Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Be Wary of Crowds

Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People
Delacroix – Liberty Leading the People

The default mode of political organization within democracy is the ‘movement.’ Movements exist to either form political parties or to influence them to develop certain policies.

Movements form when superior men conspire to create them. They require minimal leadership talent to start (because most democratic people will follow a socially dominant man who takes initiative without reservation). The goal of a movement is to create a bureaucracy, which will then reward the leadership with power, money, and sinecures to reward to their cronies.

Even anti-democratic ‘movements,’ like fascism, fall into this social organization out of habit and by following the examples conditioned into them by early education. As children, citizens (even those who attend private school) are first socialized into the adult world by listening to lectures among their ‘equals.’ Disorganization and informal social groupings are standard in the academy.

It doesn’t need to be outside of schools, but habits require strength to break. By default, we’re conditioned to form crowds.

It’s in social organizations that need to actually achieve goals (like corporations and the military) that the law permits us form hierarchy with defined social roles. Without this measure of laissez-faire authoritarianism, we’d all be forced to return to the trees within months.

On the internet, groups tend to fall prey to the ‘eternal September‘ effect. Open entry into a group leads to a decline in value, as the leadership loses the ability to maintain a coherent society as numbers increase without regulation.

This is because open entry is a moronic principle by which to run any organization. No corporation on Earth — even staffed by the most incompetent idiots — operates on an open entry policy for hiring. To state that all that’s needed to join an organization is to bleat an intention to join, and perhaps to fill out a perfunctory form, is to say that the organization’s values are worthless.

It’s because of this that it’s wise to be skeptical of any banner that anyone can hoist. Exclusivity marks value worth defending.

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How Hierarchy is Kinder to the Poor Than Equality

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The poor have no place in an egalitarian society. To the intellectual, each poor person is a problem. The poverty of a neighborhood is something to be solved through the grand plan of men like him. Intellectuals see poverty as a mere lack of material goods, combined with ignorance due to lack of education and unfair bigotry directed towards them.

In America, LBJ even declared a ‘war on poverty,’ which we fight each time we receive a paycheck or pay one to an employee. The notion is that with the right combination of transfer payments and bureaucracies, what makes the poor poor can be eliminated, and everyone can exist on more equal social and economic terms with one another.

Egalitarianism turns poverty into something like a chronic medical condition that requires a treatment or a cure. This denies the poor the self-respect that might otherwise be accorded to them were society allowed to recognize their true position in life relative to others. Further, by treating poverty like a disease, superior people lose their sense of obligation to provide personal leadership and guidance to the impoverished members of society.

Because inequality is an inescapable factor of nature, one method that the West has used to maintain its egalitarian principles while still hiring gardeners, shoeblacks, and nannies is to import people from foreign lands to serve. These workers, not formally Americans (or British, German, Swedish), can be treated as lower status without risking much social opprobrium. After all, since they just arrived in the country, most are uneducated, which means uninitiated into the egalitarian collective, so there’s a ready-made, socially approved reason to hire them for servile positions.

Meanwhile, many people within these egalitarian societies who are mostly fit for work as maids, cooks, drivers, privates, butlers, shoeblacks, seamstresses, nannies, nursemaids, maids, and handymen instead go to university, where they spend four years learning to be leftists, and then graduate indebted, but with too many airs to work in the servile positions to which they’re fit.

As has happened over time, when the egalitarians spend more time around their imported servants, they come to empathize with them, demand equality and citizenship for them, and thereby reduce the coherence of the civilization, as incompatible cultural strains multiply, and the need for a synthetic national culture becomes more acute to treat the issue.

Many of the jobs that the unintelligent are fit for are so marginal as to be illegal due to wage restrictions. This doubly pushes the ‘enlightened native’ population into idleness and discontent. A generation of former students, who expected to become bureaucrats, instead turns rotten.

Sedition multiplies, the state becomes unsustainable, and civil disorder becomes inevitable. This is the current situation in Europe, South America, the United States, and even parts of the Middle East and Africa. Modernity has written more checks than it can cash.

In contrast, hierarchical societies hold that there’s no shame in service: that it can be a source of pride, of character, and social acceptance. A custodian may not own much more than a cottage, or a room in his lord’s house, but at least he belongs to someone in a place that respects him for who he is and doesn’t attempt to push him to become something he’s not capable of being. Civilization needs strong hands and obedient minds to continue itself, to be whole, beautiful, and true to its people.

Further, a common religion shared between the high and the low (while still recognizing their essential differences even in spirit — spiritual equality is a heresy) keeps all portions of the hierarchy within appropriate limits.

The converse of the low person uncomfortable with his status is the high person who feels a duty to equalize society, per the intellectual fashion of the era. The American caste that Moldbug calls the Brahmins does this for a living: agitating for equality, and earning a cut of the enormous transfer payments that shuffle from person and institution to person.

The notion that the better classes have obligations to the poor, and that the poor have obligations to their superiors, combined by legal rights appropriate to each, is a self-stabilizing system. Since many of the factors that separate rich from poor are determined by nature and fortune, it’s a sanity check for everyone involved to relate to one another appropriately as befits our real capabilities and duties to one another. Even aristocrats revert to the mean, and all great houses crumble to nothing over time, which humbles all of us.

Extending these rights and duties beyond what a sovereign can provide — the tendency of universalism — is another topic, but I won’t get into it here. Suffice to say for now that law isn’t free, each legal right has a cost, and since we want to preserve civilization, we ought to use all the mechanisms that worked in the past to reduce the costs of law enforcement as much as possible.

Demotism, in contrast, divorces rights from obligations as much as possible. Both rights and obligations multiply without relation to one another, haphazardly, buffeted by the whims of conspiracies and mobs alike.

The poor will always be with us, so it’s our duty to provide them with dignified, stable, respectable roles of service within civilization. None of this particularly changes with high technology at the current time, and my views wouldn’t change even with a sudden increase in technological development. I share Aristotle’s view that advanced machines obviate the need for slaves in many contexts in which they were needed previously, but there are still countless unskilled and semiskilled jobs that go unmade due to vile egalitarianism and the laws motivated by that ideology. From my experience, the people who use the ‘technological unemployment’ excuse tend to be both cowards and egalitarians.

For more on this topic, please take the time to read Liberty or Equality by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

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Can Neoreaction Avoid Libertarian HIV?

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Patri Friedman, noted ex-polyamorist and Seasteading pitchman, has taken an interest in creating a ‘politically correct’ neoreaction.

Jim writes often about entryism — the corollary of Robert Conquest’s second law of politics as retold by John Derbyshire. Reproducing it here:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will
sooner or later become left-wing.

This has been evoked regularly on Twitter and elsewhere with reference to libertarians, who themselves have been infested by essentially left wing thinkers of various kinds. Part of this owes to the character and works of Murray Rothbard, who is libertarianism embodied in all of its aspects, good, bad, and ugly.

As retold by Stephan Kinsella, the word ‘libertarian’ dates only back to the 1950s and 60s, as Leonard Read and Rothbard tussled with each other for leadership of what remained of the classical liberal remnant after World War II.

The muddled nature of libertarianism today owes to the muddled nature of its beginnings in excerpt from an article by Dean Russell:

Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.” Webster’s New International Dictionary defines a libertarian as “One who holds to the doctrine of free will; also, one who upholds the principles of liberty, esp. individual liberty of thought and action.”

Russell, with a boy’s innocence, attempts to unite liberals, conservatives, and classical liberals under the same umbrella. While he stated overt opposition to leftism, the simplistic formulation of the ideology left open the entrances to anyone who could figure out the clever rhetorical crannies into which leftism could sneak into.

Rothbard himself allied with the new left during the 1960s, establishing a journal called ‘Right and Left.’ This strategy ultimately failed, because the left is insane and evil:

“To put it bluntly, the convention was a disaster. As Rothbard feared, many of the SDS libertarians were infected with extreme left- ism. One of the left-wing libertarians denounced “all academic economists” and the wearing of neckties as great evils which the libertarian movement should focus on destroying.”

It’s for this reason that Hoppe hews to the later Rothbard, in advocating for explicit rightism, to the exclusion of the leftists. It’s because, by bitter experience, his teacher taught him that the original formulation of ‘libertarian’ was doomed to incoherence and neutralization by the left.

This is rather serious. John Payne recounts

“Former Barry Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, who had been converted to anarcho-capitalism by “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” and conversations with Rothbard, but had drifted toward anarcho-socialism in the interceding year, sealed the conference’s fate when he spoke on Saturday night. Wearing Fidel Castro-style battle fatigues and a Wobblie pin adorning his hat, Hess roared out to the audience, “There is no neutral ground in a revolution. . . . You’re either on one side of the barricade or the other.” He proceeded to implore the crowd to join him in a scheduled anti-war march on Fort Dix the following day.”

Truly, there’s little that’s new in history.

Considering that libertarianism isn’t even a century old, and that it became subverted within its first two decades of existence, it’s sensible to avoid going down the same permissive & disorderly path that it did, to avoid suffering the same fate in the same manner.

The promiscuity of ‘libertarian’ as a term, and the promiscuous nature of many of its institutions, give it something a lot like Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but for an ideology. This is the case for all ideologies permissive to leftism, and to all ideologies that appeal to the leftist psychology, defined as it is by ressentiment, which popular followers of libertarianism are prone to (as criticized frequently by Hoppe).

The solution to this is to not hop onto any leftward social trend that appears merely because it’s both growing fast and dislikes the current government. Discriminating against people that would create a kinder, gentler, more politically-correct neoreaction doesn’t mean destroying them — just ensuring institutional separation and clarity of language.

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