Amerika

One of my favorite commenters speaks on the topic of religion as a means of salvaging dying civilizations:

Latin/Asian/African cultures cannot assimilate because culture is a result of the genetics/race of a people. We are a nation founded by Western and Northern European/Scandinavian peoples. Our culture reflects that. When we demand that other races assimilate to our culture, we are essentially asking them to be what they can never genetically be. It is no wonder they are angry and hate us; we are in essence saying that they are not us, which is true.

I used to believe that religion was independent of race but now I realize that is not true. Cultures adopt religion because it reflects the values and understanding of the people. That is why when Christianity is taken to Africa or Latin countries it becomes laden with superstition and is not Christianity at all. Different races will experience God in different ways because each is only capable of understanding God within the limits of their intelligence, which is a product of their genetics. Is it any wonder that the Middle East is Islamic? Their religion fits who they are as a people, genetically speaking.

This is a fundamental split among those who are not-Left. Among our population, most are hard in denial about the fact that our civilization is imploding. Of those who do recognize the decline, most have panicked and are looking for an easy answer; this is more denialism. Of this type of post-denial denialism, most choose a visually distinctive method: God fanatics, race fanatics, economic fanatics and eugenics fanatics. Each group is looking for a single principle to act like Leftist ideology and apply in all circumstances.

• God fanatics. These are exemplified by this comment from the thread:
  

  There is nothing left to preserve. We have abandoned the God of our fathers and are rightly judged for our sins. When we return to the Lord Jesus Christ in our families and local communities, we can then begin to see restoration of some form.

  God fanatics argue for this because it lets them off the hook to do anything. They cannot force others to come to God, so they’ll go to church twice as hard and lament how no one follows God, then watch their society further crumble away while they do nothing. This is a typical conservative behavior: put your head down, work hard, pay those taxes, and lament the impossibility of something impossible instead of fixing the obvious problem.

• Race fanatics. These people recognize a problem — that diversity is paradoxical in design and so will produce collapse — but instead of accepting that difficult thought, settle in for scapegoating one or more minority groups. By implication, after the great racial purge, everything else can continue as before, so the highest number of pro-democracy pro-socialist liberals can be found in this group. They deny that diversity did not happen in a vacuum, and it started 200 years ago or more, so we have to find the cause of that or all the sadistic racial holocausts in the world cannot save us from diversity, much less all the other problems.
• Economic fanatics. These come in two types: socialist and capitalist. The New Right in Europe makes a lot of excellent observations but then comes out in support of European socialism, which creates a society that is insufferable because it is regimented and forces everyone to keep doing repetitive make-work in order to pay for the welfare state in classic “We Are The Robots” style jerky motions and cancelled eyes attire. Europe is miserable and has been for centuries because of the growing state and its inevitable tendency to enslave people to boring, pointless jobs and ugly, tedious cities. We are breeding ourselves into robotic zombie morons in order to pay for all those bennies, but your average European would rather die by rape than give up the welfare state. On the other hand, there are many American conservatives who believe that all of our problems could be solved by pure capitalism. Like the race fanatics, they take part of the solution and make it into the whole, which ignores all the other problems and their solutions.
• Eugenics fanatics. Like most of the above, these have a partially correct response but miss the point by making it into an ideology like Leftism. Yes, Idiocracy is upon us but it has always been upon us. 90% of humanity by the ancient reckoning were of the thrall-nature and required telling what to do or they would screw it up and destroy good things for their own idiocy. The point of eugenics is to allow as many of the fools as possible to perish, but that by itself would not solve our problem, since even smart people make stupid decisions when assembled into herds.

All of the above are trying to make conservatism into Leftism. They want an ideology, or one simple principle that is applied universally to all people equally. The core of this belief is the socially-pleasing notion that all people are equal, when in fact since the dawn of time most people have been idiots who if not oppressed, destroy a civilization as surely as a leak in your intestine kills you with E. Coli poisoning.

“Return to God” is not the answer. Nor is “work hard and get ahead,” nor is “kill the Negroes/Jews.” These are all scapegoats and surrogates for the actual answer, which is to rebuild civilization. That requires four elements of a platform that I have identified elsewhere, which are (briefly): aristocracy, nationalism, positive incentives (incl. capitalism) and transcendental goals. Nationalism enables rule by culture, not Government; aristocracy gives us the best chance of good leadership; positive incentives reward competence instead of trying to protect the foolish from themselves, and a transcendental goal keeps us improving in quality.

Conservatives have failed for 200 years by relying on stupid fictions like “Return to God” that are basically a way of avoiding personal responsibility for fixing the problem. When you give up on an actual solution, you need to find a surrogate, and this is why “Return to God” — like racial fanaticism, socialist lunacy and raving eugenicism — is immensely popular.

Hint for the wise: avoid anything which is broadly popular, as that inevitably means that it is a form of denial of reality, and instead, a pleasant human fiction that causes warm fuzzy feelings as your society and future slide downward into a third-world abyss.

Here is another guy who gets it almost right:

I break with the alt-right crowd on a number of issues, abortion, might makes right morality, religion and aesthetic, but I feel that their specific argument in regard to racial/ethnic differences as they effect social order are valid. I, for my part, would add foundational religion to that list as I find credence in Carl Schmitt’s observation, “Political concepts are just secularized theological concepts.” Religion is not part of culture, but Culture a function of religion. The importance of Foundational Religion > Culture per say.

No, ten thousand times no: culture creates religion. All religions are interpretations of a naturalistic truth, or in other words, are descriptions by individual people of a symbolic representation of a truth that not all can detect and even those who can detect can only perceive in varying degrees. All implementations of religion are in turn interpretations of that religion. It is nonsense to say that there is “Christianity,” unless one is treating it as an ideology and assuming that the words in the book control people, which is nonsense as they will interpret those words as convenient for them, and to the degree that they are capable.

It is not accidental that Christianity in Mexico becomes a type of idol-worship and mysticism, or that in Haiti, Christianity becomes hybridized with Vodou. Third world populations choose third world levels of religion, just as they choose third-world style governments, personal behavior, and levels of social order. The people make the interpretation and no matter what you write down, they will convert it into what fits their own agenda, because — per Dunning-Kruger — this is what they understand and where their understanding stops.

As I have said before, you either put the best people in charge or watch as we are all oppressed by the incompetence of the rest. People in groups, even smart people, enact lunacy and stupidity.

Culture in turn arises from genetics (and also shapes genetics; like many things in nature, the two bootstrap one another). It is not as simple as IQ, but also involves the amount of vision and transcendental thinking among the group. An original culture like that of Europe aspires to something above the merely tangible, and this is why it rose above even those cultures which seemed ahead in intelligence, wealth and power like Asia.

Religion then arises out of culture and genetics alike. For that reason, any “return to God” will become a weapon of the enemy unless it is preceded by a restoration of health in culture, genetics, leadership, opportunity and transcendental goals.

Jonathan Haidt hits on a similar illusion, which he gets about half-right:

Human beings are incredibly irrational, biased, imperfect creatures. We are really, really bad at following the truth wherever it leads.

His second sentence is as accurate as anything that can be said, except for the implied equality of “we” — human beings vary greatly, and some are good at following the truth where it leads.

His first sentence is where he goes wrong. Our “rationality” is what leads us astray every time. It enables us to make symbolic conclusions based on gritty, complex data. This eliminates all consideration except the immediate and human in a utilitarian context. This is where we go wrong.

He then proceeds to make what I am calling “the STEM illusion”:

The brilliance of some of our classical liberal institutions, especially science at the university, is that it institutionalized disconfirmation. […] “We in science, we don’t really see the truth unbiasedly. We each put out our models, our theories, we try our hardest to prove we are right. And other scientists say ‘no, you didn’t see, this is wrong’ and then we have to defend it. That’s the way it works, institutionalized disconfirmation. It has made us as a species as a culture vastly smarter than we could be if we were just individuals deciding things for ourselves,” he continued.

And we are back to Leftism: he believes that a System can save us, instead of pointing out that this system worked when it was in the hands of 130+ IQ aristocrats but now, in the hands of the proles, it is nothing but multiple fumbles in an attempt to advance the career of each researcher.

No, Mr. Haidt, for all the good that you write, the above is wrong, although in service of a good thing (the idea of open debate on any topic). We are not all equal. And no System can compensate for that failing, just as merely sending everyone to church or killing off other races will not solve our problems, either.

Tags: alternative right, capitalism, christianity, conservatism, eugenics, jonathan haidt, neoconservatism, new right, racism, religion, socialism, STEM illusion, the scientific method