lose money, but they can't create imaginary money. And they are always waiting for the police to show up at their door with a warrant. Highly intelligent people though can create entire tiers of imaginary value and trade them back and forth in a glorious tulip economy, which everyone believes in, until unaccountably the whole thing evaporates because it was never there.

Israel's peace economy is the work of highly intelligent people trading real world items for an imaginary currency that they have turned into their national existence. Their burning conviction is that the only reason the imaginary currency has not realized its full value is because they have greedily not given up enough real world items to make the imaginary currency appreciate in value.

It's not a mental illness unique to Israel or to Jews. It is how cons work. Once you've been conned, you either wise up and move on, or you protect your sunk cost, your self-esteem and your credibility by throwing in more good money after bad. The only way to keep justifying this destructive behavior is by believing that the con artists are legitimate, that there is a system, and that you just need to put in more money to get back ten times what you put in.

I want peace. I also want to cure all diseases, and universal happiness and immortality for all. The difference between me and virtually every Jewish communal leader is that I know that I can't have those things because they don't exist. And if they did, I couldn't get them by giving money and land to a bunch of grubby socialist and Islamist militias.

In a time of war, modern people base their goodness on wanting peace, because doing so allows them to believe that they are good people, not bloodthirsty monsters cavorting on a throne of skulls. And to go on believing that, they cannot refuse any offer of peace; otherwise, they would be choosing war over peace. Then they would be bloodthirsty monsters resting their feet on a giant pile of corpses. Instead they show themselves to be idiots with no sales resistance and no common sense.

If a war is worth fighting, then it is worth fighting until the conditions that make that war necessary no longer exist. The minimal condition of any war is the willingness of the other side to stop fighting. If this condition is not met, then nothing else matters. Not peace doves or postmodern neurosis. It is not a matter of opinion at that stage, but a matter of fact, that the war will go on. It will go on regardless of what you do because you are not in control of the conflict.

To believe that you will have something because it is an absolute good and that to strive for it is so moral that the failure to do so is immoral regardless of its feasibility, is magical thinking. It is every bit as delusional as waiting for a magic fish to swim up and grant you three wishes. And once you base your identity on a commitment to an absolute good that cannot be achieved except through your own destruction, then you have committed suicide.

That is Israel's peace disease in a nutshell. It is not unique to Israel. It can be found in America and Europe. It can be found anywhere modern enlightened people fail to come to grip with the necessity of violence in the affairs of men and escape into illusion and delusion instead. It is a fatal disease. It does not kill quickly or cleanly, it is an agonizing fevered death filled with hallucinations, peace doves circling the ceiling, amputation after amputation, bloody limbs piled on the altar of peace that burns and burns until everything is consumed and only the ashes remain.