Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Sex Roles and the De-Civilizing Ratchet

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The concept of time preference, as explained at length by Hans Hoppe, explains the process of both civilization and de–civilization. Civilization results from the systematic lowering of a population’s time preference — that is, their preference for a better future over enjoyment in the present. The destruction of civilization is what occurs when people systematically prefer the the consumption of goods in the present.

Sex roles play a critical role in both processes. Women are the only sex that can give birth to children, and are their primary caregivers except in extraordinary situations. This gives women a unique advantage in terms of gender specialization, and one that technology hasn’t supplanted, despite protestations to the contrary. Even artificial wombs, were they to be invented, would both require generations of research to perfect, and would likely be quite expensive. If it has been decades since the invention of the birth control pill, and new hormonal birth control methods still cause lethal side effects, it stands to reason that far more complex technologies will take even longer to reach maturity.

To the extent that society and its governing institutions encourage women to invest into their children and stabilize their families, they contribute to the waxing of the time preference of that civilization. The sacrament of indivisible marriage is the building block of a civilization that transcends generations. It’s the legal, religious, mystical, and sexual institution that prevents people for living solely for themselves within their lifetimes.

When institutions encourage women to abandon tending to their families, to instead work in bureaucratic settings, it contributes to present time orientation in society. The labor resources of women can be extracted by corporations and the central state, rather than clustered around the hearth and home, where they can’t be taxed efficiently or redirected towards corporate profits.

Western institutions encourage families to send young women into the workforce, where their work can be profited from by governments and corporations alike, at the expense of their fertility and the health of their infants. While this does contribute to the availability of financial capital within the society, which can be invested into capital growth, it causes a degeneration in the human capital of society, for whom that financial capital must ultimately serve, or it becomes worthless.

The modern mentality, derived as it is from Protestantism and republican egalitarianism, tends to privilege the human activities that can be measured, counted, and written about easily (see the books of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn for more on this theme). The elevation of text alone to a sacred position, as in Judaism and most forms of Protestantism, accentuates this tendency within countries where those two religious forms are dominant, even in secularized forms as they are today.

That female labor drives profits in the present for various institutions is indisputable. However, the breakdown of family structures is itself a well-understood contributor to crime and other major agents of decivilization. In this, Western institutions have traded a ‘good’ that can be easily measured for a set of ‘bads’ that are more challenging to quantify, but no less difficult to understand.

In the modern world, it’s more responsible to encourage a woman to earn $45,000 per year for 2,000 hours of her time than it is to reduce her family’s stress, be a resource for her children, and to begin raising infants when her body is healthiest. From the perspective of a major corporation, a self-sufficient household is expensive to advertise to; a nuisance. A well-rested and capable home-maker doesn’t need to send money to Proctor and Gamble when it takes 20 minutes to brew up a superior alternative to Tide out of common chemicals. She doesn’t need to buy ready-made meals from Stouffer’s when she can make something better from scratch.

Further, the local government can’t collect sales tax on those containers of blue fluid, she may not demand a public school (and therefore jobs for bureaucrats), and her children will not be neurotic enough to demand prescriptions for brand-name amphetamines.

In the aggregates obsessed over by GDP-minded economists, each kid hooked on Adderall is considered to be a net gain to society, even if it damages the long term health of the child. Econometricians tend to favor an economy of frenetic activity, of a multiplying of transactions, pretending that larger numbers on spreadsheets connotate greater societal achievement. As most human activity can’t be quantified with any precision, even with stupendous computer models, the obsessions of the ‘wonks’ are liable to miss far more than they understand.

Hoppe writes that as decivilization progresses, “formerly provident providers will be turned into drunks or daydreamers, adults into children, civilized men into barbarians, and producers into criminals.” Per Hoppe, it’s no surprise that the most resonant drama within the upper middle class in the United States is ‘Breaking Bad,’ which tells the story of the fall of such a man.

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This has occurred within our lifetimes, as the male labor force participation rate has plummeted, at the same time as the participation rate for women has increased. Indeed, the rate has reduced from over 85% to under 70% since after World War II, although one must not accord too much precision to these numbers collected by a bureaucracy subject to all the usual failings of bureaucratic institutions that have no incentive to promote merit.

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As the culture deteriorates to a focus on pleasure today at the expense of flourishing tomorrow, feminine symbols within culture become progressively more fixated on a sort of self-annihlatory frenzy.

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In such a childlike society, given to fixation upon fantasy and image as more important than reality, decay is inevitable.

Although it’s fashionable in the cities for clever writers to poke fun at bourgeois parents for gasping in horror at the antics of Miley Cyrus, there are some portents in those gasps. It makes no sense to be a high-investment parent if your daughter is going to become a whore, or is going to emulate whores in her after-hours, when she goes from her job to the nightclub.

It becomes a marker of insane irresponsibility for a parent to let their daughter to sit in front of Disney Channel shows for four hours a day if that corporation’s emblems of young womanhood go on to become emblems of harlotry, again and again. Little horrifies the K-type psychology more than the prospect of having lived a life of dashed meaning.

It’s challenging for a left-wing elitist to understand that, within the United States, there still exist strong family cultures in isolated and dispersed parts of the country, where people still take pride in old-fashioned family portraits of smiling, healthy children going on to fulfilling and successful adult lives.

Tut-tutting defenders of degenerate mores may trot out the moralizers of days gone past, like Tipper Gore, but like many things in life, social trends tend to go on for longer than most individual lives. The quantitative obsessives can come up with endless spreadsheets ‘proving’ an increase in general well-being, as unhappiness, failure, and prole drift compound misery within society.

Even if degeneracy does make people happy (and it does), it does so by making them happy in the present at the cost of greater potential happiness in the future, and itself depletes cultural capital by privileging the present over the future.

Further, the statistics-gathering bodies of Western governments are roughly as credible as those of the Soviets. Publication standards are low. Statistics are quoted readily by economists and journalists without knowing how they were collected, and without independent verification. It’s safe to assume that all numbers reported in the popular press and by academics are fabrications, just as a time-saving heuristic. The faith in these numbers would be charming if it were not so harmful.

Attempting to reverse this ratchet through high-minded arguments about the esoteric connection between zero interest rate policy and time preference is unlikely to succeed, and has never succeeded at halting the self-destructive tendencies inherent to democracy, which is itself a variant on Communism. Only mass death corrected the bad policies of the Soviet Union, or rather, forced Stalin and his successors to liberalize the economy further and to retract some of the revolution’s most idealistic social policies.

Further, changing the intellectual character of the United States as a whole is an impossible goal to achieve given current resources. It is instead easier to lop off a section, and get to work on reforming that one to health. Easier said than done, but to do it, one must say it first, and repeat it often enough to recruit enough people of the right caliber to make it happen.

Grandiose goals for global change as a starting point always fail (and aping the organizations that do this is a recipe for failure). Just as Alexander the Great began his march across the world in tiny Macedonia, any great task must start at the smallest possible level, as success builds upon tiny victories.

In the 1970s, Christopher Lasch wrote that such a return would be unthinkable. Within his lifetime, he was correct. Currently, the outcome is less certain, as cultural Marxist tropes, taken as they were from ordinary-Marxist tropes, become challenged by (probably outnumbered, certainly out-funded, definitely out-gunned) a rising trend of masculine thinking in the popular culture. As the university system in the West comes under the same pressures as the Communist university system did, it too will collapse with a suddenness that will shock thousands of professors into suicide, as it did during the Soviet collapse, even if the exact manner in which it happens occurs differently.

In this cultural vacuum, there will be opportunity & peril. Restoring patriarchy must occur as a critical foundation before returning Western civilization to at least partial order. Getting the steps backwards is like attempting to put a roof over a house before pouring its foundation.

To that extent, promoting a return to the patriarchal family in law and culture is critical, as is a return to traditional female roles in the family unit.

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Shooting An Elephant

The Republican party serves as a resource sink for the right wing. It’s a token resistance to the left, which temporarily delays the general ruination of the country, if that. The neocon faction, which has suffered catastrophic losses since the financial collapse that footed  the Bush II presidency, was more a different varietal of mainstream leftism than representative of rightist thought.

The right wing tends to blunt itself when it pursues democratic political power, because winning elections requires ideological dilution, as is taught in any political science course. I’ll stop writing now about why the GOP sucks, because this should be review for most of you.

The Republican party can never again gain national authority as in the manner that its ‘base’ wants it to, because, as Mitt Romney noticed during his campaign, roughly 47% of the country is reliant on transfer payments from the state to make ends meet. The real number is probably higher, given that many private companies rely on government contracts.

As more people have realized this, the media organizations that used to be at the fringe has begun to supplant the former guardians of the mainstream right. I’ve regarded with trepidation the professionalization of radio crank Alex Jones, although he’ll never land accounts from major corporations.

Conservatives like Glenn Beck have started their own companies in an attempt to profit from the trends in the American political right, and often run ads like this one, elucidating the finer points of prepping for social collapse. The content tends to orbit around an obsession about redeeming the Republican party, electing ‘true conservatives,’ and various articles that excite right-wing bellyfeels.

Destroying the GOP is the best way to undermine support for democracy on the right. The reason for this is that, without hope for electoral success, the rank and file of the right will be forced to abandon their hopes for electoral redemption. When the typical “Joe Plumber” recognizes that it’s fruitless to go to the polls or to send money to their favorite politician, the GOP will fold in more states, which cedes to progressives the right to ruin more towns and cities in the service of their ideological goals.

This would limit the available options of the right wing population to either accept destruction or secede. Cutting off the option of winning elections, and making it obvious that it’s no longer possible to win elections, is key to achieving this goal.

While this is a hazardous political strategy to pursue, the risk makes possible the winning of a political contest, that as David Brin points out, will confer hundreds of years of benefits to the winning side.

I favor a rope-a-dope strategy as a method of dealing with the left. Encourage their fixation on winning elections, because that’s where their strength will continue to be. Meanwhile, encourage cultural division and militancy. To the extent that the right attempts to dominate a country that is essentially left-wing (and doomed), it’ll continue to waste resources on an un-winnable battle for the loyalty of a majority-worthless people.

Hugging the mainstream ropes and encouraging the left to deplete its energies is likely to make them weak and fractious enough to destroy over a long enough timeline.

The older generation of right-wing media personalities are stuck in the loops that they have trained themselves into — that of winning elections, and then failing to implement the policies that their constituencies actually want.

Further, it’s important to convince the Stanley Druckenmiller types that their noble campaigns to keep the American government from killing itself are fruitless. Delaying crisis is counter-productive. Instead, hand the left the rope with which it shall hang itself, and win the loyalty of the people who are still productive. Partition the country in such a way that the left is left with all of the liabilities and none of the assets of the United States, and you’ll have a strong set of countries to work with.

You want a left bureaucracy struggling to maintain the Detroits and Clevelands of the world, while right free-states maintain ownership of states like the Dakotas and Texas. Tying up the Federal government in ‘humanitarian interventions’ within its own useless territory will misdirect Federal energies to such an extent that it can’t suppress competitor states effectively. That goes as much for the rest of the world as it does domestically. Each Camden, NJ within USG’s purvey limits its ability to achieve its ideological goals, or to extend control over hostile domestic territories.

One major issue that the mainstream right has is that it appeals primarily to an elderly demographic that has much to lose and little to gain from the euthanasia of the Federal state. Ignoring this entire demographic, who will actually perish without regular deliveries of Medicare-financed drugs, is important to maintaining an exit trajectory. Leaving the mainstream right with an audience of 70-year-old Lipitor addicts is a worthwhile goal.

This demographic is what powers the current GOP, and it’s difficult to displace them. As inflationary economic policy annihilates this slice of the country (for ill) and depletes standards of bourgeois morality both in the US and abroad, elections will become even less important than they already are. What’s important is to have a sane alternative in the works by that time, to prevent President Comacho figures from capitalizing on the social failure.

In the meantime, constructing a parallel set of affiliated cultures can make it possible to accumulate the necessary capital (human, cultural, financial) to successfully partition the United States.

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Dreher and Noble Lies

Nick Land and Occam’s Razor have posted their reactions to Rod Dreher’s post in the American Conservative that stated that acknowledging biology is politically dangerous.

While I disagree with Dreher’s position, I think that he’s correct in saying that, were the USG to admit that much of its post-WWII domestic and international policy have been built upon shams, and that much of the social science staff throughout the West consists of sham artists, that there would be stunning levels of political disruption, which would probably spiral into civil conflict, perhaps even civil war.

Rarely do people involved in maintaining a major political lie admit that is what they’re doing. Writers like Dreher consciously suppress conflict in the present by concealing valid information, but by doing so, they guarantee a far worse ‘correction’ of the social structure later. Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile explores this theme, and comes out against the maintenance of shams, because it’s a highly destructive practice in the long run.

The ‘Austrian economic calculation problem’ method of thinking also impugns this strategy as a sort of method of intellectual price-fixing — doomed to fail, certain to cause errors to multiply, and to spark deadly conflict in the future.

Land makes light of Dreher’s fears, and Occam attempts to calm his anxiety. Pretending as if the breakdowns of the various progressive lies will be largely benign for everyone involved isn’t a realistic prediction.

While forbidden knowledge doesn’t directly result in ‘genocide’ (a recent term that only entered wide use post-war), the retaliatory rage and political dysfunction that results from the unwinding of countless lies does often result in political dissolution and war.

The result is not likely to be Auschwitz redux, however. The term ‘genocide’ and the United Nations diplomatic framework put in place to freeze in place American hegemony for-ever-and-ever only came into being after a series of genocides all over Europe perpetrated by all sides of the war that created all the homogeneous nations west of the iron curtain.

That Hitler was able to conquer the liberal Weimar Republic, sympathetic as it was to the ideals of 1789, is more an argument against the ideals of 1789 than it is against anything that might threaten the preservation of those ideals. The modern American state is probably closer to the revolutionary idyll than Weimar was, so I understand Dreher’s hitlerexia nervosa. Building a social order that’s resilient to Hitlers seems more sensible than attempting to deal with every little corporal that decides to declare himself first among brothers in a nation of brothers. The 1789 way of doing things is demonstrably vulnerable to such degenerative modes, as was broadly understood in the West since antiquity.

As soon as a clear and permanent majority develops under democracy, some variant on Napoleon/Hitler/etc. is inevitable. This is one of the reasons as to why we see such a scramble by minority groups in democracies to hamper majority populations and to ally with other minorities — they know that permanently losing the kulturkampf means permanently losing the kampf proper.

Majority rule so often means minority expulsion or mass-murder that it’s practically axiomatic; derivable via first principles or plain observation.

This is the situation that the former American majority finds itself in, and why the Dark Enlightenment finds purchase now and not ten yeas ago, whereas the other mind-virus strains from which its thinkers have synthesized it could not infect more than a small portion of the population, most of whom were cranks with compromised mental immune systems anyhow. Now that the stakes are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, politics looks less like sport and more like a battle for survival.

It’s a pathetic accident of history and low education standards that ‘democracy,’ which confers power to the majority, has been somehow identified with friendliness to minorities.

To the extent that the Dark Enlightenment dismantles popular lies at a faster rate than was possible before, it’s not a benign force — from the perspective of the people who make comfortable livings off of those lies, like most of the people living in Washington DC. It may even be dangerous to the millions of upstanding, productive people who have adapted to a high parasite load, even if they don’t enjoy all the squirming tapeworms sharing their intestinal tract.

The Dreher position, which is more widely shared than most will admit, is ‘responsible’ to the present, but destructive to the future of more than 20 years from now, in the same way that the lies of the ’68ers caused immense destruction as those ideas hardened into opportunistic demotic policy.

In this, the superior position is the one which accepts a temporary period of strife to make more durable and organic orders possible. While yes, this will devastate the lives of millions of people (just as the implosion of the USSR hollowed out millions of sad lives), it’s preferable to the alternative of catastrophic collapse.

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