Amerika

I guess liberalism gets a bit of a bashing here. Let me explain.

I started life as a liberal; I still am a liberal.

However, liberalism got redefined.

Historically, the original idea behind liberalism was: whether we must be disloyal to the current regime or not, our goal is to combat the naturalistic fallacy. Meaning: that which is is not necessarily right. We must be guided by values above convenience.

This got hijacked by the crowd into: “we must make all individuals equal.”

In doing so, liberalism became a foe of biological determinism and in doing so, it became an enemy of nature. And, since morals and values are adaptations to nature, it became an enemy of morals and values — and soon after that, opposition to all value systems.

Every philosophy, over time, decays into a simpler version of itself.

Liberalism has done so, and what it has become is terrible, so instead, I think I’d rather pick a philosophy which never decays: naturalistic realism, or the idea that an organic order exists on this earth which is both practical and divine, and that we should pay attention to this invisible but discernible structure instead of being confused by appearances.

It’s the same truth you’ll find etched through history. It’s in the Bhagavad-Gita. It’s in Hemingway. It’s in Eckhart. It’s in Emerson. Even Mary Shelley. And Nietzsche. Found in Plato. And in many of the common sense folk sayings handed down over the generations.

If my goal is fairness, I need to apply that fairness scientifically. I choose to recognize the obvious, which is that with civilization, we could not longer as individuals act as free agents.

As a result, I’ve come full circle: liberalism (of a consistent type) opposes individualism and as a result, embraces biological determinism.

That includes some taboos, like recognizing differences between the races, supporting the organic society, recognizing different gender roles, and rejecting the idea of equality of ability since genetics shows us otherwise. Those are big, bad ideas in the eyes of:

• Big media.
• Big corporations.
• Liberals and neoliberals (“conservatives”).
• Your buddies.
• “Everyone” on the internet.

But I’ve long observed that a statement’s truthfulness is inversely proportionate to its popularity. Just as liberalism gained popularity when it strayed from the truth, into that easy land of symbols and categories that seem indivisible — of pure composite — until you analyze them and see there’s no purity on earth. There’s only relativity, practicality as determined by relativity to the whole, and human will.

And when you’ve realized that, life gets a lot simpler and a lot more exciting and rewarding.

Tags: liberalism