I don't have time to write a post myself today, but here are a couple of items from around the web worth looking at.
The first is from Mark Moncrieff. He has written a post on "The paradox of the autonomous individual and the expanding government." It's brief but well-stated.
The second is a Daily Mail article on trends within marriage and cohabitation. The suggestion is that, based on current trends, a child born today to cohabiting parents only has a nine percent chance of still living with both parents when sixteen.
http://www.news.com.au/money/money-matters/is-having-kids-really-rational/story-e6frfmd9-1226650511066
ReplyDeleteIts articles like this that make me think mainstream Australian media and society is toxic and mentally unstable.
What would be different if the Left openly said the goal was to destroy the family, the nation, and religion, instead of covertly doing so under the pretense they love freedom and autonomy?* Would the attacks on these institutions be less intense and relentless?
ReplyDeleteNothing, and no.
The Right is stupid to grant the Left the benefit of supposedly acting from "good intentions". The Right should act as if the Left wants to obliterate the Right completely and uncompromisingly.
Because it does.
* By the way, it is not hard to find prominent Leftists openly saying such things!
Mr Richardson, to judge by the comment above which is date-stamped "Sunday, 26 May 2013 1:32:00 pm AEST", you appear to be receiving spam from a pornographer. I urgently suggest for the sake of your readers that you remove this comment and make it impossible for future spam-generating pornographers to have their comments published.
ReplyDeleteNah: "* By the way, it is not hard to find prominent Leftists openly saying such things!"
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
Back in 2008, leading Norwegian academic multiculturalist Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen of the University in Oslo, who received millions in government funding for his projects, said that in his view the most important thing to do right now is to "deconstruct the majority [population] so thoroughly that it can never be called the majority again."
Unfortunately the translation seems no longer to be available online. Embarrassingly blunt statements by the anti-white elites have a way of doing that. There is no transcript of Joe Biden's famous recent speech either.
It's remarkable how little cover of jargon the anti-white establishment needs to use; just "deconstruct" for "destroy" and "the majority" for "white Norwegians" and it's all good.
Nah, if it were just a case of the left wanting to destroy the family, the nation and religion then things wouldn't be so bad. The right would then lead ordinary people to victory over the left.
ReplyDeleteBut the right too has shown over and over again that it will not defend the family, the nation or religion - some parts of the right are just as aggressively anti-family and anti-nation as the left.
So you have to delve deeper into what prominent leftists and rightists believe.
And it turns out that both sides are agreed that freedom understood as autonomy is a key goal of politics.
Some radical leftists then conclude that the family can never do justice to autonomy and that it must be destroyed. Other less radical leftists believe that you can "autonomise" the family, by having multiple definitions of what a family is, by degendering family roles, by having easier divorce and so on.
And the right? They want to have their cake and eat it too. Someone like Tony Abbott accepts the idea that we self-actualise through careers. Therefore, he is largely oriented to the goal of getting women out of the home and into the labour force. Just like the leftists he wants traditional family roles to be outsourced to experts.
And yet in his own mind, I have little doubt that he believes that he is pro-family. It's a case of a conflict in ideology: the liberal part of his ideology, which tells him that individuals must be self-made in the market, conflicts with the more conservative part, which tells him that the family, should be defended as a non-state institution.
Robert,
ReplyDeleteSorry, I was away from internet access for a little bit longer than usual. I've marked the comment as spam. Hopefully others are doing the same thing.
On topic considering your blog.
ReplyDeleteMark, you have good insights, but you naively believe in the sincerity of liberals.
Ideological word membrane between the system and the people have the following functions:
a) Protective layer. People direct their attention and expend their energies fighting against and for words like human rights, racism, LGBT rights, equality, etc. and thus the system, the large complex bureaucracies can peacefully function under the surface. Bureaucratic functions are the essence of the system, not the liberal ideology. The teeming action of civil society is directed to harmless and/or useful predetermined channels.
b) Liberal ideological word universe is designed to manipulate, lie, distort, obfuscate, etc. in such a way it enables the unobstructed selected flows of the system and increases them. Every word is directly related to bureaucratic power. E.g. racism - tolerance word dipole is designed to create psychological and societal pressures and incentives towards tolerance which enables immigration and multiracial society, which gives cheap labor, bureaucratic clients and political clients to the system. This makes the elites richer, and gives them more power and more work opportunities. It is of secondary importance to elites that this creates a short term gains to elites, but long term disadvantages to everybody. Classic case of tragedy of commons (Hardin, 1968), political principal agent problem, moral hazard, asymmetry of information, etc. combined.
c) Elites know the system is a racket. But it is much easier to do evil deeds when you and everybody around you say you are doing morally sublime, rational, societally important, altruistic, helpful, etc. things.
This gives you compact insider view to the thinking of elites:
http://mises.org/media/2814/Washington-Warp-Why-Even-Good-People-in-the-Beltway-Cant-Think-Straight
Of course there are lower level useful idiots, who genuinely believe in liberal ideology.
Notice also that Big Lie -phenomenom known from propaganda techniques limits people's understanding of elite thinking and actions. Normal people would lie a little bit in their lives, tell little white lies now and then, e.g. telling wife that "You are not too fat" when she asks. These are mostly well meaning lies, designed to strenghen or uphold social relations. People anchor (anchoring in psychology) their thinking to their own world, so they cannot (fully) comprehend or believe that elites would tell so enormous lies, manipulate so insidiously or do so bad things, especially when elites talk flowery language. So people tend to believe what elites say. Hence it is better to elites to tell big lies and use big manipulations, rather than small ones (advantages/disadvantages -ratio).
ReplyDeleteValkea,
ReplyDeleteThe ideology that people espouse is most likely to reflect the way they understand the world and the way they attempt to construct meaning out of that understanding of the world.
So underlying it are all kinds of assumptions about human nature; about how we come to knowledge; about the existence or non-existence of essences; about how we express solidarity; and so on.
To complicate matters, those ideologies which also seem to "make sense" to powerful social interests are also more likely to gain acceptance than those which don't.
The problem for us is that within the political class liberalism is so strong that it excludes traditionalism from political debate and discussion - it sometimes even makes traditionalist views "incorrect" so that they are taken to be morally wrong.
A crticism of the formal ideology of liberalism is therefore important as:
i) It helps to guide people away from liberalism in a principled way, rather than people simply taking the "least worst" option allowed within liberalism.
ii) It challenges the idea that liberals are promoting a "natural" morality rather than a political one based on a set of dubious first principles. In other words, it removes the "moral" power of liberal claims.
iii) It points to the connection between liberalism and a whole series of effects on society. So rather than objecting to just one consequence at one moment in time ("this policy X has gone too far") it encourages people to go beyond discomfort with a policy and to think about the wider direction of society and the larger values promoted within the society.
iv) It encourages people to think more realistically about who they allow to represent them. If rank and file traditionalists are aware that the mainstream right-wing leaders identify as right-liberals and have similar philosophical ideas to left-liberals, then they're less likely to try to fix problems in society by passively voting in right-liberals.
It's also necessary to point to the fundamental contradiction; political correctness (of "right" and "left") is all about privileging group rights (to the exclusion of the interests of whites), so all this talk about the autonomous individual is a lie. The individual, with only his individual rights, is subordinated to "communities" under multiculturalism.
ReplyDeleteAnd non-white mass immigration and forced integration means that those "communities" grow ever larger and more powerful, while those with only individual rights, that is the whites, are gradually driven from cultural centrality and power, and ultimately subjected to genocide. That is, through a set of state policies, white people cease to exist.
What is the "racism" taboo? Fundamentally it is a group right held communally by non-whites against whites, one that means non-whites are broadly empowered, even if they are not yet in white countries, as even immigration policy has to be "anti-racist" meaning anti-white.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when this group right clashes with individual rights? The police arrest whites at 3:20am, for twittering "racist" words, that is what happens. That means individual rights lose. Traditional rights like free speech are lost and nothing replaces them but communal rights for non-whites but not for whites.
In political correctness, nobody is really an "individual" except whites who lack group rights, and they are being methodically eliminated by mass immigration and forced integration.
In other words, political correctness means a future where there will be no whites, and also group rights or no rights.
But I don't care about the part after whites have ceased to exist as an identifiable group. That has nothing to do with us. We'll be gone. We have no more stake in that than neanderthals have in whether we cro-magnons are at peace with the environment.
Daybreaker,
ReplyDeleteWhen liberal system atomizes people, individualizes people, the consequences are:
a) When the interest of the state and individual collide, the state is immensely more powerful than individual. The state gains virtual monopoly on power, aided by large complex organizations. Masses of individuals form diffuse collectives, which is very different from groups and communities. Collectives are centrally (state and large complex organizations) managed, governed and manipulated. Groups and communities manage and govern themselves. Individualism means automatically collectivism and central management, they always go together, whether the system is communism, national socialism or liberalism. Collectives are large, up to millions; groups and communities are generally fairly small (less than 150 people, but can form large community networks).
b) Individual is dependent on state and large complex organizations in every way. Food, unemployment security, housing, all kinds of benefits, information (schools, media, biased research etc.), law, order, medical care, old age care, etc. Groups and communities can be in many ways independent, they can produce almost all services and wares if necessary. State and large complex organizations want you to be dependent on them, so they favor individualism in every way, and try to dissolve independent groups.
c) Individual choices of individuals are harmless and insignificant use of energy (which is away from forming groups, opposing the state power, becoming more genuinely independent, etc.); provide countless clients and exchances to the state and large complex organizations; and exaggerated individualism prevents group generation by forming artificial incompatibilities, maintaining propitious situation vis-a-vis the state and lco's. The latter becomes understandable when you think about e.g. funnily tattooed gay human rights activist, who buys fair trade food, visits gay bars almost daily and reads cheap novels, and suit wearing ceo of a firm, who collects old cars, flys small aeroplanes, and repairs engines in his spare time. It is highly unlikely that individuals differentiated and separated in thousands and thousands little, trivial and less trivial ways could form coherent, organized, permanent and effective groups and communities. Illusory, thin and meaningless identities are bought on the market. Individual e.g. buys recycled bag and second hand clothes to signal his identity as certain kind of individual, liberally oriented "caring" individual. Rarely identies are life long, demanding and meaningful socially oriented identities, which form lasting groups, and improve the individual gradually to a high level. Bought identities also change according to fashions and trends, which further decrease the compatibility of people. Bought identities fill cellars with new, only slightly used and unnecessary things, and make lcos and other producers rich and increase tax revenues.
Mark,
ReplyDeleteI agree, but it is important to accentuate that liberal ideology is false ideology; it has ulterior motives; and it is a manipulation through and through, used by the elites as power and money accruing mechanism. Like all manipulations, it grabs to human needs, fears, aspirations, social psychology, etc.
It is also important to emphasize that traditionalism is genuine way of thinking and acting, it is not an ideology, and it means what it says. It has no ulterior motives, it doesn't make outsiders more powerful or rich, and all the advantages accumulate to the people who practice it.
Addition to comment at 4:58:00,
ReplyDeleteand individuals must be free to flexibly move from one job or place to another in large complex organizations and state bureaucracy. Any permanent and strong social ties would obstruct this process, these flows, and therefore the functions of lcos and bureaucracies, and job markets.
Liberalism is based on appeals to everything else BUT reason and principle.
ReplyDeleteLiberalism explicitly excludes the existence of objective truth and virtue.
Therefore, attempting to reason with them about what is true and what are the best moral principles is utterly futile. A waste of your time and theirs!
Looked at another way, the only people you can convince with a logical criticism of liberal principles are... conservatives, who believe in truth and principle, and therefore don't need convincing.
ReplyDeleteNah, if it were just a case of the left wanting to destroy the family, the nation and religion then things wouldn't be so bad. The right would then lead ordinary people to victory over the left.
ReplyDeleteBut the right too has shown over and over again that it will not defend the family, the nation or religion - some parts of the right are just as aggressively anti-family and anti-nation as the left.
You are again allowing your enemy to define the terms of the debate. But don't feel too bad, "the right" does this too, which is why "the right" is always crushed politically.
"The right" is not really the right (as in, a real opposition to the left). "The right" is a sham opposition, and is only allowed to employ language and to propose legislation that is acceptable to the left. "The right" is the party of inevitable defeat and surrender to the left. This is true in all the white English-speaking countries.
Put in simple terms, if "the right" is aggressively anti-family and anti-nation, then they are not really the right, they are an arm of the left.
So you have to delve deeper into what prominent leftists and rightists believe.
And it turns out that both sides are agreed that freedom understood as autonomy is a key goal of politics.
This is because "prominent rightists" are actually leftists -- which is why they are prominent. If they were genuine rightists they would not be prominent. Not prominent politicians, anyway.
Anyone who argues for what the left wants -- even if they dress it up in "conservative" language -- is a leftist. Period.