Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Limits of Moral Argumentation

It’s sometimes observed that different political orders flow down from different moral understandings. The facile conclusion to draw from that is that changing the moral beliefs within a society will then change the political order. Since politics is war at a low violence threshold, this implies that it’s possible to alter the political order through the use of rhetoric alone, without resort to force at any level.

Superficially, this can be true in certain situations. When the USSR fell, yes, there were some tanks driven around near the Kremlin, but it was more of a demonstration than an actual instance of combat. Rhetoric and internal dissolution eventually made the Soviet state untenable, as the lack of belief in Marxism-Leninism lead to the incapacity of that state to defend itself with the vigor that it had shown in decades past.

In contemporary politics, the end of the Soviet Union has out-sized relative importance, and often, observers and political actors tend to draw too many lessons from it which are not necessarily appropriate.

In contrast, when Hungarian students revolted in 1956, expecting eventual armed assistance from NATO, Khrushchev showed no pity in suppressing the rebellion. He had no pity because at that time, patriotic feelings and moral legitimacy were still high within the Soviet states. Further, the westerners were not willing to go to war in support of their stated beliefs about universal liberty — the desire for self-preservation won out over the desire to promote democratic-universalist values.

In this case, radio broadcasts from American intelligence encouraged the Hungarians to revolt, but the military support that they expected did not materialize. In a rhyming event, something similar happened at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba — the military support for the planned invasion was withheld at the last moment. This is a typically American political error, arguably deriving from pervasive beliefs that spiritual force trumps material force, and that with enough of one, a people has no need for the other.

Although Americans would not typically call their moral beliefs about the liberating power of democracy to be spiritual, it is a spiritual belief nonetheless.

The notion that the promotion of moral values is a risk-free activity that can never lead to violence is completely false. Promoting a competitive system of moral values is a whole lot more dangerous than “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” The latter can be a harmless prank, but the growth of an alternative value system reliably leads to war. Indeed, when the American State Department helped to overthrow the governments of Egypt and the Ukraine recently, enormous political violence resulted in the aftermath of the spread of the new moral teachings.

Similarly, in the US itself, the new morality of Civil Rights lead to waves of crime, disorder, and terrorism, not to mention a wildly expensive (in moral and material terms both) reaction, termed the ‘War on Drugs.’

Moral entrepreneurs tend to be furtive, claiming that they are not violent people, but we see from history that they are much more dangerous than fighting men themselves, because when they are successful in establishing a new moral order, physical conflict typically results. Moral entrepreneurs, similar to economic entrepreneurs, seek to re-arrange the moral basis of society.

The common portrayal of such people as inherently peaceful is spurious, because encouraging moral change, if successful, usually results in physical conflict.

This is because when there are differing conceptions of moral order within a single state, that state becomes destabilized — as Lincoln cribbed from the Bible, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” It must be split into multiple properties, or the people living in the residence will fall to violent squabbling. Even after the separation, violent squabbling is likely.

This dynamic helps to explain why America’s educational and press organs are so frantic in promoting the new morality of non-morality — when too many people are left behind in the push towards a fully Satantic moral system, the state itself must become destabilized, as too many people fail to comply with its directives, and the ability of its administrators to govern depletes. To the extent that the people prove themselves unwilling or unable to adopt the new morality is to the extent that they become enemies of the state.

This dangerous dynamic was well understood by the American founders, which was why they built legal structures designed to permit some measure of moral pluralism within certain legal limits.  Private sovereignty was permitted in the context of obedience to certain public restrictions, within a framework of the culture of English Protestantism. Given that that cultural framework has been broken, and the legal framework weakened to the point of nonexistence, the struggle for moral supremacy becomes more severe.

Whereas previously, under the more Constitutional order, there was space for some private moral sovereignty (households and communities could make important moral distinctions), there is now a pervasive demand to keep up with the rapid pace of moral disruptions emanating from the capitols of democratic politics and media influence.

Those that fail to keep up with the pace — even if they are bumpkin television chefs held guilty of violating the new moral laws in past decades — find themselves the target of retaliatory lawsuits, employment discrimination, and public defamation.

The funny thing about the leftist ratchet is that a person becomes wicked by simply maintaining yesterday’s beliefs, by not keeping up with the rapid pace of moral disruption. This must inevitably lead to physical conflict, which is generally why many  everyday Americans, frightened by the idea of fighting, stay glued to their TV sets, to ensure that they stay within the realm of the acceptable opinion.

In this the leftists are the real traditionalists, doing their best to resurrect the chaotic ways of living from the dead tribes of eons past, whom they idealize, versus the relatively recent moral innovations of the Christian culture which they have mostly succeeded in undermining. Cthulhu’s music provides the background track to their dreams, pulling them down towards the ancient cities without names, generating an irresistible attraction to forgotten rituals performed according to laws written in incomprehensible runes.

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Kill the Kulaks

[ED: Listen to a reading of this essay by playing the embedded video above.] 

Why have America’s leading organs of influence decided to demonize white, Christian men as the most uniquely evil group in the history of the world? Why is it necessary for students, especially of that ethnic group, to unpack their invisible knapsacks?

The answer is that these men are routinely targeted for politically-empowered looting, usually by their own wives, with the assistance of the state. This looting would not be morally palatable without a pervasive myth of uniquely white male evil. It would otherwise trip the moral alarms that might otherwise come up when dissolving a family for personal gain.

The growth in anti-white-male op-eds in influential magazines makes more sense when you look at the real lives of middle class men, which are often marked by either divorce or threatened divorce, which typically involves an enormous transfer of valuable assets from the man to his ex-wife. This expropriation would have been regarded as execrable even just 50 years ago, but with the assistance of a powerful guilt-myth, it goes down much easier.

The pre-existing myth can be used by lawyers and others to sway judges to the favor of their clients. If white men are assumed to be uniquely wicked, it becomes easier to weave their reported actions (whether true or false) into a legal case against that man, and then to use that case to deprive him of his children, assets, and honor.

The irony here is that men like Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of the Progressive party, were imperialistic white supremacists. However, this was within the framework of the ‘white man’s burden’ of uplifting the other races of the world. This part has stayed within the Progressive platform, and arguably the supremacy plank has stayed also, but in the form of creating a uniquely flagellating class, trained into self-loathing. The tragicomic part of this is that the successful uplift of African-Americans that TR brags about as a unique American success has been reversed by future more aggressively progressive policies.

The flagellating guilt complex is seen as furthering the international-uplift mission, but the Christian aspect has, in large part, been bumped off. The humility before God has become humility before the diversity instructor. The Fall from Eden has become the fall from a murky fall from racial grace. The space in life that would have been allocated towards the worship of God has instead been allocated to the hatred of the White race, although this co-exists simultaneously with a proclamation that race is a social construct that has no bearing on anything temporal.

Without Satan and the demons as scapegoats, White men and their pallor do a great job as stand-ins as the source of the world’s great historical and contemporary evils. The narratives catalog all the purportedly unique historical crimes of the White devil, and then close with some argument to seize the assets of that class, often combined with a demand for the denigration of that entire category of person.

It is not entirely useful to make the comparison to Nazis and their assignment of anti-Jewish math problems and the like in schools, because this program of retaliation is seen as a corrective for those sorts of things, in the same way that the Nuremberg trials were one-sided against the Axis, while ignoring the pervasive and open attacks on civilians by the Allies, in which civilian body counts were seen as success indicators.

It might be funny to bring up the Turks and how they got rid of the Armenians, but most people are unfamiliar with that, and in any case, unlike in the 16th and 17th century, ‘Turk’ is not a byword for ‘bad person’ — ‘White’ is. That is the cultural context in which the educated American classes are operating in. Reforming the image of the Kulak is not easy when every day, all the educated people learn that to hate the Kulak is to get in good with the authorities.

So, what is a Kulak to do? For one, you should take the language denigrating your ethnic group seriously, because calls for asset seizures are always presages to calls of physical liquidation. Once your liquid assets are seized, it is necessary to take your tough-to-move assets, and when you have nothing left to give, you are useful either as a slave or as a dead body.

If the moral trend can be reversed, by openly contradicting the story of [insert group here]’s perfidy, then good on you, but typically, once a state has begun the scapegoating process, it finds itself unable to back down from it — it has to see it to its logical conclusion. Physical resistance usually never occurs, because actors within states only begin these sorts of widespread demonization programs if there is unlikely to be any real physical resistance to it.

Similarly, whining slogans about ‘white genocide’ are meaningless when that sounds like a great idea to the people who want to expropriate you. The guilt-narrative is that White Christians are uniquely responsible for the post-1945 crime of genocide, and that retaliation is more than fair play. That chatter only works if they are actually amenable to that moral argument, and in fact, they think it would be a great thing, and have indeed cheered on such operations in countries like Rhodesia and South Africa.

Memorializing the Communist leader Mandela is practically mandatory in the US, just as veneration of various Communist revolutionaries was mandatory in the USSR.

No one cares — that, in fact, only enhances the support for the policy on the opposing side. In the same way that telling Turks that they are naughty for getting rid of the Armenians, the left just grins and laughs when you tell them that they are doing what they want to do, what they plan to do, what they are openly proud of talking about doing.

The cheeky proposal is to make like previously successful mass-exiles and to negotiate deportation between the state that wishes to get rid of the host population, and a state that could make use of it. The exile of the Huguenots from France to other Protestant countries throughout Europe is a good example of this sort of relatively peaceful ethno-religious cleansing. The more serious proposal is to break up the United States, due to incompatible moral visions of society among the differing members.

In this way, you could separate the states between those that believe Whites are demons whose sin requires punishment on this Earth, and those who believe that Whites are men to be judged by God and perhaps by other men when the time calls for it.

Much like Stalin rewarded journalists and minor authors with high prizes for authoring tracts against the Kulaks, our contemporary authorities award such prizes for demonizing our Kulaks. None of this will make much sense without a good understanding of the greatest, most terrible man of the 20th century, and this biography is a wonderful place to start.

Being able to credibly threaten this would be the only thing that could even begin to derail the de-Kulakization program in place. Once the authorities can no longer promise worthwhile prizes and status in return for mouthing words of hatred towards the White devil, the words will stop being spoken with nearly as much authentic fervor.

We should learn from history that negotiation with the terror is not possible — that is the road to the fate of men like the Girondists, moderates exterminated by the Jacobins. Taking the symbolic meaning of language seriously is important, because people must use strong symbols to arrange any project, either great or terrible.

When the left says that they want to expropriate you (and later kill you) in increasingly less subtle terms, they are being entirely serious, and the dumbest mistake to make is to treat it as idle talk. They mean what they say. They will do what they say as soon as they have the political will and the numbers to execute it. That could be a long time, but it might not be, either.

Also, to think that you can deflect the hatred towards some other subclass of Kulak is folly, because you’re next, even if that succeeds.

In the contemporary sense, just as historically, the way to avoid the de-Kulakization is to re-align yourself with the state and against the Kulaks. If you could credibly be mistaken for a Kulak, you instead loudly proclaim how much you hate Kulaks, and how willing you are to assist in their expropriation.

A defense can be mounted in a secure state, but it can’t be  mounted within a state that is entirely oriented against you. Finland withstood the Soviet invasion, but the states which were already in the Soviet orbit left the gates unlocked, and gladly accepted absorption. During the civil war in Spain, towns purged and counter-purged one another until the borders were clear — the secular Bolsheviks versus the Catholic Francoists.

Even then, people caught on the wrong side of the internal border were killed by their friends and neighbors, often with crude farm tools in barbaric rituals.

This even of course has occurred in recent times under American supervision — similar mass-killing of civilians is going on as I write this in Ukraine and New Russia. Ethnic cleansing famously occurred under hapless US supervision in Iraq, amassing an enormous body count. The American press is uniform in either glossing over these murders of civilians or in lauding them as necessary.

It is not so much of a jump to say that the same governing class that did not bat an eye in those wars would not bat an eye to do the same domestically, at least following a crisis of significant magnitude.

It’s not wise to trust in moderate political parties to brake the success of the neo-Jacobin left, because moderate parties are the first ones to go in crisis, under pressure from both sides.

Of course, none of this will make any sense if you are totally unfamiliar with the history of the left, especially in the 20th century. The rhetoric will seem benign because the symbols that they use for certain things are going to appear benign, rather than containing murderous intent. The normalcy that you have experienced for most of your life will be what you expect to experience for the foreseeable future, because you don’t have the records of others stored in your head, warning of such things.

In the same way, when people talk about ‘socialized medicine,’ you are going to have an entirely different emotional reaction to it if you know that Soviet doctors dumped dying patients out in front of hospitals to make their statistics look better than if you are wholly ignorant of that anecdote.

This is why it is often so difficult to make what should be an alarming historical parallel argument with regards to the bloody history of the left — contemporary people have been trained into fearing the ‘Brown scare,’ but not the far more dangerous ‘Red scare.’ They feel calm when they should feel alarm. They dismiss language that they should take seriously until precisely the moment before language commands action.

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Scattered Graduates

The general difficulty in talking about ideas and culture in America partially derives from the abolition of fixed curricula in higher education. Without reference to a common set of books, without an objective definition of what it means to be educated, makes it so that discussion between strangers must fall to some lowest common denominator that all parties can comprehend.

Because of this, you often wind up with people talking around one another, in which both parties have bad mental models of what’s going on with the other person, because they both have such wildly different backgrounds. A reference to an important work or thinker is likely to be misunderstood in discussion, because it’s likely that one party or another has never even heard of it, or is only familiar with it in the abstract.

Further, because of the meaningless specialization of the last century or so, different schools of thought which cover the same topic may have entirely different methodologies and sets of jargon. The academics prize the development of new ‘discoveries,’ no matter how trivial, and reward originality even when the original work is either pointless or spurious. The arts and natural sciences, once unified under the humanities, have instead been balkanized and fractured.

In the world outside of academia, the arts and sciences are actually not fractured.

For example, software engineers in modern firms need to take into account market dynamics, aesthetics, user demands, and internal politics within their organizations to actually produce usable software. They coding part makes up a minimal portion of the labor-hours of a senior level engineer, who will typically be bumped into a political position which requires political-economic skills in addition to technical mastery.

High levels of technical specialization are less necessary than breadth, because apart from a small number of superb individuals, humans need broad political talent, especially on large projects, much more than they need narrow technical excellence.

So in this the centuries-long call for ‘practical’ education is almost always in practice impractical, because it produces overspecialized people who are mis-trained into the bureaucratic needs of the academy rather than the flexible, dynamic needs of the natural world. The degrees rewarded by these academies, although portrayed as standards, are instead mixed standards, because the curricula are not even close to uniform, and neither are the standards by which they are awarded.

So, what should we hope for from higher education for men? We should expect far less of it, and reserve it for a far, far tinier number of people, and stop considering them centers for ‘research,’ because research divorced from the surrounding society tends towards yak-shaving. The primary goal should be to preserve classical learning. The secondary goal should be to prepare graduates for their future specialization. The tertiary goal should be to acculturate the leadership class, help them to make social bonds, and provide a common cultural framework that facilitates cooperation within that class.

Finally, there is no reason as to why most of these goals can’t be achieved by independent tutors for most people of means, or otherwise bypassed by non-institutional methods. Mercantile success has rarely matched up well with academic success. If you are concerned about the undue influence of money in politics, it’d be a good idea to revoke many of the privileges that universities currently enjoy with respect to intelligence testing, as they serve as legal proxies to insulate companies from accusations of discriminatory hiring practices.

It might also be sensible to restore the religious purpose of universities, to reduce the temporal power accorded to the graduates, and formalize that distinction.

Reducing the scale at which higher education is expected to perform also makes standardization less necessary. When there is less focus on standardization, people can evaluate education on a more qualitative basis. It also becomes possible to make the programs far more rigorous.

In terms of increasing your understanding of your fellow Americans currently, it’s good to recognize that you may have almost nothing in common in terms of intellectual background with the people that you speak with. There’s a solid chance, especially if they’re younger, that they are totally unfamiliar with anything substantive.

They may be well-read in some small portion of human knowledge, but it’s likely that they are not familiar with something that you’re talking about within what you know. You have to suss out their level of knowledge before a productive conversation can happen. It does no good to reference some complex work that they have never read, and providing a summary is not likely to meaningfully transfer knowledge to them, either.

To the extent that you do know a thing or two, your character, from the perspective of the other person, will be that you are a foreigner from the past, and your language is unlikely to be understood by the listener. Because modern newspapers, magazines, and websites must be written to the standard of a child. People are much more likely to recognize references from television shows than they are to books, because the typical American spends about three hours each day watching television.

According to Pew, the average number of books read is about five per year, but this is a bit distorted by the heavy readers. 54% read five or fewer. I write this blog with the assumption that you are in the category of 15% that read 20 or more books each year. And those quantitative measures of course mix in fans of pulp literature designed to be read quickly and in sequence.

The key problem with the modern scattershot education is that it makes it so that the people who have it have trouble coordinating with one another. They squabble and misunderstand each other continuously. They’re held together by weak, watered-down glue. They can’t handle competition from a unified opposition with a common high culture and reading of history. That doesn’t exist right now, but it could be reconstituted.

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