Modernity’s gift to “them”

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 14 November 2010 01:44.

Now and again even left-of-centre commenters make useful observations. Like this one in the Independent on Sunday:

So, how does the average British citizen regard the state? The first problem lies in the existence of that shadowy entity known to social historians as “them”. In their myriad guises, “they” can be positively protean, taking in everything from the tax authorities to park-keepers. To my father “they” were a malign and anti-meritocratic force at work to obstruct his and his family’s path through life.

... But if you get rid of “them”, what do you put in their place? Here you face another problem; the almost complete lack of civic awareness and communal spirit shown by a good 80 per cent of the population. Orwell himself once proposed that most of the patriotic flag-waving that takes place in this country was carried out by small minorities. The same is true of collective action. It is not even that we are all sturdy individualists, for whom collaboration is a kind of selling out, merely that, rather than having any deeply held opinions about how our relationship to the state might be better managed, we simply want to be left alone while, paradoxically, enjoying all the benefits that the state has to offer.

For “civic awareness and communal spirit” read “a sense of peoplehood and belonging”. Then the second paragraph reads absolutely, depressingly true. And truer than the general run of nationalist excuses as to why we have acquiesced while the political class has imposed its genocidal will on us. The “them” of the Talmudic (or, anyway, millenarian) Jew, anyone? The “them” of the greed-driven banker and the CEO of a mega-corporation? Or of the eponymous guilt-ridden left-liberal of the cultural Establishment? And then, somehow, in its turn MacDonald’s meta-thesis of innate individualism never quite convinces. Out-group nepotism likewise. But this idea of limited intellect and limited horizons, of an all-too-easy immersion in the mundane preoccupations of modern life, of mounting debt, of mounting material expectations, of fear of unemployment ... this hits home. This is how life is for most people. It used to be physically exhausting, dangerous, disease-ridden, destitute. Somewhere in modernity’s struggle to do away with all that the relation between citizen and state was mislaid, and into the void slithered the Jewish niche-fillers and the greedy bankers and so on. They are not where we, as dissidents and lovers of our people, have to take aim politically. Rather, we have to find incentives for re-engagement that touch real lives. And that’s not easy.

Tags: Oh Tempora, Oh Mores

Comments:

Posted by Drifter on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 03:19 | #

The modern state is in perpetual conflict with culture, which is eventually subverted, followed by race, which apparently soon follows culture’s fate. Yet, we’re born to our respective races and from these grow cultures.

The state has an idealized human template from which it draws rules for all to fit into, yet there is no living individual who perfectly fits this imaginary template. Many people are a poor match for it. Some of these mismatches occupy early graves, find themselves imprisoned, or emigrate.

Posted by Notus Wind on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 03:47 | #

Modernity’s “gift”, I like that.

You do know that in your slickness you’ve created the perfect ideological Rorschach test for people on the far right. I won’t say another word.

Rather, we have to find incentives for re-engagement that touch real lives. And that’s not easy.

The well will run dry, necessity is the mother of invention.

Posted by Bill on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 10:42 | #

Welfare state, daytime television, equal outcomes. All must have prizes.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 11:12 | #

The problem with necessity in our scenario is that it probably means war. I would rather we do this peacefully.

Posted by Wandrin on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 17:11 | #

60 years of deliberate demoralization and division. How can there be collective action when any sense of “us” has been systematically undermined? There’s plenty of collective action among those groups who haven’t been the target of that demoralization.

Posted by Hail on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 09:29 | #

Article:
the almost complete lack of civic awareness and communal spirit shown by a good 80 per cent of the population

As Diversity Rises, Communal-Spirit Falls. It might as well be a Newtonian Law.

I need not point out to MR regulars the following study out of Harvard:

Neighborly Trust Low in Diverse Areas

“In the presence of diversity, we hunker down,’ [lead researcher Putnam] said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.” [emphasis added]

A wide array of other measures of social capital and civic engagement are also negatively correlated with ethnic diversity. In areas of greater diversity, our respondents demonstrate:
—Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
—Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in their own influence.
—Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
—Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
—Less likelihood of working on a community project.
—Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
—Fewer close friends and confidants.
—Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
—More time spent watching television and more agreement that ‘television is my most important form of entertainment.’

http://vdare.com/sailer/070701_diversity.htm

Posted by calvin on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:27 | #

It is not even that we are all sturdy individualists, for whom collaboration is a kind of selling out, merely that, rather than having any deeply held opinions about how our relationship to the state might be better managed, we simply want to be left alone while, paradoxically, enjoying all the benefits that the state has to offer

The state provides no benefits. The state provides services, which we pay for. The state has assumed an authority over the people of Britain that it has no right to assume. I don’t need any opinions about the state that are anymore “deeply held” than my opinion of the people who take away my trash. The state can either do its job, or it cannot do its job, and unless the job of this state is to give away the actual physical territory of its rightful owners, whose ancestors have lived here for centuries, and to enslave us to international financial carpetbaggers, it is guilty of criminal negligence and should face the consequences.“To be left alone” ? Being left alone is a supremely noble desire, the diametrical opposite to the herd like, small man desire to interfere, snoop and poke one’s miserable snout into every aspect of their neighbours lives. The author of the comment is a fool, whose “pox on all your houses” posturing is both a fashionable pose and a cowardly cop out.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:39 | #

MacDonald’s theory of individualism is not driven by innateness but by the pressures of the Church and the aristocracy, whereas Confucianism highly valued extended kinship relationships. However, more generally people off load unto the state responsibilities and costs that would be demanded of them by extended kin. It is kinship, not a racial collective that is that is at odds with individualism. In other words, the move to individualism was not from a racial collective (although KMac interchanges both words at will) but from an extended kinship based society. The German clans he alludes to that filled the void after the fall of the Roman Empire undoubtedly were extended family groups with a strong genetic relatedness and in no way even approximated a racial or ethnic collective. The continuum is thus individual => kin, not individual=> ethnic group. Hardly modernity’s gift.

Ultimately, the paradox is that it was individualism that led to the rise of the nation state. A removal of a strong central government will lead to a warlordism that is evident in places like Afghanistan or in English history prior to the Magna Charta. Thus the MC was not a victory of the individual against the state, but the victory of individualism against nepotism.

Posted by Leon Haller on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:12 | #

This is how life is for most people. It used to be physically exhausting, dangerous, disease-ridden, destitute. Somewhere in modernity’s struggle to do away with all that the relation between citizen and state was mislaid, and into the void slithered the Jewish niche-fillers and the greedy bankers and so on. They are not where we, as dissidents and lovers of our people, have to take aim politically. Rather, we have to find incentives for re-engagement that touch real lives. And that’s not easy. (GW)

But the incentives can be positive or negative (or both at different times). The question we face is, what type of racial nationalism should we promote: that of love, or fear?

On the one hand, our people (no, peoples - an important distinction - the ethnies collectively making up the race) have been, over the past half-century or more, deracinated, and dispossessed of their cultural heritages (at least as public matters), and, at accelerating rates, their liberty, property/wealth, and ethnocultural control of territory and government. The British people have had their sense of British peoplehood hollowed out, to the point where being British no longer conveys the same sense of ethnic group belonging and militant affiliations that it would have at any time over several centuries (at least, the Elizabethan period through WW2 and into the 50s).

Clearly, there is a need to recover and promulgate a renewed sense of Britishness, and attendant national pride, with an open and appropriate recognition that any ethnoculture arises from a genetic/racial foundation, yours/ours being white. Thus, interethnic cultural/national assimilation is possible with small numbers, but interracial cultural/national assimilation is impossible.

This would be a positive white/British nationalism. It would express itself in concerns with building up a renewed British (or sub-British; English) ethnic pride, and with infusing that pride with a militant sense of belonging to a great and worthy people. I believe this would necessarily be a backward-looking, conservative sort of nationalism, the kind that tries to conjure up an unbroken line of tradition extending back into the primordial ethnic mists, and as a cultural reactionary, I would applaud it.

Alternatively, those of a more revolutionary cast could seek to develop a forward-looking, but still positive, nationalism, one which might posit an ideal British type (in the manner of the Nazis’ Model Aryan, or the New Soviet Man), and then seek to persuade current citizens of the desirability of refashioning existing society so as to realize this type more fully and extensively.

On the other hand, we could promote a more negative nationalism, based on consuming dislike or fear of group competitors or antagonists (certainly the more common psychological underpinnings of nationalist movements in history). Underlying this strategy would be a frank recognition of the degenerate state of the British, evidenced not least in their lack of racial/national pride, as well as of the ‘race against time’ aspect vis a vis the ongoing immigration invasion and territorial (and political) displacement.

This strategy would appeal not to any ‘airy-fairy’ traditionalism or, conversely, New Ontology, but simply to the base instincts of the masses for security and prosperity; in a word, for much derided physical comforts. It would involve warning our people of the hardships they and their children will face if we continue down our current anti-racist, open immigrationist path. In other words, it would center not on cultural renewal or national pride (let alone the intellectual resolution of the existential problems of modernity and its still-aborning progeny), but simple fear of a dark future.

I favor the latter approach. Fear is a greater motivator than greed ,and much more so than love.

Posted by Thunder on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:45 | #

Sincere apologies for going off topic but has anyone been following the Beck/Soros thing? See http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/ Occidental Dissent has been chewing on it too but I can find no discussion of it here. Unless I missed it, which is not impossible.