Chapter 6: My Own Politics

I’ve put a lot of time into explaining what’s wrong with modern politics, so your next question might be-“Well, what do you consider yourself?” Of course, it is a lot easier to explain what’s wrong with something, then it is to say what’s the right thing to do-“The Man in the Arena” and all that.

My primary political tenet, as alluded to several times in the previous pages, is basically “leave people alone”. I am against imperialism (there’s a very practical reason to be against imperialism, it leads to illegal immigration, historical revisionism, and a national guilt complex down the line. “Imperial backwash”, as John Updike put it),  government intrusion into most things (emphasis on MOST), the War on Drugs, and the like. I support government transparency, a free press, free speech, the right to bear arms, and pedagogy that doesn’t seek to indoctrinate. While I am also against private organizations wielding too much power (Especially when they ally with the government), I realize that it’s rather intrusive to ban them from doing their behavior, beyond, say, forbidding lobbying of the government. To make it very simple, I agree with Lao Tzu-the best government is the one that you barely even notice.

“So you’re a libertarian then?” Not exactly. I’d say that a lot of what I described above is similar to their tenets, but I don’t consider myself one of them, for three main reasons: A)They put too much faith in the hands of private entities  to “do good because of the profit margin” (ignoring that it’s often cheaper to “polish a turd” then to make a good product), B) They are too fixated upon economics. They see every nation on Earth as nothing but a big “economic zone”, culture, heritage, and population be damned. They’re some of the biggest proponents for open borders. Considering that my own nation has gone from an actual nation with a shared culture and heritage (perhaps not a “high culture”, but it was its own unique entity) into a meaningless economic territory of thousands of tribes at each other’s throats, why would I wish that upon the world?

And C) I feel the government serves a purpose. When I say that “government should be barely detectable”, that doesn’t mean “non-existent”. As I repeatedly alluded to in the previous sections, I feel a degree of socialism can make a nation better (but too much causes problems, and I emphasize economic socialism. The cultural socialism we’re dealing with currently I obviously don’t have any tolerance for.) I support unions, public healthcare and public schools, and taxpayer-funded police and fire departments (of course I favor codes of law to be kept simple and alternate methods of punishment for non-violent crimes, and by extension the police being less militarized). I support a degree of regulation upon businesses (just enough to avoid eating dead circus animals, basically), while also recognizing that something has to be done to avoid outsourcing (having regulated borders might help that).

Basically I feel that the government should serve the majority’s interests first and foremost (shocking idea, no?), as long as it doesn’t infringe upon the rights of other citizens (and the same goes in reverse for the “oppressed minorities”) which means that opinion polls should have some clout (mainly because I love using the term “plebiscite”. But in seriousness, perhaps alternate means of voting might help, and there are several, look them up at your leisure). Public healthcare is a good thing. National parks are a good thing. The police, when properly restricted and regulated, are a good thing. Making sure that our food and water isn’t going to kill us is a good thing. But there’s plenty of things the government does that are not, in fact, good things. Let’s get rid of them.

However, as I mentioned previously, I feel those socialist measures truly do work best with an insular population. It would also help if there were measures to prevent abuse of these systems (I admit I don’t know what they would be off hand, but then again I’m not a government think-tank). One thing is for sure, the influx of illegal immigrants to first world countries is not helping the abuse of said systems. Tangentially related: stop trying to “promote democracy” around the world, some people don’t want it, and that’s fine. God forbid we have diversity of political systems. A government’s utmost priority should be to its people, and maybe if there’s some money left over donate to the IMF or something.

And that leads me to a very big influence on this paper, one that I have repeatedly alluded to and cited: the Alternate Right (henceforth referred to as Alt-Right). This is a loosely connected group of writers and philosophers that mostly reside on the Internet that have “taken the red pill”, in their parlance (can we not make allusions to something a bit more dignified?), largely sharing one thing in common-they feel that global society is authoritarian leftist, and the current leftist zeitgeist is making everybody miserable (there also seems to be a rough consensus of a negative view of Judeo-Christian religions, and the United States, from my experience anyway). I was first exposed to them via the Art of Manliness, which is only barely considered part of them (though it seems to be generally respected amongst the farther right) due to it obviously promoting traditional patriarchy and gender roles. The Alt-Right has many subsets-there are Human Biological Diversity (HBD) researchers, “Game” shills (you’ve probably heard of them more than the others, these guys have a predominant focus on sexual relations), Masculists, Traditionalists, Tribalists, neo-Pagans and the self-proclaimed neo-reactionaries, who feel that society began its leftward (and downward) slide after the American Revolution and hasn’t stopped since.  There’s more (including some of that are talentless hacks, plagiarists, deluded fantasists, and frauds, an unfortunate but inevitable phenomenon amongst any school of writers) but those I previously mentioned are mainly the ones I’m familiar with. Like any political movement, there are factions within, and I personally consider the views of some to be more sensible than others. With that being said, even on the websites I largely disagree with, I can usually find at least one good thing to bookmark, which is more than I can say for Gawker or other hysterical leftist clickbait sites.

There’s a pretty impressive amount of intellectual heft here-for an example, take Return of Kings. I don’t agree with every single article on the site, but I must admit I have great respect for a man with a BS in microbiology that got rejected by thousands of women over a decade in an effort to understand sexual dynamics. That’s what a scientist does, and I’ll give kudos to this not-so-humble cad. I’ll take the opinions of a front line soldier in the Battle of the Sexes (one that truly “walks the walk”) over somebody else

Rest assured, the Alt-Right (or at least the sections of it that I read) has no tolerance for neo-Nazis or other imbeciles of that nature. More than anything else, these people seem to want to be left to promote their theories without hysterical censorship, and for society to be a lot more sensible-there’s not much talk of white supremacy at all. While there are extremist aspects of the field, I feel that the most intelligent alt-right writers are the only people speaking sensibly about politics and society in 2015. I’d recommend that anybody who wants to truly understand the modern world (or even just to develop a thicker ideological skin) should “gaze into the abyss”.

This writing has been greatly influenced by the alt-Right, but as I’ve stated previously, there are aspects I don’t agree with, most importantly I feel that democracy in general, and the USA in particular, are not inherently flawed (The latter again being something they share with the farthest left people). Also, I am not a strict biological determinist, as some of the HBD people are. But on the whole, I agree with their political dogmas more than any other political group today.

The Alt-Right tenet I agree with the most is that the biggest problem the post-modern world faces is that there’s not enough exposure to reality. People are too wrapped up in their “echo chambers”. If people had actual life experiences and conflicts, I feel a lot of these shibboleths would cease to exist-you’d find out pretty fast that women are not as strong as men on average, you’d find out that nobody cares about whether you’re gay, transsexual, or if your real form is of a cartoon fox, just as long as you can shut up and get your work done (and chances are if you’re constantly squawking about your sexual hang-ups, you’re not going to work well with others). And VERY quickly, they’d find out that in times of crisis, you’re going to stick with the tribe (rather, it’s human nature to form groups, and race is more often than not the most obvious differentiating feature. In the absence of it, other groups will form). To clarify, while I support separating things into “us and them”, I am not advocating total insularity. You should live peacefully with “them”, and you should try to understand “them”, but also understand the differences between you and them. A degree of insularity and shared experience is how a real, living culture forms, and lord knows we have none of that these days. Or at the very least, if you must apply diversity and multiculturalism, do it fairly and evenly, don’t generate tribalism in some groups and guilt and cultural cringe in others.

They say in a free exchange of ideas, the smart ones will always win out. I think not, it’s just the loudest ones (which are often times the stupidest ones), that win. Exposure to the cold, unfeeling hand of Nature, Reality, and Logic is what weeds out the stupid ideas.

(Of course, I am aware of the possibility that this cultural collapse was deliberately engineered rather than an accident, but that is a topic for another writing).

In this paper I have referred to “The Gods of the Copybook Heading”. This is a poem by Kipling, the basic premise of it is that history is cyclical, and that humanity has repeatedly had to choose between ugly, brutal truth (the eponymous Gods), and beautiful, sweet lies (the “Gods of the Market Place”), and humanity has always chosen the Gods of the Market Place. But eventually, society decays and falls into decadence and anarchy, and the Gods of the Copybook Heading come back and we learn from them to get back on our feet, before choosing the Market Place…again. I am a firm supporter of the Gods of the Copybook Heading.

And thus, how I’d describe my political leanings: 40% classical liberalism, 30% traditional socialism/economic protectionism, and 30% Alt-Right/harsh reality and common sense. I lack a formal term for this political philosophy at the moment.

I am not seeking to proselytize, or convert people to my side. All I wanted to do is cite the examples that made oneman, born and raised a far-leftist, in a far-left culture, abandon these beautiful, but impossible ideals and embraced what I feel is an uglier, but more truthful, outlook on life.

Little use is there to pray to Crom…