Nick Land and Occam’s Razor have posted their reactions to Rod Dreher’s post in the American Conservative that stated that acknowledging biology is politically dangerous.
While I disagree with Dreher’s position, I think that he’s correct in saying that, were the USG to admit that much of its post-WWII domestic and international policy have been built upon shams, and that much of the social science staff throughout the West consists of sham artists, that there would be stunning levels of political disruption, which would probably spiral into civil conflict, perhaps even civil war.
Rarely do people involved in maintaining a major political lie admit that is what they’re doing. Writers like Dreher consciously suppress conflict in the present by concealing valid information, but by doing so, they guarantee a far worse ‘correction’ of the social structure later. Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile explores this theme, and comes out against the maintenance of shams, because it’s a highly destructive practice in the long run.
The ‘Austrian economic calculation problem’ method of thinking also impugns this strategy as a sort of method of intellectual price-fixing — doomed to fail, certain to cause errors to multiply, and to spark deadly conflict in the future.
Land makes light of Dreher’s fears, and Occam attempts to calm his anxiety. Pretending as if the breakdowns of the various progressive lies will be largely benign for everyone involved isn’t a realistic prediction.
While forbidden knowledge doesn’t directly result in ‘genocide’ (a recent term that only entered wide use post-war), the retaliatory rage and political dysfunction that results from the unwinding of countless lies does often result in political dissolution and war.
The result is not likely to be Auschwitz redux, however. The term ‘genocide’ and the United Nations diplomatic framework put in place to freeze in place American hegemony for-ever-and-ever only came into being after a series of genocides all over Europe perpetrated by all sides of the war that created all the homogeneous nations west of the iron curtain.
That Hitler was able to conquer the liberal Weimar Republic, sympathetic as it was to the ideals of 1789, is more an argument against the ideals of 1789 than it is against anything that might threaten the preservation of those ideals. The modern American state is probably closer to the revolutionary idyll than Weimar was, so I understand Dreher’s hitlerexia nervosa. Building a social order that’s resilient to Hitlers seems more sensible than attempting to deal with every little corporal that decides to declare himself first among brothers in a nation of brothers. The 1789 way of doing things is demonstrably vulnerable to such degenerative modes, as was broadly understood in the West since antiquity.
As soon as a clear and permanent majority develops under democracy, some variant on Napoleon/Hitler/etc. is inevitable. This is one of the reasons as to why we see such a scramble by minority groups in democracies to hamper majority populations and to ally with other minorities — they know that permanently losing the kulturkampf means permanently losing the kampf proper.
Majority rule so often means minority expulsion or mass-murder that it’s practically axiomatic; derivable via first principles or plain observation.
This is the situation that the former American majority finds itself in, and why the Dark Enlightenment finds purchase now and not ten yeas ago, whereas the other mind-virus strains from which its thinkers have synthesized it could not infect more than a small portion of the population, most of whom were cranks with compromised mental immune systems anyhow. Now that the stakes are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, politics looks less like sport and more like a battle for survival.
It’s a pathetic accident of history and low education standards that ‘democracy,’ which confers power to the majority, has been somehow identified with friendliness to minorities.
To the extent that the Dark Enlightenment dismantles popular lies at a faster rate than was possible before, it’s not a benign force — from the perspective of the people who make comfortable livings off of those lies, like most of the people living in Washington DC. It may even be dangerous to the millions of upstanding, productive people who have adapted to a high parasite load, even if they don’t enjoy all the squirming tapeworms sharing their intestinal tract.
The Dreher position, which is more widely shared than most will admit, is ‘responsible’ to the present, but destructive to the future of more than 20 years from now, in the same way that the lies of the ’68ers caused immense destruction as those ideas hardened into opportunistic demotic policy.
In this, the superior position is the one which accepts a temporary period of strife to make more durable and organic orders possible. While yes, this will devastate the lives of millions of people (just as the implosion of the USSR hollowed out millions of sad lives), it’s preferable to the alternative of catastrophic collapse.