The Goal

 

Jordan Peterson narrated a Prager U video on 1/29/2018, entitled Fix Yourself. I took notes on his video and will comment on it.

 

Jordan: “Blaming others for your problems is a complete waste of time; when you do that, you cannot grow, you cannot mature. Thus, you cannot make your life better.”

 

My response: as a proponent of egoist-individual ethics, I agree here with Jordan that moral problems are personal territory; only you own your moral puzzles and only you can solve them, not by serving others so much as improving yourself as a means of serving others indirectly.

 

Jordan: “I have learned there are two fundamental attitudes towards life and its sorrows. Those with the first attitude blame the world.”

 

My response: If you seek to change the world out there, blaming it as the source of your problems, and out there is the cure for your problems, you are an altruist-collectivist, but you are on the wrong track. You will find no relief for your problems in the community.

 

Jordan: “The second attitude is what can I do differently. Other people are not the problem. You are the problem. You can’t change other people, but you can change yourself.”

 

My response: The individual is the problem and moral solutions emerge with his effective self-care regimen taking hold. The conservative, mature kind of egoism that I envision is a program of self-improvement through self-discipline, as one’s unloved, low self-esteemed but the selfish, self-indulgent self determines to sin no more or at least less by self-realizing. Whether he is a victim or not, the maverizer blames himself for his shortcomings, and comes up with a working plan of self-improvement to make something of his life. He knows he is flawed but is residually benign that he can get better if he works hard at it, consistently, over time.

 

Jordan: “It is hard to change the self, requiring courage, admission of fault, and it takes discipline.

 

It is much easier and much more gratifying to your basest desires (Ed Note: To escape from growing by immature self-indulgence, strengthening one’s low self-esteem, selfishly ensconcing oneself in non-individuated pack-living.)

 

Blame others for your misery. Consider the youthful activist making a ‘statement’ against the ‘corrupt’ capitalist system. He smashes in the window of a business establishment. What has he done other than to bring harm to people who have nothing to do with his real problems. The guilt, doubt, and shame he will inevitably feel in consequence will have to be suppressed so his beliefs can remain unchanged. And that suppression will do nothing but foster his anger and alienation.

 

There is a woman in a TS Eliot play that is very unhappy and she consults her therapist. She admits that she hopes her mess is her fault so she can do something about it, but it the mess is in the nature of the world she is doomed. She can’t change everything else, but she can change herself.”

 

My response: As individuals start to maverize, the changes they make to themselves will revolutionize society and that is how the egoist helps the collective.

 

Jordan: “There are some people that suffer greatly, but most of us have a chance to make our lives better.

 

Start small. Ask yourself a few questions. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Are you working at your full capacity at school or work? Have you set your own house in order?

 

If no, stop doing what you know to be wrong. Stop. Today. Don’t waste time asking how you know that what you’re doing is wrong. You can know it is wrong without knowing why. Inopportune questioning can confuse without enlightening and deflect you from action. You can know something is right or wrong without knowing why.

 

Pay attention. Do you procrastinate, show up late, spend money you do not have, or drink to much?

 

It is not a matter of accepting some externally imposed morality. It is a dialogue with your own conscience. What are you doing that is wrong from your own perspective? What could you put right, right now. Get to work on time. Stop interrupting people. Make peace with siblings and parents. Diligently utilize everything you have at hand.

 

If you do these things, your life will improve. You will become more peaceful, productive, and desirable. After a few months of attentive effort your mind will clear. Your life will be less tragic, and you will be more confident; you will see right from wrong more clearly. The path is front of you will shine more brightly. You will not get in your own way.

 

 You will no longer be trouble yourself, your family or society. You will be a positive and reliable force.

 

Life will still be difficult. You will still suffer but that is the price of being born. Maybe you will become strong enough to bear that burden and even act nobly and with purpose.

 

The proper way to fix the world is not to fix the world or even assume you are up to such a task. But you can fix yourself; that harms no one, and may make the world a better place.”

 

 

 

 

 

Merit

 

We should promote, be promoted, love and marry based upon the character content and personal merit of the individual or candidate that we are interviewing.

 

We cannot progress as a people when we fail habitually to judge each person as an individual, not an avatar of the groups that he springs from. The diversity of his original thinking, not the color of his skin is why we select him.

 

To select based upon group affiliation is a subjective standard, picking an inferior candidate nd that holds all down and back

The Goal

 

You know you are in a strong communion with your soul of self-realization once you clearly sense and envision the state of greatness you can and likely will achieve, anticipating the self as it will be, a clear, honest, accurate glimpse of yourself as an arrived great soul, a role and level of genius. This soon-to-be-realized vision, of your heightened, more talented self, is soon to be you, the concrete existent.

 

This is the coming, emerging you that none other can see and will refuse to believe is possible as the awesome transformation of dull, average you. They retort that you are just a vain dreamer. But this dream is your prophecy come true, foretelling the future state of exciting, gifted, brilliant you, if you imagine who you will become, dare to believe in that miracle and work to bring it into existence.

Thugs

 

In response to the 10/7/2023 Hamas invasion and genocidal attacks upon Jewish citizens, Jordan Peterson, on 10/17/2023 wrote a paper that he read online. Its title: I am Pro-Muslim But Anti-Thug.

 

I took notes on and paraphrased, as best I could, what he said as he read that paper. I will comment on his reading.

 

Jordan: “I have talked to various Muslims differing in views about their faith, from atheist, ex-Muslims to moderate to conservative Muslims. I have done this because I believe Jews, Christians and Muslims share more in common than in division, and because I know there is no such thing as a world without religion, we all must do what is best with what we have been bequeathed.

 

I find myself in some serious online trouble because I encouraged Israeli authorities to give the Hamas terrorists all the hell they deserve.”

 

My response: Jordan is insightful: Jews, Christians and Muslims share the Abrahamic tradition, and they are all monotheistic faiths. As human beings, they have more in common than how they differ.

 

All religious denominations are naturally fanatical, fundamentalist, believing they are the one true faith, that only they have the key to the gates of heaven, that unbelievers and apostates should be put to death, or converted by indoctrination or by terror, force, torture, holy war or pressure. There are still fanatical Jewish and Christian fringe groups, but they have little influence and not many followers. Their encounter with reason and the Modernist Age have moderate, modernized, and demilitarized most of them.

 

Not so many Muslims. There are a few radical Islamists that are openly fanatical, violent extremists willing to run through critics, unbelievers, and apostates with the sword, and that they will go to heaven as they reward, for the blood dripping off of their wielded swords.

 

To criticize this faith is to encounter immediate anger, outrage, and claim to be offended. They will form mobs, riot, use death threats to silence any opponent so most critics are silenced. To assume and state that the one-true-Muslim-faith is perfect as it is, and is theologically always correct and always good, and that to deny that is to be killed, that fanatical reaction is to force opponents to be silenced, and to quell dissent and it works to often.

 

But I argue that what is good is moderate (one’s faith can be largely good and correct but never totally correct and totally good), and all faiths require scrutiny, skepticism, and open debate about their efficacy. To take the common Muslim response to criticism is to be fanatical, and to be fanatical is to be evil, so there is much evil in that faith that must be expunged, modernized, moderated and demilitarized.

 

Most differences are minor and along a spectrum, so fanatical purists making modest differences seem like insurmountable, monumental, black-and-white, stark contrasts or differences is a lie, and is a perfect way of keeping rival tribes or groups fighting forever. It is useful for war-makers and imperialists, not peace-making or improving relations between neighbors.

 

The core faith then will be moderated and modernized like Judaism and Christianity have been, and then the world will be much safer, and Muslims can go about setting up democracies, liberty, and capitalism so that their people can escape tyranny and taste prosperity and higher standards of living. Jordan Peterson says none of this, but I think he would agree with my argument here.

 

Muslims would consider me a racist, xenophobe and Islamophobic for this argument, but I deny these lies and absurd accusations, and, if they will receive Western criticism and reform themselves morally and perhaps doctrinally, their people would be much happier and suffer much less.

 

Jordan: “How could I say that while seeking rapprochement among people of Abrahamic traditions? Let us begin that discussion by rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. The monstrous attack by Hamas last week occurred not because Muslims and Jews must be at each other’s throats, but because Iran stirred up trouble. Iran is a country run by thugs even so deemed by their own people.

 

These thugs are concerned that Saudi Arabia was working on peace with Israel. Four Arab countries signed the Abraham Accords, a Trumpian initiative. Trump should have got a Nobel Peace Prize.

 

Behind the Arab signatories (UAR, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan) backed by the Saudis, things fell apart because, Biden, jealous of Trump, did not court the Saudis, so the latter were lost, alienated. This was a huge mistake. The Saudis would have come aboard the Abraham Accords if treated right.

 

So, there is violence again and the Saudis are angry and would not provide US with oil, and are talking to China.

 

The totalitarian mullahs of Iran worried the Accords’ succeeding would undermine and isolate them fatally.

 

Biden courts Iran. Is Iran a shining star in the distant firmament or a hag-ridden, psychological and criminal kleptocracy, religious in name only?

 

Let us turn for a moment to psychology, where psychology and psychopathy and psychic instability meet evil itself. The personality features are part and parcel of the danger to integrated psyche and state, and this danger is garnered by the nomenclature of Dark Triad.

 

The Dark Triad is a combination of machiavellianism (machiavellianism is instrumental manipulation and deceit.), narcissism (narcissism is inflated self-esteem and the desire for unearned attention and status.), and psychopathy is a malignant mixture of the criminal propensity, callousness and parasitism.”

 

My response: I am no psychologist but I am an insightful amateur of the human condition or psychic response and interaction with the world, and while I trust Peterson that he thinks the Dark Triad describes the vicious mullahs that run Iran, I caution the convergence of these malevolent personality traits arise in the parasite oppressor types living off of the suffering of millions of people. These callous, selfish narcissists and egotists are really groupist, the heads of the pack. These selfless, cruel apex predators are selfish collectivists, for whom group-living and group-orientation is their whole life. Their addiction to and obsession with accumulating unearned, undeserved power, stolen from their victims is not the honorable wielding of personal power implemented by a skilled, principled, egoistical supercitizen and individuator with a strong sense of civic duty.

 

Jordan: “The Dark Triad traits were identified by the intellectual descendants of Dr. Robert Hare who spent his life assessing and endeavoring to understand the worst of the habitual criminals that are responsible for the most barbaric and cruel misdemeanors, but the vast majority of criminal acts follow the famous Pareto Principle of talent and acquisition. This principle applies to the underworld too. As 1% of the people end up with 70% of the wealth, 1% of the criminals commit 70% of the crimes.

 

Now research has added an extra dimension to this criminal personality: sadism: the positive delight in the suffering of others, the more unnecessary and gratuitous, the better. The Dark Triad types fit well in the Cluster B personality disorders, including such delights as anti-social personality disorder borderline personality disorder (the female equivalent of the criminal tendency), histrionic personality disorder—also mostly female—and the narcissism personality disorder.

 

Those that manifest Cluster B symptomology and sins have, in addition to their other psychological and sociological dangerous tendencies, have a proclivity to claim positive virtue or outright victim status while pursuing their grandiose, self-serving, and destructive claims.”

 

My response: There is a lot of technical language being tossed around here, and it seems scientifically factual and applicable; note that the perpetrators lie about being virtuous (they are not) and about being victims (Victimizers often blame the victim to justify continuing to attack the innocent and defenseless.)

 

Jordan: “The Cluster-B types lie, cheat, steal, gossip, reputation-savage, brag, claim credit where it isn’t due, blame everyone but themselves (ED NOTE: Altruist bosses of criminal gangs blame others not themselves, but egoist individuators admit to their mistakes and clean up the messes they make—an ED NOTE.), all the while pursuing nothing but their own hedonistic self-gratification while championing their moral virtue or claimed, oppressed victim status. When they organize, they burn down society and dance orgiastically in the ruins. This happened after the French Revolution, in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany (ED NOTE: all collectivist arrangements—ED NOTE).

 

It is happening now in the West by the markedly Woke now spread by the power accessibility and irresponsibility of social media. There Cluster B nonsense propagates with none of the ordinary real-world consequences. Think now about how evil it is to extend your resentful, narrowly self-serving, juvenile, self-centered pleasure to do maximal harm to anyone skilled and conscientious enough to deserve a just reward.

 

In what guise would you treacherously cloak yourself. You could do so under a religious cover, masking the self in all that is traditional and ethical. That ruse is less effective in the West after the death of God and the collapse of religious authority.

 

 Here the Dark Triads portray themselves as the very avatars of compassion. We are for the downtrodden so then we can in good conscience punish the deservedly successful. We are for diversity because ethical unity (ED NOTE: Ethical unity is the high standard of objective morality for Peterson, I think.—ED NOTE) stands against our depredations. We are for inclusivity because our fetishes and kinks demand their full expression and to hell with everyone else. We are for equity because merit is our sworn enemy.

 

Imagine this: Queer For Palestine tear down everything in the West unifying with Hamas, a suicidal connection if ever manifested. Jews are to blame—really? Is Iran your idea of a worthy Muslim state whose citizens have been on the brink of revolution against their psychopathic masters for more than a year? Their leaders repress their own women. Iran unleashes the chains of its Hamas dogs to have a go at Israel to rile up Arabs, and if the Palestinians are destroyed, okay—all of this just so we can stay in power.

 

Muslims, who in the West back Hamas? University students demented by Wokeism and Professors that destroyed academia. The Marxists back Palestinians. Marxists hate Islam far more than the most fundamentalist Jew or Christian.

 

Marxists denounce religion as the opiate of the masses, religion that you share as Muslims with your Abrahamic brothers.

 

The LGBT are also demented allies of Hamas, uniting with the gangsters of Hamas and the mullahs of Iran, Dark Tetrad types all.

 

Israel is an oppressor state? The Palestinians in Israel are a lot better off than the Palestinians in Gaza, despite fortunes spent in that blighted area. Hamas leaders embezzle the money. Yasar Arafat took 1 billion dollars.

 

Muslims, can you trust Westerners allied with you, manipulating the endlessly repeating Muslim against Jew story? How is that allegiance better than recognizing your Abrahamic commonality with Jews and Christians?

 

Tell me how the decentralized structure of your faith so admirable in so many respects is being used by bloody psychopaths capturing it and making faith a front for criminal evil.

 

We are no better in the West. We listen to blandishments of postmodernist Marxist, Dark Triad mobs.

 

You are center stage right now with a choice to work with expanding the Abrahamic Accords among the Muslim people or allow the thugs in Iran and Palestine to prop their own miserable, tyrannical states You can go with the Accords and benefit, or follow the thugs.

 

The Hebrew Second Commandment is don’t take God’s name in vain. This does not just discount trivial swearing, but we are not to act in God’s name when acting on your own behalf or in the power of dark forces.”

 

My response: it is typical of vicious fanatics that they murder and conduct unholy wars in God’s name.

 

Jordan: “Jesus warned of public hypocrisy in three ways:

1.     Be not hypocrites being seen praying in public;

2.     Do not do your good works in public to show how noble you are.

3.     You will not get to heaven necessarily just by shouting, Lord, Lord. You better actually have done the will of the Father.

 

The mere claim that it is religious conviction that motivates personal action is no proof whatsoever that such is the case. It is very difficult to aim upwards in alliance with the spirit that wishes everything well and is in line with the truth. It is a path rife with moral hazards and the display of public virtue or high church or mosque position is not any guarantee that the God claimed to be present is actually there. Quite the contrary quite often.

 

You Muslims must remove the beam from your own eye to not take the path to righteous destruction. Rather the people of the book need a generous, wise, productive peace to heal this green orb.

 

We need a transcendental axis to revolve around, not a blinkered materialism or foolish populism to lift our eyes to the heavens beckoning.

 

You Muslims must do this, work for peace; we must all work together. This is why I am pro-Muslim and anti-thug.”

 

My response: It would be wise and good news if Muslims would moderate and many nations sign the Abrahamic Accords, but that is not likely to be.

 

Peterson does reach out to Muslims, but the online reaction is quite hostile against him. Here are some few that I looked at.

 

One young, educated Muslim man, reported by MEM (Middle East Monitor) completely excoriated Peterson for referring to Hamas as dogs. He thought Jews in Israel were colonizers who took Palestinian land.

 

Another critic denounced Peterson as not qualified to be a public speaker and celebrity, as not qualified to speak out on the subjects he speaks out on.

 

My take is that we want amateurs to have open, strong—hopefully reasonable, thoughtful—opinions stated in public about everything under the sun/ The more amateurs speak and dialogue in public, the better is our thinking, and the more knowledge and awareness humans gain. Spout off at length, Jordan.

 

 

Savagery

 

Kurt Schlicter writes editorials for Townhall and is a lawyer. This is his today’s editorial from Townhall, which I will quote in places and then comment on. The title of the editorial is: Accept That Savagery Is The True Nature of the World—and Deal With it.

 

My response Kurt is part right that savagery is part of—the evil part where endless warring and unceasing power struggles never end—the true nature of the world, but that goodness, civil society without endless internal war and internal power struggles or external power struggles and wars between countries, is achievable, if not permanent, but that, or goodness, is also part of the true nature of the world. He is correct, we must deal with the world as it is, not how we fantasize that it is.

 

Kurt: “If you want an indicator for how lost Western civilization has become, go to your kid’s school and check out their rules on fighting. Most likely, you’ll find out if two kids get into a fight, both get suspended, regardless of whether one is a punk bully who started it and the other was simply defending himself or some little kid. This is a moral disaster—violence in defense of what is right is a moral obligation and a symbol of the greater rot within society. This is the kind of rule created by middle-aged, divorced cat women who can neither find or satisfy a man and live in a tranquil bubble of affluent, frivolous safety and security created by their harder, worthier forebears who understood the world’s true nature.”

 

My response: his criticism is stinging, caustic, morally correct and wise. Violence in defense of what is right is a moral obligation. The cat women and Leftists punishing kids to repel bullies physically live in their sheltered, bubble world, but a society that seeks contemporary, lived Utopia where no violence exists and peace and love are universal, will be a society smashed and overthrown by criminals and revolutionaries in a few years.

 

Kurt: “The true nature of the world is savagery.

 

The true nature of the world is that good is forever pitted against evil (Ed Notes: Amen).

 

That has never changed. What has happened over the last 70 years or so was an interregnum of peace in the West, created by violence against barbarians and facilitated by people willfully looking away from the butchery still continuing at the fringes of the map. The West managed to build a civilization that was—for the first time in history since perhaps the Pax Romana—generally internally peaceful. And the West convinced itself that this was normal.”

 

My response: Kurt is right; remember that collectivists and totalitarian killers took 100 million lives in the 20^th century, all while the insular Americans glibly concluded that the world was filled with peaceful, loving people, born basically good, and that the current peaceful state of society was permanent and would last forever.

 

Kurt: “But it was not normal. It was an anomaly, a glorious one, but an anomaly nonetheless. The world is not a peaceful place; and it never was, and it never will be. Despite the best efforts of the arrogant left, human nature has not changed. Human nature is vicious and cruel. Rousseau’s noble savage nonsense, which we are still dealing with today in the form of eager sophomores in Che t-shirts slobbering over Hamas psychopaths—is a giant fraud. Savages are not distinguished by their nobility. Their savagery distinguishes them. And we need to find the moral strength to do what is necessary to defeat them.”

 

My response: Kurt is wise, but I have a couple of corrections to make. People are born vicious, and the world is not a peaceful place, but it could be if God’s Good Spirits and good values (the Ten Commandments plus Mavellonialist ethics) became common among citizens of America It would not be heaven on earth, but peace, civility and lawful settling of disputes would be commonplace.

 

The butcherers and Nazis, the young men of Hamas, that did the October 7^th killing of 1400 Jews in Israel are not psychopaths, but sinful, sane, ordinary young men, brainwashed and indoctrinated into true-believing foot soldiers of a genocidal ideology, radicalized Islam, and this psychopathic, insane holy cause released and gave moral cover for the murdering, raping and looting perpetrated by these rather regular young men. Irish youths, with the same sick training, would do the same. If Hamas young men were raised as Jewish youth in Israel, practicing the Jewish faith, they likely would be peaceful, lawful, civilized young men.

 

Yes, we must find the moral strength to defeat violent evildoers in the world by taking up arms against them in self-defense.

 

Kurt: “We must learn to kill again. We must again learn to destroy. We must learn again to be ruthless in defeating our enemies. The big lie that Western civilization tells itself is that there are no real enemies, that there are no bad people—except the people of the West themselves, who bear some sort of original sin for not being corrupt and inept Third World barbarians.

 

We do have enemies, as we have seen. We do have enemies, as they tell us. When they talk about decolonization, they are talking about de-you-ization. When they talk about killing settlers, you need to understand that you are a settler, and they mean killing you. They mean raping your daughter in front of you. They mean chopping your baby’s head off. They mean slaughtering your wife or husband, sons and daughters, and even your dog. And they mean enjoying it, reveling in the ecstatic glee of mass murder, and being so proud of it that they call home to their daddies and brag about it, or put up their body cam videos on Tik Tok.”

 

My response: Kurt is hard hitting but accurate. The Leftists and Islamists see all Jews, all Americans, all white people as illicit colonizers and occupiers, all to be wiped out.

 

Kurt: “The world was always a savage place. What happened on October 7 was not an anomaly. It was normality. What do you think happened in sacked cities in the past, which is what these Gaza-adjacent towns in Southern Israel essentially were? The attackers captured their objective, burned and razed the buildings, stole everything they could carry, raped everyone without a penis and some with, and piled corpses in the streets. We’re stunned simply because we forgot what a sack is, but for most of human history, people lived in terror of it happening to them, hoping for a chance to inflict one upon their neighbors.

 

We in the West, of which Israel is a part and thereby is hated, forget about this. Worse, we have forgotten our strength and our courage. We have forgotten that we survive not through gentle hugging but through sword-swinging. For example, we have forgotten how to conduct a siege. The idea that Israel should somehow give the Hamas barbarians food, water, and electrical power even if it surrounds Gaza and prepares to attack is mind-boggling insanity. The moral illiteracy of expecting Israel to care more about the Palestinian people than other Palestinians do is simply bizarre.”

 

My response: Well said.

 

Kurt: “Remember the Pax Romana. Do you think that peace just sort of occurred because everybody shared their feelings openly and without restraint? Do you know how the Romans did sieges? Let’s talk about Caesar at Alesia. The Gauls had gotten uppity and killed a lot of Romans, so Caesar decided to pacify them. The barbarian leader Vercingetorix took refuge in the hilltop town, and Caesar immediately surrounded it. He had his legionnaires build a giant wall around it to lock the Gauls inside. The Gauls called their friends for help, so Caesar built another wall around his besieging forces to keep the relief column at bay.  He starved out Alesia, eventually forcing the Gauls to attack and defeating them handily. Then he took Vercingetorix back to Rome, made him march in chains in triumph, and then had his defeated enemy strangled. This was an important learning point for the barbarians. Don’t screw with civilized people, or everyone dies.

 

This is how you get a Pax Romana. There’s no other way.

 

The hard truth is that the world contains bad people who must be crushed through ruthless violence, which shocks and horrifies modern sensibilities. But it is reality nonetheless.”

 

My response: he is right we must keep a strong military, and use it when necessary to quell aggressors, to keep Pax Americana alive.

 

Kurt: “When people want to kill you, you are at a decision point. You can either let them kill you or stop them. But stopping them often involves aesthetically displeasing actions, such as blowing them into little bits with bombs or shoving a bayonet in their guts and watching them die in agony. And it necessarily means inflicting death and damage on the noncombatant camp followers around them. That’s why they say war is hell. And that’s why starting one is probably not a good idea. But when someone starts one, you have to choose them or you. Someone is going to die badly, and you know, I propose it is those other guys.”

 

My response: There are good times when good people have to go to war to keep evil at bay.

 

Kurt: “The West didn’t start this fight, but it damn well better finish it, or they will finish us. Time to stop being soft. It’s time to stop lying to ourselves. It’s time to stop pretending that human nature took a 180 degree change a few decades ago and that we are not the same animals we used to be because now we have cars, airplanes, and Instagram.

 

We are the same brutal, cruel and warlike creatures we have always been. Every headline, every act of hideous violence, and every pro-genocide cheer by the grad school sociopaths who fetishize Third-World savages, proves it. What we have to do is lift the scales from our eyes, understand the situation we are in, and accept it.”

 

My response: I like what he warns about, but the grad school ideologues are not sociopaths: there are regular young adults, radicalized, true-believers that would do anything to promote their holy cause, and that ideology is twisted, dark and sociopathic.

 

Kurt: “For the last couple of generations, we in the West have told ourselves that we have changed. We told ourselves that we are beyond violence. And we told ourselves that everyone else was too. But that was a lie.’

 

My response: It was a big lie. We have not changed for human nature has not changed, for we are still basically violent and evil.

 

Kurt: “We need to stop lying to ourselves. A society that suspends both kids when one of them slugs a bully is signing its ow suicide note.

 

Even if our leaders refuse to be clear-eyed, you can be. Buy guns and ammunition.”

 

 

 

Kristallnact

 

 

Journalist and Christian Scott Hogenson, today (10/29/2023) wrote an editorial for Townhall, and I will quote some lines from it and respond to his ideas. The title of the article was Slouching Toward Kristallnact.

 

Hogenson: “Something sinister is happening before our eyes. An alarming number of Americans blame Israel for the murder of civilians by Hamas terrorists October 7, and violence against the Jews is rising precipitously.”

 

My response: the tradition of ghettos, pogroms, and periodic efforts at genocide against the Jews was almost finished with the Holocaust, and today Islamists and Leftists—even here in America want them wiped out in Israel to the last one, from the sea to the river. They are not kidding and will do it if they can.

 

The consistent and periodic flare-up of Jew-hating and Jew-killing is all I need to know that they are God’s chosen people, and the rest of us, based in envy, devil worship and altruistic amorality, living in sin in a world run by Lucifer and Lera, working to wipe them out—that is the proof that I point to as proving that evil exists and it is the human heart, unreformed and untrained by God.

 

Hogenson: “It began before the dead were buried, when a group of Harvard students issued a statement proclaiming they ‘hold the Israeli regime responsible for all unfolding violence.’ Days later, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres cribbed a line from that statement, saying the killing of Israeli civilians ‘did not occur in a vacuum.’ In cities across the nation, Americans chant for Palestine to seize land ‘from the river to the sea,’ promoting the annihilation of Israel and the Jews living there.

 

Today, American Jews are forced to hide behind locked doors in fear of attack of pro-Hamas activists. Jewish middle school students are threatened with taunts of ‘kill the Jews.’ In Brooklyn, Jews are being warned to stay in their homes this weekend because militants supporting the Gaza charter calling for ‘the destruction of Israel’ massed in their neighborhood.

 

The Anti-Defamation League reports that anti-semitic threats and violence have risen nearly 400% in just two weeks, and a recent Harvard Caps Harris poll revealed that more than half of 18-24 year old Americans think the murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians by Hamas was justified. They blame the victims; the Jews had it coming.

 

Some people are simply bigots that hate Jews. But others who are not dogmatically opposed to Israel or Jewish people are persuadable toward this pro-Hamas position. They can be misled into victim blaming, believing Israel could have avoided the massacre if only Jews were better people.

 

There is a body of research on why people blame victims, much of it reflecting secular beliefs about the nature of man and society. One reason was postulated by psychologist Melvin Lerner who pioneered the ‘just-world’ theory. It’s described as a ‘psychological concept proposing the individuals possessing a strong belief in the inherent fairness of the world, where people get what they deserve, and deserve what they get.’”

 

My response: As a staunch individualist, I always advocate blaming the victim. Often, he may not be  to blame for his unfortunate state or his suffering, but I want him to take responsibility and then self-realize so that, as an individuator, he is most enabled to recover, and empowered to battle the forces that hurt him and hold him down. It is what I refer to as a useful fiction that the victim blame himself first, and the society blame him too. A corollary to this is that society must agree to protect him against evildoers hurting him, and make sure he has equal opportunity to succeed so that he is free to better himself by his own effort.

 

In no way am I for pathetic, loser groupists looking for victims to blame and attack for their own worthless lives. We should never victimize anyone nor allow anyone to victimize us. If we blame ourselves when we are victims, it is tough love so that we resolve to climb up out of the morass that we are stuck in.

 

Hogenson: “As essay by Young Leaders for Legal Literacy Foundation explores Lerner’s theory observing: ‘One’s need to maintain a belief in a just world may be at fault for our tendency to blame victims. When bad things happen to someone that seems a lot like us, this threatens our belief that the world is a just place.”

 

My response: There is Prager moral clarity at work when cowards and popular insiders in a society, part of the popular majority, subjectively assume that they are nice and moral, and if any of the majority are thugs going after victims, it is just morally easy to live with their attacking innocent victims, if we just declare that the world is just, and the victims had it coming. That is cowardice and mendacity, no proof of the just world outside one’s window.

 

Hogenson: The theory is intriguing but in order to have a fair and just world, the world must be filled with fair and just people. (Ed NOTES: EXACTLY!) The belief in the natural goodness of man –widely promoted through the works of Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacque Rosseau and others—is accompanied by the theory that man’s goodness is corrupted by society. Taken as a whole, it’s a false utopian philosophy that invites anarchy by rationalizing bad behavior.

 

This view of man’s nature is diametrically opposed to the biblical view. Ask any Bible-believing Christian about the nature of man and they’ll say it is sinful and corrupt. The notion of man as naturally sinful isn’t universal but it is foundational to Judeo-Christian thought. It might explain why so few Christians blame Israel for the Hamas attack. Christians can debate Israel’s response to Hamas, but I don’t know any claiming that Jewish civilians deserved to be killed. If there are any, they’re in miniscule fringe seeking 15 minutes of fame.

 

This differing perspectives matter when talking about Israel and Hamas. Those subscribing to Rousseauean and similar philosophies see Hamas as a organization of fundamentally good people who were corrupted by society and the state of Israel. It gives terrorists a pass, as do many pro-Hamas agitators marching in the streets today. But to those adhering to biblical precepts, Hamas is an organization of sinful people who demonstrated their sinfulness in a orgy of murder and rape, and who are solely responsible for their actions.

 

The larger issue, however, is what kinds of societies these conflicting worldviews foster. While the biblical view promotes order, the secular view foments chaos, gratifying American Leftists and other authoritarians. It is another reason the Left is keen on denigrating Judeo-Christian values, paving the way for new violence.”

 

My response: Leftists are secular, and Islamists and Hamas are religious, but both are true-believing fanatics willing to use violence, terror, and revolution to spread their causes everywhere. There is a demonic spirit running through the ethos of these haters and killers, be their secular or religious, and wiping out Jews works for them just fine.

 

Hogenson: “America is slouching towards Kristallnact, the seminal pogrom against innocent Jews across Germany on the evening of November 9-10, 1938. Thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were looted and burned. Men were arrested by the tens of thousands for the crime of being Jewish. Others were simply murdered.”

 

My response: Israel must wipe out Hamas, I hope with minimum death to civilians, but the Arabs in Egypt and elsewhere should open refugee camps for them in Sinai Desert immediately. Hamas must be liquidated in Gaza, and no talk of a two-state Palestine unless the Palestinians agree that Israel has a right to exist in peace.

 

Hogenson: “We need to wake up before a tipping point arrives. A staggering 51% of college age Americans think the barbaric Hamas murders of Israeli civilians were justifiable, an attitude likely to metastasize. This is why defending the biblical view of man’s nature is so critical. We cannot confront evil without first understanding the inherent sinfulness of man.”

 

My response: Amen.

Until We Come To Life

 

In a social, traditional, more natural than contrived, controlled, man-made landscape, where 94% of adults group-live, do not self-realize, where they reinforce each other’s evil, innate proclivity to lead lives of mediocrity and quiet desperation, the product of such mass, socialized pathology is much needless suffering, sinning, and widespread unhappiness.

 

But, between these peers, there is also some—the degree varies from a little enjoyment of each other to extreme, actual love and enjoyment of each other, depending on the particular clique, and the moral health of its participants—pleasant, mutual gratification gained from each other’s company.

 

Where group-livers are ethnically, racially, religiously, or culturally homogeneous, it is easier for them to enjoy each other. They may be of the same nation, region, tribe, or community sharing customs and values. They may belong to the same socioeconomic class and share roughly the same degree of social rank and degrees of being popular or unpopular within their clique, so they are telling the truth when they insist that they enjoy each other. There is not much internal conflict among them.

 

As humans began to come to life in this new century, if the Mavellonialist ethos catches on—and it will eventually after I am dead for truth and better ideas, at first ignored, dismissed, and suppressed as the rantings of a crank, will hold sway when adopted by most of a new generation as obviously useful and practical.

 

Once the Mavellonialist ethos goes mainstream, accepted and normalized, then this godly, ethical, artificial, contrived, unnatural, angelic new culture with its ennobling values, awakening the weak impulse in each adult to grow and live, of their own free will of course, will expand and reach out across our country until 75% of adults fear and love the Divine Couple, individual-live and self-realize as revealed, recommended and rewarded by the still becoming Good Spirits, the servants and followers of the Divine Couple, growing evermore in wisdom, talent, skill and love.

 

 The becoming trajectory blazed by the becoming Good Spirits sends them towards some perhaps infinite, unreachable end. Then, for their followers, the individuating masses here on earth, whatever degree of group-living and enjoyment of others (family, spouse, friends, peers, neighbors, strangers, and business associates) should large be a morally wholesome social process. It should be mostly non-competitive, with little fighting for power and position, rather cooperative.

 

In these social arrangements, a society of supercitizens would associate with each other for fun or necessity, and disputes over rank, values, economic and political differences of opinion could be dialogued and resolved without too much fuss or delay.

 

Each individuating supercitizen can then go in and out of group-living arrangements with little fuss. It then should be easier to find lasting, loyal friends, or just pleasant, calm encounters and interactions with strangers.

To Remain Free

 

On 9/6/2021, atheist and ex-Islamic believer, Somalin-born, Dutch, and now American citizens and intellectual, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, narrated a video for Prager U, entitled What Radical Islam and The Woke Have in Common. I took notes on the video and will comment on them.

 

Ali: “There were many American heroes on 9/11 but the greatest were the crew and passengers of Flight 93. They saw and prevailed the plane from hitting the White House. They embodied Patrick Henry’s motto: “Give me liberty or give me death.’ Do these words still hold meaning?

 

For 20 years I have spoken out against those strands of Islam that gave rise to Al Qaeda. I have faced many death threats,”

 

My response: The very courageous Ali faced and faces numerous death threats, and this is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the threat-givers are vicious, violent group of fundamentalist thugs, but why does not the majority of Muslims, who are always telling they are peaceful and nonviolent (and perhaps most of them are), but no other great religion’s leaders and theologians would fail to publicly so shame these potential killers for threatening to kill dissidents and outspoken critics, that they would not be able to make these public threats without severe condemnation and isolation.

 

Ali: “I have always consoled myself that freedom of conscience and expression were paramount values.”

 

My response: Her encountering the murderous, violent, mass movement, fanatic outcry against dissidents, shouted out by angry, mobs in her faith, may have been a factor in her becoming an atheist. Now, radical fascists or Communists, secular, irreligious or pagan, can be just as vicious and intolerant to their opponents.

 

I agree with Dennis Prager that more murder is committed by the godless—especially in the 20^th century—than by the religious. Fanaticism is the enemy, not religion. If what is good spiritually and morally is what is rational more than emotional, moderate more than fanatical, individual more than groupist, egoist more than collectivist, peaceful more than violent, then Islam can still be a viable, great faith in the future, but its followers must shed the violence, the intolerance, the fanaticism, the concepts of jihad and holy war against infidels and apostates. These are from Satan not from God.

 

Ali: “This is part of why I moved here in 2013. It never occurred to me that free speech would be threatened here but in 2014 I was offered an honorary degree at Brandeis University and then ungraciously disinvited. My early encounter with cancel culture did not stress me too much.

 

I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus Leftists and Islamists as the lunatic fringe. They are not the fringe anymore. Academia, the media and corporations have inculcated a generation of students with an ideology that has much in common with the intolerant doctrines of a religious cult, than with the secular political thought that I studied at Leiden University.

 

In the debate after 9/11 many sought materialist explanations for the attacks the jihadis that they lacked educational and employment opportunities. They were angry at American foreign policy. I argued that none of these explained the motivations of the hijackers most of whom came from middle class or upper-class families.

 

Their goal was religious and political to denounce Arab governments as corrupt and its Western allies as infidels. Their ultimate goal was to overthrow the existing order in the Middle East and establish a caliphate.”

 

My response: Below the brilliant, principled Ali will show what the woke Left and the Islamists have in common (and where they differ), but I want to point out another similarity. Just as the jihadis and hijackers of 9/11 were excused by their Progressive apologists as doing what they did for material reasons, when in fact their immaterial, ideological, religious grievances were what propelled them onward to terrorism and war, so to the cultural Marxists today claim to social warriors bringing revolution and totalitarianism out of their outraged, compassionate need to do something for the downtrodden identity groups that they champion, in truth they want to take over all countries and the world—it is all a power grab in disguise and their fanatical ideology is their cover. Marxism and Islamists seek raw power in the name of being noble ideology when they are but killers and butchers.

 

I did some moderate online research and the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to Ali as an anti-Muslim extremist (typical of Islamists and Leftists to label as extremist and haters, those critics that oppose them, when it is the Leftists and Islamists doing extremist, intolerant canceling of alternative voices.) and some sources, I could not re-find them, call her a neo-Orientalists (According to Wikipedia, “. . . contemporary neo-Orientalists are not, however, merely ‘native informants or ‘comprador intellectuals’ . . . but rather Middle Eastern women and men who use their native subjectivity and new-found agency in the West to render an otherwise biased account of the region . . .’) but her personal suffering as a Muslim woman and her subsequent university education, and her brilliant, critical mind do not make her a traitor to her people whose bias is slandering a perfect religion and culture.

 

She is legitimate, accurate and objective—note how she criticizes American Leftist excesses as well as those of the Islamists from her own faith and region. She is warning us that fanatics and ideologues of any stripe anywhere are dangerous and favor world conquest. For me this makes her a wise, brave truth-teller to be respected and heeded.

 

At another spot on the Internet, they dismissed her criticisms of Islam as uninformed and without merit because she is not a PhD scholar and expert on Islam and the Koran. Experts and professors and mullahs run in packs as a mob, so such group-oriented, elite class rulers of the masses, are devoid of wisdom and truth, so they are capable of the dumbest and most cruel solutions to keep the people down and in check. Dennis Prager repeatedly notes that any Catholic school or Jewish school 12 year-old possesses far more God-based wisdom than any self-righteous, arrogant, atheist secular, ideological professor, Leftist or Islamic mullah, Their groupism and their fanatics converts their highly credentialed brightness and goodness into folly, cruelty and human rights abuses. I will stick with Ali and her criticisms of Leftism and Islamism though her amateur, not-expert opinion of these two groups is insightful and correct.

 

Ali: “American policy-makers preferred the materialist explanations as they implied actions to solve the impasse: invasion, regime change, democratization.”

 

My response: I have been a neo-conservative but these efforts may not work in the Middle East if the people are not ready to modernize and have working democracies.

 

Ali: “It was unpopular to suggest that the terrorists might have unshakable convictions having nothing to do with material considerations.

 

Now to the American Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 explained as the result of the material disadvantages. These are real as are the far more serious socioeconomic problems of the Arab world.

 

But they hide the leaders’ real motives. Their ideology goes by many names: social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality but I call it all Wokeism.

 

Wokeism cannot be equated with Islamism. Islamism is a militant strain of an ancient faith. Its believers have a coherent sense of what Allah wants them to achieve on earth to earn rewards in the afterlife.

 

Wokeism is just another version of Marxism. It scorns the idea of religion and an afterlife. Wokeism divides society into myriad identities (Ed Notes: identity groups). Islam’s division is simpler: believers and unbelievers.

 

There are other differences but consider the similarities: The adherents of each pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude.”

 

My response: both Leftists and Islamists are true-believing promoters of their fanatically praised, mass-movementized, holy cause to be spread across the world. We are all correct, all—knowing, all-good, and those that criticize us even a little and accurately are all-evil, all-wrong, all-subhuman, all-worthless so we are allowed by our own perfect status and state to deal with them as cruelly as possible as this extermination of enemies is for their sake and the world’s sake.

 

Ali: “Neither will engage in debate. Both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation for those that resist.”

 

My response: Westerners must not submit to their indoctrination or forget to defend ourselves should they take up holy war against us infidels.

 

Ali: “Both have distinctive rituals. Islamists shout Allahu Akbar and Death To America. The Woke shout Black Lives Matter and I Can’t Breathe.

 

Islamists pray to Mecca, the Woke take a knee.

 

Both burn the American flag.

 

Both take offense at every opportunity and demand not just apologies but concessions.”

 

My response: We must pride ourselves at speaking the truth and speaking unpleasant truths and our unwelcome opinions. If Islamists, the Woke or other fanatics furiously take false offense as an attack ploy and seek to see us wilt under their withering assault that we are Islamophobic or racist, we should assertively repeat our claims to their face without flinching, offering neither apology nor concession where none is deserved.

 

We will speak our truth, and if they do not like to bad. If they threaten us, we will defend ourselves vigorously and be bullied or intimidated by no mob of thugs.

 

Ali: “Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with Utopias that always turn into hellish anarchies.

 

Both are collectivist and group identity trumps the individual (Ed Notes: Collectivists and group identifiers are altruistic, fanatical and imperialistic, so they are evil by definition, not to be heeded or surrendered to.).

 

Both glorify and celebrate violence carried out by zealots (Zealots using violence to ‘convert’ apostates are walking devils on earth.).

 

 

The grievances of the Woke and Islamists are not just economic. They won’t be satisfied with entitlements or other blandishments offered by politicians. Their motivations are ideological, and they will not be satisfied only power and then they will demand more power.”

 

My response: It is hard for the naïve and foolishly optimistic to understand that fanatics or ideologues, of any stripe, will talk peace, free speech, coexistence, tolerance, nonviolence and mutual cooperation, but, they are lying and buy time. They have the one true, holy cause, and that is their only and all-consuming loyalty. They intend to take all that you have: your wealth, your women, your property, your freedom, your land, even your lives. All they live for is absolute control of everyone and everything everywhere by any means necessary to win. They live in a bubble of total lies, so they can justify whatever horrors and suffering their inflict on outsiders and infidels, and they will square their actions with their coopted consciences quite easily as they sleep well at night and rule supreme. There is no goodness or honesty in them. Do not compromise with wicked people. Fight them to the death and give them not one inch ever, and stay armed no matter what they Biden Administration preaches after the Maine shooting by Mr. Card.

 

Ali: “I cling to the hope that most Americans are still willing to fight and if necessary, die to preserve our freedoms, rights, customs and history.”

 

 

 

 

Carol Swain

 

Carol Swain, a black lawyer, and PhD of political science, inspires me. She narrated a video for Prager U on 1/11/21, entitled What I Can Teach You About Racism. She lectures that she practiced what she preaches, that she arose out of teenage motherhood, poverty, and Southern systemic racism to make it large in life, and if she can do it, any black youth or anyone else can do it. Anything else is a lie, period, and the Progressives are doing all youths, including black youth no favors, by telling them that, without being white with white privilege, those of intersectionalized, identity group backgrounds cannot make it in America today, that they cannot Horatio Alger their way to success. All gaslighting, brainwashing and bull-crap.

 

I took note on Swain’s short video and will respond to it.

 

Swain: “Let me tell you what I have achieved: I am a tenured, award-winning professor of political science at a leading university in the South. I grew up dirt poor in rural Virginia and had 3 kids by the age of 20.

 

I worked hard, not crazy hard 24 hours a day, but hard. I made good decisions—not brilliant 3-dimensional chess decisions—but good decisions.

 

I had help along the way and most of those that aided me were white. They did not do it because they had something to gain, but just because they were decent people.

 

But I was blessed in one crucial way. I was born in America, a land of true opportunity for anyone of any color. Where you start from does not determine where you end, and where you start from, well-off, does not determine where you end up at.

 

It all depends on your attitude, not your race, gender, or class. You determine where you end up in life."

 

My response: I love this smart, fine woman. If kids in America, of any color, class or gender would learn to individuate, to individual-live and work hard and make good decisions like impoverished young Carol Swain did, there would be almost no poverty in America, and the race-baiters and victimhood hustlers would go bankrupt and dry up and blow away.

 

With good values, a can-do-attitude of refusing to ever quit seeking to excel, being a proponent of large personal ambition and working hard to make it all happen, no one can be held down and back for very long, let alone being denied the kind of success that the impressive Swain has made a reality for her and her family.

 

The sky is the limit, or close thereunto. Sheer willpower, fierce self-discipline, unshakable self-confidence will self-propel the self-realizer forward to prosperity, promotion, and excellence.

 

Swain: “When I hear that talk about systemic racism being fed to young blacks, I do not know whether to laugh or cry. I want to laugh because it is nonsense. I want to cry because it is pushing down untold numbers of young blacks into self-pity and despair.

 

Instead of seizing amazing opportunities that America offers, they seize excuses for why they did not succeed.

 

I was born into a world where systemic racism was real, outright bigotry, back-of-the-bus real. Yes, racism shaped black experience, but it did not define it.”

 

My response: Define yourself, and let no one convince that you are not worthy of becoming or cannot become almost anything you want if you work hard enough and stay at it long enough.

 

Swain: “Change was in the air. Call it systemic reform. The civil rights movement was in its infancy. People of all races were fighting for civil rights. They believed in America and wanted to see it live up to its highest ideals manifested in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

 

Did I know Washington and Jefferson were slave owners. I likely didn’t think about it. We cannot judge men that lived 250 years ago by today’s moral standards.

 

I know that Jefferson wrote that all men were created equal, and that led to the ending of slavery. I know that Washington and the Founders risked everything to make my America possible. I feel grateful and proud of America. US is the greatest country in the world. I knew if I diligently pursued my ambition, I could leave the poverty of my early years behind, all that abuse and depression.

 

I am grateful that I was spared the life-sapping, negative messages about America crippling a generation of young people; they are poison.”

 

My response: Swain is fair: the Founders were not perfect men, and some were slave owners, but they fought for individual liberty in a constitutional republic with free enterprise and limited government, and that is a wonderful blessing for blacks and whites to be provided with opportunity to become prosperous and accomplished.

 

Those woke negative messages have taken down young blacks, but also many young whites—especially males—that required tough-love reassurance from Jordan Peterson to feel encouraged and worthy of growing up, getting married, having a good job, children, a career.

 

Swain: “These ideas are white privilege, whiteness as a form of property, unconscious racism, microaggressions, police have it out for blacks, reparations, and the United States was created to protect and promote slavery.

 

The young have been taught to reject the success principles that helped me and millions of others to escape lives of poverty.

 

These are not complicated ideas: work hard, learn from your mistakes, take personal responsibility for your actions.

 

When I decided to get my high school diploma, go to community college and then four additional degrees, I made it.

 

In graduate school, I was introduced to Academic theories of oppression suggesting that being black, poor, and female, I could not do what I had already done."

 

My response: What a fine woman. If this video, if viewed by young people, does not inspire them to manage themselves to success, then there is no hope for them.

 

White Privilege

 

There are plenty of reverse-racists that hate white people that go on and on about white privilege. Most whites have had to work hard to get to where they are. I grew up in a poor rural family whose parents in 1966 had an income of around $10,000 for a family to ten.

 

Today, my family and I are modestly prosperous. I worked two jobs for 20 years. I was a full-time janitor for 21 years, and now I am a maintenance engineer and handyman, so do not tell me about my white privilege. I am 69 years old and still work full time.

 

Still, there is privilege to being white—or anyone else in this country as some observant person noted that white privilege is being born in America, but that applies to all Americans. If you apply yourself here, as an industrious individual, you can achieve at least some level of material success.

 

The other privilege enjoyed by white Americans and all Americans is to be the recipient of good values, the American and Western set of values, growing out of our Greek and Judeo-Christian cultures origins.

 

With the right values, we know that we as individuals can better ourselves through self-reliance, honesty, hard work, consistent employment and managing our financial resources prudently. That is the fantastic promise of America.

Make It Here

 

There is so much wealth, freedom, and opportunity available to everyone is America, that you can become prosperous with hard work, saving, investment and discipline. You may even become a millionaire, mildly rich or fantastically rich.  You can do this: you can make it here.

 

The Primacy

 

I subscribe to and receive frequent online, emailed publications from Chris Rufo. I received one today (10/27/23) which I will quote some pertinent lines from and then respond to. The name of Rufo’s publication is The Primacy of Culture, Why changing the law is not enough to defeat left-wing capture.

 

Rufo: “The editors of Aporia magazine have published an essay comparing my book America’s Cultural Revolution which argues that cultural and institutional capture are at the heart of the radical Left’s rise to power, to Richard Hanania’s book The Origins of Woke, which argues that civil rights law is the key mechanism for explaining the rise of left-wing politics.

 

My response: Hanania is a lawyer and he may be right that civil rights law, gone woke and pushing group rights for various intersectional victim groups, may well undergird the cultural war that the conservatives are losing.

 

Rufo: “Juxtaposing the two books helps to answer a fundamental question: how do we; change society—through political or institutional/cultural capture? Obviously both approaches are needed; after all, the left took both approaches. But at this moment of leftist hegemony, where should the right focus its efforts? In science there is a distinction between ultimate and proximate causes; if politics is downstream of culture, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say, the efforts should be concentrated on the ultimate cause, culture. But if civil rights law is the ultimate cause of woke culture, then just changing legislation would be enough. . . . ‘

 

My response: we should do both at the same time; I wish I was not so invisible and unknown for Mavellonialism could provide a powerful philosophical underpinning, with its political conception of the anarchist individuator supercitizens jump-starting, ruling, and energizing the political system, and supercitizens that maverize, would revolutionize and crush woke culture.

 

Rufo: “If Hanania is right, then abolishing wokeness is simply a matter of taking over the government . . . and passing the right laws. Effects will then trickle down to the culture in the space of a few decades. But if Rufo is right, then what’s required is a painstakingly long process of intellectual and political activism: the anti-woke crowd needs to actually start caring to sacrifice their barbecues and become committed activists.”

 

My response: we lost the legal and cultural battle by not being political and cultural activists: the meaning of each supercitizen is that each is very politically involved, every day, every month, every year for a lifetime to not let ideologues, left or right, to take hold of our country. If good is not active, then foolish, inferior, evil thinkers, and their poor solutions, fill the void predictably and inevitably.

 

Rufo: “To an extent, my argument is that this is a ‘both/and’ scenario. The radical Left captured America’s institutions through cultural conquest and well as using civil rights law as a powerful tool for formalizing its rule. The solution to this problem, logic would seem to dictate, will require countering both approaches. But the question that Ivanov raises is one of emphasis and centrality: which is the proximate cause, and which is the ultimate cause?

 

We can discern the relative weight of ‘culture versus law’ by conducting a simple thought experiment: if we could instantly abolish one of these conditions, which would be more effective? That is, would we remove the cultural elements of left-wing radicalism—the ideology, the language, the activists within the institutions—or would we remove the provisions of civil rights law that enabled its bureaucratization?

 

I believe the answer is clearly the former. As Ivanov notes, Hanania himself writes that ‘the text of civil rights law is actually quite innocuous, and it was only through judicial and bureaucratic activism that such law became a tool of social engineering.’ In other words, civil rights law, and especially its interpretation, is dependent on the culture that surrounds it. Activists shape the conceptions, detach them from their original intentions, and apply them ideologically as a matter of policy. The legal text becomes nothing more than a justification for and an instrument of the broader cultural war.

 

This is an unhappy conclusion for the Right. To stop the advance of left-wing radicalism will require more than winning elections and changing laws; it will require deep cultural and institutional change, led by, in Ivanov’s words, ‘a community of people who are ready to fight for their ideals, and who command power.’

 

What do you think? What is the ‘ultimate cause of woke’: culture, law, or something else.”

 

My response:  I accept Rufo’s opinion that in fighting wokeness, we need to win the cultural war more than just changing laws, but we must fight both battles simultaneously.

 

The ultimate cause of woke is spiritual: the Good Spirits fight the Evil Spirits for mastery in this world, and the children of darkness has fooled billions of people by masking their attack upon people under the claims of morality (the fake morality of identity politics, group rights, collectivist economic and totalitarian political remedies), compassion and social justice battles supposedly  waged for the sake of the downtrodden and have-nots, when these useful idiots are but tools for the leaders of the children of darkness to take over the whole world, binding all to their blighted wills.