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We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

January 2, 2022

We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.

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Anyone to the left of Ted Cruz is a communist. Anyone who opposes US imperialism loves and supports the governments it targets. Anyone who defends Palestinians hates Jews. Move the Overton window far enough toward your side of the debate and you can spin even the slightest hint of disagreement with you as dangerous extremism.

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People who spend their time freaking out about communism are hilarious. Even if you believe communism is always necessarily evil, if you live in the western empire you’re so far from experiencing communism it makes more sense to spend your time fretting about shark attacks or being struck by lightning. If you’re reading this odds are you live in an English-speaking nation. If you live in an English-speaking nation your government is so very, very, very far from espousing communism that it would make more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being eaten by lions.

Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism, the simple economic realities of your nation and the mountains of violent force keeping it in place mean that of all the many, many existential threats you can worry about, communism should rank near dead last.

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Reverse Batman: A working class ninja spends his nights beating up kleptocratic billionaires whose thievery has created the socioeconomic injustice that’s destroying his city.

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

A tale of two civilisations

October 24, 2021

A tale of two civilisations

In recent years, America’s unsuccessful attempts at containing China as a rival hegemon has only served to promote Chinese antipathy against American capitalism. China is now retreating into the comfort of her long-established moral values, best described as a mixture of Confucianism and Marxism, while despising American individualism, its careless regard for family values, and encouragement of get-rich-quick financial speculation.

After America’s defeat in Afghanistan, the geopolitical issue is now Taiwan, where things are hotting up in the wake of the AUKUS agreement. Taiwan is important because it produces two-thirds of the world’s computer chips. Meanwhile, the large US banks are complacent concerning Taiwan, preferring to salivate at the money-making prospects of China’s $45 trillion financial services market.

The outcome of the Taiwan issue is likely to be decided by the evolution of economic factors. China is protecting herself against a global credit crisis by restraining its creation, while America is going full MMT. The outcome is likely to be a combined financial market and dollar crisis for America, taking down its Western epigones as well. China has protected herself by cornering the market for physical gold and secretly accumulating as much as 20,000-30,000 tonnes in national reserves.

If the dollar fails, which without a radical change in monetary policy it is set to do, with its gold-backing China expects to not only survive but be able to consolidate Taiwan into its territory with little or no opposition.

Introduction

On the one hand we have America and on the other we have China. As civilisations, America is discarding its moral values and social structures while China is determined to stick with its Confucian and Marxist roots. America is inclined to recognise no other civilisations as being civilised, while China’s leadership has seen America’s version and is rejecting it…
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Conservatives Must Now Draw A Line In The Sand And Stop The “Great Reset”

January 28, 2021

Conservatives Must Now Draw A Line In The Sand And Stop The “Great Reset”

There are many millions of Americans today in the post-election environment that feel uneasy about the fate of the country given the rise of a Biden presidency. And though I understand why this tension exists, I want to offer a possible “silver lining”; a different way of looking at the situation:

With Biden in the White House, there is no longer any ambiguity about what conservatives (and some of the more courageous moderates) need to do and need to accomplish. Now we know where we stand, and now the stakes are clear.

With Trump in office, a lot of liberty minded people became a little too comfortable, to the point that they were inactive. They actually believed the system could be repaired and corruption ended from within, and without much effort on our part beyond our votes. Trump made many conservatives lazy.

Then there was the Q-anon-sense floating around on the web which also misled some freedom activists into thinking that people much higher placed or “smarter” than us were fighting the good fight behind the scenes and that the globalists would be swept up in a grand 4D chess maneuver. This was a fantasy; it was never going to happen. Finally, everyone knows this and we can get on with the business of fighting the real battles ahead.

I think we are reaching a stage in the conflict between freedom advocates and collectivist tyrants when many illusions are going to melt away, and all we will be left with is cold hard reality. Now is the time when we find out who is going to stand their ground and fight for what they believe in, and who is going to cower and submit just to save their own skin. Now is the time when we find out who has balls.

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

The Paradox of Individualism and Hierarchy

July 31, 2020

The Paradox of Individualism and Hierarchy

In the early 1970s, Geert Hofstede discovered something interesting. While analyzing a work-attitude survey that had been given to thousands of IBM employees around the world, Hofstede found that responses clustered by country. In some countries, for instance, employees tended to prefer an autocratic style of leadership. But in other countries, employees preferred a democratic approach. These differences, Hofstede proposed, were caused by culture.

Today, Hofstede’s work has blossomed into the field of ‘cross-cultural analysis’. It’s a vibrant discipline that looks at how attitudes and beliefs vary between societies. The tools of the trade are simple surveys and questionnaires. But the goal of cross-cultural analysis is ambitious. It aims, as Hofstede puts it, to understand the ‘software of the mind’.

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Geert Hofstede didn’t invent the idea that culture varies between societies. (That idea is probably as old as culture itself.) But he did pioneer the quantification of culture. Before Hofstede, there was much grand theory, but little measurement. Theories of culture date at least to the Greeks, who were perhaps the first to give culture a name. (They called it the nomos.)¹ The modern theorization of culture, however, probably began with sociologist Max Weber.

Like many social scientists, Weber wanted to understand the origin of capitalism. Why, he asked, did capitalism arise in Western Europe? His answer was that Westerners had adopted a peculiar attitude towards work — what Weber called the protestant work ethic. Rather than see work as a chore, protestants (especially Calvinists) saw industriousness as a virtue. This culture shift, Weber argued, was key to understanding the emergence of capitalism. Without the idea that work was a virtue, people would meet their basic needs and then relax. But when work became a goal in itself, the wheels of capitalist accumulation were set in motion.

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

Be Outwardly Collectivist And Inwardly Individualist

July 10, 2020

Be Outwardly Collectivist And Inwardly Individualist

Individualism could theoretically work as a political system, in a hypothetical world where nobody is ever helpless and the planet has infinite resources and the ecosystem is infinitely robust. But we do not live in such a world.

No, we live in a world where every single person is born helpless and somebody needs to take good care of them to help turn them into physically and psychologically healthy adults, where people get sick and become disabled, where most of us go through a prolonged period of steadily increasing weakness and convalescence before death. A world with a fragile ecosystem and finite resources.

Individualism has no real answers for the mass-scale implementation of its value system in such a world. The only way to believe it does is with a lot of compartmentalizing away from reality and refusing to look at the tremendous suffering that is brought on by saying people who need help must either get it from family members who are hopefully kind or rely on the charity of strangers who are hopefully feeling charitable. Refusing to look at the reality that ecocide will continue as long as it remains profitable and no collectivist measures are put in place to prevent it from being so.

The only thing that can help humanity, as our situation appears from behind this pair of eyes, is what I call enlightened collectivism.

But this doesn’t mean that individualism has nothing to offer.

Individualists tend to have a more lucid than average understanding of the concept of self-sovereignty, which will be an essential component of any healthy world if one exists in humanity’s future. When it comes to what happens up to the border of your own skin, collectivism should hold no power.

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

Lockdown #2 Begins

July 9, 2020

LOCKDOWN #2 BEGINS

In Europe, several places (cities and entire regions within a number of countries) have already locked down for a second time, and many others have returned to stricter rules (masks, quarantines and forced testing when coming from abroad, etc) barely a couple of weeks after having relaxed those rules a bit. They are deliberately shutting down the world economy to further this Great Reset. What these elitists fail to grasp is that the wholesale destruction of the world economy is not going to be smoothed over with Guaranteed Basic Income and hoping people are content to live in this new communistic world where individualism is dead.

They have realized that it is best NOT to let up and try to keep people locked down and terrorized rather than allow them freedom and then try a second lockdown September-October with the next flu season.

This is NOT the Black Plague and the wholesale destruction of the world economy will bankrupt another 20%+ of all small businesses and further their agenda to NATIONALIZE companies. They are using this virus, that they may have planted, to achieve this dramatic Marxist Revolution. They have divided people into groups and furthered the hatred to the point that they will be turning violent against each other. This is how even the Nazis succeeded in gaining power — divide and conquer to the point they will seek government and surrender all liberty to restore safety.

Welcome to the NEW REAL MARXIST WORLD ORDER.

Even in California, you really have to wonder why that state is so left. The people lit up the sky on the fourth of July DESPITE the nasty draconian politicians who imposed a $50,000 fine per person. They are fining people up to $2,000 in some parts for not wearing a mask. This is just insane.

Gathering in groups as society falls apart – by Vicki Robin

November 14, 2019

Gathering in groups as society falls apart – by Vicki Robin

“Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, it involves other people.” I used that line in lectures on frugal living when talking of the loneliness of consumerism and the benefits of sharing resources. We idealize the good old days of people helping people out. But can we live them, given who we have become?

Individualism is one of the many privileges of ‘the privileged’ in Western society. We have options and choices about where we live, with whom, of what genders, ages or races, whether we are child-free or have a brood, what we eat, what we believe, jobs we’ll accept, and on and on and on. As people look at civilizational breakdown in detail, though, they realize that to survive, other people might not be optional – joining a group, a farm, a small town might be necessary.

Survival is not a solo sport. If it happens, it will happen in community – intentional, multi-generational family, accidental – where we can share the work, grow food, trade, defend ourselves, socialize, learn, teach, repair. Civilization, it turns out, has a lot of services built in that will need to be maintained as long as possible or created anew… or done without.

How do we, who are so accustomed to individualism, enter into a new reality of living in concert with others? Not as a condiment but as a necessity. Not through idealistic eyes but as a sober process of surrendering attachment to the ego’s demands and entering a state of belonging to a people and a place.

I’ve lived in several communities and learned many lessons, surprising ones and hard ones. Here are some ideas for those of you contemplating moving to an existing rural community or forming your own, given your perspective of deep adaptation.

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

Rugged Individualism Cannot Save Us. Only Enlightened Collectivism Can.

July 22, 2019

Rugged Individualism Cannot Save Us. Only Enlightened Collectivism Can.

Individualism cannot save humanity from the crises it faces. It’s not the right tool.

There is a widespread belief that if we just eliminated all collectivist impulses within our society, we could eliminate all our problems. That the government which causes so much bloodshed and oppression wouldn’t be harmful if we can shrink it down to a minor role, or even to nonexistence, and the corporate powers which attach themselves to governments would thereby lose power over individuals. Let individuals take care of themselves however they see fit, with no collectivist power interfering in their affairs, and the world will sort itself out in a harmonious way.

This will never happen.

The most common argument for why this will never happen is that the world is full of awful people, and if you place the will of the individual over the will of the collective, the awful people will be able to do a lot more awful things. The people who are sociopathic enough to destroy the environment and exploit others for profit will be able to exert more influence over the total wellbeing of the world than those who aren’t, and there’ll be no safety nets in place protecting those who are born into under-privileged situations. Individuals like mothers who aren’t as capable of earning money would frequently find themselves dependent on the kindness of a man who may or may not be kind. Such a society would claim to be just, since it makes the same demands of everybody, but due to real circumstances could only ever be gravely unjust.

This argument is of course true, but it’s not the primary reason that individualism cannot save us.

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

In Praise of Hayek’s Masterwork

May 16, 2019

IN PRAISE OF HAYEK’S MASTERWORK

Friedrich von Hayek first published The Road to Serfdom in 1944. His book was subsequently popularised by a condensed version in The Reader’s Digest. This article re-examines Hayek’s theme in the context of today’s economics and politics to see what lessons we can learn from it, and whether personal freedom can survive.

Why personal freedom is important and the treat to it

Destroy personal freedom, and ultimately the state destroys itself. No state succeeds in the long run by taking away freedom from individuals, other than those strictly necessary for guaranteeing individualism. And unless the state recognises this established fact its destruction will be both certain and brutal. Alternatively, a state that steps back from the edge of collectivism and reinstates individual freedoms will survive. This is the theoretical advantage offered by democracy, when the people can peacefully rebel against the state, compared with dictatorships when they cannot.

Nevertheless, democracies are rarely free from the drift into collectivism. They socialise our efforts by taxing profits excessively and limiting free market competition, which is the driving force behind the creation and accumulation of personal wealth and the advancement of the human condition. At least democracies periodically offer the electorate an opportunity to throw out a government sliding into socialism. A Reagan or Thatcher can then materialise to save the nation by reversing or at least stemming the tide of collectivism.

Dictatorships are different, often ending in revolution, the condition in which chaos thrives. If the governed are lucky, out of chaos emerges freedom; much more likely they face more intense suppression and even civil war. We remember dictatorships through a figurehead, a Hitler or Mussolini. But these are just the leaders in a party of like-minded statists.

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

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard

December 10, 2018

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard

We seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of Modernism: the primacy of the individual versus the increasing technological and economic might of the central state.

In Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score” (May 7, 2018), I wrote about Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic nightmare emerging in China’s “Social Credit Score.”

The idea here is the central state sets up a vast, pervasive surveillance system to monitor all its citizens, and assigns a social score to each citizen based on his/her compliance with regulations and social norms as defined by the state.

In Kafka’s nightmarish novels, an opaque, impenetrable and impersonalized bureaucracy controls the social and economic structures of everyday life.

China’s system is based on a social score, but one’s social score has enormous economic consequences: the citizen with a low score can be denied rights to travel, his/her children can be denied access to educational opportunities and so on.

As I noted, there doesn’t appear to be a legal process for challenging one’s low social score, or much transparency on the various violations and weighting of violations that go into calculating each individual’s score.

I’ve often written about the difference between force and power: as per Edward Luttwak, force (coercion) is costly and clumsy, while power works via persuasion, grudging or otherwise.

China is attempting to create a system that is extremely coercive (a low score generates severe punishments) but also seeks to internalize the social scoring system: no authority figure is required to force individuals to comply; each individual internalizes the rules and modifies their own behavior accordingly.

This aligns with China’s historic reliance on internalized social norms to control its vast populace. Even in the Song Dynasty (960 AD to 1279 AD), the central state relied on the internalized social norms of Confucian values to “order society” with minimal coercion.

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

Language: The Indispensable Fundamental Actuator of False Orthodoxy

November 15, 2018

Language: The Indispensable Fundamental Actuator of False Orthodoxy

In Ayn Rand’s penultimate magnum opus, “The Fountainhead”, there was a minor antagonist by the name of Ellsworth Toohey whose raison d’etre was to undermine Rand’s ideal man and protagonist, Howard Roark.

Although Toohey considered his parasitical power as having a major stifling effect on capitalistic society, in reality, all his cumulative efforts ended up as a mere minor footnote in the long march of Man; as evidenced in the story’s denouement and ensuing towering city skylines.

Of course, much of Rand’s life consisted of excoriating the parasitical aspect of the Collectivists and their government, as both defined by dependency; in stark contrast to the rugged self-reliance of the men who moved the world.

In The Fountainhead, a discussion took place whereby Toohey said he wanted to make the “ideological soil” infertile to the point where young heads would explode prior to expressing any individuality (or similar to that). Then, later, near the end, Toohey asked Roark what Roark thought of him, and the egoistic, self-reliant architect replied: “But I don’t think of you.”

In reality, is it possible today to ignore the Collective? Or, has it propagated sufficiently to where it can be ignored no longer?

Acceptance of reality requires honesty. And the author Ayn Rand identified reason as the means for Man’s thriving existence on this blue marble. Therefore, if we are to examine reality with honesty, then we must by all means factor logic and time as follows:

If (this), then (that)

Stated another way, either the decisions we make now will improve our reality in the days ahead – or, we will be worse off than we are at present.

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

Liberal Capitalism as the Ideology of Freedom and Moderation

November 7, 2018

LIBERAL CAPITALISM AS THE IDEOLOGY OF FREEDOM AND MODERATION

Nowadays, many along the political spectrum seem to agree that America increasingly has become a polarized society. Ideological and public policy discourse has been gravitating more toward the extremes: progressives and the Democratic Party with a more explicitly socialist rhetoric and proposed government agenda, and conservatives and Republicans who increasingly appear to be moving in the direction of populist, and especially economic, nationalism under the presidency of Donald Trump.

If such ideological extremism is politically tearing the country apart in the eyes of many, then what could and should be a “non-ideology” of compromise and moderation? This is a question that Jerry Taylor, president of the William Niskanen Center, asks and answers in a recent article, “The Alternative to Ideology,” in which he directly challenges the premises and policy perspective of many libertarians.

Mr. Taylor insists that those who espouse a political philosophy of individualism, free markets, and strictly limited constitutional government are out of touch with reality and make themselves irrelevant in contemporary political discourse. Having long been a proponent of libertarianism himself, Mr. Taylor believes that he understands its asserted weaknesses from the inside.

Doubting Market Solutions to Global Problems

His first doubts, he explains, emerged with his conclusion that libertarians have little or nothing to contribute to the leading problem of our time: global warming. In Mr. Taylor’s view, this demonstrated to him that there needed to be answers outside the mantra of individual liberty and free markets. How else could this threat to humanity be tackled other than through extensive and combined governmental intervention, regulation, taxation, and possibly organized planning?

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

What We Can Do…

December 1, 2017

What We Can Do…

Until enough people’s minds are changed about coercion and collectivism, resistance is futile. The debate will continue to be about how much should be stolen from whom and for what purpose – rather than about whether anything should be stolen by anyone for any purpose.

As things are, many people believe it is ok to steal from others – provided the stealing is done on their behalf by other people (these are called “tax collectors”) and the stolen goods are called by pleasant but intellectually dishonest, morally evasive names (examples include Social Security, welfare, foreign aid, grants and so on).

Using this technique of doublethink, people are able to do things to other people – or urge they be done to other people, on their behalf – without feeling ashamed or guilty, as they would if they were to do these things themselves, personally.

This “surgical excision” of the psychologically normal human revulsion for other-than-defensive violence and for the use of violence to take things from others is the keystone of the coercive collectivist system. Dislodge it and the whole edifice collapses.

It is that simple – and that hard.

Simple, because the moral principle is already established.

Excluding psychological defectives – the relatively small population in every society that does not feel ashamed or guilty about the use of violence (these people are called “criminals”) most people do feel ashamed and guilty when they steal or resort to violence.

And hence, most people do not steal or resort to violence.

It is a broadly accepted moral principle that theft and violence are wrong things; that those who steal and threaten to harm others in order to get what they want are not good people. This is half the battle, already won.

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

Social Destruction by the Abuse of Money

October 5, 2017

SOCIAL DESTRUCTION BY THE ABUSE OF MONEY

In Britain, the top 1% of earners pay over a quarter of all income tax collected, and while super-rich British residents perhaps don’t have the tax breaks the Macklowes enjoy, the bulk of the burden falls on lawyers, bankers, company executives and owners of successful private enterprises. And it should, say the collectivists….

One of the juicier stories doing the rounds in New York society is the Macklowe divorce. Harry, the husband, kept a French mistress for two years before seeking a divorce from his wife of 58 years. So far, this is a run-of-the-mill marital split. But what made it the subject of gossip is the extraordinary lifestyle of the Macklowes, the mud being slung, and the expectations of the wronged 79-year old wife, seeking a billion or so to see out her remaining days.

They say hell hath no fury, and all that. Here is one of New York’s richest couples, washing their laundry in public, and it emerges that Harry has not paid tax since 1983. Harry’s lawyer bluntly stated in court that “people in real estate don’t pay taxes”. It echoes Leona Hemsley’s infamous quote that emerged at her trial thirty years ago, when the Queen of Mean said “We don’t pay taxes, only little people pay taxes.”

This still surprises many of us little people, but we must believe a top New York lawyer when he makes a statement in a court of law. The source of immense personal wealth in cities like New York is often from property development, and if this is a tax-free activity, it makes a mockery of the state redistributing money from the haves to the have-nots.

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

Catalan Independence: Why The Collective Hates It When People Walk Away

October 5, 2017

Catalan Independence: Why The Collective Hates It When People Walk Away

I have written many times in the past about the singular conflict at the core of most human crises and disasters, a conflict that sabotages human endeavor and retards critical thought. This conflict not only stems from social interaction, it also exists within the psyche of the average individual. It is an inherent contradiction of the human experience that at times can fuel great accomplishment, but usually leads to great tragedy. I am of course talking about the conflict between our inborn need for self determination versus our inborn desire to hand over responsibility to a community through group effort — sovereignty versus collectivism.

In my view, the source of the problem is that most people wrongly assume that “collectivism” is somehow the same as community. This is entirely false, and those who make this claim are poorly educated on what collectivism actually means. It is important to make a distinction here; the grouping of people is not necessarily or automatically collectivism unless that group seeks to subjugate the individuality of its participants. Collectivism cannot exist where individual freedom is valued. People can still group together voluntarily for mutual benefit and retain respect for the independence of members (i.e. community, rather than collectivism).

This distinction matters because there is a contingent of political and financial elites that would like us to believe that there is no middle ground between the pursuits of society and the liberties of individuals. That is to say, we are supposed to assume that all our productive energies and our safety and security belong to society. Either that, or we are extremely selfish and self serving “individualists” that are incapable of “seeing the bigger picture.” The mainstream discussion almost always revolves around these two extremes.

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

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