A recurring point of discussion and debate which is reflective of our times is whether the ruling class and their system are malicious or merely incompetent.
As an aside, which relates to the conversation in the thread. Truth Stream Media who produce very thoughtful work in this area recently, on their second video about The Shining, said that the industrial revolution and in particular the invention of the steam engine was a result of an organized group with an agenda. I think ''The Moon Company''.
This I found interesting because the steam engine has long been my go-to example of an emergent, but world changing development. The point being, if history was pre-planned then there are limits on the scale of the plan due to technological innovation which would change the world.
To my surprise, they suggest even that is part of a plan. But this needs further investigation on my part.
I watched the first truthstream video on the shining and was surprised that it turned out to only tangentially be about the (great) movie but was actually about the Native American genocide. They had a few factual errors and omissions, some info on the Harvey company was off and their magnificent lodge at the Grand Canyon where I have stayed was omitted. The Harvey Girls is actually pretty entertaining and Judy Garland is always worth watching.
I can’t disagree that there was a Native American genocide, that even powerful moderates who wanted to coexist were consistently ignored in favor of brutalism, but most clashes of cultures go that way. We aren’t a nice species.
It was well done and I plan to continue but I was wondering what you thought of the first episode in the series?
Well, naturally I find it grating when I'm slapped in the face with a big dose of white guilt, and I'm still yet to assess where they are politically, so mainly I went in with an open mind and eye on objectivity.
To me, though, the drive across the endless plains of America by the pioneers is simply the western, Faustian drive. In one old clip, the narrator pointed out how inefficient the native tools were even though, if they had opted for Faustian technics they'd still have lost their connection to the land.
Thank you for replying, I am very interested. I agree, I’ve yet to figure out their perspective. I am very sympathetic to the suffering of the North American natives, but her apology at the end grated on me. I have no ancestors in America prior to 1910, I don’t feel you can apologize for acts you didn’t personally commit and there is no realistic way of assessing how much one personally benefits today from the past, or realistic way to make meaningful reparations to the only people who might possibly be entitled to them.
My youngest son is adopted from Guatemala, pure Mayan. There was a literal color chart in effect with adopting from Central America which was very upsetting. Natives were generally treated better by Catholics, even if conversion was forced they were on more equal footing. The Spanish and French came here without women and often married Native women, something the British settlers would rarely have considered, dehumanizing and demonizing the Native population being a necessary precursor to genocide.
I am watching the second part which I find more interesting as the first was well done and easy to listen to but repetitive, her point was made early on.
You are exactly right, it does fit with the Faustian view. I have learned so much from your Morcasts on Spengler. Thank you for suggesting this series, it’s very thought provoking and I love the movie. Mad Max is next.
Whether it’s incompetence (it’s not), indifference or malice, the outcomes are still the same. Malice should be assumed by default because the outcomes are evil. The regime and its enjoyers are really fond of “ignorance of the law is no excuse” except of course when it comes to their policy outcomes.
We should never grant any charity to the motives of these people. Start at any point in time during the past 60-70 years, hell the past 6-7 years especially and it’s crystal clear that their motives are malicious.
History has shown that the fate of leaders, whether thy are with malice or indifference, needs to be the same. It's the same reason, for an average person, fatal gross misconduct or direct malice both result by him going to prison.
The three treasons are interesting to think about, particularly as regards the motivations of our regime antagonists. Almost no one likes to think of themselves as the bad guy - humans naturally develop narratives that cast them in the role of the hero, at least as an ex post facto justification for what they would do anyhow out of pure self interest, but very often these narratives are a direct motivation for action.
So, take the Kalergi plan - the grand project to knit the planet together under the technocratic control of a 'nobility of the mind' as the count put it, with the world's people being mixed into a single rootless ethnos. Kalergi's vision explicitly hopes to attain a world without warfare, of general harmony and peace for all. Further, it retains a special, privileged place for those who manage this utopia.
Examination of Kalergi's project yields good reason to believe that it has been decisively influential in shaping elite opinion and, therefore, allegiance. One can see how it would be compelling to them, as it provides a higher moral purpose as sanction for the privilege achievement of the vision would provide. Institutions such as the EU and the UN are all in line with this vision, as are feminism, gender theory, mass immigration, the green new deal, the great reset ... even the phrase 'hate speech' seems to have been coined by Kalergi.
The point being, perhaps the elites are not malicious in the sense of being motivated by hatred for the common man. And perhaps it is not mere indifference arising from the venal desire for big line go up. Maybe the callousness is the pitiless disregard for suffering that emerges from ideological zeal - they see themselves as sculptors, and our lives and nations as clay in their hands. Whatever pain they inflict, whatever misery we endure, is all justified in their minds by the greater benefit of the utopia they are shaping for us. Whether we want it or not.
Personally, I find this far more chilling than mere greed or malice.
Your last line returns us to that famous statement of C. S. Lewis according to which it's infinitely preferable to be ruled by robber barons or old-fashioned tyrants than moral busybodies worrying about whether we have all taken the right vaccines or are in line with the most recent opinions about blacks and homosexuals and so on.
I do think--and this may be a perennial problem, or especially one that afflicts regimes where the model of the ruler is some kind of pseudo-benevolent merchant or middling type rather than an aristocratic combination of the warrior, the thinker, the honorable, and the priestly--that the elites actively despise the hoi polloi of their own race, the vast majority of whom are lower- or working- or even (now) middle- class but hide that fact (barely) from themselves by adopting all sorts of increasingly fashionable but still seemingly egalitarian views about pretending to include the "underprivileged" from elsewhere. They flatter themselves with faux universalism and pseudo-philanthropy in this way, and so satisfy their intense self-love, all the while catering to the even deeper urge they have as petty human beings to cast hatred and aspersion on huge swathes of other people. The results, of course, are disastrous.
Indeed, I had Lewis' observation in mind when I wrote that. It's something of a preoccupation, this tyranny of the morally obsessed.
There's no question in my mind that our elites demonstrate a barely concealed contempt for the lower orders of their own kind, and you're exactly right that they disguise this to themselves with their preening concern for the plight of the third worlder. This isn't new, either. Dickens skewered it as telescopic philanthropy.
He did. Rousseau analyzed it too. Do you think it's a perennial problem of decadent elites or more of a specifically modern and post-Christian phenomenon?
I don't recall ever reading about the Roman nobility exhibiting an overweening concern for the state of the Picts, so I suspect this relates to Christianity.
But in their advanced or decrepit stage they brought in all sorts of bizarre Oriental cults, including, of course, Christianity. Lecky has a great line in his History of European Morals: From Augustus to Charlemagne about how the latter, especially, appealed to Senators in the decaying Empire, "or rather their wives" (I'm paraphrasing).
I think we tend to be puzzled by the elites' motivations because they and we simply have what I would call a different "innate view." Whereas we look at human biodiversity, different nations and their practices and have a positive emotional reaction, they look at the same things and experience a negative reaction. It's something similar to a disgust response.
They view separate and different nations as ugly, difficult to manage, and a source of potential conflict. Their desire is to impose rules on humanity, and ideally to bind humanity under a single set of rules. How is a single set of rules to be imposed on all of these wildly different nations? Well, you start by making them the same.
Also, while to some extent I buy Ed Dutton's ideas about an abundance of middle class people seeking distinction through political correctness when no other avenues for distinction are available, that motivation pales in comparison to the motivation of money. How many people are in business or day jobs and are fearful for the fate of their country, but say nothing because it could mean, if not the loss of their present job, the inability to get a better one, or a drop in sales or an inability to get funding because someone on Twitter pointed out that they were at an anti-immigration protest.
Why do they like to collect bits of Aztec AND Islamic art, say, proudly showing them off on the walls of their lavish homes while gleefully eating tacos on Tuesday and Thai on Thursday? It's all a sham, I agree, but they at least imagine they're embracing cultural diversity in the name of sophistication or depth or some such. I suppose it will all go away once the money goes away, but surely their faux universalism has played a huge role in quickening that process.
That's what they think diversity is. They have no conception of a people who breathe a completely foreign air, and whose mindset is completely foreign to Western rationalism. You have no idea how small these people's minds are.
The incompetence viewpoint is also intellectually reassuring. The man who is tolerating an idiotic job to pay a crippling mortgage and being made to feel like a stranger in his own country can laugh at the morons running the country who earn six-figure salaries, and proclaim his indifference to politics because, "They're all the same. They're all a shower of gangsters," etc. Then he can stretch out on his couch to watch his football of a Wednesday evening because what else would you do in a country run by morons?
It really is a cope for some people. I'm mates with a bloke who is very clever and very well-meaning. He often reaches for the "never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence" line. I am certain that this is because he actively doesn't want to believe it's malicious. The only thing which stops me writing him off as a coward is that he's been a good friend.
I'm pretty sure malevolence is the least reassuring conclusion we can draw with regard to elite motivation. Our response to it is a subsequent question.
Malevolence is at least understandable as bad will. And that can be pointed out and fought (at least in theory and perhaps, ultimately, in practice). What if the problem is so entrenched, and in all sorts of bizarre ways, through bad will and stupidity and everything in between, that it really is simply intractable?
The stupidity argument I'd think has been fairly refuted by Morgoth's article. His "dog shit on the doorstep" allegory does this very well. Perhaps your neighbor is so stupid they leave dog shit on your porch by mistake - unlikely but possible. But every day, and only on your porch, and nowhere else?
Look. It's clearly both. The legions of masked chubby ladies shrieking about health and safety and the patriarchy and whites are, above all, deluded and stupid, not malicious and duplicitous Machiavellians who "weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words." They're true believers and for that reason immensely dangerous.
Ah I see your argument more clearly now. I was limiting my consideration to our ruling class and the policies they implement. I agree completely that those who unthinkingly enforce the will of our rulers are often stupid.
There´s another quality, or lack thereof, to all these policies that casts doubt on the motivation which I would call a conspicuous lack of moderation or plain decency for lack of a better expression. For example, assume somebody did run the numbers and came to the "scientific" conclusion that mass immigration really is necessary for e.g. demographic reasons. Would that policy not be more successful and more amenable to the people if individual criminals and gangs were harshly punished and potentially deported rather than being treated with kiddie gloves? It´s not like such a policy would be a noticeable deterrent to immigration as such, perhaps to the contrary. Likewise with electric vehicles. Why do they have to outright ban combustion engines - in terms of "climate", going from say 80% EVs to 99% EVs has little benefit, especially if you encourage the use of smaller cars with less weight to move around. All these policies don´t hold up even within their own paradigm and there´s always a sometimes small but in any case obvious element of apparently irrational sadism in them.
Excellent point. Another example is the types of facilities closed during the lock downs. Why would they close playgrounds and beaches? Why close gyms and churches but not liquor stores? And as the lock downs progressed and people grew increasingly frustrated, our rulers' behavior became more needlessly cruel. Why would you tell people not to have family over for Thanksgiving and Christmas?
There was also this thing in a certain central European country where "it was decided" that classroom windows should be kept open during winter (I am not talking about a country with a mediterranean climate) during school hours so as to "reduce virus loads" in the classroom air. First of all, this policy by itself appears unnecessarily sadistic, doubly so by specifically targetting children. It doesn´t appear to serve any real policy goal, _especially_ since a similar kind of discussion (or even instruction) was NOT raised or issued for workplaces. How can that make sense from a "running the numbers" perspective?
But to really top things off, the head of government (childless, BTW) of this central European country, when asked about children that feel cold in the classroom, callously suggested that they could do some exercises to keep warm. It would have been easy to just brush this question aside and say nothing, but to mock the plight of children, which was inflicted by the government´s (headed by this very person) own policy, in this way appears utterly gratuitous. All things considered, this may be a rather small thing, but I feel that it provided a brief glimpse into a character that is filled to the brim with the vilest malice.
I'd like to think that if nothing else comes from the entire embarrassing spectacle of the Covid 19 episode, at least it's removed any vestige of belief that our ruling class has any good intentions towards us at all. At this point the best we can hope for is indifference. I don't know of a single thoughtful person in my circle who still thinks they consider our well-being when making decisions.
This makes a great point about immigration. There would be better gatekeeping against bad actors if there were any concern for the citizens. To claim lack of resources is absurd given the huge bureaucracy which massive immigration has spawned. Statistics around how much of an effect electric cars will have are similarly hard to find as Covid deaths of the young and healthy. Climate is just another hammer to destroy the quality of life.
My son is an electrician. Charging electric cars requires expensive upgrading to most people’s service panel. Meanwhile no one is building nuclear power plants or telling us where the extra electricity is coming from. We will all be doing without while social media silently consumes a large chunk of the grid.
I think this essay does a first rate job of showing how unlikely it is that any of the things recently brought in by our elders and betters to destroy western civilization are inadvertent. The massive amounts of money sloshing around pharmaceuticals in the US completely account for what happened during Covid. The energy at the center of these ideas are demonic, the way they can’t perceive the irony of shouting down and drowning out or intimidating off the stage viewpoints they disagree with while claiming free speech would be funny if it weren’t terrifying to think these are the future elites. The idea that intellectuals relentlessly destroy has been with us for a long time, but never with so much coordinated and ruthless success in so much of the world. The destruction of the family has been a triumph. Even those who still aspire to it have come to agree with their keepers that they simply can’t afford it. Women have stifled their biological imperative with anti depressants and go on destroying rather than creating life.
It’s infuriating to think about how much they’ve gotten away with by denouncing detractors as conspiracy theorists. Blind greed, ambition, and learned hatred of your immediate ancestors may not be a conspiracy but they’re not exactly innocent good intentions and shouldn’t be let off the hook.
The Eugyppius take regarding these matters is at least helpful for thinking through the extent of institutional incompetence owing to misguided idealism and girlish stupidity involved in all this. I recommend reading his Substack, even though I agree ultimately with your take.
He uses Covid to speak about a general phenomenon, though: the takeover of all our institutions by what he calls "head girls."
I suppose the question is ultimately reflective of the debate between the theological vs. the philosophical view of life. Is religion but a childish toy and is there ultimately no sin other than ignorance? Or is there a providential god who rewards justice and punishes injustice and looks into our hearts and guides us?
In the hands of all the wrong people the Socratic view that all virtue is knowledge and that all vice is ignorance leads to rule by busybodies and self-anointed experts who propagate the hive mind of the moment and who end up ruining much of what made life enjoyable, or at least tolerable and livable, for our peoples in the past. This seems inseparable from malevolence.
I've wrestled with the emergent view as opposed to top-down view of for a while, particularly because the emergent view tends to be more Spenglerian than the top-down view.
I'm not well read enough on Eugypius work to pass commentary really to be honest. Though I'm skeptical about just how much agency these ''Head-girls'' have to be honest.
We could falsely content ourselves, while satisfying our proclivity for "depth" and flattering our intellectual vanity, by saying "it's complicated," but let's not. Let's get into the heart of the matter. Some of the other commenters here have already helped shed light on this seemingly intractable problem of the relation between malice, the will, ignorance, and knowledge. Your essay has started a proper discussion here.
As for the head girls, they may not have much agency themselves, but they're everywhere these days and they're often highly active, apparently designing, greatly turbulent, and massively seditious. They are not like the salon ladies of old, a rather unenterprising race. They're somewhat more pernicious, to put it mildly.
A grander project that I work on from time to time deals at length with the incentive structure within a bureaucratic hierarchy. In one essay I speculate on the motivation of a teacher who notices a boy in her class has swirl handwriting like a girl, and he likes purple not blue, or pink. Etc
Now, is she reacting to top-down messaging? Yes, in a sense she is, so where did the message originate? The J's or from other people like her in the system? Or other institutions and think tanks.
Moldbug, for example, puts academia as being the sovereign entity. Others will say ''The Jews'' and others still financial centres.
All these, surely, are factors. Plus the general depravity, malevolence, AND stupidity that are always lurking in the heart of man. And Loretta.
It strikes me that the people I speak to on a regular basis these days, even or especially the people who have received an official "education," are immensely stupid. I know from what I read and the conversations I've had with others that my experience in this regard is not unique. It also strikes me that there is a direct proportional relationship between the kinds of opinions these educated nitwits espouse and actual "hate" ("hate has no home here," one of their preferred slogans, being perfectly emblematic of the point). What did Yeats say? "An intellectual hatred is the worst."
Eugyppius makes a good argument, but I find it interesting how consistently those with an academic origin are biased towards systemic rather than personal explanations. There's an aversion to naming names, as it were. Human agency is deprecated in favor of the blind mechanics of impersonal societal and organizational dynamics. It's very similar to the perennial debate over whether history is dominated by great men or great social forces.
It's not that the systemic explanation is wrong, per se; there's a great deal of valuable insight to be gleaned from that lens. However, it's incomplete. History is not purely deterministic, but also contingent. Human agency plays a role alongside structural dynamics. Both things are true, and by rejecting one of them out of hand - a habit of thought that seems to have emerged from Marxist theorists - one's perspective on reality is artificially flattened.
Fascinating stuff, glad I checked in and saw this. Also looking forward to watching the video you did on Mad Max. Morgoth, I watch Max Igan's videos and sometimes think to myself, "I wonder if Morgoth is watching this and what the heck he makes of it. " Haha. I must read some Heineman. With people endlessly going on about bloody AI and this ChatGPT shite, I am always referring them to the idea of a Butlerian Jihad, although I've not read that one yet.
I agree with Morgoth that we're well past attributing the regime's policies to stupidity. At this point the only question is: do they do these things from indifference, or malice? I'd like to suggest that their policies start out from a position of indifference and then ofttimes escalate to malice.
The indifference is easy to understand. Does a rancher care about the feelings of his herd? If he switches their feed from one mixture to another it's not because he thinks they'll like the second feed more, it's generally due to some other reason completely divorced from the cow altogether- perhaps the new feed is cheaper, perhaps the change has been mandated by the government, perhaps he's simply having an argument with the guy who runs the feed store and so he's buying from somewhere else out of spite. But what all these possibilities have in common is that at no time does he consider the desires of his cattle. He doesn't hate them, he simply doesn't care.
How does this sometimes change to malice? Well we can see this in our own dealings with the government. Indifference changes to malice when someone they don't care about gets in the way of them reaching their goal. For example, the two ruling parties in the capital city have a budget disagreement because the populace is raising a fuss about taxes. They are getting in the way of the rulers' grand plan! A government shutdown looms. Which services shall be temporarily suspended during the shutdown? Well here in the US you'll see the National Park Service do things like drive out to remote campgrounds and put chains up across access roads, and lock canvas sacks over barbecue grills. They shut down tours of the White House. They close child support offices. They intentionally stop services that will inflict the most pain on their subjects to encourage them to call their representatives and complain, and also to increase overall misery so that in the minds of NPCs government shutdown = bad.
Consider great rulers from history and ask yourself, how much did they care about the wishes of those they ruled? Did Alexander consider the people of Macedonia during his campaigns? When Lincoln fought the South during the Civil War, did he stop to consider whether the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers and civilians even WANTED the USA to remain united?
The ruling class probably does hate us, or at least despise us. But their actions are those of someone who operates under a completely separate order of priorities.
It might sound asinine but I reckon the relentless promotion of women's / girls' football is of malign intent: it's masculinising them and too much exercise isn't actually good for a woman's fertility. Israeli women who tried to pass Special Forces selection ended making themselves infertile and a lot of elite female athletes have this problem also.
If you do something because of a mistake or because you inherited the immigration policies of the previous guy BUT THEN someone says "hey this is really messing up my life" you are NOW doing malice because you are knowingly doing harm to someone who is asking you to stop.
This is why I do not believe in judging based on intent, or otherwise put: means, but entirely on ends. When you entertain the, frankly Christian, perspective that it's a person's will that matters, you enable him to shield himself from the harshest scrutiny by means of playing the fool in various ways. Do they do us good? They are good. Do they do us evil? They are evil. Eliminate the nonsense about interrogating peoples' consciences, it does not matter.
We also have their words and statements that we can analyze. I recently put together a presentation for my family, a bit of a slap upside the head about the Great Replacement and what it means for us and our posterity. In that presentation I had a bottomless well of AntiWhite vitriol, as well as massive numbers of psychopathic admissions that white replacement is desired. It isn't just white replacement, it is the eradication of our existence. It is in their own words.
Now, the office holders keep their hands clean - or words clean to be exact. But we can see here what they do with others. They condemn and straightjacket and even seek to propose legislation to make criminal white people speaking out about our replacement in our own homelands. They condone and cheer rioting and looting and burning when criminals overdose in police custody and encourage mobs on the eve of trials - creating a sham justice system. When vicious, Anti White vitriol is spewed by people employed by the most prestigious institutions of the regime, they turn a blind eye.
We can see with our own eyes. This is a deliberate persecution. This is the unspeakable malice that we call pure evil.
Confronting this kind of malice in your own homeland is stunning and disorienting. It flies in the face of the most basic expectations of what a government should provide. It does not compute. It is no different than a parent who abuses its child. It is so stunning in its audacity and malicious in its undertaking that most think it simply cannot be real. This is the tactic of psychopathic suicide cult leaders. At a certain point they will say the most stunning and vile things in a public forum. Once nobody speaks out, then they have approval. From there, the normalization of brazen threats and demeaning words and abusive behaviors increases. This is exactly the regime we face. It is a psychopathic death cult, bent on our destruction and it behaves in exactly the same way as they all do.
Now for Harris and Weinstein, they are not of us. Weinstein has explicitly stated that he fears us acting in our own self interest. The very act of him saying that means we are to him a them. Perhaps that is indifference. In the end, when someone wants you to sit in silence while your homeland is invaded by foreigners, while the invaders are told that the people of the homeland are vile and evil and beneath the invader; when they remain silent in the face of vicious, genocidal vitriol against your people, does it really matter if it is indifference or malice? What matters is what it is and what it means for us. What matters is how we feel and what we perceive.
No. This is a fight for survival, and a fight for our land. It's unconventional and unprecedented means is disorienting and disarming makes it the most vile evil ever conceived. I thank everyone here with the sense of self to be oriented and face up to this malevolence. Our job is to hold the line and orient our people still caught in the understandable - who are stunned by the bitch slaps of their abusers. They face a choice; stay comfortable as our race is marched into the oblivion of persecution and then extinction, or summon their will to survive and join us.
We face the same choice. There are many trials ahead that will summon our courage; that will call us to rouse the flames that are the spirit of our ancestors.
May The Gods Bless Us All With Optimism, Nobility, Courage, Discipline, Wisdom, Strength, Honor, Confidence and an Unbending Will to defend and keep what is rightfully ours.
To the malevolent we say, you have made your choice. You will reap what you have sewn. It will be you who will fall. Let us rise! Let us rise and claim our right to survive and thrive on our land just as our ancestors did for us.
‘ In actual fact, I believe it offers something of a shield and bolt-hole to those with a vested interest, financial or otherwise, in protecting Power from criticism.’
As an aside, which relates to the conversation in the thread. Truth Stream Media who produce very thoughtful work in this area recently, on their second video about The Shining, said that the industrial revolution and in particular the invention of the steam engine was a result of an organized group with an agenda. I think ''The Moon Company''.
This I found interesting because the steam engine has long been my go-to example of an emergent, but world changing development. The point being, if history was pre-planned then there are limits on the scale of the plan due to technological innovation which would change the world.
To my surprise, they suggest even that is part of a plan. But this needs further investigation on my part.
I watched the first truthstream video on the shining and was surprised that it turned out to only tangentially be about the (great) movie but was actually about the Native American genocide. They had a few factual errors and omissions, some info on the Harvey company was off and their magnificent lodge at the Grand Canyon where I have stayed was omitted. The Harvey Girls is actually pretty entertaining and Judy Garland is always worth watching.
I can’t disagree that there was a Native American genocide, that even powerful moderates who wanted to coexist were consistently ignored in favor of brutalism, but most clashes of cultures go that way. We aren’t a nice species.
It was well done and I plan to continue but I was wondering what you thought of the first episode in the series?
Well, naturally I find it grating when I'm slapped in the face with a big dose of white guilt, and I'm still yet to assess where they are politically, so mainly I went in with an open mind and eye on objectivity.
To me, though, the drive across the endless plains of America by the pioneers is simply the western, Faustian drive. In one old clip, the narrator pointed out how inefficient the native tools were even though, if they had opted for Faustian technics they'd still have lost their connection to the land.
I was sympathetic to both sides if I'm honest.
Thank you for replying, I am very interested. I agree, I’ve yet to figure out their perspective. I am very sympathetic to the suffering of the North American natives, but her apology at the end grated on me. I have no ancestors in America prior to 1910, I don’t feel you can apologize for acts you didn’t personally commit and there is no realistic way of assessing how much one personally benefits today from the past, or realistic way to make meaningful reparations to the only people who might possibly be entitled to them.
My youngest son is adopted from Guatemala, pure Mayan. There was a literal color chart in effect with adopting from Central America which was very upsetting. Natives were generally treated better by Catholics, even if conversion was forced they were on more equal footing. The Spanish and French came here without women and often married Native women, something the British settlers would rarely have considered, dehumanizing and demonizing the Native population being a necessary precursor to genocide.
I am watching the second part which I find more interesting as the first was well done and easy to listen to but repetitive, her point was made early on.
You are exactly right, it does fit with the Faustian view. I have learned so much from your Morcasts on Spengler. Thank you for suggesting this series, it’s very thought provoking and I love the movie. Mad Max is next.
Whether it’s incompetence (it’s not), indifference or malice, the outcomes are still the same. Malice should be assumed by default because the outcomes are evil. The regime and its enjoyers are really fond of “ignorance of the law is no excuse” except of course when it comes to their policy outcomes.
We should never grant any charity to the motives of these people. Start at any point in time during the past 60-70 years, hell the past 6-7 years especially and it’s crystal clear that their motives are malicious.
History has shown that the fate of leaders, whether thy are with malice or indifference, needs to be the same. It's the same reason, for an average person, fatal gross misconduct or direct malice both result by him going to prison.
The three treasons are interesting to think about, particularly as regards the motivations of our regime antagonists. Almost no one likes to think of themselves as the bad guy - humans naturally develop narratives that cast them in the role of the hero, at least as an ex post facto justification for what they would do anyhow out of pure self interest, but very often these narratives are a direct motivation for action.
So, take the Kalergi plan - the grand project to knit the planet together under the technocratic control of a 'nobility of the mind' as the count put it, with the world's people being mixed into a single rootless ethnos. Kalergi's vision explicitly hopes to attain a world without warfare, of general harmony and peace for all. Further, it retains a special, privileged place for those who manage this utopia.
Examination of Kalergi's project yields good reason to believe that it has been decisively influential in shaping elite opinion and, therefore, allegiance. One can see how it would be compelling to them, as it provides a higher moral purpose as sanction for the privilege achievement of the vision would provide. Institutions such as the EU and the UN are all in line with this vision, as are feminism, gender theory, mass immigration, the green new deal, the great reset ... even the phrase 'hate speech' seems to have been coined by Kalergi.
The point being, perhaps the elites are not malicious in the sense of being motivated by hatred for the common man. And perhaps it is not mere indifference arising from the venal desire for big line go up. Maybe the callousness is the pitiless disregard for suffering that emerges from ideological zeal - they see themselves as sculptors, and our lives and nations as clay in their hands. Whatever pain they inflict, whatever misery we endure, is all justified in their minds by the greater benefit of the utopia they are shaping for us. Whether we want it or not.
Personally, I find this far more chilling than mere greed or malice.
The chat with Distributist is in the MorgCast back catalogue on here, about a year ago. One of the best ones imo.
Your last line returns us to that famous statement of C. S. Lewis according to which it's infinitely preferable to be ruled by robber barons or old-fashioned tyrants than moral busybodies worrying about whether we have all taken the right vaccines or are in line with the most recent opinions about blacks and homosexuals and so on.
I do think--and this may be a perennial problem, or especially one that afflicts regimes where the model of the ruler is some kind of pseudo-benevolent merchant or middling type rather than an aristocratic combination of the warrior, the thinker, the honorable, and the priestly--that the elites actively despise the hoi polloi of their own race, the vast majority of whom are lower- or working- or even (now) middle- class but hide that fact (barely) from themselves by adopting all sorts of increasingly fashionable but still seemingly egalitarian views about pretending to include the "underprivileged" from elsewhere. They flatter themselves with faux universalism and pseudo-philanthropy in this way, and so satisfy their intense self-love, all the while catering to the even deeper urge they have as petty human beings to cast hatred and aspersion on huge swathes of other people. The results, of course, are disastrous.
Indeed, I had Lewis' observation in mind when I wrote that. It's something of a preoccupation, this tyranny of the morally obsessed.
There's no question in my mind that our elites demonstrate a barely concealed contempt for the lower orders of their own kind, and you're exactly right that they disguise this to themselves with their preening concern for the plight of the third worlder. This isn't new, either. Dickens skewered it as telescopic philanthropy.
He did. Rousseau analyzed it too. Do you think it's a perennial problem of decadent elites or more of a specifically modern and post-Christian phenomenon?
I don't recall ever reading about the Roman nobility exhibiting an overweening concern for the state of the Picts, so I suspect this relates to Christianity.
But in their advanced or decrepit stage they brought in all sorts of bizarre Oriental cults, including, of course, Christianity. Lecky has a great line in his History of European Morals: From Augustus to Charlemagne about how the latter, especially, appealed to Senators in the decaying Empire, "or rather their wives" (I'm paraphrasing).
I think we tend to be puzzled by the elites' motivations because they and we simply have what I would call a different "innate view." Whereas we look at human biodiversity, different nations and their practices and have a positive emotional reaction, they look at the same things and experience a negative reaction. It's something similar to a disgust response.
They view separate and different nations as ugly, difficult to manage, and a source of potential conflict. Their desire is to impose rules on humanity, and ideally to bind humanity under a single set of rules. How is a single set of rules to be imposed on all of these wildly different nations? Well, you start by making them the same.
Also, while to some extent I buy Ed Dutton's ideas about an abundance of middle class people seeking distinction through political correctness when no other avenues for distinction are available, that motivation pales in comparison to the motivation of money. How many people are in business or day jobs and are fearful for the fate of their country, but say nothing because it could mean, if not the loss of their present job, the inability to get a better one, or a drop in sales or an inability to get funding because someone on Twitter pointed out that they were at an anti-immigration protest.
Why do they like to collect bits of Aztec AND Islamic art, say, proudly showing them off on the walls of their lavish homes while gleefully eating tacos on Tuesday and Thai on Thursday? It's all a sham, I agree, but they at least imagine they're embracing cultural diversity in the name of sophistication or depth or some such. I suppose it will all go away once the money goes away, but surely their faux universalism has played a huge role in quickening that process.
That's what they think diversity is. They have no conception of a people who breathe a completely foreign air, and whose mindset is completely foreign to Western rationalism. You have no idea how small these people's minds are.
Oh, I have some clue. I live in a university neighborhood of Chicago inhabited by masked cunts with gunts who pretend they like blacks.
Heh.
An understated chuckle.
The incompetence viewpoint is also intellectually reassuring. The man who is tolerating an idiotic job to pay a crippling mortgage and being made to feel like a stranger in his own country can laugh at the morons running the country who earn six-figure salaries, and proclaim his indifference to politics because, "They're all the same. They're all a shower of gangsters," etc. Then he can stretch out on his couch to watch his football of a Wednesday evening because what else would you do in a country run by morons?
''The Great Incompetence Cope''.
It really is a cope for some people. I'm mates with a bloke who is very clever and very well-meaning. He often reaches for the "never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence" line. I am certain that this is because he actively doesn't want to believe it's malicious. The only thing which stops me writing him off as a coward is that he's been a good friend.
Isn't the malevolence view also somewhat reassuring, though? "It's the (fill in the blank)!" "We didn't have anything to do with it!"
I think the truest account would have to reckon with both main aspects of this problem which we can all agree is a problem.
I'm pretty sure malevolence is the least reassuring conclusion we can draw with regard to elite motivation. Our response to it is a subsequent question.
Malevolence is at least understandable as bad will. And that can be pointed out and fought (at least in theory and perhaps, ultimately, in practice). What if the problem is so entrenched, and in all sorts of bizarre ways, through bad will and stupidity and everything in between, that it really is simply intractable?
The stupidity argument I'd think has been fairly refuted by Morgoth's article. His "dog shit on the doorstep" allegory does this very well. Perhaps your neighbor is so stupid they leave dog shit on your porch by mistake - unlikely but possible. But every day, and only on your porch, and nowhere else?
Look. It's clearly both. The legions of masked chubby ladies shrieking about health and safety and the patriarchy and whites are, above all, deluded and stupid, not malicious and duplicitous Machiavellians who "weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words." They're true believers and for that reason immensely dangerous.
Ah I see your argument more clearly now. I was limiting my consideration to our ruling class and the policies they implement. I agree completely that those who unthinkingly enforce the will of our rulers are often stupid.
There´s another quality, or lack thereof, to all these policies that casts doubt on the motivation which I would call a conspicuous lack of moderation or plain decency for lack of a better expression. For example, assume somebody did run the numbers and came to the "scientific" conclusion that mass immigration really is necessary for e.g. demographic reasons. Would that policy not be more successful and more amenable to the people if individual criminals and gangs were harshly punished and potentially deported rather than being treated with kiddie gloves? It´s not like such a policy would be a noticeable deterrent to immigration as such, perhaps to the contrary. Likewise with electric vehicles. Why do they have to outright ban combustion engines - in terms of "climate", going from say 80% EVs to 99% EVs has little benefit, especially if you encourage the use of smaller cars with less weight to move around. All these policies don´t hold up even within their own paradigm and there´s always a sometimes small but in any case obvious element of apparently irrational sadism in them.
Excellent point. Another example is the types of facilities closed during the lock downs. Why would they close playgrounds and beaches? Why close gyms and churches but not liquor stores? And as the lock downs progressed and people grew increasingly frustrated, our rulers' behavior became more needlessly cruel. Why would you tell people not to have family over for Thanksgiving and Christmas?
There was also this thing in a certain central European country where "it was decided" that classroom windows should be kept open during winter (I am not talking about a country with a mediterranean climate) during school hours so as to "reduce virus loads" in the classroom air. First of all, this policy by itself appears unnecessarily sadistic, doubly so by specifically targetting children. It doesn´t appear to serve any real policy goal, _especially_ since a similar kind of discussion (or even instruction) was NOT raised or issued for workplaces. How can that make sense from a "running the numbers" perspective?
But to really top things off, the head of government (childless, BTW) of this central European country, when asked about children that feel cold in the classroom, callously suggested that they could do some exercises to keep warm. It would have been easy to just brush this question aside and say nothing, but to mock the plight of children, which was inflicted by the government´s (headed by this very person) own policy, in this way appears utterly gratuitous. All things considered, this may be a rather small thing, but I feel that it provided a brief glimpse into a character that is filled to the brim with the vilest malice.
I'd like to think that if nothing else comes from the entire embarrassing spectacle of the Covid 19 episode, at least it's removed any vestige of belief that our ruling class has any good intentions towards us at all. At this point the best we can hope for is indifference. I don't know of a single thoughtful person in my circle who still thinks they consider our well-being when making decisions.
This makes a great point about immigration. There would be better gatekeeping against bad actors if there were any concern for the citizens. To claim lack of resources is absurd given the huge bureaucracy which massive immigration has spawned. Statistics around how much of an effect electric cars will have are similarly hard to find as Covid deaths of the young and healthy. Climate is just another hammer to destroy the quality of life.
My son is an electrician. Charging electric cars requires expensive upgrading to most people’s service panel. Meanwhile no one is building nuclear power plants or telling us where the extra electricity is coming from. We will all be doing without while social media silently consumes a large chunk of the grid.
I think this essay does a first rate job of showing how unlikely it is that any of the things recently brought in by our elders and betters to destroy western civilization are inadvertent. The massive amounts of money sloshing around pharmaceuticals in the US completely account for what happened during Covid. The energy at the center of these ideas are demonic, the way they can’t perceive the irony of shouting down and drowning out or intimidating off the stage viewpoints they disagree with while claiming free speech would be funny if it weren’t terrifying to think these are the future elites. The idea that intellectuals relentlessly destroy has been with us for a long time, but never with so much coordinated and ruthless success in so much of the world. The destruction of the family has been a triumph. Even those who still aspire to it have come to agree with their keepers that they simply can’t afford it. Women have stifled their biological imperative with anti depressants and go on destroying rather than creating life.
It’s infuriating to think about how much they’ve gotten away with by denouncing detractors as conspiracy theorists. Blind greed, ambition, and learned hatred of your immediate ancestors may not be a conspiracy but they’re not exactly innocent good intentions and shouldn’t be let off the hook.
I agree this would make a great Morgcast.
An outstanding essay, Morgoth. You really get to the crux of it all in a succinct, elegant yet hard-hitting manner.
This work deserves - nay, needs - to be disseminated as widely as possible. You really should use this for a spoken version. Top-drawer stuff.
I like this extended discussion quite a bit.
Well done.
The Eugyppius take regarding these matters is at least helpful for thinking through the extent of institutional incompetence owing to misguided idealism and girlish stupidity involved in all this. I recommend reading his Substack, even though I agree ultimately with your take.
Yes, he's speaking specifically about Covid, I'm more interested in the concept as a general rule of thumb.
He uses Covid to speak about a general phenomenon, though: the takeover of all our institutions by what he calls "head girls."
I suppose the question is ultimately reflective of the debate between the theological vs. the philosophical view of life. Is religion but a childish toy and is there ultimately no sin other than ignorance? Or is there a providential god who rewards justice and punishes injustice and looks into our hearts and guides us?
In the hands of all the wrong people the Socratic view that all virtue is knowledge and that all vice is ignorance leads to rule by busybodies and self-anointed experts who propagate the hive mind of the moment and who end up ruining much of what made life enjoyable, or at least tolerable and livable, for our peoples in the past. This seems inseparable from malevolence.
I've wrestled with the emergent view as opposed to top-down view of for a while, particularly because the emergent view tends to be more Spenglerian than the top-down view.
I'm not well read enough on Eugypius work to pass commentary really to be honest. Though I'm skeptical about just how much agency these ''Head-girls'' have to be honest.
We could falsely content ourselves, while satisfying our proclivity for "depth" and flattering our intellectual vanity, by saying "it's complicated," but let's not. Let's get into the heart of the matter. Some of the other commenters here have already helped shed light on this seemingly intractable problem of the relation between malice, the will, ignorance, and knowledge. Your essay has started a proper discussion here.
As for the head girls, they may not have much agency themselves, but they're everywhere these days and they're often highly active, apparently designing, greatly turbulent, and massively seditious. They are not like the salon ladies of old, a rather unenterprising race. They're somewhat more pernicious, to put it mildly.
A grander project that I work on from time to time deals at length with the incentive structure within a bureaucratic hierarchy. In one essay I speculate on the motivation of a teacher who notices a boy in her class has swirl handwriting like a girl, and he likes purple not blue, or pink. Etc
Now, is she reacting to top-down messaging? Yes, in a sense she is, so where did the message originate? The J's or from other people like her in the system? Or other institutions and think tanks.
Moldbug, for example, puts academia as being the sovereign entity. Others will say ''The Jews'' and others still financial centres.
The debate rages on...
All these, surely, are factors. Plus the general depravity, malevolence, AND stupidity that are always lurking in the heart of man. And Loretta.
It strikes me that the people I speak to on a regular basis these days, even or especially the people who have received an official "education," are immensely stupid. I know from what I read and the conversations I've had with others that my experience in this regard is not unique. It also strikes me that there is a direct proportional relationship between the kinds of opinions these educated nitwits espouse and actual "hate" ("hate has no home here," one of their preferred slogans, being perfectly emblematic of the point). What did Yeats say? "An intellectual hatred is the worst."
All three of those actors are doing it. THAT'S our problem. We're f###ing surrounded
Eugyppius makes a good argument, but I find it interesting how consistently those with an academic origin are biased towards systemic rather than personal explanations. There's an aversion to naming names, as it were. Human agency is deprecated in favor of the blind mechanics of impersonal societal and organizational dynamics. It's very similar to the perennial debate over whether history is dominated by great men or great social forces.
It's not that the systemic explanation is wrong, per se; there's a great deal of valuable insight to be gleaned from that lens. However, it's incomplete. History is not purely deterministic, but also contingent. Human agency plays a role alongside structural dynamics. Both things are true, and by rejecting one of them out of hand - a habit of thought that seems to have emerged from Marxist theorists - one's perspective on reality is artificially flattened.
Fascinating stuff, glad I checked in and saw this. Also looking forward to watching the video you did on Mad Max. Morgoth, I watch Max Igan's videos and sometimes think to myself, "I wonder if Morgoth is watching this and what the heck he makes of it. " Haha. I must read some Heineman. With people endlessly going on about bloody AI and this ChatGPT shite, I am always referring them to the idea of a Butlerian Jihad, although I've not read that one yet.
I do sometimes watch Igan, less than I used to, I found it became a bit repetitive.
I agree with Morgoth that we're well past attributing the regime's policies to stupidity. At this point the only question is: do they do these things from indifference, or malice? I'd like to suggest that their policies start out from a position of indifference and then ofttimes escalate to malice.
The indifference is easy to understand. Does a rancher care about the feelings of his herd? If he switches their feed from one mixture to another it's not because he thinks they'll like the second feed more, it's generally due to some other reason completely divorced from the cow altogether- perhaps the new feed is cheaper, perhaps the change has been mandated by the government, perhaps he's simply having an argument with the guy who runs the feed store and so he's buying from somewhere else out of spite. But what all these possibilities have in common is that at no time does he consider the desires of his cattle. He doesn't hate them, he simply doesn't care.
How does this sometimes change to malice? Well we can see this in our own dealings with the government. Indifference changes to malice when someone they don't care about gets in the way of them reaching their goal. For example, the two ruling parties in the capital city have a budget disagreement because the populace is raising a fuss about taxes. They are getting in the way of the rulers' grand plan! A government shutdown looms. Which services shall be temporarily suspended during the shutdown? Well here in the US you'll see the National Park Service do things like drive out to remote campgrounds and put chains up across access roads, and lock canvas sacks over barbecue grills. They shut down tours of the White House. They close child support offices. They intentionally stop services that will inflict the most pain on their subjects to encourage them to call their representatives and complain, and also to increase overall misery so that in the minds of NPCs government shutdown = bad.
Consider great rulers from history and ask yourself, how much did they care about the wishes of those they ruled? Did Alexander consider the people of Macedonia during his campaigns? When Lincoln fought the South during the Civil War, did he stop to consider whether the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers and civilians even WANTED the USA to remain united?
The ruling class probably does hate us, or at least despise us. But their actions are those of someone who operates under a completely separate order of priorities.
It might sound asinine but I reckon the relentless promotion of women's / girls' football is of malign intent: it's masculinising them and too much exercise isn't actually good for a woman's fertility. Israeli women who tried to pass Special Forces selection ended making themselves infertile and a lot of elite female athletes have this problem also.
But they go apeshit if you tell them this
If you do something because of a mistake or because you inherited the immigration policies of the previous guy BUT THEN someone says "hey this is really messing up my life" you are NOW doing malice because you are knowingly doing harm to someone who is asking you to stop.
This is why I do not believe in judging based on intent, or otherwise put: means, but entirely on ends. When you entertain the, frankly Christian, perspective that it's a person's will that matters, you enable him to shield himself from the harshest scrutiny by means of playing the fool in various ways. Do they do us good? They are good. Do they do us evil? They are evil. Eliminate the nonsense about interrogating peoples' consciences, it does not matter.
We also have their words and statements that we can analyze. I recently put together a presentation for my family, a bit of a slap upside the head about the Great Replacement and what it means for us and our posterity. In that presentation I had a bottomless well of AntiWhite vitriol, as well as massive numbers of psychopathic admissions that white replacement is desired. It isn't just white replacement, it is the eradication of our existence. It is in their own words.
Now, the office holders keep their hands clean - or words clean to be exact. But we can see here what they do with others. They condemn and straightjacket and even seek to propose legislation to make criminal white people speaking out about our replacement in our own homelands. They condone and cheer rioting and looting and burning when criminals overdose in police custody and encourage mobs on the eve of trials - creating a sham justice system. When vicious, Anti White vitriol is spewed by people employed by the most prestigious institutions of the regime, they turn a blind eye.
We can see with our own eyes. This is a deliberate persecution. This is the unspeakable malice that we call pure evil.
Confronting this kind of malice in your own homeland is stunning and disorienting. It flies in the face of the most basic expectations of what a government should provide. It does not compute. It is no different than a parent who abuses its child. It is so stunning in its audacity and malicious in its undertaking that most think it simply cannot be real. This is the tactic of psychopathic suicide cult leaders. At a certain point they will say the most stunning and vile things in a public forum. Once nobody speaks out, then they have approval. From there, the normalization of brazen threats and demeaning words and abusive behaviors increases. This is exactly the regime we face. It is a psychopathic death cult, bent on our destruction and it behaves in exactly the same way as they all do.
Now for Harris and Weinstein, they are not of us. Weinstein has explicitly stated that he fears us acting in our own self interest. The very act of him saying that means we are to him a them. Perhaps that is indifference. In the end, when someone wants you to sit in silence while your homeland is invaded by foreigners, while the invaders are told that the people of the homeland are vile and evil and beneath the invader; when they remain silent in the face of vicious, genocidal vitriol against your people, does it really matter if it is indifference or malice? What matters is what it is and what it means for us. What matters is how we feel and what we perceive.
No. This is a fight for survival, and a fight for our land. It's unconventional and unprecedented means is disorienting and disarming makes it the most vile evil ever conceived. I thank everyone here with the sense of self to be oriented and face up to this malevolence. Our job is to hold the line and orient our people still caught in the understandable - who are stunned by the bitch slaps of their abusers. They face a choice; stay comfortable as our race is marched into the oblivion of persecution and then extinction, or summon their will to survive and join us.
We face the same choice. There are many trials ahead that will summon our courage; that will call us to rouse the flames that are the spirit of our ancestors.
May The Gods Bless Us All With Optimism, Nobility, Courage, Discipline, Wisdom, Strength, Honor, Confidence and an Unbending Will to defend and keep what is rightfully ours.
To the malevolent we say, you have made your choice. You will reap what you have sewn. It will be you who will fall. Let us rise! Let us rise and claim our right to survive and thrive on our land just as our ancestors did for us.
‘ In actual fact, I believe it offers something of a shield and bolt-hole to those with a vested interest, financial or otherwise, in protecting Power from criticism.’
That moves them into the black