The people I've known with no sense of humor are always self-righteous - which means they think they are always right. That's means they are sadistic and cruel - and they don't even know that. Of course, they always rationalize their behavior.
So, yes, Fox had a point.
Now, I'm not saying I can turn you into a Love God (aka "me") but I can give you enough pointers so that you won't be a goggle-eyed melonhead anymore, suavely and most probably drunkenly, asking, "Did it hurt when an angel like you fell from heaven?" (I once saw a guy say, "What's the story, morning glory?" to a girl when I was in college. He told me defensively, "It's the only way I know how to talk to the chicks.")
It all started in college. But let me back up. It didn't start in high school; in it we simply had to jump on a girl to see if she was interested, and even then I knew something was very wrong with all of it.
But foward. One hungover Saturday morning, my roommate and I were eating breakfast at one of those places with a lot of booths. There was a woman about three booths over, eating breakfast by herself. She was facing me, so my roommate couldn't see her.
As I looked at her, and she saw me looking at her, she had some sort of a seizure. At least I thought it was a seizure, at first. She began to bounce up and down, flinging her head around and flipping her hair back from her face with her hand.
"Good Lord," I thought, "I've got Super Villain superpowers! I can make women have fits just by looking at them!" I looked down at my hash browns and eggs and pretended I didn't see her anymore. I figured she was probably really upset by my looking at her.
"Why do you have your nose stuck in your plate?" my roommate asked me.
"I think that woman over might call the cops on me," I answered.
Here I'll stray for a few minutes. How did it ever get to the point where if a man looks at a woman, and she acts funny, he thinks she's upset? In a word: feminism. This leftist house of cards has driven a wedge between women and men, and tried to make men into the enemy. I don't think it's done any good at all (for one thing, many women don't know how to be women anymore, most especially when it comes to attracting a guy's attention).
Here's an example, possibly apocryphal: a guy was walking down the street, and as he passed a woman, he looked at her. She snarled, "What are you looking at?" He responded, "At first, I thought you were attractive, but when I looked twice, I realized you weren't."
It's got the point where men think a joke like that is funny, and wouldn't be surprised if a woman said something like that to them.
Feminism and leftism in general just exacerbate the natural flaws in people. Case in point: years ago my boss at work was on the phone, talking to his boss. What I heard was: "What? Are you kidding? You know that's not true!"
What happened is that he had made what is today one of the most serious work-mistakes a man can make: he dated, one time, a woman he worked with. Major mistake! He didn't want to see her twice, and she was so offended she told his boss he was sexually harassing her. His boss didn't take it seriously (he knew what she was) but he gave my boss a head's up on the woman, to ward off trouble.
What started the whole thing was when my boss gave her five dollars to do a little bit of work for her, and she told his boss that it was to induce her to have sex (he gave her the money instead of dating her again - big, big mistake to give her the money). My boss's boss thought that was funny, commenting she "didn't put much value on herself."
Life lesson #1: at work, never talk to a woman, unless it's work-related. I blame this on the old saying, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and also on the fact these inherent flaws in people have been only made worse by feminism.
I once had a woman at work claim I was sexually harassing her, and I concluded she had a crush on me - she had created a relationship where none had existed. So when I told my boss, "She was a crush on you" he responded, "That's what my father told me!"
But back to flirting.
A few weeks later after this woman in the restaurant had a fit, I had a class assignment to cover a talk by a woman who was a supposed expert on flirting. As I was sitting at a table by myself, she walked by me on her way to the podium and banged my chair with her hip, hard enough to move me.
"Aha!" I thought. "Flirting behavior! She likes me!" Later I realized she was probably just nervous and accidently walked into me.
Later she became very well-known - Helen Fisher, for those interested.
Guess what she told the crowd? That the first thing women did when flirting was "the hair flip," along with a big smile, They flip their hair back from their face with a hand. Usually they arch their back and aim their boobage at you, too (and I have had women to these things to me, but not until I was out of college. except for the woman at the restaurant).
In fact, I can only clearly remember this being done to me twice, although it probably happened more than that.
The woman in the restaurant wasn't upset with me. She was flattered because I was looking at her, and I had no idea whatsoever. Clueless I was!
Do not women realize they first show signs of interest and men respond? That, I realized later, was the problem in high school. Even then I realized how dumb it was. I just jumped on a girl in a car without having any idea how she was going to respond (actually, none of them ever said no).
In college I used to wonder how people ever got married. It was always women sittting here like lumps and showing no interest. What exactly where the men supposed to do? Approach all of them and get shot down left and right until one said yes? Good luck with that, you dipshit females!
These days, some women are more interested in brutally attacking innocent men than knowing how to attract them. Is this because of how Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn defined leftism - the murder of the Father? Is there a part of women that wants to destroy men, out of envy and hate - which is what feminism is?
I'm at the age where there are one of me for every five woman. Their "flirting" usually consists of trying to give me food - one actually threw a hamburger in front of me.
Okay, guys, I've done my public service announcement for this week.
The internet has changed everything, so much so that even I, a man who has been online for 19 years, am constantly amazed at the pace of accelerated change. The printing press changed the world in a few decades in the 16th century. The internet is even more revolutionary.
Even more so than the press, the internet has evaporated prior means of didactic instruction. The printing press created change, but only the rich could afford to buy one. For less than $100 today, one can get a domain and start a media empire on the web.
Kids now get their news from the internet. Prior to YouTube, news came from "respected" media sources. Now any kid with an iPhone can break a story. In America, videos of police brutality have become a cottage industry, with attendant consequences. I could have used an iPhone when I was a teen.
Craigslist has done a runaround on newspapers by offering free advertising, thus cutting their revenues. Newsprint is collapsing. Paper after paper has gone broke. The Media Elite are gone. Little mammals, like American Thinker, have overtaken the "venerable" dinosaurs of the liberal establishment.
The most noticeable change has been reporting from the Mideast. Until 15 years ago, Jews, by virtue of education, and presence in the media, could wield a moderating -- critics have claimed a suffocating -- influence. However, today every Arab in the contested areas seems to come equipped with an iPhone, ready to video every supposed Israeli "outrage." Anybody with an anti-Israel bent can open up a website. No one listens to Wolf Blitzer any more. The borderline anti-Semitic site Mondoweiss now has the new media's ear. There are more smartphones in the hands of Muslims than Jews available to contest the narrative. Horror or improvement, this is the present reality.
Beyond the death of the Mainstream Media, the value of a journalism degree has evaporated. So much for six years to a masters at the Columbia School of Journalism. Save yourself a fortune and open a YouTube channel. On the job training. Make money from adding commercials.
With the free Word Press platform -- a user friendly content management system -- anybody can open up a news site in a few hours, and soon compete with the BBC, which also uses Word Press, as well as the New Yorker, and the NY Times Blogs. The rise of Mondoweiss -- also run on Word Press -- is a glaring example of how the media has been overtaken by the technology. If you want to counter anti-Semitism, then ask Ted Belman. Israpundit runs on Word Press.
YouTube now outflanks, and scoops cameramen with 20 years of experience. Kids with a 16-megapixel Samsung smartphone camera are now obsoleting experts with ten thousand dollar rigs. Satellite uplinks have given way to snapping and shooting off to the cloud. Every teen is a star.
With Photoshop, high end photography has changed. Apple's Final Cut Pro, and Sony's Vegas have placed professional editting into the hands of people for less than a thousand dollars. If one is broke, Gimp and Kdenlive are quite capable freeware alternatives. Teens can outperform studied experts.
If one needs instruction in these software packages, they are available for free on websites and YouTube. Where then is the value of a film degree that cost tens of thousands?
In the 1960s, green screening chromakey required hundreds of thousands of dollars in a camera and rig. Now, a $50 webcam, some borrowed furniture, lights, and a green towel, with some freeware, can produce the same effect. With Audacity, and a used, cheap mixer, who needs training in audio engineering?
One can self-educate her or himself up to a Masters degree in civil or mechanincal engineering on the internet. Indeed, the only thing truly provided by schools today is a space for lab work. All else can be acquired online at little or no expense.
I taught myself HTML, CSS, PHP, and jQuery about nine years ago. Had I gone to school at that time, it would have cost me thousands of dollars. I learned them for free from a few websites.
Eight years ago, there was a great demand for the mid-level coder, who wrote individualized websites. It was heavy with teens who needed spending money. Now, coding is only useful for the back end of design platforms, where elite expertise is needed; and those experts are often non-degreed, but self-taught. With WIX, a computer illiterate can now design fancy sites in a few minutes. The mid-level profession has evaporated. So much for that training.
Even Word Press is now being assailed by simpler platforms like Weebly, which are making websites so easy that web design is now officially dead. A whole sub-industry was birthed, grew, and died out in less time that it took to even learn the skills.
The New Boston website offers complete courses in computer science, coding, math, and physics. The owner started the site when he realized that college was now a pointless waste of time. The Khan Academy is a free university. Other World Computing was teaching Apple computer repair -- and quite well –- until Apple started soldering parts a few years ago, probably in response to IFIXIT and DIRECTFIX, whose repair kits cut into Apple's profits.
Medical Degrees, which require training, will survive, but not without severe pruning of required attendance. Who is going to pay hundreds of thousands to go to Columbia Med School for a degree when he or she can learn many of the skills for free. What is needed is apprentice/intern training, not fluff courses. More time as an intern, less time in redundant classes.
True, research has to be centralized, but everything up to a bachelor's can be achieved gratis. Entrance to graduate school will be solely by exam, along with a small syllabus of lab courses, and nothing more. To the enterprising student, this can be accomplished with home study, and a year in commercial labs in capacity as a trainee; an arrangement once familiar to medieval guilds, only this time defined by the net rather than tradition.
For budding clerics, the Blue Letter Bible is an online bible college, complete with interactive Greek and Hebrew interlinears, which give pronunciation. Aquinas and Luther would have killed for such tools.
Unlike the revolution started by the printing press which soon stabilized, internet changes are not merely drastic but continually accelerating.
In the liberal arts, one can practice Spanish with a native speaker in Argentina on Skype for free. No need for four years in college with an American professor who never learned how to trill an r. No need for a community college degree in graphic design, when Roberto Blake does a far better job of it for free on YouTube.
Academia will soon die out. The relic courses designed only to make work for obsolete professors will no longer be tolerated. The debt, and the social bloat, will have to collapse. Education has now become truly democratized. Only Engineering, the Sciences, and Medical Education will survive -- and these in only an abbreviated form.
This has the advantage of removing the last holdouts of a vestigial intellectual aristocracy which distorts our Republic with claims of expertise, and high salary requirements. However, the downside, as evinced by YouTube reporting, will be the total lack of responsibility. We will happily lose the Ivy League elite; but alas we may pay for this liberty with BDS coming out of every pore.
For those who say the servers can be shut down, you can learn how to set up your own for a few hundred dollars. In fact, older computers are perfect for such servers.
It will be interesting. I, for one, feel that it will be good to see ossified, overpriced universities disappear. I would rather exercise my own discretion than have choices made by some elite dinosaur. Academia was the last vestige of medievalism. Good riddance! Long live the internet.
My experience has been that leftists always lie - and they don't even know they're lying.
Enough is a good as a feast. - Old saying.
I've pointed out several times before the ancient Greeks noticed that eudamonia (well-being) is achieved through arete (excellence) - doing what you're good at doing (they also noticed that the opposite of hubris - overweening arrogance - is sophrosyne (humility or understanding your strenghs and weaknesses - to "know thyself").
As for gratitude, you can't be envious and grateful at the same time. That, too, has been noticed for thousands of years. I can do no better than to quote Meister Eckhart: "If the only prayer you say is 'thank you' it will be enough."
And perhaps to also quote Ray Bradbury, who once wrote that he was immensely grateful for merely being alive, even with all the horror that is sometimes inherent in this wonderful and bizarre circus known as life (for that matter, how often is anyone truly grateful for anything these days?).
Of course, bravery (fortitude) is one of the Four Cardinal Virtues, along with Prudence, Justice and Temperance.
Concerning altruism, it's probably the main reason the demented Christianity-hating Jew atheist, "Ayn Rand," makes no sense, with her destructive philosophy of pure selfishness (which is always related to hatred and envy - and Alice Rosenbaum, which was her real name, was a hater and envier if there ever was one).
This article is from USA Today and was written by Marilyn Elias.
"The happiest people surround themselves with family and friends, don't care about keeping up with the Joneses next door, lose themselves in daily activities and, most important, forgive easily."
The once-fuzzy picture of what makes people happy is coming into focus as psychologists no longer shun the study of happiness. In the mid-'90s, scientific journals published about 100 studies on sadness for every one study on happiness.
Now a burgeoning "positive psychology" movement that emphasizes people's strengths and talents instead of their weaknesses is rapidly closing the gap, says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, author of the new book, Authentic Happiness. The work of Seligman and other experts in the field is in the early stages, but they are already starting to see why some people are happy while others are not: The happiest people spend the least time alone. They pursue personal growth and intimacy; they judge themselves by their own yardsticks, never against what others do or have.
"Materialism is toxic for happiness," says University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener. Even rich materialists aren't as happy as those who care less about getting and spending.
Because the December holidays are friend- and family-oriented, they painfully reveal the intimacy missing in some lives, Diener says.
Add in the commercial emphasis — keeping up with the Joneses and the Christmas enjoyed by the Joneses' kids — "and it's a setup for disappointment," he says.
And yet some people manage to look on the bright side, even if they lose their jobs in December. Others live in darkness all year for no apparent reason. A person's cheer level is about half genetic, scientists say.
Everyone has a "set point" for happiness, just as they do for weight, Seligman says. People can improve or hinder their well-being, but they aren't likely to take long leaps in either direction from their set point.
Even physical health, assumed by many to be key to happiness, only has an impact if people are very ill. Objective health measures don't relate to life satisfaction, but subjective feelings do.
Plenty of healthy people take their health for granted and are none the happier for it, Diener points out. Meanwhile, the sickly often bear up well, and hypochondriacs cling to misery despite their robust health.
Good feelings aren't "all in the head," though. Actions matter, just not in the way often believed.
Life satisfaction occurs most often when people are engaged in absorbing activities that cause them to forget themselves, lose track of time and stop worrying. "Flow" is the term Claremont Graduate University psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheeks-sent-mee-hi) coined to describe this phenomenon.
People in flow may be sewing up a storm, doing brain surgery, playing a musical instrument or working a hard puzzle with their child. The impact is the same: A life of many activities in flow is likely to be a life of great satisfaction, Csikszentmihalyi says.
And you don't have to be a hotshot to get there.
"One of the happiest men I ever met was a 64-year-old Chicago welder with a fourth-grade education," he says. The man took immense pride in his work, refusing a promotion to foreman that would have kept him from what he loved to do. He spent evenings looking at the rock garden he built, with sprinklers and floodlights set up to create rainbows.
Teenagers experience flow, too, and are the happiest if they consider many activities "both work and play," Csikszentmihalyi says. Flow stretches someone but pleasurably so, not beyond his capacity. "People feel best when doing what they do best," he says.
Everyone has "signature strengths," Seligman adds, and the happiest use them. Doing so can lead to choices that astound others but yield lasting satisfaction.
That's what happened to Greg and Tierney Fairchild. He was a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, and she'd already earned a Ph.D., when they learned that the child she was carrying had Down syndrome, along with a serious heart defect requiring surgery.
In the Fairchilds' intellectual circle of friends, some viewed having a retarded child as unthinkable — and let them know it. Lots of people, including some family members, assumed they'd opt for abortion. After thoroughly exploring all the angles — medical, practical and emotional — they decided to keep their daughter, Naia.
"We're pro-choice, so it's not that we wouldn't get an abortion under some circumstances, or think that others could make a different choice here," Greg says.
They were leading with their strength. An interracial couple, they both had long histories of taking bold, less traveled paths rather than following the parade.
Greg was the first black on his high school track team at a Southern, mostly white school; he became student body president.
Tierney was the only MBA student at her university also getting a Ph.D. in education because she wanted to train executives.
And they chose each other, despite all the stares of bigots they knew they'd face forever.
"We haven't shied away from tough choices," Greg says, "and we've been able to persevere through some difficulties other people might not have been able to."
Tierney says, "We thought having Naia would be a challenge, but we really wanted her, and just because something's a challenge, I'm not the type to turn away."
Their struggles are depicted in the new book, Choosing Naia by Mitchell Zuckoff.
That was a few years ago. Now Naia is a 4-year-old people magnet with a great sense of humor, the first Down syndrome child to be "mainstreamed" at the preschool for University of Virginia staff. (Greg teaches in the business school.) She walked late, talked late and is potty-training late—just as her parents expected. "And so what?" Tierney asks. "She's brought us a huge amount of joy because she's such a happy child."
Tierney, who is manager of executive education at United Technologies Corp., feared she'd have to quit work to care for Naia, but that wasn't necessary. Tierney and Greg gave Naia a baby brother, Cole, 22 months ago. "We're so grateful for these kids," Greg says.
Gratitude has a lot to do with life satisfaction, psychologists say.
Talking and writing about what they're grateful for amplifies adults' happiness, new studies show. Other researchers have found that learning to savor even small pleasures has the same effect. And forgiveness is the trait most strongly linked to happiness, says University of Michigan psychologist Christopher Peterson.
"It's the queen of all virtues, and probably the hardest to come by," he adds.'More fun, less stuff'
There's also evidence that altruistic acts boost happiness in the giver.
That doesn't surprise Betsy Taylor, president of the Center for a New American Dream, a Takoma Park, Md., non-profit that favors simple living and opposes commercialism. "The altruism part is worth keeping in mind over the holidays," Taylor says. "Our mantra is 'more fun, less stuff.' Do for others, we say."
Karen Madsen, 51, of Everett, Wash., is a believer. For several years, she's organized local families to buy holiday gifts for needy foster children. Madsen sinks in about $1,000 herself, often trimming her own kids' Christmas haul to do it. "You'd see these notes from foster kids, 'I don't really need anything, but my little sister needs a coat because she's cold.' "
Her son, William Shepherd, a high school senior, doesn't mind. "It's a lot of fun to go shopping for their toys," he says. "I have enough, and it feels good to make sure other people can enjoy the holidays, too."
Many parents would be amazed that a kid could be happy to get less, but surprise is the name of the game with happiness. People aren't very good at predicting what will make them happy, cutting-edge research shows.
Even Seligman, the happiness maven, tells how he wanted no more children — he already had two grown ones — and his current wife wanted four, "so we compromised at four," he says. His book reveals he's besotted with these kids and marvels at them daily. "I just didn't know," he says.
None of us knows, says Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert. "There's a reason why Euripides said, 'It would not be better if men got what they wanted.' " People expect that events will have a larger and more enduring impact on them — for good or ill — than they really do, Gilbert's studies find.
People tend to rationalize bad things, quickly adapting to new realities. They also visualize future events in isolation, but real life teems with many experiences that dilute the impact of any one.
This means winning the lottery doesn't make people's lives stellar, but they recover from romantic breakups much quicker than expected.
"If you knew exactly what the future held, you still wouldn't know how much you would like it when you got there," Gilbert says. In pursuing happiness, he suggests "we should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we'll feel. We should be a bit more humble and a bit more brave."
"I enjoy every sandwich. - Warren Zevon
"Machines are amplifiers" - Cooper's Law
Machines amplify our natural powers, for good and bad. The trick is to figure out the good and bad before it happens. And good luck with that! Because we'll need it!
This is from the Citadel Foundations.
There is a problem that those favoring Traditional modes of society face, pointed out by various thinkers. Technological advancement, particularly technological advancement as it pertains to international competition.
It cannot be denied that many ideals that we are fond of were undermined by new technologies. This wasn't the primary force driving changes (this was a spiritual alteration which set in among Occidentals during the 'Enlightenment'), but it was absolutely a catalyst. In several areas, because human beings have been able to develop more advanced methods of production of goods and later services, life for people has been radically altered. Not only do we face man's 'liberation from labor', but we are also seeing new technologies exploited by those with power to ensure the propagation of false memes and the perpetuate of the Progressive agenda.
For the longest time, the technologies of civilizations provided innovative ways to do things that would not be possible otherwise. In agriculture, we see things like Archimedes' screw and grain storage methods going back thousands of years. Civilization has a higher capacity to innovate than nomadic tribal society because it has to innovate to support a larger population which must necessarily specialize to produce more of life's bare essentials, food, drinkable water, and shelter from the elements, in addition to things that people naturally desire such as grandiosity.
However, once we reach the Modern era, technology begins to change. With the introduction of the firm as a key market unit in place of the guild, economic competition takes on a much greater role in larger society, aided by the collapse of religious significance for Occidental life. It is now imperative to spur creative destruction, that is the removal of market agents who refuse or are unable to innovate and provide either better or cheaper products and services. More often than not, this process has served Progressive ends. Media devices such as televisions and the printing press have allowed religious ideas to be disseminated without the use of a temple, and so have their true intentions cloaked as supposed 'news'. Household appliances have played their part in allowing women access to the labor market, a source of nothing but grief for both sexes, not to mention its detriment to children. Even more remarkable than these, our technological advancements which have made material life much more gratifying than at any other point in history, give us the illusion of that central dogma of the Cult of Progress, which is progress itself. People are seeing, from their limited vantage point, a linear change of improvement. Its like witnessing a miracle in terms of its religious confirmatory power.
But we forget of course that there are far more important factors that determine the outcome of civilization than material. Man is numb to these, and lives only for tomorrow's innovation. He has become 'homo economicus' with a Progressive operating system. His primary directives are to accrue as much economic material as he can, working within the religious confines of the dominating occult motivator which underlies his entire world.
What can be done? It is no solution to simply say the Reactionary is a Luddite: he sees technology's hideous effects on the fundamental constitution of man and wishes it done away with. If true globalism was desirable or even possible, then this might find purchase, but in a world where nations necessarily look for every advantage over other nations, the Luddite finds himself on the light end of a balance of power. It's a rat race we are in fact forced to run. No matter the moral cost, no matter how it might mutilate our internal society, we must compete because if we do not, then our neighbor will. Always, somebody somewhere will be willing to saw their foot off in order to escape the bathroom, even if we aren't. That person lives. We die. Someone mentioned this to me in the context of genetic engineering, now possible due to the advances in science over the last decade or so. Like many, I find this idea abominable. Not only do I think its a moral perversion (which carries its own set of consequences), but practically I can see looming dangers of such technologies, Our smartest scientists are like newborns at God's great computer, ready to get stuck in to an incalculably complicated code. Our instinct is to pull them away and say "don't touch that, you fool!", but if we do what will be our fate? We know the Chinese or somebody else will do it instead, and while it might lead to their utter ruin, in the short term it could very well lead them to be our masters.
So we have a dilemma. I call it the Dilemma of Technological Competition, that is, how can we maintain good societal health when the technological rat race forces us to develop technologies which may not be healthy?
It is a dilemma that I don't think has been well-addressed by any contemporary thinkers. There are some trains of thought which definitely engage with it. One says that technological advancement to a singularity is inevitable, but that its destructive power must be managed by Reactionaries if we are to survive at all. Another puts forward that technological advancement is a good means to bring about the end of Modernity in an actively pursued cataclysm, that we should accelerate this advancement to bring forth the next stage of humanity, which will end up being Reactionary.
These are very clear-cut answers. Either future technology is something we can harness and in fact must harness for a more responsible future, or technology will be the default death of Progress itself due to unforeseen consequences worldwide.
I'd propose the answer is not as easy. It seems self-evident that the death of entropic Liberalism will end in catastrophe rather than transition. There are ethnic, religious, military, and economic factors which ensure this on a global scale, which both enhance dangers and spread them over wide areas. Technology amplifies the amount of influence individuals have on this future 'event' by an incalculable magnitude. Put simply, our technological abilities allow what would previously have been insignificant portions of society to have a big impact. The problem is, this is in the hands of so many that where it might produce order in the hands of one, it produces further chaos instead. It is impossible to say what the earth will look like in fifty years time, but I would argue we are going to see increasing irresponsibility with regards to technology, as it becomes more widely available, and moves through radical stages of development with increasing velocity.
What does the aftermath look like? Unknown. It seems that technology could fall prey to the survival instinct. Can factories be maintained when civil order unravels? Can companies justify continuing the production of goods to populations in no position to buy them? I have made clear that from what has been written and what can be observed, we are gradually moving towards a point where Liberalism breaks under the weight of its own contradictions, but the scariest thing is our reliance on technology, and technology's ties to Liberalism itself. If Liberalism disappears, what of technology? Where does it land? We may end up in a world where technology unthinkable today exists for us in one area, but in another we are reduced to a subsistence level. The question remains terrifyingly open-ended.
I've spoken before about Reactionary policy prescriptions. What does the government of a Reactionary State do, with regards to marriage for example. Can a similar proposal be developed for technology? I believe it can, so long as we hold true the idea of a destiny component, that where history lands next will in fact inherently favor the success of Reactionary ideas as man will return to his organic state. By assuming this, we can say that there may not exist the international competitive pressures which drive technological advancement today.
If so, consider the following:
1) Technology is good insofar as it may improve the lives of the state's subjects within the limitation of their immaterial requirements. Technology that eliminates all manual labor from the lives of men is therefore maladaptive, for example. Such considerations should always be in play when decisions are made about which technologies are pursued in knowledge of our limited resources.
2) Technology ought not serve the ends of heteronomic or theonomic authorities in illegitimately expanding their spheres of authority. The Reactionary deplores totalitarianism, which can only be possible through the select use of particularly surveillance technologies.
3) No technology should be pursued without first taking into account its long-term social consequences. Extending the lives of a nation's people through advanced medicine is not a sound policy when these periods of extended life are periods of infirmity during which such people become unable to take care of themselves in any capacity.
4) All technologies should be passed through a moral lens. Just because we can do something, does not mean we should, and rather than viewing morality as the Modernist views it, a series of values judgments based on our subjective feelings, we should see it as a rigid guide with profound consequences for violation, not just for individuals, but societies at large.
5) It is perfectly reasonable to suspect that technologies can be justly limited to caste if there is sound practical justification for this to be the case. Certain technologies, while highly beneficial if held by the warrior caste, may be horribly detrimental if held by the merchant caste.
Beyond the fog of the future, it is hard to comprehend exactly what trials await us in the realms of technology. Which will rear their ugly heads, and which will vanish with a soft refrain of "what is a microwave?". General principles are useful to postulate in such a dilemma, so that they may be flexibly applied to any given situation which may confront the Reactionary State. Politics trumps any technological interest there is. If it is politically more appropriate to have man live no longer than 60 years of age, then technology must submit to this demand. Machines are not here to serve our personal purposes, but to serve our greater collective mission which is the maintenance of a healthy, responsible, moral, and stable society. It is error to think that greater technological prowess in all areas serves these ends. History says little to support such a notion, and plenty against it.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Education...voting...single mothers...ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
When there are too many women in a field, they always damage or destroy it. Why? There are only a few reasons.
One, many women are natural socialists/fascists. Two, they are ruled by their feelings first, reason second. Three, they think they are always right. Four, they place security above freedom. All four of them, when together, are very bad things. And in a woman, they are always together.
Being natural socialists, they think everyone should be equal. That is one of the basic tenets of leftism, which is why leftism is feminine even if a man believes in it. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who everyone should read, defined leftism as "the murder of the Father."
When you apply leftism to society, you always get a collapsed society.
When you apply leftism to education, you get female teachers (and their mangina supporters) trying to turn little boys into little girls, usually through the use of extremely dangerous psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin. That way, everyone will be "equal," although the female teachers define equal as "everyone acting like a girl."
Having a few female teachers is fine, but having too many female teachers is not only not fine, it is dangerous, mostly because they have no idea how to handle little boys. Which, sweethearts, ain't that hard.
Second, women are ruled by their feelings first, then by reason. It's a brain thing. An illustration of that is the classic line in As Good as It Gets, when Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) says he understands women so well because he thinks of a man and "takes away reason and accountability."
Any woman who is honest with herself knows she is ruled by her feelings, so if she has any sense she will wait a few hours and try to reason out whether or not she is right. Or, she can just ask one of those Awful Things known as a man.
As for women always thinking they are right, Carl Jung that was women's greatest flaw. Which is is. The other side of that coin is "It's somebody else's fault." If you think you are always right, then somebody else must be always wrong, so they have to be the cause of every problem.
This is why women always blame their problems on men, even when it's clearly the woman's fault.
The late humorist Stephen Leacock wrote this about a hostile woman who thought she was always right and blamed all problems on men: "She went on to explain instead that when women have the vote there will be no more poverty, no disease, no germs, no cigarette smoking and nothing to drink but water. It seemed a gloomy world." You betcha. Does that female world sound familiar today, with male females like the former mayor of New York banning too-big bottles of soda pop?
There is a famous comedy performance called "Defending the Caveman." Rob Becker, who created it, said that in one performance, when he commented that while men find women mysterious, women think men are always wrong, a woman stood up in the audience and shrieked, "They ARE wrong."
Four, women place security above liberty. This also is dangerous. Men created civilization, society and science and technology. They did it by being innovative, by exploring and doing dangerous things. You will never see a woman jump out of a balloon 23 miles up, as Felix Baumgartner did.
Women created none of these things because they don't have the ability. This is not due to thousands of years of oppression. It's because men and women have different brains.
There has never been a matriarchy, contrary to the hallucinations of those who think one has existed. There has always been patriarchy. Because, whenever any society gets close to being a matriarchy, it collapses before it gets there. That's why our society is close to collapse.
I'll close with something else Leacock wrote: "Let the reader remain agonized over that till I write something else."
"As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism." -Christopher Dawson
This was written by Christopher Dawson and is from 1933.
I've seen what happens when men devote their lives to seducing women and it ain't pretty at all (which is why I point out that such frauds and liars as "Roissy" and "Roosh," for all their lip service to traditional morality, marriage and family, are ultimately offering very bad advice). The same applies to "Vox Day" and his childish delusions about "alpha" and "beta" and the rest of that Greek soup nonsense.
I've also seen what happens when men devote their lives to nothing but making money and it too is not a pretty thing.
I’ve also seen Briffault quoted extensively by those in the Manosphere who don’t know their history. (Briffault's Law: "The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place. — Robert Briffault, The Mothers, Vol. I, p. 191)
As I and many others have pointed out several (and more) times, women on their own can’t do much of anything. In reality they’re 100% dependent on men for support, culture and advancement, with men being 100% on them for children (This is one of the reasons Briffault's Law applies to animals, not humans.)
I find it bizarre that leftist governments (which is what most of them turn into) are consistently trying to destroy families, even though families predate all governments. If the families go, the governments certainly are going to go, too.
As for spiritual leaders belonging to the celibate class, I will again strongly urge you to read Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s wonderful novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz.
This article was written in 1933 but lo and behold! it could have been written today.
The article starts here.
The traditional view of the family was founded on a somewhat naive and one-sided conception of history. The knowledge of the past was confined to the history of classical civilization and to that of the Jews, in both of which the patriarchal family reigned supreme. But when the European horizon was widened by the geographical discoveries of modern times, men suddenly realized the existence of societies whose social organization was utterly different to anything that they had imagined.
The discovery of totemism and exogamy, of matrilinear institutions, of polyandry, and of customs of organized sexual license gave rise to a whole host of new theories concerning the origins of marriage and the family. Under the influence of the prevalent evolutionary philosophy, scholars like Lewis Morgan elaborated the theory of the gradual evolution of the family from a condition of primitive sexual promiscuity through various forms of group-marriage and temporary pairing up to the higher forms of patriarchal and monogamous marriage as they exist in developed civilizations.
This theory naturally commended itself to socialists. It received the official imprimatur of the leaders of German Socialism in the later nineteenth century, and has become as much a part of orthodox socialist thought as the Marxian interpretation of history. It was, however, never fully accepted by the scientific world, and is today generally abandoned, although it still finds a few supporters among anthropologists.
In England it is still maintained by Mr. E. S. Hartland and by Dr. Briffault, whose vast work The Mothers (3 vols., 1927) is entirely devoted to the subject. According to Briffault, primitive society was purely matriarchal in organization, and the primitive family group consisted only of a woman and her offspring. A prolonged sexual association, such as we find in all existing forms of marriage, except in Russia, is neither natural nor primitive, and has no place in matriarchal society.
The original social unit was not the family, but the clan which was based on matrilinear kinship and was entirely communistic in its sexual and economic relations. The family, as we understand it, owes nothing to biological or sexual causes, but is an economic institution arising from the development of private property and the consequent domination of women by men. It is “but a euphemism for the individualistic male with his subordinate dependents.”
But in spite of its logical coherence, and the undoubted existence of matrilinear institutions in primitive society, this theory has not been borne out by recent investigations. The whole tendency of modern anthropology has been to discredit the old views regarding primitive promiscuity and sexual communism, and to emphasize the importance and universality of marriage. Whether the social organization is matrilinear or patrilinear, whether morality is strict or loose, it is the universal rule of every known society that a woman before she bears a child must be married to an individual male partner. The importance of this rule has been clearly shown by Dr. Malinowski. “The universal postulate of legitimacy,” he writes, “has a great sociological significance which is not yet sufficiently acknowledged. It means that in all human societies’ moral tradition and law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a sociologically complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here again on entirely the same lines as natural endowment; it declares that the human family must consist of the male as well as the female.”
It is impossible to go back behind the family and find a state of society in which the sexual relations are in a pre-social stage, for the regulation of sexual relations is an essential pre-requisite of any kind of culture. The family is not a product of culture; it is, as Malinowski shows, “the starting point of all human organization” and “the cradle of nascent culture.” Neither the sexual nor the parental instinct is distinctively human. They exist equally among the animals, and they only acquire cultural significance when their purely biological function is transcended by the attainment of a permanent social relation.
Marriage is the social consecration of the biological functions, by which the instinctive activities of sex and parenthood are socialized and a new synthesis of cultural and natural elements is created in the shape of the family. This synthesis differs from anything that exists in the animal world in that it no longer leaves man free to follow his own sexual instincts; he is forced to conform them to a certain social pattern. The complete freedom from restraint which was formerly supposed to be characteristic of savage life is a romantic myth. In all primitive societies sexual relations are regulated by a complex and meticulous system of restrictions, any breach of which is regarded not merely as an offence against tribal law, but as morally sinful. These rules mostly have their origin in the fear of incest, which is the fundamental crime against the family, since it leads to the disorganization of family sentiment and the destruction of family authority. It is unnecessary to insist upon the importance of the consequences of this fear of incest in both individual and social psychology, since it is the fundamental thesis of Freud and his school. Unfortunately, in his historical treatment of the subject, in Totem and Tabu, he inverts the true relation, and derives the sociological structure from a pre-existent psychological complex instead of vice versa. In reality, as Dr. Malinowski has shown, the fundamental repression which lies at the root of social life is not the suppressed memory of an instinctive crime — Freud’s prehistoric Oedipus tragedy — but a deliberate constructive repression of anti-social impulses. “The beginning of culture implies the repression of instincts, and all the essentials of the Oedipus complex or any other complex are necessary by-products in the gradual formation of culture.” The institution of the family inevitably creates a vital tension which is creative as well as painful. For human culture is not instinctive. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort, which involves the repression of natural instinct and the subordination and sacrifice of the individual impulse to the social purpose. It is the fundamental error of the modern hedonist to believe that man can abandon moral effort and throw off every repression and spiritual discipline and yet preserve all the achievements of culture. It is the lesson of history that the higher the achievement of a culture the greater is the moral effort and the stricter is the social discipline that it demands. The old type of matrilinear society, though it is by no means devoid of moral discipline, involves considerably less repression and is consistent with a much laxer standard of sexual behavior than is usual in patriarchal societies. But at the same time it is not capable of any high cultural achievement or of adapting itself to changed circumstances. It remains bound to its elaborate and cumbrous mechanism of tribal custom.
The patriarchal family, on the other hand, makes much greater demands on human nature. It requires chastity and self-sacrifice on the part of the wife and obedience and discipline on the part of the children, while even the father himself has to assume a heavy burden of responsibility and submit his personal feelings to the interests of the family tradition. But for these very reasons the patriarchal family is a much more efficient organ of cultural life. It is no longer limited to its primary sexual and reproductive functions. It becomes the dynamic principle of society and the source of social continuity. Hence, too, it acquires a distinctively religious character, which was absent in matrilinear societies, and which is now expressed in the worship of the family hearth or the sacred fire and the ceremonies of the ancestral cult. The fundamental idea in marriage is no longer the satisfaction of the sexual appetite, but, as Plato says: “the need that every man feels of clinging to the eternal life of nature by leaving behind him children’s children who may minister to the gods in his stead.” This religious exaltation of the family profoundly affects men’s attitude to marriage and the sexual aspects of life in general. It is not limited, as is often supposed, to the idealization of the possessive male as father and head of the household; it equally transforms the conception of womanhood. It was the patriarchal family which created those spiritual ideals of motherhood and virginity which have had so deep an influence on the moral development of culture. No doubt the deification of womanhood through the worship of the Mother Goddess had its origin in the ancient matrilinear societies. But the primitive Mother Goddess is a barbaric and formidable deity who embodies the ruthless fecundity of nature, and her rites are usually marked by licentiousness and cruelty. It was the patriarchal culture which transformed this sinister goddess into the gracious figures of Demeter and Persephone and Aphrodite, and which created those higher types of divine virginity which we see in Athene, the giver of good counsel, and Artemis, the guardian of youth. The patriarchal society was in fact the creator of those moral ideas which have entered so deeply into the texture of civilization that they have become a part of our thought. Not only the names of piety and chastity, honor and modesty, but the values for which they stand are derived from this source, so that even where the patriarchal family has passed away we are still dependent on the moral tradition that it created. Consequently, we find that the existing world civilizations from Europe to China are all founded on the tradition of the patriarchal family. It is to this that they owed the social strength which enabled them to prevail over the old cultures of matrilinear type which, alike in Europe and in Western Asia, in China and in India, had preceded the coming of the great classical cultures. Moreover, the stability of the latter has proved to be closely dependent on the preservation of the patriarchal ideal. A civilization like that of China, in which the patriarchal family remained the corner-stone of society and the foundation of religion and ethics, has preserved its cultural traditions for more than 2,000 years without losing its vitality. In the classical cultures of the Mediterranean world, however, this was not the case. Here the patriarchal family failed to adapt itself to the urban conditions of the Hellenistic civilization, and consequently the whole culture lost its stability. Conditions of life both in the Greek city state and in the Roman Empire favored the man without a family who could devote his whole energies to the duties and pleasures of public life. Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire, where the citizen class even in the provinces was extraordinarily sterile and was recruited not by natural increase, but by the constant introduction of alien elements, above all from the servile class. Thus the ancient world lost its roots alike in the family and in the land and became prematurely withered.
The reconstitution of Western civilization was due to the coming of Christianity and the re-establishment of the family on a new basis. Though the Christian ideal of the family owes much to the patriarchal tradition which finds such a complete expression in the Old Testament, it was in several respects a new creation that differed essentially from anything that had previously existed. While the patriarchal family in its original form was an aristocratic institution which was the privilege of a ruling race or a patrician class, the Christian family was common to every class, even to the slaves. Still more important was the fact that the Church insisted for the first time on the mutual and bilateral character of sexual obligations. The husband belonged to the wife as exclusively as the wife to the husband. This rendered marriage a more personal and individual relation than it had been under the patriarchal system. The family was no longer a subsidiary member of a larger unity - the kindred or “gens.” It was an autonomous self-contained unit which owed nothing to any power outside itself.
It is precisely this character of exclusiveness and strict mutual obligation which is the chief ground of objection among the modern critics of Christian morality. But whatever may be thought of it, there can be no doubt that the resultant type of monogamous and indissoluble marriage has been the foundation of European society and has conditioned the whole development of our civilization. No doubt it involves a very severe effort of repression and discipline, but its upholders would maintain that it has rendered possible an achievement which could never have been equaled under the laxer conditions of polygamous or main-linear societies. There is no historical justification of Bertrand Russell’s belief that the Christian attitude to marriage has had a brutalizing effect on sexual relations and has degraded the position of woman below even the level of ancient civilization: on the contrary, women have always had a wider share in social life and a greater influence on civilization in Europe than was the case either in Hellenic or oriental society. And this is in part due to those very ideals of asceticism and chastity which Bertrand Russell regards as the source of all our troubles. For in a Catholic civilization the patriarchal ideal is counterbalanced by the ideal of virginity. The family for all its importance does not control the whole existence of its members. The spiritual side of life belongs to a spiritual society in which all authority is reserved to a celibate class. Thus in one of the most important aspects of life the sexual relation is transcended, and husband and wife stand on an equal footing. I believe that this is the chief reason why the feminine element has achieved fuller expression in Catholic culture and why, even at the present day, the feminine revolt against the restrictions of family life is so much less marked in Catholic society than elsewhere.
In Protestant Europe, on the other hand, the Reformation, by abandoning the ideal of virginity and by the destruction of monasticism and of the independent authority of the Church, accentuated the masculine element in the family. The Puritan spirit, nourished on the traditions of the Old Testament, created a new patriarchalism and made the family the religious as well as the social basis of society. Civilization lost its communal and public character and became private and domestic. And yet, by a curious freak of historical development, it was this Puritan and patriarchal society which gave birth to the new economic order which now threatens to destroy the family. Industrialism grew up, not in the continental centers of urban culture, but in the most remote districts of rural England, in the homes of nonconformist weavers and ironworkers. The new industrial society was entirely destitute of the communal spirit and of the civic traditions which had marked the ancient and the mediaeval city. It existed simply for the production of wealth and left every other side of life to private initiative. Although the old rural culture, based on the household as an independent economic unit, was passing away for ever, the strict ethos of the Puritan family continued to rule men’s lives.
This explains the anomalies of the Victorian period both in England and America. It was essentially an age of transition. Society had already entered on a phase of intense urban industrialism, while still remaining faithful to the patriarchal ideals of the old Puritan tradition. Both Puritan morality and industrial mass economy were excessive and one-sided developments, and when the two were brought together in one society they inevitably produced an impossible situation.
The problem that faces us today is, therefore, not so much the result of an intellectual revolt against the traditional Christian morality; it is due to the inherent contradictions of an abnormal state of culture. The natural tendency, which is even more clearly visible in America than in England, is for the Puritan tradition to be abandoned and for society to give itself up passively to the machinery of modern cosmopolitan life. But this is no solution. It leads merely to the breaking down of the old structure of society and the loss of the traditional moral standards without creating anything which can take their place. As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members. The home is no longer a center of social activity; it has become merely a sleeping place for a number of independent wage-earners. The functions which were formerly fulfilled by the head of the family are now being taken over by the state, which educates the children and takes the responsibility for their maintenance and health. Consequently, the father no longer holds a vital position in the family: as Mr. Bertrand Russell says, he is often a comparative stranger to his children, who know him only as “that man who comes for week-ends.” Moreover, the reaction against the restrictions of family life which in the ancient world was confined to the males of the citizen class, is today common to every class and to both sexes.
To the modern girl marriage and motherhood appear not as the conditions of a wider life, as they did to her grandmother, but as involving the sacrifice of her independence and the abandonment of her career.
The only remaining safeguards of family life in modern urban civilization are its social prestige and the sanctions of moral and religious tradition. Marriage is still the only form of sexual union which is openly tolerated by society, and the ordinary man and woman are usually ready to sacrifice their personal convenience rather than risk social ostracism. But if we accept the principles of the new morality, this last safeguard will be destroyed and the forces of dissolution will be allowed to operate unchecked. It is true that Mr. Russell, at least, is willing to leave us the institution of marriage, on condition that it is strictly demoralized and no longer makes any demands on continence. But it is obvious that these conditions reduce marriage to a very subordinate position. It is no longer the exclusive or even the normal form of sexual relations: it is entirely limited to the rearing of children. For, as Mr. Russell is never tired of pointing out, the use of contraceptives has made sexual intercourse independent of parenthood, and the marriage of the future will be confined to those who seek parenthood for its own sake rather than as the natural fulfillment of sexual love. But under these circumstances who will trouble to marry? Marriage will lose all attractions for the young and the pleasure-loving and the poor and the ambitious. The energy of youth will be devoted to contraceptive love and only when men and women have become prosperous and middle-aged will they think seriously of settling down to rear a strictly limited family. It is impossible to imagine a system more contrary to the first principles of social well-being. So far from helping modern society to surmount its present difficulties, it only precipitates the crisis. It must lead inevitably to a social decadence far more rapid and more universal than that which brought about the disintegration of ancient civilization. The advocates of birth-control can hardly fail to realize the consequences of a progressive decline of the population in a society in which it is already almost stationary, but for all that their propaganda is entirely directed towards a further diminution in the birth rate. Many of them, like Dr. Stopes, are no doubt so much concerned with the problem of individual happiness that they do not stop to consider how the race is to be carried on. Others, such as Mr. Russell, are obsessed by the idea that over-population is the main cause of war and that a diminishing birth rate is the best guarantee of international peace. There is, however, nothing in history to justify this belief. The largest and most prolific populations, such as the Chinese and the Hindus, have always been singularly unaggressive. The most warlike peoples are usually those who are relatively backward in culture and few in numbers, like the Huns and the Mongols, or the English in the fifteenth century, the Swedes in the seventeenth century, and the Prussians in the eighteenth century. If, however, questions of population should give rise to war in the future, there can be no doubt that it is nations with wide possessions and a dwindling population who will be most likely to provoke an attack. But it is much more likely that the process will be a peaceful one. The peoples who allow the natural bases of society to be destroyed by the artificial conditions of the new urban civilization will gradually disappear and their place will be taken by those populations which live under simpler conditions and preserve the traditional forms of the family.
Many people cannot get the idea into their heads that society was not created nor is run by a single authority. Now someone objected to this idea once by saying that since God created everything, He is effectively the creator of society as well.
That is true in a sense, but one thing I have insisted on, along with the late Pope John Paul II, is that God made man a co-creator with him. This applies not only to creativity in the commonly understood sense (inventions, art, literature) but to society and the market as well. John Paul II held that we humans have self-possession and self-governance, which give us self-determination. Men are in control of their actions (assuming they are not slaves to their passions, public opinion, or something else), and therefore are responsible for those actions.
This self-determination includes the setting up of institutions, usually occurring over long periods of time and resulting from trial and error. These institutions serve the function of human flourishing. For example, look at the way universities have evolved since the later middle ages. They began as monastic schools, gradually opened to others, developed into universities in major cities, and are now represented by the innumerable and diverse institutions we see today. Are they perfect? Of course not -- nothing man does can be so. But one cannot argue that they have not been centers of great learning and progress for the benefit of the human race.
The same is true of the growth of markets. Agricultural inventions in the middle ages allowed more than minimal food to be grown, thus allowing people to travel. They traveled to the chief trading centers and brought back things never before available to people in the medieval non-coastal areas. They erected bazaars, where consumers visited and bought things that enhanced their quality of life. These turned into towns when the patterns of trade became habitual, and some towns eventually became cities.
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek used the Greek terms "cosmos" and "taxis" to describe the difference of worldview between those who see the spontaneous order of society and the market and those who do not. Cosmos indicates the self-governing order of things--like the universe. Did you know that the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy are on a collision course and there is nothing we can do about it? This is an example of cosmos in the area of space. Think of taxis in the sense of hailing a taxi cab, and then telling the driver where to take you. In the first instance, the cosmos is self-directing; in the latter, you are directing the cab.
Society and the market conform to the cosmos rather than the taxis. Both are self-generating, a function of billions of interactions between thinking human beings all over the globe -- and those interactions are based on the interactions yesterday, and those are based on the interactions on the day before that. No one controls this.
This does not mean that large institutions can't influence society and market, but control eludes even the most powerful forces. With respect to President-elect Obama's economic "stimulus" plan, for example, no one is really sure how the market is going to react to it. How did it react to the original issuing of money to free up loans? Well, Donald Trump put it this way the other day: "No matter what your credit rating or your track record, you still can't get a loan."
The implications are clear. Those who say that they can fix this, that, or the other thing, in the market are blowing smoke. Even if they can influence things, this influence might not be for the better, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is founded on the fact that people will act in their own perceived best interest, regardless of what a government program will try to accomplish.
This is why it is better to let the economy deal with circumstances than to try to tweak it. It was constant meddling with the economy that caused the problems in the first place. More meddling can remedy the results of the original meddling only in the world of our dreams.
Cosmos was a spontaneous self-organizing feedback (these days, cybernetic) system. It is the natural world, including the universe. It may or may not have an end purpose; some claim it does, and some that it does not.
"Taxis" was a system organized by man. It, too is a cybernetic feedback system, but one imposed by man. Taxis always has an end purpose, a human one.
In reality almost everything is a "cosmos." The free market, for example. It is an unbelievably complex, self-organizing system that is not designed by man. Just have some simple, basic laws and up pops the cosmos of the free market, which is based on economic and political liberty.
Richard Maybury wrote that political and economic liberty is based on "Do all you have agree to do" (tort law) and "Do not encroach on other people or their property" (criminal law). The basis of all these was religion, specifically in the West, Christianity. (You'd have a pretty good society based on the Ten Commandments - which is really the Ten Words or Ten Utterances - and even a moron can understand them.)
This just amazes me. A minimal state, with some basic laws, and up pops liberty and wealth! Automatically! This is why some refer to "natural law," i.e. the laws of the universe - the "cosmos."
The purpose of "reason" is to discover the law of the cosmos. For those who believe everything should be a taxis, the purpose of reason is to create and impose, rarely understanding the Law of Unintended Consequences and insteal expecting the end result to be what they anticipated.
Unfortunately we have people (and have had them for a long time) who think society is a taxis - designed by man. They're the kind who think that "We oughta pass a law" really works without those unintended consequences. That's because they don't understand everything is a cybernetic feedback system (I tell people linear cause-and-effect only works for pool balls, which includes shooting probes to Jupiter).
Let's take, as an example, governments in Europe letting in Muslims. That's a taxis, a system designed by man (the open borders types are, as always, clueless, thinking borders are "unnatural" rather than evolved as part of the cosmos). Some think, oh, Muslims will overwhelm Europe and take it over (they'd turn it into a poverty-stricken Trashcanastan, anyway).
(As an aside, whenever you see a border that is a straigtht line, it was generally imposed by man through violence - none of which changes the fact they aren't going to go away.)
The idea that Muslims are going to overwhelm Europe without that cybernetic feedback system coming into play is that simplistic linear cause-and-effect pool ball thinking. Again, in realty, everything is a cybernetic feedback system, which is why Eastern Europe has closed it borders in response to these Third World invaders, and in Northern Europe illegal aliens are being burned out of their residences. Sooner or later, they'll be lined up against a wall and shot or swim back to their hellholes, because no one makes war like Europeans.
I predicted this, since I understand the difference between cosmos and taxis.
I've pointed out before that science and technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and that the U.S. leads the world in them. Our problem is our screwed-up government. It needs to be about one-fifth of the size it is now. I'd settle for that.
However, the rest of the world is in lots worse shape.
This article is from the Dallas Morning News and is written by Cheryl Hall.
And when the 41-year-old geopolitical analyst from Austin studies the U.S. map, he sees the world’s economic powerhouse for the next several decades, perhaps much longer.
Why?
The U.S. has the world’s most extensive navigable river system, most productive agricultural land, an “ocean moat” that provides defensible trade access to the world and economic allies on its borders, says the author of The Accidental Superpower, published last year.
Factor in the size of the U.S. Navy, and you’ll realize America is the only country with total global military reach and the capacity to shut down essential shipping channels if threatened.
“You can look at a map of any country, its topography, look at the climate, study a bit about the culture, history and the military system, and understand what they’re worried about,” Zeihan says in a recent interview.
He uses this unusual set of forecasting tools to help the business world figure out how to home in on opportunities and avoid global disasters. And there’s no place like home, he says.
Other pistons in the U.S. engine:
Demography. Other countries face much sharper economic decline as their populations age by an average of 25 percent faster than ours. “We are the only developed country that has a population cohort of Gen Y [currently ages 11 to 33] who will provide economic growth for the next 30 years,” he says. “Since 1974, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Germans, the Chinese stopped having kids. There’s been this 30-year baby bust in the rest of the world. So all the growth is going to be here.”
Shale oil. By the end of next year, North America will be at net-zero oil imports. The break-even cost of production will be about $35 a barrel.
“You’re looking at the United States being cost competitive with every energy producer in the world outside of the Persian Gulf at the same time as it hits energy independence,” Zeihan says.
Isolation
All of this is coming together as the United States shifts into an isolationist mode that will probably leave out China, Japan, South Korea and Europe (with the exception of the U.K.) as favored trading partners.
The U.S. no longer needs a trading alliance it established after World War II to contain the Soviet Union, and there’s growing resentment that some of our allies are feasting on our goodwill.
“Russia really gets screwed in this future,” he says, because it was never a comrade in trade.
“To be perfectly blunt, Americans are tired of the rest of the world,” Zeihan says. “The question is whether this retrenchment lasts for five years or 60. The conscious decision of countries like Germany and China to maximize exports and take advantage of the environment that the U.S. created isn’t winning free trade many fans here.”
It’s a concern that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump can share, even if they disagree on remedies.
“Seven percent of our GDP is from exports, and most of that is from NAFTA,” Zeihan says. “The rest is from a short list of countries that we’re probably going to keep in the allied network. Instead of 150-plus countries, the network is going to be more like a couple dozen. If you’re in that group, party on. If you’re not, it’s going to be horrible.”
Zeihan worked for Stratfor Global Intelligence, a well-regarded geopolitical company in Austin, for 12 years before going out on his own with his company, Zeihan on Geopolitics LLC, three years ago. He was in town late last month to give the keynote speech at the Commerce Street Conference at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Wait, what?
Zeihan is articulate, edgy, highly informed and oddly entertaining about topics that are anything but amusing. At times, I’d think, “Whoa! Is he serious?” — such as when he predicted that China, Japan and Russia might cease to exist in their current forms — before I’d conclude that he might be onto something.
For example:
“The Russian population collapse is one of the most severe in the world. Five years from now, the Russians will not have sufficient demographic capacity to man the Red Army. It’ll be less than half the size that it is today. So if the Russians are going to use military strategy to assure brighter days, Putin knows they have to do it now. And so he is by expanding west.”
Or how about:
“There is a lot of noise breaking out of the international system about Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Russia, the Ukraine and China. There’s this perception that things are falling apart. And they are. It’s not myth. Things really are falling apart. But international instability doesn’t hurt the United States anymore. In fact, if you want to be really cold about it, it actually helps.”
Then there was:
“Anyone who’s dumb enough to poke us, they’re screwed. The United States still has the military capacity to interfere with international trade anytime it wants to. The U.S. Navy is 10 times as powerful as all of the world’s other navies put together. Any country that decides to mess with the United States for any reason faces an entity that has the ability to shut down the world and not care what happens the next day.”
Provocative sells. Zeihan has become a speaking-circuit star, typically charging $15,000 for a keynote speech. Lately, he’s been booked for several each week.
He adapts his conclusions to the industry he’s talking to, but his central takeaway is the same:
“The bottom line is the United States is going to be just fine.”
But will the stock market crash?
“Can I get back to you tomorrow?”
Friedrich Hayek spent some ten years trying to figure out what exactly "social justice" meant. He conclued it was an empty phrase and didn't mean anything.
"Social justice" used to be called, more correctly, "distributive justice" and it meant then, as it means now, that certain protected groups are supposed to get a bigger share of the good things in life.
But, of course, these "goods" have to produced first before they can be distributed. Those "protected groups," not suprisingly, don't want to produce, just consume. Since "social justice" is leftist, and leftism is based on hate and envy and the desire to destroy, this isn't surprising. "You owe me!"
This "you owe me" attitude is based on the delusion these groups have been oppressed for hundreds if not thousands of years, so they're owned for past "injustices."
None of these Social Justice Warriors have the slightest understanding of how economics works. Apparently they think it's magic.
Because they're motivated by hate and envy, they want to drag down and even destroy the productive and creative. So if they're the ones who maintain the economy, and are destroyed, then where is the wealth to come from that these Social Justice Warriors want distributed to themselves?
Obviously they don't know. Or again, wealth is just magically there!
Not only do Social Justice Warriors not understand economics, and think the goods in life should be distributed to them without producing anything, they think they should rule and their ideas imposed by the force of law.
This attitude of theirs is why Thomas Sowell referred to these people as "the Anointed." Because they think they were intellectually and morally superior to the benighted masses.
These Social Justice Warriors don't want to compete and certainly not in the realm of ideas. When it comes to ideas, they want to shut down completely those with different ideas, not only because leftists think they're wrong, they think they'e evil
Such people want to shut down the free exchange of information. They want to shut down the free market. In other words, they want to eradicate liberty.
Since leftism is based on envy, everyone is supposed to be equal, which is impossible, since to be equal everyone has to be identical and interchangeable. Except, of course, for the Anointed, who are supposed to get a lot more, for free, than the unwashed, benighted masses.
I've pointed out before leftists want to turn us into the Borg - equal, indentical, interchangeable. Except for the Borg Queen, who had all the power (and she sought a Borg King).
So exactly what would happen if Social Justice Warriors (i.e. leftists) had all the power? Look at all the former socialist countries - poverty-stricken, oppressed, tyannized.
Of course, leftists don't believe this. They never do. In their minds society will be a Utopia - a political utopia, which has never existed and never will.
They're self-deluded. When you're self-deluded you're lying to yourself - which is what they have to do before they lie to others. Not that they know they are lying to themselves or others.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn made the comment - which I have quoted before - that rightists have to "knock the heads" of leftists - because otherwise leftists will murder and destroy.
"Democracy" has been around for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks wrote extensively about it and how it always collapsed.
Democracy is therefore an antique form of government. There's nothing "modern" about it.
Europe had pretty much 100 years of peace between 1815 and 1915. The form of government? Mature constiutional monarchies - not one of which went down fighting against its "citizens" attempting to overthrow them.
And what did we get from this? Perhaps 200 million dead in the 20th Century. The age of socialism and athiesm - which is just an extreme form of democracy.
I am amazed at the attempt to defend democracies. Winston Churchill once said something to the effect democracy was terrible but better than all the rest. This is the opinion of a fascist and a terrible man who did terrible things, including being partly responsible for WWII - which he heartily encouraged.
Just look around. Feminism? Not just an effect of democracy, but both socialist and fascist (fascism is leftist, not right-wing, just the way Nazism is leftist- after all, "Nazi" means "national socialist").
Do people really think they have a voice in the government when they vote? In my entire life not one candidate I supported has ever been elected.
I don't think we've had a decent President since the '50s - Eisehower, perhaps. I liked Reagan but even he was a screw up - he appointed the catastropic Alan Greenspan to the Federal Reserve. Along with other awful things, such as amnesty for anti-American Third Worlders.
Politicians don't get elected for being competent. They get elected by knowing how to get elected.
Does anyone think that Barak 0bama, who's never had a job in his life and while he may not be a Muslim is certainly no Christian, is qualified to be President? He is what democracy has given us - a buffoon.
The Founding Fathers, who were educated men, despised demoracy. They knew it almost always turned into tyranny. That's why they set this country up as a republic.
Again, it's not hard to predict the future, in a general way. And the further you look into the past, the further you see into the future.
Since the U.S. is in many ways now socialist, of course that form of government will collapse. I just hope it's not replaced with tyranny.
The 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress report, also known as The Nation’s Report Card, shows that U.S. educational achievement, to put it nicely, leaves much to be desired.
When it comes to reading and math skills, just 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively, of U.S. eighth-grade students tested proficient or above — that is, performed at grade level or above. Recent test scores show poor achievement levels in other academic areas. Only 18 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in U.S. history. It’s 27 percent in geography and 23 percent in civics.
The story is not much better when it comes to high schoolers. According to 2010 and 2013 NAEP test scores, only 38 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading. It was 26 percent in math, 12 percent in history, 20 percent in geography and 24 percent in civics (http://www.nationsreportcard.gov).
Many of these poorly performing youngsters gain college admission. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reports, “Every year in the United States, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students discover that, despite being fully eligible to attend college, they are not ready for postsecondary studies.” That means colleges spend billions of dollars on remedial education. Many of the students who enroll in those classes never graduate from college. The fact that many students are not college-ready takes on even greater significance when we consider that many college courses have been dumbed down.
Richard Vedder, emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University, argues that there has been a shocking decline in college academic standards. Grade inflation is rampant. A seminal study, “Academically Adrift,” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, argues that very little improvement in critical reasoning skills occurs in college. Adult literacy is falling among college graduates. Large proportions of college graduates do not know simple facts, such as the half-century in which the Civil War occurred.
Vedder says that at the college level, ideological conformity is increasingly valued over free expression and empirical inquiry.
While educational achievement among whites is nothing to write home about, that for blacks is no less than a disaster. Only 13 percent of black eighth-graders score proficient or above in math, and only 16 percent do in reading. In 2013, only 7 percent of black 12th-graders scored proficient in math, and only 16 percent did in reading. The full magnitude of the black education tragedy is seen by the statistics on the other end of the achievement continuum. “Below basic” is the score given when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. In 2013, 62 percent of black 12th-graders scored below basic in math, and 44 percent scored below basic in reading.
Dr. Thomas Sowell has written volumes on black education. The magnitude of today’s black education tragedy is entirely new. He demonstrates this in “Education: Assumptions Versus History,” a 1985 collection of papers. Paul Laurence Dunbar High School is a black public school in Washington, D.C. As early as 1899, its students scored higher on citywide tests than any of the city’s white schools. From its founding in 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went off to college. Dunbar’s distinguished alumni included U.S. Sen. Ed Brooke, physician Charles Drew and, during World War II, nearly a score of majors, nine colonels and lieutenant colonels, and a brigadier general.
Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School also produced distinguished alumni, such as Thurgood Marshall and Cab Calloway, as well as several judges, congressmen and civil rights leaders. Douglass High was second in the nation in black Ph.D.s among its alumni.
The stories of the excellent predominantly black schools of yesteryear found in Sowell’s study refute the notion of “experts” that more money is needed to improve black education. Today’s Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frederick Douglass high schools have resources that would have been unimaginable to their predecessors. Those resources have meant absolutely nothing in terms of academic achievement.
Everyone seeks meaning, importance and community in their lives (Freud, who was mostly a nut, said everyone needs "love and work" to be happy).
Most people, the more normal ones, seek these things though love of spouse, family and children. Though religion, though work.
The far less normal ones - the leftists - since they have lost their faith in religion and in fact consider it a fraud, seek their meaning, importance and community though the (never-to-exist) utopia of politics. It has never worked and never will.
If you look at the history of the bizarre things leftists have done, start with the horrors of the French Revolution, which was fanatically anti-religion and thought utopia would come though murder and destruction.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn goes so far as to claim the Marquis de Sade was the founder of leftism (which makes leftism a French import). De Sade, not surprisingly, was a fanatical atheist who considered people no better than insects, and was one of the main instigators of the French Revolution, which was an inferno of guillotines, torture, mutilation and necrophilia.
In the 20th Century leftists in the '20s and '30s and '60s and '70s went barking after Russia, Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua...claiming each was utopia and far superior to the West. Utopia through politics and the creation of the New Man!
The West (at least the United States) was founded on political and economic liberty. You cannot get meaning, importance and community through those things. Even the Founding Fathers, to a man, were religious, although almost all of them were Deists.
Yet the first things leftists do is try to destroy religion and replace it with the belief in leftism. After all, in their minds, people are plastic and can be molded into anything.
Carl Jung once wrote that most of his patients had lost their faith. Bizarrely leftists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Carl Sagan thought people could find their meaning, importance and community through the belief in the religion of evolution (Dawkins once wrote that astrologers should be prosecuted).
Leftists hate the United States and seek their utopia in other countries. Since there are no longer any foreign countries for them to idealize, they have turned their hate and envy onto the U.S. and seek to change it - in reality, for the worse. Hence the hatred and envy we see on college campuses, including the University of Missouri (which I have visited many times when I lived in that area).
It doesn't surprise me at all that when Jesus went though his Temptations the Devil offered him political power over the kingdoms of the world - and he said no thanks! How many people pay attention to that wisdom anymore?
Paul Hollander, some years ago, wrote a book called Political Pilgrims in which he detailed the insanity of leftists as they ran from country to country, seeking utopia and the meaning, importance and community they thought each one offered.
It's one of the those books, like Kuehnelt-Leddin's Leftism Revisited, that everyone should own. I've owned my copy for a few decades.
I don't hate leftists. Mostly I feel sorry for them. How can you not feel sorry for such unhappy and self-deluded people, motivated by such envy and hate and the desire to destroy? Yet at the same time I'd deport them if I had the power (Kuehnelt-Leddihn said sooner or later the Right has to "knock the heads" of Leftists).
Leftism has even infected "libertarianism." Why else would so many support open borders? Do they expect utopia from importing envious and hate-filled Third Worlders? What sort of self-delusion is that?
It's a given that feminism is leftist, which means it's based on hate and envy and the desire to destroy. The Manosphere, obviously, is a reaction to this lefist, feminist assault on decency.
Unfortunately the Manosphere has gone off the rails with its misdefinitions of "Alpha" and "Beta" and "hypergamy" and its belief in "the Red Pill." Although its function is necessary, its beliefs are overwhelmingly adolescent.
The Manosphere is in many ways leftist, with its attempt to overthrow old established norms and definitions and replace it with new ones (just remember "neomasculinity" was the creation of a semi-white Third Worlder liar and fraud).
As it stands now, will the Manosphere bring meaning, importance and community? It seeks it, but does it truly offer it?
In some ways it's not hard to predict the future in a general way. All you have to do is look to the past, and the further you look into the past, the further you can see into the future.
The U.S. right now is badly infected with leftism. This means it's on its way down. Now as to how far down it will go...that is the question.
Someday, this leftism will get so bad there will be a reaction, and a bad one. Then, as always, we will get back up, dust ourselves off, and rebuild. And find our meaning, importance and community again.
"The cycle of societies past their prime degenerating into leftist decadence and general weakness and experiencing a population decline will inevitably give way to new rightist ideologies of strength emerging from the ashes. One standpoint is associated with the decline, the other with ascension." - Peter Wiggin
To the Dark Side feminism leads! Screw all of us over it will! (And when the Dark Side takes over, some people just give up and play video games in their basement all day long because they have no hope of jobs and women - what Freud described as essential: Love and Work.)
I see a fair number of spinsters these days: never married, no children, no home (apartment instead), a cat or two. They're hostile and blame all their problems on men. Usually they're on a combination of anti-anxiety and anti-depressant "medication."
Spinsters have always existed but there are many more today. How did this happen?
A few reasons, I believe.
One: women have gained, though the force of law, what might be considered men's "formal" power. Economic and political power. At the same time men, again through the force of law, are losing these things. So, as women ("educated" women, I'll add) move up, men move down.
At the same time, women still want their "informal" power: you ask me out, you pay my way, you ask me to marry you. Also, informally, women want a man who is at least as good-looking and makes as much money they do. Usually, more money.
So, as men are moving down, women are moving up, but still looking to "marry up." Fewer and fewer men meet these criteria. Hence, hostile spinsters wondering where "all the good men have gone." (My stock answer is: "Right where you left them; back in your 20's.")
Incidentally, the delusion of women "trying to have it all" is one of the biggest red flags that exists signaling the decline of society. These women want all the advantages of being a man and a woman and none of the responsibilities.
Additionally, since men are moving down, and losing their "formal" power, there is no reason to get married. It's got to the point there is no benefit for men to get married. This is one of the reasons close to 50% of all people are unmarried.
There is especially no reason for any guy who is good-looking and who makes a lot of money to get married. He can, for all practical purposes, have a harem. I first noticed that when I was 19, when I realized at that age, if polygamy was legal, I could have had half a dozen wives.
Now the problem with harems is that while a few guys will get most of women (at least the attractive ones) the vast majority of men will end up with no one except the unattractive and crazy women no one wants.
Polygamy (one man, many women) has been consistently ruled illegal in the U.S., and good thing, too. There was a case a few years ago of a polygamous Mormon community in the U.S. When the boys turned 16 they were simply cast adrift in the world since they would be competition for the young women, who were generally married to older men.
There have been some truly creepy polygamous societies in the world. In the polygamous Islamic world the unmarried men go crazy, commit a great deal of crime, and get their heads cut off. Here, in the U.S. they go to prison.
China is a more interesting case. In the past, one very wealthy man (as an aside, looks have nothing to do with this) might have a thousand wives.
It is only in the West that the concepts of monogamy and romantic love exist. I don't find that surprising. I do not believe love exists in a polygamous society. How can a man love half a dozen or a thousand women? How can any woman love a man when she is just one of many wives?
Jung had some wisdom here when he wrote you can have love or power, but not both. You can have love or the intoxication of power. There can be the intoxication of power when you have a harem of a dozen or a hundred or a thousand women, but I do not believe love factors into this at all.
But let's get back to China.
Now here's where things get very interesting in the place. How did these men get all this wealth? One reason is that the wife had to offer a dowry, gotten from their families. Dowries have usually been considered a leg up to get the the family started. If a man has to support a thousand women, he must be very wealthy indeed. (Also, if a man has a thousand wives, some of them - possibly most of them - will end up, for all practical purposes, as semi-spinsters. No man could pay anything but the most minimal attention to all of them except his favorites.)
Dowries (or groom prices) exist when there is a shortage of men. Bride prices exist where there is a shortage of brides. Technically these days in the U.S. women should be paying groom prices for men, but of course even the suggestion would outrage them them and make them froth at the mouth.
In China, since it cost a lot of money to marry a daughter, there was a lot of female infanticide. There still is.
Poor families couldn't pay dowries but could be paid a bride-price if their daughter was attractive enough and became a concubine. Not a wife, but a concubine.
The whole thing gets very complicated, but can be read in detail here
How does this apply here? Again, since women think there is a shortage of men, they should pay a groom-price. They will not do this. Since they think there is a shortage of acceptable men, many will end up as spinsters. Those who do not, since they cannot marry up, will end up a being a member of a "soft" harem.
Since the law now benefits women at the expense of men, many families will invest more resources in daughters than men. Women will move up economically through the force of law (usually with worthless degrees in Human Resources, Management, etc.) while men will move down unless they can get degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math). Few men can do that.
Since marriage no longer benefits men, there will be less of it. There will be more single mothers. There is nothing good about children without fathers; the problems they have are well-documented.
The economy will get worse and worse as more boys "fail to launch" because of missing fathers (men create society and science and technology). There will be more crime and more people on welfare. There will be more single mothers (supported by taxpayers) with screwed-up kids.
All of these bad things have come about through the government interfering in society and benefiting "educated" women at the expense of all men. Those men who are wealthy and good-looking will do okay, although many will ruin their lives later on (the more stupid in the Manosphere refer to these guys as "Alphas"; in reality the old term applies: cads).
Overall, I can't see any good coming out of all this. Ultimately it won't benefit anyone. Of course, none of this will stand. It'll collapse, as it always does, and then we'll pick up the pieces, as we always do, dust ourselves off, and keep going.
