nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

One of my classes this semester claims to be on the topic of “changing the world”: learning the methods of activism and the philosophical backings thereof in order to, as the course description puts it, “inform … decision-making about both ends and means in the struggle to change the world”. However, its actual content is concerned almost exclusively with a small subset of its possible range of topics: the behavior of the government. We are to focus not on our hideously small Overton window, but on SOPA and ACTA, to take one example: the topic of censorship is considered as the topic of state censorship.

This exclusive concern with the ‘public’ sector is a characteristic error of liberal political thought: the only power it recognizes is formal, centralized, and usually governmental. The glaring security hole should be obvious to anyone versed to any substantial degree in leftism or Moldbuggery. As Moldbug said:

A rule that tells us to “keep Mithra out of the schools” is overspecified, unless you think Mithra in specific is the great danger to impressionable young minds. If we keep Mithra out of the schools but we say nothing about Baal, Baal will outcompete Mithra and our children will grow up as Baalist bots.

Moldbug was referring to the separation of church and state—limiting the power of one kind of repeater will, at the very least, not touch the power of other kinds—but this applies equally well to forms of power. What difference is there in practice between thousands of small repeaters situated in a decentralized reinforcement mechanism such that they all send out the same packets and one large, sovereign repeater sending out the exact same packets? The same packets will be sent out either way, but the thousands will go unnoticed, and the one will not.

We can summarize this distinction easily by saying that liberalism, in many forms, is concerned solely with statecraft: the arrangement of the formal sovereign. Statecraft is a subset of politics: the arrangement of society, and the values and determiners of social standing therein. (Adjective forms: registerial, from Esperanto—any possible Latin root is already taken, and Greek would give something beginning with cyber-, which would be far too confusing—and political.)

The values and determiners of social standing thereof… We have already identified statecraft as our Mithra, the focus that brings about the security hole; could this be our Baal?

Well, who canned John Derbyshire? The state?

What was apparently important was not how mild he was but how mild-mannered he could present himself as being; the breach now, in terms of the National Review, may in the end be more one of politesse than politics.

Politesse. Civility, politeness, courtesy. Politesse fired Derbyshire. Values and determiners of social standing, in the ballroom, with a candlestick.

Note the strange liberal speech tic, the assumption that politesse and politics are mutually exclusive. It’s not a political matter, no, not at all; it’s just a matter of “being a good person”, as if such notions are utterly apolitical, outside the realm of dispute, right where liberalism wants them to be.

How, then, can activism, in the registerial sense in which it is taught, change the world? Trying to effect real change through activism is like trying to build a botnet using a hole closed back when OS/2 was the hot new thing, while there are millions of end-users running unpatched Windows installs as root who don’t know any better than to download FunnyCatPic.jpg.exe.

If you’re a fascist, say, no amount of activism will be as effective as getting the student body of Harvard into Von Thronstahl. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference what the government does if the Cathedral priests of the next generation rattle on about ‘honor’ and ‘degeneracy’ the way ours do about ‘justice’ and ‘racism’. (Of course, I’m not a fascist, but there aren’t any bands with my politics. Maybe I’ll start one someday. Bet I’d suck less than Von Thronstahl, or, for that matter, NOFX.) The ‘struggle’ to which my professors refer is far more ideographic than registerial, unless you support the existing ideography.

It’s not entirely ideographic, of course, but this post is long enough already.

Or not.

(via Gates of Vienna)

The liberal ideography is one hell of a virus, kids. Even its supposed most serious competition is getting owned.

(Note: Finals season has begun, so this will probably be my last post for a while. I might be posting some of my final papers here once my grades are in, since they may turn out to be of interest to at least the alt-right crowd. We’ll see.)

I’ve referenced the concept of ideography before, but I haven’t given it a proper treatment yet. In short, an ideography in the political sense is a set of ideographs: terms assigned a particular emotional load by an ideology for use in its rhetoric.

The use of ideographs will often seem absurd to readers outside the ideology to which they belong. An average American going through Nazi political material would almost certainly find the references to Volksgemeinschaft, das Führerprinzip, and Jewry to be, at the very least, disorienting, similar to the feeling one gets when traveling to a foreign country and finding that the toilets have foot pedals instead of flush handles. But then, so would the average Nazi upon hearing the constant references of Western political material to the somewhat isomorphic concepts of liberty, democracy, and fascism. For an example closer to home, consider the reaction of the average American ‘liberal’ (I’ll dispense with my usual scare quotes from here on out; just keep in mind that, contrary to my usual practice, all terms are to be taken in their usual American senses) to Newt Gingrich’s “secular socialism” routine.

Can an isomorphic example, of a conservative reaction to a sound bite applying the liberal ideography, be constructed? It is possible to come close, with, for example, the constant charges of racism leveled at just about every conservative figure and movement, but there is one crucial difference: liberals don’t respond emotionally to “secular socialism”, but conservatives most definitely do to “racism”. In fact, as the conservative line on affirmative action demonstrates, “racism” is just as much a part of the conservative ideography as the liberal one. And, for that matter, the white supremacist one: David Duke uses it.

Pretty pervasive ideograph we have here, if a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan uses it to deliver the exact same emotional load as Tim Wise. They both agree that racism is a Bad Thing; the only difference is in the definition. Duke wants to apply it to Wise, and vice versa. Any debate between the two (ignoring that, in reality, at least one of the two would have to be carted off by security five seconds in) would almost certainly consist mostly of redefinitions of the term, and other ideographs common to the American political arena. These semantic games are common: witness the attempt of Roger Scruton, one of the few conservatives with two brain cells to rub together, to split the positions he disagrees with that can be supported by the positive ideograph “liberty” into a new, negative ideograph, “license”, instead of rejecting the ideograph altogether.

It is clear, then, that in addition to the conservative ideography, there exists an ideography shared by just about the entire American political arena, which I will call the American ideography. Its contents include, on the positive side, liberty, equality, freedom, democracy, progress, fairness, and justice, and on the negative side, racism, fascism, and anything related to Hitler.

The astute reader will, by now, have picked up on an omission: nowhere have I mentioned liberal ideography. There is a reason for this omission: there may be a few minor differences, but at least on the major points, the liberal ideography is the American ideography. Most ideographs used by liberals are also used by conservatives, and with the same intended effect. (This is less so on the alt-right; one of the many instances of convergent evolution between Mencius Moldbug and the European New Right is their explicit refudiation of that ideography.)

Now consider the history of the American ideography. Its terms’ associations have changed consistently, and in a consistent direction: leftward. Equality under the law became equality of opportunity, and is now becoming equality of outcome. Freedom from the tyranny of a single, unelected, overactive monarch became freedom from fear and want, and is now becoming freedom from any sort of moral judgment of all but the most repulsive forms of libertinism. And so on. Considering the structure and history of this ideography, and its identification with ‘Americanism’, there can be no American Right. The American ideography does not hold promise for conservatives, and yet they do not challenge it; in fact, they do the opposite, and in doing so, sign their own death sentence.

That is the failure of conservatism.

The absurdities of contemporary society outlined in my previous post come from one clear source: the individualist ideography. Human relations are cast as oppressive restraints, and their participants, due to their nature as interchangeable, detached souls existing outside all human constructs, must be liberated from all such oppression, set free to… well, to do what? Individualism is largely silent on that question, but in practice, all it frees most people to do (in the first world, at least; its policies have been far more disastrous in other areas, most notably the former Rhodesia) is march listlessly about in architectural monstrosities of glass and concrete on weekdays and hammer themselves into the ground with cheap beer at night. Meaningless people living meaningless lives, inhabiting places that cannot be homes, occasionally falling into narcissistic restatements, whether New Age or liberal, of the dogma that created their problems in the first place. Or, of course, drug addiction. Anything to escape the hell they have no language to acknowledge.

Without structure, there can be no virtue, only subsistence. Asian parenting tactics are widely opposed, and even in my opinion a bit extreme (mostly because they focus on the wrong things; Asian culture emphasizes skill in repetition over skill in thought, which is useful for getting the best government bureaucrats, but not much else), but when was the last time you saw a white college student with actual competence? As in parenting, so in society: lack of structure breeds failure and apathy.

I saw a high school acquaintance go down that road. He was on the MIT track, but due to circumstances nobody possibly could have foreseen, his train got derailed and he ended up in a party college for rich, nihilistic SWPLs, at which point his parents decided not to give a damn about what he did. He ended up changing his major to philosophy, dropping out, and becoming a drug dealer. Many other people were ruined by that college, that shining exemplar of liberal individualism and hedonism at work; several people I knew there are now reportedly homeless, permafried from acid and riddled with STDs. But our language has no words for such concepts. The absurdity of contemporary society is made apparent by the fact that words such as “wasted”, “trashed”, and “hammered” have taken on positive connotations. Productivity is for squares, bro. Real men fuckin’ party. Drop that Bach shit, let’s crank some Kanye.

Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century arch-reactionary, saw this all coming:

In the progress of Emancipation, are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle? Horses too have “motives;” are acted on by hunger, fear, hope, love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity, ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude outline of all our human spiritualities,—a rude resemblance to us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame. The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:—I am sure if I could make him “happy,” I should be willing to grant a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that object!

Him too you occasionally tyrannize over; and with bad result to yourselves, among others; using the leather in a tyrannous unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times. “Am I not a horse, and half-brother?”—To remedy which, so far as remediable, fancy—the horses all “emancipated;” restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe: turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner! So long as grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin: oats in full measure if thou wilt. “Hlunh, No—thank!” snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? “Hlunh!”—Gray Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,—O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops are ended in this world!—For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of Hodge’s horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge’s horses to emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this habitable Earth no grass to eat,—in Black Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;—to roam aimless, wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos, by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour.

The main error of liberalism is its denial of human nature. We, the Whig says, are superanimal—fundamentally rational beings, homo economicus, separate from our hardware, and yet with no higher purpose than the base fulfillment of that hardware. (This, of course, is the Bentham/Mill debate, and the world, predictably, has taken Bentham’s side, leading to our current predicament. One cannot justify liberalism through Mill, for reasons explained best, albeit unintentionally, by Jeff Moss: Mill does not like big squooshy blobs.) If you build a contraption to dispense cocaine to a rat whenever it pushes a bar, the rat will waste away at the bar, forgetting even to eat; and in the end, we are but rats. At the very least,  if you firehose dopamine down my mesolimbic pathway, I’ll fry like one.

The New York Times, that modern-day Pravda of left-liberalism, recently ran a review of a book purporting to explain the demise of the American left. The explanation given—that leftists failed, for unknown reasons, to maintain an “animating vision” of socialist utopianism—is, as one would expect given the Pravdan nature of the NYT, absurd, but the reviewer inadvertently mentioned a real explanation for said demise.

The left generally failed, according to Kazin, when it emphasized atheism, collectivism and ideological purity. It has been more successful when taking the form of broad, heterogeneous movements struggling for individual rights. Witness the rise of gay marriage, arguably today’s most effective left-leaning social campaign. Viewed as a utopian dream, it promises to transform the institution of marriage. But viewed as a civil rights matter, it simply aims to include more people in an existing institution.

By this statement, one can easily predict, given any leftist policy goal, whether it will succeed or fail: it will succeed if it involves expanding individual freedom, commonly known euphemistically as “civil rights”, and it will fail otherwise. On its face, this may seem like an odd statement; leftism, after all, is fundamentally collectivist, so why are its successes limited to a domain in which it does not lie? But it fits the reality of the situation well enough that, despite its initial counterintuitiveness, there must be a way to make sense of it.

And, in fact, there is: leftists succeed in implementing any policy goal that moves American society further toward the liberal ideal of maximized individual liberty. (Americans may be confused by this statement, since that ideal is much more commonly associated with libertarianism than liberalism in America, but libertarianism is simply a subspecies of liberalism that believes nongovernmental forces cannot restrict liberty.)

A clear example of this is American feminism, which, according to Christina Sommers, can be divided into two camps: ‘egalitarian’ (that is, liberal) feminism, currently the dominant philosophy in feminism, and ‘conservative’ feminism, the illiberalism of which has gotten it written out of the historical record, despite having been historically far more effective than egalitarianism:

Willard, a suffragist and leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, is another once esteemed figure in women’s history who is today unmentioned and unmentionable. Willard brought mainstream women into the suffrage movement, and some historians credit her with doing far more to win the vote for women than any other suffragist. But her fondness for saying things like “Womanliness first—afterwards what you will” was her ticket to historical obliquy.

Approved feminist founders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through Wollstonecraft-like appeals to universal rights. Their inspirations were John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Wollstonecraft herself. Stanton wrote affectingly on “the individuality of each human soul,” and on a woman’s need to be the “arbiter of her own destiny.”

What then, in practice, is leftism in America? It cannot be proper leftism, because proper leftism, as per Kazin, has not been successful; what has been successful is liberalism, which commonly disguises itself as leftism. This may be confusing to Americans, who have most likely never encountered a proper leftist and, if they have, were most likely too distracted by the rhetorical similarities between the two to tell the difference. (Liberalism and leftism are both progressivist ideologies, but they have one easily noticeable difference: the eschaton that liberalism would immanentize is one of atomistic individuals with maximum license and no connections to anything or anyone, with the possible exception of the benevolent State, whereas leftist utopian projects demonstrate at least a faint grasp of human nature. More on that later.)

American ‘leftism’, considering its in actu effects and its rhetoric of “civil rights” and “individual liberty”, can only be described as liberalism, or, more insightfully, as ultra-Americanism:

But when we look at the actual political motifs in the two kinds of anti-Americanism, we see very little in common – besides of course hatred of America.

Clearly it’s this word anti-American that’s confusing us. If we split it in half we can see the trend clearly. To be counter-American is to resist American political theory. To be ultra-American is to accept American political theory so completely that you become more American than America itself, and you feel America is not living up to her own principles.

But what is American political theory? It is, quite trivially, the dominant political ideology in America. Considering the history of American politics, it is clear the American political theory is fundamentally liberal, and that said history can be summarized as the bringing in line of American society to a distinctly un-nuanced reading of that oft-quoted clause in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

Liberty is license, happiness is hedonism, and our political discourse has been shaped in such a way that liberal hegemony currently goes unchallenged. The left, then, did not die due to lack of an “animating vision”; it was co-opted by liberalism. But how did this happen and what can be done? That will have to wait until next time.