It markets itself as a gateway from North America to the Pacific and a world city. Yet residents and business alike are becoming increasingly fed up with the costs of living and working here. The city greets you with endless construction from the UBC campus all the way to the easternmost suburbs of the Metro area. Despite this, young people and professionals alike find it difficult to become homeowners and have families. Recently, a post reporting on the hiring difficulties this places even on the lucrative tech industry was shared widely online. Despite being an immigration hub, Vancouver seems to be losing those parts of the population which give it a future. Young people aged 20-30 are leaving the city and heading to provinces like Alberta.

Who is replacing them? Apart from the boomers who have a tidy nest egg in the form of a downtown condo, wealthy immigrants have been a growing presence in the city, especially from China. Now you might think that these people will contribute far more economically to the city. You would be wrong. After 15 years, the incomes reported by the wealthiest class of immigrants is lower than every other group, including refugees. This suggests that many come for the citizenship and then leave, and even many of those who stay will live here but keep their businesses in the homeland. In other words, Vancouver has been sacrificing the liveability – and the possibilities for creating families – of those who contribute the most to its existence and growth. There is little to show for it. With broader economic trends which will likely exacerbate this crisis, the city is building its future on increasingly shaky foundations.

Vancouver isn’t the only place where living and housing costs are forcing demographic shifts. Economist and author Tyler Cowen recently wrote a Time article about how Texas is benefiting from a similar phenomenon. The central phenomenon is differences in costs of living:

“The lower house prices, along with a generally low cost of living–helped along by cheap labor, cheap produce and cheap gas (currently about $3 a gallon)–really matter when it comes to quality of life. For instance, the federal government calculated the Texas poverty rate as 18.4% for 2010 and that of California as about 16%. That may sound bad for Texas, but once adjustments are made for the different costs of living across the two states, as the federal government does in its Supplemental Poverty Measure, Texas’ poverty rate drops to 16.5% and California’s spikes to a dismal 22.4%. Not surprisingly, it is the lower-income residents who are most likely to leave California. On the flip side, Texas has a higher per capita income than California, adjusted for cost of living, and nearly catches up with New York by the same measure. Once you factor in state and local taxes, Texas pulls ahead of New York–by a wide margin.”

Now as Cowen points out, the Texas model is based on a minimalist model of governance, a model which Vancouverites generally reject. We might complain about Translink or zoning laws, but most people are glad to have a decent transit system and ways to protect the fertile land the city sits on. But if that’s the case, then a trade-off exists. If Vancouver needs to tax its citizens more to provide such services, then it needs a population which is willing to accept this model of government while bringing in competence, skills, and a demographic future. In other words, we need to attract skilled professionals who want to have families, and will invest their economic and social capital in the city. But as we’ve seen, this isn’t happening.

So where are young people and the middle to upper-middle income earners going? Some are moving further out into Vancouver’s expanding suburbs, and further into the Fraser Valley’s smaller (and more conservative) communities. Others are headed to the prairies. There is a certain stereotype that the Alberta economy is for people in the trades, but that’s not the case at all anymore. Calgary has plenty of white collar jobs and a fairly good university. For those not willing to brave the hardy lifestyles of the natural resource camps in the province’s north, the southern part offers a better environment and a place where one can balance a career with a family. Demographics journalist Steve Sailer has launched the criticism that the clash between Texas’ Anglo-white population and the Hispanic population should inspire a bearish attitude toward Texas’ future. But Alberta does not have a similar population crisis in the wings. Of course Alberta isn’t the only other province. In fact, young people looking to make their incomes go further are better off pretty much anywhere else in the country. I personally know people who have gone as far as Nova Scotia and Newfoundland – not exactly popular migration hubs. And that’s before we even add the US into the mix. A young graduate going into tech has just a short shuttle bus ride south to Seattle, after all.

From the mountains to the sea.

If the young are leaving, this tells us several things about Vancouver’s demographic future. First, it will need to be wealthy enough to afford the high costs of living. Given this wealth, we can also predict certain things about its ability to replace itself. Wealth, especially wealth plus high population density, correlates with low fertility rates. As Singapore has discovered, no amount of pro-family policies seem to be able to reverse this phenomenon. This is true for locals as well as for immigrants from East Asia and Europe, although not for African and South Asian immigrants. Since the bulk of Vancouver’s population is European and East Asian, this means that Vancouver’s population will become even more migrant-based than it already is.

On the one hand, Vancouver prides itself about being a hub for multiculturalism. Yet the literature detailing the effects of “hyperdiversity” on social trust and cultural cohesion is expanding. Douglas Todd, a Vancouver Sun columnist who has written about the impact of multiculturalism on the city, calls it “hunkering down“:

“…when the Vancouver Foundation recently conducted a massive survey of Metro Vancouver residents, researchers discovered most people in this West Coast city feel unusually high levels of loneliness and lack of friends.”

He quotes Harvard’s Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame:

“Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us. … The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them.” Putnam adds an additional disturbing discovery — that “in-group trust, too, is lower in more diverse settings.” In other words, people also become more distrustful even of members of their own ethnic group. “Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, vote less … have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television,” Putnam writes in his report E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st century.”

In a city where constant migration is needed to replace the population, the short run never ends.

When social trust is low and families have few roots, what motivates people to invest in the community? This goes beyond economic investment. Social investment is just as important. Vancouver prides itself on being a friendly and polite city, but many newcomers complain that this friendliness is a shield against developing deeper relationships. Healthy social networks impact everything from physical health to controlling crime. As these deteriorate further, Vancouverites can expect conflicts like the urban-suburban divide on increased public transit funding to become more common. Furthermore, it bears consideration that Vancouver has been economically healthy for many years now. But when economic downturns increase political polarization and inter-group tension, having countless points of friction leads to increased conflict, and this can have drastic effects. We have seen the path which the European countries have taken with their disastrous policies regarding mass migration and integration. Vancouverites who blanch at the idea of parties like Golden Dawn and the Communists making inroads in Greece would do well to reflect on how these policies created the perfect environment for extreme polarization. Vancouver is very far indeed from the abyss which our friends across the Atlantic are walking along, and we should learn the necessary lessons to remain so. Our city has inherited a particularly Anglo balance which tolerates difference precisely because it reinforces mutual respect and boundaries. This is what distinguishes our city, and those who wish to see it continue must guard against unsound governance.

Of course, it’s bad manners to present a problem without at least suggesting some solutions. So let’s examine what needs to change in Vancouver in order to secure its demographic future and maintain a culture which encourages social investment. First, we must examine the root cause: Vancouver’s high costs of living, which discourage family formation for professionals and drive off the next generation. If rent and utilities take up more than 30% of income, they are not considered affordable. For renters in Vancouver, nearly 45% of households fall into this category.

Sound governance is necessary to secure Vancouver’s future.

A lot of ink has been spilled on how to solve Vancouver’s housing problem, and we’re not going to come to a definitive conclusion here. Vancouver will have to continue building housing if prices are going to get lower. This is especially tricky for a city which has ocean to the West, a border to the South, and mountains to the North. The only way to expand is east – but this will encroach on valuable fertile land which could also be utilized to further secure the region’s food security. Once it’s built on, it’s gone. To echo what someone else said about California, God wanted Vancouver to be expensive. All this leaves increased-density housing as the main solution for both the city of Vancouver itself and the growing suburbs and small towns which surround it. However, it’s also necessary to confront the huge numbers of buildings which stand empty, owned by foreign investors who use them for perhaps a season a year. The costs of absentees are becoming increasingly apparent, as Coal Harbour – with up to a quarter of its condos sitting empty or absentee-owned – begins to fight with increased vandalism and other broken window effects. While it is not in the interests of the city to begin a reputation for property expropriation, a steep increase in taxes for absentee owners may help free up these properties for residents who bring a longer-term benefit to the city. City planners must ensure that local families and long-term migrants are the focus of development, rather than short-term wealthy investors.

Canada has also been reforming its immigration and citizenship laws in order to make them more selective and increase the value of its citizenship. This is a positive step, but it has yet to address the elephant in the room of birthright citizenship and the passport tourism it incentivizes. Where migration is concerned, Vancouver depends on federal laws, but also exercises its own influence in where it chooses to market itself. As we’ve seen above, Vancouver’s interest is in migrants who will stay and invest over the long-term, and who will integrate in order to minimize the impacts of hyperdiversity studied by Putnam. Looking within Canada is of course the preferable option. The best thing Vancouver can do here is try and overcome its reputation for an impossible cost of living. As more and more Europeans consider emigration, it would be worth it for Vancouver to step up marketing in Britain and the continent as well. As English is widely spoken in many EU countries, the linguistic barriers to integration are much less of a problem. Cultural similarities among Western countries work in the city’s favour as well. British, Irish, Germans, Dutch, Ukrainians, and many other Europeans were among the first to make the city a multicultural one, all under an Anglo-Canadian umbrella. The ever-growing expat communities of Europeans will no doubt find Vancouver’s strategic economic location attractive, especially if they do business in the US or Asia. The same goes for our American neighbours, particularly if Vancouver can become a stronger presence in the West Coast’s expanding tech industry. With Vancouver’s established Asian communities, China and its neighbours will continue to find the city an attractive destination. As discussed earlier, Vancouver must increase the incentives to reside permanently and invest. It must stop marketing itself to moonlighting economic tourists and focus on skilled professionals.

The challenges facing Vancouver are complex and facing them requires moving its governors toward a long-term, low time-preference framework. Vancouver is a unique city both in Canada and on the West Coast. Its natural beauty and particular culture are prized by residents and praised by visitors. Its location gives it unique economic opportunities, provided it does not shut out those who can take advantage of them. It is in the interests of the city to develop in a way which achieves all these things. No developed country has been able to entirely overcome the fertility losses which accompany increased wealth and urbanization, but we must be honest about the impacts of these effects and try to minimize their negative aspects. Vancouver has a history of migration, but we must also be careful not to make the mistakes of other countries and cities. A Vancouver which sacrifices social trust and cultural cohesion will be a city which undermines the willingness to invest in ones’ community – precisely that which makes a city worth living in. Nevertheless we can confront these challenges honestly and respond to them prudently. Vancouver may yet be able to move from an uncertain foundation to a solid one, capable of confronting the global political and economic shifts which lie ahead.

The post Vancouver: A Demographic Destiny appeared first on Social Matter.

Lee Kuan Yew at St. John’s College, Cambridge.

Lee Kuan Yew is a contradiction. A Singaporean of Chinese descent, his critique of liberalism was in a sense uniquely English. At a time when Britain and much of its diaspora became the most enthusiastic supporters of liberalism and democratic modernity, his worldview has a spark of something aristocratic…dare we say, imperial? He does not fall into the postmodern philosophizing of the French, the quiet conservatism of the Germans, or the pious resistance of the Catholic countries. Instead, his critique was delivered with wit, candor, and the occasional stinging barb. Rather than bemoaning the changing times, he kept a stiff upper lip. He did not shut himself off from modernity, but sought to reshape and improve it. So what might we call this tradition, which nurtured such English sentiments in a child of the anti-colonial era? What is this unique expression of Reaction?

The British Empire was not the child of grand designs. As one author wrote long ago, when the Empire was still a lived reality and not a topic of history books ignored by modern education:

“The British Empire…is a typical British product. It is the result of gradual, almost fortuitous development, and not of deliberate planning. Its constitution is difficult to describe in terms of political theory, but it is a living political association in full working order.”

This seems to be a striking pattern in the history of English civilization. From the slow unification of the UK itself to a preference for the market system in modern times, the Anglosphere has harnessed its taste for personal liberty and benefited from what we might call an antifragile approach to social and political life.

It is a curious fact that there has never been in Great Britain any dynamic popular urge towards Empire building….even in the expansionist, Imperialist era of the last century, new lands were added to the domains of the Crown often reluctantly and with halting steps; and always there was opposition from the little Englanders, who raised powerful voices and powerful influences against the building of an Empire. In this century, following a brief period when the Empire was a cult and its prophet was Kipling, there has been among all but a few lack of knowledge and lack of interest. The Empire was taken for granted.”

No great crusades to be seen here. Britain’s scattered, varied, global scope of rule stemmed largely from the fact that its decision to start ruling seems to have come after it woke up one morning and realized that things might have gotten a little out of hand. I would put forward that as with England’s Empire, so too with its Reaction. The essence of the Anglosphere is one of exit and searching for new frontiers, and little surprise that it did not die with the advent of Social Progress. From across the Anglosphere we have had artists, poets, authors, and philosophers who have imagined a different future for English and Western civilization. The idea that modernity could not be wrested from the firm grasp of the Whig and the Jacobin was entirely foreign to these thinkers.

The Crowd, by Wyndham Lewis. The small figures in the grids remind one of modern skyscrapers – not a common site in 1915 when this was exhibited.

T. S. Eliot made his mark as a poet who turned modernity against the moderns. This “Classicist in literature, Royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion” believed that human nature was nowhere so pliable as the Enlightenment had imagined, and thus tradition was the result of generations of trial and error. In these sentiments he echoed men like Charles Maurras from across the Channel, who stated that it was necessary to “bring freedom downstairs to the people and restore authority at the top”. Eliot’s fellow American, Ezra Pound, was even more enthusiastic in his belief that there was a future beyond modernity. With his ally Percy Wyndham Lewis, he engendered a futurist art in Britain which attacked what it saw as a decadent and naively liberal literary establishment, epitomized in the Bloomsbury group. From elsewhere in the British realms, Roy Campbell came out of South Africa and began a career as a writer, defending the classical and Christian traditions through his poetry. He would end up going to Spain during the Civil War, and dying a Catholic after the faith captured his heart there. Closer to our day, we have thinkers such as Roger Scruton, who is renowned for his work on how the death of aesthetic beauty has mirrored a broader cultural dissolution.

Portrait of T. S. Eliot, by Wyndham Lewis

These very few examples are given to show a general trend. Insofar as we can talk about an English expression of Reaction, it is as much a patchwork as the Empire itself once was. The eclectic mix includes High Tory futurists, Nietzschean-minded Catholics, aristocrats and populists, traditional colonials and techno-commercialist capitalists. Its lineage includes Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets and Yeats’ Second Coming. But there is something of a cohesive entity behind them. There is a shared suspicion that perhaps the baser elements of English civilization triumphed over the loftier ones. There exists an embrace of the future combined with a typically Anglospheric willingness to set out and discover the future for oneself. The English reactionary is pragmatic, appreciating that which has passed the tests of time.

Lee Kuan Yew possessed all these things. He may not be an English reactionary, but there was something recognizably English in his Reaction. Whatever the essence of this mindset is, our own Henry Dampier sees it in neoreaction:

“This is my tentative suggestion: if neoreaction is not English, then it’s incoherent, because most of its values are at least implicitly English…Considering that the cultural ailment afflicting the rest of the world has its roots in London, Washington D.C., and New York, the correction ought to be focused on those cities, also. For most of us, it isn’t a choice. We can’t suddenly decide to be Chinese, Swiss, Italians, Germans, Austrians, or Russians, especially if our roots are here. We want to believe, perhaps, that we have a choice in these matters, but there is no choice, because it was already made before we were born. We can no more elect to stop being English any more than we can elect to become frogs or wombats.”

It remains to be seen where exactly the English spirit of Reaction will make itself manifest. If I had to guess, I’d say that the reactionary mindset will become most apparent among those forced to make their exit, following in the footsteps of their ancestors. Across Africa, the diaspora lives on as a tiny, often-urbanized minority. Cape Town has remained an astoundingly English city in temperament. One need only go to its Victoria gardens or the Rhodes memorial to see that England left its mark. If a charter city is ever established here or elsewhere, the cosmopolitan Anglos will likely be drawn to it, bringing their cultural pragmatism with them to a project with little room for error. Australia has recently had something of a resurgence in its Anglospheric roots, with the government of Tony Abbott, a monarchist and cultural conservative. As the Asian powers increase their influence, perhaps we will see Australia and New Zealand become more aware of just how much they differ from their neighbours.

Of all countries, America has retained and grown the independent streak of the earliest English pioneers of the New World. The question is to what extent the melting pot has eliminated any identification with the heritage which bred that streak. In Canada, the Anglophone elite was without a doubt the Laurentian Consensus – the Anglo-Protestant liberal elite of Ontario. However, this consensus also established the progressive ideology which has undone its former hegemony. Anglophone Canada will remain a large majority of the country, but its conflicts with French or Aboriginal cultures begin to fall away as China, India, and other Asian powers make their presence felt north of the 49th. Finally, there is also the huge British expat population, many of whom have seen first-hand what measures places like Dubai and Singapore must use to properly govern a multiethnic and multicultural society.

Finally, I’d note that the vast majority of these groups – aside from those actually from the UK – would likely never think of themselves as “English”. American, Canadian, Australian, and South African identity has swept away the earlier British one for generations now. Nevertheless, the cultural inheritance remains. Each part of the English cultural and ethnic diaspora has adapted the mother country’s customs to its own environment. Yet many have retained a similar sense of pragmatism, ordered liberty, and remarkable adaptability. Those with such a mindset cannot long tolerate the ideological rigidity and praise of victimhood which are all too common in our day. Like their ancestors before them, they will leave it to its fate and set sail for greener pastures.

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

The post Seeds of England appeared first on Social Matter.

But the fact is that there have been plenty of philosophies and worldviews which have little or no concern for truth. In North Korea, truth is less important than what the Dear Leader says, even when the latter obviously contradicts the former. That should give us pause, because if such worldviews exist, then there is no reason that we and our descendants might not find ourselves slipping into such a worldview. The idea that truth should be valued by everyone instead of just philosophers – despite costs and consequences – is an exceptional one. This mindset pushed Western countries to develop modern science and integrate high philosophy into our religious traditions. With such a rich heritage stemming from our cultural devotion to truth, it’s worth asking what kind of societies develop such a worldview.

The individual attitude to truth begins in the family. Parents teach their children to tell the truth. But that doesn’t mean they always do, and how lies are responded to determines a child’s attitude to telling the truth in the future. First, imagine what happens when discipline is poor. Children get away with lying and the parents are unable or unwilling to curb this behaviour. The lesson the children learn – and learn very quickly – is that their self-interest can be better served by lying when it suits them. If they’re intelligent, they quickly learn how to lie convincingly and worm their way out when they get caught. For these kinds of children, truth is something to be taken up or discarded at will. It all depends on the payoff. How does that affect the atmosphere of the family? Instead of trust, parents must be suspicious of their children and children are in conflict with their parents. Conflict disincentivizes truth, and that further undermines trust. It’s a vicious cycle. What every parent desires is a child which will tell the truth. Punishment isn’t enough for that to happen; the child must actually want to be truthful. This requires trust. Good parents will give positive reinforcement, especially if the child remains honest even when they’ve done something wrong. With that kind of trust, the child comes to appreciate being honest with your parents as something a good person just does. They appreciate the truth because it is the truth. Trust reinforces truth in the family, and vice versa.

Let’s scale that up to a city. What sort of a city has high conflict? One with high diversity, close proximity, and great uncertainty. When a few neighbourhoods and skyscrapers house wealthy families while the masses starve, those wealthy families are going to value security. Armed guards will accompany them and walls will surround their houses. When cities undergo rapid ethnic shifts, conflicts break out between newcomers and natives. Cultural conflicts occur. Parts of the city become enclaves. This all becomes reflected in the politics of the city. Politicians must increasingly represent particular interest groups to rule effectively. This means that secrecy and intrigue will increase. Fighting corruption becomes an attack by one faction on another. It’s easier to ignore problems like crime by moving away than to face the uphill political battle of doing something about it. Truth, especially harsh truth, gives way to politics. On the other hand, people in high-trust cities feel safer investing in the community. If you’re certain that your tax dollars will go into better infrastructure and not councillor paycheques, you’re more willing to pay them. There are virtuous circles here too. Safe and prosperous cities attract families who invest in their children. Those children are less likely to commit crimes, and the city remains safe and prosperous. High-trust environments reinforce truth-telling and punish betraying social trust. The best ones reinforce the desire to maintain a high-trust environment. What attitude will the resident of such a city have toward truth? They must think about it in relation to business and politics. They are more likely to consider truth and honesty a social responsibility and not simply a private preference.

Finally, let’s consider an entire culture: an ingroup bound by common history, values, ways of life, and social institutions. As in our other examples, a low-trust culture will reinforce conflict. In low-trust cultures, one has to expend a lot of energy and resources on not getting stabbed in the back. Because the culture is low-trust, those who try to demonstrate faith in others become victims of their own good natures. But of course people need each other to survive, so cultural institutions are geared toward decreasing uncertainty. The difference is between cooperating voluntarily and cooperating because you have a gun to your head. Because low-trust cultures must mitigate a huge amount of uncertainty, norms and institutions micromanage interactions and punish eccentrics. In such a culture, social harmony is highly valued. In fact, innovators who violate social norms aren’t likely to last long – both socially and sometimes physically. How many great philosophers, daring scientists, or brilliant inventors will such a culture produce? Now consider a high-trust culture. The marker of such a culture is that social harmony doesn’t need to be enforced by harsh restriction. Because one can assume that others are acting in good faith, the culture allows for more spontaneity. A certain amount of heterodoxy can be tolerated without jeopardizing the culture as a whole. When people can be trusting and truthful in social interaction, those who bring innovation are believed to have the well-being of the group in mind. It seems safe to say that such a culture will be more willing to change in the face of new knowledge. It possesses a certain antifragility. This seems to be a culture where appreciation for truth can thrive.

Having considered these examples, where do our own societies seem to be headed? Millennials are quickly losing trust in both institutions and our fellow human beings, especially in America and Europe. Conflict resulting from mass immigration is rising. Ever tightening speech codes seem to indicate decreasing social trust – remember how our low-trust culture needed to compensate with heavy discipline? Nationalist parties in Europe respond to alienation and distrust. Economic inequality is once again rising. When you view yourself as part of a class in conflict with the rest of society, you won’t want to invest in your enemies – with wealth if you’re rich, or with trust if you’re poor. If a culture which declines in trust also declines in its appreciation for truth, then we are on a dark road indeed. You can’t solve problems when pointing them out and suggesting solutions is immediately interpreted as tribal conflict. Will such a culture maintain the idealism which characterized scientific endeavours? What of the vocational attitude which the most admired philosophers have to their life’s work? Given that many modern philosophers have already become mired in endless deconstruction in the service of Social Progress, the answer seems clear. No doubt there will be many individuals and groups with whom devotion to truth survives. But the minds of our brahmins may well not be among them. And where the brahmins go, the culture and the country follow.

The post The Flight From Truth appeared first on Social Matter.

Nevertheless, his anti-theism and whiteness have drawn a clear image in many heads: Hicks murdered 3 Muslims in cold blood because of religious and ethnic hatred. Like the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, he could not stand people who differed from him and found an excuse to act on this rage. It’s easy to see why this interpretation would be good for the narrative that rhetoric about terrorism is Islamophobic. When the media talks about terrorism, the lens is often focused on Muslims. Convincing the media to depict more crimes committed by white Westerners as terrorism would make the focus less disparate.

But do the facts align? As things stand currently, it seems that the motive was a long-standing parking dispute – a fact which drives home how senseless the murder was, but which would require an extremely liberal interpretation of terrorism. Even if we discover that Hicks had disliked the students for their religion and thus committed a hate crime as well as three murders, it’s still a huge leap to being America’s Charlie Hebdo. The men who committed the Charlie Hebdo attacks intended them to create terror, explicitly invoked a religious ideology, and had received training from Al-Qaeda. Hicks invoked no agenda, had no training by or even affiliation to any group, and seems to have had no motive for his barbarous acts beyond nursing a deep grudge. His actions didn’t even indicate that he was planning some kind of attack – he was studying to become a paralegal. That is the sort of action which causes the media to speculate about mental instability instead of terrorism. If Hicks had claimed to be representing some anti-religious agenda, this would not be the case.

Nevertheless, these facts will ultimately matter little in how this case is presented. As with Ferguson, the press and online “activists” framed the debate in such a way that only one outcome would have been acceptable to them. Were Darren Wilson’s story to be entirely accurate, he would still had to have been sacrificed for the greater good of Social Justice. This case will likely turn out similarly, especially with the leaders of Muslim countries making statements on the issue. This event is another marker for the direction which debates about hate crimes and terrorism will go in. The demand to treat this attack as equivalent to Charlie Hebdo indicates increasing lines being drawn.

The power of the press to spin news and weave narratives is an immense one. Both Muslim activists and the political Left have an interest in keeping up pressure on the media to paint crimes committed by culturally Western whites as hate crimes, terrorism, and persecution – regardless of actual intent. The figure of the angry white male must become as feared as that of the radical Muslim. If they can use it to further taint MRA’s, libertarians, programmers, or any other group that is too nastily white and male, so much the better. If this trend continues, the distinction between these charges and acts of assault or murder without such motives will become ever more blurred.  If there is truth to the idea that criminals with minority backgrounds tend to get painted as representing their entire group, white criminals can ever more expect to join them. As hate crimes and even terror charges become proxies for inter-thede violence, each group has greater incentive to use such charges against opponents. If it doesn’t hold up in court, it can certainly hold up in press headlines.

Thus, the disintegration of the mainstream media continues.

The post The Enthedening of Media Spin appeared first on Social Matter.

No amount of secularism can obscure the fact that French society shares certain worldviews and values and believe that the state has a role in enforcing these “proper” values. Without these shared principles, the famous French welfare state would have been dead in the water. Because of this, it is possible for Marine Le Pen to work within France’s secular framework to fight Islamic  fundamentalism – to a degree. Yet the narrative following the Charlie Hebdo attacks continues to ignore the impact of religion on political stability. In insisting that fundamentalism is merely an aberration of religious values, France and the West presume that everyone is as shallow about spirituality as we have become. Laïcité may enable France – including its Front National – to engage in a secular cultural nationalism at the moment. But ultimately it serves as a myth. It makes a pretence of disinterest in religion, when in reality this has become impossible.

Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, much of the media has responded by declaring its solidarity with the Muslim minority. Decent citizens agree: Islam had nothing to do with the attacks. Do we judge all Christians by the Westboro Baptists?

No, but then the Westboro Baptists don’t receive funding from resource powerhouses like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Islamic fundamentalists do.

Saudi Arabia and its neighbours continue to play a dangerous game. The Saudi practice of crushing terrorism in its borders while allowing funds to reach them abroad infuriated Hillary Clinton. Qatar’s interference in countries like Egypt and Syria got so bad that the other Gulf countries even withdrew their ambassadors. Both countries are aware that gaining religious influence over Islamic authorities in Western countries will increase their political influence – a fact well known to French Muslim organizations. Nabil Ennasri, President of the French Muslim group Collectif des Musulmans de France, was quoted in a recent report:

“France has a large Muslim population of Arab heritage, which will one day, whether it is welcome or not, play an important role in French politics. Investing in this population is a way of recruiting supporters who will — consciously or unconsciously — further Qatari interests.”

Religious institutions are an important avenue of funding for these countries. While the press paints Le Pen as a radical for wanting to “go into mosques“, there is no way to confront fundamentalism without confronting its political and economic portals into Western countries. Says Le Pen:

“The massive investments which Qatar has made in suburbs are made because of the very high proportion of Muslims who are in the French suburbs…We are allowing a foreign country to choose its investments on the basis of the religion of this or that part of the French population or of French territory. I think this situation could be very dangerous…

I say solemnly, the Qataris are financial supporters of Islamic fundamentalists, madmen of Sharia. The French have a right to know that, especially in Libya, the jihadists who are now in power and whose first action was to apply Sharia, were financed and armed by Qatar.”

The Islamic Supreme Council of America actively opposes this current of Islam and has criticized more well-known groups for not being staunch enough in this. It reports that, in addition to the Arab countries, Wahhabi teachings have filled the post-Soviet vacuum in Central Asia. Former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke wrote about ISIS’ roots in this ideology in Huffington Post. The Saudi monarchy benefited from its alliance with this faction: Wahhabi clerics supported its leadership role in the Sunni Islamic world. The price for this? Funding its agenda to purge global Islam of “deviations” and unify it under Wahhabism’s stern watch. Through its access to funding and educational resources, it has been able to permeate mosques around the world. Fundamentalism does not simply march into the room, fully formed. It makes use of the increasing links between social status and religious purity, a trend sparked by Wahhabi influence. It justifies itself through calls to increasing stringency until it enters a holiness spiral, bottoming out (?) at Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Perhaps the Caliph is himself an example – the Telegraph reports that he eschewed violence in his years as a scholar, before radicalization in prison. In order to combat this effectively, the West must admit that it is in conflict with an ideology which is not just political, but religious.

Canada has worked with the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of Nizari Ismaili Muslims.

Secularist disinterest in religion was possible during that century when Liberalism enjoyed complete triumph over the cowed Christian Churches. This is not the case when mass immigration and global shifts have made religion a powerful force again – and our milquetoast progressives have forgotten what a religion with teeth is really like. France and the West cannot pretend such disinterest in whether it is the esoteric philosophy of the Ismaili, traditional Sunni scholarship, or the puritan ideology of the Wahhabi which is preached in its mosques. It is clearly unreasonable to think that, in the age of the internet, the ideas of fundamentalists will easily disappear. But there is no reason for Western countries to allow networks funded by the same groups promoting fundamentalism in central Asia to operate without prudent oversight and restriction. The alternative is to remain open to ideological exploitation, and ultimately dependent on those rulers who continue their perilous games.

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The differences between worldviews become clear from the start. Following in the tradition of the French Right, Le Pen does not shy away from seeing the state as the spearhead of reform. While modern movement conservatives in America and elsewhere rail against the evils of “big government”, this abhorrence is absent in French culture. Le Pen declares that the Front National’s platform is aimed towards reclaiming French sovereignty – in political, economic, and military terms. All these objectives require the state apparatus. Politically, the FN wants to decouple France from the Schengen Area and its free movement of trade, goods, and people. Monetarily, this means returning to a French national currency instead of the euro. Without being the final arbiter of its own laws and monetary policy, French political sovereignty would be a mere fiction. Even so, the state cannot exercise this power if it is dependent on global economic networks for food, energy, and capital. Therefore the FN considers it vital to employ protectionist policy to rebuild French industry, energy independence, and food security. In terms of foreign policy, the FN aims to restore France’s role as a Great Power on the world stage, refusing to be tied into a greater European structure:

“Our political adversaries base their actions on a historical nonsense. They have decreed…that history brings us toward a globalized world without states in which universally we all submit and cowtow to the American-Western model. That is a mistake, and their mistake is the reason for our weakness. From Asia to Latin America, going through the Muslim world, a new world is emerging based on the affirmation of these individual identities and national sovereignties.”

The Canadian Pacific Railway: Not an example of “small government”.

Here is the first of our distinctions: the role of the state. Neoreactionary thought has already gone beyond the inane “small government versus big government” debate. What is necessary is competent government. In practice, nearly all politicians end up doing this. Progressives might expand this or that program, but the market still creates most wealth. Conservatives cut back welfare, but infrastructure spending goes on. “Small government” ideologies have been particularly effective in the Anglosphere for a variety of reasons. This may indicate that competent and appropriate governments in these territories will in fact be smaller in practice. Nevertheless, when we shift the focus from size to competency, we free ourselves from ideological constraints which can blind us to good solutions.

This is especially obvious in economics. In the Anglosphere, the gap between positive and normative economics gets blurred. Free trade increases economic efficiency because countries will focus on areas where they have competitive advantage, lowering prices over the long term. So let’s go for it! In the French Right and Left alike, this is not the case. Political and social goals make create economic costs, but then those costs must simply be paid. For the FN and many French, food security is worth paying more for groceries. This only becomes a problem when people forget that this trade-off exists. You can’t live like the German or American middle classes if you work 35 hours a week, and no amount of “people before profits” chants will change that. We can’t treat the laws of economics as alterable. They stem from human nature and the realities of supply and demand. Rhetoric like Le Pen’s statement that “we are bending to the laws of trade” aren’t careful enough in making this distinction.

The lesson to be learned is this: positive economics is not normative economics. Once you understand what choices Gnon has given you, you still have a choice to make. As an extreme example: the legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus understood the effects of currency inflation. He used this knowledge to make the currency worthless and instil martial asceticism in his people. Neoreaction’s focus on Civilization-promoting institutions forces it to confront these questions. Could it be worth paying economic costs to maintain food sovereignty or a manufacturing sector? Or do lower prices allow us to focus on developing industries like technology? Do we pay the economic cost or the political one?

Another lesson France can teach the Anglosphere is that intellectual power shouldn’t be dismissed as “elitist”. Without a doubt, one of the worst characteristics of right wing groups across the Anglosphere is their dismissal of intellectuals. We can see this tendency in America’s Republican base as well as their equivalents in Canada, the UK, and other countries. It’s difficult to overcome because it responds to a real problem: the left does have immense power in the universities and media. Participating in red state cultural institutions like 4-H can make it harder for working class white Americans to get into elite colleges. They may denounce colonialism abroad, but this demographic essentially plays the role of the barbarian in the mind of Academia. Their backward ways must be left behind if they come to our universities.

France did not succumb to this temptation. Unlike many Anglosphere countries, there has never been a contradiction between being an elite intellectual and a political reactionary. The result? It’s much easier for the French right to attract intelligent people who can carry it forward. From the Economist

“The French far right is intelligent. This makes it the more compelling and the more disconcerting. Compared to, say, the BNP in Burnley or Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’, we are talking of some of the best and the brightest. Far right thought is a rich and textured seam in the French intellectual imagination. It emerged in part from the writings and philosophy of highly influential and intellectually respected reactionary thinkers like Chateaubriand and de Maistre who began, as it were, a right wing narrative – dialoguing with their adversaries over the next two centuries – in negative reaction to the French Revolution of 1789. And they dialogued. In and out of the right, centre right, and far right, and even the left. They are part of the landscape. In the twentieth century, writers on the nationalist far right such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras became enormously influential—and their influence was felt well beyond the right.”

Carlyle: Because there’s more to good governance than being the kind of guy you could have a beer with.

Because of this ongoing tradition, rightist French intellectuals were able to create ideological responses to the French revolution and anti-colonialism. Although Le Pen has been criticized for substituting populism for this tradition, it also makes it possible for her to harken back to France’s past as a colonial Great Power. The Anglosphere countries – even those which maintain the monarchy – generally have a more negative view of the imperial era. When we learn about the Empire at all, it is in the context of racism, capitalism, and gunboats. The tradition of shrewd diplomacy, technological development, and “stiff upper lip” mentality has been entirely forgotten. As we saw earlier, “professional governance” is more desirable than across the board “small governance”. Until recently, only the paleoconservatives preserved the Anglosphere’s intellectual Right – and this at the cost of achieving real world goals. Neoreactionary writers have begun re-examining this tradition. Moldbug cites Carlyle. Foseti examines old Rhodesia.  Examining former colonies which learned the British tradition well is also useful. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew brilliantly synthesized British governance and Chinese cultural values.

The Anglosphere stretches around the world and across continents. As such, it can be difficult to understand what unites it. Countries where other cultural forces compete may be expected to drift further from the Anglosphere. Will Han Chinese culture come to dominate in Hong Kong? India retains its civil service, but its ruling party is staunchly Hindu and nationalist. Yet could Canada, Australia, and Anglo expats from Barcelona to Dubai find commonalities?  The Anglosphere thrives on trade. British Capitalism birthed both the golden child of Technological Progress and the black sheep of American Consumerism. But why is this? Unquestionably, the Anglosphere has a more individualistic bent than its continental cousins. Neither communism nor fascism did that well here on a popular level. Perhaps that’s why the Soviets had to get their spies at Cambridge. Modern liberalism and free trade conservatism fit in better with the Anglo tradition of property rights and individual liberty. This is also why it is known for greater tolerance of cultural differences. While it’s not impossible to imagine British laws banning the burka, the government would be hard pressed to find an equivalent to laicite to justify it. The officials who allowed 1400 children to be raped by Pakistani gangs in Rotherham were able to exploit this and use political correctness as a weapon.

Before I close, I should address the question of why it’s worth thinking about the Anglosphere as a distinct entity at all. The answer is that similar issues are confronting many of the Anglosphere countries and communities, from mass migration to Cathedral politics. On the flipside, shared cultural norms will likely shape similar solutions. The nationalism of old tied ethnic identity to territory. This form of nationalism cannot serve the interests of a group which finds itself across the world. Like Chinese and Indians, the Anglosphere exists both as populations with political institutions (Canada) and minorities maintaining their culture (Dubai expats). Like the Arabs and Hispanics, foreigners – from high-performing colonial subjects to migrants – have historically been brought into the ethnic fold (Anglo-Indians). Neoreaction in particular must understand these realities. It is a primarily Anglo phenomenon with its roots in the analytic, empirical tradition of social science. I won’t predict that this will result in some kind of reborn Anglo thede, but who knows? The Neo-Victorian phyle of Diamond Age may yet come to pass. 

Or this.

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“Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might have been very thoughtful joy, a real miracle not heretofore considered possible or conceivable in the world,–a Reforming Pope.”
– Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850

The world rejoiced the day the Pope was elected.

In a time of rapid social change and doctrinal divisions, the papal election is watched by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. It determines what sort of religious leadership entire regions of the world will receive in the coming years. The conservative and the liberal alike are fully aware that huge swathes of their constituency likely place more weight on the old man in St. Peter’s throne than on their own speeches and sloganeering. On the day of this election, liberals across Europe and America rejoiced. The liberal factions among the cardinals triumphed over conservative pressure. The elected cardinal was known for his unquestionable personal sanctity and humility. Moreover, he had a reputation for being sympathetic to reformers and even those who set themselves against core teachings of the Church. In those times when the Church seems increasingly out of step with social progress, such Popes can offer hope of revitalization.

The year, by the way, was 1846. The new man in the Vatican was Pius IX.

Papal States in 1796. Napoleon would conquer them, but they were restored after his defeat.

When he was elected, Pope Pius IX was not just a religious leader. He was also the political sovereign of the Papal States. While his predecessors pursued a reactionary political policy in these domains, liberals across Europe hopes that this Pope would bring reform.

This Pope had a reputation, you see. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, as he was born, became an Archbishop of his hometown of Spoleto just before an outbreak of revolutionary fervour across Europe beginning in 1830. Elsewhere it would culminate in France’s July Monarchy and the creation of Belgium. In Italy, however, the uprisings were successfully suppressed. As Archbishop, he obtained a declaration of amnesty for participants. This action was interpreted as a sign of liberal and nationalist* sympathies, and his future actions would prove this interpretation correct. Accordingly, the strongest opposition to his election came from the Austrian government, which was then under the influence of the defiant reactionary Klemens von Metternich.

Despite Metternich’s attempts, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti was elected and immediately began to implement reforms in the Papal States. One of his first acts was to declare amnesty for political prisoners in his territories. Presumably the Pope hoped that this gesture would entice radical reformers to moderate their views. He was wrong. The freed prisoners immediately returned to their political destabilization of the Papal States, and the Pope would be forced to reckon with the results. He also appointed a liberal cardinal to govern the territories, reduced restrictions on the liberal and nationalist press, and even created a new civic guard.

When revolution broke out across Europe in 1848, the Pope was called on to support the war against Austria in order to unify Italy. He refused to do this and simply stated that he would not stop volunteers from joining. Ultimately, the radicals he had given amnesty, led by the very ministry which he had established to govern his territories, instigated riots across Rome and the Papal States. Pope Pius IX was forced to flee to Sicily. Ironically, his liberal reforms had not been able to save him from being given the same treatment as his reactionary opponent Metternich, who was himself forced to flee to Liechtenstein and then to England. From his exile, the Pope excommunicated all those who participated in the establishment of the new Roman Republic. It was too little, too late. When he returned, he would enter a self-imposed exile in the Vatican for the rest of his life. The Papal States disappeared from the map.

In 2013, another papal election was greeted by adulation on the part of liberals across Europe and America. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis. Again, the personal sanctity and integrity of the man captured the imagination of Catholics and non-Catholics. Again, his history as an archbishop and cardinal gave signs that a reformer may now sit on St. Peter’s throne. The New York Times hoped that the first Pope from the New World would further orient the Church toward its growing Asian and African constituencies. Progressive media worked itself into a frenzy, facts be damned. His statements that the Church should improve how it counsels Catholics with homosexual desires and study the changing structures of relationships were interpreted as being on the brink of accepting gay marriage. Eventually, the Pope had to disappoint them by “spouting” Catholicism.

Despite this, it is undeniable that progressives have interpreted this Pope as being a harbinger for change. Pope Francis may believe that his outreach could lead to a more modern, more tolerant Church which can better cope with the social changes the world is undergoing. But does compromise actually make this possible? These are the same people who think that Church doctrine should reflect the democratic will of the faithful rather than the eternal will of Divinity. There is no way of escaping this core assumption of people who say that the Church must “reverse its position” on moral law to better reflect the practices of its devotees rather than providing better guidance. When English Protestants, French radicals, and American liberals are happier with the Pope than the traditionalists in his own flock, perhaps the Church should ask itself what road it intends to walk. These groups cheered for Pope Pius IX and cheer now for Pope Francis only to the extent that the Church takes another step toward the religion of Social Progress. The day it fully embraces that religion, the Church will cease to be Catholic at all.

This was exactly what Pius IX ultimately realized. Following his return to Rome, he abandoned his liberal policies and began to defend the Church in the political, social, and religious spheres. One of his most famous steps in this direction was the publication of the Syllabus of Errors, which outlines a series of doctrines which the Pope deemed incompatible with the Catholic faith. The Syllabus ranges from perceived falsehoods in Enlightenment rationalism to political wrongs against the Church’s temporal powers, and concludes with a list of errors in liberal philosophy. Its 80th and final error reads as follows:

“[They are in error who say that] the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”

This passage refers to an allocution which the Pope gave on a previous occasion:

“To those who, for the good of Religion, invite us to extend our hand to contemporary civilization, we ask whether the Vicar of Christ, divinely established by Christ to preserve the purity of His heavenly doctrine and to nourish and confirm His lambs and sheep in this same doctrine, could join forces with contemporary civilization without a very grave danger of conscience and causing the greatest of scandals. For it was this civilization that produced evils so numerous that we could never deplore them sufficiently, as well as so many poisonous opinions, errors and principles which are extremely opposed to the Catholic Religion and her doctrine.”

It makes clear that the Pope did not oppose progress and modernity as such, although many readers certainly interpreted the statement that way. This misconception is where the original, derogatory sense of the word “reactionary” comes from: the individual who opposes progress for opposition’s sake. This was never the position of Pope Pius IX or the Catholic Church. Rather, he opposed those changes which presented themselves as progress but which the Church believed to be based on false principles and deception. Scientific progress was never the issue; atheistic materialism was. The greatest proof of this is the Church’s own massive contribution to scientific development, spurred by scientists from Mendel, the father of modern genetics, to Lemaitre, who first proposed the expanding universe concept which would become central to Big Bang theory. But progress based on falsehood is no progress at all.

This is the distinction which the Church must understand if it is to survive. Attempts to pander to progressive ideology will only end with its demise. Nothing should make this clearer than the fate of the Anglican Church and other denominations which have substituted “relevancy” for principle. While some note that immigration is helping to bolster the Catholic Church’s own numbers, we would surely expect that the churches most enthusiastically employing the strategy of Progressive Christianity would also see the highest rates of conversion, especially if people want to leave more conservative traditions. That honour goes instead to Catholics, Pentecostal denominations, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. These churches are known for their massive outreach and strict religious mores, but not for their liberalism.

Ultimately it’s a simple rule: if you must choose between compromising with those in your in-group or with those who are utterly opposed to you, choose the in-group. Pope Francis may have legitimate disagreements with the traditionalists in his flock, but they’ll be the ones in the pews on Sunday and will carry the faith forward. Even if the progressive journalist does make his way to the parish each Sunday, his policies will make certain that his grandchildren won’t. In even the best case progressive scenario, the Church will win the world and lose its soul. I don’t know how many leaves His Holiness takes from the books of his predecessors, but it would certainly be worth it for him to take one from Pope Pius IX.

*Nationalism in Italy was at this time a liberal, revolutionary force. Italy was divided into kingdoms ruled by aristocratic families like the Bourbons, as well as the Papal States. Nationalists sought to overthrow these dynasties and unite Italy into a constitutional monarchy or republic. See map above.

Sources:
Ohio University
New Advent: Pius IX and the Syllabus

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I’d like you to do something. Listen closely and repeat after me: We don’t deserve power.

Nope, I’m afraid your good intentions mean nothing. Mine don’t either. It’s a simple truth, really: if you or I deserved power, we’d have it. That’s it and that’s all. Sit back and I’ll explain.

One of the reasons the Right collapsed over the past 200+ years is the abandonment of a fundamental principle of Civilization.

During the time of the French Revolution, there was a true divide between Right and Left on what constitutes political legitimacy. What gives King Louis or Citizen Robespierre the right to enforce laws, suppress criminality, and implement the death penalty? The Right said that the King ruled by virtue of his noble birth and by the grace of God. The Left said that Robespierre ruled on the basis of the People’s sovereignty – and that same sovereignty sent poor Louis’ head rolling.

Joseph de Maistre explains the philosophy of the Right in his Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1810):

“To this general rule, that no constitution can be made or written, à priori, we know of but one single exception; that is, the legislation of Moses. This alone was cast, so to speak, like a statue, and written out, even to its minutest details, by a wonderful man, who said, Fiat! without his work ever having need of being corrected, improved, or in any way modified, by himself or others…Thus, this legislation lies evidently, for every intelligent conscience, beyond the circle traced around human power; and this magnificent exception to a general law, which has only yielded once, and yielded only to its Author, alone demonstrates the Divine mission of the great Hebrew Lawgiver….No human institution can endure unless supported by the Hand which supports all; that is to say, if it is not especially consecrated to Him at its origin. The more it is penetrated with the Divine principle, the more durable it will be.”

In other words, political institutions are legitimate to the extent that they accept Divine laws. As a Catholic, de Maistre can debunk the American religious right’s anti-intellectual tendencies. Aside from any Revelations, Divine will is expressed through nature; thus, rational and empirical inquiry will lead us to discover these laws. Because natural laws and limits exist, the state can never be omnipotent and totalitarian. It cannot change human nature on a whim. It cannot decree that the economic laws of incentive, supply, and demand no longer apply. Neoreactionary philosophy avoids the potential religious conflict by simply referring to “Nature or Nature’s God”. These limits are the same regardless of whether God is their ultimate cause or not. The road to political failure and chaos is paved with denial of these truths.

Contrast this to Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, approved in 1789 by the French National Assembly:

“The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.”

Which of these views more closely resembles the philosophy of the modern conservative? The most ardent Christian Republican still adheres to a document that claims to embody the general will of “We the people”. That makes him an ideological cousin of the Jacobin. The fact that one can be considered a right-wing extremist for strict adherence to Revolutionary ideology should demonstrate just how marked with failure the history of the Right has been. Despite producing intellectual lights from de Maistre to Julius Evola to Leo Strauss, the tide has only gone Leftward.

Let’s think about what tactics the Right has used to try and reclaim the course of history.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, reactionary forces still held institutions like the Church and military. Pope St. Pius X wrote the Oath Against Modernism to rally clergy against subversive currents inside the Church itself. Decades earlier, Prince Klemens von Metternich managed to foster Imperial cooperation to contain the forces which threatened to overthrow them. In many countries, revolutionary fervour seemed to have been suppressed by an alliance of Christian monarchies (and France, which joined later) backed by religious authority. This was not to be. Despite its contribution to the sciences, the Church never managed to counter the ideological claims that science represented the triumph of Social Progress over the forces of religion and reaction. The project of Restoration was overwhelmed by growing nationalism on the one hand and renewed liberal revolts on the other. By the early 1900’s, Europe was divided into the power blocs which would lead to the Great War and annihilate the old political order completely.

In the 20th century, the Right tried to play the game of the Left. That being the case, its total cultural and political defeat should not come as a surprise. Many of us today would feel as out of place in old Christian Europe as we would on a foreign continent. Progressives might claim that the Tea Party is full of scary racist ultra-capitalists, but at least it’s the enemy they know. The Right of de Maistre and Carlyle is a different creature entirely. But because it is a different creature, we should consider that its ways are as alien to us as the old world which embodied it.

The goals of the Left are liberty, equality, and fraternity. The tactics of the Left are those which further liberty, equality, and fraternity. Revolution is a tactic of the Left because it destroys obstacles and restrictions to Leftist freedom. Anything is better than despots, right? If the Right intends to improve order and not destroy it, does it make sense to follow in their footsteps? The Left likes “social activism” and protest tactics because they create the image of ideological solidarity. The goal of these tactics is to project an image of a society speaking with one voice and demanding that the state accedes to its will. The implicit notion is that the state’s legitimacy is based on that common will, which is the same principle that formed the core of Jacobin ideology. Sure, there are short term gains. The Tea Party managed to be very successful in backing candidates during the 2010 midterms. But ultimately its claim to represent the Silent Majority – the “Real America” of #rednationrising – will lead to its destruction. What happens when the Real America becomes the Silent Minority? Older white people can be scared into voting GOP during mid-terms, but its success depends on Democratic voters staying home. If you take Revolutionary philosophy as your guide, don’t be surprised when it leads you to the Revolutionary endgame.

So where does that leave the agents of Truth and Order?

Astonishingly, it seems that the Right has tried every tactic in the Revolutionary playbook and never once considered looking to its own tradition. As we saw above, the criterion of legitimacy for the Right is accordance with the laws of God and nature. A good ruler is one who can turn chaos into order. Augustus was a great ruler because he entered the Roman world at a time of civil war and left it with peace, prosperity, and imperial glory. Isabella and Ferdinand were great rulers because they took the occupied and disunited Iberian peninsula and build a reconquered Catholic Spain under the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon. This requires strength of both intellect and will; intellect to understand the natural law, and will to act in accordance with it to build a lasting political and social order. The ruler who achieves this gains the Mandate of Heaven.

For de Maistre, this was the criterion for legitimacy:

“God makes kings in the literal sense. He prepares royal races; maturing them under a cloud which conceals their origin. They appear at length crowned with glory and honor; they take their places; and this is the most certain sign of their legitimacy. The truth is that they arise as it were of themselves, without violence on their part, and without marked deliberation on the other: it is a species of magnificent tranquility, not easy to express. Legitimate usurpation would seem to me to be the most appropriate expression (if not too bold), to characterize these kinds of origins, which time hastens to consecrate.”

If this is so and if the Right is correct, the only path open to it is to become worthy of power. Metternich and his allies possessed tremendous ability, yet they were unable to establish a just and enduring political order. Thus, they were eventually overcome. The Right has never since been worthy of the power it wielded during that time. The intellectual insights of Kirk, Maurras, Evola, and others did not achieve it. Focusing on economics did not achieve it. The mass rallies and protests of the Tea Party will not achieve it. Replacing the highest forms of Western religion with the anti-intellectualism of its demotist bastards won’t achieve it. Only knowledge of Truth and the application of that knowledge will achieve it.

In his Gentle Introduction, Moldbug describes the Procedure through which the Right can become worthy of power. Interestingly, it echoes many other voices on the Right. In Ride the Tiger, Evola explains that abandonment of political participation in establishment structures is the only path left:

“After taking stock of the situation, [the differentiated type] can only feel disinterested and detached from everything that is ‘politics’ today. His principle will become apoliteia, as it was called in ancient times…He recognizes, as I have said before, that ideas, motives, and goals worthy of the pledge of one’s own true being do not exist today; there are no demands of which he can recognize any moral right and foundation outside that which they derive as mere facts on the empirical and profane plane.”

Evola’s belief was that focusing ones energy on the pursuit of truth and personal development was the only path left open. In his writings, it becomes clear that at some point this “hidden elite” will come together and participate in restoring the Traditional order. How this works is unclear, although it is suggested that some crisis must first lead to the collapse of the anti-Traditional order.

Where Evola assumed uncertainty, Moldbug gives a clear procedure. First, he and Evola are in agreement that apoliteia is desirable for the reactionary. He calls it the steel rule:

“The logic of the steel rule is simple. As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself…you must be the first to make the great refusal…
As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy…
One excellent way to make this relationship concrete in your mind is to use the word “subject,” rather than “citizen.” If by some unfortunate coincidence you remain a resident of the British Isles, you are already taught to say “subject.” So you’ll have to shift to something even more demeaning, like “peasant.” This may still overstate your political impact.”

This means no voting (except perhaps for a clear establishment-approved winner, like a tribute), no party membership, no attending protests, no making signs, no signing petitions, etc, etc. For the record, there are two exceptions. First, one may make personal petitions to the holders of authority, since this is an affirmation of inequality between you and them. Second, political action may be undertaken as a necessity of self-defense. No point to the Restoration if your city has been overrun by looters. Although that might just be the kick in the pants your city needs. The fact that this applies to governments is obvious, but the question becomes greyer when it involves universities, media, and other non-state actors in the Cathedral’s framework. Judgement calls are necessary and there might not be a best answer for everything. For example, engaging participants in political activism is clearly worthwhile, as #GamerGate showed. Like much activism, #GamerGate had some success. But so did the Tea Party. Maybe they’ve liberated their space for a while. But unless they keep that space liberated, they’ll end up right back where they started. And to keep it liberated, they’ll need to understand the opponent.

But surely doing nothing will get you, well…nowhere? This is where things get interesting. Moldbug describes the steel rule as zen. Decades before, Evola wrote the following in Revolt Against the Modern World: 

“[The Mandate of Heaven] acts without acting (wei wu wei)…by virtue of just being present. It is as invisible as the wind, and yet its actions are as ineluctable as the forces of nature. When this power is unleashed, the forces of common men…bend under it as blades of grass under the wind.”

Moldbug takes another step and explains the effectiveness of this approach. Among other things, the steel rule lets avoids wasting energy in conflict with the Cathedral. The fact that the Right increasingly defined itself in opposition to the Left cost it even the semblance of intellectual cohesion. Ultra-capitalist Rothbardians and protectionist Buchananites, nationalist identitarians and cosmopolitan free traders, authoritarians and libertarians; all these contradictions are grouped under the “right-wing” umbrella. Sorry libertarians and ancaps, but the Left is like a club. You’re either in or you’re out, and I haven’t seen many of you on Upworthy.

The steel rule frees up resources. Activism ties you to the schedule of political competition. You need to make sure to comment on that next big hashtag or else you’re no longer relevant. Passivism (Moldbug’s term for apoliteia) lets you to pursue truth as truth allows. Better ten good thinkers than a thousand retweets. We do not have the privilege of sacrificing quality for quantity.

So what are those resources dedicated to? Very simply, to becoming worthy. And how do we become worthy? Knowledge and application of Truth. Then our path is clear: we must devote ourselves to pursuit of Truth, and most especially those truths which our modern blinders make hardest to uncover.

This is where Moldbug introduces his idea of the Antiversity. It’s the ultimate Truth-service whose mandate is to be right or else to be silent. Its first project is to take over from the Cathedral’s mentally ill brain. The great tragedy of politics is that a day always comes when leaders stop adapting the Party to Truth, and try and adapt Truth to the Party. We live in such an age and whatever system comes next will live through such an age as well. But that’s the concern of some future generation. We have quite enough to deal with.

In some ways, the prevention of the Right’s victory may have been providential. For the first time in history a key resource for an effective Truth-service exists: the internet. The cost of information transfer is minimal to nil, the ease of research is high, and the costs of publishing are laughable. Displacing academia has never been easier. In many ways, the Antiversity just scales up projects like Khan Academy or Coursera. I won’t speculate here how it might develop. The Antiversity must combine research on all relevant topics for human survival and advancement. It plunders everything of value from the Cathedral and leaves the rest to stand as a warning to others for what happens when truth is abandoned. From biology to metaphysics, the pursuit of truth is being wrenched from the grip of academia. The neoreactionary trichotomy has created a good starting point. One current focuses on human biodiversity and thedish differentiation; a second focuses on how the phenomenon of capitalism can further human advancement; a third analyzes the social impacts of religion and what philosophical truths lie behind it. Future tasks for the Antiversity include formalizing research structures, including the necessary checks and balances to minimize human bias and error (and hopefully go beyond peer review).

Armed with this knowledge, the task of the Right is to apply it while upholding the steel rule. Trying to seize power is the Left’s game; the Right creates and projects it. It’s basic economics. The institutions which the Right builds must be better at providing resiliency and a stable, prosperous order. Our time faces a whole lot of crises, from ecological fragility to political instability to economic transition. There’s plenty of opportunity to become worthy. Have the resources to support families. Be the ones which intelligent people invest money with. Create the networks where scientific and technological development is free to take place. Survive the crisis. How many people in Syria wish they were in Saudi Arabia right now?

This knowledge must also be applied on a personal level. This diet better suits your metabolism? Change your diet. This organizational structure better allocates resources? Apply it in your business. This religion has a clear understanding of natural and Divine law? Get your ass in a pew. Read some books by Dead White Men (any intelligent mind will do, but we should rescue these ones lest they be consigned to the flames of Literary Social Justice). The Right has always had a microcosm-macrocosm view of things. You might not be an Emperor but you’re still a father. You might not be a warrior-saint, but the inner Holy War still needs fighting.

Since this process will take quite some time and is quite enough to be getting on with, I won’t spend more than one sentence on an end goal to all this. Here it is: the end goal must be to be so much better than the Cathedral that we displace its influence over the best and brightest, whom all the rest will follow.

This is the path for the Right which neoreactionary writers have begun to lay out. Does it require a leap of faith? Certainly. We might well fail. If becoming worthy were easy, then the Left would be right and the Right would be wrong. But playing the Left’s game hasn’t worked in 200 odd years and the insanity of that strategy becomes ever clearer. Leave activism to the revolutionary activists. The Right understands where real authority comes from.

This is not a revolution. Cast aside the wheel and scrap it for firewood.

This is an ascension.

The post Become Worthy: The Path of the Right appeared first on Social Matter.

Sonja talks about eco-fundamentalism as a religion – a belief system based on emotion instead of evidence. I’d just call it Political Environmentalism. This is the sort of environmentalism which thinks that all pollution is bad and rejects technological solutions to ecological problems as somehow impure. It’s the belief system which leads people to link anti-capitalism and ecology – never mind that the Soviets devastated their environment. Sometimes it’s backed by a back-to-nature sentiment or an idealized version of non-western cultures living in harmony with the planet. Sonja does a good job of showing why these mindsets are at best naive and at worst dangerous. I fully agree that some of the major ecological problems stem from lack of property rights, tech, and population pressure.

But I’m going to lay the eco-fundamentalist conception aside for a moment. My own academic background is in the economics of food and natural resources. I often cross paths with people involved in conservation, climate science, forestry, and similar work. I’ve seen eco-fundamentalism at work time and time again. But I’ve also seen saner people. I can’t think of any mainstream environmental economist who would push zero pollution, for example. Instead, economists state that the benefits of pollution should outweigh the costs. Furthermore, externalities have to be internalized. For example, if your company causes damage to land, you need to pay for its proper restoration. Few people would disagree with that principle. Certainly no rightist accepting the value of personal responsibility should.

Let’s scale up. The purpose of the state is to preserve order and stability. This is a central tenet of neoreactionary thought. Now let’s say that agricultural companies are operating in your state. But they’re generating large negative externalities! Land is being damaged, insects are being poisoned, mono-cropping is impacting biodiversity. This presents a clear threat to the biological resiliency of the state. The companies don’t have incentive to change their practices; maybe they can buy land elsewhere at a lower price than changing their practices would leave them with. In this situation, the state must intervene to fulfil its function. It must make sure that the companies pay the full cost of their operations. The response will probably be something like “but then won’t those companies leave anyway?” Yes, probably. But they would have had to leave when damage to the land made it impossible to use further anyway. The cost to the state is the same, but by playing it safe the state has preserved vital biological resources.

Scale up again. An oil company operating in international waters screwed up and oil is churning out into the ocean. There are several states bordering that ocean. Those states will have to deal with ecological damage, health effects, and economic loss. It’s in the interest of these states to prepare for such an eventuality, especially when oil companies are operating in that ocean. It’s also in the interest of these states to cooperate when creating these safeguards. Businesses also like a single set of rules more than a variety of differing ones because it’s easier to follow. It’s the same reason multinationals like free trade treaties. Here we see the foul spectre of international law arise, which elicits fear and disdain from many on the right. But international laws have existed for millennia. From the treaties between Rome and Parthia to the Peace of Westphalia, cooperation benefited the states involved.

The point of all these examples is to show that ecological concerns are well  within the purview of hypothetical neoreactionary states. The result by definition is environmental law and regulation. The principle of subsidiarity should be followed here. I’ve heard the counter-argument in discussions that the majority of environmental problems are local in nature. This is true. National laws which try to regulate local effects often have their very own set of negative externalities. Nevertheless: non-local environmental problems are by definition bigger problems even if there are less of them.

Here’s where we should address the elephant in the room: global warming. Generally speaking, neoreactionaries are suspicious of climate science, and not without reason. But here’s where things get tricky. On the one hand, the political impact of climate science means that politicians desire certain results. Collectively, these results provide the politicians with a Useful Truth. Like anything related to politics, Useful Truth can conflict with real Truth. Eventually, Useful Truth becomes Official Truth and that’s pretty damn hard to overturn. One of the tenets of eco-fundamentalism is that Green Energy is pure and good and oil companies are corrupt lobbyists. The problem is that most industries end up lobbying and acting in their own interests instead of the common good. Green energy is no exception. The logic of the skeptic is simple from here: interests from progressive politicians to environmental consultants benefit from results which tighten regulations and create green energy demand to reduce carbon. Therefore, climate science is compromised and cannot be trusted. The issue is that this narrative leaves out the other half of the story. There’s a collection of interests which benefit from fighting Warmist climate science and disproving its findings. And that collection of interests has got deep pockets too. So we must apply the same chain of logic to them. The person who believes the science behind global warming to be in thrall to Useful Truth must say the same about those who denounce it.

I don’t have a solution to the above quandary to publish here. But I want to take a step down the road. The problem is time-preference. Actors on both sides have relatively high time preference. Businesses (both oil and wind) must think in terms of shareholders and profit cycles, not generations. Politicians (both Bush and Gore) must think in terms of special interests and election cycles. This problem is exacerbated because these interests control the state which could otherwise take a long-term view. In other words, it’s necessary for the state to lower its time preference in order to accurately assess  and confront threats to ecological stability. Isn’t this long-term view of politics exactly what neoreaction demands?

Sonja references the fact that the climate has always changed and will always be changing, from the age of the dinosaurs to the Medieval Warming period. One response Skeptics give Warmists goes like this: non-human causes changed the climate throughout history, so isn’t it wrong/overblown/presumptive to attribute such a significant human cause to modern changes? I think this is fallacious, but I’ll let you pursue that for yourself. Humans are one of many factors which can impact the climate – but we are one of the factors. What remains is the question of how much weight we should give that factor. And even if humans have a negligible impact, this does not mean that all changes are favourable to humans. States will become more fragile if extreme weather events become more normal. Investment in increasing resiliency requires a time preference low enough to not see an ROI until a statistical outlier shows its face. The commenter SanguineEmpiricist was dead on when he said that we can’t tiptoe around ruin events when we only have one earth. The fact that these events might be hard to predict doesn’t provide an escape; that signalling sometimes rules over substance should only make us more worried. Nassim Taleb (a skeptic of anthropogenic warming) expressed this sensible view: do not shake up an extremely complex system when that system could cave in and doom us. (This is also why a Taleb student would be suspicious of large, centralized solutions, by the way.) Massive deforestation and destruction of vital insect populations definitely constitute a shake-up. Sure, a ruin event could be a complete outlier. But it only takes the one. The best thing which could happen for the state would be a source of knowledge which exists outside of the current academic nexus.  One which could conduct the research necessary to verify or falsify the current models. I believe Moldbug calls this a “truth service” and dubs it the Antiversity.

And here’s where the neoreactionary approach to this issue should lie. First, we should acknowledge the simple fact that political interests substitute Useful Truths for real Truths – and then admit that this applies to both sides of this debate. Second, it needs to be admitted that ecological systems are highly complex and difficult to analyze – and that’s exactly why states have an interest in making themselves ecologically and biologically resilient. Changing climates and long-run environmental consequences are far from Black Swan events. Third, the work of the Antiversity begins now. The hydra image of the Green Movement which many on the right have leads to a confusion of issues. There’s a sense that to buy into restricting pesticides which harm bees requires going the whole nine yards and chaining yourself to a nuclear plant. The Antiversity is a truth provider and advises on that basis. Does the evidence swing in favour of pesticide toxicity? Regulate. Does it come down against the efficacy of wind energy? Get rid of the subsidies.

I hope this article serves to create a better frame of mind for approaching ecology. As happens time and time again, political signalling tends to overrule reason when it comes to the issue and very few on the right or left are immune. Useful Truth and Official Truth are worthless when they don’t reflect reality. The neoreactionary approach must be better. The work may be complicated. The method surely isn’t.

The post On Ecological Realism appeared first on Social Matter.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

That phrase contains all the hope and promise of political freedom of speech. One pictures intellectuals and workingmen alike discussing ideas unhindered. There is no idea so sacred, no value so widely held, that it is beyond critique. Without the power of the state guarding some official truth, only reason and logic can test their strength.

That’s the theory, anyway. But the theory and the real history of free speech are very different. The modern era institutionalized free speech as a safeguard, not as an ideal. Acemoglu and Robinson are two economists specializing in institutional development. In How Nations Fail, they discuss how various interests vied for power following Britain’s Glorious Revolution. Agreements between these factions to uphold the rule of law were self-serving. After all, the emergency powers you allow your friends one day are ones your enemies can usurp the next. Further studies seem to show the same behaviour at work. Democracy and its freedoms are “a way of committing to reforms when the likely alternative is the guillotine or the firing squad.”

The thing about this model is that the incentives are different. In the idealist vision, people commit to free speech because they desire a tolerant, liberal society. In the latter one, it’s because people don’t want to risk being silenced themselves. Problem is, it only takes one bastard who thinks they can get away with it to tear the whole thing down. The conditions which foster free speech on a political and cultural level are fragile indeed. As we’ve seen here at Social Matter, we’ve got a whole gang of bastards at it this time. The internet has been a haven for free speech. Campaigns have been fought to protect those freedoms from governments and businesses alike. Who’d have thought that its well-established denizens would be the ones using the internet to limit speech?

Free speech doesn’t just function as a constitutional right; it also defines the great game of politics. It introduces a rule which players in the game have to follow. Those on the top can’t use their power to limit what their opponents say about them. Those trying to get to the top can’t use silencing tactics on their way up. Like any game, there are a variety of strategies which players – parties, political leaders, activists, etc – can use to try and gain political power. What are some of them, and how does each strategy affect the resiliency of free speech?

First, each player could agree to respect free speech norms. That means that no one undermines anyone else’s rights to free speech. No rallies howling for the silencing of the enemy, no secret plans to invoke emergency powers. Each player incurs a cost upon gaining power because their opponents will be able to criticize them. But the benefit is that no other player will be able to silence them either. That’s pretty big, especially since the majority of people usually don’t hold political power directly. Free speech remains stable. The system functions.

What happens when a player stops following the rules? Well, that depends. In stable democracies, openly saying you oppose free speech erases any hope of gaining power. That’s why politicians have to play a careful game. It’s common to hear that certain speech infringes on other rights: it’s racist, it offends religious rights, it undermines national security, and so on. Even Communists and Fascists invoke the security of the state or the people. It takes a pretty ballsy authoritarian to straight up deny the right to speak. In stable liberal democracies, destroying your chance to gain power is a huge cost. In unstable regimes, like Britain during 1688, Weimar Germany, or Greece today, the game is a bit different. If things get bad enough, you might find yourself being the only one willing to stand up for free speech. In that case, the costs to you are high (since your enemies can speak against you) but the benefits are low (you will be silenced if you lose power). In Britain, players took this into account and stabilized the situation by accepting open criticism. In Germany, radical groups ended up battling it out until Hitler and his allies emerged victorious in 1933. Greece’s ultimate fate is yet to be determined, but it doesn’t look great.

None of this is radical thinking. But here’s where it gets interesting. Since it’s in no one’s favour to oppose free speech, how can one avoid the costs of free speech without openly opposing it? Let’s look at Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement (FSM) helped spark the student movements of the 1960’s. Their vision of free speech was certainly not restricted to the government. This was the dawn of the New Left. As Jacobin Mag explains, the Old Left was never a fan of “bourgeois freedoms” like speech. It reeked of the capitalist liberal democracy they sought to overthrow. So the very name of this student-led rebirth of Left-wing theory seemed to repudiate the old militancy. Nevertheless, strong ties remained between the student movements and the Old Left. Barbara Kay recounts the history of Bettina Aptheker, former Communist Party USA member, radical left activist, and student leader of the FSM. She was raised in a radical home, where “Party line” was a serious matter. Her father believed in Comrade Stalin and became his staunchest defender on the American Left. Despite supporting free speech in America, she was by her own admission not such a fan when it came to free speech for the USSR. For the record, the CPUSA was one of those critics of “bourgeois freedoms”. From a former member:

“Discipline in the Communist Party is voluntary, but in the silent background is the sword of excommunication. Without the power and religiosity of expulsion, the Communist Party could not exist as it is. Before the moment of the Khrushchev secret speech, expulsion from the Communist Party was akin to eternal damnation, the body alive but the soul already dead for eternity; and so powerful had this conviction of the membership become, and so widely and sincerely had they promulgated it, that millions of non-Communists considered anyone who bore the label of expulsion from the Party as a lost and damned soul, a corrupt and dangerous human being who no longer owned the right of admission to the society of men of good will. To a sincere and devoted Communist, expulsion was almost as bad as death – and sometimes worse.”

Fast-forward to 2014. The long march through the institutions is complete. One study found a third of faculty members admitting they would discriminate against people with conservative political views. Nicholas Dirks, Chancellor at Berkeley, now warns against “division and divisiveness that undermine a community’s foundation”…during his FSM 50 year anniversary talk, no less. The idea that “we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so” (Dirk) has overturned “defending to the death” your enemy’s right to speak. Now, in our model of the game of politics, this attitude should incur a great cost. Isn’t the agreement that everyone must respect free speech?

Marcuse: architect of our age?

As Radish has shown, these trends aren’t the product of over-zealousness or misguided idealism. Herbert Marcuse, philosopher of the Frankfurt School and the New Left, went into detail about the nature of political toleration. He believed that freedom was only useful in the service of Social Progress and political liberation. This demands “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left”. A feminist professor physically assaulting female pro-life students (including a minor) is a pretty good metaphor for the whole thing. Roger Nash Baldwin, co-founder of the ACLU, summed up this sentiment in an infamous quote:

“I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers’ rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies, at home and abroad.”

I won’t re-print the entire Radish article, but I encourage everyone to read it. The use of political freedom as a strategy to gain power is nothing new. This is the third strategy which our game must consider. In the democracies which these movements operate in, they want to avoid the costs incurred by opposing free speech. By necessity, this requires them to officially favour free speech, and other democratic rights. As Baldwin so eloquently shows, this is entryism: the player pretends to agree with the commitment to free speech in order to be accepted. Moreover, the player continues to uphold this official commitment to political rights once they have gained power. However, through slow re-definitions of those rights and freedoms, they are able to silence opponents over time. Of course we all want free speech, but can we really turn the university into an unsafe space? After all, when your ideology has not only political but also cultural dominance, your power increases exponentially. We saw above how Communist Party influence extended far beyond Party members. We’re living in a time where most people accept the values of Social Progress, tolerance, and equality. If activists and philosophers want to re-assess those terms, who’s going to say no? Isn’t that their job? Once you can get people to advocate equality of rights in the same breath they use to advocate revoking rights from certain groups, you’ve pretty much won.

This strategy is the most threatening of all to free speech. When a group openly opposes free speech, people can ally against them. The battle is in the open. But in the face of the entryist strategy above, the challenge is more difficult. One has to fight to reveal the hypocrisy of the player employing this strategy. Until their actions become too blatant to ignore, this treads a fine line between conspiracy theory and fact. When the player holds the weight of moral authority, as the Social Justice movement does for many progressives and youth, defense becomes even harder. If large numbers of people see you as a “bad person”, whose rights can be revoked without any threat to the freedom of “decent people“, then they have no reason to protest. The player avoids all the costs of openly opposing free speech while gaining many of the benefits over the long term. This would make the strategy very attractive to political actors who can pull it off. Once the facade no longer holds, cultural and political power are strong enough that it no longer matters. If you’re really lucky, maybe you can even get people to admit that free speech was a bad idea. After all, look how many bad people were able to subject decent people to their bile through exercising that right.

The most recent victory of this strategy was at 4chan. The haven/sewer of internet free speech appears to have been successfully purged of many of its moderators. Given the seductiveness of the entryist strategy, the question is how to guard against it. Those liberals and progressives truly committed to free speech must begin to examine who they have allied with. Those committed to free speech for other reasons need to consider their situation as well. Above all, pursuit of Truth – scientific, philosophical, and intellectual – demands free speech because it requires inquiry and criticism. If the game includes rights to free speech, then players have the incentive to use the entryist strategy. Therefore, new rules and protections need to be built to guard against it. Some are trying to do just that. Created in the wake of events at 4chan, 8chan is experimenting with allowing anyone to make their own board. Following the principle of free exit, if people become unhappy with the direction of one board, they can just switch to a new one. This makes it difficult for anyone to silence opponents through restrictions and purges. Even a small minority can just escape to their own board. It’s an option almost no minority  – ethnic, political, or otherwise – has in real life. It also reduces the benefits of the entryist strategy. After all, once your motives become obvious, people will just leave. That’s one solution, and others are doubtless forthcoming.

More than anything else, the internet may have made the entryist strategy much harder to employ. Whether this is enough to overcome it completely remains to be seen. If one thing is certain, it’s that we are moving into a new phase in a conflict as old as politics. The game has changed.

The post Devil’s Game: Free Speech and the Entryist Strategy appeared first on Social Matter.