America’s Long-Lived Leveling Culture
Written by Henry Dampier Posted in Uncategorized
America’s essential tension, going back to the first European settlements, is between a democratic egalitarianism and a heroic-aristocratic sensibility. Americans both expect to be able to advance themselves by going out into the frontier, making their own rules. Once they ‘make it,’ their fellows also expect the right to pull them back down to where they started, usually through legal or political processes, but sometimes by the relentless advance of public opinion.
Success, unless it’s attacked or redistributed, will tend to calcify into permanent privilege. Over time, as that becomes more solid, a society that starts off on relatively even footing will become dramatically stratified. Regardless of all the rhetoric about property and privacy rights, Americans have tended to be dramatically uncomfortable with the results of respecting those sorts of rights. Antitrust legislation and other forms of regulatory intervention came about because popular opinion was so dramatically opposed to the results of free market principles in action — a small number of winners wind up consolidating power, foreclosing off some areas of opportunity.
In America, ‘equality of opportunity’ has a sacred tone to it, more so than more absolute forms of equality. More people are more likely to say that they’re in favor of that equality, but not in terms of ‘equality of outcomes.’ Americans love symmetrical sports in which both teams start from zero, and like to imagine that they can make the rest of the world like one big game. The more that the world resembles a game of baseball or football, the better.
The real world is more like a permanent blowout game in which the best compete against the weakest, and with biased referees. By reducing the messy real world into something that seems like an even game in which both teams have a genuine chance of winning, it eases some of the discomfort that comes with seeing the world as it is, exposing idealistic conceptions of fairness to a reality that can’t support them.
The natural world isn’t a fair place, and neither is the political world. The way to advance under a democratic system is not necessarily to promise full equality to everyone, but to promise that all the people will have an equal shot at success, to make the world like a talent show competition in which everyone, even the least talented and capable, believe that they have a chance at the prize. If they believe that they at least have a chance if they try hard enough, it gives them a sense of agency and control over their own lives, of a freedom without responsibility which they can pretend to.
This is one of the reasons why the education complex in America continues to retain so much credibility. It has nothing to do with the outcomes that education produces. It has to do with maintaining the myth of equal opportunity, which was the promise of the obligatory universal education system. It doesn’t even have much to do with the people who use that system — it’s important even to people who send their children to private schools to maintain the pretense that the people who go to ‘good public schools’ still have a great shot at economic success within the system. Critics sometimes skew reformist politicians who send their children to private schools as hypocrites, but that action is less hypocritical than it seems — it’s more important, generally, for them to promote the idea that the schools are equality-generators than it is to acknowledge the broader truth that the bold goals of the entire system were fatally flawed from the beginning, at odds as they are with reality.
Attempting to engineer equality of opportunity inevitably encourages that equality of outcome will also be engineered — because if all people deserve an equal shot, it implies that they’re of mostly equal value, and if they’re of equal value, then everyone should be winning the same trophy from the same competition, and any time the scores come back differently, it’s that they somehow cheated during the game.
America’s trajectory can’t be changed, but we will have the opportunity to write the closing chapter about why it ended how it did. They built the doom into the project from the beginning.
Clear and concise, a very nice article. It would seem impossible outside of insanity to truly declare that all people are equal, with equal defined as identical. They are of course not, and not just in the superficial sense that we are all aesthetically unique from our facial structure to our fingerprints, but also that we possess within ourselves different strengths and weaknesses, different talents.
The idea of an equal start, that in spite of these differences in ability, intelligence, strength, parentage etc., all people should have a shot at exactly the same outcomes put in the eye-roll worthy adage “anyone can be president!”, I think comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian theology sanitized for the Deist intellectuals of the Founding period. They draw a logical line that doesn’t exist.
All people will be judged by God ———> All people are equal before God ———–> All people should be equal before other people.
This is basically wrong. It’s a failure to understand how a disciplinary hierarchy works. Just because a CEO can fire a both a mid-level manager and the mail room guy, that doesn’t mean they are equals within the hierarchy of the business, just that they are both underneath the CEO and their foibles can be punished by that CEO on a whim if he so chooses.
I think at least a core component of the degeneration in Modernity is the lack of a class system, the lack of defined uppers and lowers, with far too much mobility in and out of power roles. The end of such a system was written into the founding documents of ‘Enlightened’ nations and as you say, has sown the seed of doom. The ink is being applied to this final chapter. Equality dies at the hands of reality, and unforgiving hands they are.
“Fairness” is fine when it refers to fair play, fair price, fair weather, etc., but all too often it is merely a cloak for envy and simply reflects the Devil’s philosophy.
I myself sort of understand, as you say, the American idea of – not so much equality, but more – “I’m as good as the next guy” as a case of reverse snobbery. There’s a kind of smug dullness that advertises itself as equality. Multi-billionaire sport, movie and pop stars are worshipped as long as they in turn adore Beyoncé or whomever is the current black purveyor of rancid mob cliché. Those who understand can exploit this, to me, uniquely American characteristic.
Scott Walker’s show of solidarity with white motorcycle riders is interesting because he’s actually defying negroization at a symbolic level. Maybe we’ll have a Putinesque politician come along who will actually give money to white motorcycle clubs and recruit them for clandestine military action in the increasing number of Ferguson’s and Islamic strongholds.
Do Americans really believe in equality? There are now more women in state universities than men. The establishment’s response has been an ongoing vicious attempt to destroy fraternities. There seems to be no broad alarm about this astonishing development.
It appears that large numbers of white men rather welcome dhimmitude while a smaller number clearly do not.
“Attempting to engineer equality of opportunity inevitably encourages that equality of outcome will also be engineered — because if all people deserve an equal shot, it implies that they’re of mostly equal value”
I would have to disagree, It may be true the left has been able to fool many into thinking both concepts are interchangeable, but I don’t think all Americans are fooled and I don’t think the roots of Americans support for equality of opportunity is why you think it is. [Well its possible we have crossed a line in the recent past but still.]
I think Americans see themselves as historical proof that much talent is wasted in the old world system. Whle they may have a better opinion of their own talents than warranted by reality and are even kind of aware of this, they never the less still support the new system because it affords the emotional satisfaction that life has some meaning. Having managed people my whole life I have found if people have even an illusion of agency they become more productive and happier less likely to become difficult
And I think in this they are correct. Much talent is wasted through aristocracies and crony capitalism. First movers though the legitimate winners of their generation can and do parley this into a sclerotic entrenched oligarchy which personally i feel is neither meritoriousn or creatively destructive. The problem as I have always seen it is how to overcome that without destroying capitalism meritocracy property rights etc.
I think it would be wise to consider why the old class system was seen as a failure. Note that I’m not talking about why it was attacked, but why the attacks were seen to make sense. I find that NRx is generally poor at understanding why older versions of its proposed systems lost their evolutionary races, and it creates a large blind spot. Bravo to SM for beginning to address social technologies around aristocracy, but there’s a very long way to go.
The counter-complaint in this article is that “Attempting to engineer equality of opportunity inevitably encourages that equality of outcome will also be engineered.” Let’s assume, for argument, that this is true.
We can promote equality of opportunity as a way of destroying caste hierarchies (it would surely destroy our present one if the delivery mechanisms could be built), knowing that eventually the system will be manipulated to created another caste hierarchy based on engineered equality of outcome. In the interim, it will create a very prosperous spike in history. The down-side is that you risk a Dark Ages/ totalitarian level crash each cycle. Eventually, your culture is going to roll snake-eyes.
Or, we can promote a less porous class system, which rejects equality of opportunity at a conceptual level. Now, what are some of the risks?
* Engineered inequality of outcome. Status and cash (resources) seem to try to become cross-convertible, as a common theme of human nature. What fluctuates are the exchange rates for various circumstances. An aristocracy that can’t fully compete will attempt to fix conversions that leverage their position. See employees, modern American government.
* Competition kills. Risk of a stable outcome where everything goes “well” – until you must compete with a society that stepped on the equality of opportunity roller-coaster. You tried to trade highs and lows for prosperous stability, and find that Gnon doesn’t care. You lose the race, and the winner transfers its memes into you. Since your opponent usually has to be near its peak of power, it’s almost an axiom that the meme transfer happens shortly before the roller-coaster heads sharply down. Lucky you.
* Legitimacy erosion. Now that you’ve taken away a general belief in opportunity, what incentive do people have to buy into your system? That’s a very hard belief to replace, esp. when people have seen the “wrong” people wind up being successful through legitimate production. Anyone who has seen the Sharpe series (fantastic modernist take on the Napoleonic Wars with Sean Bean) get this issue.
I understand that it’s still early days for NRx, But its days of being taken seriously will begin when it moves past attacking underlying modern axioms, and begins to leverage everything the modern world knows about social systems to engineer workable and sustainable non-equalist systems.
“Now that you’ve taken away a general belief in opportunity, what incentive do people have to buy into your system?”
Fear.
There never has been a truly egalitarian society. And the US was never even close. For all our talk about equality, our society never was. Back in the days of the Founding Fathers, only white men with property could vote. Over time, the franchise was extended to more people, but elections never made a difference. The powerful got what they wanted, one way or another.
The Industrial Revolution was the real game changer. The previously slow rise of a middle class that demanded a share of the power was dwarfed in the exponential rise of wealth and new power structures as a result of the IR.
Now you had “dirty coal chippers” like Andrew Carnegie becoming vastly wealthy industrial magnates. And then accused of being robber barons. The tremendous churning of social classes as a result of the overwhelming amount of new wealth generated in the IR resulted in the idea that the class system was wrong, outmoded and had previously kept good people down.
Additionally, the new power centers of mass education and mass media, which rose in the late 19th century gave former outgroups power and control over millions of people. And yet these newly wealthy and powerful people could never join the club of aristocracy. No matter what estate they bought or built, or what accents they tried to put on, they were never going to be a member of the old aristocracy. Many of the newly powerful outgroups were bitter about this, and set about denigrating anything that smacked of the old class structure, through their control over the education system and the media.
This has, over time, gone from attacking the old aristocracy to the land owning gentry, to the robber baron industrialists to the bourgeios middle class all the way down to the average white male.
We have to live somewhere and the only somewhere for nearly all Americans is America.
Saying it’s DOOMED isn’t a solution to our problems and we must face and solve our problems or be consumed by same.
Our problem: The New Deal Administrative State has predictably moved into Tyranny, it was predictable as there was never any check on it’s power other than the virtue of the Administrators. It was a benevolent if center left bureaucracy for exactly one generation that became quite hostile with the second generation of administrators in 1966. 1966 wasn’t just the key year of Cloward Piven but the year you see the administrators change into professional bureaucrats who hire academic radicals. Go and look what was the premier social program of maximum “buy in” in 1966: The VA. You’ll see the Administrators all changed that very year. That is also the year the socially pathogenic staffers of the Great Society and campus radicals overthrow the New Dealers who had become Cold Warriors and the year LBJ’s fate is sealed.
As far as contradictions and tensions in the system those exist in any system as that’s part of any existence.
Principles above do appear in practice but are not part of the Official Canon until the last 50 years, in particular Equality. The closest is “All Men are Created Equal” which was an appeal to God’s Law against the idea of hereditary and in the case of the British Empire’s policies towards America a mismanaging and corrupt, distant Capitol in London. We face much the same situation with regard to our sane elites. We also have utterly alien and non-American Jacobin clubs throughout our government and elites for instance in our DOJ Civil Rights division.
We have to face our problem of a predatory and hostile to the ethnic majority State and elites. That’s nothing new to men and has happened all throughout history. They should be thrown down and removed from any lever of power at a minimum and replaced with a government that doesn’t hate it’s own people.
No system change solves our problems as it’s not a systems problem, it’s a personnel problem. We have criminal elites who can be divided into two basic actual parties: The Resource predators who are concerned with looting us for $ Trillions per year and the Process predators who are motivated by their need to destroy and degrade our race [and all other races].
Predators coming to power is normal for human history and civilization and so is their fate.
It is our duty to defend what is ours be it ever so flawed. You defend in reality as opposed to in the abstract by striving against men and not their ideas. Ideas are but drums beaten to summon followers. The French Revolution succeeded not because of Rousseau but because of money – first the Duc of Orleans agents paid the core of what became the Jacobin murder crews and later of course looting France paid. The Duc of Orleans paid as he coveted the throne and under the name Louis Egalitie paid with his head for his folly and treason. *
The Left isn’t flawed ideas of Equality that fail in practice, the Left is brilliantly successful in gangsterism and looting for the Leftists. The Jacobin’s were failed lawyers and defrocked priests who hired career criminals to kill and loot and drunkards and prostitutes to fill the galleries.
First the other Estates of landed property and the bourgeois parties failed, then the Giordinists failed for the same reason the Right is failing now and the mistake made here; they thought ideas, law and culture mattered. They had a stake in the system and the Leftists coveted their stake. The Left understood that Force and Gain was all that mattered. They were never anything then or now but a violent and criminal minority engaged in intimidation, bribery and murder to get power and then terror to hold onto power.
Power isn’t ideas or merit and nor is it biology or birth. Power is Force and Force’s Gains [loot]. The levers over men are Force and Gain. The rest is marketing and priestly trappings. The Right continuously makes the mistake of the Trappings being what matters, the Left understands what really matters.
*Father of Louis Phillipe, a wise monarch who took many of his lessons on Liberal rule from his time spent working as a common teacher in America during his exile.
Defend what is yours, and in common with us what is OURS.
You defend in reality as opposed to in the abstract by striving against men and not their ideas. Ideas are but drums beaten to summon followers.
More simply – Mr. Dampier you need to stop hunting decoys and start hunting actual Ducks.
This is what the Ducks actually DO, as opposed to what they Quack. Ducks do Force & Gain. Quack Ideas.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2578/2578-h/2578-h.htm#link2H_4_0002
This is the path we are on now, and The Right is following the same doomed steps of the French Right.
Do look above and see what should be done differently. Ta.
There is a difference. The French counter-revolutionaries were trying to prop up an order. We live in a time where the order has been utterly annihilated. Only vague remnants remain. As such, we have to be more careful when it comes to actual action. Don’t doubt the power of ideas. It is ideas after all that bring in men of action. To co-ordinate an army you first have to build that army. We start from scratch where the original counter-revolutionaries didn’t.
I get the idea that the left is more about power than ideas, but I don’t think that quite captures the last century of history. In China, every three hundred years or so, there would be an uprising that would oust the ruling dynasty. They would be eliminated trunk, root and branch down to the eighth cousin thrice removed. And so would all their ministers, generals, supporters, lackeys, toadies and other assorted hangers on.
After this paroxysm of violence a new emperor would rise to power and go about using the same ruling system. In other words, it was like a neutron bomb; the people would all be eliminated, but the power structure would remain. The same culture, the same Confucian texts, the same family system, the same ministerial offices, the same mandarins and functionaries. China survived through thousands of years of these sorts of power struggles.
What I don’t get about the left is their hatred not just of the corrupt, incompetent and brutal leaders, but of every single thing about western culture. Sure, the leaders are unworthy; take power, someone’s gotta rule. But why set up a system that destroys ordinary people and their ordinary aspirations? Why set up a structure that destroys a man’s life through frivolous divorce for cash and prizes and takes his kids away? What’s he ever done to deserve that? Why glorify the perversion of homosexuality? Why sanctify the absolutely insane transgenders? Why should they even care what a Christian bakery in Iowa does? Why destroy and bankrupt them to the hoots, hollers and howls of glee from the SJWs? It’s demonic.
Most westerners were productive, dutiful and respectful of authority, why use that against them? Why undermine these people’s natural obedience and replace them with less productive, less dutiful others and encourage the destruction of the culture that nurtures these obedient, dutiful and productive citizens?
I call it The Hatred. I am trying to understand The Hatred. Why do they Hate their own past, their own culture, religion, families, fathers, Mom, apple pie and all that? I think it’s ultimately spiritual. They turned away from God and tried to figure out things on their own. Now they have loosed the demonic.
”I call it The Hatred. I am trying to understand The Hatred. Why do they Hate their own past, their own culture, religion, families, fathers, Mom, apple pie and all that? I think it’s ultimately spiritual. They turned away from God and tried to figure out things on their own. Now they have loosed the demonic. ”
How is it that the godless chinese for many thousands of years manage to retain their power structure and everything else in chinese culture.
While the west that abandons God ends up being more destructive?
I wouldn’t really call Chinese civilization godless. Originally, in Ancient China, they did have a sort of monotheism with some startling similarities to that which emerged from the Middle East. This did degrade over time into a more Japanese style of religion, the concepts being more abstract, but Chinese life was still very ritualistic and religious… up until you know who arrived on the scene of course.
The Chinese did not escape modernity unscathed. They, too, destroyed their traditional culture. In 1911 the last emperor was deposed. But they didn’t keep the old system with new personnel as they had done with previous uprisings. It was to be something completely different. Sun Yat Sen’s American style liberalism lost out to Mao. The traditional Chinese way of life, including their family structure was chewed up and spat out. One of the first things the Communists did was legalize divorce.
Similar developments took place in that other unmodern vast land empire, Russia. Reading Dostoyevsky, you can see The Hatred at work. He wrote whole books about it. When the Communists were victorious, peasants who had only the year before knelt piously in front of their icons, now gleefully tossed them in the flames. It is depressing to contemplate how quickly people can turn on their “deeply held” beliefs.
Yes, I have studied the Modern history of China in depth, and your analysis is correct. It is unfortunate that the Empress died when she did, before the young emperor to be had come of age. He stood no chance against Yatsen’s thugs and the treachery of the imperial army. Imagine what China might look like today, with European Imperialism effectively ended after WWII? It could have become a strong Traditionalist power, rather than a strong Communist one.
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