Brett Stevens’s Web site is Amerika.org.
Topics include:
How the rise of liberalism made an enemy out of nationalism & traditionalism
How diversity itself rather than its ingredients is the problem with multiculturalism
The correlations between the fall of our modern civilization with the fall of empires throughout history
How liberalism always targets the “favored” in order to promote its agenda-equality though distribution of wealth and crippling of ability
How liberalism, egalitarianism, and anti-elitism share a common root in human psychology
How the Left hijacked environmentalism and the need for deep ecology
Futurist traditionalism-how conservatism is about learning from the past and nature and why modern conservatives fail to do so
How America is a type of civilization rather than a place
How immigration is class warfare that causes racism
US foreign policy
The sociosexual marketplace
1. How has the rise of liberalism made an enemy out of Nationalism and Tradition?
In 1789, with the Revolution in France, the Western world split in two. There were those who favored the old way, which was based on the idea of a pervasive order of nature external to the human individual. And then there was the new group, who favored only the desires, feelings and judgments of human individuals.
We might call that older group realists, objectivists, conservatives, consequentialists or even simply “scientists.” We might call the new group individualists, egomaniacs, narcissists or reality-deniers, but the fact remains that the new group are immensely more popular because they pander to the lowest common denominator impulses in all of us. We each wish, when we feel weak or sad, that our desires, feelings and judgments were more important than the complex and often baffling world around us.
Liberalism panders to this idea through its insistence on “equality,” or the notion that whatever each person believes is more important than reality, including the limits of that person in any given situation. While the liberal idea is never stated in such plain terms, nor do liberals reveal how it develops quickly into its pure and extreme form, all liberal movements — communism, Democrats, progressivism, anarchism, leftism and socialism — are based in this singular idea of equality. As mentioned above, however, equality is shorthand for the human individual and its desires being more important than reality itself.
Liberals gain their power from their popular, and so they specialize in removing any restrictions on the individual. As a result, they oppose any form of shared community values. This includes both nationalism, or the idea that a nation is defined by the common heritage, customs, language, culture and values of its citizens, and Tradition, or the idea that a transcendental order exists in nature and that humans find joy by understanding it instead of asserting our own desires, feelings and judgments against it.
In fact, since the French Revolution in 1789, liberalism has made “internationalism” or erasing of national borders, social classes and ethnic identities its primary goal. It gains its power from popularity, as mentioned above, so it specializes in turning the individual _against_ any form of culture. It goal is the creation of a lynch mob that votes against any form of power, wealth or intelligence higher than its own lowest common denominator. Seen in this light, liberalism is the perfect system of control because it is invisible to most people and yet controls all aspects of their lives. The only forces that oppose it are traditionalism, conservatism and nationalism, and those tend to be versions of the same idea.
2. How will these things save us from modernity?
Modernity is a type of civilization. It occurs only after liberalism has taken control. Because it tends to come later in the life-cycle of a civilization, it usually brings with it increases in wealth, technology and military power. However, what defines modernity is not the number of the year, but the way the civilization in which it arises is organized.
One way to view modernity is as a mid-life crisis. Civilization has grown up strong and youthful, conquered all the obstacles and climbed every mountain, and now it is less driven. It wants to go to bed earlier and wear comfortable but ludicrous slippers. Modernity is like a mid-life crisis: civilization has lost direction, and starts trying to please everyone at once. It “acts young” but can’t even enjoy its old pleasures, so instead it tries to be popular by telling people what they want to hear.
Like most truly powerful crises, modernity does not announce itself this way. It portrays itself as youthful, altruistic, enlightened and compassionate. In reality, it is selfish and manipulative. 222 years after the French Revolution, our civilization is in ruins. We produce none of the quality art and culture of the past. Our “thinkers” are incapable of having competent or realistic thoughts. Our cities are ugly and we spend most of our lives waiting around for stupidity to end. Most of us hate our jobs and it’s only some employers that could apply different ways to improve employee morale within their roles, mosy of us hate our work commutes, and the constant blaring of commercial messages and the control that commerce has over every aspect of our society. Pulling back from our daily acceptance of this world, we can see that we live in hell.
Instead of good times, liberalism means social decay and the collapse of our civilization. It has brought us endless wars for Democracy and constant internal friction as our pluralist society tries to reconcile the fact that its citizens have no common ground with its dogma that demands that our common ground be a lack of common ground. It does all of this to smash any vestige of the old order, which is the startling notion that there is a world outside of the individual and that the rules of that world define what we should do.
Nationalism and Tradition will save us from modernity by opposing the one part of modernity that liberals try very hard to hide — its central principle. With liberalism, the central principle has two parts. The first is its public appearance, which is “equality” and the altruistic, pity and “progressive” politics that support it. The second part is not public. In fact, it’s hidden. This part is the truth of equality, which is that it’s an attempt to take control of this society by creating a huge mob of people who are easily controlled because they are trained to demand certain ideas, and smash anyone who has any other ideas.
Conservatism is the parent ideology of nationalism and tradition. Unlike liberalism, which focuses on what the individual wants to think, conservatism is based on a study of reality — in other words, what works. Conservatives are consequentialists, or those who study the results of our actions, and they believe that when we know all possible results, we can pick the results we want, and discipline our actions to match. This principle, along with nationalism and traidtionalism, is the antithesis of liberalism.
If our civilization were to see even 2% of its population shift to an original sense of conservatism, including nationalism and traditionalism, that unified front would be active enough to create vast change. Liberalism fears that, which is why they do their best to demonize any true conservative movement by calling it racist, elitist, sexist or otherwise contrary to the values of 1789.
3. Explain how diversity itself rather than its ingredients is the problem with multi-culturalism.
As part of the liberal agenda, it is essential to smash all shared community values and all culture in order to achieve total individual equality. One way liberals do this is to demand that societies become multicultural or “diverse,” which are shorthand terms for racial, ethnic and cultural mixing. Liberals spin this to you as the idea that you’ll have every possible variant of the human form ready for you to use, but in reality what happens is that all of these nifty cultures meld and create a singular cultureless gray race.
When multiculturalism appears, the temptation is for people of the majority group to criticize the minority groups that are now part of their lives. However, this misses the point. No matter what groups are chosen, the end result is the same (cultureless gray race). Even if the groups are similar, all shared culture is destroyed among each group, and what takes over is commerce, media and government propaganda. Throughout history, this has happened time and time again.
It doesn’t take advanced technology to get to this stage. In fact, the ancient Romans and Greeks both experienced multiculturalism, thanks to their vast empires and their habit of bringing back new citizens to work doing basic labor (today’s equivalents would be construction, food service and lawn care). The more multiculturalism came about, the less these ancient cultures were able to hold together, and finally they collapsed from within. It took multiple factors to bring them down, but multiculturalism was a big one, even though multiculturalism itself was a symptom of the decline. As any doctor can tell you, certain symptoms will kill you unless treated.
The problem with diversity is that by introducing many cultures into the same place, multiculturalism forces the adoption of a lowest common denominator. Since these cultures have little in common, and picking a culture will only offend other people, citizens invariably choose to have no culture except the innocuous stuff like television commercials, movies, celebrity gossip and fun facts about equality from government propaganda. The result is that since there is no common agreement on how to behave, people act selfishly and at random, which requires a strong police/nanny state to keep them in line.
If you want the proof of this, imagine an ethnic or religious group you’re concerned about. Now, imagine them gone from the picture, but the multicultural state still existing. You may have to substitute other groups for them. In every combination, as long as there is a combination and not a single group, the result is the same. Whose holidays do we pick? Whose gods? Whose moral rules? Whose visual aesthetics and architecture? Whose music? The list goes on and on. Instead of a clear path and clear values system, you have chaos. And this is why the police state, oligarchs, and other “strongmen” come to power.
4. How come multi-culturalism takes the same form inevitably, no matter what we do?
Multiculturalism isn’t defined by what it is, but by what it isn’t. It is not a single culture. It is a mixture of cultures, which results by default in a non-culture. Just as two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, two or more cultures, religions, ethnic groups or races cannot occupy the same nation at the same time. The problem is not the specific differences, but the fact of difference itself. This is why every time multiculturalism has been tried, it has resulting in misery and decay. One metaphor is putting your food in a blender. If you take everything you were going to eat for dinner, dump it in a blender and turn it into a uniform mush, it’s going to be disgusting, even if all of the individual parts were good. A quality steak, potato, salad and ice cream turns into vomitous goo. The problem is the blending, which multiculturalism forces, not the parts that are blended.
5. How do you see the correlations between the fall of our modern civilization with the fall of empires thoughout history?
The best way to visualize this, weirdly, is to compare it to a business. All businesses fail the same way. They get big and powerful and stop paying attention to the reality of the market and themselves. The result is that they either stop making products that people need, or become so disorganized and internally divided that they disintegrate even though they still have a lot to offer. This is a pattern that we see repeated time and time again. There’s a similar pattern for societies, and it is basically the same idea: get big, stop paying attention to reality, become internally divided and then fall apart.
We have this myth in our modern time that we are immune to collapse because we have all this technology and wealth. However, the Romans and Greeks had much more technology and wealth than their neighbors, too. They were the most powerful civilizations of those days. They also found out that “too big to fail” is an illusion. They stopped paying attention to reality, lost track of the values they had in common, and as a result became more oppressive states that tried to use power to keep people in line, since culture had failed. At that point, their citizens became individualistic and decadent and displayed the values and behaviors that liberals today also share. Multiculturalism wracked their cities, as did hedonism and perversity. As a result, they fell apart from within.
The most interesting part is that this pattern applies to empires outside the West as well. Jared Diamond, who normally writes leftist propaganda, took a break to write a study of the civilization on Easter Island and how it fell apart from within. In the New World, the ancient Maya, Inca and Aztecs showed the exact same pattern, which left their civilizations weak and near death by the time the Spanish arrived to crudely finish the job. Even ancient Asian and African civilizations, from Angkor Wat to Egypt, showed this pattern of decline.
As with multiculturalism, societal collapse does not involve a bad guy we can isolate and smash. There is no tangible enemy. The enemy is disorder, and the lack of social order is what causes the decline, just as the fact of mixing destroys culture and thus causes the destruction that accompanies multiculturalism. The message of history is clear: you either hold your civilization together by having the same identity, culture, language, customs and values, or you fall apart.
What is interesting is how many works of ancient cultures deal with this theme. The epic of Gilgamesh touches on it; the Bhagavad-Gita is almost exclusively about it. The cornerstone of Western philosophy, Plato’s “Republic,” is written on this topic. Across the globe and throughout history, the problem of collapse and decline has fascinated and horrified our best thinkers, and they have come up with similar solutions — but all acknowledge that once we make popularity of an idea more important than its veracity, societies are unlikely to elect to choose those solutions.
6. What can we do to delay this process?
Surprisingly, the answer is simple but it may require some complicated methods. I’ll break it down into three sections:
(1) Re-assert culture. Culture is organic and arises from the people, so it’s hard to resurrect once it’s gone. However, you can start with the older works of the past, and by going back to folk common sense, folk values and customs, and any traditions we can read about or learn from our elders. Make culture the dominant part of our lives. Instead of asking “What do I want to do today?” ask yourself “What is the activity that feels ‘right’ in light of what I know about our customs, calendar and values?” For this to take hold, it needs to be instilled in the public. One way to start this is to throw out all “art” from after our cultural decline. Get rid of the bad books, weird modern art, and mindless two-note pop music. Replace it with the greatness of the past and, once we learn how it works, with our own contributions.
(2) End the reign of popularity. Trends define us now and rule us. When something is popular, all of our merchants rush to it in order to cash in. Then there’s a huge crowd of people with no direction in life — normally called “liberals” — and they rush toward the trends because each one of them wants a chance to be important and to share in the drama. Then government and media pay attention. Soon it’s a giant cycle of a huge in-group deciding that some idea is “important” and then selling it to each other. We can retaliate against this by putting some limits on consumerism, including cheap products from abroad; restricting the vote to people age 30+ who own homes; taxing mass media as if it were shipping a physical product; and perhaps most importantly, visibly dropping out of the rush for popularity. We need to refute it in all of its forms. All of this starts with us making fun of it, mocking the people who are addicted to it, and refusing to participate not on political grounds but on practical grounds like “Television bores me” and “Celebrities are too neurotic for me.” Finally, I think we should encourage software, news, video game, movie and audio piracy in order to sabotage and destroy our media industry.
7. Is there a way to rebuild it after it happens?
Civilizations have been destroyed and rebuilt many times before. What happens is that about ten percent of the population, generally not survivalist types and not social butterflies either, decide to carry on their culture, technology and people and start up somewhere else. In fact, the classic epic poem “Aeneid” by Virgil conveys this very theme. Aeneas of Troy and his cohorts have fled the scene of their vast loss in battle and have evaded the victorious Greeks and set sail for a new homeland, where it is foretold that Aeneas will found a new and great civilization. The Aeneid is quite a stirring writing based on many historical sources, but what’s most important is that it accurately describes the process by which people rebuild.
What is different in our case is that we do not want to abandon Europe or America; we want to rebuild them. This presents a quandary because our cities are choked with people, most of whom have no useful skills. What will most likely occur is, as has happened in the distant past, our strongest people will withdraw to less-populated and un-trendy areas, where they will build centers of great wealth and power. They will then slowly reconquest the other land, probably by becoming enough of a threat to the interlopers there that those interlopers will flee, leaving behind the land. What civilization rebuilders need is (a) knowledge, (b) quality people and (c) land. It doesn’t matter if we cannot recapture New York or L.A. — any open patch of land with access to lake or ocean will do. When the rebuilt civilization becomes more powerful or more numerous than the remnants of the ruined culture that came before it, the new civilization will conquer the old and exile its people, and then be in complete control.
8. Why does liberalism always target the “favored” in order to promote its agenda, equality though distribution of wealth and crippling of ability?
If you want equality, you have two options for achieving it: either you try to raise up the lesser, or bring down the greater. Raising the lesser doesn’t really work, because if someone is in a lesser position it is usually because they have screwed up and/or lack abilities needed to rise above that level. This leaves bringing down the stronger, which is easier to do. As in the Kurt Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron,” you just handicap the more competent people so that they are only barely able to compete with the incompetents around them. This brings everybody down to the same level.
Interestingly, modern liberalism uses both methods. It creates a massive welfare state for those who are not succeeding like the poor, incompetents, gays/lesbians/bisexuals/transsexuals, minorities, women, the obese, mental health cases. At the same time, it tries to bury its most intelligent and capable people in a mountain of red tape, regulations, unstable cities and pointless governmental exercises. Affirmative action, the welfare state, and high schools that bore intelligent children are all part of this liberal method.
9. How would you solve the issues of wealth distribution such as the concentration of wealth and power among a tiny few?
I wouldn’t. This problem is a non-issue that solves itself. The Paris Hiltons of the world will manage to waste their money and new people will take their places. What is most important is having a society where the competent and motivated people can rise above the rest. This method, which when it occurs in nature we call “natural selection” or “Darwinian evolution,” simply works because it means that the people on top are GENERALLY the most productive, intelligent, moral and hard-working types. Everyone benefits from having the most capable people at the top, even if it means those capable people become quite wealthy.
If you are a Christian, you can see this expressed in the parable of the talents. A master leaves money with his three servants; one buries the coins, and gives back the exact same coins; another invests the coins and has mediocre performance, but is able to return the same amount; the third invests the money well, makes a lot more, and returns that. If you’re the master, you’re going to take a much bigger sum of money and give it to the servant who can invest it well and make more of it. That way, everybody wins. There is more money for everyone.
While the “libertarians” we see floating around are often not the best examples, I like the basic principle of libertarianism. Get the regulation out of the way and let the best people rise. This encourages every citizen to think not in terms of what they deserve, or how they’re victims, but in terms of what they can do to make more wealth. It’s a healthier mental state than waiting around for government handouts or pity.
10. A. Do you think that Capitalism is worth preserving or should we look to some third way economic theory such as distributism?
My answer here is classic New Right: capitalism is the best possible economic system, if and only if we keep it under the thumb of culture. We need to have shared values that come first, and then capitalism should serve that. Without culture to rein it in, capitalism becomes a voracious parasite that tears a society apart. Of course, without culture, any aspect of a society becomes parasitic because they are all running out of control without leadership.
B. Should we oppose big business and big finanace as we do to big government?
The entire reason I’m a nationalist is to avoid “opposing” institutions that are required as a result of our social order. In America as it is currently designed, we have a huge mass of grey culture proles who need a giant nanny/police state to keep herd over them. Because they have nothing in common, they can be counted on to do random destructive acts when not constantly watched over, and to randomly cause conflicts with each other. To try to ride herd on this vast morass of confused citizenry, we have welfare agencies, help groups, police forces, counselors, disciplinarians, and millions of bureaucrats. In addition, big business exists because the more clueless the population gets, the more services they need just to make it through the day. When you think about it, America as a frontier nation did not have big government or big companies, and not just because such things did not exist — they were known in Europe. However, there was no need. Everyone knew what the task was and had a role in it. The same thing is true of the healthy nations in Europe. Everyone joins hands because they perceive a common values system, goal, culture, heritage, identity and history, and there’s a far lesser need for enforcement of any kind, and certainly not for a nanny state. We have a government that seems to spend most of its time trying to save idiots from themselves. Our corporations spend their time designing entertainment and convenience products for vast herds of sofa-bound citizens. Do we need this? We would not, if we had a nationalist and tradition society created with paleoconservative principles. Culture would guide us, and shape the role of both government and citizen. A self-help mentality would pervade the population, and the loss of stupid people through accident would not be a “tragedy” but a normal event. The result would be a self-maintaining, healthier society that would not need the nanny state or its commercial lapdogs.
11. Explain how liberalism, egalitariansm, and anti-elitism share a common root in human psychology.
The root of liberalism is fear. The individual fears that they are not capable. For that reason, they start to hate and resent those who are having a good time in life. At that point, the situation becomes sort of like the plot of a Hollywood movie — think of Napoleon Dynamite: the nerdy kids join together, form a little mob, and take on the rich, good-looking and powerful kids, and win. The crowd takes over. The outcasts triumph over the successes. Everything is reversed and inverted. This is the common root of all liberalism, egalitarianism and anti-elitism. They exist because of the fear of individuals. Those individuals find a way to gain power, which is to concoct this absurd fiction of “equality” and use it to force their way into power. What is always popular, especially among those who are less capable? Equality — it means that even if you contribute nothing, you’re guaranteed a place at the table. Who has no use for equality? Those who have risen above it. And so that’s who the liberals target. All of this originates in a root in human psychology, which is our tendency to project our fear onto the world and by making parts of that world symbols of our fear and smashing them, to think we have escaped our fear.
12. Explain how they form the basis of decay.
Once liberalism appears in your civilization, each of your citizens is a free agent. They are no longer bonded toward a common goal and values system, like culture. They are acting for themselves, selfishly, and against the rest of society, which they see as “oppressing” them. Even more, suddenly all of your citizens want to act like victims and have someone else do the work and make the hard choices. Their agenda becomes the classic liberal agenda not of generating wealth and power, but of redistributing wealth and creating democracy. At that point, decay is gaining strength because the society has lost any sight of reality itself.
13.A. Do you defend elitism?
Absolutely I defend elitism. However, I need to separate elitism from its cousin, pretense. Elitism means that you pick the best possible option and push yourself to the highest possible goals. That’s it. Pretense works the opposite way, which is that you assume you are important, and in order to justify that appearance, you start claiming that the stuff you like is of the highest quality and everyone else should respect it. Elitism is the enemy of pretense because elitism demands actual performance. If you’re going shopping for music, buy the best. If you’re in school, all praise goes to the smart kids and best athletes. If you’re doing a job, you hold yourself to high standards. Pretense is when people pick something obscure and claim it’s the best possible thing, and they do this for one reason and one reason only, which is that it gives them more control and more social power over you.
B. If the ideas of the left such as eqalitarianism are anti-elitist explain why the entire elite of the west supports them?
Elitism means support of the best. That scares our western liberals, so they have constructed false elites. Just as natural selection scares them, so they created equality, they are now creating false reasons to be “elite” such as having politically correct opinions, being socially popular and being inoffensive. This does not qualify anyone as an elitist. In fact, you can ONLY be a liberal elitist if you are egalitarian, which is the opposite of being an elitist (it’s like being a vegetarian carnivore). Egalitarianism is the opposite of elitism which is why our (false) “elites” will not accept anyone who is not egalitarian.
C. We have discussed how egalitarianism reduces human output to the lowest common demoninator. what is your take on populism and especially how it relates to elitism.
The left uses the term “populism” to refer to any right-wing movement with popular support, but a more sensible definition is pandering to the immediate financial and social demands of a population. If done at the expense of long-term plans, this is very destructive, but otherwise, it’s important to realize that a nation like an army runs on its stomachs. Political leaders need to make sure that the demands for dogma do not outweigh the need for people to have stable lives, income, food and medical care (and the like). Our current president has put much of that stuff on the back burner in order to work on ideological objectives, and Soviet-style infrastructure failure has resulted from it.
14. How come the environmental movement is deeply confused?
When you introduce liberalism into a movement, no other goals are possible. Liberalism is a binary movement: you are either liberal, or you are the enemy of liberalism. That is because liberalism is its own agenda and all of the issues that liberals like are means to that end. Multiculturalism? Smash the majority, create equality. Drug use? Smash morality, create equality. Atheism? Smash religion, create equality. Sodomy? Smash normalcy, create equality. Their goal is to make every choice, idea, decision, preference, person and concept “equal” so that no choice is more valuable than any other. This means every individual will feel accepted, and anyone who creates a value shared between people will be viewed with suspicion.
Obviously, this outlook doesn’t play well with others! It’s very hostile, inherently defensive and views itself as a victim, and as such is highly reactionary and aggressive. It’s like a cancer. The environmental movement allowed itself to be swallowed up by liberalism sometime in the 1950s. This meant that instead of simply working toward a better environment, the environmental movement was working toward a better environment — through liberalism. As a result, environmentalists stopped talking about conserving the forests and started talking about how equality and multiculturalism will save our forests. Not surprisingly, at that point every sane person tuned out, because it was like listening to Soviet Radio to hear these people talk.
Right now, environmentalists refuse to talk about the actual problems of nature and the solutions. Instead you get lots of expensive lightbulbs filled with mercury, people telling you to stop whaling and start recycling your condoms, and toilets that take two flushes instead of one. What are liberal-environmentalists avoiding? Population, for one. We’ve got seven billion people and the next stop is nine billion. Next, most of these people are impoverished and having lots of kids. They’re also avoiding what happens when we try to give all nine billion of these people a first-world lifestyle, with fast food and two cars and a house. Further, they’re not mentioning the big problem, which is use of land. For every 100 sq ft we live in, there’s probably another 10,000 sq ft of land for farms, roads, hospitals, schools, parking lots, airports, warehouses, stores, restaurants, bars, and government buildings.
What nature really needs is conservation. However, environmentalists will not accept that. Conservation is a right-wing movement that involves setting aside land for nature. As a result, conservation means we stop telling everyone that they’re entitled to a house, car, wealthy lifestyle, etc. just because they are human and therefore equal. Instead, we work toward having fewer humans by putting a lot of the land off-limits and letting natural species thrive. By off-limits, we mean no roads, no fences, no power lines and no “guaranteed safety.” We mean keeping the land wild and if you get eaten by a bear or wander three miles off a trail and fall to your death, oh well. That’s part of nature, the un-cuddly and scary parts. The bigger point is that for us to have the many species of plants and animal out there, we need to give them space to hunt, play, mate and rear young. They need more space than we think. We can’t put them in zoo-cage-sized plots and hope they’ll thrive. But all of that is not acceptable to environmentalists, who are liberals first and environmental activists a distant second.
15. Explain your ideology of deep ecology?
Let me first quote from the Deep Ecology Movement’s mission statement:
“We believe that true ecological sustainability may require a rethinking of our values as a society. Present assumptions about economics, development, and the place of human beings in the natural order must be reevaluated. If we are to achieve ecological sustainability, Nature can no longer be viewed only as a commodity; it must be seen as a partner and model in all human enterprise.
We begin with the premise that life on Earth has entered its most precarious phase in history. We speak of threats not only to human life, but to the lives of all species of plants and animals, as well as the health and continued viability of the biosphere. It is the awareness of the present condition that primarily motivates our activities.
We believe that current problems are largely rooted in the following circumstances:
* The loss of traditional knowledge, values, and ethics of behavior that celebrate the intrinsic value and sacredness of the natural world and that give the preservation of Nature prime importance. Correspondingly, the assumption of human superiority to other life forms, as if we were granted royalty status over Nature; the idea that Nature is mainly here to serve human will and purpose.
* The prevailing economic and development paradigms of the modern world, which place primary importance on the values of the market, not on Nature. The conversion of nature to commodity form, the emphasis upon economic growth as a panacea, the industrialization of all activity, from forestry to farming to fishing, even to education and culture; the drive to economic globalization, cultural homogenization, commodity accumulation, urbanization, and human alienation. All of these are fundamentally incompatible with ecological or biological sustainability on a finite Earth.
* Technology worship and an unlimited faith in the virtues of science; the modern paradigm that technological development is inevitable, invariably good, and to be equated with progress and human destiny. From this, we are left dangerously uncritical, blind to profound problems that technology and science have wrought, and in a state of passivity that confounds democracy.
* Overpopulation, in both the overdeveloped and the underdeveloped worlds, placing unsustainable burdens upon biodiversity and the human condition.
As our name suggests, we are influenced by the Deep Ecology Platform, which helps guide and inform our work. We believe that values other than market values must be recognized and given importance, and that Nature provides the ultimate measure by which to judge human endeavors.” (http://www.deepecology.org/mission.htm)
If you read this statement carefully, you see that what it calls for is a role best filled by a traditional society. We need values outside of commerce, trends and popularity; this means we need culture. We need sanctity of the natural world as part of those values, which means we need a traditional outlook on society and religion. We need smaller civilizations more closely bonded to the land, which is nationalism. The National Socialist Germans talked about “Blood and Soil,” but they picked that phrase up from the Volkisch movement, which was also the parent of the original German environmental movement. We need strong culture, national identity and strong pro-nature values in order to want to do what is right (i.e. difficult) to preserve our environment.
16. Why do you think the right wants nothing to do with environmentalism?
Once the left took over environmentalism, the right fled it. The media is not liberal-controlled, but it’s leftist-sympathetic because over 75% of the people who work in media are leftist, and the media overlords know that liberalism is more popular than conservatism so they pander to liberal values. As a result, what a normal person saw was that environmentalism meant socialism with a tacked-on afterthought saying “Oh yeah, and help the animals and plants too, when we’re done with the wealth redistribution.” This caused the right to get the heck away from environmentalism, because the environmentalist movement was basically a liberal recruiting ground.
17. You also state that you see modern environmentalism focusing to much on trivial issues. Give examples and what are the more serious issues they should focus on?
(This was probably answered in #14)
18. Is a significant degree of government itnervention nessesary to preserve the environment?
In a traditional society, culture is more important than government. As a result, government serves culture. The opposite is true in our time, where government serves itself and uses liberal talking points to justify itself. In a truly traditional society, agreement among the leaders both official and unofficial would be in favor of radical conservationism. These leaders would be clergy, business leaders, teachers, police, firefighters, academics, small business owners and military people — normal people, but people who had proven their ability to lead. They would influence others. If our architecture emphasized buildings set apart from each other by wide-open unbroken natural spaces, and our social values emphasized huge forests where no one went, and all of our television programs praised the wild frontier, we’d have our results without government having to do anything.
19. What is green conservatism?
Green conservatism is the idea that conservatives conserve, and we conserve the environment too. Currently, the right-wing is in a bad state because fundamental right-wing values like social Darwinism, elitism, natural selection, nationalism, shared values (but not collective force), and strong culture are forbidden and classified as taboo by the liberal majority. To avoid being banned, right-wing parties hide their true nature and make themselves hybrids with liberalism, which gets us neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatism will not embrace environmentalism because it is too infected with the leftist agenda, but also because neo-conservatism is too infected with liberal dogma. As a result, the right is distanced from greenism. However, it makes sense for us to re-adopt this value and take it back from the left. We believe in nature and in the natural order, and it’s sensible for the right-wing to come up with a conservative platform for environmentalism and green activism, which is outlined above in the “deep ecology” and conservation questions.
20. How it would it be implemented and what are some positions it would take to preserve the environment?
(This was probably answered in #14)
21. Explain what is futurist traditionalism.
Futurist traditionalism is conservatism without the dead parts. We want to learn from the past and apply those lessons toward having a better future. We recognize that every society needs a clear identity, shared values, heritage, culture, language and customs in order to thrive. We want a rising society, or one that isn’t so obsessed with wealth redistribution that it forgets to do great things. We want an end to idiocracy, which is a product of egalitarianism, and an end to liberal democracy. Instead, we want a society that can assert its values and act toward realizing them. This requires we keep the traditionalist nature of all successful societies to date, and introduce futurism, or a desire to reach toward the future through technology and learning. We want to discard what conservatism has become, which is defensive and boring, and replace it with a desire to conquer the universe and to be better than we thought we could be. We desire greatness, beauty and adventure. We’re not stodgy old reactionaries like the liberals, who are still spouting the lies from 1789 and trying to use guilt to control us.
22. Explain how conservatism is about learning from the past and nature.
Conservatism is based on understanding cause/effect relationships. History is our laboratory, and we hope to learn from our mistakes. When we see how a certain cause ended up, we know whether we want to repeat it or avoid it. This is analogous to how natural selection works in nature, where good ideas result in success and bad ideas result in failure. Even more, nature teaches us that all good designs come with an inherent beauty and grace that not only is functional, but makes us feel at home and in awe of our universe. Paul Woodruff wrote a great book about this called “Reverence.”
23. Why don’t modern conservatives respect the past and nature?
Modern conservatives are neoconservatives, or half-liberal/half-conservative hybrids. Like most hybrids, they have some “hybrid vigor” in that they are driven forward by the contradictions in their ideology, but over time it starts to break apart. Among the modern conservatives are many paleoconservatives, who hold on to the older and truer conservatism of people like H.L. Mencken and T.S. Eliot and before. These respect the past and nature. Modern conservatives cannot respect the past and nature because it clashes with the values they have adopted from liberalism. The past was not egalitarian, and yet society was better — as a result, it’s politically incorrect and social taboo to mention the past. Nature rewards the competent, which is against equality as well.
24. Explain the existentialist case for conservatism.
Life should be beautiful and exciting, filled with discovery and adventure, and giving each individual a sense of place and purpose. You cannot do that by telling everyone they must be equal and that they can do whatever they want that does not offend others. What that translates into is a society of single people alone in their apartments for the eight hours a day they’re not at jobs, pursuing their hobbies alone because otherwise they might cause someone to be upset. Freedom, equality and “peace” sound good on paper but in reality they’re a form of entropy. Nothing changes; everything is a surface appearance with no depth. The conservatives of the future are the people who are bored with modern society because it is adventureless, ugly and without a goal. These people want a challenge and want a beautiful life, not just a utilitarian one. That is how existentialist sentiments direct people toward conservatism.
25. Explain how the ensuing social chaos demands a strong force of control, found in commerce, media and government.
When we have a strong culture or shared values system (including actual “common sense”) people do what is sensible according to that values system. Since everyone shares this values system it is easy to know what you should be doing and what you should avoid. As a result, the only deviants are criminals, and those are dealt (preferably by exile).
Without that values system, people have no idea what they should be doing. In addition, equality means they are faceless and anonymous, so they start “acting out” in an attempt to stand out from the crowd and be recognized socially. This means that sheer chaos reigns. Every individual is doing something different, usually without purpose, and since they desire “different” more than “logical,” they end up creating mayhem wherever they go. The ensuing social breakdown requires a strong police state to keep deviancy in line when it goes far; in addition, government and media collude to preach simple commands at the people to keep them from screwing up. For example, look at the massive campaigns against cigarettes, drugs, DUI, incest, child abuse, etc. that so elegantly line our freeways and fill our magazines. That’s propaganda. We don’t object because we think it’s a good cause. But when your society has so few values in common that you have to educate people to not rape their children, we’re past the point where good causes can help anything.
26. While mainstream conservatives focus on how people are dependent on the government you also focus on how they are too dependent on entertainment and social approval. Explain?
Without culture, people are looking for meaning in their lives. Since there’s no goal in common to work toward, all that is left is ourselves — who we are as social constructions, who we know and what kind of personal drama we have going on at the moment. This makes social approval become important. In fact, it becomes the only way they measure themselves. Liberalism encourages this, because liberalism is fundamentally a social movement, or a fashion, or trend.
All of these social ideas cause people to stop thinking about real goals. Instead of trying to achieve something, they ask “How will this look to others?” Instead of having real values, they wonder “Will this make other people like me?” And instead of acting with purpose, they look for novelty and distraction, so that other people find it interesting.
The media plays into this both as a provider of memes, and as a parasite that follows trends and hypes them up so that each group can get its turn. The coolfinders come first, the hipsters imitate them, then middle America imitates that, and then the true drop-outs get a turn. It’s just like trendy products, like those dumb plastic singing fish. At first, they’re rare and kind of hip and a few people own them. Then, Target gets ahold of it and sells it to middle class America. Finally, at some point down the line, K-mart and Wal-mart start selling the things in bulk at a discount, but at that point only the hopelessly un-hip buy them. It’s like a giant ecosystem where the media stimulates trends, then markets products for them.
As a consequence of this, most of modern society lives in a place that doesn’t resemble reality at all. We had millions of people worldwide convinced that Troy Davis was innocent because that’s what CNN said and that’s what all their friends said. If they had the police file in front of them and read it, they would have been thinking, “Wait just a second — this guy is not a good person, he’s guilty as hell.” But instead they let the social trends, media memes and popular fashion sway their thinking. It’s how crowds are dangerous.
27. Explain how America is a type of civilization rather than a place.
There’s a lot of hatred for America in the world, and 99% of it is caused by (a) envy or (b) distrust of American policies. I don’t hate America, and don’t see the point; the real issue is that modern society is the source of those American policies many of us distrust. America is a civilization in its modern stage, which is a kind of mid-life crisis. What makes America seem so horrible to people is that we are caught in a liberal time, and so we are preaching liberalism to the world, yet as our society decays it becomes apparent that our “gift” of liberal democracy is anything but a gift — it’s a death sentence.
Instead of hating America, the smart people out there should realize that America is a country like any other, and the disease that grips America can grip other countries too. America is just ahead of the game because it never had as clear of an ethnic consensus, and because as a rapidly growing highly social civilization, it has surged ahead to encounter these challenges. What has happened to America can happen to any country, however, and indeed has happened to all empires before they have fallen.
28. Comprised of equal parts liberal anarchism and commercial fascism, this type of civilization uses “freedom” and “equality” to create a society without standards, values or ideals — what does this mean?
Our society endorses liberal values, which at their fullest expression take form in anarchy: everyone is equal, no one rises above to make rules. At the same time, an anarchist society would rapidly develop commerce and armed security guards because as long as there are people, there will be a need for services and a vast profit potential. Any society that did away with money and government would find itself in short order in the grips of far more powerful forces of commerce and a police state. Our society gets as close to the anarchist ideal as it can and also tries to keep its citizens happy with commerce, so it ends up creating a balance by which the citizens do whatever they want so long as they do not intrude on the commerce. This is a problem because without culture to guide it, commerce becomes parasitic and destructive. However, both commerce and anarchistic liberalism agree on one thing — no rules, except the obvious protection of commerce, no murder, etc. This means such as society is violently opposed to standards, values and ideals because these conflict with the absolute equality of anarchism and the absolute corrupting force of commerce.
29. The ensuing social chaos demands a strong force of control, found in commerce, media and government. Commerce ropes citizens into debt and jobs, media fills their heads with illusions, and government enforces profitable laws — what does this mean?
When you do away with standards in common, you introduce social chaos. Our government has no interest in limiting that chaos because it provides a justification for its power. In the meantime, people are tired of it, so they flock to commercial messages and products which promise peace, relaxation, etc. No one wants to admit that our cities are ugly, our people are chaotic, and as a result our civilization is disorganized, boring, and fundamentally soulless.
30. You believe that peaceful revolution can occur if 5% of the population adopts your ideas?
5% would be nice but even 2% of the population, if they give up on their “individualism” and join together toward a goal in common, can effect a massive change in the world. All it takes is consistency and dedication. All revolutions start this way. It’s easier for liberal revolutions, because their ideas are popular, but as liberalism fails more people are turning toward the new forms of conservatism.
31. Explain how immigration is class warfare and causes racism.
Immigration is a tool of the liberal left. It is used to destroy the majority by forcing a new culture into our country, thus putting the former majority culture on the defensive, with any incidents of friction used to induce guilt in members of that majority culture. Further, it imports a huge number of new liberal voters. The ultimate goal is to shatter culture, destroy values consensus and replace members of the majority with impoverished newcomers; in addition, the influx displaces lower income Americans from their jobs and forces them either into poverty or into jobs for which they may not be qualified. The result is fear and trembling all around, but the ultimate goal is class warfare against the wealthy majority and the replacement of that majority with a new population.
32. Explain how immigration is fundamentally racist since it seeks to destroy a race and replace it with a new one.
Immigration is multiculturalism, unless we’re talking about immigration from Europe. America is a European nation by how her founding fathers saw her and by the dominant Anglo-Germanic culture of the time. It was only in the 1840s that we opened America up to non-Northwestern Europeans, and only in the 1960s that we opened it up to non-European descended people. The result has been replacement of a vague but vital original culture with the culture of not having a culture, or multiculturalism. The goal of multiculturalism is not to provide us with more exciting ethnic foods, but to replace us. The new people will be more likely to vote liberal. They will also take their revenge on those they are certain have oppressed them.
33. You reviewed Jared Taylor’s new book. Explain your take on it.
Jared Taylor wrote a real masterpiece with “White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century.” Over the past 40 years, we’ve learned a lot about diversity. The problem is not African-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, etc. but the fact of diversity itself, which both (a) destroys our shared values and identity and (b) replaces those with a culture dedicated to having no values. Diversity is conformity. We don’t recognize it as conformity because it is spun to us as an “alternative” to a (“boring”) ethnic majority, and we’re told by our televisions that we are boring and have no culture, so we must import some. However, the end result of diversity is uniformity in a mixed-ethnic, cultureless void. Taylor starts out his book by recognizing the value of ethnic identity and the shared cultural values it brings. He discusses this first in other ethnic groups, and then in white people. Then, without falling back into criticism of the ingredients of diversity, he explores recent research that shows us how destabilizing and sabotaging diversity is. As Taylor notes, this diversity does not have to be racial or ethnic, as even same-race and same-ethnic groups have disintegrated under diverse conditions if separated by religion, philosophy or even radical gaps in social class. He points out the role of diversity in destroying aging civilizations. It’s a compelling argument, diligently researched, and written very well. I highly recommend this book and Pat Buchanan’s “Suicide of a Superpower.” If you read them together, you see the whole picture at once.
34. With the state of modern conservativism, what makes you want to hold on to that label rather than go in some other direction such as third position?
I used to like the idea of third positionism, but then I reconsidered history. All of history until 1789 showed us a solid conservative underpinning to society that while it had its problems, was nothing like the chaos and crass mundane evil that seems to define modern society. For that reason, I do not see a reason for a third position; conservatism is the sane position, and liberalism is a product of decay. You don’t try to find reasons to argue around decay. In addition, we already have a third position, which is pre-1789 conservatism with its caste system, monarchies, traditions, and highly ritualized daily experience. The last thing I want to do is create a path because it seems socially acceptable and like it might attract people who are afraid of conservatism. I think instead it makes sense to explain that the right is correct and always has been, and that we can find solutions to all of our modern problems by simply avoiding all liberalism. Liberalism destroys civilization. That which is not liberalism, and is realistic and common sense, is conservatism. I want to re-make conservatism so it’s more like the Traditionalist movement, the pale-conservatives, and so that it recaptures its deep ecologist conservationist roots. But I see no reason to abandon it. Its appeal is that it is a collection of strategies for living that simply work. Its triumph over liberalism is that liberalism is airy theory that sounds good to your friends, but doesn’t work. As year 222 rolls past and Europe’s and America’s fortunes remain in a screaming downward spiral, more and more people are realizing that we went wrong in 1789 and the solution is not to invent some new method, but to simply stop making the bad choice to perpetuate liberalism. We took a wrong turn; we need to retrace our steps, fix the damage, pick ourselves up and move on.
35. Is a new political party nessesary to implement your ideas?
This sounds flippant, but no, I’d rather implement them directly. We have an entirely workable conservative establishment in which it is not a mystery that diversity doesn’t work, that the entitlement state is death, and that liberalism destroys the family and produces alienated cultureless citizens — heck, these things aren’t a mystery on the left, either, but they’re planning to use these social disruptions (Alinsky was not the first to think of this) to seize power permanently and destroy the majority so no challenge to their power remains. If normal citizens start rising in the Republican ranks and demanding polite and logical attention to these issues, change will occur.
36. What were the aims of the Frankfurt school how haw sucessful were they at implementing their ideas?
Let’s backtrack through history. 1789 was the first open liberal revolt in the West; before that, stirrings had existed but mainly confined themselves to religion. The Frankfurt School came about at a time when liberals were first realizing the power of internationalism and the starry-eyed progressive appeal, and so certain academics decided to subvert traditional concepts through “theory” (where I’m from, theories are supposed to be about reality, not airy constructions removed from any workable notion of reality). This was part of the same political struggle, internationalism versus nationalism, that formed the basis of the two world wars. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Frankfurt School took on a new direction — merge Marxism with consumerism. I see the Frankfurt School as a subset of the European pro-anarchist/socialist drive of the 1910s and 1920s. It’s useful to note that whether it calls itself leftism, liberalism, internationalism, globalism, anarchism, socialism, liberal democracy or communism, it’s all the same ideology, just separated by small matters of degree.
37. What is the driving ideological force behind our foreign policy in the mideast. Some say its humanitarian interventionism, American hegemenomny, the millitary industrial complex, Israeli interest?
I think it’s building our own image of ourselves. We have to show our citizens that we are right, and we are bringing a better world order through liberalism, so we need to (a) fight wars for democracy and (b) open up these new places to our business to destroy their culture and enrich ourselves with their raw material wealth. Like all good liberal plans, this one relies on an altruistic public truth that conceals a private self-interested motivation. It just happens to dovetail, quite frequently, with what we need to do as a superpower. For example, the big powers now are Russia, China and India against the USA. It’s sensible to knock out any potential allies. This is why the US is all over Eastern Europe and trying to infiltrate it with our business as quickly as possible. If we own those assets, the Russians and Chinese don’t. So far India has played it smart and stayed friendly with the US and neutral to the Soviet Union while committing to neither. The sad truth of this situation is that US foreign policy generally produces good results. Any time a first-world society conquers a third-world society, that third-world society inherits many benefits of the first-world experience and eventually is incorporated into the first world empire. It’s what the Romans did and Greeks did, and now it’s what we do.
Regarding Israel, since that’s what a lot of people are curious about when they ask about the middle east, I think it’s important to realize that there are many groups competing for our political power and they all do it the same way — by getting dollars into the hands of lobbyists. We now have a huge pro-shariah lobby in this country and a huge liberal establishment that is if not outright anti-Semitic at the very least anti-Israel, who they accuse of apartheid (that’s liberal slang for “ethnic self-preservation,” apparently). There’s also a huge fundamentalist Christian lobby with a hilarious forked tongue: they’re pro-Israel, but only so that the final battle can occur at Har-Megiddo and we can all go up to the sky in The Rapture. To me, it seems obvious the Jews in Israel are fighting the same struggle that white people in Europe and the USA are, which is self-preservation against a third-world horde that is attempting to use our egalitarian philosophy to force us to accept them. They are aided by huge liberal camps in all three areas. Remove the liberals, and the problem goes away. It is probably in everyone’s interest to have Israel rule the middle east — the Israeli average IQ is one standard deviation above the next best comer in the region. Israelis are simply smarter, on average, and we should probably let them positively influence the area. That’s not to say the game couldn’t change tomorrow — if the Arab league decides to suddenly exterminate all of its own citizens under 120 IQ points, Israel would face a smarter enemy that still outnumbered them. But that’s a really hard strategy for any leader to take.
38. I noticed you follow some of the manosphere blogs. What is your take on the trends in regards to relations between the sexes and the sociosexual marketplace? Ironically the traditional system of monogamy was much more egalitarian while the sexual revolution that the left has cheered on has led to a much less egalitarian sexual marketplace.
Our society is falling apart, and the family has been disintegrating at a rapid rate since 1968. The result is that few people have any concept of love, but they’re all good with the idea of sexual convenience, which serves the needs of the state and commerce. Was monogamy more egalitarian? It forced men to demonstrate some value before entering into a sexual contract. The sexual revolution has put women at a massive disadvatange by reducing their value and forcing them to endure much more misery before they achieve any permanent union. The manosphere addresses some of these issues but is expanding to address more. It’s growing past its teenage rebellion — pick up artists, “game” and semi-misogynistic rantings — toward a movement of men who are demanding not just equality, but a better future for men in relationships, marriage and family.