Good Citizenism Has Failed, Authoritarianism Beckons

One of the main assumptions of Classical Liberalism is that people are rational creatures, capable of thinking for themselves and acting in their own best interests.

However, the obvious, glaring reality is that people are more like guinea pigs - although less cute and cuddly, to be fair. But both will eat anything that you put in front of them. They’ll eat ‘till they’re sick. They’ll chew through the wires of your TV and electrocute themselves. That’s why you keep ‘em locked up in their cage.

I’m going to use drugs and vice in general to hammer home my point here.

The golden rule of drugs is that if there are readily available and affordable drugs, people will start taking those drugs. Then they’ll get hooked on them. Then they’ll get sick from them and some of them will eventually die from them.

Most societies used to understand that the vices are more convincing than any appeal to sober, rational behavior. As a result, they did everything in their power to not to test the average man by dangling vice in front of them and relying on their better, rational senses to ignore these vices. This is why sane, rational society-planners try to ban vices or make it harder to access them. Again, the unspoken assumption is that people are like guinea pigs or like a rugrat who will put anything that he sees on the floor in his mouth up to and including industrial cleaning chemicals and then die from them.

Why then the push to legalize just about every single vice under the sun that we see now?

It seems obvious to me - the ruling caste know that personal liberty weakens the average person. The average person is only as sane and rational as his environment allows him to be. Introduce vice into the environment and the average man does not rise to the challenge.

Experience shows that he succumbs. He chews on that wire. He gets hurt.

People are not made free because some system of government or other gives them political, economic or social freedoms. True personal freedom is only the province of a select few who are capable of becoming masters of themselves. People who cannot face down vice and overcome it are slaves to their passions. Personal freedom then, is a state that only comes about after intense personal struggle and conscious discipline. It cannot be legislated into existence. Nor does it exist in a state of nature.

This view is important to at least consider because Liberalism’s moral claim to legitimacy is that it maximizes personal liberty. While it is true that Liberalism has systematically hacked away at anything that might “limit” a person like ethnic ties, religious ties and familial ties in favor of creating a system of atomized individuals that are held together by laws administered by an omnipresent state, it hasn’t actually really made anyone freer. People have simply swapped masters. Laws, customs, norms, social pressure were replaced by vice and the pernicious belief that so long as one’s political ideology is correct, one is “saved” and automatically a good person.

Liberalizing drug use, pornography consumption and encouraging self-victimization certainly isn’t making anyone healthier or stronger. In fact, every single “liberalization” that we have been offered by our overlords over the recent years and decades has actually been the lifting of guardrails and safeguards that were once put into place to encourage people to weaken themselves and their communities through self-destructive behaviors.

The current debate over abortion “rights” is a good example of this. The story I read the other day about two high-schoolers OD’ing on fentanyl is another. @libsoftiktok makes the case for limiting personal liberties better than I ever could.

It helps to remember what the elites did to us during the scandemic (and what they still plan to do in the coming years) if one is still possessed of the quaint notion that one enjoys any positive rights and liberties like actual bodily autonomy and the like. The Liberals will fight tooth and nail to provide you with rights that enable you to hurt yourself and your loved ones, but will come down like a hammer on those that seeks to use personal liberty in a positive way.

That’s why I don’t really get the never-ending talk about “freedoms” and all that. See, there has to be a guarantor of positive freedom otherwise rights are not worth the paper they are written on. The Founding Fathers believed that so long as the American people remained moral and disciplined, that they would be able to maintain their freedoms - they believed that the people themselves, being rational, would work actively to maintain and maximize their positive freedoms.

But we are well and past that point by now, aren’t we? The only questions is whether or not we admit it to ourselves yet.

See, if Americans were a disciplined people committed to maintaining their positive freedoms, there would be no drug epidemic, would there? That is the Libertarian argument is it not? Everyone ought to have the right to choose? Well, the peasants have chosen to the tune of close to a 100k overdose deaths a year. No one held a gun to their head and forced them to ingest fentanyl, have an abortion, become obese, etc. Having said that, I don’t blame the average person anymore than I blame a guinea pig for chewing through a wire.

There’s something… well, liberating about keeping one’s expectations low.

Anyways, the point that I’ve been meandering towards goes something like this:

1. Without a strong, moral, disciplined population, merchants of vice become the masters of a society.

2. Liberalism then, is simply a bait and switch operation and the new bosses are far worse than the “strict” ones that we had before.

3. Atomizing an individual by “freeing” him from the constraints of his ethnic group, his tribe, his clan, his family and the customs and mores that come with his membership in these organizations weakens the individual.

4. These “unfreedoms” actually made a person stronger, provided safeguards and guardrails to his life and kept vice at bay through social pressure at least.

5. Most people do what is expected or permitted them by their social environment. Destroy a positive, safe environment and you will destroy the vast majority of people’s abilities to function in a positive way.

6. Guinea pigs are cuter than humans

A final point:

People bristle at the idea of someone with power telling them what to do. I know I sure do, at least. But the idea that we are free because someone wrote something on a piece of paper however many years ago is absurd. Freedom in America was supposed to be maintained by a well-disciplined, well-read, and well-armed population. But, put simply, the American people failed to live up to the expectations of their Founding Fathers.

Now, in most other parts of the world with an Authoritarian tradition in their past or present, things worked in a different way. Instead of putting their faith in themselves (bad idea) the peasants looked to the power of the Autocrat to be their guarantor of freedom and to create favorable conditions for them. In Russia, for example, peasants routinely clamored and demanded to be freed from their boyar oligarch lords and to be put under the direct vassalage of the Tsar. If they rose up in revolt, it was to put another, better king on the throne, not to establish the Worldwide Self-Governing Peasantitariat. It is also a historical fact that the peasants enjoyed far better working conditions under the Tsar - some Russians historians have argued that they lived better off than their European counterparts in places like France when it came to wellness indicators like calories, off-time and the like, but that’s whatever at this point, and I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything when it comes to 19th century peasant GDP or CPI.

The point is that the peasants in Russia (and all of Old Europe, frankly) were, to their credit, under no illusions about their supposed freedoms. They knew that freedoms can only be guaranteed by a powerful force working to fight off the opposing forces that would strip them away if given the chance. They knew that they themselves could not guarantee these freedoms in any meaningful capacity for long. As a result, the peasants gave the Tsar absolute power, with the understanding that he was their champion and the defender of the realm and its way of life. In an act of humility, they faced up to their peasant nature and refused to indulge in the belief that they could create a system of Good Citizenism.

Looking back now, we can conclude that the American experiment certainly was built with a rosy view of human nature in mind. Locke’s pessimism was actually leaps and bounds more optimistic than the political thinking that preceded it. In the end, American Good Citizenism was destroyed by the forces of entropy, helped along by the agents of entropy on this material plane (the you-know-whos). The Communist experiment was similar in its assumptions about the nature of man, by the way. The average prole was “empowered” just long enough for him to fall into divorce, drink, and despondency.

And please don’t think I’m attacking America or comparing Americans to Communists.

I just think that the average American needs to face facts and start demanding a King or a Tsar or a God-Emperor or a four-term President. The average peasant anywhere needs someone with some serious strength in his corner fighting for him. He can’t go it alone.

Besides, boiled down to its most essential and fundamental premise, reactionary and Authoritarian politics is about creating a powerful executive office and then propelling a man worthy of the title into it.

But it takes humility and self-reflection on the part of the people to understand why this is the best course of action for themselves and their posterity. Most people behave like guinea pigs when it comes time to make sober economic, social and political decisions. But they don’t like it when you point out that day in and day out, they seem to wake up with the sole purpose of digging themselves into a deeper hole than they are already in and then go to bed whispering lamentations into their whiskey handle between thirsty gulps.

Never fear though: they’ll vote for a strong man given the first opportunity. Someone who can promise to fix everything for them. Because they know that this is the only way. Group-discipline? Group-organization? Group-improvement? Impossible now that the social environment has degraded to the point that it has. Too many drugs, too much porn, too little self-control. Far better to hand over all earthly power to an exceptional someone who can make all these temptations go away and punish sin harshly.

Good Citizenism has been tried and it has failed, folks.

Authoritarianism remains the eternal, unchanging, next-best option.