We Get the Politics That We Deserve

The only dip in the steady rise of subscribers that I’ve been accumulating since I started the blog occurred when I wrote that article trashing the Old Testament. Strap in because I think I’m about to outdo myself with this one.

I’m always struck by just how much the behavior and attitudes of the peasantry is mirrored by the political class. Or, perhaps, the order of causality is exactly backwards. Regardless, what you see on the macro level with the behavior and attitude of the politicians and their behavior and what you see on the level of the small folk is strikingly similar.

For example, the behavior and attitudes of the Ukrainian peasants and proles is identical to their robber-baron politicians. Every other Ukrainian I know is making plans to steal as much as he can and flee for the West. The war is a golden opportunity for the middle-class of Kiev to finally get into America or some Western European country, and especially for the middle-aged women to escape their husbands and upgrade to new ones. The worse-off Ukrainians will have to settle for Poland, I suppose.

So, when the politicians rob the country blind, the average Ukrainian is outraged, true. But he’s outraged that it’s not him up there lining his pockets. What’s that guy in the suit on TV got that he hasn’t?

Furthermore, he hates his neighbors in the East. Is it because the politicians told him to hate them? Yes, probably. But he’s also generally just a hateful and petty person, so he’s been primed for it. After all, he hates the neighbors in his own commieblock too, so it wasn’t hard for him to extend that feeling to people he didn’t even know living in the East. At some point, he could have just been a good person and decided to not blindly hate his neighbor just because the TV told him so. But, well, sin comes so easy and virtue actually requires just a tiny bit of self-reflection and self-control.

The average person has so many contemptible traits that he has allowed to infect and fester in his personality. You don’t need me to tell you about Ukrainians to know this to be true. Anytime I talked to a Western office-worker over drinks, they eventually start complaining about their co-workers. Their colleagues backstab them, gossip about them, steal credit for their work, offload work on them, and suck up to the bosses even when they’re abusing their power. Worker solidarity is a myth. The average person behaves worse than a gang member when it comes to snitching, backstabbing and selling out their fellow prisoners. Why then get mad that Republican politicians in America screw over their voters when the average conservative voter exhibits the exact same qualities and then dresses up his selfishness by appealing to Rothbard, Rand and some other Jewish ideologues who have enshrined greed as a cardinal virtue?

The official motto of America is, “E Pluribus Unom,” (I think) when it ought to be, “Fuck you, I’ve got mine, Jack.”

But it’s not just America, sadly.

In Russia, when I was living with my girlfriend in one of those massive 10+ floored commieblocks, the police came knocking on the doors asking whether the neighbors had seen a fugitive. They put the picture up in the hallway. It was a dark-haired, slanty-eyed, bearded and brown migrant goblin. He looked literally nothing like me. But, my girlfriend’s neighbors told the police that they had seen him, that is me, that is the fugitive, living with her. The police came knocking on my girlfriend’s door and explained that her neighbor had ratted her out and told her to fess up. She showed them a picture of me and the police dropped the matter. We didn’t hear from them again.

But I was outraged at her neighbors. Why would they a) rat to the police b) lie about me?

My girlfriend’s family just waved their hand and said, “c’est la vie.”

In Ukraine, the rat infestation is far worse than anywhere I’ve ever lived. But America is a close second. Parents rat out their children and their children rat them out in turn over political squabbles. The political stuff is really just a pretext for far pettier concerns. Petty behavior, in general, is the norm. Solidarity is so rare that when you see an example of it, it sticks with you for your whole life like a piercing ray of hope in the gloomy darkness. I’m not kidding when I say that prisoners adhere to a higher standard of moral behavior than upstanding citizens.

Take #MeToo, for example.

Well, when I was still studying, #MeToo was the norm a decade before it ever hit the mainstream. A girl claimed that one of the guys in our circle had been raping her for 2 years non-stop while they were in a relationship together. He had to leave school for a year over the completely unfounded accusations. But, did we, his friends, close ranks and offer him our support? No, we ditched him immediately and never spoke to him again, even though we knew he was no rapist.

Was this #MeToo moment political in nature? Not really. Almost all the social trends that we see in the West appear to just be thinly disguised excuses to engage in anti-social and immoral behavior. It’s a comparable situation to what happened in Kiev, when the authorities handed out guns to the residents who hadn’t fled the capital. These people started looting their own city and settling scores with other people while the enemy was at the gates.

No one forced these people to rat on each other or to shoot at one another.

Yes, the political class provides the means and the ammo with these various astro-turfed social justice campaigns and, in the case of Kiev, actual weapons of war. But no one held a gun to the heads of the people who denounced their family members over a Thanksgiving quarrel or who organized an outrage mob against their co-workers to get them fired. Normal, social, moral people do not act this way.

Even Stalin condemned that little brat who ratted his parents out to the authorities.

Pavlik Morozov was probably tired of getting made fun of for his 5-head.

Stalin, a paragon of morality himself, probably would have been appalled by the behavior of people nowadays. He would have also probably had a heart attack if he saw how his great-granddaughter turned out:

Where are we, as a society, that we allow ourselves to be so easily convinced to engage in selfish, destructive behavior against our fellow prisoners? And, having reached this low point, are we even capable of stepping back and taking a long, hard look at ourselves in the mirror?

At this point, frankly, we deserve the politicians that we get. Why should we expect our leaders to be clean-cut, honorable people when the average person is a degenerate, drug-addled slob? We can’t honestly claim that we deserve better because we really don’t, frankly.

Now, I don’t really view the average peasant and prole in America or Ukraine or Russia as entirely human. They’re just higher animals in my conception of them. I also don’t think that they have souls. But, I don’t categorize them as such out of spite, rather out of pity. If I thought of them as humans, I’d have to hold them to higher standards and judge them for their mistakes and their poor behavior, because being human means having the capacity to choose between right and wrong, solidarity and sliminess, loving one’s neighbors and ratting them out. By assuming that the average person is a potty-trained golem, I find it easier to absolve them of their bad behavior and just say, “c’est la vie.”

Furthermore, the only way to raise the standards of behavior in the population, en masse, is through the use of the technology of Nationalism. Nationalism, boiled down to its most fundamental premise, is basically like a fat camp for the nation. Good behaviors are drilled into the animal-like masses. This is mostly done by placing heroic figures, either mythical, historical or living, on a pedestal and haranguing the masses into copying their behavior.

In that sense, Nationalism isn’t really an “ism” ideology like the rest, but a best practice that actually works.

Nationalism posits that the potential for development lies in every person because the heroes that a nationalist state puts on a pedestal share the same blood as the lowly masses that are taught to look up to them. It’s a radically democratic proposition, actually. Instead of claiming that only the nobility have the traits necessary to, well, be noble, nationalists claimed that shared blood and a shared ideal was the only prerequisite necessary. The various nationalist projects were largely successful - standards of behavior rose dramatically while they were being implemented. Using both the carrot and the rod, the nation-state societies were able to noticeably raise the moral condition of the average person, which justified bestowing rights and responsibilities on their newly-empowered citizens. A great period of prosperity and national enthusiasm followed. It was, in many ways, a rejection of feudalism and a return to tribalism albeit on a far larger scale.

Unlike other right-wing thinkers, I have no trouble reconciling the truths uncovered by the Feudal and Nationalist experiments in my mind. This is because there are, indeed, people who are naturally endowed with noble traits. Courage, honesty and a commitment to service to others rarely occur naturally in the population. Usually, these traits are confined to the martial and spiritual classes. However, it is also true that with conditioning and social-engineering, the general standards and norms of a society can be improved by sharing/imposing these qualities on the larger population.

Instead of continuing to work on this social engineering project, the elites, at some point, decided to encourage the worst qualities of man and dress them up as virtue, no doubt because it was profitable. And because the child-like average man was so tired of being “uptight” and “bourgeois” or whatever, they eagerly took the chance that the elite gave them to engage in selfish, self-destructive behavior when the nationalist standard of good behavior was no longer enforced on the population.

As a result, the West is now hurtling towards neo-Feudalism at an alarming rate. And our hostile, increasingly foreign elites will only continue to encourage the absolute worst qualities in the bipedal animals that surround us to make us weaker than we already are. Appeals to the nationalistic civic spirit will start to lose their hold on people who have grown up in a post-moral society. Our only hope is to break away from the anti-social, immoral masses and create our own parallel island societies i.e., social circles. The only nationalists who will be left will be the “natural nationalists” who possess the higher qualities from birth, and not because of training. It will become increasingly impossible to appeal to the better qualities of a person when they simply aren’t there and when you lack the proper tools to drill them into a person. It will also become increasingly dangerous to associate with low-quality people who do not have these higher qualities, because they will become a liability going forward.

Having come this far in this essay, I realize that I haven’t even defined my terms, which is a cardinal epistemological sin on my part. We’ve spent so much time talking about best practice, that we haven’t really touched on morality. So, what is “good”, really? How can we define it?

Well, I hold that anything that leads to greater strength on an individual or group basis is “good."

On an individual level, self-mastery, which leads to strength, is the practice of “goodness.” And, using the classic example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, I’d define group-cooperation strategies as being “gooder” than rational, selfish strategies and modes of behavior that lead to worse outcomes.

This is a totally new/old/perennial way of looking at things because the defining principle/goal isn’t the maximization of personal liberty or achieving higher standards of equality or, following a rigid set of dogmatic rituals. No, the goal is, (say it with me this time) Strength, not selfishness, self-effacement or servile obedience.

But I’ve said enough for today. We can talk more about our brave new moral epistemology another time.