Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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The European ‘Refugee Crisis’ Is Funny

The reason why it’s funny is because the tired, hungry, greedy masses are just calling Europe’s bluff about universal human rights — which includes universal pensions for everyone, free housing according to the needs of the individual, and complete autonomy in social matters.

Adding to the comedy is that many of the people fleeing are fleeing the consequences of Washington’s haphazard foreign policy in Syria, Egypt, and Libya. The idea was to spread liberal democracy to those places. It seems that, having tasted a little democracy, the people prefer the German variety which provides a big payoff in return for nothing.

It puts state administrators in a difficult position. They can’t say that mere neediness or lack of formal citizenship is not enough of a reason to lavish welfare benefits on someone, because that same principle is what the native citizenry leans on in order to justify their entitlements from the state. Practically, it’s not possible for those states to provide the same level of benefits in perpetuity to everyone in the entire world who manages to hop onto a train in the Schengen area. But it’s important for the moral mythology that binds together post-modern culture to not just pretend that it’s possible, but to do everything to demonstrate that the people believe that the state can be a savior to the world — that it can end not just war but suffering also.

Liberals consider it responsible and humanitarian to say pious things about caring for the wretched masses, even though as individuals none of them bear either the cost or the responsibility for the health of their countries. It costs nothing to say something pious about the refugees, but it’s quite risky — and in some cases illegal — to stand up and say that states can’t provide free lunches to everyone everywhere in perpetuity with no conditions attached.

The other funny part is that Europe’s relative prosperity is entirely temporary. During and after World War II, Europe itself had a European refugee crisis. Without the interest or capacity to maintain and expand a market economy or to defend itself, it won’t be capable of serving its messianic illusions about itself and its ability to rescue all the unhappy people of the world.

The drama isn’t entirely about the refugees themselves and their problems. It’s more about maintaining the culture of radical autonomy and freedom without obligations (apart from high taxes and obedience to every niggling regulation) for the native Europeans. By saying that there is no difference between a German and a Syrian, it liberates the German from the obligations which previously characterized a German — namely the preservation of kinder, kirche, and küche, the obedience to the Christian moral order.

To the state, it’s more important to demonstrate that it doesn’t discriminate between citizens and potential citizens. From its institutional perspective, they’re all just social security numbers that need benefits checks. According to the beautiful models used by the economists, all of those numbers represent rational economic actors who will respond to incentives in a way that can be meaningfully averaged over an enormous population and large periods of time. Even if people don’t really believe this in their everyday lives or through their revealed behavior, it’s more important to act as if they believe, and one way to do that is to insist on swamping the continent with barbarians.

David Millibrand makes this connection directly:

Mr Miliband said there needed to be more “burden-sharing” and said UN rules drawn up after Britain took in thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis should now apply to Africans and Asians, Press Association reports.

Britain was at the forefront of writing the conventions and writing the protocols that established legal rights for refugees. A lot of the legal theory came out of the UK.
“The reasons we did so were good in the the 40s and 50s and they are good today. What applied to Europeans then should apply to Africans and Asians today. We cannot say UN conventions apply to one group of people and not to others.”

Of course, it’s an entirely different situation, and there’s no reason why governments should be bound by broad brush legal analogies. But taking in the refugees is important to these states because it maintains the legitimacy of the United Nations in particular and the new international system in general. Acting to preserve that international system would, itself, undermine the principles that it runs on.

The refugees are just taking Europe to the logical conclusions of its own philosophy. The Europeans say that all people are equal and that everyone deserves dignity delivered in the form of a welfare check. So the refugees show up and demand to be treated well by the Europeans, heedless that it’s impossible, with the Europeans being obligated to act as if they believe in the impossible.

The bureaucrat-heroes of the story believe that they have to stand up to populist rumbling in order to preserve ‘European values’ which only date to the mid-19th century and mostly consists of blue jeans, bad rock & roll, Yugo-style protected manufacture, and welfare checks.

What started as a noble dream of universal elevation has turned into a funny spectacle of aging Europeans dreaming of having their adult diapers changed by dutiful Syrians, who will contribute to the market economy — and the state social security system that lives off of it — in a way that they were never able to do in their home countries.

Most European countries are not going to be able to pull themselves out of the current course, in which the right thinking people invite foreigners to sack their own countries while preventing the organization of any defense.

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Humane, Egalitarian Terror

In an egalitarian world in which authority expects everyone to consider themselves the moral equals of everyone else on the planet, what critics call ‘pathological altruism’ is actually entirely rational.

If all people must be treated equally by the laws and their fellow men (except in certain aberrant situations in which the person is ‘sick’ enough to commit a crime that must be treated by the medical-prison complex), then the general population will tend to support humane causes which confer dignity and material support to all people from around the world. Statements like ‘All human life is sacred’ become non-objectionable, even official statements of dogma.

This developed in part due to the terror of World War II. If millions of people could be liquidated by bombs and industrial prison camps — because enemy lives were seen as equally worthless, with the people identified with popular governments — then ‘the people’ came to be rightfully concerned with supporting humane governments in the interest of avoiding retaliatory herd-culling.

So, when modern people participate in anti-war movements supposedly on behalf of oppressed foreigners, they may just be marching to save their own skins. Typical people under popular governments know that foreigners will hold them accountable for the actions of their governments in a way that would have been unimaginable in most periods of history in which there was a clear delineation between rulers and ruled, and war was often a more ceremonial-ritual affair than one of mass war between entire populations.

This leads to an international pacifism which seems a bit crazy in the light of the historical behavior of states. Decolonization as a foreign policy priority became important in part due to fear of direct competition between major states. Even competition between the American and Soviet blocs in the third world was muted for fear of provoking conflicts which could be more destructive than World War II.

The contemporary mass immigration issue in part owes its origins to the pervasive belief in egalitarianism and the desire of statesmen to avoid nuclear war. It becomes very difficult to maintain an official belief that all people are equal while telling billions of foreigners from the third world that they have no right to enter European countries which are themselves run as egalitarian benefit-houses for the general welfare.

The same intellectual classes that must be maintained to create that egalitarian pig-house, like aristocrats hungry for honor in war, have a strong tendency to extend their authority to the rest of the world, especially when they’re not restrained by others with more level heads. If you run out of domestic pigs for your utilitarian pighouse, you have to start importing them from somewhere else to keep the engines humming.

To say that some people are not equal to others is to undermine the entire basis of the postwar state, which uses humanitarianism to justify its right to rule in a similar way that old kings used theories of divine right to justify their authority.

Humanitarianism results from this terror of mass violence which the dream of popular government has always melted into. Attempting to excise this self-defense mechanism from popular government will just result in the usual bloody and pointless consequences. The root of the problem is the identification of the people with the state. When you make that separation, it becomes much easier to avoid such extreme religious commitments to the egalitarian upkeep of all peoples everywhere.

It’s a mistake to call this international altruism ‘crazy’ or a pollutant introduced by foreign agitators. It serves a purpose, the intellectuals who put it into place knew what they were doing, and Westerners tend to support it because it’s much less altruistic than it seems. It serves a self-protective purpose for the populations in question.

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Training a Bureaucratic Population

Mass education of populations, originally developed as a means of improving the military readiness of the population in an era of mass conscription, has developed into a tool for the preparation of mass bureaucratic labor forces. Because mass conscription has lost its military relevance and has lost the political support of Western elites, education has turned into a sort of vestigial bureaucracy mostly dedicated towards its own survival and expansion.

The modern education system developed as a response to the military and political innovations of Napoleon. In America, their character was also shaped by the desire of Protestant denominations to exercise social control over the burgeoning Catholic population.

Today, most mass education advocates downplay the original institutional motives. Instead, they talk about education being a combination of a way for children to become ‘fully-formed’ individuals, prepare them for the labor market, and make them into good citizens. On the left, it’s openly considered a means of inculcating right political thinking. The standards that educational institutions hold students to are bureaucratic standards rather than other standards. The chief expectation is that it will prepare people for a life of either paperwork or academia rather than manual or artisan work — especially as courses like home economics and shop class have fallen out of fashion and lost status.

Standard education is also a force for increasing labor fungibility — which is to say that one laborer of a certain academic class can be substituted for another, rather than different laborers being so specialized that it be reflected in their surname, as was the case before the era of mass mobilization.

What’s important about developing a bureaucrat is creating the correct emotional temperament. It doesn’t have much to do with cultivating excellence, because the presence of excellence tends to be disruptive to any bureaucratic setting, as excellence tends to be unpredictable and challenging to account for. Adult bureaucrats tend to complain a lot about ‘stress,’ in part because they have been trained from an early age to respond to distress resulting from verbal disapproval by authorities and peers. This takes a lot of repetitive operant conditioning, which is one of the top reasons why school curricula tend to be so repetitive and pointless on the surface. The purpose isn’t to create good calculators or a labor force aware of trigonometry, but to create a mass of people who are docile, predictable, and easily frightened into compliance.

The long term consequence of this has been an overproduction in clerk-like personalities. Because the state mandates that everyone go through clerk training, you wind up with a homogenous population marked by the character traits that have been historically associated with clerks — bad physical health, obedience to authority, intense respect for arbitrary rules, a weak aesthetic sensibility, an obsession with official approval, and androgyny.

Rather than a more diverse society in which people tend to judge one another based on their character or their ability to fulfill a given social role, everyone tends to be graded on how much of an ideal bureaucrat they are. This has become more pronounced as implicit pacifism has become the dominant way of life for most Western elites after World War II and especially after the antiwar eruption of the 1970s and 80s, which made mass military preparedness a low priority. As military pursuits have become more professionalized, the American republic has come to lean on first a ‘professional’ military, and now increasingly mercenary forces, which suggests that the popular republic is on the way out as a political form.

In a super-bureaucratic society, anyone who is not a bureaucrat tends to be regarded as a bad or unclean person without dignity and deserving of pity. This is one of the reasons why American thinkers tend to pathologize any mode of production or way of life that doesn’t involve a life of desk work. And even modes of life that don’t involve desk work need to be brought under the rule and regulation of desk-workers — physical space must be brought under ‘code,’ while mental work can be left relatively free — Peter Thiel says that this is the reason for the divergence in the rate of innovation between the ‘world of bits’ and the ‘world of atoms.’

The world of atoms is a dangerous, conflict-ridden world — it creates intolerable levels of anxiety for a hothouse bureaucrat-people who have been protected from physical discomfort and exertion from an early age. The physical world is dirty, unpredictable, and dangerous when compared to the climate-controlled office or classroom.

Everywhere that this mass education model has been in place for significant amounts of time, there is an oversupply in aimless bureaucrat-people without bureaucracies to stuff them into. Europe in particular suffers from ‘mass youth unemployment,’ especially among the educated, which is because they have been educated to fill slots in imaginary bureaucracies which both don’t exist and are uneconomical where they do exist. Because educational bureaucracies have watered down their own standards over the years to be able to accommodate the entire population, many of these aimless bureaucrats are also unsuited for any pursuit that requires much real expertise. Further, their mentalities have been shaped to expect a didactic, predictable, safe, office-existence in which people tell them what they need to ‘learn,’ and then they complete an assignment graded by a light hand.

In the third world and near-third-world, the problem is even more acute, as their economies aren’t even developed enough to support substantial bureaucracies, but their labor forces have been trained for an economy that doesn’t exist based on the faith that the supply of bureaucrats creates its own demand.

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