Saturday, January 25, 2014

How do you bridge this gulf?

There is a gulf in understanding between those who follow "interest group politics" and those who identify with the larger tradition they belong to.

The leaders of minority groups often understand that in a liberal society the aim of politics is to create a formal structure through which self-interest can be equally pursued (with the formal structure including definitions of rights). They see the aim of politics, therefore, as being to organise as a minority interest group and to make sure that this framework (of pursuing self-interest) is structured in a way that is biased for rather than against their own group. The minority groups will often assume that this has also been the focus of the majority, meaning that the majority has used its influence to structure society to its own benefit (hence the notion of majority privilege dominant on the left today).

White liberals who belong to the majority often perceive society the same way that minority groups do, and so tend to be sympathetic to claims of majority privilege.

But for most members of the majority all this is very confusing. They don't see their society as being a field of contest for competing rights. Their society means much more to them than this. It has a meaning as an entity in itself: as a source of identity, as an expression of the culture that is connected to one's own people, as a means of transmission of a distinct tradition.

Furthermore, the non-liberal member of the majority will want his society to be ordered according to objective moral truths, rather than being merely a system enabling the pursuit of self-interest.

So there is a seemingly unbridgeable gulf in understanding here. Unfortunately, the majority has to understand that it is liberal whites and minority interest groups who are running the show, so their understanding now dominates.

I have had readers in the past who have insisted that liberals aren't interested in the truth and that there is therefore no purpose in trying to argue with them logically. I've mostly disagreed as there do exist principles within liberal thought which liberals follow through to their logical conclusions.

However, I agree that liberals, in thinking about the nature of society, aren't as oriented to what is objectively true or good. Instead, they focus on relationships of power - on who gets to benefit from structures which limit or empower the pursuit of self-interest (when liberals praise someone for being "empowered" doesn't it often mean that the person has thrown off limitations in the pursuit of what they want?)

It should also be said that even though it is left-liberals who have made interest group politics their own, right-liberals did much to prepare the ground for it. It was right-liberals who pushed along the idea of society being made of millions of rights-bearing individuals each pursuing a rational self-interest. It was not a long step from that to the idea that the contest was not just between individuals but between interest groups.

So even though it's true that right-liberals often hate the idea of interest groups replacing individuals (with many complaints about the intrusion of ethnicity, culture and race into politics), it was right-liberals themselves who set up the idea of society as being a neutral or vacant space rather than a space that was already inhabited by a particular culture, tradition and people.

11 comments:

  1. This is completely off-topic but a number of conservative blogs seem to have been suddenly disappeared by Blogspot. Mine hasn't entirely vanished but it no longer shows up on my Blogger dashboard. It may be mere paranoia or it may be the beginning of a crackdown on conservative blogs.

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    1. Hope not. I know that Vanishing American decided to close her site - a pity, as she was well worth reading.

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    2. I was a frequent reader of Vanishing American, and I'm appalled by her decision to delete all of the blog posts she had written for the past several years. I understand her discouragement and her desire to throw in the towel. But I have trouble understanding what seems to me a senseless act of nihilism. I don't think she fully realized the impact that her cogently written posts had on borderline individuals like myself.

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  2. "White liberals who belong to the majority often perceive society the same way that minority groups do, and so tend to be sympathetic to claims of majority privilege."

    Non-whites, including those who have benefited socially from the white liberal rules of privileged and disprivileged identity, are on the whole remarkably unlikely to be sympathetic to claims of majority privilege when the minority is white and the majority is non-white, and they perceive society the same way that minority whites do extremely infrequently.

    Once whites give up power democratically to a non-white majority, including a recently imported one, "minority rights" mean little and it's "majority rule" for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    White liberals know this. South Africa and Zimbabwe have made it brutally clear, as though it wasn't obvious before where things were heading. But white liberals prefer to exercise "crimestop", that is protective, strategic stupidity, about what the non-white mass immigration and other policies they support mean for the white race and for the democratic order they claim to favor. For the liberal democratic order, it's game over. For the white race, it means genocide.

    South Africa and Zimbabwe aren't any further away from Australia than South Africa and Rhodesia were before black rule. The total lack of interest now compared to the burning urgency then is down to the fact that whites in those places are subjugated now.

    White liberals say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.

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    1. TDT, of course you're right that at the end of the day it is whites who get treated in an exceptional way as the target of all this. I didn't work this into the post; I was focused on something else, namely the incompatibility of the liberal concept of politics and society and the upholding of a communal tradition.

      I think it's worthwhile drawing this out, because there are two different ways of being oppositional today. One way is to play the game within the liberal framework. There are some very good men's rights activists doing this now. They are agreeing with the idea that society ought to be a neutral space in which there is an unbiased structure of rights in which people can equally pursue their own rational self-interest. What they are challenging is the idea that men benefit from the structures being biased in their own interest; they are showing the evidence of men being disadvantaged within the existing framework.

      It's good for us that they are doing this, as it breaks down the idea of men being the oppressor group, with the loss of status that comes with this.

      However, this kind of oppositional politics isn't going to prove sufficient. You cannot at the same time uphold a particular tradition whilst you push the idea of society being a neutral space within which individuals can equally pursue rational self-interest.

      We're the opposition that has to overthrow the whole concept. We have to reassert that we don't want a neutral space, we want a space that is occupied by our tradition and by the efforts of a community to establish a social order that is oriented to what is objectively good.

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    2. Excellent reply, I have nothing to add.

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  3. Mr. Richardson

    "it was right-liberals themselves who set up the idea of society as being a neutral or vacant space rather than a space that was already inhabited by a particular culture, tradition and people."

    Very well put!

    Mark Moncrieff
    Upon Hope Blog - A Traditional Conservative Future

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  4. "It should also be said that even though it is left-liberals who have made interest group politics their own, right-liberals did much to prepare the ground for it. It was right-liberals who pushed along the idea of society being made of millions of rights-bearing individuals each pursuing a rational self-interest. It was not a long step from that to the idea that the contest was not just between individuals but between interest groups."

    Perfect

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  5. Just to add a further thought, it's curious the way that both the liberal view of politics and society coexisted with a preliberal outlook for such a long time. You can definitely see evidence of both, for instance, in the England of the 1800s. By the early 1900s, the formal justifications had to be made in terms of the liberal view and during the course of the century the preliberal outlook gave way.

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  6. Up until the 20th century "liberalism" was mostly about old money vs new money. Where old money and titles were inherited by middling mediocrities and new money was mostly previously disenfranchised high IQ people. As we became more and more an economy where knowledge, raw analytical power, an almost pathological ambition, and moral "flexibility" became the traits that led to economic success and gross material deprivation no longer dominated the lives of smart but poor people new money started to win. Originally liberalism was about removing the privileges of old money that were seen as being in the way of new money, and this was done in the name of equality (of opportunity).

    The problem though is that new money was obsessed with the one thing that while it concerned old money they were always a little embarrassed by it...namely money. Equality of opportunity also meant a dog eat dog world where you had to climb to the top by any means necessary, because the top was no longer a secure thing you could count on from birth but rather something you could fall out of at any moment. Call it elite overproduction, there just aren't enough elite spots for all these wannabe elites, so it tends to go to the person who wants it the most (not always a good thing).

    This had plenty of positive effects of course. The elite got smarter and more technically capable. And to an extent they had some more perspective on the lower classes because they came from there. However, they were also desperate to escape from their own class and join the higher one, which while they had to acknowledge them financially they usually rejected them socially (can't join this golf course no sir). This caused a fracturing of elite culture as new money tried to invent its own culture, one that would also be accommodating to the methods they had to use to get their money (which was never going to mesh with that of old money who were concerned with different ideals). In addition new money never quite got over its cultural insecurity, just as old money never got over its financial insecurity as it fell behind (when it was still around).

    The elites reaching down to the lower classes in order to form interest groups that would advance them in the inter-elite struggle, and the decline in any kind of standard that came with the weakening of a common culture, was an inevitable result of elite overproduction. High IQ* people inventing appealing if false memes to appeal to lower IQ people in order to use them against their other high IQ competitors.

    This is not to say rule by aristocrat would be better, nor to I even consider it possible (technological changes make it impossible, there needs to be at least a veneer). However, it is the world we live in described, and it might explain why you believe liberalism switched in the 20th century. New money won, and the "great sort" was already busy assigning people class based on genetics rather then lineage.


    *Often gullible high IQ people are the target of these memes as well, hence the clever silly.

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  7. @asdf
    "*Often gullible high IQ people are the target of these memes as well, hence the clever silly."

    LOL.

    Either way I doubt very much that the Liberals of the left or right would allow white North Western European ethnicities to form political associations or pressure groups, little alone a white Australian group who call themselves Aussies. To even be legally allowed to have a clan you have to sign the life away to promise no political groups...

    The biker laws were pretty full on, notice it's mainly the White supremacist USA imported gangs and Iraqi Muslim supremacist gangs also USA imported that help bring in these laws... Some people are worried about the future prosperity evidently.

    Ironically Russia under Putin is coming Westward theologically, now the USA of America is a hybrid anti-white, multi-ethnic gang alliance of parasitic thugs enforcing AnarcoTryanny on innocent people. Such complex charades never last, as these types of civilisations need expanding technological advances along with economic uplifting to dupe or keep the people busy and occupied. We will hit a choking point eventually, these choking points are very unpredictable in human terms, in this chaos we can make order if we organise above or below ground. Time is of the essence IMO.

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