Humane, Egalitarian Terror

In an egalitarian world in which authority expects everyone to consider themselves the moral equals of everyone else on the planet, what critics call ‘pathological altruism’ is actually entirely rational.

If all people must be treated equally by the laws and their fellow men (except in certain aberrant situations in which the person is ‘sick’ enough to commit a crime that must be treated by the medical-prison complex), then the general population will tend to support humane causes which confer dignity and material support to all people from around the world. Statements like ‘All human life is sacred’ become non-objectionable, even official statements of dogma.

This developed in part due to the terror of World War II. If millions of people could be liquidated by bombs and industrial prison camps — because enemy lives were seen as equally worthless, with the people identified with popular governments — then ‘the people’ came to be rightfully concerned with supporting humane governments in the interest of avoiding retaliatory herd-culling.

So, when modern people participate in anti-war movements supposedly on behalf of oppressed foreigners, they may just be marching to save their own skins. Typical people under popular governments know that foreigners will hold them accountable for the actions of their governments in a way that would have been unimaginable in most periods of history in which there was a clear delineation between rulers and ruled, and war was often a more ceremonial-ritual affair than one of mass war between entire populations.

This leads to an international pacifism which seems a bit crazy in the light of the historical behavior of states. Decolonization as a foreign policy priority became important in part due to fear of direct competition between major states. Even competition between the American and Soviet blocs in the third world was muted for fear of provoking conflicts which could be more destructive than World War II.

The contemporary mass immigration issue in part owes its origins to the pervasive belief in egalitarianism and the desire of statesmen to avoid nuclear war. It becomes very difficult to maintain an official belief that all people are equal while telling billions of foreigners from the third world that they have no right to enter European countries which are themselves run as egalitarian benefit-houses for the general welfare.

The same intellectual classes that must be maintained to create that egalitarian pig-house, like aristocrats hungry for honor in war, have a strong tendency to extend their authority to the rest of the world, especially when they’re not restrained by others with more level heads. If you run out of domestic pigs for your utilitarian pighouse, you have to start importing them from somewhere else to keep the engines humming.

To say that some people are not equal to others is to undermine the entire basis of the postwar state, which uses humanitarianism to justify its right to rule in a similar way that old kings used theories of divine right to justify their authority.

Humanitarianism results from this terror of mass violence which the dream of popular government has always melted into. Attempting to excise this self-defense mechanism from popular government will just result in the usual bloody and pointless consequences. The root of the problem is the identification of the people with the state. When you make that separation, it becomes much easier to avoid such extreme religious commitments to the egalitarian upkeep of all peoples everywhere.

It’s a mistake to call this international altruism ‘crazy’ or a pollutant introduced by foreign agitators. It serves a purpose, the intellectuals who put it into place knew what they were doing, and Westerners tend to support it because it’s much less altruistic than it seems. It serves a self-protective purpose for the populations in question.