Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Average IQs and Below-Average Jobs






The average IQ in the United States is 100. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re talking about mean or median average; either way, it means one-half of the people in the U.S. have IQs below 100, and the other half has IQs above 100.

About five percent of all people in the U.S. have IQs of 125 and above. Less than ten percent have IQs above 120, which is the cut-off point for “very bright.” Before the days of Political Correctness, those with IQs 85 and below were called "morons" (Muhammed Ali scored 78 on a military IQ test - and even his best friends claimed he was a moron).

What does all of this mean? Nothing good for the vast majority of people, which means nothing good for the United States.

As the political scientist Kevin Phillips has pointed out in several of his books, great countries go though three phases: agricultural, industrial, then in decline they develop financial industries. Actually, countries are already in decline when they enter that last phase.

Phillips used the now-gone empires of Spain, Holland and England as examples. All went though all three phases then collapsed. These days, he writes about the United States – which mired deep in its financial bog is in decline.

If this decline isn’t bad enough, it’s made worse by the exporting of our highly-paid industrial jobs, which the feds encourage because they delude themselves they’ll be replaced by better financial or service (“Do you want fries with that?”) jobs. Which they’re not, and won’t be.

Many of these now-gone jobs didn’t require high IQs to do them. You don’t have to have an IQ of 120 to work in a steel mill or on an auto-assembly line. In fact such an IQ would be a detriment in such jobs due to boredom.

Those high-paying jobs requiring average IQs are now gone. What’s left for these people? Jobs paying minimum-wage or slightly above. Either that, or welfare. Or crime (the average IQ of those in prison is 93).

The United States is stratifying itself by IQ. We’re going to end up without much of a blue-collar middle-class since their jobs are being outsourced. We’re going to end up with a poorly-paid lower-class partly supported by marginal welfare payments and a highly-paid upper class with higher IQs, who are partly supporting the lower classes through transfer payments.

I’ll give one example of what happens when the middle-class collapses: in Germany the Nazis were bought to power by the economically-ravaged middle class. You can fill in the blanks about our future (it won’t involve Nazis, contrary to the hallucinations of leftists).

Liberals, who delude themselves human nature is completely plastic, claim IQ can be raised substantially. How they think someone with an IQ of 85 can raise it to 125 is beyond me, but then, I’m not a leftist, all of whom are about four years old emotionally.

Your IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 12 years old. It can go up and down a little bit but it’s not going to go up and down by 20 points. There is no way to make it go up 20 points, and barring some major neurological insult, it can't drop 20 points, either.

Education does help in developing what IQ a person has, but the public schools haven’t done that for a long time, not with a 50% drop-out rate. It’s got to the point where if you have a lot of money you can get a fairly decent education but if you don’t have money these days you can’t even go to college unless you go into debt $30,000 – and sometimes a lot more.

One of the things that the financial “elites” do is what to flood the country with low-IQ illegal immigrants. Why? To drive down wages, which means more money for the elites. The fact that many “libertarians” are too blind and ignorant to realize that by supporting open borders they are cutting their own throats – and that of the nation – would be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic.

This stratification into socio-economic classes won’t last, since the financial phase never lasts. If whatever administration that is in power had any sense, it would set up laws to reindustrialize the U.S. It wouldn’t be that hard.

Only making things produces wealth. Shuffling “money” around is not wealth; for that matter, money is not wealth. Gold and silver are not wealth. Agriculture is wealth; manufacturing is wealth; a financial economy is an economy on its way down and out.

To use Thom Hartmann’s phase, we need to reboot the country. That rebooting would in many ways take us back to the past, to ideas that worked for decades. The ideas of today are not working; they are destructive.

The financial “elites,” for all their vaunted high IQs (which doesn’t have much of anything to do with wisdom or even common sense) are extraordinarily short-sighted. They won’t change their policies until there is revolt.

Which, of course, sooner or later, there will be.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Why Feminists Are 98.7% Wrong

Carl Jung and one of his interpreters, Marie Louise von Franz, said one of the main difficulties for many women is to give up the belief she is always right. Jung called this a “sacred conviction,” that many women have. This can certainly be interpreted as meaning: Men are always wrong.

“One may suddenly find oneself up against something in a woman that is obstinate and cold,” von Franz writes. And, I’ll add, irrational and hysterical.

There is a one-man play called “Defending the Caveman.” I’ve never seen it, but once heard the author interviewed on a radio comedy show. He said that while men consider women mysterious, women consider men wrong. During one show, he related, a woman stood up in the audience and shrieked, “They ARE wrong.”

Did she understand she was hysterical, irrational, obstinate – and wrong? Of course not.

Unfortunately, the influence of leftist/lesbian feminism on women increases what Jung identified as their main flaw: that they think are always right and men are always wrong. It is why, even today, I still hear about things that don’t exist – “patriarchy” and “white male privilege” or how women are “oppressed.” It’s also why even these days I hear the mantra, “Men are responsible for all the trouble in the world,” completely ignoring the appalling evil women have done.

Writes Erich Neuman in The Origins and History of Consciousness,“Since the unindividuated woman has not consciously developed any of her symbolically masculine qualities (e.g. logic, leadership, need for independence), her personality is apt to be taken over or ‘possessed’… so that she appears opinionated, argumentative, or domineering to others, though she will not think of herself that way.” In the words of Jung, ‘[J]ust as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.’”

In simpler terms, women who are opinionated, argumentative and domineering think
they are logical and capable of leadership, but aren’t and don’t know it, and are therefore irrational and don’t make much sense. Gloria Steinem once said, “Logic is in the mind of the logician.” That’s nonsense, but she doesn’t know it and will never figure it out.

(Parenthetically, Steinem has been correctly described as a “hopeless romantic, dependent on men, and a serial monogamist.” She led her life the exact opposite of what she prescribed for women.)

"But," writes von Franz, "if [the woman] realizes who and what her animus is and what he does to her, and if she faces these realities instead of allowing herself to be possessed, her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion."

The key to this process for woman is that she must question her most sacred convictions, e.g. believing men are always wrong and she is always right. “Only then can she accept higher wisdom from the unconscious that contradicts the opinions of her animus,” writes von Franz.

Jung observed the good “male” aspect in women consists of courage, initiative, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom. Women cannot get those things on their own. They can only get them from a man. If she does not have these things, she can retreat into a dream-filled cocoon of what she believes could have been, instead of engaging in life. I have seen it happen more than once.

A woman who has a warped animus can become reckless, engaging in brutal emotional scenes (which they often claim is “honesty”), are full of empty talk and silent, obstinate, evil ideas. To them, men are always wrong, and they often wish to control, dominate or destroy them (which is the goal of leftist/lesbian feminism) – as I have seen some mothers do to their male offspring.

"By nursing secret destructive attitudes," von Franz explains, "a wife can drive her husband, and a mother her children, into illness, accident, or even death." It is therefore not surprising that women are responsible for two-thirds of all child abuse, and they are twice as likely to abuse boys as girls.

You can see the amima/amimus projected into politics. Liberalism, which is feminine, is, in its extreme form, full of brutality, recklessness, empty talk and those silent, obstinate, evil ideas. It also believes those who disagree with them are always wrong. Conservatism, in its bad form, has little respect for nature and the environment, and is supposed to be totally rational and masculine, with little or no room for “irrational feelings.”

If the animus of many women is warped, and they have silent, obstinate ideas about men, whom they think are always wrong, and are opinionated, argumentative and domineering…these days most of it is due to the 40-plus years of feminist propaganda.

These days, and for the past few decades, many women have been propagandized into thinking they have been abused and oppressed by “patriarchy” and “white male privilege” – things that don’t exist. This leads them to believe men are always wrong, and they end up hostile and bitter and full of empty talk which solves nothing and in fact causes only trouble.

In other words, these kinds of women, for all practical purposes, are always wrong. It’s the same reason that leftism (which is feminine) is always wrong (the only reason it’s occasionally right is the same reason a stopped clock is right). Or as Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote, “Leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all.”

This warping of women by leftist feminism automatically leads to the warping of men. When women think that men are always wrong, and become hostile and bitter, men return this “favor.” It’s one of the reasons the Manosphere exists; it was an inevitable reaction to feminism.

Unfortunately, the reaction of the Manosphere to feminism idealizes “the Alpha,” the correct name for which is “a cad,” all of whom lie to, and abuse, women, whom they generally don’t much like or have respect for. My experience with cads is that they end up like Cal in Titanic (dead) or John Malkovich’s character in Dangerous Liaisons (dead) or Michael Caine’s character in Alfie (alone after having lost everything).

What Jung’s theories means is that no one can be whole unless they become aware of the negatives about themselves and overcome them. It applies not only to people, but also to societies. Jung called these negatives “the Shadow” and said that people project them onto other people. In other words, because these women, warped by radical feminism, are always wrong, they project it on men.

Jung said the acceptance out of own flaws and not projecting them onto other people leads to “a transformed state of consciousness, relatively whole and at peace." Not perfect, mind you, but for most people, they can’t really ask for much more than some wholeness and peace.

It’d be better than a lot of what we have now.





Sunday, June 24, 2012

“Free Trade” is Statist, not Libertarian







Some libertarian theory, especially the anarcho-capitalist variety, is a rather simplistic attempt to understand a complex subject. It reminds me of Marxism, another simple-minded ideology that takes five minutes to teach and a thousand years to get rid of.

One of the things that anarcho-capitalists are almost rabid about is “free trade.” They think it’s a great thing. It’s not. It’s a very bad thing. It’s statist, not libertarian.

Why is “free trade” statist? Because currently – and it has been for decades – it’s not free trade at all; it’s managed trade for the benefit of the 1% against the other 99%.

The political scientist Kevin Phillips, in his many mostly-excellent books, has pointed out that countries go through three phases: agricultural, industrial, then, finally and fatally, they metastasize into the terminal financial phase, which involves little more than shuffling money around and claiming it’s a wonderful thing. When countries reach that financial phrase they have passed their peaks and are on a steep downhill slide. Worse, it’s a prelude to economic collapse.

Phillips uses the examples of Spain, Holland, England…and now the United States. The U.S. was first an agricultural nation, so much so that Thomas Jefferson hoped it would always remain one, since he was impressed by the admirable character of farmers.

The agricultural phase doesn’t last. Then the U.S. industrialized. Now, it has mutated into the end-stage financial economy and the problems are so manifold I don’t have to list them. Let’s just say the problems with a financially-oriented economy are just horrible, and anyone with one eye open can see this.

Spain, Holland and England ultimately became financial economies. Every one of them collapsed. Of course, the court whores (aka court intellectuals) praised the wonders of their respective financial economies then, just as today they burble about “the information economy,” crushingly expensive schooling for the coming highly-paid jobs that will never exist, and other lies and propaganda.

Phillips, in his book Boiling Point, lists the characteristics of financial economies that lead to their collapse: “a diminishing concern for fading national industries, rising transnational values, support for minimal restraints on immigration, willingness to sell critical technology overseas and an eagerness of domestic capital to invest in rival foreign economies.”

Free trade did work to enrich the U.S. during the agricultural and industrial phases (John Hancock, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was referred to as “the Prince of Smugglers”). Back then, international free trade pretty much was free trade.

But not anymore. Since the U.S. is now deep into its financial phrase (and is pretty much in free-fall, not that the traitorous globalist 1% cares in the slightest), “free trade” doesn’t benefit anyone except the very wealthy “elites” (I use that term neutrally).

Some will claim that even if trade is managed, it can still benefit Americans. They cite Wal-Mart, an exploitative corporation which some of the more blind libertarians worship, as an example.

Wages stopped going up in 1973 for various reasons, but what all of them have in common is they were caused by the State interfering in the economy. Since then, wages have been flat and in many cases declining. (If the U.S. had maintained the growth rates of the ‘50s, the average wage today would be $100,000 a year.)

The economy has gotten so bad – and is going to stay bad – that many people are now on some kind of welfare – food cards, subsidized housing, medical cards, aid to dependent children.

Where do many of the people on welfare shop? Wal-Mart. How Wal-Mart (a corporation, and like all corporations is a creation of the State designed to benefit the owners against everyone else) is healthy for the American economy through poorly-paid jobs, with a clientele on welfare or unemployment (or else underemployed), selling imported goods manufactured by countries who wish the U.S. nothing but evil, is something only a “libertarian” could believe.

The existence of Wal-Mart is a sign of the decline – indeed decay – of the United States. If the American economy still had growth rates of 4% a year, as in did in the 1950s, and the average wage was now $100,000 a year, Wal-Mart probably wouldn’t exist, or else be a regional retailer for the lower classes.

(For that matter, you only need to wander through the stores to document the physical degradation of many Americans.)

I understand the concept of how free trade is supposed to enrich the U.S. We export our less productive jobs, the more productive ones here replace them, we send green pieces of paper overseas, foreigners send us DVD players and SUVs, they get richer, buy our products with the green pieces of paper we’ve sent them, our economy grows by investing the green pieces of paper here, and so everyone gets richer.

Even Milton Friedman, who did a lot of the Devil’s work during his statist/Monetarist career, fell for that argument. Unfortunately, the ideal is not what happens. International “free trade” doesn’t exist, not since the U.S. has entered its financial phase. And getting a cheap imported DVD player in exchange for a part-time $9 an hour job with no benefits because your $18 an hour job has been sent overseas…only a fool would think this is a good exchange.

Those deluded people urging an underemployed 50-year-old with an IQ of 104, whose blue-collar job was outsourced after 25 of employment, to go to college for four years in the vain attempt to get a degree in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) …it reminds me of something Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in Leftism Revisited: “Leftists don’t merely understand human nature; they don’t understand it at all.”

Back when Spain was an empire (several hundred years ago) a cocky – and economically ignorant – Spaniard wrote this: “Let London manufacture those fine fabrics of hers to her heart’s content; Holland her chambrays; Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuna; Milan her brocades; Italy and Flanders their linens…as long as our capital can enjoy them: the only thing it proves is that all nations train journeymen for Madrid and that Madrid is the queen of parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody.”

Does that quote sound familiar? It does to me. These days it comes from the caviar-and-brie-holes of the deluded, ignorant and arrogant court whores/court “intellectuals” supporting the hollowing out of the United States economy and the destruction of the middle class.

Where is Spain now? Not much better than a Third World country. The U.S. could follow – will follow, if we let it. We are, after all, making every mistake made by every country that collapsed in the past.

The United States could reverse its course. For one thing, we’re not a tiny maritime country the way England and Holland were. We’re a lot bigger and wealthier than Spain ever was. But we are firmly in the grip of the statist 1%, whose utter lack of concern for the decline of the U.S., and disdain and contempt for the shrinking middle-class, is painfully obvious.

Are libertarians helping things? To the extent they give up supporting statist policies such as open borders and the hollowing out of our domestic industries, yes. Otherwise, they are unwittingly playing into the hands of the smirking 1% that used the force and fraud of the State to steal 40% of the wealth of the United States.

Friday, June 22, 2012

The Impulsive Blurting of the Rhetoric-Impaired

As far as I know it was Aristotle who made the distinction between Dialectic and Rhetoric. For that matter, he discovered the laws of logic, which makes him one of the indispensible people in history.

Dialectic is the rational discussion between two or more people based on the available evidence. Rhetoric is based on emotion and logical fallacies. (Strictly speaking, it’s based on childish, indeed infantile, emotion.)

My experience has been the easiest way to distinguish dialectic from rhetoric is that those who use rhetoric impulsively blurt out answers without thinking (sometimes they even make things up on the spot). Although, in their minds, they believe their answer is rational and based on the facts. It’s not.

Example: when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started, I would hear from the Young-Republican-I-Support-the-Military-But-Will-Never-Join types about “If we don’t fight them over there we’ll have to fight them here.” (Notice these chickenhawks always say “we,” not “I.” What they really mean is “you,” not “me.”).

Their answer is pure rhetoric – pure dissembling rhetoric. When I pointed out that Iraq had an economy one percent of the U.S.’s, that the CIA had helped put Saddam Hussein in power, that he was our ally for decades and we armed him in the war against Iran, that he had no army, navy or air-force worth anything compared to us, and there is a picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with his buddy Hussein…they knew none of these things. The only thing they “knew” was that Hussein suddenly decided to attack the U.S.

Why did Hussein suddenly decide to attack a county 100 times stronger than his? Well, just because. No, not really. It’s because he had a conniption fit and immediately turned into an Insane Evil Homicidal Maniac Who Was of Course the Reincarnation of Hitler. At least that’s what the government told us. Government propaganda, that is.

Without exception governments always use the most simplistic of propaganda techniques to paint foreign leaders they want to go to war against as Compleatly Insane, who will in their rabid mad-dog-drooling lunacy attack the strongest country ever, thinking, somehow, they can win. As George Orwell put it, “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

The retarded always fall for this propaganda. As Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, said, “…it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

People engaged in a dialectical discussion can be recognized because they are thoughtful people. People who use rhetoric are never thoughtful – they’re always impulsive. Although, again, they think they are rational and thoughtful.

Impulsivity, except in certain select instances, is not a good thing. Impulsivity and stupidity together puts individuals in prison (the average IQ of prisoners’ is 93). For groups, impulsivity, coupled rhetoric and propaganda, leads to meaningless wars that can destroy the country (Germany and Japan found out about that the hard way).

Fortunately, it is easy to demolish the arguments of those under the spell of rhetoric and propaganda. They never have any proof. Unfortunately, they rarely change their minds. They don’t believe the evidence, since the cognitive dissonance makes their brains hurt. Stupidity can’t be fixed; ignorance, sometimes.

It is a very bad thing that so many people fall for emotion-based rhetoric and propaganda. They never know it, though. After all, Aristotle also pointed out there are two kinds of ignorance: one in which you know you are ignorant, and the double-ignorance in which you are ignorant and don’t know it.



Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Why Lying to Kids is a Good Thing

The only time it’s required to tell the truth is if the person has to know the truth. Sometimes, and most especially for kids, it’s necessary to tell them lies.

Of course, it depends on how you define lies. Lying to kids is a form of play, and that kind of lying is necessary for them to grow up and be good people.

Play is a rehearsal for growing up, and as such necessary to becoming an adult. Kittens and puppies play all the time, much to the damage of my fingers and hands. For children, one of the ways adults help children grow up is to lie to them through amusing stories.

Stories are a way to transfer the accumulated wisdom of the human race from adult to child. The ones that are both entertaining and amusing are the best ones. Stories sharpen kids’ minds and develop their talents.

The best kinds of stories are one that show truths, not merely tell them. And what is acting out a story called? A play. Shakespeare, for example, was never meant to be read. His stories were meant to be watched on stage (watch the movie, Anonymous sometime).

For another example: I used to tell some little kids I knew that a dragon lived outside their house and that he was always trying to drag me outside the door by my feet. The two boys, less than five, would rush over, grab my arms, yell, and drag me inside.

Their sister, on the other hand, sat on the couch and just looked at me.

What we did was put on a little play. An absorbing play, one that entertained and educated. Actually, they were improvisational plays.

There are certain rules that make improvisation comedy work (and these are good rules for life). The first rule is: deny no suggestion. Whatever someone says, never say no to it. If you say no, the other person has to go in a different direction. If you say yes, they can build on it. It flows. It’s serious but spontaneous. In other words, you go with the flow.

“Accept all offers made,” writes Keith Jonestone, one of the founders of improvisation comedy, “which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.” Unless, of course, they’re playing with children. I was engaging in that little dragon-play with the boys, one looked outside and said he didn’t see the dragon. “He’s invisible to kids,” I told him. “Only adults can see him.” I had to improvise, and they accepted my explanation.

The boys were learning some courage, although they weren’t exactly scared and I suspected they knew there really wasn’t a dragon outside (although when I asked them about it years later, they told me they thought there was).

Courage, self-discipline, a sense of humor, working together, helping those who need it, imagination, creativity, empathy – these are some of the traits that play develops.

People who can’t play are literal-minded people. They’re not only boring; they’re a danger to society if they get into positions of authority (usually they end up as bureaucrats).

I still do that kind of lying play with children. Most adults, at least ones with a sense of humor, do it their children. It’s a very good thing and there is no bad side to it.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

The Death of Chivalry

The evil man is the child grown strong – Thomas Hobbes

Not much good has come from feminism. A little bit, perhaps (after all, nothing is totally evil). But being that feminism is almost exclusively left-wing – and leftists are emotionally four years old – it has done far more damage than good.

Two of the most destructive four-year-olds, who conned a lot of women, and quite a few men, were Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Neither of them, being Compleat Leftist Hypocrites, followed in the slightest their prescriptions for other women. They were female children who grew stronger but never grew up. Both, not surprisingly, completely ignored the damage their ideas were responsible for when women put them into effect in their lives.

Leftists hate society and many lesbians hate men (although both deny their hate and project it on “rightists.” This projection is typical of any four-year-old.). Since feminism is leftist/lesbian, how could good come from such hate? The fact this hate disguises itself as “justice” or “fairness” is something bad ideas always do. Evil always pretends to be good.

Feminism is also parasitical, and only exists because of the technology and civilization created by men. If civilization collapsed and went backwards 200 years, do you think feminism would exist, when people had to spend most of their time merely surviving? Luxury and leisure – thanks to men’s creativity and inventiveness – allowed feminism to flourish.

One of the bad things feminism has done is essentially demolish chivalry. I get the impression that many people don’t really know what the word means anymore – to be disciplined, to protect the weak and helpless, to be loyal and generous, to tell the truth.

Sounds like the Boy Scouts, doesn’t it? (By the way, I was in both the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts – and at their best they are very good organizations for young boys).

Chivalry originally exemplified the better warrior virtues, and in some ways still does. To protect the weak and helpless you’d better have some warrior spirit in you, or you’re not going to be much help at all. And it does take some courage to tell the truth when you don’t want to.

As I’ve noted, the Manosphere blogs are a reaction to feminism, which blames nearly every problem in the world on men. Specifically, white men (“The white race [white men] is the cancer of human history,” lied the envious leftist-lesbian hater Susan Sontag). In response to this hostility, most men have ceased to be more than minimally chivalrous because of all the abuse heaped on them, and have become hostile in return. What else could you expect? What goes around comes around.

In 2010 (not 1971, as you’d expect) I had two women tell me, “Men are responsible for all the problems in the world.” Both were spinsters on psychiatric drugs (I can’t call it medication), who lacked husband, home and children. They tried desperately to fill that void with cats and jobs they called “careers.” I occasionally wonder how they ever thought they’d get what the wanted with such hostility instilled in their characters through four decades of lies/propaganda/brainwashing.

One concept in the Manosphere is that of “the Alpha.” Alphas are supposed to be good-looking guys with money who get all the women and lead wonderful lives. It’s the Manosphere ideal of a man. At least, to the more bitter Manosphere bloggers.

That ideal definition of an Alpha hasn’t been my experience. Mine has been that many of them are drug-abusing cowards who ruin their lives by middle-age. The word that has historically been used to describe them is “cad” (the dictionary definition of that word is “a man who behaves crudely or irresponsibly toward women”).

Actually, a cad could be considered the Bad Alpha. A good Alpha is the exact opposite of a cad. A Good Alpha would be a chivalrous man.

A cad exhibits in his character and behavior most of the Seven Deadly Sins. For him these traits are chronic since they are part of what he is. I have found that all of them show lust, greed and gluttony. Ennui, too, since most of them cannot tolerate being alone, so they go from woman to woman – none of whom they get emotionally involved with.

Four out of seven is pretty bad. I could make an argument they’re afflicted with Biblical Pride (what the Greeks called Hubris) since they never believe what they are will catch up with them – they’re convinced they’re above the moral laws written on their own hearts. Eventually those laws mow them down, as they always do (one told me, “I got a taste of my own medicine”). Then their lives collapse.

That makes five out of seven sins. That’s a terrible score. I generally don’t see wrath or envy, although one cad I know quite well nearly had a seizure when one of the very few women he was seriously interested in when we were in college dumped him for me.

Perhaps most cads do show wrath, since I have found they don’t really like or respect women. Not that the more foolish and naïve women can see this contempt. Or the lies and attempts at manipulation.

For that matter, cads are also short on the Four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance (restraint) and Fortitude (courage). (They’re called “cardinal” because they are of fundamental importance for morality - “cardinal” means “hinge,” as in on which everything else swings.)

The opposite of a cad would be a man with self-discipline and honesty. He’d have most of the opposite of the Seven Deadly Sins. He’d have the Seven Heavenly Virtues of prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope and charity (actually the first four are the Four Cardinal Virtues and the last three are the Three Theological Virtues). He’d be a grown-up Boy Scout – and that is a fine thing to be.

The word “virtue” is an interesting word indeed. It translates as “the powers of man.” Obviously, the Seven Deadly Sins are not virtues, in any culture in the world.

For that matter, the word “sin” isn’t accurate. It comes from the word hamartia, which comes from archery and means “to miss the mark.” That’s why current translations of Jesus’ sayings use “You have missed the mark” instead of “You have sinned.”

Incidentally, the world “repent” is from the Greek word metanoia, and the correct translation is “to change your heart and mind.” So, “repent from your sins” means “You have missed the mark so change your heart and mind.”

There is nothing in that phrase about changing yourself because of any “sin” against God. The offense is against the health and integrity of your own character (the word “holy” comes from the same root word as “health” and “wholeness” – and that is why health and integrity is the same thing).

The Seven Virtues would show themselves in chivalrous behavior, something that the Seven Deadly Sins don’t support at all.

These things – sins and virtues – are not taught anymore, even in church. They certainly aren’t taught in the catastrophes that our public schools have become. Even private schools don’t teach them. They don’t know they should.

Instead, men, trying to understand what is going on, have made a detour in the Manosphere concepts of Alpha, Beta, Sigma, Omega – inaccurate, simplistic ideas, none of which support any kind of civilized, chivalrous behavior.

Those Manosphere terms are from evolutionary psychology, and neither evolutionary theory nor psychology is a science. What is a science, and has been for over a thousand years if not longer, is the effect of “sins” and virtues on the life a person leads (these studies used to be called “natural philosophy” before they were shattered into worthless fields such as sociology and economics).

A society based on the Seven Deadly Sins wouldn’t be a society worth living in, except perhaps if you were a psychopath. And psychopaths are closer to monsters than human beings.

On the other hand, a society based on the Seven Heavenly Virtues and the Four Cardinal Virtues wouldn’t be a bad place at all. I think everyone instinctively know that. Unless, of course, if you’re a deluded, destructive leftist.

I’m a bit surprised it’s taken over 40 years for this reaction against feminism to manifest itself. Of course, when something is destructive there always is a reaction against it. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a while for that pendulum to swing back into sanity again.

This swinging back of the pendulum means feminism is on its way out. Its leaders will die and the world will be shut of them. It’ll take less than a generation before they’re gone. If we’re lucky, far less.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

There Are No Alpha and, No Betas, Too

I have been following the Manosphere blogs (some of which are written by women) for the past few months, and realized a lot of them, if not almost all of them, are a sometimes hostile and bitter reaction to the evils of leftism/lesbian feminism, which like all leftism (populated by emotional four-year-olds) blames nearly every problem imaginable on innocent people.

There are some other problems with the Manosphere, exemplified by the saying, “The map is not the terrain.” The ideas in our heads are not reality, and the further from reality they are, the worse they work.

Some people use the word “model” instead of map. We have models in our head that most of us are continually refining to make them describe reality better. For example, when I was a kid I once jumped out of a swing wearing a life-vest. I figured it would cushion me when I hit the ground.

I did it exactly one time, because I got the breath knocked out of me. It was the first time it had ever happened and it was not pleasant. My model of reality changed immediately. It became a better model. Some people’s models don’t change, no matter how many times they fail to work.

The Manosphere uses terms such as Alpha, Beta, Sigma, Omega, etc. These words are inaccurate and as such are not very useful in describing reality. In fact, they overwhelming fail, since lots of guys are going to claim they’re either Alphas or Sigmas - and when they define themselves thus, they are neither. It’s just a way to try to raise their self-esteem by deluding themselves.

As an aside, the Bad Alpha has always been considered a cad (and why do we need new inaccurate words to replace older, much more accurate words?).

I use the example of Cal in the movie Titanic as a cad. Then there is Alfie in the film Alfie. The ones I’ve known have are cowards who have destroyed their lives and ended up alone. One of the reasons they end up alone is because they devote their lives to seducing women without getting emotionally involved.

The ancient Greeks, I’m sure along with every other culture in the world, noticed that people who devote their lives to physical pleasure become degraded.

Betas have always been considered wimps (another term is pussy-whipped). Omegas are complete losers and aren’t even in the game.

The words to describe these people have existed for a long time. For that matter, no man exhibits all the traits and so cannot be put in one category.

Do all men fit into the categories of cad, wimp and loser? Hardly. Sometimes a man is brave, sometimes he is cowardly, sometimes he is smart, sometimes he is stupid, sometimes he is right, sometimes he is wrong. You can’t put any man – or woman – into one category. Or even two.

People like simplicity because it makes them think they know what’s going on. Simple, inaccurate concepts are certainly easier to understand, but they creak and groan and sometimes blow up when applied to reality.

I recently read an article suggesting Betas created civilization. Again, this is an idea in someone’s head that doesn’t describe reality.

Other people suggested Alphas created civilization and Betas are just exploited followers. Sigh. This is so simple-minded it verges on dangerous.

Here’s who created civilization: men. In one way or another, almost all men. Specifically, white men created civilization, almost all technology and most of the better ideas.

White men of course are not perfect (I let no one off the hook). Mostly, this imperfection is the bizarre belief (to use Rudyard Kipling’s phrase) in the White Man’s Burden, which means caning the wogs (i.e. killing them) in a vain attempt to turn them into white people. This is a very strange and very dangerous idea which has never worked and never will work, for one thing because it shows zero respect for other people’s cultures. And it does nothing but piss them off and make them want to kill you.

When you ask, who created civilization, Alphas or Betas? those concepts fall apart.

Was Thomas Jefferson an Alpha? He showed a lot of traits of Aspergers, and he died millions of dollars in debt. Yet his ideas helped found a nation. What about Thomas Edison? His teachers told him he was addled and school was wasted on him.

Bill Gates, the epitome of a nerd? One who was for many years disheveled and smelled because he rarely took a shower? Yet he become one of the richest men in the world and was one of the main founders of the computer revolution.

As another aside, I know a woman who knew Gates. He was clearly interested in her, and she ran the other way. But shouldn’t she have thought, Oh golly, one of the richest men in the world! I’ll always be taken care of! And our children, too!

Yet she went the other way as fast as she could. So much for the gobbledygook of evolutionary psychology (psychology isn’t a science and evolutionary theory even less so).

Are politicians Alphas, with their ambition and desire for money and power? Politicians have never advanced civilization. They have overwhelmingly helped to destroy it. If they’re Alphas, God help all of us!

Let’s take George Bush for a good example. Bush never had a job in his life, is a brain-damaged ex-drunk, has been described as “incurious” and by his own admission “doesn’t do nuance.” He was a terrible president (even more stupid and vicious than his father), contrary to his delusions of his worshippers. Is he an Alpha? No, he’s a politician! That is, a destroyer.

Again, men created civilization. What traits did they have to create it? First and foremost, self-discipline. Self-discipline implies the ability to concentrate. Then there is creativity.

Who has an abundance of those four traits? Alphas? Betas? Sigmas? Omegas? (The hunchbacked scientist Charles Steinmetz was certainly an Omega, and he did a lot for society.) Again, the concepts fall completely apart.

People who use these Manosphere concepts of Alpha, Beta, etc. are using concepts that apply to some animals (say, dogs but not cats) and try to impose them on people. Yet they don’t understand the concepts even when applied to animals.

Wolves have an Alpha couple, which are the ones allowed to breed. Yet they can be overthrown by a couple lower in the pack, which then becomes the Alpha couple. If this applied to people, only Alphas would be allowed to have sex and the hundreds of millions of Betas in the world would be trying to kill them. Which they would do quite rapidly.

The Manosphere terms are close to nonsense.

We do have an animal nature. Civilization sits on top of it and tries to repress the worst parts (murder, theft, lying) and transform other parts to serve civilization. Unfortunately, civilization is a very thin skin on top of a lot of not-so-good animal nature, and that thin skin of civilization is easily damaged and sometimes even destroyed.

When people start babbling about Alphas, Betas, etc. and thinking these concepts about our animal natures are good things that will improve everyone’s lives and make society better – they’ll find out differently. Being in many ways a rage-filled reaction against feminism, these Manosphere terms will make civilization go backwards, not forward. Just as feminism made society go backwards.

That’s why, in the long run, these concepts will disappear.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Libertarian Novels

For reasons which I don't understand, the writers with the worst ideas, like Karl Marx, are leftist, the best, such as Conrad and Dostoevsky, are conservatives, and the anarchist/libertarian ones write science-fiction, fantasy and horror. Even Tolkien, who wrote of a Stateless Shire in his first novel, The Hobbit, described himself as an "anarchist."

As an example, nearly every libertarian I know has been profoundly affected by the writings of the late Robert Heinlein. It wasn't just the libertarian world he portrayed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but also the fact he portrayed the characters in nearly all of his stories as competent, can-do people. It's obvious that Tom Clancy was greatly influenced by him, too.

Myself, I found A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher an eye-opener. It portrayed the importance of an armed citizenry against the eternal depredations of the State - whose rulers, like all rulers, consider themselves benefactors, even though they kill a lot of innocent people. How many other novels written in the '50s were so sympathetic to the importance of the Second Amendment? I can't think of any.

Others were influenced by Eric Frank Russell's story very funny story, "...And Then There Were None" (part of his book, The Great Explosion, about a society which had discovered a fool-proof way to remain completely free and at the same time make itself unconquerable.

Today, there are four well-known libertarian science-fiction writers - L. Neil Smith, the late James P. Hogan, F. Paul Wilson and Neal Stepenson. All have huge followings.

Probably Smith's most famous novel is his first one, The Probability Broach, written in the late '70s. It's the story of one Win Bear, a detective who ends up in an alternate libertarian universe in which monkeys and dolphins talk, and Ayn Rand was President. And everyone is armed. (Obviously, there's not much crime. As Heinlein pointed out, "An armed society is a polite society.").

James Hogan is not so explicitly libertarian as Smith, but he too uses the convention of alternate universes to fashion freer worlds than our own. I am especially fond of Bug Park, a "hard science" novel about a young boy and his adventures with tiny remote-controlled robots. This one, even though for adults, has Heinlein "juvenile" written all over it, and would make a wonderful movie.

Then we have F. Paul Wilson and his "Repairman Jack" novels (The Tomb, Conspiracies). Jack, who is a combination of the Equalizer and Fox Mulder, has decided he wants to live off of the grid, completely away from the prying eyes of the State. He deals only in gold and cash, has no Social Security number, no ID. He also has a flame-thrower, bought from a weapons shop which has the same motto as the one in The Weapon Shops of Isher: "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." The name of the shop is, of course, Isher.

Jack "fixes" people's problems when they have no one else to turn to. He is equal parts Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. His adventures run from dealing with rakoski - walking, talking Great Whites who just happen to be human -to the Men in Black (who really aren't from here).

I am also impressed by Neal Stephenson, who in his Cryptonomicom writes of attempts to create an encrypted digital money beyond the control of any government.

All of these writers are great fun, and all are illustrations of Tolkien's comment that we have the Primary World (the one in which we live), and then we have Secondary Worlds - the ones writers create. There are an infinite amount of them.

If a writer has enough skill to create a fully-realized Secondary World, and readers enough imaginative muscle to suspend their disbelief, they can actually "live" for a while in that Secondary World.

What an awful world it would be if there were no Secondary Worlds. It would be the world of 1984 and Brave New World, of Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind.

Certainly, Secondary Worlds are an escape. But they are more than that. As Richard Feynman so perceptively noted, "...there are new generations born every day...there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation."

It is through stories - through those Secondary Worlds - that those ideas are passed from generation to generation. Without those Secondary, imaginative worlds, you can start saying goodbye to the collected wisdom of humanity, passed from old to young. As Richard Weaver wrote in his book of the same title, Ideas Have Consequences.

One of the curious differences between the Primary World and Secondary Worlds is that the first is inherently imperfect (in religious terms, "fallen") while Secondary Worlds are not necessarily. What this does is give the readers an idea of what better worlds might be like, in the safety of their imaginations.

Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, for two examples, spent their lives imagining fully-realized libertarian worlds, and wrote about them in the hope others would read of them and be convinced of the truth of their positions. Both were showing people better worlds.

A libertarian world, for example, is as close to an ideal world as there can be. However, being an ideal world, it doesn't (as of yet) exist totally in the real world. It does exist in bits and pieces in reality. It is a Secondary World that someday might be completely implemented in the Primary World.

All of the aforementioned writers, and their books, are about what America could have been, and what it should be. What the world should be. The books are about the writers and readers using their imaginations to see what the world would be like if the switches were set right, ones set wrong a long time ago.

Such things would be all for the good, for everyone.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Visions of Our Futures

For the past several years there has been an explosion of discussions about possible futures for the United States, often concentrating on two things: the growth of government with its inherent totalitarian/socialist/fascist values and the mass immigration of uneducable, crime-prone low-IQ Third World immigrants.

Neither of these things, contrary to the delusions of the open-borders/big government/anarchist-leftist-libertarian crowd, is good for the U.S. They’re terrible. They’re monstrous, and I mean “monstrous” in the original sense of the word: an offense against the natural order.

The first problem is the growth of government, which I now believe has reached the tipping point, thereby leading to the coming economic collapse of the United States. Specifically, the economic collapse of the ever-growing Blob known as the federal government. This, I believe, is a foregone conclusion.

Unlike anarchists (all of whom are left-wingers, even if they call themselves libertarians), who think society can survive without government, I believe it will always exist.

For that matter, all societies have had some form of government. Those who think, following Murray Rothbard (a good economist but a lousy historian) that Ireland and Iceland were anarchist societies, know nothing about how brutal, savage and murderous these places were.

I operate on the Natural Law premise that the proper purpose of government is to protect what John Locke called “life, liberty and property” (which made it into the Constitution as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”).

When it goes beyond protecting life, liberty and property it then turns into what Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock called “the State,” which is the Political Means based on violence, force, theft, lies and murder, and is always opposed to the Economic Means of persuasion, trade, the free market and political liberty.

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his book, Adventures of Ideas, about the difference between persuasion and force: "The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force...Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals...

"Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force."

So, from now on, for the sake of accuracy, I will generally use the term “the State” to describe what the United States federal government has mutated into (although not always, since I agree with what Emerson wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”).

I listen to no writer on economic and social issues unless they are logical, can explain their beliefs simply, and have a successful track record. One of them is Richard Maybury, who believes the State will collapse (neither he nor anyone else knows when) but that the country itself will survive. I agree with him on this point.

Maybury, who was in Vietnam and got wised up to the State’s mendacity at the age of 22, discussed with his wife about leaving the U.S. but decided to stay. I personally have no intention of leaving this country – my country.

There are some bad things to the collapse of the State but many more good things. The dismantling of the American Empire with its appallingly destructive military meddling in three-quarters of the world, the severe damaging of the American economy through the fed’s utterly incompetent neo-Keynesian policies; the State’s tinkering with hundreds of millions of people’s lives to achieve unworkable social goals…the disappearance of them is very good indeed.

I still have a hard time believing the mess the State has made. How can anything be so incompetent and engage in what is clearly long-term folly? How can our “leaders” not learn from the past? Unfortunately, the worst do get on top – the sheep have put the wolves in charge of the flock.

Wages have not gone up since 1973, one reason being Nixon’s going off of the gold standard in 1971, allowing the completely unconstitutional Federal Reserve Bank to inflate without any brakes on it. They’ve also failed to go up because of the “crowding out” of private investment caused by the sucking up of capital to finance the national debt, and because of the State and corporations (which are creations of the State) sending tens of trillions of dollars of our wealth, and over 500 years of Western knowledge, to our enemies in the Middle East and China (I tell people that if exporting our jobs to China is such a good thing, we should export our military defense to them. It’d be a lot cheaper, at least until the U.S. ceased to exist. Penny-wise, pound foolish.).

Probably the worst consequence of the collapse of the State is that it takes up about one-third of the economy, so there will be cause substantial problems as the economy and society repair themselves.

Other writers, such as Theodore Beale, who writes under the name Vox Day, believes we are already in what he calls the Great Depression 2.0 and that there is not going to be a recovery of any note. I agree with him but wonder it will be as bad as the first Depression, which, not surprisingly, was the fault of the State because of its financial, intellectual and moral incompetence – and that includes whackjob court whores such as Paul Krugman.

Beale and his family did leave the U.S. and now live in Italy. I understand his decision.

States collapse but countries and societies survive. England survived the disappearance of its empire. Italy and Greece are still around. Germany survived World War I and even the appalling destructiveness of World War II. America will also survive, although in what condition no one yet knows.

Now we come to immigration. If things continue on the path they are on now, there is one thing of which I am convinced: we will have a society with upper-class whites and Asians living in guarded gated communities, “Hispanics” in the middle, and blacks at the bottom (and the last two are now ethnically-cleansing the other from their “territory”). There of course will be individual exceptions to this but the general rule still stands.

Not surprisingly, the deluded “free-market” types (who don’t understand the free market), think that different tribes can peacefully share the same land by putting the materialism of DVD players and SUVs above tribe, race, religion and ethnic group. They’re finding out, and will continue to find out, just how wrong they are. That old saying, “There is no education without tears” only applies to the blind and ignorant who refuse to see the truth, even if it’s right in front of their noses.

There is a woman I know, a Filipina raised in a wealthy family in the Philippines. Not surprisingly her family lived in a gated community and later in a high-rise with guards at the entrance. What did surprise me was her fear of traveling alone: she told me that had anyone known her family had money, she could have been kidnapped. These kidnappings are now a bit closer than the Philippines; in Mexico, specifically.

It is of course impossible to tell the future, but history does repeat, and the further you look into the past the further you can see into the future. And if history is any guide, there is only one tiresome story that repeats itself over and over: the growth of the State until it collapses. The United States will be no exception to this rule.

One possible future scenario, written about extensively by Jerry Pournelle, is that the military might take over. He refers to the military as “the Legions” and has written many novels about them, several of which I have read.

Pournelle points out that when military leaders perceive the military they love as being destroyed by inept politicians – such as what is happening now with six undeclared wars and U.S. troops in 144 countries – they’ll take over. It’s happened quite a few times in the past.

I get the impression – I may be wrong here but I don’t think I am – that Pournelle is not averse to this scenario. Considering the shape this country is in, I sometimes wonder if I would be.

In a compilation that Pournelle wrote with S.M. Stirling called The Prince (after Machiavelli’s treatise), groups of colonist are voluntarily and involuntarily sent to a distant planet. The involuntary colonists, who lived their lives on welfare while on Earth, with the remaining productive members of society paying for their entertainment and drugs, are the ones who become violent, just the way they riot in the U.S. for any excuse. The liberals of that future time support them – no surprise there.

Pournelle’s reoccurring main character, a mercenary (not a pejorative term in Pournelle’s universe) named John Christian Falkenberg - of “Falkenberg’s Legion” - is the one who battles these rebels. From this and other of Pournelle’s novels it is clear he is a conservative in the true sense of the word – he understands that a massive welfare state undermines people’s characters and will ultimately lead to social and economic disorder, including collapse and starvation.

An aside: in college I drove a taxi, sometimes at night. I found that in the high-rise public-housing buildings a hundred young people, most of whom were never employed and with no intention of seeking to be, were up at 3 am every night and gathered in the parking lot to do who-knows-what. Based on my experience driving a cab, I’d wager they did nothing but socialize, drink, get high, and sell drugs and women.

Some of Pournelle’s characters have said such things as “Governments have no honor” and “Politicians get themselves into trouble that only the military can get them out of.” I am reminded of the fact politicians have for all practical purposes ceded parts of the border states to violent, murderous Mexican drug smugglers.

In a nutshell, to Pournelle (originally a Southerner) governments lie, cheat, steal and murder – this is their nature and their history. They have none of the martial virtues such as honor and trust and sacrifice. And the purpose of a military takeover is to eradicate leftist policies and to allow the natural conservative/libertarian values of Western society to re-establish themselves and flourish.

How would a military takeover work in the United States? The United States isn’t Europe - thank God for that - with its millennia-old love of fascism, so I do not think we’d end up with the horrors that have afflicted Russia, Spain, France and Germany (the late Ray Bradbury once made the amusing but perceptive comment, “If it comes out of Europe, it’s probably wrong”).

Another aside: many Hessian mercenaries (draftees) sent here during the Revolutionary War stayed, having no intention of going back to the statist Hell in which they were raised. Yet another: Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame), wrote in her pamphlet, Give Me Liberty (which can be downloaded on free on the Internet) about the troubles she had in Hungary and France, where the police asked for her papers two or three times a day, women who hadn’t worked in the last week (stamped on their cards) were issued prostitute’s cards, and once, after buying a car, she didn’t make it two blocks before the police checked her and wouldn’t let her drive any farther because the seller had forgotten to screw a metal plate into the dashboard with Rose’s name and address on it.

While I was not in the military I know several people who were, and was surprised, but should not have been, when they told me that many people have joined to learn how to defend their race or ethnic group in case of a violent collapse. This includes not only whites but blacks and Hispanics. Such are the “wonders” of diversity, which have now infected the military.

Unfortunately, I have little idea what would happen during a military takeover in the U.S. The leaders of all branches would have to support it – and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they did. Democracies are the worst form of government; they all fail since they set up massive welfare states while destroying their militaries through overextension.

In some ways it is unfortunate humans are hierarchical animals. Maybe it would have been better if we had evolved from dogs, with their sunny manic natures. We’d still be hierarchical and probably downright stupid, but we’d spend lots of time playing and no time imposing the anti-American leftist delusion of “democracy” on other dogs by killing their puppies and their mothers.

As things stand now, our hierarchical nature has allowed probably less than 500 people in the federal State to severely damage this country. And the more than 300 million people in this country let them get away with it. It’s a cliché, but it does boggle the mind.

The fact there are so few people in the federal State is what convinces me how easy it would be for the military to take over, if they were motivated to do so.

Traditionally when democracies fail they turn into dictatorships (which generally only last until the dictator dies), but what dictator could rule the entire U.S.? I consider the idea ridiculous; we’re not some postage-stamp-sized country, as is common in the rest of the world. But people supporting the military ridding us of the terminal cancer that our originally small federal government has metastasized into…I can see that. Besides, who else could do it? After all, it is a truth that only power can fight power. Weakness certainly can’t.

Even today most Americans don’t have the fascist mindset that has afflicted Europeans probably since the time of the Roman Empire (the blind, ignorant, hubris-ridden Eurofascists of the EU have designs on Europe that Hitler never had). So even if the military took over here I believe it would be temporary. At least, if it ever did happen, I hope so.

I’d like to think that phrase about the military defending the United States from enemies “foreign and domestic” is true, especially since most countries fall not from attacks from without, but from within, from traitors who pretend to be patriots, such as the leftist chickenhawk/chickenshit “neo-conservatives” who pushed for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Another scenario is that the United States breaks up politically into several independent sections. Neal Stephenson has written about this in some of his novels such as Snow Crash. I believe such a break-up is improbable to the point of near impossibility but what Stephenson has correctly pointed out is that each of these tribal lands is armed to the teeth to protect itself against attacks by other tribes (try his The Diamond Age for a better illustration of this).

Stephenson has been influenced by the novel The Camp of the Saints, in which Europe is overrun and destroyed by hordes of envious hate-filled Third Worlders. Although Stephenson is a funny writer, his depiction of a future U.S. is essentially that of a Hell in which the protagonist of Snow Crash lives with a friend in a storage unit, can’t find any job except delivering pizzas (for the Mafia, of all things) and has to arm himself with two swords.

As things stand now, one percent of the people in the United States control 40% of the wealth. They didn’t do this through the free market. They did it by perverting the State’s power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Of course these people, as James Burnham warned in his The Machiavellians, are going to do whatever they can to maintain their power and privilege. Or as Richard K. Morgan, author of the satirical (but somewhat leftist) Market Forces, writes, "Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses."

Morgan’s and Burnham’s observations have been the history of the world. As theologian Marcus Borg has pointed out, during Jesus’ times the elites (the term is used neutrally) were the ten percent who owned two-thirds of the wealth. The other 90% had to share the other one-third.

This concentration of wealth is why Jesus used such insults as “vipers” who would steal the last penny of widows and orphans to describe the corrupt, wealthy Jewish leaders who were allied with Rome. Obviously, human nature does not change. While wealth does not necessarily corrupt, political power, except for truly exceptional individuals such as Marcus Aurelius, does.

It is only in the West that political and economic liberty was discovered and took root (the words “liberty” and “freedom” are Western words and do not exist in any other culture). As Charles Murray wrote in Human Accomplishment, it flowered in the areas comprising northern Italy, France, Germany, northern Europe, England and southern Scotland. One of the main reasons they took root is because of Christianity, as many writers have noted. No other culture, religion or race has achieved but a single-digit fraction of what the Christian West has achieved.

Another scenario – which is occurring in some areas today – is the expulsion of illegal aliens, most of whom hold values inimical to American ones. The states are leading this fight since the feds has so far shown themselves to be actively hostile to it.

These expulsions are more prevalent in some states more than others, so essentially what is happening today is the fracturing of the United States among racial and ethnic lines. Big cities have become magnets for the Third Worlders in our midst. The formerly-beautiful city of Detroit, for example, has been destroyed and some sections of it are returning to wilderness.

Those in the middle-class and above (and often below) are moving into better and safer areas. I lived in Missouri for several years and have seen a flow of middle-class white people into the Ozarks, a vastly underrated area of lakes, streams, meadows and wooded hills (which, among other things, accounts for the popularity of Branson). I have also seen a flow into the Pacific Northwest; unfortunately, some of the people are so implacably hostile to government they’d like to see a violent revolution.

My view? The United States federal government will collapse sooner or later. Every government in the history of the world has disappeared. The country, fortunately, will survive, and it won’t break up. More power will return to the states, as it should be. I’d like to see Washington D.C. return to being the fetid backwater that is was until after World War II. The economy will be fairly good in some areas and terrible in others.

The expulsions of illegal aliens will continue, which is a good thing with no downside to it. It will work better in some areas than others. Many whites will immigrate into areas where there are other whites, because people are tribal and want to be with their own. The economies in the areas with mostly white people will be fairly good. The big cities will be basket-cases because of unemployed (and unemployable) Third Worlders living permanently on welfare and crime.

Those who are dumb enough and wealthy enough (the two are not mutually exclusive) will be living in armed gated communities. I believe this will occur mainly in the coastal areas of southern California, although I’ve also seen them in Las Vegas. These things would be amusing – gated wealthy communities a five-minute drive from slums – if they it weren’t so tragic.

Another digression: throughout the world whites live in the hills and non-whites live in the valleys. This is why one of the worst places to live is in big cities located in valleys, which are going to turn into slums even worse than the ones they are now.

I have to admit that I am amazed at what this country has turned into, most especially since 1965, when the State decided to allow hordes of non-Europeans into this country. It has happened quite rapidity, so fast it appeared to be in the blink of an eye (and when anyone points this out, there are some who do can’t anything except engage in point-and-sputter and wail, “That’s ray-ciss!”).

As always, there has been a backlash, one that anyone who isn’t a deluded leftist (which should be one word) could see coming. Now as to exactly what form this backlash will take, no one can predict with any great accuracy. But I will say it won’t be pretty.

It is safe to predict that the future will be one of both happiness and agony, just as the past has been. So, as always, forearmed is forewarned.

Monday, June 4, 2012

The State as the Worst Serial Killer of All

If one person kills another one, he is a murderer. If he kills 100, he is a monster. But if he kills 100,000, he is a patriot and a hero. The only way one can become this type of "hero" is through the agency of the State.

The victims of the worst serial killer in the world are but a drop in the ocean compared to the political victims of Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler. They are still but a drop compared to the victims of Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. They're a drop compared to what Clinton, Bush and Obama have done, and to the murders that will be committed by those who come after them. The State is the worst serial killer in the world.

How people can engage in such enormities with a clear conscience is something I don’t completely understand. But I do understand it to a degree. It has to do with our inborn narcissism, which perhaps may be a modern term for Original Sin.

To a degree, everyone is narcissistic. What psychologists call "primary narcissism" is an inescapable -- and universal -- phrase that all people go through as babies and children. We never grow out of it, a good thing in certain circumstances. But taken to an extreme, especially when politics is involved, and we have Hobbes' quote: "The evil man is the child grown strong."

Our narcissism is what allows us to treat others as things -- to "objectify" them, to see them as objects. Perversely, the more power one person has over others, the more it is necessary to objectify them. Considering the history of the human race, power over others leading to the objectification of them appears to be inescapable. It would certainly explain the accuracy of the story of Satan, as told in the Bible, and in John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Taken far enough, this objectification is an example of the saying, "Power is the horse that evil rides." Power over others is intimately tied to doing evil to them. And power over others -- when those others can do little or nothing about it -- is the definition of political power.

I don't think it's possible for a surgeon to open someone up with a scalpel and root around in his insides if he always had it in his mind that it's a living human being he's working upon. It's easier for the surgeon's peace of mind (and I'm sure for the horror-free, anxiety-free exercise of his abilities) to imagine the patient is a "thing" that has to be fixed, much like a mechanic working on a car.

Unfortunately, that "objectivity" is almost always part and parcel, in varying degrees, of grandiosity, the belief one is god-like. It explains the popular joke: "What is the difference between God and a doctor?" Answer: "God doesn't think he's a doctor."

Healthy narcissism can turn into malignant narcissism. The Greeks called malignant narcissism hubris, and the Bible calls it pride. A one-sentence definition of it is: you're a thing, and I'm a god. It's the reason why humility -- a realistic appraisal of oneself -- is considered such a virtue.

Perhaps anyone who actively seeks political power over others is already a malignant narcissist. If that is true, then Satan is a politician, the collorary being, all politicians are Satanic. I think history backs up that observation.

Writes Sam Vaknin: "The narcissist's pronounced lack of empathy, off-handed exploitativeness, grandiose fantasies and uncompromising sense of entitlement make him treat all people as though they were objects...the narcissist regards others as either useful conduits for and sources of narcissistic supply (attention, adulation, etc.) -- or as extensions of himself."

Vaknin is speaking of clinical narcissists, but what he wrote applies to everyone in some degree. It especially applies to some people more than others. Christopher Lasch, in his book, The Culture of Narcissism, had some relevant comments about narcissistic people: "He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he...demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire."

Lasch's quote about praising respect for rules they don't believe apply to themselves explains the Chickenhawk ("You fight and die; I'll yell directions from the sidelines"). And that desire for immediate gratification and "restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire" does not bode well for the U.S. and the world, since they plan on using the former to conquer the latter.

Some people can handle political power. The ones who don't want it. But those who seek out this power are the ones who shouldn't be allowed near it. They are invariably more childish and narcissistic than more healthy normal people. They are the child grown strong, doing evil to others.

"In malignant narcissism," writes Vaknin, "the true self of the narcissist is replaced by a false construct, imbued with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The narcissist's thinking is magical and infantile. He feels immune to the consequences of his own actions...the narcissist cannot afford to be rejected, spurned, insulted, hurt, resisted, criticized, or disagreed with."

Magical, infantile thinking. Is that not the thinking of anyone who truly believes the U.S. can invade, conquer and remake entire countries in its image? "Resisted, criticized, disagreed with"? That’s behavior that militant nationalists (i.e., traitors and cowards) exhibit when people point out how mistaken they are.

Ultimately, the State is childish, narcissistic, and murderous. I can't see any way around that, except to get rid of it. It's astonishing so many people see the State as a good thing. It's almost a form of insanity, if insanity is defined by that old joke: "Trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."

Sunday, June 3, 2012

There Are No “Alphas”

For the past few months I have been reading what is embarrassingly called the “Manosphere” (would one for women be called the “Womanosphere”?). I understand what the Manosphere is about – it is an understandable, inevitable, and in many ways necessary reaction to 40 plus years of the evils of leftist/lesbian “feminism.”

Feminism would be irrelevant – indeed just another nutty left-wing ideology – except for the fact it has been enshrined in law by the State. And the State, as is its nature, meddles, damages and destroys – it never heals or creates.

Since the Manosphere is a reaction to the destructive influence of feminism there is of course a lot good to it. Unfortunately, there is some bad to it, too.

One of the bads is the idea of “the Alpha.” The Alpha as such does not exist; it is a concept without much of a referent.

The reason the Alpha does not exist is the definition is too broad, and since the definition is too broad it doesn’t make much sense and therefore confuses people who are already confused – which are the people who read the Manosphere blogs looking to find structure and meaning for their lives – structure and meaning (i.e. rites and rituals) that have been destroyed by the State.

There are actually two kinds of Alphas: the bad one, and the good one. The accepted definition rolls both into one, which doesn’t work.

The bad one has traditionally been called a cad. Strictly speaking, while the cad is male he is not a man, since his values are the opposite of what has traditionally defined a man. So then, a man would be the good Alpha.

My experience of bad “Alphas” is that they are immature, childish and cowardly. Their loyalty is almost nonexistent (it exists toward some guys but not to women), and they have little discipline in the important things. They are impulsive, self-centered, deficient in empathy, prone to drug addiction, and when they become middle-aged they are filled with regrets over their ruined lives and lost opportunities for happiness.

Any man who continually babbles that he is an Alpha, such as the washed-up loser Ted Nugent, isn’t. (It’s like crowing, “I’m a manly masculine man!”). Such babbling is an excellent indication the babbler is a cad, who covers up his lack of character with empty rhetoric.

I know one cad whom I first met when I was 21. He was never a friend, just an acquaintance. Back then I was getting huge red flags on him, even though I did not know what he was doing (I was informed about his behavior years later by a mutual friend).

He was a fairly good-looking guy who did some pretty vile things. He would target women who weren’t good-looking (and never very bright), tell them what he described as “what they wanted to hear,” lead them to think he was their boyfriend, then have sex with them for two weeks (while seeing other women), then dump them.

He did this approximately 100 times.

How did he end up? As a drug addict (and has ruined his teeth because of it), who is alone, and who has never had a serious relationship with a woman. He did say, finally, “I got a taste of my own medicine.” He is also, not surprisingly, a coward (a coward is someone who is a blowhard and a bully who collapses when someone – or life - gets the best of him, which isn’t all that hard and sooner or later always happens).

Cads can be quite popular with the more stupid and immature women who can’t see through them. (As an aside, men are far better judges of men’s characters than women are, and any woman with any sense will ask other men what they think of the “boyfriend” and if they don’t listen to their judgments they have no one to blame but themselves).

Some women did see through this cad. They were very rare, and all of them were intelligent, perceptive and sensitive. In college one of them ended up with me, and when this cad, who was just starting out his career as a cad, found out about it he threw a fit - because she was one of the few women he was seriously interested in. And she very quickly dumped him.

Cads are actually quite narcissistic, which means they can be charming and manipulative, but have nothing on the inside. They collapse in middle age. This has been seen by therapists so many times dozens of books have been written about it.

Artists (who as Ezra Pound commented are the antennae of the human race) have noticed what happens to cads. The example I use is of Cal (played by Billy Zane) in the movie Titanic. Cal was a coward and a bully who happened to have looks and money.

But what happened when he lost his money during the Great Depression? He shot himself. This happened because he was empty on the inside, again typical of narcissists. They’re like balloons, nothing on the inside and easy to pop (I am reminded of that old saying: “All hat, no cattle”).

An earlier movie about a cad is the ‘60s film, Alfie, with Shelly Winters and Michael Caine. Caine is a womanizer, who never gets emotionally involved, and when he finally falls for a woman – Winters - she dumps him by telling him, “You’re too old.” The shock on his face is priceless; he suddenly realizes what he is and where he’s inexorably heading – because he cannot change.

Incidentally, the lyrics to the theme song run thus: “What’s it all about, Alfie? /Is is just for the moment we live?” That is how the impulsive cad lives his life and it’s why he ultimately collapses and ends up alone and desolate, with no relationships, no meaning and no importance to his life.

The easiest way to needle a cad is to say, “You know what your problem is? You’re not a man. You’ve never grown up” (the shorter version being the aforementioned “All hat, no cattle”). They’ll get upset and angry every time, which means you’ve hit a very sensitive nerve.

Cads think they can go on with their behavior for decades and nothing bad will happen to them. They almost always think, “Well, I can manipulate and lie to stupid women for years, but still get a good one.” It doesn’t happen unless they change – and it takes a lot of bashing in the School of Hard Knocks to effect that change. Even then, it doesn’t happen very often.

What is the opposite of a cad? A man who has loyalty and honor. He has self-control (meaning he is not impulsive except in certain select circumstances). He tries to be brave. He tries to not manipulate and lie.

These characteristics are generally considered to be the good military virtues (there are also the bad military qualities, which have now pretty much overwhelmed the American military). I am not necessarily defending the military; I’m just pointing out that, ideally, what it embodies has traditionally been the best masculine virtues.

For that matter, these ideal masculine virtues run back to at least the Greeks, who referred to it as Stoicism. A Stoic, contrary to the common belief, is not someone who tries to have no feelings (a delusion also believed by those ignorant of Buddhism) but is someone who tries to achieve equanimity, peace and happiness amidst the turbulence in the world.

In other words, a Stoic has humility (meaning knowledge of his limitations), self-control (i.e. is not impulsive) and tries to be a rock who lets the chaos and disorder of the world flow past him without disturbing him. In other words, he has mental, emotional and physical discipline.

For that matter, the above qualities were the ideal of the Victorians, whom Neal Stephenson wrote about extensively in his novel, The Diamond Age. Those masculine virtues of self-control, discipline and selected venting of impulsiveness allows societies based on them to achieve great intellectual, moral and financial wealth.

By the way, the Victorians were a reaction to the preceding age, which was the degraded one that Dickens wrote about in his novels. That decadent pre-Victorian age is what we’re repeating now, leading to the inevitable pendulum-like reaction of the Manosphere, which in its good aspect is an attempt to roll back the society-destroying evils of “feminism” and re-impose morals on which American society can thrive.

Here I will quote from The Diamond Age: “[H]umility and self-discipline…are moral qualities. It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation…”

The Greek word for humility is “sophrosyne.” It can be defined in two famous sayings: “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess.” The opposite of sophrosyne is hubris, or the belief that one is above the law (and that means more than anything else moral law, the one written on our own hearts).

It is always a good thing to have self-knowledge. It is also a good thing to not do things in excess – such as drug abuse, uncontrolled impulsiveness and devoting your life to seducing as many women as possible (I have, of course, seen these problems among women). The ancient Greeks also noticed that those who devote their lives to physical pleasure become degraded. It might take years, but it will happen.

As many have noticed before, men not only invented technology; they created civilization. They were the ones who realized what self-discipline and true humility leads to. They discovered the ideas of political and economic liberty, law, and religion. And ideas, as Richard Weaver wrote, have consequences.

Now, unfortunately, many men have abdicated their responsibilities. Or perhaps better yet, forgotten what they are, which is why they read the Manosphere blogs looking for guidance. They are looking for models and mentors. Ideas to guide their lives.

These bad things, again, are caused by the damaging interference of the State.

Men and women are mirrors of each other. When women don’t act like women, men mirror them and don’t act like men. And when men don’t act like men, women mirror them and don’t act like women. Since it is easier to sink than swim, each sex is bringing down the other – and therefore society with them.

The fact that the common definition of “Alpha” includes both what a man should be to have a good life and should not be because it will destroy his life is why it is a terribly confused definition, and is in fact a dangerous one. The main reasons are that the real Alpha has the good virtues of bravery, honesty, loyalty, humility and self-discipline, and the cad – selfish, irresponsible and childish – doesn’t have any of them.