I spent a good portion of my Saturday shelling nuts and listening to lectures.

This one is a piece that most of you can benefit from. This comes from Theodore Dalyrymple, author and chronicler of the decline of Britain in publications like Taki’s Magazine and the Telegraph.

Although today, you might think that Freud’s ideas are not in wide use, you would be mistaken. Freud and the psycho-cults which he inspired continue to have enormous influence on social mores, the practice of religion in America, and the course of professional medicine. Americans often speak in the language of Freud without knowing precisely where it comes from.

In rejecting the politics of the 20th century, it’s also critical to reject the false ideas at the core of those political developments. In the acute case of Freud, these ideas are likely to have had corrosive effects on your personal and social life. Marx is not that personal unless your family lived under Soviet or Maoist rule — but Freud has been much more corrosive and insidious.

It’s not even possible to begin to address the influence of the Frankfurt School, for example, on the course of the West without also tackling the baleful influence of Freud. Marxian ideas starved, tortured, & riddled bodies with bullets. Freud warped minds and spirits in more insidious ways.

It’s sort of a rambling post, but it probably communicates a lot of what many men are thinking, but not willing to express themselves.

From the conclusion:

Depending where you live, there are still plenty of nice American girls who want nothing to do with radical feminism. These girls want to get married and have families just like you do. Sure, odds are you’ll probably wind up getting raped in divorce court someday and losing it all, but the risk might be worth it. While they may not be as reliably submissive as their third world counterparts, American women at least speak the same language as you, grew up learning about the same heroes and possibly will have even watched the same cartoons as children(unless there’s a huge age difference and you’re robbing the cradle, in which case… good for you.) For low time preference individuals, the bond of shared history and common ancestry is too strong to be broken by the frivolity of modern feminist brainwashing and “interracial male bonding sessions.” At least, we hope it is, for the sake of our children and the world they will have to live in. Short of a massive alien invasion or diabolical female plot to take over the world, that’s unlikely to change.

Something like this has generally kept me away from expatriation over the last several years.

Part of it has to do with the fact that as much as I sometimes dislike American culture and politics, it’s still mine. This might be, also, a similar impulse keeps other people in unfathomably terrible and lowly little countries around the world.

I can’t really say that I’ve ever been that tempted by foreign women. Even when I was a good progressive about race, I just never felt much of any xenophilia. It’s really about the hair for me.

Xenophobe goes on to say:

The thing is, I simply don’t hate feminists enough to embrace multiculturalism. While radfems like to talk tough, at the end of the day they are more of a nuisance than anything. As soon as we collectively decide we’ve had enough of their crap, we can put them in their place whenever we feel like it.

Although feminists occupy many places of influence, in the world of everyday people, they have almost no influence. They influence the legal structure and the ambient culture, but most women that you meet about town have no inkling of real feminism beyond maybe a class or two that they attended in college. They exist in larger numbers in the major cities, but even there, they’re not all that prevalent in an absolute sense.

Most Americans, even among whites, don’t attend college. They receive little strong indoctrination. Even those that go to ‘good schools’ can be talked into or out of anything if you’re glib and persuasive enough.

The larger problems come from parenting, moral values, social groups, and expectations. While it may be trivial to argue most women into anything you want her to believe as soon as you have her hooked, it’s not nearly so easy to get that same person to actually be all that useful as someone who could be an effective wife and mother. And after the marriage, she has every legal incentive to cook your goose in court.

Most of them, even the ones with nominal religious belief, have been partying (a funny euphemism) since their early teens or before. The lifelong acculturation that used to go in to producing cooperative family life is not present any longer. For that matter, neither is the career orientation or work ethic that used to be instilled into American men. Standards have declined across the board.

It’s less the ideology, and more the passive absorbers of the ideology who cause the problems for most people. Those people have to be the ones whom you harden against the message, more so than angling to debate the people creating that message. It’s less the ideologue, and more the girl who can’t cook and has bad manners. The latter is endemic. The former is a tiny, loud minority.

This came up as a topic during the recording of an upcoming episode of Ascending the Tower, when we were discussing the recent flailing in American foreign policy compared to other eras.

We have to consider that, while declining standards in American universities have been a major issue for more than a century, that they declined at a far faster rate to accommodate the flood of female and multi-racial students. For modern students, the international makeup of the student body also can’t be ignored — especially at elite schools, foreign born Chinese are often prized for high test scores and paying full freight tuition.

A common experience you’ll see recounted among female baby boomers is that they saw themselves as “challenging the glass ceiling” and needing to show that they were the intellectual equals of men.

In subsequent generations, we tend to see many descriptions of young men as being disengaged from their studies, and shunning the mixed-gender university in ever increasing numbers. Increasing diversity is coincident with declining objective academic standards, despite the pretenses towards meritocracy. In the popular press, men tend to be denigrated as stupid and lazy for, by and large, disliking bureaucratic education.

These students of diminishing knowledge get funneled into the commanding heights of the American bureaucracy and its political machinery. While bureaucracy has some structural defects that tend to make the institutions struggle to reach their goals (and grade inflation is a symptom of bureaucratic decay).

The Ivies and Ivy-like institutions like Georgetown are supposed to be providing gold-quality stamps, with some idiosyncratic quirks for each school. The stamp means less each year, especially with humiliating events like “mattress girl” resulting in hoaxes which reflect poorly on the educational and social standards at these institutions.

What this just means for states and state-like institutions that want to compete with America is that all you have to do is to be more politically effective than the incoming generation of majority-female-and-feminine-presenting American leaders. By and large, we know that they are:

• Indifferent to classical learning
• Are of low moral caliber (in loco parentis was abandoned decades ago)
• Are mostly secular
• Are profoundly ethnically fragmented, sometimes into groups that don’t even speak the same native language
• Have no common culture
• Are attracted to academic fads that tend to be limited to the US

Like anyone in charge of any elite institution will tell you, everything that the institution does flows down from the quality of the people which you admit into that institution. While these schools are picky about who they admit, and many of them tend to be on the higher end of the IQ scale, a high innate intelligence will often go to waste without proper cultivation of character or the enforcement of high standards in terms of academics and moral conduct.

This isn’t a terribly high bar to jump over, despite the enormous endowments which rival the treasuries of many significant nation-states.

So, to trump the US as it exists today, you just need to follow the traditional path to success, which is to raise overall social standards (it helps to start with the leadership) until it’s obviously much better than in the rival countries.

It’s much better to focus on reforming the leadership class than on the lower people (despite Charles Murray’s insistence on prole-shaming), because there are real problems at the top, and there are far fewer of them to convince. Loss aversion is also a powerful motivator, and certainly, America’s contemporary polyglot leadership class has much to lose, and many of them are destined to lose a lot from the developing implosion of America’s international influence — especially in war and finance.