This was especially resonant this morning to read just after an article about how European states are actively hiding the crime stats for immigrants. Instead of worrying about actual crime, and the citizens it affects, these bureaucrats worry about the racial profiling that might result from knowing who commits the crimes!
All too common. Such is the power of narrative management. It rules their lives. The flip side of identity politics. If you identify as a social justice warrior you cannot cope with a challenge to that as it wounds your identity. So they defend it with all they've got, resulting in these absurdities. It is worse in education. They condemn the lower IQ kids to a hopeless life to maintain the illusion of sameness their belief in equality demands. The cruelty of this is lost on them.
I am an old retired teacher. I have watched the gradual decline of our educational system and government leadership. I will be gone, gratefully, to Heaven, and my beautiful America will be destroyed. Evil has been allowed in, and God and truth ignored. If only people could wake up and see truth. Read 2Chronicles 7:14. My prayer. This is an excellent, well written essay. Thank you.
You and I are like Thomas Sowell. He said, at age 90, that he was glad to be nearer to the end of his tenure on Earth than the beginning. He would not have to live through what younger generations will have to endure.
Here is a good example. In the UK 6.5% are Muslim. A recent FOI request showed that of those convicted of sexual assaults, rape, etc 11% of the prison population is Muslim. Elites hide the truth when there is no reason to- they fear an Islamophobic backlash when an honest admission by the authorities that the problem exists, is not as a significant as many believe, but will be dealt with a strong clampdown, and the overwhelming majority of Brits would not only be satisfied, but ecstatic that police had finally found the backbone to investigate real crimes rather than speech crime.
If you've read Ayaan Hirsi Ali book 'Prey', then you will know that Austria is about the only European country with the balls to keep crime stats on both ethnicity and religion. The data shows that Muslims who have been in the West the longest- those who have fully acclimated, integrated and assimilated to Western values show no difference in offending to the native born White population. However, roughly 1% of the total population of Austria are Muslim recent arrivals, mainly due to the massive recent migration waves. This recent wave accounts for 50% of ALL population level crimes of this type in Austria.
But here's the real kicker- and its absolutely mindblowing! By recognising and acknowledging the problem they've managed to drastically reduce it. They run courses explaining Western cultural norms and Western women. They explain the legal consequences men will incur for themselves, the unmitigated shame they will bring on their communities and the social ostracism they will face within their own communities when they get out of prison.
And the men stop! Who wouldn't! Our liberal-minded cosmopolitan authorities CAUSE more islamophobia than they stop, because they simply refuse to acknowledge the basic decency of ordinary people in the West. All that ordinary people want is procedural fairness and the guarantee that as problems arise they are dealt with in a swift and expedient fashion. Instead we get institutions sweeping problems under the rug and accusing 14 year old working class girls of being prostitutes. Andrew Norfolk the Leftist journalist who with deep reluctance brought this problem to light is a national hero. He felt that regardless of his personal feelings it was his duty to expose a national scandal. Yet some on the Left still impugn him subtly of being a closet racist...
We haven't really changed that much since 30s Britain, when the preoccupation at the Palace of Westminster was the mistaken belief that ordinary British people would fold at the first sign of German bombers- that the Jews would riot White Chapel and the Old Kent Road. And who was it who fled to the countryside in droves- the upper middle classes.
I did some work in youth criminal reform and have experienced first hand the objection that “the stats are racist”. Verbatim, from a university criminologist- who was responding to the prosecution figures for knife and gun crime and for gang membership in London.
... at the community level (and not the home), are the decisive factor in upward social mobility, from important even than quality of education.
I think it's a couple of things. First, fathers regulate and socialise boys when they hit puberty, especially in terms of peer group. Second, they act as a form of unofficial social safety net- encouraging boys who don't well at school into honourable (not to mention also often well-paid and high status, high prole work). This shows up in the equalities figures for the UK. Although 18 to 30 earnings by Blacks vs Whites are identical at a population level, the Black British labour participation figures are roughly 7% worse for Black British males than White males.
Here's another interesting phenomenon. Germany is the model that liberal criminologists point to for a relatively low violent crime society which didn't have to crime stat-based policing. But what they fail to recognise is that Germany engages in exactly the type of male mentoring youth reform which you've worked in. The only difference is they do it for EVERYONE. 30% of their kids are streamed into higher education. The other 70% are pushed into vocation/technical training- which through sex-based self-selection of vocation means that all those teenage boys are exposed to admirable male mentoring for two to three years...
I've written on the subject. Teresa 'Lettuce' May has a lot to answer for with many of her 'reforms' as home secretary. The evidence is incontrovertible- in every country that compstat style targeted policing was introduced, violent crime halved within a decade. The greatest exemplar was Scottish Public Health Policing, where a combination of proactive policing and the type of youth reform you are obviously aware of, actually managed to achieve this near miraculous feat without substantially raising prison population, especially amongst the young.
The problem is that it one of those rare successes in politics where both Left and Right bring their best ideas to the table and cooperative in a common cause. The only other example I can think of is the London Challenge, paired with Mr Gove's reforms. Generally, he may be a complete twat, but on education history will view him as a minor hero.
To be fair to liberal/leftist criminologists the better ones tend to argue that although proactive policing works it also causes damage in community relations and is better pursued by specific methods like Hot Spot policing. Let me guess- the one who told you it was racist was either young or one of the trendy patched sports jacket brigade? The other canard is intelligence-led policing- an approach which lead directly to the knife crime epidemic (as well as reductions in frontline officers).
Here's a really interesting bit of criminological guesswork. Per population, Latino and African American gang membership in America is almost identical. Pew Research shows income levels are identical as well. Yet homicide rates by race are 1:3:c.21 for White:Latino:AA. The only discernible sociological difference is fatherhood rates by community. There is also social mobility research from Dr Raj Chetty, gleaned from tax records for an entire generation for America, which shows that fatherhood rates at the community level (and not the home), are the decisive factor in upward social mobility, from important even than quality of education.
I think it's a couple of things. First, fathers regulate and socialise boys when they hit puberty, especially in terms of peer group. Second, they act as a form of unofficial social safety net- encouraging boys who don't well at school into honourable (not to mention also often well-paid and high status, high prole work). This shows up in the equalities figures for the UK. Although 18 to 30 earnings by Blacks vs Whites are identical at a population level, the Black British labour participation figures are roughly 7% worse for Black British males than White males.
Here's another interesting phenomenon. Germany is the model that liberal criminologists point to for a relatively low violent crime society which didn't have to crime stat-based policing. But what they fail to recognise is that Germany engages in exactly the type of male mentoring youth reform which you've worked in. The only difference is they do it for EVERYONE. 30% of their kids are streamed into higher education. The other 70% are pushed into vocation/technical training- which through sex-based self-selection of vocation means that all those teenage boys are exposed to admirable male mentoring for two to three years...
A thoughtful piece, Frank. They still dodge much of the Jimmy Savile saga even today. Selective focus works for narrative management. I remember when the TV presenter Philip Schofield came out as gay. The media celebrated this stunning act of bravery. But they chose to overlook the fact he had a wife and children. There was no thought given to them and what such a thing would do to them. I think his kids were young teenagers too.
These bubbles seem to be bursting, dying under the weight of reality. The benefits of multiculturalism have not materialized, gender-affirming care for children is sterilizing them, and as you say nothing works.
Reality is the cleansing fire it all needs, to burn away the dead wood.
Thanks for the John Gray reference. He popped onto my YouTube feed in an interview with Novarro Media. I thought this looks interesting- an intelligent liberal consensus detractor being interviewed by an editor from the home of evangelical cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately, at the time I had things to do- and by the time I came back the suggestions seemed lost forever.
I gather one of Gray's areas of expertise is the works of Isaiah Berlin, of whom I am a great admirer. In the post war liberal consensus there has always been a notion that everything must be done to reduce the cultural potency of the nation state- if we are all same and cleave to similar values would this not prevent future wars? The liberals fundamentally misunderstood the causes of the Second World War, it wasn't nationalism or cultural homogeneity which was the root cause of Nazism or its somewhat less odious contemporaries which caused the German 'blood and soil' pathological call to a mass national cult, but rather the fact that their culture and civic pride had been fundamentally wounded, the infection from which had poisoned their society.
And how do we know that the liberal consensus was fundamentally mistaken? Egypt. Turkey. Any number of Muslim states. In the West, the deliberate attempt to secularise and remove cultural differences with an new ethos of material abundance as a sort of God of Consumers, only lead to apathy, a crisis of meaning and general political discontent. In Muslim countries, many of whom had made great strides in the pursuit of modernity under the likes of Atatürk, there was a far more definite backlash. By attempting to deprive people of their cultural differences, and most particularly in the continuing demand of elites towards secularisation, away from religious cultural roots, untold damage was done to the future of Muslim countries. In fifties Egypt it had not been uncommon to see women wearing sleeveless shirts. The hijab was much more of a rarity.
Deprive a nation of its identity and one invariably creates a more powerful countervailing force. The only metric by which individual cultures vary is the point at which the cultural feedback wave becomes more powerful than the initialling force. We are seeing it right now in Europe. With the exception of the UK and Ireland, virtually every country in Europe is lurching to the Right as is the Overton Window- particularly along the lines of cultures which refuse to integrate to the Western notion of keeping religion completely isolated from politics. In the West, religion and politics can and should be like oil and water, other than with regard to tolerance for all faiths. This is not the Islamic Tradition- in Islam religion and politics are so deeply intertwined that religion informs every aspect of the legal code. Sharia Law is not just a matter of technicality or the pursuit of justice of by wise minds- it has acquired the status of a moral imperative for all good people.
This is not to say that there aren't many wonderful Liberal Muslims in the West. In fact, they constitute a sizeable majority in the West. But in many matters of culture the Dictatorship of the Small Minority prevails. Why should religion be any different?
I include a rare interview of Isaiah Berlin on the Two Concepts of Nationalism from the Isaiah Berlin virtual library. Herder is a fraught subject matter- especially in the current paradigm. Nonetheless Berlin's discussion of his ideas is fundamental to understanding the internal forces stirring tribal political warfare within the West.
All of these demonic corruptions of the public and private sphere and even perception itself travel in a direct beeline to the charade of the pandemic and the vaccine hoax. The people behind these things have a profound understanding of human psychology to pull this off and know in advance people were stupid enough to walk in and get that vaccine willingly. I had a low estimation of people in general but even I was shocked to find out they were that slow-witted. There was a global vapidity between the ears of the Western populations that crept up on me. I didn't know it had gotten that bad. Anybody who loved their children would have at least drawn the line at getting them vaccinated. Only a hollow man would worship the State that much they would sacrifice their own child to it. It goes against all animal instincts, I don't care how busted your brain might be. There is more wrong there than just being an idiot.
P.S. No matter how far out it sounds, I can't help but feel 5G is somehow connected to all of this, perhaps it degrades the hippocampus to the point where you have to rely on others to make your decisions for you. This would concur with the sudden difficulty even holding simple conversations I began to see in people after 2012 throughout the software industry.
Well, this at least gets to the root of our disagreement about human nature.
You're of the opinion that people are induced to vices like knowing, but pretending not to notice, that powerful people are pedophiles. You would categorize dark triad personalities as sinful or evil, or something like that.
I'm of the opinion that the dark triad is a functional, adaptive, and completely valid alternative reproductive strategy that thrives in fast life history environments but is poisonous to slow life history societies even in small doses (I take this view from Jean Twenge, see "The Narcissism Epidemic" for details). From this perspective, the shenanigans of fast life history strategists, such as sexual cheating, are coded as sinful by slow life history strategists because it threatens the genetic interests of their group.
Though I believe in good, evil, sin, et cetera I treat them as an orthogonal axis to these environment-based adaptations. Therefore there must be righteous and sinful ways of being a polygamist used car salesman, and righteous and sinful ways of being an altruistic Mother Theresa type. (The axes may not actually be orthogonal but I haven't navigated that problem as of today.)
I take Twenge's idea further by asserting that 80% of people will, at all times, prefer to influence society and culture toward the fast life history strategy. Why? The politics of envy--they know their reproductive strategy isn't cut out for living slow, and they'll lose the reproductive race. This is why democracy is disastrous. Therefore the 20% can only influence society toward their own interests with oppressive campaigns of moralizing, propaganda, and early-life indoctrination. The 80% will resent this but be unable to resist it for lack of conscientiousness and collective organization, and anyway they have so many children that a few are bound to make it in school and church, so their resentment is only partial.
You're of the opinion that the 80% are misled, and understand on some level that descending into African dystopia is against their long-term interests. Therefore they must eventually come around. This is where we differ! I believe the 80% know they benefit from tearing out the wires and indoor plumbing of civilization because it hurts their genetic competition more than it hurts them. When you appeal to reality, you are appealing to the OPPOSITE of their self-interest.
Most people are mediocre (ref. bell curve), and all people are selfish, therefore the masses are selfish mediocrities. Therefore populism can only recreate mediocracy, because it must appeal to the self-interests of the mediocre.
This. That's why the grandest plans in the world run straight into the immutability of mankind. Civilizations are only capable of reform early on, later they can't fix anything or make it better. Most people inherently know in their hearts it takes a crash to end madness like this. That's the only way it can get better. Not a manufactured collapse but simply nature reaffirming the Gods of the Copybooks.
Extremely interesting comment. Would like to hear more. I’m not sure if the fast lane strategy is chosen or that it works out well for those who find themselves in that mode.
Call me ignorant, but I am not sure what you mean by “fast life history environments . . {and} . . slow life history societies”. What popped into my mind was urban society versus agrarian society. I feel like I am way out in right field on this. Your condensed argument does explain a lot.
Civil societies use evil to enforce restrictions. Natural law is “do no harm”. Harm is revealed by “fucking around and finding out”. So grandpa copulates with granddaughter, mom gets angry and banishes grandpa from her life. Grandpa dies lonely alone. Civil societies codify natural law henceforth removing free will from relationships. As civil societies evolve their systems of codes become incomprehensible, contradictory, illogical. Codes are applied randomly. Natural justice is rarely served.
Advanced civil societies (empires) fall under the clutter of their absurd fictions and their destruction of responsible men and women.
It ends when parents kill their daughters murder and find themselves the heroes of their culture.
Extremely enlightening essay. Especially the part describing how the governance seems to have an ultimate plan, whereas the governed do not. Maybe we should demand a copy of their plan. And see for ourselves if it is "as advertised".
This was especially resonant this morning to read just after an article about how European states are actively hiding the crime stats for immigrants. Instead of worrying about actual crime, and the citizens it affects, these bureaucrats worry about the racial profiling that might result from knowing who commits the crimes!
Yes we are in a game of "let's pretend", but fewer and fewer people are willing to play along.
All too common. Such is the power of narrative management. It rules their lives. The flip side of identity politics. If you identify as a social justice warrior you cannot cope with a challenge to that as it wounds your identity. So they defend it with all they've got, resulting in these absurdities. It is worse in education. They condemn the lower IQ kids to a hopeless life to maintain the illusion of sameness their belief in equality demands. The cruelty of this is lost on them.
One day I will write about my adventures in educationland. Spoiler: Skule does not enclever.
Oh so true. My heart hearts over the evil of it all.
I am an old retired teacher. I have watched the gradual decline of our educational system and government leadership. I will be gone, gratefully, to Heaven, and my beautiful America will be destroyed. Evil has been allowed in, and God and truth ignored. If only people could wake up and see truth. Read 2Chronicles 7:14. My prayer. This is an excellent, well written essay. Thank you.
You and I are like Thomas Sowell. He said, at age 90, that he was glad to be nearer to the end of his tenure on Earth than the beginning. He would not have to live through what younger generations will have to endure.
Here is a good example. In the UK 6.5% are Muslim. A recent FOI request showed that of those convicted of sexual assaults, rape, etc 11% of the prison population is Muslim. Elites hide the truth when there is no reason to- they fear an Islamophobic backlash when an honest admission by the authorities that the problem exists, is not as a significant as many believe, but will be dealt with a strong clampdown, and the overwhelming majority of Brits would not only be satisfied, but ecstatic that police had finally found the backbone to investigate real crimes rather than speech crime.
If you've read Ayaan Hirsi Ali book 'Prey', then you will know that Austria is about the only European country with the balls to keep crime stats on both ethnicity and religion. The data shows that Muslims who have been in the West the longest- those who have fully acclimated, integrated and assimilated to Western values show no difference in offending to the native born White population. However, roughly 1% of the total population of Austria are Muslim recent arrivals, mainly due to the massive recent migration waves. This recent wave accounts for 50% of ALL population level crimes of this type in Austria.
But here's the real kicker- and its absolutely mindblowing! By recognising and acknowledging the problem they've managed to drastically reduce it. They run courses explaining Western cultural norms and Western women. They explain the legal consequences men will incur for themselves, the unmitigated shame they will bring on their communities and the social ostracism they will face within their own communities when they get out of prison.
And the men stop! Who wouldn't! Our liberal-minded cosmopolitan authorities CAUSE more islamophobia than they stop, because they simply refuse to acknowledge the basic decency of ordinary people in the West. All that ordinary people want is procedural fairness and the guarantee that as problems arise they are dealt with in a swift and expedient fashion. Instead we get institutions sweeping problems under the rug and accusing 14 year old working class girls of being prostitutes. Andrew Norfolk the Leftist journalist who with deep reluctance brought this problem to light is a national hero. He felt that regardless of his personal feelings it was his duty to expose a national scandal. Yet some on the Left still impugn him subtly of being a closet racist...
We haven't really changed that much since 30s Britain, when the preoccupation at the Palace of Westminster was the mistaken belief that ordinary British people would fold at the first sign of German bombers- that the Jews would riot White Chapel and the Old Kent Road. And who was it who fled to the countryside in droves- the upper middle classes.
I did some work in youth criminal reform and have experienced first hand the objection that “the stats are racist”. Verbatim, from a university criminologist- who was responding to the prosecution figures for knife and gun crime and for gang membership in London.
... at the community level (and not the home), are the decisive factor in upward social mobility, from important even than quality of education.
I think it's a couple of things. First, fathers regulate and socialise boys when they hit puberty, especially in terms of peer group. Second, they act as a form of unofficial social safety net- encouraging boys who don't well at school into honourable (not to mention also often well-paid and high status, high prole work). This shows up in the equalities figures for the UK. Although 18 to 30 earnings by Blacks vs Whites are identical at a population level, the Black British labour participation figures are roughly 7% worse for Black British males than White males.
Here's another interesting phenomenon. Germany is the model that liberal criminologists point to for a relatively low violent crime society which didn't have to crime stat-based policing. But what they fail to recognise is that Germany engages in exactly the type of male mentoring youth reform which you've worked in. The only difference is they do it for EVERYONE. 30% of their kids are streamed into higher education. The other 70% are pushed into vocation/technical training- which through sex-based self-selection of vocation means that all those teenage boys are exposed to admirable male mentoring for two to three years...
Boys need men. Who knew?
I've written on the subject. Teresa 'Lettuce' May has a lot to answer for with many of her 'reforms' as home secretary. The evidence is incontrovertible- in every country that compstat style targeted policing was introduced, violent crime halved within a decade. The greatest exemplar was Scottish Public Health Policing, where a combination of proactive policing and the type of youth reform you are obviously aware of, actually managed to achieve this near miraculous feat without substantially raising prison population, especially amongst the young.
The problem is that it one of those rare successes in politics where both Left and Right bring their best ideas to the table and cooperative in a common cause. The only other example I can think of is the London Challenge, paired with Mr Gove's reforms. Generally, he may be a complete twat, but on education history will view him as a minor hero.
To be fair to liberal/leftist criminologists the better ones tend to argue that although proactive policing works it also causes damage in community relations and is better pursued by specific methods like Hot Spot policing. Let me guess- the one who told you it was racist was either young or one of the trendy patched sports jacket brigade? The other canard is intelligence-led policing- an approach which lead directly to the knife crime epidemic (as well as reductions in frontline officers).
Here's a really interesting bit of criminological guesswork. Per population, Latino and African American gang membership in America is almost identical. Pew Research shows income levels are identical as well. Yet homicide rates by race are 1:3:c.21 for White:Latino:AA. The only discernible sociological difference is fatherhood rates by community. There is also social mobility research from Dr Raj Chetty, gleaned from tax records for an entire generation for America, which shows that fatherhood rates at the community level (and not the home), are the decisive factor in upward social mobility, from important even than quality of education.
I think it's a couple of things. First, fathers regulate and socialise boys when they hit puberty, especially in terms of peer group. Second, they act as a form of unofficial social safety net- encouraging boys who don't well at school into honourable (not to mention also often well-paid and high status, high prole work). This shows up in the equalities figures for the UK. Although 18 to 30 earnings by Blacks vs Whites are identical at a population level, the Black British labour participation figures are roughly 7% worse for Black British males than White males.
Here's another interesting phenomenon. Germany is the model that liberal criminologists point to for a relatively low violent crime society which didn't have to crime stat-based policing. But what they fail to recognise is that Germany engages in exactly the type of male mentoring youth reform which you've worked in. The only difference is they do it for EVERYONE. 30% of their kids are streamed into higher education. The other 70% are pushed into vocation/technical training- which through sex-based self-selection of vocation means that all those teenage boys are exposed to admirable male mentoring for two to three years...
Oh yes!!!!! Thank you
Thank you for this information
A thoughtful piece, Frank. They still dodge much of the Jimmy Savile saga even today. Selective focus works for narrative management. I remember when the TV presenter Philip Schofield came out as gay. The media celebrated this stunning act of bravery. But they chose to overlook the fact he had a wife and children. There was no thought given to them and what such a thing would do to them. I think his kids were young teenagers too.
These bubbles seem to be bursting, dying under the weight of reality. The benefits of multiculturalism have not materialized, gender-affirming care for children is sterilizing them, and as you say nothing works.
Reality is the cleansing fire it all needs, to burn away the dead wood.
Thanks for the John Gray reference. He popped onto my YouTube feed in an interview with Novarro Media. I thought this looks interesting- an intelligent liberal consensus detractor being interviewed by an editor from the home of evangelical cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately, at the time I had things to do- and by the time I came back the suggestions seemed lost forever.
I gather one of Gray's areas of expertise is the works of Isaiah Berlin, of whom I am a great admirer. In the post war liberal consensus there has always been a notion that everything must be done to reduce the cultural potency of the nation state- if we are all same and cleave to similar values would this not prevent future wars? The liberals fundamentally misunderstood the causes of the Second World War, it wasn't nationalism or cultural homogeneity which was the root cause of Nazism or its somewhat less odious contemporaries which caused the German 'blood and soil' pathological call to a mass national cult, but rather the fact that their culture and civic pride had been fundamentally wounded, the infection from which had poisoned their society.
And how do we know that the liberal consensus was fundamentally mistaken? Egypt. Turkey. Any number of Muslim states. In the West, the deliberate attempt to secularise and remove cultural differences with an new ethos of material abundance as a sort of God of Consumers, only lead to apathy, a crisis of meaning and general political discontent. In Muslim countries, many of whom had made great strides in the pursuit of modernity under the likes of Atatürk, there was a far more definite backlash. By attempting to deprive people of their cultural differences, and most particularly in the continuing demand of elites towards secularisation, away from religious cultural roots, untold damage was done to the future of Muslim countries. In fifties Egypt it had not been uncommon to see women wearing sleeveless shirts. The hijab was much more of a rarity.
Deprive a nation of its identity and one invariably creates a more powerful countervailing force. The only metric by which individual cultures vary is the point at which the cultural feedback wave becomes more powerful than the initialling force. We are seeing it right now in Europe. With the exception of the UK and Ireland, virtually every country in Europe is lurching to the Right as is the Overton Window- particularly along the lines of cultures which refuse to integrate to the Western notion of keeping religion completely isolated from politics. In the West, religion and politics can and should be like oil and water, other than with regard to tolerance for all faiths. This is not the Islamic Tradition- in Islam religion and politics are so deeply intertwined that religion informs every aspect of the legal code. Sharia Law is not just a matter of technicality or the pursuit of justice of by wise minds- it has acquired the status of a moral imperative for all good people.
This is not to say that there aren't many wonderful Liberal Muslims in the West. In fact, they constitute a sizeable majority in the West. But in many matters of culture the Dictatorship of the Small Minority prevails. Why should religion be any different?
I include a rare interview of Isaiah Berlin on the Two Concepts of Nationalism from the Isaiah Berlin virtual library. Herder is a fraught subject matter- especially in the current paradigm. Nonetheless Berlin's discussion of his ideas is fundamental to understanding the internal forces stirring tribal political warfare within the West.
https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/interviews/gardels.pdf
All of these demonic corruptions of the public and private sphere and even perception itself travel in a direct beeline to the charade of the pandemic and the vaccine hoax. The people behind these things have a profound understanding of human psychology to pull this off and know in advance people were stupid enough to walk in and get that vaccine willingly. I had a low estimation of people in general but even I was shocked to find out they were that slow-witted. There was a global vapidity between the ears of the Western populations that crept up on me. I didn't know it had gotten that bad. Anybody who loved their children would have at least drawn the line at getting them vaccinated. Only a hollow man would worship the State that much they would sacrifice their own child to it. It goes against all animal instincts, I don't care how busted your brain might be. There is more wrong there than just being an idiot.
P.S. No matter how far out it sounds, I can't help but feel 5G is somehow connected to all of this, perhaps it degrades the hippocampus to the point where you have to rely on others to make your decisions for you. This would concur with the sudden difficulty even holding simple conversations I began to see in people after 2012 throughout the software industry.
Well, this at least gets to the root of our disagreement about human nature.
You're of the opinion that people are induced to vices like knowing, but pretending not to notice, that powerful people are pedophiles. You would categorize dark triad personalities as sinful or evil, or something like that.
I'm of the opinion that the dark triad is a functional, adaptive, and completely valid alternative reproductive strategy that thrives in fast life history environments but is poisonous to slow life history societies even in small doses (I take this view from Jean Twenge, see "The Narcissism Epidemic" for details). From this perspective, the shenanigans of fast life history strategists, such as sexual cheating, are coded as sinful by slow life history strategists because it threatens the genetic interests of their group.
Though I believe in good, evil, sin, et cetera I treat them as an orthogonal axis to these environment-based adaptations. Therefore there must be righteous and sinful ways of being a polygamist used car salesman, and righteous and sinful ways of being an altruistic Mother Theresa type. (The axes may not actually be orthogonal but I haven't navigated that problem as of today.)
I take Twenge's idea further by asserting that 80% of people will, at all times, prefer to influence society and culture toward the fast life history strategy. Why? The politics of envy--they know their reproductive strategy isn't cut out for living slow, and they'll lose the reproductive race. This is why democracy is disastrous. Therefore the 20% can only influence society toward their own interests with oppressive campaigns of moralizing, propaganda, and early-life indoctrination. The 80% will resent this but be unable to resist it for lack of conscientiousness and collective organization, and anyway they have so many children that a few are bound to make it in school and church, so their resentment is only partial.
You're of the opinion that the 80% are misled, and understand on some level that descending into African dystopia is against their long-term interests. Therefore they must eventually come around. This is where we differ! I believe the 80% know they benefit from tearing out the wires and indoor plumbing of civilization because it hurts their genetic competition more than it hurts them. When you appeal to reality, you are appealing to the OPPOSITE of their self-interest.
And you have to admit, that would explain a lot.
To condense the argument:
Most people are mediocre (ref. bell curve), and all people are selfish, therefore the masses are selfish mediocrities. Therefore populism can only recreate mediocracy, because it must appeal to the self-interests of the mediocre.
This. That's why the grandest plans in the world run straight into the immutability of mankind. Civilizations are only capable of reform early on, later they can't fix anything or make it better. Most people inherently know in their hearts it takes a crash to end madness like this. That's the only way it can get better. Not a manufactured collapse but simply nature reaffirming the Gods of the Copybooks.
Extremely interesting comment. Would like to hear more. I’m not sure if the fast lane strategy is chosen or that it works out well for those who find themselves in that mode.
Call me ignorant, but I am not sure what you mean by “fast life history environments . . {and} . . slow life history societies”. What popped into my mind was urban society versus agrarian society. I feel like I am way out in right field on this. Your condensed argument does explain a lot.
I suppose I was assuming everyone watches The Jolly Heretic and has already read Anonymous Conservative's book on r/k selection.
Hmm...start with Dutton's "Making Sense of Race", that should be a good intro to the subject.
https://edwarddutton.com/index.php/books/
Thank you for this information.
I’m fairly well read but have missed this author. No wonder. What a collection of third rail topics. I can’t wait to read several of these books!
A very interesting take. You should write this up in your own substack, explore it more.
I still write on WordPress as Aeoli Pera, I just made this account to leave comments because somebody bugged me into it.
Civil societies use evil to enforce restrictions. Natural law is “do no harm”. Harm is revealed by “fucking around and finding out”. So grandpa copulates with granddaughter, mom gets angry and banishes grandpa from her life. Grandpa dies lonely alone. Civil societies codify natural law henceforth removing free will from relationships. As civil societies evolve their systems of codes become incomprehensible, contradictory, illogical. Codes are applied randomly. Natural justice is rarely served.
Advanced civil societies (empires) fall under the clutter of their absurd fictions and their destruction of responsible men and women.
It ends when parents kill their daughters murder and find themselves the heroes of their culture.
Societies destroy culture, culture destroys societies.
EXCELLENT !!!!!!
Extremely enlightening essay. Especially the part describing how the governance seems to have an ultimate plan, whereas the governed do not. Maybe we should demand a copy of their plan. And see for ourselves if it is "as advertised".
Brilliant piece. Much appreciated.