How to Ensure that Feminists Never Reproduce except with the lowliest of low value males

https://everydayfeminism.com/2017/12/intersectional-feminist-first-date/

Well, here's what feminism expects every woman to ask on a first date as a weed-out questionnaire.  Of course, the problem is, the kinds of guys that they actually want aren't going to subject themselves to something so stupid in the first place.  By even suggesting such a thing, they've already weeded themselves out of the reproductive gene pool

But for the sake of fun, I'll answer the questions the way that I would if I were somehow to find myself subjected to them.  This would have to involve me becoming widowed or transported into an alternate reality, so it's really hypothetical.

1. Do you believe that Black Lives Matter?

Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group.  Anyone who supports them should be shot in the street, and then the shooter cheered by America as a hero.

What?  Trial?  Constitution?  Give me a break; the Left doesn't care about any of that.  And since they don't care, fair is fair.  They don't need to have access to the benefits of it.

2. What are your thoughts on gender and sexual orientation?

Sex describes your biology.  Gender describes your grammar.  There's no such thing as sexual orientation, just normal, healthy, psychologically functional and then broken.

3. How do you work to dismantle sexism and misogyny in your life?

Well, I'm out with you on this date in spite of your obvious and apparent lack of any charm or redeeming social traits, aren't I?  I should be given a medal; I'm a freakin' hero already.

4. What are your thoughts on sex work?

If it's work, you're doing it wrong.

5. Are you a supporter of the BDS movement?

I believe in boycotting, divesting and sanctioning any entity that deliberately singles out white, male, heterosexual men for targeting and harassment.  I couldn't care less about how the Israelis deal with a surly population of interlopers in their territory, though.

6. What is your understanding of settler colonialism and indigenous rights?

Settlers and colonists established their nations, the indigenous have whatever rights the settlers consent to let them have.  That said; get ready for a major upcoming disruption in the tolerance that Americans and Europeans have for the would-be settlers and colonists who think that they can take our countries from us.  It ain't gonna be pretty.  You ever heard that Kipling poem "Wrath of the Awakened Saxon?"

7. Do you think capitalism is exploitative?

That kind of emotive nonsense is exactly why our more intelligent ancestors knew that women's suffrage was a terrible idea.  Too bad it took us 4-5 generations to figure out what everyone else in the world already knew.  That's a bad data point for white supremacy, isn't it?

8. Can any human be illegal?

Of course.

9. Do you support Muslim Americans and non-Muslim people from Islamic countries?

There's no such thing as a Muslim American.  You're either a Moslem or an American, because the two are mutually exclusive.  On that note: all Fake Americans have to go back.  If they leave soon of their own accord, it'll be a lot prettier than if they wait until our patience for them is completely exhausted.

10. Does your allyship include disabled folks?

I'm not even your ally.

So; I took your stupid quiz.  I doubt I won anything that I actually want, so see ya.  I'll leave the check for you to pick up since you're such a strong, independent woman.

Kate Steinle's killer aquitted

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/11/30/five-times-deported-illegal-alien-jose-zarate-found-not-guilty-in-murder-of-kate-steinle/

The dramatic Breitbart headline: Five-Times-Deported Illegal Alien Found **Not Guilty** in Murder of Kate Steinle.  Shock Verdict: Seven-time convicted felon — had confessed!  Sanctuary: San Francisco

There is no greater example of how much the so-called leaders of America actually HATE Americans than this. Unbelievable.

Anyone who doesn't look at today and see echoes of the 1850s and Bleeding Kansas and the inevitable upcoming Civil War 2.0 is sticking their head in the sand.

We'd have been better off with King George than with the feckless, hateful tyrants who we have today.

Parenthetically, if you still believe in law, order, justice and "muh Constitution"—this is a great example of the problem—none of those things WORK anymore in America. Ammon and Cliven Bundy have been held prisoner for no reason against the express purpose of the Constitution for... what; over 600 days running now? While a Fake American is given a free pass to murder American women on the street. Not even a slap on the wrist. Not even a stern talking to about "Try not to kill any more Americans while you're here taking American welfare money, OK?"

There is no law that can't be ignored at will by those who are on the Left.

There is no order, because the Left hates American order and wants to destroy it.

There is no justice because the Elites hate Americans and want to punish them for being Americans, and ultimately exterminate them and replace them with a more compliant population that already accepts daily corruption and socialism as part of their life.

There is no Constitution, because for decades, all of the powerful who have ignored it have never been brought to account. Almost daily, we see the Constitution violated by agents of the Federal government, from all three branches.

America is done, unless Americans WAKE UP and take their country back. Already it's too late to happen without almost certain terrible bloodshed. The longer we wait, the worse it's going to be. For us, and for the traitors in DC, and for the Fake American invaders who HAVE TO GO BACK.

Yes, you might say, the pattern isn't always reliable.  OJ Simpson was given a pass for murdering a white woman because of black solidarity and hapless white guilt tripping about "muh racism."  On the other hand, George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson were acquitted.  Just because sometimes a vast, bureaucratic system does what its actually supposed to do doesn't mean that it isn't actively hostile to its original purpose and to the American people, though.  There are simply too many examples of it going awry because of corruption, political considerations, or other problems for me to have any confidence in it anymore.  And then when retired judges openly admit that they ignore precedent and even the law and go with what they "feel" is right, whatever lingering odor of confidence that I once had is dashed for good.

On Mormons being Christian

An interesting post from a guy that I often read:

Apparently saying that 3 does not equal 1 now qualifies as "hate speech." An episode unfolded yesterday here in town that exposed just how far gone even most conservative evangelicalism is in riding the inclusivity train right off the cliff 

A local Christian women's Facebook group, after a couple months of ambiguity, determined to update their policy to clarify that they were open to Christians only, not unbelievers. My friend politely asked what this did and didn't mean, since there were Mormons in the group as well, who by definition are not monotheists. The group admin *deleted* her comments, then, when confronted, insisted that she had somehow done so by accident. 

So my friend dutifully posted again, bending over backwards to coat her words with grace and love, and merely noting that it was important to be clear that Christians and Mormons don't really share the same faith at all, so the group should be simply be renamed for the sake of clarity and accuracy. A Mormon friend of hers cheerfully rejoined and said that actually Mormons are Christians, and another said, “Yeah, we believe the Trinity—three distinct beings in one Godhead, etc.” 

My wife piped up briefly to say, "Well, see, that's the problem. Actually Christians don't believe in three distinct beings" and quoted from the Athanasian Creed. One of the Mormons responded fairly defensively seeking to justify the Mormon view from Scripture. 

At that point, the group admin shut down the thread, declaring that it was not glorifying to God, the devil was at work, it was hateful and slanderous, and posted a general rebuke warning people not to debate their beliefs. This was the cue for the other (mostly conservative evangelical) people in the group to pile on and accuse my wife and her friend of "hate speech."

There are three points I want to make about this.  All of them are very relevant to our interactions as members of the only true church with our brothers and sisters who are Christian, but of an incorrect and incomplete tradition.  Elder Christofferson's talk from the April 2017 General Conference is an important reference too.

First; let's note the obvious error, just for the sake of posterity.  Within the Church, we believe that claiming Christ as the head of your Church is what makes one Christian, and attempting to follow in his footsteps.  This is obviously consistent with the definition as used by the Nephites and the Jews in the very early years of the Church following Christ's Ascension, but outside the Church, there are often a lot of odd qualifiers that get thrown in.  I've heard of Christians who believe that acceptance of the Nicene Creed is a baseline for being considered Christian before, although I've never heard anyone do so about the Athanasian Creed before.  To Latter-day Saints, the very existence of either Creed is evidence that the Church had already departed from true doctrine and divine principles and was languishing in Apostasy.  The Nicene Creed was adopted by political exigency, after a bunch of bishops from Anatolia got together and decided by committee what doctrines to accept or not accept.  There was a strong element of politics involved as well, as the Arians were mostly Germanic peoples, culturally incompatible with the dwindling Romans.  The Vandals, the Goths, the Lombards, etc. were all Arians (although the Franks and Anglo-Saxons were not).  Although they were tolerant of the Nicenes when those peoples ruled over the ashes of the Roman Empire, the reverse was usually not true, and much of the conflict between Arianism and Nicene Christianity was motivated by politics and not by doctrine.  The more honest and Christlike of the commentators at the link above will note that Christians have been unable to come to an understanding of the nature of the Godhead, or Trinity, in 2,000 years of struggling with the question, but needless to say drawing a line in the sand in the comments field of a Facebook group was hardly a good idea for more reasons than one.

In any case, while the Nicene Creed is ambiguous and answers very little, the actual beliefs of the Arians—as expressed by the Arians or Arianus himself—are hard to get at, since his enemies since have destroyed much of what he wrote.  With our understanding of the nature of Divinity given to us by revelation and the experiences of Joseph Smith, it's clear that the Arians were closer to being correct than the Nicenes.  But the Arians were violently oppressed by the Nicenes and either killed as heretics or forced to renounce the Arian heresy and convert to Nicene Christianity.  We should hardly be surprised that echoes of this tyranny still come down to us through the centuries; and we should not act surprised that people get really stubborn about what they would accept.  Following the Protestant Reformation in Europe nearly a thousand years after the death of the last Arian king (Grimwald of Lombardy, d. 671 A.D.) Arian thought, or at least Semi-Arian thought resurfaced.  Europeans fought what is possibly a much more devastating war than the World Wars of the 20th Century—the Thirty Years War—precisely over differences of confessional tradition (or at least that was the stated reason, although it quickly devolved into a war between Great Powers for political ends)—people feel strongly about this kind of thing and always have.

Second, many in the Church have adopted an attitude of trying to gain the sufferance of the world.  The Brethren have, of course, encouraged us to build bridges between other religious communities, and this has been misinterpreted by many into a search for acceptance.  In some cases, this manifests as pushiness (you have to accept that we're as Christian as you are!) or hurt, as expressed above.  This is foolishness, of course.  The acceptance we should seek is that of God.  The World will never accept the ways of God fully.  If we are to be persecuted for the sake of the Gospel, well, we've certainly been told to expect that, haven't we?  Matthew 5 teaches us "10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."

I'm always somewhat surprised when I hear of members of the Church who are surprised and hurt, or worse, find their own strength failing, because they fail to adequately gain the inclusiveness with the world which they crave.  For that matter, I'm somewhat surprised that they crave it.  We are supposed to be a peculiar people; let's be so, then, and embrace the implications thereof.  Maybe you didn't grow up in a region where anti-Mormon evangelical sentiment was relatively high and The God Makers was shown at various churches from time to time.  But I did.  I never expected to be accepted as a Mormon in the greater Christian community, and I learned long ago not to crave it either.  And I saw how fragile our illusion of acceptance was in 2016.  In many political discussion forums, when it looked like Evan McMullin was going to get a significant Mormon proportion of the vote and potentially throw the election away from Trump to Hillary merely so that the so-called Mormons could posture about their moral superiority in not voting for Trump, even as they knew that Hillary would destroy what little is left of our freedoms were she elected, any hint of "they're one of us" was thrown to the winds.  As an aside, in post election voter data, it looks like the LDS were the group that broke for Trump in the highest numbers, even moreso than Evangelical Christians.  But we won't get any credit for saving the country or the Constitution, even though it hung by a thread.  Such is the nature of things.  Guys like Jeff Flake hardly help.

Third, Elder Christofferson also warns us of shaming and shaming culture.  Now, it's not clear to me from the example above that the LDS sisters were themselves the authors of this guilt trip (it seems, in fact, that they probably weren't), which is a clear shaming tactic.  Most likely it was the admins who decided that drawing a line between your beliefs and someone who believes something else is "hate speech" but I've gotta tell ya; I really hate to see the term "hate speech" and other shaming tactics thrown around indiscriminately.  As Elder Christofferson teaches us (if you needed him to point this out to you), it is not the Lord's way to change hearts and minds by shaming people into behavior that we want from them.  Always avoid it.  Never indulge in it.  As it says in D&C 121: "41 No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned;42 By kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile—"

It is not in keeping with the commandments of God to try and shame or guilt-trip or otherwise indulge in any kind of emotional blackmail to get behavior that we want from people.  If they choose to behave badly, such is the prerogative of their agency.

16 Points

If I can be cheeky enough to say so, Elder Ballard has inadvertently made my job harder following this past weekend's General Conference.  I have often made a very clear distinction in how I talk of the difference between supremacism and nationalism.  The former would mean, of course, that I think my people are supreme; better than any other.  This paradigm is today mostly limited to only a handful of groups, really—the La Raza people are Latino supremacists, the Han are Chinese supremacists, some elements of the Black Power, BLM, Nation of Islam guys are black supremacists, and modern Judaism is basically a tribal supremacist belief system today.  Of course, individuals of any group can be supremacists of all different kinds, but those are the only ones where supremacism is routine enough part of their cultural fabric that it can fairly be applied to the group generally, with the knowledge that those who are not are the exceptions rather than the rule.

For a long time now, dishonest propaganda has told us that white nationalism in America is equivalent to white supremacism in America, and I've therefore been careful to be very precise with my terminology by condemning the one, and accepting, if not even sometimes applauding, the other.  But then Elder Ballard gave his talk and condemned any form of "racism, sexism or nationalism".  Now, it's clear from context that he's referring to nationalism as supremacism, not as "love of your people" and patriotism.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it's very unlikely that Elder Ballard would condemn, for example, Mormon, who gave us clear examples of his own fervent Nephite nationalism when he agreed to lead their armies against the Lamanites because he loved his people and wanted to preserve them.  Or the many prophets and General Authorities of the past who have spoken fondly of love of country and people. Was Elder Ballard calling out Ezra Taft Benson?  I don't think so. Or even, for that matter, Elder Koch who spoke only a few minutes later of his love of his country, Brazil, and the fact that passing another Brazilian in the street was a moment that struck him because their shared nationality was something that brought them together in unity.

But, it is my sad experience that few members of the Church will be willing (or in some cases, able) to see beyond the word which has now been moved onto the Bad List­™ and won't respond with anything but, "But Elder Ballard!" and head for the fainting couches if I try to talk about context and which definition of the word I'm referring to, etc.  For all practical purposes, he has taken the word Nationalism out of the acceptable words I can use to explain my political philosophy.  So I'll need to come up with another term that isn't loaded with triggers for the unthinking to describe it, otherwise, I'll fail to convince very many of the merits of my philosophy.

To that point, I'm going to take Vox Day's "16 Points" manifesto and recreate it here.  I say recreate rather than "copy and paste" because I am going to modify it slightly.  And that's how it's meant to be.  Vox didn't create the 16 Points to be an iron-clad manifesto but as a foundation to be built on, because as he himself is wont to say, there is no leader of the alt-right.  It's like an open source document that others can use in their own way as they see fit, to better meet their goals—assuming, of course, that the goals are broadly similar.  Or, to put it more succinctly, it's OK to tailor it slightly to your intended audience.

And so I ask you to read these 16 Points and tell me, if you think you can, how any of these contradict or conflict with anything you heard at General Conference.  (Most of them, of course, have no relevance at all to anything said at General Conference.) I don't think you can in a way that doesn't involve deliberately misrepresenting what either these say or what the General Authorities say, assuming that one or the other must mean something other than what it says.  But this is my A/B testing, if you will.  I already know how the 16 Points work with other people within Christendom, I'm curious how well it flies in the Church, or if the membership of the Church will have a hard time hearing these points.

Not only have I slightly modified the specific language of the 16 Points, but I've also decided to annotate at least some of the points with some additional commentary.  I recognize that without having been somewhat steeped in the schools of thought out of which the 16 Points evolved, that there might be some head-scratching about why something is included or what exactly it's supposed to mean.  I've done my best to fill that in too.

Anyhoo, without further ado:

1. The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right, because they're of the Left. Progressives are not Alt Right, for the same reason. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right. National Socialists are not Alt Right. By definition, no ideology that accepts the premise of the Left—as all of those listed do, to some degree or other—can be on the Right.
2. The Alt Right is an alternative to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA that is nominally encapsulated by Russel Kirk's 10 Conservative Principles and the intellectual tradition of William Buckley, but in reality has devolved towards progressivism. It is also an alternative to libertarianism.
3. The Alt Right is not a defensive attitude and rejects the concept of noble and principled defeat. It is a forward-thinking philosophy of restoring what has been lost.  The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history.
4. The Alt Right, as a philosophy rooted in Western Civilization, desires to preserve it and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.
5. The Alt Right is openly and avowedly patriotic and believes patriotism, regardless of your nation, to be a virtue. It supports all nations and the right of all nations to exist, homogeneous and unadulterated by foreign invasion and migration.
6. The Alt Right is anti-globalist. It opposes all groups who work for globalist ideals or globalist objectives.*
7. The Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.**
8. The Alt Right is scientific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method, while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that the "science industry" is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on the scientific method, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific.
9. The Alt Right believes that the hierarchy of decision making employed by humans is identity > culture > politics.
10. The Alt Right is opposed to the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means.
11. The Alt Right understands that diversity + proximity = war.
12. The Alt Right doesn't care what you think of it.***
13. The Alt Right rejects international free trade and the free movement of peoples that free trade requires. The benefits of intranational free trade is not evidence for the benefits of international free trade.†
14. The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.‡
15. The Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, or people. Every race, nation, and people has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers.
16. The Alt Right is a philosophy that values peace among the various nations of the world and opposes wars to impose the values of one nation upon another as well as efforts to exterminate individual nations through war, genocide, immigration, or genetic assimilation.††

* Globalism is part of the heresy of Universalism, which is indistinguishable from Trotskyism and is rooted, ultimately, in the same hubris as Babel.  One does not reach God through anything on Earth other than the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  This does not mean that we disavow organizations that are global in scope (for example, the Church)—merely that we do disavow the notion of a One World government or the erosion of national sovereignty, or the imposition of a system of government on any people that is not of their own choice of any kind other than that headed by Christ himself.

** The Parable of the Talents; Matthew 25: "14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.  15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.  16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.  17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.  18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.  19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.  20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.  21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.  22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.  23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.  24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:  25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.  26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:  27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.  28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.  29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.  30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

We are not created equal.  Again; context.  In the Declaration of Independence, it clearly means that we are equal under the law, and in today's world, even that is obviously no longer true.  In any other respect, we are not equal.  We do, however, have equal claim on the rewards of the Lord if we live righteously and make the most of what we are given.  You'll note that the servant who turned two talents into four got exactly the same reward—word for word—as he who started with five, and turned it into ten.  But in no wise are we to suppose that they were equal, because we are, after all, capable of doing math, and we all know that four is not equal to five much less ten.

*** What did God tell Joseph Smith after the 116 pages were lost?  D&C 3: "7 For, behold, you should not have feared man more than God. Although men set at naught the counsels of God, and despise his words—  8 Yet you should have been faithful; and he would have extended his arm and supported you against all the fiery darts of the adversary; and he would have been with you in every time of trouble."  Many other examples.  We are not to fear Man, we are to fear only God.

† This is a little bit wonkish, and goes against the grain for the Science of Economics, which is largely libertarian in most respects.  But it is, actually, economically and empirically sound—you'll just need to read a bit deeper than most to get the arguments for it.  Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is a good place to start, but you'll probably also need to read beyond that.

‡ Although this sounds like a straightforward and oddly placed phrase, there's actually a long history behind it.  One can readily see, if one cares to pull ones head out of the sand and look, that every people in the world except white people are encouraged to do their thing, whereas we are constantly told that we are the ills of all the world, and that it will be better when we are either bred out or killed off (preferably both—I suspect a lot of men around the world wouldn't mind access to our women without our men being around to get in the way.  Take a look at "Great" Britain, Germany, or Sweden, and the child grooming pedophilia scandals involving migrants, the rape and sexual assault scandals, etc.)  This particular phrase was actually authored by a white supremacist, but that doesn't mean that it isn't correct.  It's worth noting that the rest of that particular manifesto was not carried forward into the 16 Points, precisely because it is wrong.

†† Applies to points 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 and 16 at least.  But especially 11.  https://heartiste.org/diversity-proximity-war-the-reference-list/

What is Western Civilization?

Long ago (or at least it seems so now) I read Samuel Huntington's essay "The Clash of Civilizations."  If you haven't, you should.  In fact, here it is right here.  Go read it now.  It's OK, I'll wait...

What I haven't ever read is the full-length book that expanded on that notion.  I've recently had it pointed out to me that I should; that it's brilliant; that without doing so, I can only claim to know about the issue, not to actually know it.  The premise that Huntington proposes has been "rebutted" many times over the years, by those with a penchant for Trotskyist globalism, but in the last couple of years it's become obvious that Huntington was right.  Soon, even the dimmest, most stubborn globalist cheerleader will be forced to admit it.  Therefore understanding what our culture is, and why it is coming into conflict with other cultures, is a paramount question for today.

It's at our public library.  Sure, it's checked out right now, but I put the next hold on it, and I should have it within a few weeks.  In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to discuss what Western civilization actually is.

Huntington spells out what he believes the major civilizations of the world are today in the essay (which you just read if you haven't already, right?) so I'll start with that list: Western, Sinic or Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Latin American, Slavic-Orthodox and Sub-Saharan African. As an aside, according to his divide, some cultures that speak Slavic languages are part of Western civilization (or even Islamic civilization) rather than Slavic-Orthodox, highlighting the paramount important of religion in determining civilization.

The earliest roots of what would become Western Civilization start out with the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.  Not only were these civilizations great and powerful in their own day, but they were literate, and they passed on down to us because of this much of the foundation of our own thought.  The rational pursuit of knowledge through study comes from the philosophers of the Greeks; Plato and Aristotle founding much of what academic inquiry even means, joined by guys such as Thucydides and Herodotus, etc.  Literature too, gets its start in a manner that we recognize with Homer, Hesiod, and later other Greek writers.  Even the system of government that we use throughout most of the West has its nascent form in Athens and the Roman Republic.

I have to caution against drawing too direct a line from Classical Civilization to modern Western civilization, though.  In many other ways, Classical civilization is completely alien to us.  Does anyone in Western civilization really believe that we could attempt to implement the brutal eugenic policies of ancient Sparta, no matter how much they may admire Leonidas?  Or the anti-family state-sponsored agoge, complete with the ritual hunting and murdering of untermenschen Helots?  As much as one can admire Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar as brilliant military minds and great spreaders of their civilization, is it admirable that Plutarch claims Caesar killed a million Gaulish warriors and enslaved a million more—at a time when their ability to field warriors was only three million?  That's what we call today ethnic cleansing or genocide.  Maybe one can point out that at least sometimes in the history of Western civilization we had some similar episodes; the colonization of the Americas was characterized by often very bloody civilizational clash, after all.  But uniquely in the history of mankind, did Western civilization have critics who bemoaned this for ethical reasons, and uniquely did they stop doing it, even as they approached the height of their power.  It wasn't co-civilizational sub-Saharan Africans who protested the Congo Free State (rather, they were perfectly willing to help out if it was profitable for them); it was other elements within Western Civilization that made it such a scandal.  The Classical civilizations were an important foundation to Western civilization, but clearly it is not sufficient in and of itself.

The next element that has to be layered in to the development of Western civilization is Christianity.  As Tom Holland said:

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

You do not get anything that resembles Western civilization without Christianity; it is that system of belief that truly separates Western civilization from the late Classical civilization which preceded it.  If you are going to quibble with the quote above by saying, "The Crusades! The Inquisition! The Colonialism!" you probably should get more educated on all of the above before speaking up.  Plus, keep in mind my point above about Leopold of Belgium.  The same claims were made against the Spanish (who are not part of Western civilization) and others.  Only in Christendom is this condemned.  Although, of course, a parallel similarity was profoundly influential in Buddhist thought—hence the appearance of guys like Gandhi, etc.  This was a much more radical (and alien) idea than merely Christian valuation of human life, however—it was pacifism for its own sake, which doesn't make any sense to anyone in Western civilization except for highly divergent liberal hippies, who as r-strategists, constantly try to dump on Western civilization anyway.

The next element to be introduced is the customs and traditions of the Germanic people (often overlaid on a Celtic substrate.)  This is where Western civilization deviates from Slavic-Orthodox and Latin civilizations, although the tribes of Visigoths, the Rus, and other more far-flung Germanic groups gave a weak patina of this to other areas outside of the core Germanic settlement.  It's fair to say that Western civilization isn't really a development of Classical civilization per se; it's the appropriation of most classical civilization elements and Christianity and the syncretic  fusion of those elements by an alien people to their own culture; the alien people being, of course, the Northern European Germanic people (and their largely Celtic substrate over large parts of their core settlement area.)  The presence of a large population of "freemen" (or comitatus, to use the word the Romans coined to describe this alien (to them) custom) who had the right to bear arms and sit in council with their chief is one core element from the Germanics.  This evolved into Salic Law as the migration period ended and the first "empires" of the Germanic peoples started to form, which codified much of what was already happening, and then laid the foundation for legal tradition throughout Western civilization for centuries to come.

This also sets the stage for separating Core Western civilization from southern Europe, a divide that not all will make, but all will recognize the significant cultural differences between Northern and Southern (and Eastern) Europe; the influence of the Germanic tribes is this factor.  But this evolved through a particular vector, and without that particular vector, you still don't get anything recognizable as Western civilization.  This is actually only somewhat recently recognized, although the fact that it existed is no mystery.  Just that the likely causes of it were.  These divisions can be more or less described by looking at a map of the Hajnal Line (which as you'll see, leaves out southern Italy, much of Spain, especially the parts that were "Reconquistadored" late, Ireland, and Finland.  In reality, it should be much more jaggedy, should probably have spots within it that are left off (Highland Scotland and probably Wales, for example) and parts without that should be added as "islands"—the Ulster area of Northern Ireland and western Finland, probably the rest of Austria or the Sudetenland at least, for example.  I'm making the case that only the areas within the Hajnal Line truly qualify as "Western civilization" other areas (like Ireland, southern Italy, etc.) that are without it are merely dabbling in Western civilization, or imitating certain aspects of it, without fully embracing it.  They are satellite pseudo-Western nations, not truly members in full fellowship.

Of course, later colonies of people from within the Hajnal Line to areas outside it still qualify, so places like Iceland, the US and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are, of course, prominent members of Western civilization despite their geographic appearances outside the traditional Hajnal Line.  But their ancestors came from within it, and in all of those cases, they were successful in dominating their new homes to such a degree that they did not really hybridize either culturally or even genetically (to any significant degree) with the peoples who were there before them.

But what really happened within the Hajnal Line to cause this foundation to completely and fully develop into Western civilization as we know it?  The Hajnal Line itself describes marriage patterns, and the reason for it is the Catholic church's ban on consanguinous "cousin" marriages, which were enforced most strictly in the corest core of core Europe; the Merovingian stronghold of Austrasia, and it's later satellites in Neustria, Burgundy, Saxony, Anglo-Saxon Britain, Lombardy, etc.  In short, it spread from the capitol in Metz through all of what would become a "Greater Germania"—France, the Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia (minus the Lapplander and Finnish areas) and the kingdoms that later emerged as England.  This ban on close relative marriage was also present in other parts of Christendom, but inside the Hajnal line, it was combined with two other developments, and these three, together, created selection pressures that created modern Western Civilization.  As Avner Greif said:

“The medieval church instituted marriage laws and practices that undermined large kinship groups. From as early as the fourth century, it discouraged practices that enlarged the family, such as adoption, polygamy, concubinage, divorce, and remarriage. It severely prohibited marriages among individuals of the same blood (consanguineous marriages), which had constituted a means to create and maintain kinship groups throughout history. The church also curtailed parents’ abilities to retain kinship ties through arranged marriages by prohibiting unions in which the bride didn’t explicitly agree to the union. 

“European family structures did not evolve monotonically toward the nuclear family nor was their evolution geographically and socially uniform. However, by the late medieval period the nuclear family was dominant. Even among the Germanic tribes, by the eighth century the term family denoted one’s immediate family, and shortly afterwards tribes were no longer institutionally relevant. Thirteenth-century English court rolls reflect that even cousins were as likely to be in the presence of non-kin as with each other. 

“The practices the church advocated, such as monogamy, are still the norm in Europe. Consanguineous marriages in contemporary Europe account for less than one percent of the total number of marriages. In contrast, the percentage of such marriages in Muslim, Middle Eastern countries, where we also have particularly good data, is much higher – between twenty to fifty percent. Among the anthropologically defined 356 contemporary societies of Euro-Asia and Africa, there is a large and significant negative correlation between Christianization (for at least 500 years) and the absence of clans and lineages; the level of commercialization, class stratification, and state formation are insignificant.”

So, the end result of this was the replacement of the large, extended family with the nuclear family as the primary unit.  This lack of large extended families eventually undid the entire tribal structure of core Europe.  Large, extended, cohabiting families, on the other hand, are still very normal in places like, say, Sicily or Eastern Europe—outside of the Hajnal Line.  In these areas, there's an environment in which "nepotistic altruism"—giving favors to extended family and other forms of what we in Western civilization deem to be corruption—which was largely eliminated within the Hajnal Line.  Combined with manorialism—the founding principle of feudalism, where the Lord of the Manor had vested in himself certain legal and economic powers, and in turn owed certain obligations to the serfs or villeins as well as the free farmers who used the land of his manor, or demesne.  As hbd chick observes, manorialism "was really an almost all-encompassing socio-religious-political system which, although its features and importance did vary at different times and in different locales, pretty much regulated nearly all aspects of medieval Europeans’ lives."  Throughout "Core Europe" it existed for the better part of three quarters of a millennium; even in areas where it was adopted a bit later, it lasted nearly half of one.  What are the selection pressures that manorialism plus outbreeding and non-consanguineous marriage exerted on the developing Western Man?  Again, from hbd chick:

The working theory around here is that the Outbreeding Project set up the selection pressures for getting rid of much of what we could call “nepotistic altruism” in Core Europe, allowing for greater cooperation and trust between unrelated individuals and, therefore, a more open and “corporate” sort of society. A second working theory is that manorialism set up selection pressures for a whole suite of traits including perhaps: slow life histories; future time orientation; delayed gratification; the good ol’ protestant work ethic; a general compliant nature and even rather strong tendencies toward conformity; perhaps even a high degree of gullibility; perhaps a few extra IQ points; and even more cooperation and trust between unrelated individuals. ... The manor system also probably contributed to the selection for the reduction in impulsive violence. ... the Outbreeding Project and manorialism very much went hand-in-hand as well — the medieval European manor system could not have happened without all of the outbreeding, and the Outbreeding Project was reinforced by the manor system (since marriage was often regulated within the manor system).

Does that now sound like modern, Western Civilization?  Not the feudalism itself, of course, but the selection pressures it generated caused, after many generations, a new type of European to emerge in the northern portions of the continent.  A Brazilian with whom I communicate on occasion expressed the idea that many in Latin America see themselves as members of Western civilization, but he sees these stark differences clearly—as do I, and my oldest son, for that matter, who lived for a few years in various parts of Spanish Latin America.  He pointed out that both in Latin America and Southern Europe (the same is true of Eastern Europe) that the culture is characterized by "low trust society, weak rule of the law, corruption, weak work ethic, etc."  This is a major disconnect, and why I cannot consider Europeans of descent outside of the Hajnal Line to truly be members of Western civilization.  The Jews also have extremely strong nepotistic tendencies, and a culture that encourages "digging a pit for thy neighbor" if it gives you personally an advantage; although they also at first glance appear to be members of Western civilization, and in fact many of them live among us, they also are not.  Again, from hbd chick, on the "sin" of being a sucker among the Jews: https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/thou-shalt-not-be-a-freier/

What does this mean for America?  Firstly, it means that the large numbers of immigrants that we took on 100-150 years or so ago from Ireland, the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Jews are not really members of Western Civilization, didn't understand it, and have largely undermined its success in America to greater or lesser degrees.  When first arrived, they turned quickly in large numbers to organized crime, voluntary segregation instead of attempted assimilation, tribal nepotistic takeovers of businesses, politics, and to some degree, even entire industries (media, Hollywood, etc.) and in defiance of the good of the host nation in which they were living, they agitated and campaigned for changing immigration laws both to 1) bring more of their kind that they could nepotistically deal with, and 2) change the fabric of the prevalent Anglo-Saxon with a touch of Dutch and German American society to one in which they stood out less, by inviting even more alien cultures into the fold.

If this hasn't been bad enough, the mass invasion of the US by the completely non-Western civilization members of Latin America in their tens of millions, and from Islamic civilization (a bigger deal in Europe than America, but it's growing fast here too) is a genuine crisis; an existential threat to Western civilization on the American continent.  Give or take a few tens of thousands, Switzerland has the same population as Honduras.  Because of our shared Western civilization background, America could probably absorb the entire population of Switzerland without it being too disruptive (we're way too diverse now to quibble about Anglo- vs. Germano- backgrounds now; although Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers were more skeptical) but absorbing the population of Honduras will never happen successfully; they simply won't integrate and assimilate.  Ever.

If we hope to remain a bastion of Western Civilization in America, instead of being absorbed into a growing Latin culture, or continue to be held hostage to an admittedly native subset of sub-Saharan African culture, or even worse, continue to invite Islamic civilization into our homes to the extend that it becomes a significant threat, then we need to recognize who and what we are and stand up for it again.  Maybe Western civilization isn't the pinnacle of human achievement (although I kind of think it is) but even if it's not, it's ours and we have every right to our civilization, the same as every other people on Earth.

Lincoln: For Posterity

Putting up this link for posterity.  Because I absolutely don't want to lose sight of it.

I'm not unfamiliar with the gist of it, of course.  I've read many such works, including Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln, but this is one of the best, succinct, and surprisingly quite old now (1986) published, peer-reviewed examples of puncturing the hagiographies of "Honest Abe."

http://sam-dickson.com/AbrahamLincoln.htm

What is a "Fake American?"

On Facebook, I've had a few people ask me about this label.  For the most part, I don't engage with them.  Pretty much everybody knows what a Fake American is, so those who are trying to get me to define it with hard edges are usually in one of two classes:

• They want the hard edges so they can pick it apart, nitpick with it, and argue with it.  For the most part, these people are not asking in good faith, and their requests can and should be ignored.
• They want the hard edges because they're worried that maybe I mean them (or someone close to them) when I say it.  Some of these are asking in good faith (although some are not), so it is probably useful, for those who are asking in good faith, to have a discussion on what I mean by it.

First, however, let me establish some context.  It's important that certain fallacies that are commonplace (because we have been indoctrinated for decades that these fallacies are true) in American political discourse are understood.  If you accept any of these fallacies, then you will struggle with the concept of Fake Americans, because by and large, these fallacies were promulgated by Fake Americans for their own benefit.

• Birthright Citizenship.  The original intent of the law was not jus soli citizenship, i.e., citizenship was not granted to "anchor babies."  This is a much more modern corruption of the law.  This concept was created out of thin air in 1982 by Justice Brennan in dicta, and leaped upon by Fake Americans as a super secret trapdoor into American citizenship.  The 14th Amendment was meant to force the issue of the children of slaves, which traditionally had not been citizens prior to Reconstruction, to also be accepted as citizens.  Not that anyone who happened to somehow step foot on America and have a baby here was a citizen.  Read Ann Coulter's column on it for the fuller story (or her book ¡Adios, America! for the really complete story; it's quite impeccably researched.)  
• Magic Dirt. A related fallacy is the notion that geography can make you something different than what you are.  For example; if you brought a zebra to America, you cannot say that it magically turns into a horse or a donkey or some other animal that is common to America, just because it is in America.  It is still a zebra, which is a specifically African animal.  The same is true if you bring a Guatemalan to America; there is no magical property to the dirt of America (nor is the oath of citizenship, for that matter, a magical spell that transforms you.)  The Guatemalan is still a Guatemalan.  America is more than a geographic expression; it is a specific nation founded on very specific cultural and legal ideas—most of which are not shared by the rest of the world.  The Guatemalan above is extremely unlikely to transform into a person of Hajnal Line culture, valuing high trust societies, rule of law, personal responsibility, limited government, and English common law and Rights of Englishman tradition.  No, he's still going to be a Guatemalan.  America's pretty cool, but it does not have magical properties that change people from one thing to another.
• Nation of Immigrants.  We are not a nation of immigrants.  Nobody in America claimed that until just the last few decades, when the descendants of a massive wave of immigrants (the Ellis Island folks) started saying that as a way to cement their dubious claim to being as American as actual Americans—instead of being foreigners living in America, which is of course exactly what they actually were.  It is a self-serving myth, and it's being abused even further to justify the further dilution of American legal and cultural traditions—again, to benefit the foreigners living among us who wish to see America changed into something that more closely resemble their cultural and legal traditions.  My line, on both my mother's and father's side, has the first American born child appearing in the late 1600s.  My ancestors did not come to North America and petition any of the Indian nations for citizenship.  They did not become citizens of the Cherokee nation, or the Iroquois League, or the Mohawk tribe.  If they had they would have been immigrants.  What they did do was contribute to the forging of a new nation as settlers and colonists.  This is not the definition of an immigrant.  
• Land of Opportunity.  The concept of America is not a land of opportunity, and anyone who wants to get ahead in life is welcome to come here and try to do so.  The concept of America is liberty.  From the Preamble to the Constitution (emphasis added:)  "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."  The Founding Fathers fought the Revolutionary War to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves.  And to their posterity.  Not to everyone and anyone.  Everyone and anyone needs to fight their own Revolutionary Wars in their own nations if they want the blessings of liberty; and then they can organize their society in the fashion that best suits them.  The Founding Fathers were also under no illusions whatsoever of the fragility of the blessings of liberty, and were very cautious and concerned that those from other cultural traditions would neither understand nor value it, and therefore not preserve it, which would then jeopardize the blessings of liberty of their own posterity.  The very first act on the very first day of the very first session of the very first Congress following the ratification of the Constitution was the implementation of very strict immigration law to protect the blessings of liberty for the Founding Fathers themselves (and their fellow citizens) and their posterity.

So... if you weren't already aware of those highly pertinent historical facts which our education tries pretty hard to bury and ignore, then having read that (and hopefully been sufficiently intrigued to look further into the concepts summarized above) you'll have sufficient background to discuss what I mean when I say "Fake American."  However... I still think that I'm going to not establish hard edges other than to say, "anyone who works against the interest of America or the American people, yet calls himself and American, is a "'Fake American.'"  Let's illustrate by way of example.

• A young, healthy male from Syria who doesn't want to fight for his homeland against ISIS, and so comes to America because he's been told that he'll get all kinds of free stuff if he does, and heck, he doesn't even have to pay for the flight thanks to some organization like World Relief that funds it and calls him a "refugee."  Once here, he has little interest in learning English, adapting to American culture or our legal system, and in fact, agitates for sharia law to be implemented in America, and the conversion of Americans to Islam.  He sees the government as a scam to be taken advantage of; because that's how it works in his own culture, and the American government is highly amenable to this particular scam.  He immediately goes on every form of welfare that he can, and starts telling Americans that they're racists for not giving him even more.  American?  Or Fake American?
• The Cartel Wars in Mexico are actually more dangerous than Afghanistan, and more people have been killed in them than have been killed by the Taliban.  Mexico has a dysfunctional government and economy in almost every respect.  A poor, illiterate, unskilled peasant of largely Aztec ancestry who speaks no English, poor Spanish, and prefers Nahuatl sneaks across the border with his wife, lives under the radar, and works unskilled manual labor for money, much of which he sends back to his extended family and friends in Mexico.  He also immediately goes on every form of welfare that he can qualify for; food stamps, HUD, etc. and sends most of the money he gets from that back to his extended family too.  He believes in the racial supremacist theories of La Raza Cósmica, and Revanchist policies.  At a rally in southern California, he shows up, threatens Americans, waves Mexican flags, and says "Make America Mexico Again."  American? Or Fake American?
• David Brooks is the "pet" "conservative" columnist for the New York Times.  He has dual citizenship with America and Israel, and his son serves in the IDF (not the American Armed Forces.)  He's a strong supporter of the border wall for Israel (because he knows how effective it is) and a strong opponent of the border wall for America (because he knows how effective it is.)  For the most part, his "conservative" positions consist of trying to convince Americans to go to war and die in behalf of Israel for causes that have no impact on America except in the negative.  American? Or Fake American?
• Barack Obama is a natural born American citizen, son of an American woman.  Raised by her and her communist parents, often abroad, and taught to despise American culture and institutions, he identified instead most strongly with his absentee Kenyan father, and even wrote (or had ghost written) and entire pseudo-biography about his relationship with his father and the resentment that he feels towards Western "colonialism" that forever changed "his" African culture.  Pampered and entitled his entire life, he was thrust into the American presidency by an accident of social mood and luck, where his stated goals included to "fundamentally transform America" and replace as much as he could of traditional American cultural norms, legal traditions, and even actual Americans when he could ("this is going to be a browner country.")  His wife stated publicly that she never felt any pride in her purported identity as an American until her husband was elected President.  American? Or Fake American?

Anyway, I think you can see where this is going.  Fake Americans—you know them when you see them.  You may even have been suckered into supporting Fake American causes.  I know that I have been, at various times in my life.  It's probably unavoidable, given that the institutional structures in America—academia, the media, entertainment, and even (and most ironically) the federal government, are all rabidly anti-American and inundate us with anti-American propaganda daily, and have done so for decades.  This is exactly why the label is so necessary—so we can have a way to combat the insidiousness of Fake Americanism.  

From Alma 46, and the words and actions of Captain Moroni are still very applicable to this Land of Promise today: "And it came to pass that he rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it—In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children—and he fastened it upon the end of a pole.  And he fastened on his head-plate, and his breastplate, and his shields, and girded on his armor about his loins; and he took the pole, which had on the end thereof his rent coat, (and he called it the title of liberty) and he bowed himself to the earth, and he prayed mightily unto his God for the blessings of liberty to rest upon his brethren, so long as there should a band of Christians remain to possess the land—And he said: Surely God shall not suffer that we, who are despised because we take upon us the name of Christ, shall be trodden down and destroyed, until we bring it upon us by our own transgressions.  And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent part of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had written upon the rent part, and crying with a loud voice, saying:  Behold, whosoever will maintain this title upon the land, let them come forth in the strength of the Lord, and enter into a covenant that they will maintain their rights, and their religion, that the Lord God may bless them.  And it came to pass that when Moroni had proclaimed these words, behold, the people came running together with their armor girded about their loins, rending their garments in token, or as a covenant, that they would not forsake the Lord their God; or, in other words, if they should transgress the commandments of God, or fall into transgression, and be ashamed to take upon them the name of Christ, the Lord should rend them even as they had rent their garments.  Now this was the covenant which they made, and they cast their garments at the feet of Moroni, saying: We covenant with our God, that we shall be destroyed, even as our brethren in the land northward, if we shall fall into transgression; yea, he may cast us at the feet of our enemies, even as we have cast our garments at thy feet to be trodden under foot, if we shall fall into transgression."

If we don't defend our birthright; or worse, we simply give it away to those who will not value it and who's clearly stated goals are to destroy or transform it, then we can hardly complain when the blessings of liberty are no longer ours, and we have nothing but ashes to pass on to our posterity.

The Political Red Pill

With apologies to the Z-Man; I'm collecting his multi-part essay into a single document, because I personally find it easier to read that way.  Anyway, this is the true source of the content in today's post.  You should read more of his blog.  It's great stuff.  I've also added my own subtitles.

The Heresy of Babel; on Striving to Reach God by Secular Means.

Somewhere in the Clinton years I began to sour on official conservatism. Part of it was the odious carbuncle Newt Gingrich becoming the leader of the Right. If that loathsome human toothache was the Right, I was going to be something else. Part of it was the general incoherence of the official Right. How can you be in favor of small government, but in favor of an exotic tax code designed to alter behavior?

The other thing that bugged me was the hoard of B-school and J-school strivers taking up positions in the official Right. Naturally, they set about making culture into science! and loading up their language with meaningless jargon. Hearing a guy like Paul Ryan say, "proactively leverage other’s high standards in infrastructures" generates warm thoughts of Gavrilo Princip.

Anyway, I slowly came to the conclusion that the whole Right-Left dynamic was just a myth. One of things about working in Washington, even briefly, is you learn quickly that politics is nothing like you see on TV. Two people on a show ripping one another apart will be at the bar after the show yukking it up like old pals. That's because they are old pals. The Right-Left narrative has simply become a convenient framework for the reality show called politics. This has been true since the 80’s.

Once you free your mind, if you will, of that framework through which you are expected to see your world, you have to make sense of what you see. If the Right-Left construct is just a version of good cop/bad cop where the people in the media hustle the rest of us so they can live above their utility, then what’s really going on in the world? How do things really work?

One way to understand the world is to think about the primary modes of thought that dominate the age. If you want to understand the Mongol Empire, for example, you have to learn something about the Mongol worldview, how they organized themselves and why they believed that was the correct way to do things. Just knowing what they did is not going to tell you why they did them.

In America, there are two dominant modes of thought that are not exactly in conflict, but they are incompatible. The primary mode of thought is best illustrated by an example from business. Every company in America of any size has some sort of quality initiative or business process improvement program. Big companies have whole departments to improve performance throughout the organization.

The basis for this is the belief that the human errors can be mitigated by arranging things in just the right way. For instance, you can stop Jose from putting the wrong stuff in a box by implementing software systems that physically prevent Jose from making that error. Jose's machine supervisor stops him before he can sin against the firm by making a shipping error. Ideally, Jose gets eliminated completely and a robot does the job.

Everything and everyone in the company gets this treatment. If you read through the literature of the Six Sigma Cult that was popular at General Electric, it sounds like a pagan purification ritual. The financial incentives for reducing errors quickly give way to spiritual incentives. Being right 99% of the time is less fulfilling than being right 99.9% of the time. The last time I checked, salvation in Six Sigma comes at 99.999999% accuracy.

This scales up to social advocacy. Progressives, for example, are obsessed with the people they see as failures or victims, the human error rate. The former are people that, through poor choices, fail to have self-actualizing careers, achieving their full humanity. The latter are people who are prevented from fulfilling their potential due to structural impediments like racism, sexism, interstellar conspiracy, etc..

This is the crux of the dominant mode of thought and it even has a name, Positive Liberty. In politics, you see this with Obama's health care plan. They fully believe that abundance can be had if they arrange the parts of the public health system a certain way. It’s also on display with the myriad of Conservative tax schemes. Arrange the incentives the right way and people will make the "correct" choices. The tax code becomes the enterprise software of the economy.

As an aside, what fuels the semi-sexual fantasies of the robot future types is the belief that the robots will remove human error and therefore human sin. Once the robots are in charge, there can be no more human error. The Christian conception of God and Heaven is perfection. You see how that works? Perfect the human condition, and you have created Eden. Alternatively, the robots slaughter everyone and the human stain is removed from creation.

There are few people in public life that reject this mode of thinking. Almost all of the so-called conservatives accept this as a premise. Progressives not only believe it, they view anyone who does not accept this world view as a mortal threat to civilization. The debate, therefore, in modern American politics is over how the central planners arrange things and whether or not to punish the refuseniks.

The revealing character trait of people who subscribe to this mode of thought is the refusal to ask why things are as they find them. If they talk about the "why" of anything, it is as a jumping off point to debate their preferred "solution" that they believe will solve some aspect of the human condition. "Why are the prisons full of blacks? Racism! Now, let’s talk about how we fix that."

[...] I'm going to get into the chief alternative to [this paradigm in America]. I'm using the word "alternative" loosely as few people of any consequence subscribe to this view.  Those that do tend to come from the parts of the country and culture that are unrepresented in the American elite.

One of those areas, and one that is a convenient example, is the US military. The great innovation Americans brought to war fighting is the prioritization of training over discipline. Put another way, the prioritization of what gets done over how it gets done. Soldiers and officers are encouraged to be creative in their problem solving and be mission focused.

This was most evident in the Great War at the Battle of Belleau Wood. German commanders ordered an advance through the woods onto the Marine's position. The French commander ordered a retreat, but American General James Harbord refused the order and told his men to hold their position. Both the French and the Germans marveled afterwards at the ferocity and improvisational tactics of the American Marines.

On the afternoon of 3 June, German infantry attacked the Marine positions through the grain fields with bayonets fixed. The Marines dug shallow individual trenches so they could lie concealed, but still fight  while lying on their bellies. The Marines waited until the Germans were within 100 yards and then opened fire. The German infantry was mowed down and the remainder was forced back into the woods.

The legend of the United States Marine Corp was born in the Battle of Belleau Wood not because they had great leadership or they had superior numbers. It was not technology that gave the Marines their edge. It was their tenacity, improvisational prowess and unrelenting ferocity in pursuit of the mission. "The deadliest weapon in the world is a United States Marine and his rifle," was said by General Pershing after this battle.

The philosophy at work here is you solve problems by giving competent people the tools and the support to go solve the problem. How they solve the problem is secondary. In small business, this is the dominant mode of thought. The owner can be seen washing the toilets then signing payroll checks. Alternatively, his second in command could take over the toilet washing and then hire a new person for accounting. The point is to get the job done, whatever it takes.

It is in sales that this way of looking at the world is still dominant most everywhere. No matter the industry or scale, salesman are always on some sort of commission system. They are also given more freedom of action than other employees. You hire a good salesman, train him on the product, give him a quota and let him go, trusting that your best weapon is a salesman and his commission check.

[T]his way of thinking is most popularly understood as using "the right tool for the job." It may not be the perfect tool and the completion of the job may not be ideal, but often, good enough is, in fact, good enough. Underlying this mode of thought is the understanding that the human condition is immutable. Perfection is for the after life. In this life, human error is a feature, not a bug.

For most of Western history, this has been the dominant mode of thought. Even in the age of kings, finding the right man for the job was the way things were done. No one had grand, complex schemes for creating the perfect society. In fact, having grand schemes for creating heaven on earth was a good way to get burned at the stake.

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

The last time this utilitarian mode of thought was dominant in America was at the founding. The first shot at a national government was pretty much just leaving most everything to the states to figure out on their own. The Articles of Confederation did not work, because the impotent national government was the wrong tool for the job, so we got the US Constitution.

The men of the Tidewater who crafted it understood that we needed a strong central government for managing trade, national defense and the courts. At the same time, they knew the Puritan lunatics in New England would immediately try to pervert the national government so they could dominate the rest of the country. James Madison had no illusions about the nature of John Adams. The result was a government based on Negative Liberty.

While this mode of thought is common in the lower classes, the people who run the country reject this completely. Therein lies the rub. The people are asked to validate the decisions of the rulers with their ballots, but no one on the ballot thinks like the people standing in line to vote. To remedy this the parties make noises about American values and talk about the Constitution, but that’s just for show. Thus the inevitable conflict.

Universalism: Lucifer's "Not One Soul Shall Be Lost" Fire-Sale version of Government.

The American domestic conflicts of the current age are unique in human history in that they are entirely caused by social reformers. In prior ages, reformers sprung up when there was a need for actual reform. Social conditions demanded changes so that the people could attain a higher degree of peace and prosperity. Today, peace and prosperity are the default, so reformers sow discord and mayhem, like firemen who set fires so they have something to do.

It is tempting to assume this is by design, but as Goethe put it, "misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent." While there are certainly cases where the people in charge swing the wrecking ball just for fun, more often it is due to incompetence, an incompetence that is the inevitable outgrowth of a universalist worldview.

One defect of the universalist mind is the inability to appreciate the complexity of life.  This is something most people understand intuitively. What works for you in your life is probably not going to work for everyone. The proletarian cliche of "different strokes for different folks" did not spring from nothing. It is a readily observable phenomenon and why restaurants have menus and cars come in different colors.

The great minds that rule over us just assume that everyone wants what they want, hates what they hate and loves what they love. There's no room in their imagination for valid and legitimate alternatives to their ethics or even their aesthetics. Instead, when our betters hear the phrase "different strokes for different folks" they assume it means varying the application of the whip in order to achieve conformity.

This is the color of every great blunder made by the American ruling class over the last half century. They cannot imagine that anyone, at least anyone worth considering, would have different priorities, values or passions. In foreign policy it means blundering into foreign lands handing out ballots at gun point. Domestically it means toppling over traditional institutions in favor of technocratic solutions that appeal to no one but their designers.

Another aspect of this is the inability to grasp the concept of scale. An old gag in statistics is that quantity has a quality of its own. Many things simply do not scale up or down very well. An obvious example is the New England town meeting system of governance. In a small town, getting the citizens together to hash out problems works very well. Try that in New York City and you end up with a riot. Try that in New Orleans and you have a hip-hop video.

The universalists cannot grasp that what works for them in their small groups of privilege and plenty cannot scale up to society as a hole. Caroline Swipple in Greenwich thinks it is great that Whole Foods does not sell sugary breakfast cereals. She thinks that should be the case everywhere so she demands government ban the sale of Fruit Loops. It is baked into the universalist worldview that their personal choices are universally good so they just assume they will work for everyone.

From the outside, it simply looks like the people in charge, the so-called social justice warriors, are just ignorant busy bodies obsessed with pushing people around. In some cases it appears to be spite that motivates them. Making smokers huddle in alleyways behind the pubs looks like the sort of thing one does to someone they hate. But, that is not what is driving it. It is a blinkered view of life that cannot incorporate the great complexity and variety of human action.

This narrow view of life is the root of another defect and that is the lack of self-awareness. Stable, sensible people have some regard for their limitations. They know that some problems are not fixable. The best you can do is work around them. The people in charge, truly believe that all problems are solvable, including death itself. Not just that, but they are certain they are the ones to solve them.

The constant blundering in the Middle East is the most obvious example. Since the Bronze Age, the people living in and around Mesopotamia have been at war with one another. This is the nature of tribal people who have outlandishly high rates of inbreeding. Cousin marriage is near universal in some parts of the world, the most clannish parts of the world. Cousin marriage fosters clannishness, corruption and clan warfare.

Violent, tribal societies composed of low-IQ individuals is not the raw material for a liberal democracy. Despite these well known facts on the ground and 5,000 years of history, American leaders have been blundering around the Middle East for over 25 years. Bush gets most of the blame, but Obama has proven to be just as incompetent, despite actually being a Muslim of sorts. Obama, like Bush, just assumes he'll solve thousands of years of problems in a few years.

When you roll it all up, America is a country with an abundance of peace and prosperity, but an over abundance of blinkered blunderers obsessed with conquering the human condition. Almost all of what ails us as a people is inflicted upon us by people who simply refuse to leave well enough alone. There is no version of the social contract that obligates or even permits the civil authorities to sow discord among the people. Yet, that is exactly where we find ourselves.

The Tao of Zeezrom and other Conflict-Profiteers.

In times of plenty, the weeds find life easy. The trouble is weeds flourish at the expense of everything else so the times of plenty are self-limiting. This is especially true in human society. In good times the soft and sneaky can be tolerated so they flourish, corrupting society over time until either some crisis requires reform or that crisis overwhelms the society.

Steppe people like the Mongols understood this. In fact, the genius of Genghis Khan was in truly understanding the dynamic. The hill people would raid the valley people because they were tougher and meaner. But, they would soon settle down and become soft and stupid like the people they conquered. In a generation or two a new hill people would come along and the cycle would repeat.

In America, a culture evolved in a world without fear of invasion. That’s an important thing to understand about America. It is a continental people with an islander's mentality. Sure, Indians were some threat, but from the start the colonists knew who was on the winning side of history. It did not take long before the people understood it was their destiny to conquer the continent.

Internally, the country evolved with various cultural groups jostling with one another for influence. This natural competition for resources (land) made everyone better, bolder and more aggressive. For a country evolving at the dawn of the money era, a culture that rewards risk taking, creativity and experimentation is an enormous asset.

Think about it. The country comes into existence in 1789 and roughly 100 years later knocks off Spain and steals many of her overseas possessions. In four generations a collection of farmers and tinkerers was on the cusp of being the mightiest economic power in the world, with a military soon to follow and match it.

From the Civil War forward, America was becoming a land of abundance without any natural enemies. Sure, the Europeans could make war on American shipping or cause financial mischief, but there was no fear of being invaded or having land taken by force. The result was a ruling class that imagined no risk premium for policy decisions. No matter how boneheaded the policy, there's no perceived downside.

The Civil War is a great example to use here. It was entirely unnecessary, but made possible by the understanding that America had no reason to fear outside threats. Europe could fund one side or the other. Europe could muck about in American shipping and finance, but there was no worry that some outside power would take advantage of the war and seize Ohio.

That was the lesson of 1812. The young country could be boarded by pirates from over the horizon, but those pirates could only cause mischief, not sink the new country. Eventually, their supplies would be exhausted and they would flee or die. Therefore, two groups of fanatics within America could tear into each other in a bloodbath over slavery. [Editor's Note: The "Civil" War was never about slavery. Lincoln had no intention of freeing the slaves when he started it.  When he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, there were thousands of deserters from the Union army, and there were riots in New York and elsewhere.  Why?  Because the North was not fighting for the slaves, and felt like they'd been baited and switched when Lincoln "freed" them (curiously, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the only slaves that it "freed" were those that he had no power to free.  All of the rest were left intact.  It was a transparent propaganda move, and most people saw through it—and said so in print.]  The group of fanatics that won were left with an ecosystem to flourish in which there were no natural enemies.

That's largely been the story of the last 150 years in America. For fifty years after the Civil War, Public Protestantism slowly morphed into Progressivism, mostly through various reform movements. With the rest of the country flattened by war, the old Yankee Protestants had no natural enemies and were free to outgrow the restraints of religion, through the Social Gospel and finally the Progressive Movement. By the time Europe was ready to commit suicide, American was a growing industrial power run by fanatics convinced it was their destiny to reshape the world in God's image.

Again, without any substantial threat from outside, this mode of thought could flourish without consequence. If the Europeans had not tried to obliterate themselves in two great wars, America probably would have evolved into a slightly violent Canada. Instead, the massive void left by the implosion of Europe allowed the world's remaining power to become the world’s dominant power.

The Pax Americana has been good for the world, but it has not been without consequence. In America, it has resulted in a warped political culture in which one side is always on the prowl for some new enemy in the world on which to unleash the world's dominant military. The other side is turning over every rock domestically for any signs of the South rising again. Like a teeter-totter, one side dominates for a while and then descends while the other side rises.

This is fine as long as America and the West, over which America presides, are safe and secure militarily and economically. The Europeans have been able to indulge in one social welfare scheme after another because they have relied on American military might to keep them safe. Similarly, America has built an elaborate and dysfunctional domestic social structure because the dollar is the world's currency. King Offa would be proud.

Nothing lasts forever and everything that must end eventually does end. Europe is now being invaded from the south at the same time that elements of her own population are becoming hostile to the developing social arrangements. If you scour the international press, you find a lot of signs that the natives are getting very restless. No people has flung open the doors to invaders without there being violent, transformative consequences.

In America, the South has finally rebounded and become as economically and culturally strong as the rest of the country. We are a generation away from there being a real challenge to the dominant mode of thought. Progressives can look at a map too and that's why they are in a panic, hoping to flood the hinterlands with migrants in an attempt to dilute the opposition. Alex Tabarrok wants to fill your neighborhood with foreigners because he fears you more than he fears them.

Internationally, the economic arrangements are being challenged all over, with the currency arrangements running out of steam. Central banks are keeping the whole thing from collapsing, but the international appetite for maintaining the dollar as the reserve currency is waning. When that ends, the cost of Progressive rule in America will no longer be exported abroad through currency manipulation.

We are in the down side of a very long cycle that is now heading for an end. At the same time, what is bringing about that end is the first real external threat to Western Europe in centuries and the end of America's economic dominance of the world. The dream of global government where ruling elites are untethered from national loyalties will never materialize. It is at odds with human biology. What comes next will be a settling of the greatest threat to civilization since the Black Plague. This time the plague walks on two feet and demands to go on the dole.

The Progressive Heresy.

After The Yankee North destroyed the South in the Civil War and assumed the dominant position in America, the first President following Lincoln was a Southerner named Andrew Johnson. He was born in the Tidewater, but raised in Appalachia so you could say he was not really from the Deep South, but he was certainly not a Yankee.

Regardless, the ruling majority hated him and never trusted him so they did everything to scuttle his presidency, even trying to remove him from office. When you hear Progressives talk about the worst presidents, they always include Johnson on the list, either by the transitive property through Nixon (Impeachment) or as a benchmark.

Johnson left office in 1869 and the next time a man of the South dominated the political culture of the nation was never. Benjamin Harrison was from Indiana, a state settled mostly by red necks from Appalachia, but Harrison was a proto-Progressive. Wilson, of course, was a man from the South, but no one in their right mind would consider him a man of the South. Most consider Wilson the model for modern Progressive politicians.

Wilson is an interesting topic for a lot of reasons, but for my purposes here his participation in the founding of The Presbyterian Church in the United States is instructive. Wilson went from being a Private Protestant to a Public Protestant, from a Cavalier to a Roundhead. His ascent to the top of Progressive America was arguably the result of his conversion. Wilson was an inscrutable man and that is mostly due to him being a Yankee convert from the South.

Anyway, the point here is that American political and cultural life has been dominated by the northern regions, particularly the old Yankee region. The political culture that developed was explicitly exclusive of the defeated regions of the country. Instead, it was a battle between the more conservative midland culture on one side and the more activist Yankee culture on the other. German Protestants on the one hand and English Protestants on the other.

As the defeated parts of the country we brought back into the fold, the two warring halves of the political elite fought over the new constituencies. Similarly, as the frontier populations of the West emerged as states, the ruling elite battled to bring these cultures into their coalition. These coalitions have never been fixed as we saw with Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

As times changed, the coalitions changed, but the organizing ethos has remained the same ever since the Reconstruction. One side is the Grover Cleveland wing and the other is the Teddy Roosevelt wing. They assemble electoral majorities from the scraps of the other regions of America. At one point the South was formally in the Democrat camp, but had no voice. Now they are in the Republican camp and have no voice.

From Reconstruction through the World War II, one wing used moral crusades to force the other side into going along with their proposals. Prohibition, for example, was mostly about the old Yankee scolds trying to reign in the Catholic immigrants. Women’s suffrage was a tool to expand the voter base of one side at the expense of the other. This dynamic has been with us for over 100 years. One side starts a revival and the other cleans up after it runs its course.

In mid-century, what we now call the Left landed on the ultimate moral cause—race. Instead of hustling votes with promises to give the Negroes free stuff, Progressives figured out how to make race a moral issue that can pry open other areas of American life to their meddling. More important, as a moral issue, it forced the other side of the ruling coalition into a partnership.

The most obvious example to see this is with public education. From the founding, this was a local issue. The race angle allowed Progressives to make it a national issue on moral grounds. Blacks were not getting a proper education because of racism so that meant a Federal  takeover of the schools. Those who opposed them were immoral racists and therefore excluded from the debate.

This new weapon had the immediate effect of gutting American conservatism by taking freedom of association off the table. At its core, American conservatism has always been based on the idea that you have the right to be left alone. That can only be possible if you have the absolute right to associate or disassociate with whomever you please. Once racism became a mortal sin, freedom of association was lost.

The secondary impact was to permanently make "the South" morally inferior and therefore prohibited from joining the ruling elite. The sin of slavery and then segregation has forever stained the soul of every southerner and every conservative. In order for a man of the right to gain acceptance he has to grovel endlessly and abandon most of what it means to be a conservative. Racism as the highest sin made certain that The South could never rise again. At least that's the theory.

The denouement of this historical cycle is coinciding with the unraveling of the ruling coalition. Part of it is the collision of the prevailing orthodoxy with biological reality. It turns out that all men are not equal after all. More importantly, diversity and proximity do not mix. Another part is demographics. The number of people without representation in the ruling elite outnumber the number of people with representation in it. There's no avoiding mathematics.

My bet is most everyone reading this is familiar with graph paper. That's the paper with the little boxes on it. Now, imagine yourself in a world  like that graph paper. You are in a room that has four walls and each wall has either a door, a window, or nothing at all. The plain walls range from impenetrable to fairly easy to bust through. You can go through the doors and windows or try to bust through the walls, but you just end up in another room that is a square on the grid. You don't know what is in each room until you enter it.

Presented with such a puzzle. you could go exploring, looking for the route out of the maze. If I decided to make the game more fun for me and added some dangers in rooms, for example, then you would be a lot more cautious about seeing the other rooms. You might take a peak through the door before charging into the next room. I could go on, but you get the idea here I hope.

Even without me adding life threatening dangers to the puzzle, your way out of the maze would be trial and error with lots of backtracking. If in your first room you have two doors and those connecting rooms each have two doors, there are four possible outcomes. If those rooms have two doors then you have possible outcomes. It’s not hard to see how the number of possible outcomes can multiply quickly.

Now, imagine instead of a simple grid, the maze is like the gaming paper from the 70’s version of Dungeons and Dragons. That's the hexagonal stuff. Instead of have four choices you now have six. That means your first choice has thirty possible outcomes. Multiply this out of a few moves and you see how quickly this puzzle becomes. Even after a few moves, you would struggle to retrace your steps without some sort of map.

That last bit is important to understand. Each decision you face is the result of previous decisions. If you make a bad move on step three, but only discover it at step nine, you have an accumulation of bad decisions to contend with before you can get back to the original error. That could be daunting enough to make going backward unrealistic.

You Can Never Go Home Again...

The point of this thought experiment is to illustrate how complicated even simple decision trees can become after a few steps. Imagine that each move is decided by a committee that represents the interests of different groups. It's not just deciding on which box to enter. It is how to decide if that choice was a good choice and then deciding where to go from there.

This is how societies evolve and develop. Even the most autocratic societies make decisions that depend on previous decisions. Kim Jung-un can only choose from the options available to him and those options are the result of decisions made long before he was born. It's why analysis that relies on reductionism should always be dismissed. There's no great design or plan from which the current actors are working. Every society is playing the hand it is dealt.

This may seem obvious, but analysts are often prone to reductionism, assuming groups are working like individuals. The most obvious example of methodological reductionism is the mythological Zionist conspiracy. Jews are often described as if they are working collectively from a game plan worked at out annual retreats. The reality is that Jews, like everyone else, are working within the constraints placed on them by history. Jews just happen to be smarter than everyone else, on average.  [Editor note: Actually, they're not nearly as smart as everyone gives them credit for.  They do have a higher than average IQ, but not by a standard deviation, or anything like that.  There are more white people of a given high IQ in America than Jews, simply by virtue of the fact that there are so many more white people than Jews.  No, the real secret to Jewish success in the West is the fact that they seek out rent-seeker occupations, practice nepotism and tribalism to bring more of their own people in, and change the rules so that they can parasitise the actually productive members of society.]

Going back to our puzzle analogy, imagine that instead of a puzzle you can transcend, the hexagon in which you and your tribe exist is where you have always lived, at least in your lifetime. Maybe some of the elders remember a time when your people lived in an adjacent hex. Perhaps your mythology and creation myths talk about some hex at the beginning that lies well beyond anyone’s ability to reach.

In other words, instead of a puzzle into which you were dropped, it is where you have always lived. To you and your people it is not a puzzle. You have no idea it is a puzzle because you lack the perspective to see it that way. Instead it is your world in the same way the tank is the world as far as the goldfish knows. Leaving the hex you are in for the adjacent hex is not in pursuit of the way out, because there is no way out.

Now, necessity from time to time will require you and maybe some others to pick up and explore an adjacent square. You have to try something new because the status quo becomes untenable or there is some hope that greater opportunity lies beyond the hex you currently occupy. Again, the options available to you and your clan are the result of similar decisions made in previous generations. History is a nightmare from which you can never awake

Societal evolution may be accretive, but it also happens in fits and starts. If you and everyone you knew were suddenly under some pressure to think about moving to the next hex, some of you could decide to go even further. The need for change opens up a range of choices that were previously off limits. If you're going to make a change, why not a big change?

We see this in our own lives. When I was a boy, television was a a box in the living room and my father cursing on the roof, adjusting the antennae. I recall going with him to the hardware store so he could use the tester to determine which vacuum tubes were dead. In the blink of an eye, I can now watch TV on my mobile phone that has the processing power of the space shuttle.

The thing is, my experience with TV as a boy was not all that different from the previous generation's experience. Kids in the decades after World War II had a consistent material life up into the 80's and then things started to change rapidly with the microprocessor. The kids of today can't imagine a world in the old hex of console television, rabbit ears and rooftop antennae.

Think about it. In the 1980's the fax machine was a wizbang invention. By the last decade it was obsolete. A decade ago, tapping on a monochrome screen was cutting edge. Today no one remembers the Palm. At the same time, the telephone of 1950 was still in use in most homes in the 1980's. We think the pace of change today will continue, but history says it will slow to a crawl for a while and then another period of rapid advance, long after we are dead.

The journey of a person, a tribe or a nation is just feeling around in the dark, mostly out of necessity, looking for a solution to current problems. There is no grand plan. The story of humanity in the aggregate and the particular is a random walk. Assigning motives beyond temporary necessity and accident, is reductionism, a structural error in thinking.

Societies move from one phase to another haphazardly, constrained by the choices of those who came before them. North Korea has the options it has due to the choices made by those of the previous generations. The decisions made today will constrain future generations.

Those decisions, however, don't spring from thin air. The choices made by Kim Il-sung were for a reason and that reason was to address a problem. The organization of his political party, for example, was about solving problems that Kim and his people were facing. Like all solutions, they were trade-offs. As is always the case with good commies, Kim let the debit side of the trade-off fall on his people, while he kept the credit side.

Everything around us, the political institutions, the laws, the customs, etc., all evolved to address the immediate needs of society and the desires of the people in charge of society. There's not a single punctuation mark in the legal code that is not there for a reason. Every jot and tittle in the regulatory code has a constituency behind it that wanted it in the code to fix a problem for them.

The temptation is to point at these things and dismisses them as corruption, greed or ideological lunacy. Even when that is true, self-dealing solves a problem for the political elites doing the dealing. The modern Democrat party shovels money to public sector unions because it is good for the party. The unions use those funds to elect Democrats, who in turn shovel them move money. From their point of view, it is the perfect solution.

Even the ideological stuff is done to address what the ideologues see as a pressing need. FDR and the New Dealers rolled out the welfare state because they truly feared popular unrest due to the Depression. They thought social security was a great solution to the problems of old age. They thought the Wagner Act would help stabilize labor and prevent the sorts of radicalization they saw in Europe.

Thus the world into which all of us were born is a world populated with solutions to problems. Some are cultural institutions like churches and social customs. Others are in the political economy of society. Government, the legal structure of every society, was created and evolved as a solution to the problems of how to best organize and rule society.

Of course, many of those problems were long solved and the lingering solutions no longer seem to have a justification. This is where Progressives get into trouble. They swing the wrecking ball without wondering why the thing they intend to destroy was created. In the 1980's, America emptied out the lunatic asylums because lefty felt bad for the crazies. Ever since, American cities have had a "homeless problem."

Then there are problems that have been truly solved. In America, food shortages have been solved and now the poor are fat, while the rich are skinny. Despite the abundance of cheap calories available to everyone, we still have food subsidy programs for the poor and farm subsidy programs for farmers. Billions are taken from tax payers, given to rich farmers and fat people so the rich farmers can sell the fat people cheap food.

Every year, sensible people propose that we spend public funds on new problems, but the cost of farm subsidies for rich people and food programs for the fat people means there's not enough money for the new solutions. We kick a lot of cans down the road in order to avoid unwinding unneeded solutions to long solved problems.

Even though we have long blown past the point where the returns turned negative, the perceived costs of rolling back these old solutions exceeds the benefits. As a result, they keep rolling along, becoming ever more draining on society. Many public policy solutions take us down a cul-de-sac.

The most well known example of this is the Roman Empire. Early conquests had huge returns that more than paid for the cost of gaining them. That meant new conquests were the obvious solution to adding to the wealth of Rome.

That made sense up to the point where the costs of new conquests exceeded what the Romans could loot form the newly conquered people. By the time of Augustus, expanding the Empire further simply made no sense, because the cost of conquering more barbarians exceeded the benefits.

The trouble for the Romans was the ongoing cost to past conquest. Those conquered lands had to remain conquered. The frontiers had to be guarded and that meant paying for legions to fight the barbarians. Administering an empire had costs as well. Roads had to be built, army officers bribed, dissent suppressed. The on-going costs of maintaining the empire eventually hollowed it out, leading to collapse.

An example of how culture can become a suicide vest can be found with the Celts. They had a tradition of burying their dead leaders with their wealth. New leaders acquired their own wealth, which created a meritocracy of sorts. To become a great Celtic leader, you had to be good at war and peace so you could gain great wealth for yourself and your people.

The trouble was, destroying that wealth on the death of the ruler made it harder for each generation to acquire gold, silver, precious gems, etc. Eventually, the number of people seeking gold far exceeded the amount available in Celtic lands. Historians believe this led to the collapse of Celtic society and the Celtic invasions.

That's fundamentally why companies fail, revolutions topple governments and empires collapse. The cost of the status quo becomes untenable, but the cost of reform is also untenable. The business cannot reorganize, the elites cannot reform and the empire cannot downsize. The only "solution" left is liquidation, a clearing off all the old solutions and their costs. A clean start.

At a nation level, revolution is just bankruptcy with more theater. The revolutionaries seize the public assets of society, liquidate them and start over with a clean sheet of paper. What is useful is retained, but all obligations are voided. The whole point of a revolution is to wipe away all those old solutions, which are viewed as mistakes and burdens, so the people can have a fresh start.

The crisis faced by the West is not just the wave of migrants or the mountains of debt. Those are easily solved. The crisis is caused by the overhang of old solutions to old problems. Angela Merkel is the answer to a question posed thirty years ago, one no one asks anymore, because we have new questions to answer, like how to keep Mohamed from self-detonating in Europe.

What comes next, what always follows a economic revolution, is a massive political reorganization. Maybe this time it is collapse under a wave of flea infested migrants from the south. Maybe the popular uprisings in response to the flood of migrants will usher in a clearing of the debts. Maybe the Germans will stop apologizing for Hitler and Southerners will stop apologizing for slavery.