The First Principle of Strength

People want to talk about what can be done to get out of the current death spiral that Western civilization finds itself in. My advice: well, you’ve tried voting and you’ve tried protesting, so just go down the list and try the next thing along the kinetic scale and see if that works, I guess.

Frankly, that sort of discussion should have been had in the 90s at the very latest. It’s a bit late in the game to suddenly realize that things are really really bad and only getting worse when the writing was on the wall and the prophets of the decline were bellowing at the top of their lungs for about 30 years now, trying to get people to wake up and do something when it was still possible.

Basically, the decline is locked in at this point. All plans have to factor that in going forward. Will the control system slacken its grip just enough for a genuine populist movement to gain enough steam to overthrow it as things get worse? Who knows. We should have that discussion at some point though.

But, while we’re waiting for the bottom to fall out of this economy and the next million strong batch of engineers and doctors to march across the southern border, we may as well talk about first principles and how bad first principles may have gotten us to this point and how they might limit our ability to get out of the hole that we’re in.

Take Liberalism as an example, which is built on the principle of maximizing personal liberty. The assumption at work here is that anything that limits personal liberty is bad. That means one’s ethnic ties, community obligations, familial duties and so on are obstacles that have to be surmounted. Then, once the individual throws off the shackles of all of the inherited, natural constraints on his personal freedom, he needs a strong Leviathan-like state hovering over him at all times to keep him safe from everyone else, now that he has no clan, no tribe and no strength to defend himself on his own. The monster-demon-state is a necessary evil, because it uses its monopoly on violence and people’s reliance on it to keep the fragile, Liberal system intact and to check people’s innate desire to seek to gain an advantage over others. Man is assumed to be “brutish” and only capable of being kept in check by the demon-state’s police force.

Socialism, which came later, was built on the premise of equality. The underlying assumption is that people and goods are interchangeable - standardizable even. The principle of personal liberty is no defense against progressive policies and the liberties of the individual can be trampled upon if it means that something somewhere is being equalized. This is because equality is the first principle of this system, regardless of what ideological form it may eventually adopt i.e. Communism, Social-Democracy, etc, not personal liberty. Quality, being the opposite of equality, is usually the first victim of this type of regime.

And these are the only two real systems of values that people have to choose from in the West, and Russia too, to a certain extent.

As a result, people largely view the worlds through one of these two value systems. The Conservatives (who are really just Liberals) ask themselves if proposal A infringes on their personal liberty or not and the Liberals (who are really just Socialists) ask themselves whether proposal A increases social equity, according to their warped understanding of social justice, naturally.

These two groups don’t really see eye to eye because they’re working with different first principles. And, off in the far distance, on the fringes of the fringe are people who don’t think either systems are worth fighting and dying for at all.

A new system, and a new approach to doing politics, building society and so on, need a new first principle to base itself on. I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve settled on the first principle of strength. In other words, when evaluating proposal A, I no longer ask myself whether or not it maximizes personal liberty or leads to social equity, but whether or not it makes me and my people stronger. Using this first principle instead of the other two allows me to think outside the box.

Take Corona and the mandatory vaxes. Most opponents of Bill Gates’ blood clot formula took a position against in on the basis that it infringed on people’s medical liberties. Me, I was against it because I knew that it would weaken my body and the body of the people. In the abortion debates, the pro-abortion people claim that it being able to kill off their unwanted child is a personal liberty, a medical liberty. Seeing as the claim rests on the accepted premise of personal liberty, opponents of abortion then have no recourse but to argue that it is an infringement on the rights of the aborted child. Then, pro-abortionists make the rejoinder argument that the baby is just a clump of cells and therefore does not possess such rights. At which point, the anti-abortionists get dragged into a theological debate about the origin of life that no one can adequately argue one way or the other. This is where we find ourselves now. Until SCIENCE! delivers a verdict on who is alive and who isn’t, no progress in the debate can be made.

But this debate could be held on different grounds and based on different first principle values. In other words, the argument against abortion could be that it undermines the strength of a nation. This is a much harder position to argue against.

Adopting a new first principle isn’t without risks, true. Debates between groups with two completely different first principles motivating their view of the world often degenerate into conflict of one form or another. And a people that does not share the same first principle drifts inexorably closer to civil war.

This all remains highly theoretical though. Until people adopt the new principle and make it a part of their mindset and worldview, it doesn’t really exist and no one is going to mobilize politically to defend it. Again, take the gun grab debate raging in the US now. We’re being told that guns are too dangerous to be allowed in the hands of White Americans because they can be used to hurt school children or something like that. Only the Feds and inner-city gangsters should be allowed to own firearms, we are told. Conservatives, naturally, argue that this is an infringement on their liberties, and this is objectively true. But, one could just as easily make the argument that an armed populace is stronger than a disarmed one, though, and rest one’s case on that fact alone. There is no argument that one couldn’t make from the first principle of strength to defend the things that conservatives in America hold dear.

Except the soda tax. We’d have to go ahead and institute that, sorry. Corn-syrup does not make you or the American people stronger. Coca-Cola has got to go.

The principle of strength can go further than conservatism can, because it is not bound by the same constraints. Acting upon the principle of strength alone allows one to advocate for the summary execution of drug-dealers, mass deportations, nationalization of predatory mega-corporations and so on. One can cut through the left-right divide and create a populist platform based solely on measures designed to make a nation stronger. Instead of endlessly debating whether reparations for brown people is socially just or whether unborn infants sign the Hobbesian social contract with the state to guarantee their liberties in the first trimester or the second, we can move beyond all of this and start a totally new debate around a totally different first principle.

It would be refreshing, if nothing else.