Amerika

The latest trend among Left and Right has been to blame “nihilism” for any problems encountered by the modern system. This is equivalent to telling people that the system works just fine, they simply do not believe enough and invest enough goodwill to make it work.

That happens in lieu of asking where the goodwill went and why, which if it had been done in the late Soviet Union might have made clear what was going wrong and how to fix it, not that socialism has ever been able to produce food in large enough amounts to provide a pleasant existence.

Following the classic Leftist style, they have created a scapegoat to attack that not only explains the failure of their system but gives them a reason to double down while allowing them to continue to cloak themselves in the aegis of social responsibility through the optics of altruism.

As usual, they are supported by an audience that wants everything that goes wrong to be the fault of someone else, and for someone else to handle these problems for them. They also want someone else to pay for it. In fact, we might call them the “someone else” special interest group.

Leftists gain power by promoting themselves as the miscellaneous citizens injured by a system that otherwise produces winners. They were certain that their population problems were caused by the kings, so they killed them; then, they were certain that their poverty was caused by a lack of socialists, so they took over.

Now years later all systems tainted with socialism are both broke and have neglected infrastructure, bleeding away what made them wealthy. In addition, their meritocracy and diversity quota programs — including for women — have depleted the stock of crude, crass, but functional people who made these societies function.

No wonder they need a scapegoat. They have chosen to blame — rolls Magic Eight Ball — the nihilists:

The myth that China, Russia, or the non-western world can be fully assimilated to a Western model of political society (any more than Afghanistan was) is over.

China and Russia – as states organised around indigenous culture – is not a new idea. Rather, it is a very old one: “Always remember that China is a civilization – and not nation-state”, Chinese officials repeat regularly.

Europe of the Renaissance did consist of civilisational states, but subsequent European nihilism changed the very substance of modernity. The West promotes its universal-value stance, however, as though it be a set of abstract scientific theorems which have universal validity.

While on the Right most at least acknowledge the idea that ethnicity=civilization, since that is the singular notion behind Nationalism, and almost everyone not on the Left agrees that the State (the “nation-state”) is a parasite on the ethnic group, many see these Asiatic states as doing the opposite of what they claim.

Russia and China, after all, are both multicultural societies that show no sign of actually ending that. Sure, the Chinese suppress the Uyghurs but this mostly comes from not wanting radical Islam to have a foothold in their country, which is why they want to assign Uyghur women to Han men and breed out the problem.

In reality, they are projecting what Samuel Huntington described as “the clash of civilizations”: groups, united by religion or culture with a strong ethnic component, will fight it out over who has the right to define what is “right” in their territories and futures.

While Russia and China have opted not to join the West in its quest for civil rights for all, they have embraced an even more controlling system, namely the Communist-style centralized economy with enforced ideological obedience. If the West is soft totalitarian, Russia and China are flirting with “firm medium” (familiar to anyone who has bought a mattress recently) totalitarianism.

Their accusation against the West — that it is in the grips of “nihilism” — reflects more their desire to repeat a Right-wing Christian meme and therefore weaponize that group, which like the Left in the 1960s finds itself in the role of Opposition Party, than an actual belief.

In reality, Russia and China are arguing for nihilism. Let us look again at the most functional definition of nihilism:

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

Obviously, nihilism does not reject personal values, truths, or communications, since it is an asserted, tokenized, and transmitted belief system. It rejects the idea of universalism, or that ideas can be shared — truths, values, and communications — among all human beings.

It acknowledges that for most humans, “truths” serve what the human wants to do, and that reality is both unequally perceived/experienced and inconsistently revealed. The sage living in a mountaintop hermitage, the Silicon Valley elites looking out from multimillion dollar high-rise condos, and an average American living in a Springfield suburb see different worlds and have different mental variables loaded in their heads about how things are achieved.

Therefore we can read nihilism as a refusal to participate in certain consensual hallucinations and mass delusions:

1. Universal truths: “truths” are conclusions made in the brains of humans; since we do not share brains, they exist in full only in one head, and are communicated with gestures, tokens, and symbols used to describe them, which allows other observes to either deliberately or accidentally selectively misread what will be applied. The classic example is the “lifetime guarantee” for your new toilet which if you read the fine print turns out to mean thirty-six months, even if to the plumber it should mean a decade, to you it should mean until you throw the toilet out, and to the average consumer, it should mean until the next renovation.
2. Universal values: in every society, some methods and goals are seen as desirable and their opposites as not, so rewards are given for some behaviors and ostracism for the opposites of those. For example, a society might reward cleanliness and be disgusted by filth, so those who clean will always be seen as contributing members of society and receive goodwill when they have needs. In reality, values fluctuate with intelligence/class, degree of individualism/narcissism/egotism, and ability including degree of mental health.
3. Universal communications: we all know how difficult it is to translate between languages or even regional dialects, not simply because the words are different but because grammar, connotation, and form of expression convey so much. In most interactions, a subject and boundaries are assumed, but when translated between languages, cultures, regions, and social classes, that framework and context is lost.

In other words, the West asserts the opposite of nihilism through its promotion of a shared universal values system based in civil rights and individualism. This may be materialistic, or without any higher goals whether agnostic or supernatural, or it may be fatalistic, meaning that it has no hope for excellence, but it is not nihilistic.

What we are seeing instead, with Russia and China in the lead, is a worldwide loss of faith and goodwill in democracy, equality, individualism, diversity, and, to a lesser extent, in the idea of subsidies themselves such as socialism or unity in defense of special interest groups.

We are seeing instead the of democracy, or the idea that everyone matters, the notion of civilization, which holds that making a functional system that rewards those who are going to be capable is more important than ensuring that everyone is subsidized and has their hands held.

While this is failing the West, the Russian-Chinese version is just as toxic and less successful, which is why they are repeating Christian Nationalist tropes in the hope of dividing the West. There is nothing more to that story, other than that it should provoke some introspection in the West.

Since the end of WW2, the West has been cruising on the idea of a social contract united by human rights or the belief in equality for all:

Social contracts are implicit agreements about what governments provide their people in exchange for public legitimacy. They reflect an understanding of how people solve shared problems, manage risks and pool resources to deliver public goods, as well as how their collective institutions and norms operate.

Renewed social contracts must also be grounded in equity. It is no longer enough for the state to provide opportunities; it must proactively design systems that facilitate access to those opportunities in ways that put traditionally marginalized groups at the centre while ensuring that there are protections in place to mitigate the creation of newly marginalized groups. New social contracts must establish mechanisms that mitigate toxic polarization within societies and mistrust between governments and their people by providing the structures and institutions necessary to develop and maintain shared citizenship.

The idea of the social contract is mistaken here; the original notion regarded the tradeoff of some freedoms for the benefits of government, where the government maintained its legitimacy by protecting the civilization. In this view, the social contract meant that government would protect the organic society.

The new version involves — per the 14A — rights granted by government to “facilitate” the individualistic desires of citizens, with no regard for actual benefits to civilization. It seeks to abolish the organic society in order to please the mob, most of whom are actually a relatively small minority.

Civil rights changed the social construct from “protect civilization” to “enable individualism.” Consequently, it is hostile to organic culture, genetics, hierarchy, and values because these limit the desires of individuals in order to protect civilization from the mob.

We can see the contract for the abolition of organic culture in action through recent world events:

Until very recently, Ukrainian nationalism had been based on Ukrainian ethnicity. It was strongest in the west of Ukraine, and it excluded Jews, Poles, Tatars, and Ukraine’s second-largest ethnic group, Russians. The Revolution of Dignity in 2014 began to change the idea of the nation’s identity from an ethnic to a civic one.

Nationalism means protecting the organic culture and by necessity, the ethnic group behind it, which in practice means excluding all other ethnic groups (Russians, Poles, Jews, Tatars, Africans, Asians, Arabs) so that the ethnic group is not destroyed by outbreeding and loss of organic culture.

Legitimacy means goodwill. Our meritocratic elites, based on the principles of scientific management and social engineering, exist in a little bubble where only civil rights is good. This tends toward a subsidist perspective which states that society must facilitate with subsidies the desires of individuals.

In other words, those who have “won” at the game of our education system and credentialing now want to do what their textbooks said was the “scientific” answer, which is to avoid problems by ensuring that each individual is taken care of no matter how insane their desires.

This shows us classic Control, or the use of mandated external methods in unison — everyone do things this particular way at the same time — to regulate internal mental state so that unity and obedience to those currently in power is maintained.

Our society has, in the grand tradition of declining human societies, decided that certain conjectural values are more important than impact in reality, and therefore, that only those who espouse and promote these values will have a place in public life. This has created a false consensus based around what most people find irrelevant.

Since we have created a system which promotes people based on rising through its educational and credentialing process, however, our experts are considered to be correct, even if they live in a bubble insulated from daily reality and historical concerns of humanity by government and NGO money.

The selection matrix for these people is first and foremost, as it has been since the 1960s, whether they are compatible with our new multicultural society. If you are against multiculturalism, the system filters you out immediately.

This has occurred mostly because the socialist-style entitlements — payments made directly to citizens, including in-kind payments like public schooling — could never be afforded and now are bankrupting us, so our leaders want to import new warm bodies to pay new taxes to keep the system afloat.

Consequently, we have set ourselves on a course toward Communism or centrally-controlled, ideologically-directed State regulation of every area of life. This has set up several roles for our political leaders depending on whether they endorse the decline, want to regulate the decline, or oppose the decline:

1. [T]here is the libertarian narrative that dominates the G.O.P. America is a land of free individuals responsible for their own fate. This story celebrates the dynamism of the free market. Its prime value is freedom. Packer wrote that “the libertarian idea in its current shape regards Americans as consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, taxpayers — indeed everything except citizens.”
2. [T]here is the narrative of globalized America. This is the narrative dominant in Silicon Valley and beyond. “We’re all lifelong learners and work for the start-up of you, and a more open and connected world is always a better world.” This story “comes with an exhilarating ideology of flattening hierarchies, disrupting systems, discarding old elites and empowering individuals.”
3. [T]here is the story of multicultural America. “It sees Americans as members of groups, whose status is largely determined by the sins of the past and present,” Packer observed. “During the Obama years it became a largely unexamined dogma among cultural elites.”
4. [T]here is the narrative of America First, the narrative Donald Trump told last year, and which resonated with many voters. “America First is the conviction that the country has lost its traditional identity because of contamination and weakness — the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims; the weakness of elites who have no allegiance to the country because they’ve been globalized.”

Brooks — who wrote one of the definitive books on American decay — maintains his position as a conservative commentator because he clearly expresses issues without giving too much of his own opinion away.

In reality, he is describing two political views. Globalism, immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism mean the same thing, which is a nationalist world order. America First means nationalism in the sense of defending the historical American nation — “traditional identity” — against globalization.

Libertarianism is a gentle nod to conservatism that both embraces values and says that history turned out a certain way for a reason. The problem with most libertarians is that they are socialists who embrace Big Government socialist entitlements programs like medicare, public schooling, welfare, obamacare, and affirmative action.

Since that failed to hold back the tide, since with socialism comes tyranny as leaders are able to help themselves to the taxpayer wealth under the aegis of justification of defending “the poor” or other minorities, the Tea Party libertarian narrative got replaced with the America First narrative.

In other words, we have the pro-culture nationalist movements and then the anti-culture pro-government (read: free stuff) movements:

As Packer noted, it values inclusion but doesn’t answer the question, Included into what? What is the national identity all these subgroups add up into?

Establishment conservatives and the Left remain behind because they do not understand that this is a “do not kill the goose that laid golden eggs” approach to America. The historical American nation produced the prosperity we have now and continues to produce it; every other path leads to the third world.

Europe wrestles with this question too and for the same reason: it cannot afford its entitlements, especially free healthcare, without hiring foreign nurses and doctors and importing millions of poor people in order to work them, tax them, and use that income to pay off its entitlements already promised to Baby Boomers.

Democracy has slotted itself into a corner again and by the same method, namely giving away free stuff and then belatedly realizing that doing so has set the nation-state on a course for default. Because our meritocratic leaders know that this is the do-or-die issue for their rule, they have demonized any criticism of diversity and created a Soviet/Mao-style censorship regime:

“Would Rushdie’s novel be published today? Probably not,” Adichie said. “Would it even be written? Possibly not.”

She said literature was increasingly viewed “through ideological rather than artistic lenses”.

She continued: “Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of ‘sensitivity readers’ in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words.

“This, in my mind, negates the very idea of literature.”

That leads us to the actual question, which involves the future of the multicultural society. As Brooks and Packer gently point out, “inclusion into what?” defines this issue. When you abolish culture, your society has only commerce and Big Government, including its blue-haired promiscuous inclusion narrative, remaining.

In the view of this author, multicultural society is unlikely to survive at a first-world level. You need culture because government cannot be a substitute there; even more, our group of first-world high-IQ people produced a thriving society because of their abilities, and “warm bodies” cannot replace them.

Among other things, every society based on entitlements has made itself flat broke with the cost of those entitlements:

In 2020 and 2021, generous unemployment insurance benefits, stimulus cheques and child tax credit payments helped households squirrel away roughly $2.3tn in excess savings — the amount above what they would have saved had there been no pandemic. This powered a surge in demand as the economy reopened (fuelling upward pressure on inflation). October retail sales posted their strongest gain in eight months. Consumption accounts for more than two-thirds of US gross domestic product growth, and so far spending has remained strong.

But with consumer price inflation running at 7.7 per cent in October and median wages rising 6 per cent, according to the Atlanta Fed’s wage growth tracker, people’s standards of living are falling. As stimulus programmes ended last year and the economy reopened — increasing opportunities to spend money — Americans’ cash war chest has been dwindling, and the spending extravaganza cannot last. Economists’ estimates for how much is left vary from about $1.2tn to $1.8tn.

Forecasts for how long the cash will last also vary, based on assumptions about the labour market, spending and GDP. Bank of America expects that at the current three-month average rate of decline of household deposits, it would take between 12 and about 40 months (depending on income quartile) to return to 2019 levels. Goldman Sachs estimates US households will have less than $1tn in excess savings by the end of 2023. JPMorgan recently warned excess savings could be completely depleted by the second half of next year.

In the above, we see the socialist or demand-based economy cycle in the small: government pays out free stuff, which causes a brief boom, but then costs go up to pay for it, and soon everyone is equally poor. This is Clinton second term versus first term.

Demand-based economies, like demand itself, are infinite because instead of regulating costs based on supply — increasing supply and quality drives prices down — demand-based systems try to control demand with triage, red tape, subsidies, and other forms of high administrative cost method. These simply impoverish everyone.

The demand-based economy is failing and diversity is its Hail Mary pass. If we can bring in enough new tax cash cows, they reason, we can at least keep the economy plausibly functional. Then it becomes a problem for someone else in the future or never, but our own careers remain intact of course.

The BRICS who want a “multipolar world” are making the same mistake that they accuse the West of making. They deny the importance of genetics and culture, and want to substitute with gaslighting propaganda control systems like ideology, big government, commerce, and theocracy.

None of these will work. The solution here is to embrace nihilism: there are no universal truths, values, or communications. However, within our national group of ethnic Western European Nordid/Cro-Magnid peoples, we can understand each other well enough, share the same values and abilities, and create the same type of society.

Tags: america first, BRICS, diversity, Globalism, immigration, libertarianism, meritocracy, multiculturalism, multipolar world, nihilism