Macaulay is revising his great history of England. You wait, breathless, as he reacts to the last years. Finally the screen flashes to life and produces a single sentence:. The trouble is that the people who run England now, while they are progressive to a T and consider themselves very much the heirs of the British liberal tradition, have different objective standards of success than Macaulay.
With its customary glacial irresistibility, it has been driving the center of British politics steadily to the left for the last years.
by Mencius Moldbug
Meanwhile, poor Macaulay has been stuck in his own cranium, just rotting. He has had no chance to adapt. So he still has the same opinions he held in , which in the world of put him somewhere to the right of John Tyndall. I suppose this is a matter of opinion. Perhaps Gordon Brown really is that convincing. However, we also need to consider the possibility that Macaulay would be convinced in the opposite direction.
Given the fact that the state of England today would horrify him, he might well be open to moving further out on the fire escape—a reaction not dissimilar to the response that 18th-century Whigs, such as Burke yes, Burke was a Whig had to the Reign of Terror. The absolute shibboleth of the 18th-century and 19th-century British liberal movement, for example, was the proposition that a fundamentally aristocratic government could resist democratic pressures by conceding a mixed constitution. Contemporary commenters on the Reform Acts of and are constantly explaining that Tory or Adullamite right-wing resistance to these measures was not only futile, but actually dangerous—it could spark an actual, French-style revolution.
And how exactly did that one work out? As La Wik puts it:. As originally conceived, a constitutional monarch was quite a powerful figure, head of the executive branch even though his or her power was limited by the constitution and the elected parliament… An evolution in political thinking would, however, eventually spawn such phenomena as universal suffrage and political parties. By the mid 20th century, the political culture in Europe had shifted to the point where most constitutional monarchs had been reduced to the status of figureheads, with no effective power at all.
Instead, it was the democratically elected parliaments, and their leader, the prime minister who had become those who exercised power. And you were also dead wrong—for about two centuries. Nor is restricted suffrage. There is simply no compromise with democracy—good or bad. The lesson of history is quite clear.
Whether you love the W-force or hate it, surrendering to it is not an effective way to resist it. There is no stable point along the left—right axis at which the W-force, having exacted all the concessions to which justice entitles it, simply disappears. It always wants more. Despite the great revolution the despots of Europe had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, except their one saving grace of benevolence. The paternal system of government has not succeeded where strong local institutions or feelings exist, and for this reason Austria has never conciliated or subdued Hungary.
But the Holy Alliance proposed a sort of patriarchal system of government for all Europe, which could not really have applied to those nations where free constitutions or strong patriotic feeling still remained. Metternich did not understand the changes created by the French Revolution in the ideas and hearts of men. He thought he could tear a page from the Book of History, and destroy both the memory and the hope of liberty.
He believed that re-action could be permanent, that new ideals and opinions could be crushed, and the world again beguiled into the dreary inaction which characterized the home politics of all nations before Friends, the world today is not such an awful place. Think of all the beautiful people who would have lived, all the beautiful cities that would not have been bombed, all the hideous ones that would not have been built.
The French Revolution was a garden-party compared to the Russian. Temperley is even wrong about the small stuff. Snoring soundly in the arms of Brussels. And before that, Moscow. Which had far less trouble with Nagy than Franz Josef had with Kossuth. No constitutions conceded there! This brings us to the failed project of conservatism, which puts its money in a slightly different place—the proposition that all the concessions made to the W-force in the past are good and necessary, but any further concessions are bad and unnecessary.
The Confederate theologian R. Dabney dispensed with this quite eloquently:. This is a party which never conserves anything.
Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.
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This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug
Dabney would have regarded the era of Ingrid Newkirk with great amusement. However, note how thoroughly hoist on his own petard he is. The proposition that suffrage is a bad idea, period, may not be one you regard as defensible—but it is surely more defensible than the proposition that all men should be able to vote, but not all women. Or white men and not black men, another proposition of which the Rev. Note that this bastion also proved impractical to defend.
Nor do we understand why reaction is the polar opposite of progressivism. Nor do we have any theory which explains in which cases the latter is good, and in which cases it is bad. But Dabney and Metternich suggest a very different way of dealing with it. Perhaps if you actually oppose the W-force, the most effective way to oppose it is simply to… oppose it. After all, as a progressive, you oppose racism. Is the most effective way to oppose racism to give it a little air, to let it blow off steam—to be just a little bit racist, but not too much?
It strikes me that the most effective way to oppose racism is simply to not tolerate it at all. As a progressive, you support democracy. Ripping off chunks of it and throwing them to the wolves only seems to encourage the critters. Why was this not obvious to the kings and princes of old Europe? Perhaps it was obvious. The trouble was that absolute monarchy was always an ideal, never a reality.
Every sovereign in history has been a creature of politics—not democratic politics, perhaps, but politics still.
At the very least, a king who loses the support of the army is finished. The inverted-pendulum model suggests that, for a stable and coherent nondemocratic state, eliminating politics requires very little repressive energy. Singapore, Dubai and China, for example, all have their secret police—as did the 19th-century Hapsburgs. Each of these governments is very different from the others, but they are all terrified of the W-force. Yet they manage to restrain it, without either falling prey to democracy or opening death camps. Residents of these countries can think whatever they like. They can even say whatever they like.
It is only when they actually organize that they get in trouble. However, when we compare this level of infringement of personal freedom to the experience of daily life under Stalin or Hitler, we are comparing peanuts to pumpkins. Why does China not tolerate peaceful antigovernment politics?
Because China is not a perfectly stable state, and it knows that quite well. Within the Chinese Communist Party, there is politics galore. Almost everyone in any position of responsibility in the PRC today was personally scarred by the Cultural Revolution, in which China felt all the vices of democracy and none of its virtues. Only by outlawing politics can the Party hold itself together.
Note that in the Chinese government broke the cardinal rule of Whig government: No—twenty years of peace, unparalleled prosperity, and personal if not political freedom. As philosophers say, one white raven refutes the assertion that all ravens are black. The inverted-pendulum model of the W-force gives us a great way to understand Hitler. Hitler was a reactionary. I am a reactionary. Perhaps waxing and curling the tips is just the only way. Nazism, and fascism in general, was a reactionary movement. It was also the product of a very unusual set of circumstances in history. So the pendulum was a long, long way from top dead center.
But the system still had a crude mechanism by which it could be brutally yanked back: Hitler and Mussolini came to power partly by good old democratic politics, and partly by using their thugs to intimidate their political opponents. This would not have been possible without a security system which tolerated this sort of behavior. When the SA had street fights with the Communists, the SA men tended to get off and the Communists get long jail sentences. Note how much effort post governments invest in making sure this particular horse does not escape from this particular barn.
There is zero official tolerance for right-wing political violence in any Western country today. The Western judicial systems today cannot be described as reactionary in any way, shape or form. Thus, if you are a progressive, you can cross fascism—at least, good old s-style fascism—off your list of worries.
And if you are a reactionary, you can cross it off your list of tricks to try. Considering the results of the s, I have to regard this as a good thing. Progressives do not, in general, believe in chaos. It is always the construction of some new order, which is at least intended as an improvement on the present one. However, in order to construct this new order, two things need to happen.
In the progressive mind, these indispensable tasks are not objectives. They may even be conceived as unpleasant, if necessary, duties. One fascinating fact about the presidential campaign of is that both Democratic candidates are, or at least at one point were, disciples of Saul Alinsky. Clinton actually studied and corresponded with Alinsky. The first and most fundamental lesson Obama learned was to reassess his understanding of power. Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others.
Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in. On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. I suspect the site has probably been updated. Here is my theory about progressivism: It brings them together around the oldest human pleasure other than sex: It lets them rationalize this ruthless, carnivorous activity as a philanthropic cause.
But the real attraction is the thrill of power and victory—sometimes with a little money thrown in. He felt dead in it. It was like feeding a dog on turnips. What made Alinsky so effective was that he dispensed with the romantic euphemisms. He just described the thing as what it is. You have to admire him for that, I feel.
A Lafayette, a Herzen, or almost any 19th-century republican outside the Marxist department, would have been absolutely appalled by Alinsky. But the fact is that they were basically in the same business. So the progressive is, indeed, the polar opposite of the reactionary. Just as order and stability are essential to reaction, disorder and destruction are essential to progressivism. The progressive never sees it this way. His goal is never to produce disorder and destruction. Unless he is Alinsky himself, he is very unlikely to think directly in terms of seizing power and smashing his enemies.
Usually there is some end which is unequivocally desirable—often even from the reactionary perspective. But if you could somehow design a progressive movement that could achieve its goal without seizing power or smashing its enemies, it would have little energy and find few supporters. What makes these movements so popular is the opportunity for action and the prospect of victory. To defeat them, ensure that they have no chance of success.
No one loves a loser. This theory also explains why progressive movements can produce results which are good. And yet, the destruction of homophobia is an act of violent cultural hegemony. Americans and Europeans have considered homosexuality sick, evil and wrong since Jesus was a little boy. In this case, you are using your superpowers for good.
As for the W-force, while the inverted pendulum is a good physical analogy, there is another: Progressivism is obviously entropic. Obviously, its enemy is order. Progressives instinctively despise formality, authority, and hierarchy. Reactionary political theorists such as Hobbes liked to conceive the state in terms of an ordered system, a sort of clockwork.
Progressivism is sand in the gears of the clock. More subtly, however, the real entropic effect is in the progressive method of capturing power not by seizing the entire state, but by biting off little chunks of it wherever it sticks out. And complexity, of course, is the same thing as entropy. A Horizon Made of Canvas Chapter 2: More Historical Anomalies Chapter 3: The Jacobite History of the World Chapter 4: The Lost Theory of Government Chapter 7: How to Uninstall a Cathedral Chapter X: What Is to Be Done?
Rules for Reactionaries Gentle Introduction Chapter 1: The Red Pill Chapter 2: The American Rebellion Chapter 3: Plan Moldbug Chapter 5: The Modern Structure Chapter 6: Brother Jonathan Chapter 7: The War of Secession Chapter 8: Olde Towne Easte Chapter 9: The Procedure and the Reaction Chapter The Mandate of Heaven Chapter A Really Ugly Bug Chapter 2: Manitou and the Zeitgeist Chapter 4: A Mystery Cult of Power Chapter 5: The Logic of Law and Power Chapter 7: From Mises to Carlyle Chapter 2: Why Carlyle Matters Chapter 3: Carlyle in the 20th Century Patchwork Chapter 1: A Positive Vision Chapter 2: On the other hand, however… History is big.
Feel free to come up with your own answer. Perhaps the best and most succinct statement of the reactionary philosophy of government—especially considering the context—was this one: Thus, good is outnumbered and evil is reinforced, producing the Yeats effect: Anyone who has not seen this in practice has no experience of human affairs. Finally the screen flashes to life and produces a single sentence: And then it all went to shit. As La Wik puts it: Dabney dispensed with this quite eloquently: An archival copy of the picture in question is available at www.
Indeed, there are other costs associated with destroying homophobia, such as a lowering of the relative status of heterosexual relationships and a signalling hazard that undermines traditional male affection and group cohesion. Personally I still tend to believe that man is born to love, however, over time people have been taught to hate. Up to this moment my belief has never changed that love is the core of humanity, while hatred is an acquired value. In some cases, though, hatred might be justified; the fear instinct, for instance, may drive one to hate the source of that fear.
You may like a lion when it is inside the cage. However, once that cage is open the lion becomes a threat to your life. But for a human being to hate another human being or even an animal for no reason other than what has been said in some old books is, from my point of view, a misfortune. Some hatred is based on unfounded narrations which could be no more than witchcraft. However, the world still lives with the results of that terrifying growing hatred; Entire peoples hate each other without even examining the real reasons behind that hatred.
In our Arab region where nations of many origins co-exist, we tend to get rid of what we hate forever, be it human being or animal which could cause civilization disruption and psychological shock. I found out that the raven could be used to symbolize this idea. Not only is this bird so peaceful but also friend to peasants and environment.
Animal Friend Love To Hate
It has good social behaviors and embraces collaboration and team spirit. Furthermore, it was mentioned in monotheist books as the bird which taught human beings how to bury their dead the story of Abel and Cain. Despite all this, the raven is hated more than any other bird by Arabs and Muslims and some peoples of the East. It is, for many, the source of evil omen. The ravens voice is considered one of the roughest sounds on earth.