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Abusive relationships where the abuser is a transparently horrible monster don’t tend to last long, because it becomes obvious to the victim very quickly that they need to head for the door. The ones that last are the ones where the abuser is an adept manipulator, who is able to elicit sympathy and attachment in the victim while constructing a prison of mental narratives in their head.

The hardest of these to escape from is the “nice guy” abuser, the kind of abuser whose manipulations revolve around framing themselves as good and virtuous while squeezing the psychological noose on the victim tighter and tighter. These are difficult to escape because by design they are hard to recognize as abusive while you’re in them, even while you’re being drained of life, liberty and happiness to the abuser’s benefit.

To escape from a nice guy abuser, it helps to actively push for things that they can’t say no to without blowing their cover. If he presents himself as a woke and sexually liberated feminist, for example, you can begin disrupting the web of nice guy narratives by saying you’d like to stop having sex with him, or that you want financial independence. Anything they desperately want to control but can’t say “no” to without the nice face mask slipping off. Their desperate attempts to manipulate you back into the position you were in previously will expose them, and make it much easier to find your way to the door through the fog of manipulation.

The escape route from the nice guy fascism of liberal narrative managers operates in much the same way.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On Finding Our Authentic Selves: or, the True and the False in the Age of Rousseau

April 24, 2019

On Finding Our Authentic Selves: or, the True and the False in the Age of Rousseau

Being Part 3 of: Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness

It may be urged that every individual man carries, within himself, at least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal. –Friedrich von Schiller

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for itself; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being . . . . This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.–Karl Marx

As in every kind of radicalism the moment comes when any critique of the present must choose its bearings, between past and future. And if the past is chose, as now so often and so deeply, we must push the argument through to the roots that are being defended; push attention, human attention, back to the natural economy, the moral economy, the organic society, from which the critical values are drawn.–Raymond Williams[i]

First, a recap: I have proposed in Part 1 and Part 2 that Liberalism (which, recall, encompasses mainstream liberals and “conservatives”) does not have the conceptual resources to enforce or even encourage limits to consumption.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Decades of laissez-faire in Europe or the destruction of the middle class

April 23, 2019

Decades of laissez-faire in Europe or the destruction of the middle class

The EU elites pay homage to the laissez-faire of liberalism. They have been deregulating and “liberating” the market for 30 years. The Western governments also follow the philosophy and hardly intervene in the market. There is only one authority that can intervene effectively in the EU: the ECB. Globalisation since the 1980s, as well as the liberation of trade and human traffic, has enabled a violent increase in world GDP and the enrichment of corporations. For emerging economies such as India or China, this was an opportunity to get out of poverty. The liberals, however, who had a global village and human happiness on their banner, were basically interested in opening up the large Asian markets for their products. The tools of these elites, the World Trade Organization and the IMF, ensured that the middle class grew in emerging countries and thus the sales markets for European corporations. Their bosses would probably say: it is a pity that India and China are not allowed to join the EU.

Awesome! In any case, the West monetized Asia’s cheap labour in this way. At the same time, the middle class in China, India, South Korea and other tigers grew, but at the expense of the European workforce and middle class, which were virtually cut off from liberal profits. While corporate profits, and hence GDPs, skyrocketed, real wages did not rise and wealth was concentrated among elites and their lobbyists. This process was accelerated by the reforms of the 2000s: in Germany at that time the reforms of the left-liberal coalitions were supposed to create more jobs for people through unusual forms of employment (mini-jobs, temporary work, fixed-term contracts, etc.), which led to the fact that even today there are more and more people with low incomes in abnormal working conditions. “The middle class has shrunk from 48 per cent in the period 1995-99 to 41 per cent in 2014-15.¹⁾

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On liberal authoritarianism

April 14, 2019

On liberal authoritarianism

Bowing to the authority of experts saps the lifeblood of democracy.

If liberal principles seem threatened, it is only because they have been so successful. Look more carefully at American, British or European Union politics, and it is hard to find any viable alternatives to liberalism even in its supposed moment of peril. Donald Trump spews forth an endless stream of illiberal invective, but even as the US president, at one point holding majorities in both Houses of Congress, he has been unwilling or unable to roll back the liberal agenda in any meaningful way. Liberalism is, after all, based on the idea that individual liberty is the highest political virtue – and who doesn’t love liberty? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ These were the words that created the United States of America, and ultimately the global liberal order.

But over time the kinds of liberties demanded by liberals have evolved and expanded. They have shifted from a historical focus on ‘negative’ freedoms toward a contemporary focus on ‘positive’ rights. The philosophical construction of the concept of liberty is contentious and convoluted, but there is an obvious and intuitive difference between the simple freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution (freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the press) and the expansive rights promised by Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (rights to food, clothing, housing, medical care, social services, unemployment insurance and social security).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2

February 4, 2019

Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2

Ed. note: Part 1 of this series can be found on Resilience.org here.

The Resurgent Aristotelians: Hopkins, Fleming, Francis, and Holmgren

What then does a modern Aristotelianism look like? How might we reconcile his ideal of a singular, philosophically deduced definition of a “good life” with modern pluralism and heterogeneity, and the Liberal insistence on individual expressive self-creation? How do we define “good” or “excellence” without imposing an ideology or world-view on others who have their own? Who judges and according to what standards? If such a reconciliation is impossible, will we be required to make a difficult choice? Or is there no real choice at all?

These are the questions that I will be considering, and to which in some cases I will hazard an answer, as we go forward. To start that process, a quick recap may be in order. I have outlined a philosophical and political standoff between Liberalism and a still-being-defined conservative Aristotelianism using common terminology, but in a particular way that may also need clarification. I take Liberalism to represent the broad post-Enlightenment political and moral philosophy that has found its home in societies organized around a market economy, in which the primary location of agency, obligation, and desert or rights resides in the individual, who is freed from the “constraints” of “kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed,” and given over to seemingly voluntary “freedom of contract” (Polanyi, 171). Liberalism, as I use the capitalized version of the term, includes both political liberals or progressives of the sort that one might associate with Democrats, the Labor party, or Democratic Socialism, on the one hand, and “conservatives” (with scare-quotes) of the sort associated with Republicans, the British Conservative Party, and Christian Democrats, on the other.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Power Of Delusion

July 12, 2018

The Power Of Delusion

Way back in the olden thymes, I was going back and forth with a liberal acquaintance about a topic related to his cult’s recent fixation on diversity. I no longer recall the details of the conversation, but at some point he said, “The reason we moved to Arlington was so our child could experience diversity.” He was speaking of Arlington Massachusetts, one of the whitest places on earth. He had moved to honkeyville, but he had somehow convinced himself that it was a rainbow community of racial and ethnic diversity.

Being a polite person, I laughed in his face. There are limits to civility. I doubt he has ever forgiven me for not only laughing at the ridiculous claim, but then proceeding to point out the demographic reality of his new home. Arlington is roughly 85% white and 10% Asian and those Asians will be college professors and professionals. The tiny black and Hispanic population is clustered in one area of town. You can drive around the place all day and never see a brown face that is not riding a lawnmower or leaf blower.

Now, I have no doubt that my former acquaintance and his Progressive hive-mates glorified one another on a regular basis for their embrace of diversity. You can bet they swapped stories about how their kid had a black friend at school or about their supposed friendship with the Muslim coworkers. He actually tried that one on me once. Because it was nothing but virtue signalling, they never faced any push-back. In fact, they got nothing but confirmation from their hive mates, so their delusions were always reinforced.

When people outside the hive wonder how people in the hive can believe the nonsense about diversity and the blank slate, it is important to keep in mind the power of magical thinking.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Conservativism Now? Market Economies and the Liberal Anti-Culture

June 19, 2018

Conservativism Now? Market Economies and the Liberal Anti-Culture

The persistent purpose of my writing over the past decade has been to reflect in a hopefully complex manner on the sort of culture necessary to “solve” the climate and ecological crisis and create a truly sustainable way of life.

One of my main themes has been that neither liberalism (nor Liberalism[i] ) is suited to that task, in large part because it is fundamentally growthist, requiring for social stability the “simple requirement,” as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, of “the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” As David Fleming wrote, “starting some three centuries ago, the market economy has, with growing confidence, been the source and framework for a loose and easy-going but effective civil society and social order” (85). Expansion, growth, and the promise of limitless possibility are the foundation of the “effectiveness” mentioned by Fleming. Growth is the social glue that has held liberal industrial societies together, which is one of several connected reasons why we won’t address our relationship to our natural ecology by becoming “more liberal” or “more progressive.” Sustainability, then, is neither liberal nor progressive.

But, one might ask, why so persistent a critique of our liberal friends? After all, they (we) seem the most inclined to pay attention to the environment, and to show care and concern for our connection to nature. One might imagine a story about a contradiction in progressive attitudes, torn between concern and empathy, on the one hand, and growth and prosperity on the other, happily resolved as the empathetic side prevails in the face of growing awareness of the collateral damage of growth and prosperity. Perhaps.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Liberal Totalitarianism

May 8, 2018

Two young girls seen taking selfies during the feminist demonstration

Liberal Totalitarianism

It used to be an axiom of liberalism that freedom meant inalienable self-ownership. But liberal individualism seems to have been defeated by a totalitarianism that grew out of its own success at legitimizing the encroachment of branding and commodification into our personal space.

LISBON – It used to be an axiom of liberalism that freedom meant inalienable self-ownership. You were your own property. You could lease yourself to an employer for a limited period, and for a mutually agreed price, but your property rights over yourself could not be bought or sold. Over the past two centuries, this liberal individualist perspective legitimized capitalism as a “natural” system populated by free agents.

A capacity to fence off a part of one’s life, and to remain sovereign and self-driven within those boundaries, was paramount to the liberal conception of the free agent and his or her relationship with the public sphere. To exercise freedom, individuals needed a safe haven within which to develop as genuine persons before relating – and transacting – with others. Once constituted, our personhood was to be enhanced by commerce and industry – networks of collaboration across our personal havens, constructed and revised to satisfy our material and spiritual needs.

But the dividing line between personhood and the external world upon which liberal individualism based its concepts of autonomy, self-ownership, and, ultimately, freedom could not be maintained. The first breach appeared as industrial products became passé and were replaced by brands that captured the public’s attention, admiration, and desire. Before long, branding took a radical new turn, imparting “personality” to objects.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Macquarie: “This Is The End Of The Liberal Order… But At Least No Wars Yet”

March 28, 2018

Macquarie: “This Is The End Of The Liberal Order… But At Least No Wars Yet”

One week after Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass wrote an op-ed in which he waved farewell to the world he helped create, saying “Goodbye, Liberal World Order.” Then overnight, one of Wall Street’s most original, if underappreciated analysts, Macquarie’s Victor Shvets, gave his own unique take on this increasingly sensitive topic, injecting a dose of his unique pragmatism, in a note that one could say has a silver lining based on the title: “The end of liberal order: De-globalization drift; but no wars, yet.” Unfortunately, in a world in which almost every analyst sounds increasingly as skeptical as this website has been for the past 9 years, that’s as far as the optimism goes, as the following note reveals.

* * *

The end of liberal order: De-globalization drift; but no wars, yet

Investors continue to search for order; there is none

Investors seem to be striving to find order and pattern in a world that has neither. It is only human to search for patterns as without some order, there are no investment strategies. Instead, it becomes a world dominated by noise. Whether it is Trump tariffs, CBs (incessant debate – ‘too dovish or too hawkish?’) or Facebook and the role of social media, investors embark on a fairly meaningless task of calculating likely damages while trying to rationalize these actions within confines of conventional economic theory (trade is good; lack of it is bad). As a result, there is a growing chorus of shrill voices about onset of trade wars and/or need for deep regulatory changes. Similarly, any widening of spreads (however small) is almost immediately interpreted as the onset of major liquidity contraction. In a modern world of signals, noise & AIdriven re-pricing, reality is just ‘fake news’ (or basically facts you don’t like).

De-globalization is a fact of life; both trade & capital

Amongst all the noise, it is still useful to examine the latest trade news with some degree of realism. First, de-globalization has been a fact of life for more than a decade. There are already ~50,000 cases outstanding with WTO, with members introducing various anti-dumping duties & non-tariff measures. This is more than double the case load of ’08, and it is bound to grow exponentially; the US is not even the greatest offender. The liberal trade order had died at least a decade ago. Second, global economy is no longer driven by conventional trade, with elasticity close to one (trade to incremental GDP) vs. ~2x in ‘80s-90s.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Was Mises’s Main Case for Peace

January 30, 2018

This Was Mises’s Main Case for Peace

War only destroys. Peace, on the other hand, creates.

War is absolutely devastating. There is no dancing around that fact. Not only is it responsible for the loss of countless human lives, it also leaves an immeasurable amount of physical and emotional destruction in its wake.

The market has taught us that incentives work.

Opponents of war may decry war until they are blue in the face, begging those in power to consider its human costs. But these cries almost always fall upon deaf ears, as history has tragically demonstrated.

When it comes to politicians and war, the ends always justify the means, even when those means are human lives. And while human life is sacred, this truth alone has never been enough to convince global leaders to seek an agenda of peace rather than one of destruction.

But the market has taught us that incentives work. So instead of relying on a method that has not done much to deter war over the centuries, why not try an argument that plays to the interests of those in power?

As Mises explains in Liberalism, the most impactful argument against war comes in the form of a basic economic principle from which we each benefit: the division of labor.

He writes:

How harmful war is to the development of human civilization becomes clearly apparent once one understands the advantages derived from the division of labor. The division of labor turns the self-sufficient individual into the ζῷον πολιτικόν (social animal) dependent on his fellow men, the social animal of which Aristotle spoke.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Neoliberalism Was Never about Free Markets

October 14, 2017

From the beginning, it was about watering down classical liberalism.

One of the most accusatory and negative words currently in use in various politically “progressive” circles is that of “neoliberalism.” To be called a “neoliberal” is to stand condemned of being against “the poor,” an apologist for the “the rich” and a proponent of economic policies leading to greater income inequality.

The term is also used to condemn all those who consider the market economy to be the central institution of human society as being against “community,” shared caring, and concern for anything beyond supply and demand. A neoliberal, say critics, is one who reduces everything to market-based dollars and cents and disregards the “humane” side of mankind.

The opponents of neoliberalism, so defined, claim that its proponents are rabid, “extremist” advocates of laissez-faire, that is, a market economy unrestrained by government regulations or redistributive fiscal policies. It calls for the return of the worst features of the “bad old days” before socialism and the interventionist-welfare state attempted to abolish or rein in unbridled “anti-social” capitalism.

The Birth of Neoliberalism: Walter Lippmann and a Paris Conference

He warned of the complementary danger from “creeping collectivism” in the form of the regulatory and interventionist policies.

The historical fact is that these descriptions have little or nothing to do with the origin of neoliberalism, or what it meant to those who formulated it and its policy agenda. It all dates from about eighty years ago, with the publication in 1937 of a book by the American journalist and author, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), entitled, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, and an international conference held in Paris, France in August of 1938 organized by the French philosopher and classical liberal economist, Louis Rougier, centered around the themes in Lippmann’s book. A transcript of the conference proceedings was published later in 1938 (in French) under the title, Colloquium Walter Lippmann.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Restoring a Responsible ‘Conservatism’

March 12, 2017

Restoring a Responsible ‘Conservatism’

As much as “liberal” has become a dirty word in U.S. politics, the word “conservative” has been ripped from all its honorable traditions and redefined as a dangerous form of radicalism, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

What is it about the U.S. that makes it virtually the only country in the world where a political Left scarcely exists? We have a center Right — the Democratic Party. And we have a far Right — the Republican Party. In fact, just invoking the L-word “Liberal” can inflict quick political death. Yes, we’re safe from the Left here in America.

President Dwight Eisenhower delivering his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961.

Having such a stunted political spectrum is bad enough in itself. Still worse is the utter corruption of the word conservative. U.S. society has allowed the Republican Party to hijack the word, distort it and redefine it to its own ends, against its real meaning.

Isn’t it time for progressives to stop bashing their heads against the “liberalism” wall? Even the Democratic Party machine itself has barred the gates against progressive Democratic candidates. At this point, we need a rethink.

Wouldn’t it make more sense simply to yield up the term Liberalto all its many enemies? Put it in the cold freeze? In a doggedly right-of-center country, it might instead be smarter to seize back the term conservatism out of Republican hands, re-own it, and restore it to its true meaning.

Conservatism has a venerable history. The very word says a lot. It seeks to preserve and conserve fundamental human institutions, values, and lives in a precarious world.

Such as, for example, conserving the planet we live on, its forests, its water, its creatures, its bounty. It’s our only home. In fact, preserving and conserving the earth really is the ultimate conservative agenda. We have been given a stewardship over this unique and precious blue orb in the cosmos upon which all life depends.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

To confront power, one must first name it: Neoliberalism and the sustainability crisis

January 14, 2017

To confront power, one must first name it: Neoliberalism and the sustainability crisis

Recently, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ordered references to human-caused climate change be deleted from the state Deparment of Natural Resources website. Scientific findings concerning the natural world have become an embarrassment for the neoliberal world view. The answer in this case seems to be to delete them.

But what is the neoliberal world view and why is it important to understand? Paraphrasing theologian Walter Wink British writer George Monbiot explains that in order to confront power, one must first name it. The power Monbiot has in mind is the power of those enacting the neoliberal agenda. He explained in a talk last year that this ideology is embraced by leaders of both the political right and left throughout much of the world.

More disturbing is that few people are aware of this fact, and fewer still can define what neoliberalism is. It’s important to understand that this ideology animates much of the governing class on the planet. It’s important because this ideology almost completely opposes doing anything serious about climate change or any of the other environmental and social ills which afflict us.

First, neoliberalism should not be confused with modern-day liberalism which is generally associated with tolerant social policies and governmental intervention in and regulation of the economy. To the contrary, neoliberalism harkens back to 19th century classical liberalism. Neoliberals champion a return to laissez-faire economics by means of the privatization of public services and property, fiscal austerity, deregulation and, of course, free trade.

Neoliberalism was first enunciated in the late 1930s as a response to fascism and communism. Only later did neoliberal ideas find their full expression in the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the government of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. For obvious reasons neoliberal ideas have been championed and lavishly supported by wealthy corporate interests.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

True Free Trade vs. ‘Free Trade Deals’: The Misappropriation of Freedom

November 30, 2016

TRUE FREE TRADE VS. ‘FREE TRADE DEALS’: THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF FREEDOM

One of the most frustrating aspect of those trade negotiations that are sold as ‘Free Trade Deals’ is that they are not truly ‘Free Trade’ and, instead, they are just selective liberalisations that work to enrich particular interests, that increase the disparities between those who are endowed with political resources and those who are not, and that work to foster global, systemic trade imbalances (whether that be frustrating, persistent trade deficits or gross trade surpluses). Of course, this leads to advocates of True Free Trade to have a bad name despite the fact that the purist position is the most morally humaneand efficient means through which to alleviate global poverty, improve peoples’ welfare and tackle corporatist privileges.

Free Trade, broadly speaking, in the purest sense of the term would involve a situation where there are no tariffs, subsidies, quotas and significant trade restrictions such as licensure restrictions (which all work to unduly restrict exports and imports and, thereby, impede the flow of goods, services and income globally). Such a situation would work to alleviate both domestic and global inequalities.

This is because tariffs, subsidies, quotas and licensure restrictions are all, effectively, forms of quantity and/or price controls and manipulation that impose incentive structures that redirect the expression of demand and supply across the affected markets inefficiently and in ways that they otherwise would not have been expressed in a more ‘natural’ equilibrium.

Spillovers onto other markets

This also has spillover effects on other markets – for example, targeting particular imports and particular countries’ exports with tariffs, licensure restrictions and/or indirectly by subsidising competitors’ products domestically will have an impact on other markets as consumers and producers are forced to substitute spending and production accordingly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Liberal Media Turns On Itself As NYT Promises To “Rededicate” Itself To “Honest” Reporting

November 12, 2016

Liberal Media Turns On Itself As NYT Promises To “Rededicate” Itself To “Honest” Reporting

In a letter from its owner and executive editor, the New York Times, a biased media outlet which together with the rest of the liberal press misreported on the presidential race – whether due to conflicts of interest or due to sheer stupidity – from day one, leading to such idiotic forecasts as an 86% probability for Hillary to win as recently as one week ago (contrast with our own prediction):

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3:20 PM – 3 Nov 2016

… Arthur Sulzberger, the owner and publisher of the NYT, promised that the paper would “reflect” on its coverage of this year’s election, as it “rededicates” itself to reporting on “America and the world” honestly.

To be sure, that would be a vast change from the NYT’s existing coverage of events, even though despite the tacit admission of its failure to account for Trump’s “stunning” victory, in the same letter Sulzberger also writes that “we believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign.”

No, you did not: you were too worried about losing your advertisers who would complain loudly, and threaten to pull their revenue, if they saw even implicit criticism of Hillary Clinton, which meant non stop explicit criticism of Trump. So why bring it up? Because seapking of the all important top-line, the NYT – already suffering from a collapse in ad revenue – which plunged 18.5% in Q3, desperately needs subscribers to keep paying for its disinformation or else the very future of the NYT is in danger. This is how Sulzberger put it:

“you can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”

What about the same humor?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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