Liberalism arises from human self-pity, and causes us to think backward, so that instead of working toward a goal and liking ourselves for the attempt, we consider ourselves superior for reasons unrelated to reality, and this makes us neurotic.

The basic idea behind liberalism is that life is bad. Nature is bad, and life is bad, because they are scary. We the individuals could die at any minute. Even worse, we could screw up.

If you are hanging with your homeys, and you suddenly say "watch this" and try the coolest stunt ever and screw up, you look like an idiot. One of your homeys is going to make fun of you and he'll then look cooler than you. He will gain social power over you.

That's a big loss. How did you screw it up? The vision in your head of how reality works did not match up to the, ah, reality of the situation. You thought you could vault three speeding cop cars with your crotch on fire, but instead of a graceful result, here you are in the body cast. Idiot. Joe told us you'd screw it up and he was right, so he gets your share of the beer.

Liberalism is a counterattack by human beings against the cruel, cold, evil world. Since we have these big brains, and in them we keep track of the world in our holographic mind-maps, we can choose to edit the map instead of acting on reality. Why strive, when we can just say we did and go home?

The oldest form of this attitude is a kind of social non-aggression pact. It says that we all accept each other and ignore our deficiencies so we can keep the peace. It may be essential in really bad situations to have this type of social order; if all of your friends are morons, and you are one too, it's best not to compete for least moron status. You'll all end up in body casts.

Liberalism takes this attitude to a new level. Instead of waiting for results, we assume that results prove we as individuals are good, and then whatever happens becomes officially Not Our Fault. You tried to vault a cop car on a motorbike and ended up in a coma? Probably a faulty bike wheel made by a large corporation with ties to Israel or worse, the Church.

Most of our human activity consists in establishing this Not Our Fault level. We do this by not talking about results, but how nice, moral and friendly we are. This leads us to idolize pacifism over all else, and culturally agree to like nerdy, insecure people who make us feel happy because they're harmless.

This creates a large mob of people committed to denying reality and being useless because they pity themselves. They feel horrible about how evil life is, and how cute little bunnies get ripped apart by fast mean eagles. They start to idolize being useless and nice, instead of possibly mean -- but also smart. Because their thinking is already inverted, they quickly turn this into hating the smart because they could be evil.

When this hits a culture, it invents for itself a further justification -- it's progress, liberal thinking, big-mindedness, open-mindedness, whatever. That's all just advertising and is as sincere as the words of a prostitute or used-car salesperson. People of this mentality like to sabotage any order, authority or consensus as to what reality is, because that way they can hide behind the chaos. Anarchy, libertarianism, atheism, weird sex, postmodernism... these are all justifications, not positive and constructive reasons for living.

Check out the latest self-congratulatory stroking:

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials -- the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium -- have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They're less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more).

But at the moment, fully 37% of 18- to 29-year-olds are unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest share among this age group in more than three decades. Research shows that young people who graduate from college in a bad economy typically suffer long-term consequences -- with effects on their careers and earnings that linger as long as 15 years. - Pew Social Trends

What a positive article! "Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change."

But when read beneath the skin, you see that all of these traits are social traits. These have zero relevance to whether these people are, say, effective or intelligent. They like to think they're intelligent, but they use symbols of intelligence -- liberalism, open to change,diversity -- instead of actual intelligence. Does anyone else think this sounds like a marketing scam?

Buy the new Zipradical 3000 lawn mower! It's open to change, well-educated, under-employed and positive. Who knows if it cuts your grass? Your neighbors will think you're cool. Buy today!

If you were wondering how this backward logic -- using the symbol of being intelligent instead of being intelligent -- comes to play, check out this amusing anecdote from more trend-watchers. First, there's the positive spin:

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. - CNN

These people are forward moving, man. They pitched out God, are good pious liberals and are more intelligent -- so says the sample group anyway -- and even more, they're unique precious snowflakes because, as the article windily elaborates, "sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past." Whoah, dude, they've transcended evolution itself!

But later on you get the skinny:

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with "unconventional" philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be "ways to communicate to everyone that you're pretty smart," he said.

In other words, if you want to look smart act like smart people you see on television. The article doesn't tell us where these IQ ranges fall, so it may be they're looking at a bunch of 118s who graduated community college, got themselves Volkswagens and now are busy telling the rest of us how dumb we are. No word on what the 130+ folks who can read and understand Schopenhauer are thinking.

As part of this whacked-out backward logic, it's important to always champion the underdog. The underdog after all has suffered, and so knows things those of us in comfy homes with stable lives cannot. We didn't die on the cross -- they did. But all of that is the tail end of the backward thinking, with the real goal being this: if we accept the most screwed up people on earth, and with pity make them equal to us, then no matter how screwed-up we are, we should accept and like ourselves.

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.” - Prospect Magazine

Chant it with me now: who's going to save us? The slums are going to save us! The sharecroppers will save us! The dropouts, the addicts and the insane! Let's accept everyone, so we can accept ourselves.

This is the psychology of liberalism, leftism, progressivism -- whatever you call it, the origin is crowdism, or the will of the mob to have it be Not Our Fault. Instead of simply fixing themselves, they're seeking external scapegoats and self-esteem builders. The scapegoats are the powerful (God, Kings, corporations, Nature) and the self-esteem builders consist of lifting up the underdogs, praising the neurotic, and of course liking themselves. Backward thinking means you start by liking yourself; you don't like yourself because of anything you've done, learned, conquered or achieved. It's the loser table at high school appointing themselves Fuehrer.

It takes a long time for the nerdy self-conscious low-self-esteem dropouts of the world to unite and overthrow their betters, but they've had many centuries to do so, and they finally started to really pick up steam around 1945 or so. Ever since then, being strong and doing what's right has had that nasty sting of "well, you could be the new Hitlerstalin" to it, and so smart people have backed off from changing anything beyond their own matching paint tones at home. The result has been a chaotic society spiraling out of control, and the only real winners are the profiteers who pander to parasites and idiots with moronic products like hip-hop, Snuggies, Big Macs, glow-in-the-dark dildos and movies like Goonies or Save the Last Dance where a band of misfits comes together to take down the successful, attractive and intelligent ruling caste.

And what's the end result of all this liberalism? Well, since people are irresponsible scapegoaters who are obsessed with finding "uplifting" reasons to like themselves, the ship of state has veered out of control and tried to promise everything to everybody, with a net result being that we've squandered our wealth and replaced it with a giant angry mob of incompetents.

The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 "lowest-low" fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can't borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian "public service" of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. - Orange Country Register

I don't want to boil it all down to money, but money reflects the degree of organization in our society. A sensible society thinks forward: it looks at reality, tries to understand it, and then sets reasonable goals and charges forward to accomplish them. A sick society thinks backward: it congratulates itself on being brilliant, and finds a reason why it is owed money by government or some other large scapegoat. The healthy society thrives and gets more organized; the sick society lapses into greater degrees of disorganization until its population breeds itself back into gibbons and flings poo at the camera.

At this point, I wonder if what I'm expressing is actually an opinion. It's a prediction and an analysis. I don't even know if I like it. After all, I think I'd like being a liberal more -- but it's hard to turn my mind off to the consequences of my actions. Because, if you can get over the fact that life ain't fair and we all suffer, you can see this world as a mostly blank canvas in which great things can be constructed. But the liberal psychology turns its back on that, and from fear of it, hopes to destroy it.

Modern society searches for a new paradigm that is both ideologically forward-looking, and pragmatic. China may get there first.

When all your efforts fail, stop and think. You probably have gotten hold of a bad assumption and it's sabotaging you each time you try to act. Because the assumption is part of your personality, it influences everything you do and so it all fails.

If you've ever searched the house for your glasses only to find them on your head, or gone looking for your keys only to find them in your pocket or hand, you know how frustrating it is to carry the cause of your failure with you.

When we talk about civilization change, we're talking about changing such an assumption -- and in doing so, changing society at its most fundamental pivot point. If we're insisting up is down, to insist up is up becomes a radical act, and one that most people will violently oppose.

Then twenty years later, it becomes the norm, and we wonder how people could have been "so ignorant" as to oppose it.

Since the 1500s, when our liberal revolution started, the world has been moving on two fronts. The first is technology, which would have expanded with time anyway; the second is toward a liberal democratic view of the universe, which we recognize as modern liberalism.

We can envision liberalism as a fundamental assumption underlying modern civilization. Here's a good summary from John Kekes:

The view of human nature at the core of the liberal faith is thus that human beings are by their nature free, equal, rational, and morally good.

The assumption of liberalism is that we needed a justification for throwing out the kings and idea of God, so we created a new notion: equality. In it we're all the same, or at least should be, so we'll act that way. In order to assume equality, we have to assume that we're all good, intelligent, and capable of making the right decision if only we're given the right opportunities, education, and information.

We've been working on this assumption since the pompously titled "The Enlightenment," which was essentially a scam. People wanted to get rid of kings and the assumption that there was a divine right, or even single right way, to do anything -- even if it was based on reality and the gods were a symbol for how reality worked, much like science is a symbolic representation of reality.

All of our bloviation about "equality" and "morality" is not the reason for our actions, but the justification for them. Kind of like when you accidentally buy an extra quart of ice cream, and then guiltily shrug it off with "well, we'll use it anyway eventually" even though you're planning to take it off to the TV room and eat the whole thing.

China, as the nation that has accelerated the fastest into modern times, coming about 500 years in the sixty-year postwar period, is starting to re-think its fundamental assumption that guides its civilization. Instead of picking ideologies that react to material or demographic changes, it is picking a positive ideal -- the opposite of a reaction, this is a goal toward which society shapes itself, instead of the other way around:

Communism has lost the capacity to inspire the Chinese, and there is growing recognition that its replacement needs to be grounded at least partly in China’s own traditions. As the dominant political tradition in China, Confucianism is the obvious alternative.

The party has yet to relabel itself the Chinese Confucian Party, but it has moved closer to an official embrace of Confucianism. The 2008 Olympics highlighted Confucian themes, quoting “The Analects” of Confucius at the opening ceremonies, and playing down any references to China’s experiment with communism. - Christian Science Monitor

This type of ideological mutation is going to be mated to another change which is both ideological and practical -- namely, the change from doing things electively "because they're right" to doing things practically "because they work." Liberal logic works backward: we act as we want to as individuals, then find a justification through a universal, abstract and absolute good like equality, altruism, justice, etc.

Conservative logic works differently. We study the world, find what is possible, and then work toward it. Instead of using backward logic where we justify ex post facto our actions, we set a goal and strive toward it, recognizing that a pure result -- an emotionally and personally satisfying one -- is unlikely. But we do what is right nonetheless.

With China's actions, we see a shift away from justifications like economics and demographics, and a shift toward positive preferences, which create a goal toward which we strive. In the USA, we can see the other half of this equation in the shift toward the pragmatic from the emotional. This is the precursor to a massive shift from liberal logic to conservative logic, as you can see in the strong words of Detroit's new Mayor:

In his strongest statements about shrinking the city since taking office, Bing told WJR-760 AM the city is using internal and external data to decide "winners and losers." The city plans to save some neighborhoods and encourage residents to move from others, he said.

"If we don't do it, you know this whole city is going to go down. I'm hopeful people will understand that," Bing said. "If we can incentivize some of those folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation." - Detroit News

In turn, this makes us re-consider evidence that happy people make exploratory decisions, and sad people make painful but repetitive decisions. This part of human nature means that 99% of the people active at any given time are repeating a failed idea, as if waiting for a tiny awakened minority to start exploring a better path. Not necessarily a new path; just a less obsolete one.

Reading that knowledge into history, we can see that our worldwide flirtation with liberalism has continued because we are miserable, and so keep repeating the sad logic of the last 500 years while not re-checking our assumptions. As multiple problems with our environment and social instability cannot be checked any longer, look for a sea change away from the liberal ideal toward a pragmatic, conservative one.

We know corruption to mean when elected leaders take bribes to use their power for the briber. We fear corruption because it means instead of doing their jobs, they are using their jobs and their power as a means to an end, which is personal profit.

And the collateral damage is staggering. A politician votes for a new law to protect powerful friends, and they get the equivalent a big power boost -- they're untouchable. A cop takes a bribe to let a drunk driver go home, and that drunk driver then plows through a bus of orphans. A teacher fakes a grade for a new laptop, putting a dumb student ahead of a smart one. The root of injustice is corruption, because we all basically agree on what justice is.

There's another form of corruption, and this occurs at a more basic level. If instead of using ourselves to perceive reality, we change reality to make ourselves look good, this is a kind of corruption. Denying reality and logic is a corrupt practice. When we fake reality to make ourselves appear good, we cause two problems: (a) we get ahead of someone more competent and (b) we start a practice of denying reality.

This virus of denying reality is what undoes societies. First, it is a gateway to corruption. If appearance matters more than reality, which it does if you can use appearance to get ahead of someone who insists on doing things the right way, people stop doing things the right way -- it's uncompetitive. Second, it makes a society of sick lies and an inability to fix them, because the minute you speak up with the truth, some liar who "appears" to be good will come in and claim you're a Stalin Hitler and have you killed.

For this reason, when societies start to decay, it's like a ball rolling downhill, gathering speed. The end comes without announcement but quicker than anyone thinks it will. Even so, it takes centuries or millennia for the first lie to bring about the last lie.

There are people around us who want to get ahead, and don't really care whether their means are honest or not. The active ones are criminals; the passive ones are parasites. The most passive form of parasites are people trying to get ahead of you on the basis of appearance. They invent a fantasy world that's equal parts advertising, politeness, moral judgment and wishful thinking. They tell you this fantasy world is real because you cannot "prove" reality but we can prove that most people would rather interact with this simpler, easier world.

They come up with helpful ideas like the following:

• Even though buying green appliances doesn't fix our environmental problem, the idea of limiting the breeding or home purchases of individuals is bad: definitely classist, probably elitist and sexist, possibly racist. So instead we'll focus on the ineffective activity of buying green products.
• That guy who is trying to rape and kill your sister -- well, you know man, it's most important to be moral. So shout stop, warn him twice, and then subdue him without hurting him. Never mind that you get killed in the process, and your sister anally sodomized and murdered -- you did the right thing. WAT
• Yep, it's true: the cars they sell are garbage. They're garbage because they can get away with it. For every one guy who both knows mechanics and has enough critical thinking skills to discern an oblivious design from a clueful one, there are over ten thousand people who can't tell the difference, don't care, and are buying the vehicle on layaway so to them it's free money anyway.
• Time to vote. We're trying to pick a candidate. On side A is a guy with lots of practical experience who promises no sudden change, but is going to be very workmanlike about slowly improving what exists. On side B is some guy who promises a revolution and that everything will be better right now. For every person who understands history and realizes guy B is most likely to be a shyster tyrant, there are ten thousand people who just want everything fixed now and hey this guy says he'll do it ok.

These dilemmas all arise from a corruption of reality in our own minds. There's multiple factors here: we're using reality as a means rather than an end, we're using ourselves as an end rather than a means, we're going inside our minds to describe the outside, and as a result, we're manipulating ourselves and others with tokens, symbols, gestures and illusions.

But all of them add up to ignoring reality as a whole in favor of "the human reality" that people like to believe in because it's easier and simpler than reality itself. We make our human reality from human feelings, from promises made to others, from personalities and morality, cash flow and social status. We like our reality because it allows us to stay in our own heads, and not test ourselves against the world, where we could end up losing!

This corruption of reality is a bigger threat than political corruption. Political corruption subverts government; corruption of reality subverts everything we do, from religion to science to how you and I think about how we're going to plan our day. Ignoring reality and receding into ourselves makes us blind the consequences of our actions, and fills our heads with insane babbling produced by the neurotic social mind.

Right now the FBI says that corruption threatens the fabric of American life. They mean political corruption, and they're correct. However, if they could get away with it, they would point out that the root of all corruption is something so basic we can't see it, any more than we can see our own contact lenses: a corruption of reality within our own minds.

We use the same words to mean different things, which can send us straight to hell. Shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, or change an exit sign to point into a wood-chipper, and you've used words as a weapon. In politics, the biggest words are these:

• Freedom
• Justice
• Liberty
• Equality

These are magic words because they suggest positive outcomes that the person hearing the word doesn't have to lift a finger to make happen. Here are their equivalents in product advertising:

• Free
• Guarantee
• No obligation
• New low price

Just buy this and it's all taken care of. Did you have a problem? Our product cures it -- guaranteed! New low price to make everyone happy. There's one for the whole family.

As our mainstream conservatives, or neocons, struggle to find a reason to exist, the Tea Party in USA and New Right in Europe is going to slam them hard. They will claim they offer more freedom, liberty and justice. Then the liberal parties will chime in. Whoah, total surprise! -- they're claiming the same thing.

In the midst of it all, the talking heads on the right are going to talk about how the essence of Conservatism is Freedom. Ron Paul will talk about Freedom. Then someone will pipe up that Marx, Engels, Mao, Clinton, etc. promised freedom too.

And this whole time, no one will have bothered to give a working definition of "freedom"!

One reason for this is that freedom is impossible to define without an object. Freedom from -- mosquitoes? exhaustion? bad smells? jobs? -- well, we don't know. If you're free you just know you are, I guess. Freedom requires an oppressor to be freed from, otherwise you weren't unfree in the first place. Who's trying to stop you from doing what? No one is going to open that can of worms.

Even more, freedom is a vernacular term for feeling like you could do anything. I feel free to do what the heck ever. But because all terms decay to the lowest common denominator through use, the most common meaning of the word freedom is this: no one telling me what to do. Of course, since those telling you what to do could be in some cases right, what we mean when we say "freedom" is "no oversight."

What's your definition of freedom?

Of course we can't say Communism and socialism are terrible ways of managing government--no true Communist or socialist society has ever existed, since they haven't been able to match utopian ideals. Really? This lousy argument continues to pop up with regular intervals, unsurprisingly on Facebook:

Socialism hasn't failed as there has never been an actual socialist society anywhere. The former Soviet Union, East Bloc countries, and contemporary Cuba, China, and North Korea, are not Socialist. These societies have incorporated certain elements of Socialism to some extent, as have Japan, and most advanced industrial nations, excepting the U.S. In Western Europe, this system (with some exceptions, and bearing in mind nothing is entirely ideal) worked quite well until fairly recently.

Oh yeah, so what do we call those societies? Fairy tale societies? Of course it doesn't matter that they call themselves socialists, reject the idea of private property, believe in complete government control, and worship Marxism. Since they haven't actually gotten rid of their government and united in brotherhood across the borders, they're not yet Communists. But we can all spot a capitalist or a Nazi when we see money at banks or swastikas on TV, right?

If we take this argument to its logical conclusion, we can't really say there are any ideological societies at all. America isn't a capitalist country, because the government owns some parts of the economy. Germany wasn't National Socialist during the war, because there were still a few Jews left in Berlin. Sweden isn't democratic because it's chosen media censorship over public polling a few times.

Dear readers, any time someone pulls this argument, fire back with the absurdity of applying it to other ideologies. At that point we can only look at history and conclude that societies that have called themselves socialist have all failed, and societies calling themselves capitalist have escaped mass poverty and generated wealth. White armchair academics are lucky, because they have the exclusive right of denying this, while enjoying freedoms and wealth billions of people in this world would be ready to kill for. Maybe one day, when someone points a gun to their head and takes their money away, they'll understand what makes the world go 'round.

People like to take stabs at random stuff on Facebook. Capitalism is one of them:

I propose, that as we're now in the early 21st century, we get beyond Marxism and Capitalism, who in many cases are remarkably similar in their view of man as just an economic animal motivated by greed or material concerns. Capitalism can be dynamic and has its positive attributes, but unfettered and taken out of a communal (national) context, it is a recipe for disaster, not to mention the fact that growth, development, and expansion of markets cannot go on for infinity. There are limits to growth, resources, and the abilities of societies to sustain these, socially and ecologically. What is the solution? Quite frankly, a synthesis of the better elements of capitalism and socialism.

I've covered this before, but let's rewind:

1. Capitalism in itself doesn't carry any intrinsic values. It's all about how you implement the system. The values of X nation will then guide that process. You can have a nation worshiping Hindu gods and still have a free market economy.

2. Where do you think concern for material standard is the highest? In a country where people are pretty well-off, or when people struggle just to get food for the day? Trust me, you'd be pretty concerned about money and material things if you lived in a shit hole.

3. Why would a synthesis of capitalism and socialism be superior to capitalism, when socialism has a terrible historical track record? It failed, everywhere, and is still failing in those European countries where it's blended with capitalism.

Let me repeat that: we are consuming ourselves to death, not because of capitalism, which is only a method of managing an economy, but because our values conflict with reality. If you hammer yourself on the finger every time you try to build a house, would you blame the hammer, or your own damn incompetence? It's so 20st Century to rail against capitalism, a superior economic system that triumphed all of its rivals, and came out as the most sensible way of maintaining competition and personal liberties.

You don't want the government to own your property, and you don't want it to own almost everything you produce. Be glad that you're living in a capitalist society, promote sensible values, and make the best of life. You'll be happier that way. Or, move to North Korea. Good luck!

It seems to me that most political groups in Europe are based on the principle of working against anyone and anything successful. If you have a lot of resentment and hate inside, here's a brief summary of historically successful groups you can direct your hate against:

- Whites
- Heterosexuals
- Middle class
- Christians
- Muslims
- Neoconservatives
- Americans
- Israelis
- Capitalists
- Rich people

Wait, did I just create a new movement for Communists and Neo-Nazis? Well, since they're so marginalized on their own, why not create a common party and simply declare war against successful people? It could become the most successful movement in Europe.

This always beats me about white nationalists: white people are expected to be in top positions of society because they've got high IQ. This is cheered and seen as one reason to why one should become a white nationalist. But when someone points out that Ashkenazi Jews also are leading within science, economics and politics because they've got a general IQ of 112-115, which is 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the European average, it's supposedly because Jews are evil and are trying to take over the world. Yeah, right.

Why don't we just face the scientific facts? Eastern European Jews are highly intelligent, as a group even smarter than East Asians, and have a culture of intellectual discipline and excellence. They're supposed to be on the top. White nationalists additionally suggest Jews are on top to destroy Europe. But if you take a second look, white Europeans are generally leftist-oriented, vote for liberal socialism, believe in some soft form of multiculturalism, and love American Hollywood culture. Europeans believe in self-destruction, because that's been the dominant paradigm since WWII. All of our current leaders praise this development. Since Western Jews, both American and European, are liberal-oriented, they're going along with that meme, just like the average whitey is.

European white nationalism is an expression of how deep we're in this shit now. We're so neurotic that we blame a small "Jewish" (Israel is almost as multicultural as Russia) island for our own problems, and call it nationalism. The truth is that Israel, apart from American support, is completely alone in its struggle for survival and couldn't be in worse condition. That's why it breaches UN agreements and vote in extremists in office. In Europe many Jews don't dare to go out in public, in case a leftist gang accuses them of being Nazis or a group of Arab Muslims harass them for...well, being Jewish.

Whitey, your problem is not a Jew, but self-destructive behavior and a lack of civil confidence. Clean your house or shut the hell up.

When America and Soviet Russia were battling during the Cold War with arms races and space exploration, the conflict centered around raw power ("realpolitik"). The nation with the biggest nukes, best astronauts and most influential political power was going to win out. America won the battle and stepped up as a Western super power, eventually establishing what some refer to as Pax Americana today (they're only partly right; America isn't outright controlling other nations like the Roman Empire did).

Now the cards have slightly changed. The most dominant powers on the planet today increasingly don't just strive to build up military, economic and political mojo. They dominate through the will to use that mojo and force itself anally on any weaker enemy coming its way. Think of North Korea. A tiny, impoverished remnant of Communism, not even able to feed its own people. Yet it defies the international community by firing off a series of missiles, allegedly for "testing purposes." If one of those missiles hit America, we don't know. All we know is that Kim Jong's got the balls to suggest he might.

The foreign threats to the Western civilization today are pretty lame in terms of raw power. Neither Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Russia nor other unstable nations who are constantly in conflict, either with themselves or perceived enemies, stand little to no chance against a military West. Yet a handful of people can orchestrate an attack against WTC in America and set off bombs in Europe. How come? Because on the inside, we are weak. Take a look at this chart based on recent 9/11 polls:

In America the number of people buying into 9/11 conspiracy theories comprise a mainstream movement:

In world No. 2, al-Qaeda is not responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The U.S. government is. The Pentagon was not hit by a commercial jet; it was hit by a cruise missile. United Flight 93 did not crash after its occupants rushed the cockpit; it was deliberately taken down by a U.S. Air Force fighter. The entire catastrophe was planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration.

The population of world No. 2 is larger than you might think. A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.

This is what matters in political and military struggle today. Critics of the Iraq War are right: it doesn't matter how many troops we send to destroy terrorism. We won't succeed. And the reason why is because we are not willing to wage the power in our possession. Instead we turn against ourselves, which is exactly what foreign powers want us to. If you believe this is just anarchistic backfire against the Bush Admin., you're wrong. Europe is the first to go: Islamic fundamentalism (diversity), unsustainable economies (Social Democracy), civil impotence (individualism) and anti-Americanism (ego neurosis).

The West is in decline because it attacks the principles and institutions that build sustainable civilizations: heterosexual family structures, civil responsibility, self-confident cultural traditions, thriving free economies, flexible military power and reverence for the environment. What we've got left is an empty shell, kept alive through increasingly larger but impotent governments, fit for nothing more than to send troops and then apologize for doing it. Our enemies can smell that hypocritical weakness and therefore cease their chance to infiltrate, mock and overthrow our public culture. This is what's left of it:

I wouldn't put it above the Bush admin. to, if anything, allow 9/11 to happen. Though who knows. The USS liberty was a false flag operation, MKULTRA really happened, and operation northwoods was on the table until JFK wouldn't go along with it. So who knows? Or cares if some of Paul's fans subscribe to such theories?

Kill off millions of people? Wouldn't shock me if that was talked about by "global elites." Hell, you talk about it, and you're a nobody in the scheme of things. Not as difficult to see the people with real power feel that way. Not that I believe it is true, but it is possible, especially since humanity enjoys playing the "pat yourself on the back" game.

Instead of believing in ourselves, our society and our culture, we choose dogmatic theories created to undermine our very existence. It's up to scientists (not nerdy teens living in mom's basement, producing 9/11 documentaries after school) to determine how 9/11 really happened. What is happening right now is the following: the public mistrusts both itself and society. In the mean time, we're being outbred, outbombed and outsourced by people who'd like to see us serve under their rule. The public's right--there's a conspiracy set out to destroy the West. And it's orchestrated by the crowd.

While the West is busy hating itself, Russia, China and other former super powers are building civilizational confidence to increase their competition on the world political map. It's no surprise that we at Corrupt have a few less admirable things to say about the West as it is today. But we're also hopeful and positive about society in general. A contradiction? Let me recap why the current Western status quo should be criticized, but still is both dominant and pleasant to live by:

Liberal democracy: Before the New World Order (pre-WWII) Europe was a collection of dictatorships, which later transformed into socialist Fascist States. During that time we saw a lot of tragedy, including economic collapse and genocide. Yeah, democracy sucks, but looking at history, it's no wonder our leaders wanted to abandon the old way of managing government.

Capitalism: Admittedly, capitalism has its problems. Yet we tried out socialism, in different extremes, and we saw that it completely failed wherever it was implemented. What happened when nations around the world, almost exclusively under Anglo-American leadership, began adopting a (mostly) free market principle? They quickly escaped mass poverty and low standard of living. Today not even hardcore-socialist countries like Russia and China really believe in a planned economy.

Multiculturalism: Even the Nazis get this one; we're living in a mass-communication society today. Regardless if you don't believe in bringing in lots of people into your country, your culture cannot avoid being influenced by foreign cultures, rendering cultural patterns dynamic and ever-changing. That diversity of ideas and lifestyles, one way or another, will exist also within pretty homogeneous cultures is a mark of the age.

NWO: Sure, it exists, a New World Order. Why so many people resent it is baffling, because never before has so many people in the world enjoyed such a high standard of living under extremely humane conditions. Maybe that's a problem in itself, but there's a reason to why the West won the Cold War, and why everyone else suspiciously is trying to emulate its development.

I see many libertarian-leaning Conservatives arguing in the following way:

1. Humans are selfish by nature.

2. For society to work, people need to contribute to each other.

3. Therefore we need to construct a society where the selfishness of individuals benefit one another.

So, selfishness basically leads to altruism, given that all people have an equal opportunity of making such contributions. There are a few problems with this line of arguments. #1 can be questioned, now that we better understand the evolutionary function behind altruism. So can #3; does self-investment always result in collective benefits?

The real virus in libertarianism is tragedy of the commons, or the idea that positive action taken by individuals alone may harvest negative consequences for the group as a whole. The environmental problems we face today are a good example of that. Sure, it's good to expand the economy and produce new goods and services, especially for individuals who want to secure a good standard of living. But the altruism only works within that human system, or market, if you will. What lies outside of it? Added together: water pollution, toxic air, extinct species, dying forests and urban sprawl. Chaos.

Libertarians always dodge the green issues, so do most Conservatives, because they only recognize the internal system: the economic market. They don't realize the long-term consequences of our lifestyle, which of course will impact the internal system as well. Therefore this line of thinking, I argue, is not long-term viable, because similar to the welfare State, it assumes we can endlessly consume resources without the system itself ever being effected by the consequences of that consumption. Margaret Thatcher famously said that "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money" - today we know this is just as true about our environment.

Like Frank and many others who are Right-oriented and just want to get on with our lives without bureaucrats making life more troublesome, I supported Ron Paul's cause for the American presidency. I still do, kind of. Ron Paul's campaign was simply amazing, but then it quickly regressed into pure conspiratorial extremism. Today only his dogmatic fans listen to what he's got to say. What happened?

Ron Paul's world view is a Conservative libertarian critique of all forms of organized authority. This led him to become a strong critic of globalism. Many of us signed up for it--who wants commerce to become a religion? The problem was that Ron Paul's grass roots gradually transformed into anti-globalists with a totally different agenda. Alex Jones became a frequent interviewer, the 9/11 Truth movement took interest in him, and Israel critics followed his campaign. If you're an alienated candidate like Ron Paul, you try to consolidate whatever agreements you have with other alienated groups. Bad idea, Ron.

Bad, because looking back in the mirror, what became of it? Conspiracy theories melted with extreme anarchism, and occasionally, anti-Semitism. His fans spammed YouTube with insane ideas about the Bush Administration planning 9/11 (since long debunked by scientists), evil capitalists plotting to take over the world and kill off millions of people (I wish), and perhaps most controversially, how all of this tied in with Israel and Jews. Maybe Half-Sigma did have a point about Ron Paul being an anti-Semite, after all.

After Ron Paul's campaign became more and more centered around these topics, it was clear that the conspiratorial element had become dominant. It alienated common people who just believed in the Constitution or wanted a thin government installed, and it drew lots of crazy young people whose only political message was that America and Israel are evil and "true" capitalism will solve all problems. Ron Paul became a symbol for marginalized extremism made mainstream. For this he probably served an important purpose, but it also was a major factor in the end of his career. Ron Paul is still one of the sanest political leaders in America right now, but due to his involvement with these groups, it's questionable whether he really would have been a better President than, say, McCain.

André Gide liked to scandalize enquirers by saying: "Je ne suis pas tapette, monsieur, je suis pédéraste!" ("I am not a fairy, Sir, I am a pederast!") In a similar spirit I am sometimes tempted to assert: "I'm not really a conservative — more of a reactionary." It's not true, though. I wonder if it really can be. It is all very well to speak of standing athwart history crying "Stop!" but history will not stop, and there are some respects in which even the most sincerely conservative of us would not wish it to.

John Derbyshire asks a good question - how can one claim to be a reactionary in today's world? There are good reasons why reaction is tempiting and we might want the world to be like it used to, at least in some ways. One recent GNXP post describes how many of our instincts are poorly adapted to living in a free economy and electing our rulers - an idea I've mentioned before. That doesn't necessarily mean we should live in a world like the one we are adapted to, though - a few days earlier another post on GNXP reminded us of how that world really sucked in a lot of ways compared to what we have today. That makes for some chaos and confusion, but I'd rather deal with that and (to pick an easy example) be able to eat five kilos of meat a week, you know? It sure as hell is worth it.

I do like to call myself a reactionary, though. I like to complain about the American Revolution and the October Revolution in the same breath. That doesn't mean I want to live in the world before the American Revolution, but I think a world in which the rebels lost that one would be a better world. I might not be a "true" reactionary, then, only a political one. As Mencius Moldbug once wrote, "I feel no hesitation in informing you with absolute confidence that the common concept of progress, which perhaps you are operating under, is a lie and a delusion and a snare. At least inasmuch as that term applies to the problem of human government, and not physics, oil painting, or backgammon. There is no reason to think the political designs of 2007 are any better than those of 1907, 1807, or 7."

I like progress. I like the modern world. I just don't like progress in politics, that's all. I don't think there's any contradiction there. After all, many of the most progressive progressives are extremely reactionary when it comes to everything except politics.

One of the less important side effects of the tragic earthquake in Haiti is that the word "voodoo" is popping up in the press more than usual. Or is it? Nowadays the Western press seems to spell it "voudou" instead. Steve Sailer suspects that it's intended to keep us masses ignorant of inconvenient facts. I disagree, though. When it comes to guessing the motivations of progressives, I would like to add something to Napoleon's famous maxim - never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by changing fashions.

The reason why journalists and other elite types are starting to use the word "voudou" is to let us know that they read enough newspapers and hang out with enough of the right people to know what the latest trendy spellings are, and also to let us know that they care about other cultures enough to use native spellings instead of Anglicized ones. They used to accomplish this by referring to Peking as "Beijing", but now that everybody does that (except for Chinese restaurants) it no longer sets you apart from the herd, so they need to find some new words to do the job. It's no different than the shifts in fashionable teenage slang, really, and is the exact same reason why they suddenly started referring to health care as "healthcare".

Progressivism really makes much more sense as a method of signaling than as an ideology, doesn't it?

As a side effect of the global warming soap opera, I have learned that the United Kingdom has a National Coordinator for Domestic Extremism. I would have figured that the British government would be against extremism, but I guess they're not only for it, they've even got a guy coordinating the stuff!

If I lived there I'd be worried.

In two seemingly unrelated posts, Sofia wonders if environmental orthodoxy seems to be self-contradictory, while Alex observes that leftist ideology is good for your self-esteem. I think the former flows directly from the latter.

Most ideologies are a way of describing how the world works and how it should be run. They provide their followers the opportunity to gain power and prominence when they succeed in ruling some part of the world. If your faction loses the civil war or the election, though, you pretty much get nothing out of being a member. Progressivism is unique in that its positions are not a worldview but a set of signals. By taking progressive positions on various issues, you let others and yourself know that you're smart, compassionate, classy and so on. Just about any progressive position is much easier to explain in terms of signaling than in terms of philosophy or politics. For example, the support for mass immigration makes you seem compassionate towards peasants from poorer countries and smart and skilled enough that they won't compete for your job. Sure, your own underclass will pay for your compassion, but that's OK - you can then signal compassion for them by supporting education. That might seem contradictory or ineffective, and that might be true if we thought of this as policy goals. When understood as signaling, though, these positions are coherent and effective.

That's why progressivism is so popular and victorious - it helps its followers gain status even when it doesn't achieve crap or makes the world a worse place. Of course it's not quite that simple. Sooner or later even the peasants figure out that caring about Brazilian rainforests is nice - anyone under the age of 30 probably learned about that in school, plus we have big TVs with all those nature channels. Caring about it does you little good when everyone else cares, too, so status-seeking progressives must constantly find new issues to support. Again, this is where mass immigration is the perfect progressive issue - because your own peasants suffer most of the negative consequences, it'll take them a longer time to get around to supporting it compared to some foreign rainforests that won't affect their lives much.

The upside of this constant forward movement is that unlike status-signaling fashion in clothes and cars, progressivism is not a cycle. That's good - otherwise progressives would impose prohibition on us every 20 years...

That's basically why progressivism succeeds, why it must keep progressing, and why it's ultimately not self-contradictory. But isn't this post full of hypocrisy? I mean, given the understanding that progressive views are good for one's status, why am I so reactionary? It's certainly not integrity, honesty or principle.

As someone who considers things philosophically, I get annoyed when people consider legitimate, stand-alone issues as necessarily political. Environmentalism has been the sexiest, new issue on the agenda to be co-opted by the left, placing anyone who does not identify with partisan politics as opposed to environmentalism.

Ridiculous for a host of reasons, but mostly how leftist partisan politics concerning environmentalism is rife with contradiction. For instance, another en-vogue issue is third world development, but I ask to what degree? Environmental and economic sustainability is not possible if everyone lived as decadently as the Western world, but raising this glaring issue is mostly met with emotivist, empathetic responses.

I won't claim to be an authority on the matter, but I wonder why third world development is an inherently positive thing. For example, a mutually beneficial exchange would occur if Western influences were withdrawn from the African continent. A continent ridden with tribalism, and a concomitant culture that does not value rationality, does not stand to gain anything from adhering to a capitalist structure. Nor do we in the developed world, stand to gain anything from industrializing and pumping empty resources someplace that does not even possess an infrastructure of sorts. Logically, environmentalism cannot exist as a priority if simultaneously third world development also exists as a priority.

We know how financial bubbles work, and I've been thinking... can there be such a thing as a prestige bubble? Here is the scenario: some group of people gains status beyond what they are actually worth, expectations grow unrealistic, more and more social and political capital is invested in these status-boosting games, and then the whole thing collapses as everyone laughs at the naked emperors. It's basically a bubble in investments denominated in the fuzzy currency of social status. I could argue that investment bankers have gone through such a bubble in recent years.

I know some people have suggested that there is a financial bubble growing right now in the field of education. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article which pretty much says that the educational sector with the most influence on social policy - graduate school in the humanities - is not just a bubble but an outright pyramid scheme. I suspect that there might be an even more important prestige bubble happening to the prestige of an Ivy League degree. Here are a few quotes from posts Arnold Kling has made this week:

I think that people can legitimately complain that the educated class that dominated Wall Street and Washington first made the mortgage mess and then railroaded through a bailout in which a transfer of wealth from main street to Wall Street was marketed as a benefit to main street. The educated class is losing the respect of the rest of America for reasons that are well deserved.

Harvard types believe that they are smarter than markets. And, at this moment in history, the Harvard narrative is that the financial crisis was caused because of blind faith in markets regulating themselves. According to this narrative, the election was a mandate to Harvard to deal with huge market failures in finance, health care, aggregate demand (hence the stimulus), and climate/energy. Based on this narrative, Harvard is absolutely committed to expert control over the economy

That certainly sounds like the status of "Harvard types" - people educated at the best American universities - is inflated, and being furiously inflated further. These are the people who, in practice, rule the world. What if the bubble pops and their status quickly sinks to the level of, say, computer programmers before bottoming out? I'd say "sinks to the level of fry cooks", but that would just be wishful thinking on my part...

Let's just face it: most people identify with a certain ideology because it makes them feel good about themselves. Leftists are on a high when they defend the rights of immigrants and poor people, liberals secretly stroke themselves while talking about equality...what about us?

The problem for Conservatives have always been that we've been accused of being selfish. How can we feel good about ourselves at all? Most polls indicate we're simply pleased with the way things are. Here's an additional suggestion: because we care about our families and ancestors.

Doing what's right and living your life the traditional way means you please your parents and the people who came before you and believed in the same values. Liberals and leftists might do good for the no-gooders, but we Conservatives do good for the people that raised us and the traditions that taught us important lessons about life. I think that's a good reason to feel good about what you believe in.

A lot has been written about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the Underwear Bomber. People tend to write a lot about you when you try to blow up an airliner these days. One thing I haven't read, though, is liberatarians saying how happy they are. Not with the bombing attempt, of course, but with the way it failed. I mean, sure, centrally planned government security failed to stop it, but the unplanned free market provided a solution which seems to have cost a lot less and work a lot better than the government's attempts.

Isn't this powerful evidence that individuals free to make their own decisions unrestrained by central planning do everything better than government?