Amerika

The 20th century was the era in which an idea finally came to fruition. Borne of the transition of Christianity to Protestantism, developed under the mostly-secular Enlightenment, and thrust onto the world through the French evolution, the concept of contextless equality gained full force in the 20th century.

The result was unmitigated, lugubrious disaster.

Equality presupposed first the political equality of peasant and king, and then became interpreted in reverse so that if the peasant did not end up as wealthy as the king, it was assumed the peasant was “oppressed.” This fatalism, or rejection of positive values, represented a civilization looking backward and knowing its best days were gone.

In 1789, the French murdered their aristocrats and set up a new government of the people that after some growing pains, began its life-long career of brutal failure with a few high points scattered through history. France went from being a top superpower, if not the top superpower, to being a kind of comical backwater that provided extended training for the Wehrmacht whenever they got restless.

In 1968, the rest of the Western world took this further as the Baby Boomers hit voting age: equality was not just for peasant and king, but for all citizens of the world in every nation. Even more, every decision was equal. If it felt good, do it, and it’s as legitimate as any other decision — and the rest of society should subsidize you.

Even today we remember Baby Boomers as the worst me firsters in the history of humankind (at least outside of prisons) even while they saturate us in propaganda about how they “fought” (whined) for civil rights, gender equality, open immigration and acceptance of everyone everywhere all the time just as they are.

Forty years after those auspicious underminings of the last vestiges of actual civilization, the me firsters are others are finding out the hard way that the “socially correct” thing to do is popular, but unrealistic; it’s rare to find any idea that is both popular and realistic. Therefore, we cut the guts out of our society and are watching it sink.

To Generation X, they left a shattered version of the relatively idyllic childhood they knew. Generation X knew they were going from zero to Brazil in 3.2 decades, and gave up early in life as a result. Innocent goofy 1970s America, with people who wanted to do the right thing, got replaced by a global ghetto culture of drawing attention to oneself and demanding that those with anything — money, virginity, power, nice objects, beauty, happiness — start doling it out to the crowd or we’re going to riot, man.

However, a backlash has begun, and it has begun dismantling sacred cows in order to get to the biggest sacred cow of all, which is that idea that because we’re all equal, if anyone has less than others, it must be oppression and therefore that inequality must be redistributed. Our sacred cows to slaughter in the meantime will be multiculturalism, the entitlement state, and equal access to education.

But for today, our story is about race — the hidden issue that we’re all tired of talking about, yet it keeps popping up again and again unless we go into complete denial — and how the sane ones among older and newer generations are throwing out the ideas of multiculturalism, diversity and the kind of racial “equality” that supposes that any person should be able to move any where at any time and have no culture or national boundaries get in their way.

Call it racial jujitsu: A growing number of white Americans are acting like a racially oppressed majority. They are adopting the language and protest tactics of an embattled minority group, scholars and commentators say.

They point to these signs of racial anxiety:

• A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 44% of Americans surveyed identify discrimination against whites as being just as big as bigotry aimed at blacks and other minorities. The poll found 61% of those identifying with the Tea Party held that view, as did 56% of Republicans and 57% of white evangelicals.

• More colleges are offering courses in “Whiteness Studies” as white Americans cope with becoming what one commentator calls a “dispossessed majority group.”

• A Texas group recently formed the “Former Majority Association for Equality” to offer college scholarships to needy white men. Colby Bohannan, the group’s president, says white men don’t have scholarship options available to minorities. “White males are definitely not a majority” anymore, he says.

• U.S. Census Bureau projections that whites will become a minority by 2050 are fueling fears that whiteness no longer represents the norm. – CNN

Back in 1968, the hippies pitched us (ad men with smoking pipes watch the projection screen intensely, it’s a hip pitch) a world of total equality. We were no longer rich and poor, black and white, but equal citizens of a world in which we would treat each other with respect. In order to do that, we had to get rid of the idea of property, even sexual “property” such as marriage, and take lots of drugs and talk about tolerance constantly.

That worked so well that by 1978 the hippies were all working in banks, real estate and labor unions, socking away money like mad. Those former hippies, enraged at having lost out on the opportunity of the past, were the ones who drove our society into insane materialism and competitiveness in the 1980s. They went from talking about freedom with a joint in one hand to worrying about the Soviet Communists and buying BMWs on the gray market.

However, they didn’t give up their ideals because those ideals were socially correct. That means that at a party, you gain points for saying these things, and if someone comes in and might be cutting in on your date, you start spouting off about equality and civil rights and everyone automatically assumes you are the better person. Altruism is a form of advertising.

An opinion poll suggesting far-right leader Marine Le Pen could win the first round of next year’s presidential election has caused a shock in France.

The survey for Le Parisien newspaper puts the National Front leader, who took over from her father Jean-Marie in January, ahead of all other candidates.

It gives her 23% of the vote, 2% ahead of both President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist leader Martine Aubry. – BBC

Yet in Europe and the USA both, people are realizing this vision was always false. We took the hippies seriously, when really they were as insincere in 1978 as they were in 1968. It was always just advertising, a scam to make us give them the power. When they came to adulthood in the 1990s with Bill Clinton as president, they put their ideas into action — but at a slower rate, since they got more points for talk than action, especially since their ideas when put into motion usually brought failure.

Europe, riding a wave of anti-Americanism since the Americans saved their collective bacon in WWII and then refused to attempt genocide as the Soviets did, decided that America was so horrible that Europe should emulate the American model. They did, and soon diversity was all the fashion in big Swedish cities as well as conquered Germany and miserable Britain.

A few wiser minds, perhaps left over from a past that was not insane, pointed out that much as two objects cannot occupy the same space, two cultures cannot occupy the same space. They will destroy each other, either quickly through violence, or slowly through assimilation. They will leave behind not a victor but a hybrid of victor and loser, a type of compromise that removes anything exceptional for either and replaces it with an average. Call it entropy.

But as the world turns on, people worldwide are seeing that the minority-majority model of diversity, multiculturalism and racial equality never works out — instead of reducing conflict and making a world of peace, it makes a cynical world of in-group nepotism and covert hatred:

The Christians are a privileged minority in India, with the government’s resources – inadvertently, it seems – allocated for their preferred empowerment. Not surprisingly, literacy rate of the Christians in India stands at 80 percent,[xiv] compared to 65 percent[xv] overall. With the missionaries providing nearly 30 percent of the healthcare services in India,[xvi] employment possibilities for those who convert to Christianity are significantly more than those of non-Christians. In addition, the minority status of missionary-controlled institutions helps them get tax, land allotment and many other benefits.[xvii]

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to justify any claims of the Christians being an under-privileged minority, as a coalition of Christian community organisations itself noted in a recent press release: “Currently the job share percentage of Christians in services like teachers, nursing, clerical and junior level CEO [Chief Executive Officer] is more than their numerical percentage.” The same press release went on to note in the next sentence that, “This is due to their [Christians’] sincerity, honesty and better education,”[xviii] while regrettably ignoring the fact that Article 30 has already granted the Christian community significant reservations and other opportunities.

The magnitude and scale of these discriminations are staggering. – Eurasia Review

The defining aspect of modernity is its insistence on equality. With equality, you get the notion that every viewpoint is equally important and valid. That in turn leads you to make justifications when not every viewpoint ends in success.

Average Bill: I think the world is controlled by prunes, and we must consult the oracular prunes, and they will instruct us.

Tolerant Bob: Well, sure, Bill.

Years pass.

Average Bill: I’ve been homeless for twenty years now.

Tolerant Bob: That really is a misfortune.

In the world of equality, cause/effect reasoning is taboo because cause/effect reasoning implies a central ideal by which we can all be compared. If there’s a right way to do things, and Bill’s theory of the oracular prunes strays outside of it, Bill’s misfortune isn’t a misfortune — it’s the result of his actions as we would have expected from the historical record.

Since equality-based living makes it impossible to claim there are degrees of logical and illogical, since every choice is equally valid, we rapidly decline into pluralism. In pluralism, we don’t agree on what is right; we agree to tolerate every type of viewpoint simultaneously. The result is that no one has much in common except that they want to get to work on time and be able to buy stuff with free shipping.

Pluralism in turn creates the modern state and statist concept of existence. If we have nothing in common, all we have to keep us in line is a powerful government with extensive laws. Those laws must be based on enforcing pluralism, because it is the only principle we have to hold us together. Forget being a nation of similar people; we want nations of random people, factory-stamped into identical citizens through removal of any culture, belief or values systems they have outside of the political creed that unites us all into a modern state.

WWI was a war fought to try to beat back the idea of nationalism and replace it with the modern state. Only forty years prior Europe had been wracked by a series of nationalist wars, so the assembled crowd decided that nationalism must be the problem — any prior causes were too invisible to make for good conversation, anyway. They ignored the steady trend in European politics to unite relatively disparate groups, call them a nation, and use that new fodder to create a smaller replacement for the Roman Empire.

Diversity was not a catchword back then but already the policy, then called “internationalism,” appealed to the strong state and its large financial, social and political players. It worked just like a factory: if we have trouble getting enough Germans in here, let’s import other people and propaganda-educate them into the perfect citizen mold. Then they (equally) will be identical in outlook and serve as a means to our ends.

This situation came about because the idea of a national culture in which the aristocracy were the implement of governance, because it was unpopular among the proles, had come under fire. The result was to toss out aristocracy, and replace it with democracy, which in turn requires a strong dogma to both unite people against the aristocracy and keep them from descending into anarchy.

As a consequence of that, pluralism was massively destructive to any shared concept except a political one (freedom, Capitalism, liberal democracy) enforced by a centralized bureaucratic state, even if one created by the mass opinion lynch mob of democracy. Because pluralism causes us to act to suspend judgment, we quickly become defensive citizens, since our own needs are under assault by many competing “equal” needs.

In pluralistic societies, everyone needs to find a reason to play the victim, or someone else with a victim-level need will come in and trump them. This defensiveness makes it impossible to associate with others except those who you know will not publicly subvert your needs, increasing the atomization of the individual into a “world of one” who keeps his actual motivations private, but talks a good socially correct game in public.

Just three days into the job, Germany’s new interior minister is already causing his government a headache after wading into a highly delicate debate about multiculturalism and claiming Islam was not a key part of the German way of life. “Islam in Germany is not something supported by history at any point,” Hans-Peter Friedrich told journalists on his first day as Thomas de Maiziere’s replacement on Thursday.

Friedrich was speaking in the context of a probe by German authorities into last Wednesday’s killing of two U.S. airmen at Frankfurt Airport, in which it is believed the 21-year-old Kosovan suspect Arid Uka was a lone operator motivated by radical Islamist beliefs. – Haaretz

Modern people are increasingly rebuking the tyranny of popular opinion. In the 20th century, it was decided that nice people did not do certain things. Some of that manipulation — and let’s call it what it is: socially-source manipulation — was for good, such as taboos on child molestation or theft. A good deal of it existed for the convenience of governments, themselves a product of popular desires for pleasant illusions. Crypto-totalitarian government was the product the buyers wanted.

When you exist in a time where there is no “right” way to do things, but there are a few politically-determined “wrongs,” a constant state of frustration prevails. Those wrongs inevitably describe what the political system cannot address, and so they refer to necessary issues that need resolution. When people see such a fatalistic government, one that has determined it will not even discuss the issues it must address, they adopt an “every man for himself” attitude and become selfish.

In turn, this leads them to ruin their children. You are only successfully selfish if you mask your selfishness in public. So like the politicians of WWI and the hippies of 1968, you talk a good game about “wars to end all wars” and “equal rights for all” in public, but you do what is convenient for you — take that free sex, take the power, make the profit — in private, a fact covered up by your public acts of altruism.

The kids of parents in such times are fundamentally schizoid. They see their parents endorse the socially correct view in public, and absorb thousands of hours of it from entertainment and school, but then notice as they mature that in private, their parents do what is convenient and defy socially correct logic in doing so. As a result, these kids shuttle between “do the right thing and get screwed for it” to “do the selfish thing and hate yourself.” They become unable to act, paralyzed by bad moral logic.

For such children, the only option is to grow up and be more radical than their parents. This gives them the moral upper hand and, because they get punished by life for doing the right thing, allows them to have trump victimhood status. They turn to increasingly sentimental, symbolic and manipulative “truths” to do this, which makes them indulge in a culture of the juvenile and simplistic. This furthers social decay.

However, for the powerful and the masses such bad news is good news. The powerful continue their rule on the popularity of an empire of useful idiots who both cannot tell truth from a lie, and are unaware of that inability, so are doubly certain they are right. The masses get their cake and eat it too, since there is increasing permissiveness and decreasing social standards, which means they can indulge whatever venal or simply crass desires they have without fear of social censure.

For most people, who only act in any positive way so that they can have immediate rewards (beer, sex, shiny objects purchased, social acclaim) this is a stronger motivator than trying to construct a working social order. As they are oblivious to consequences beyond the next pay period, they ignore the destructive long-term results of their actions in favor of paying attention to pleasures right now. Thus they join the army of useful idiots, each manipulating the others for his or her own corrupt convenience.

This was the 20th century model, which is a ruthless power structure covered with a thin sheen of chrome. That chrome was false altruism, and our pluralistic attitude toward race (diversity/multiculturalism: the same thing) descends from that. However, the 20th century model has proven to be a path to reckless expansion of our worst aspects as a species, and so starting with its most absurd taboos, it is being dismantled.

As the door slams on a historical period that brought us machine-like warfare, rigid rules that were always taken out of context, personal selfishness and ecocide, we look back on the 20th century and find in its death a kind of hope. We are replacing knee-jerk inertia and social manipulation with a more honest and a braver time.

It cannot happen too soon.

Tags: crowdism, democracy, multiculturalism