Majorityrights Central > Category: Libertarianism

Jack Sen at The London Forum:

I think this is rather pithy - A Word in the Ear of the Future-Seekers — Modernity is not the bridge; it is the abyss.

Fine Persecution — Every society has before it an ideal of the kind of society it ought to be, and every society, in order to uphold that ideal, needs to persecute those within it who are at odds with that ideal. Once again, however, the deep mendacity of liberalistic society manifests itself in that it denies the persecution which it carries out against its hated enemies, namely, those at odds with its ideal. This denial of the persecuted status of its enemies — along with the ridicule of them when they claim it — are additional elements for the intensifying of their persecution.

Specify, or Be Damned — Individualism does not specify itself to be in keeping with any particular society, or even with the existence of society at all, but rather it addresses itself only to an unspecified individuality. Such unspecification about what an individual should be is precisely at the heart of individualism’s boast about its being the friend and not the foe of the individual’s freely seeking to be and to do whatever he chooses. “Do what thou wilt”, it says, whereto it may add the black-box phrase, “so long as it harms none”. Now, given a teaching which says that everyone may do as he pleases, irrespective of all truth, reason, goodness, morality, tradition, authority, obedience, bonds, and so forth, “so long as it harms none”, and which, by its boasted lights, does not specify the kind of society which should be upheld, or even that any should be upheld, how is it that anyone could then come to the belief that it might after all stand as a pillar of any society, let alone a particular one, rather than being, as in truth it is, the rot upon all? One might say that here we are at the brink of sheer madness, inbequeathed through many years of listening to silly tales. But leaving aside an understanding of the teaching itself, which might conceivably have taken any name, the very name which it does carry gives us a clue to its drift, namely, that it seeks to uphold the unspecified individual, not any society, specified or unspecified.
 
There are no ends specific to man as man, rather than to what he shares with mere beasts, which can be reached outside of his fellowship with his kind. No speech nor reasoning, let alone higher arts and sciences, would arise if all men stood from the first outside of fellowship. Every man began as a helpless baby and would have died were it not for the society of his kith and kin. Every man was without speech, and would have remained speechless were it not for the same. Every man was without schooling, and would have stayed unschooled. And so on. No man was ever born into a so-called state of nature, as first imagined by Thomas Hobbes, even if this be helpful as a conceptual threshold for the understanding that the closer a society comes in breaking down towards that threshold, the more brutish it becomes. It is nevertheless a figment which has led to misunderstanding and mischief, and it is from it that individualism has grown. Man’s state of nature is the state of society. Man has never been in the so- called state of nature; for he is by nature a social animal and always in fellowship. Individualists, having thoughtlessly taken all social things for granted, and having for the most part imbibed unawares some old spirit of seventeenth-century philosophy, often speak as though they rose out of the ground and shaped themselves in isolation, wherein we glimpse also the drunken idea of self-creation born of Romanticism.

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. [1]

The liberal concept of man as selfstanding being, free to set his own moral ends, is one of the biggest untruths ever told — and yet folk swallow it whole, whereat we might take it that they are greedy for something.
 
Individualism is an emptiness which blights the field of personhood, turning men, if they can still be called such, into mere units of the mass to be gathered up in the total state. Man is a social animal; society is required to actualise a man’s potential as a person. There are no pre-social individual persons. In the light of this, we may see individualism as some deeply primitive recrudescence, the tendency of which is to destroy the very conditions by which one can become a human person. A man cannot be a person without the fellowship, community, or society that made him. Un- socialised, man’s potencies are not activated, and he stays at a level close to a beast, bereft of speech and reason, let alone partaking of the higher arts and sciences.
 
Individualistic societies are decomposing social bodies in which kinship-ties are loosened and even cut, and which can be held together only by an all-pervasive and socially-alien bureau-technocratic power — the “coldest of all cold monsters”. In defence of these societies, and, by extension, willing or not, of this bureau-technocratic power, liberals, who sometimes call themselves libertarians, claim the greater freedom of these societies, where the largely unexamined and fuzzily-held concept “freedom” is a multivariate reference, unspecified of what, for what, and to what. In individualistic societies there is more freedom in the direction of baser and thrilling appetites, non-specific to mankind, hence the appeal of this freedom to the mass of baser men; and it is these appetites which dissolve kinship and personhood, bringing even greater demands for individualism, which brings greater freedom in the direction of baser and thrilling appetites, and so on, in downward spiral. In individual- istic societies freedom in personhood is much lowered, whilst freedom in beasthood is heightened; and the bonds of kinship are cut whereby men would be men.
 
Liberals and libertarians, being the fiercest enemies of the freedom of personhood, and the strongest friends of the freedom of beasthood, that is to say, of the liberal haze-ideal of the “individual” whatever that individual may be, must be defeated if the freedom of the person as person is to be upheld. Liberalism, or rather its essential individualism, has a gut-feeling and a canny nose for the breaking-up of everything, even of the person, and it knows nothing of creation. The ideal of individualism can only belittle persons and bring to the fore a bulk of fittingly-blank individuals of the mass — fittingly blank for bearing the stamp of the bureau-technocratic regime.
 
                     

The conformity that is forged today through the atomized individualism that strips men of their personhood has little to do with the collective identity for which men have always yearned. The conformity today is stopgap and takeover of this natural yearning. The atomised individual is stripped bare of his humanity —which has hitherto been actualised in society —and left adrift with his “freely-formed” and “chosen” opinions, which are in truth nothing of the kind. He cannot think for himself, only of himself, as he is suffering a loss. He rebels against conformity in conformity with everyone else.                         

As the subversive mind is essentially individualistic and isolationistic, so is it essentially collectivistic and identitarian: on the view inherent in it, the curse of division and of being ‘set against one another’ cannot be surmounted except by a ‘fusion into one’; an actual identification of consciousness, of qualities and of interest. In fact, individualism (tending towards egalitarianism) prefigures collectivism from the outset, and again, collectivism is only individualism raised to the high power of an absolute monism centered in ‘all and every one’. [2]

Individualism foreshadows mass-collectivism and the herd of ersatz ‘individuals’. With authorities and societies broken down, nothing stands between pressing individual units of alienated humanity, hitherto existing as persons, into mass, each homogenised unit shaped to fit and imprinted with a set of political ideas and economic desires.
 
The pluralism which accompanies individualism is a social dysfunction built on subject- ivistic-irrationalistic ethics. It denies that mankind has a nature and thereby a natural end to be fulfilled. Only by that denial does it make sense to say that everyone has a right to pursue any goals and practice any values which he pleases so long as he does not seek to foist them upon others. And how is that disorder to be managed? Why, by the totalitarian bureau-technocratic state of liberaldom! But of course it isn’t true that under liberaldom one can believe whatever one likes, nor especially what’s ratio- nal to believe. In liberaldom one can believe anything so long as it makes no odds against liberaldom; one’s unliberal beliefs, if they can still bear the name, are to be mild quirks of self, slight hues in otherwise grey smears of bureaucratic massification.
                     
The task of liberalism from its beginning, namely, the search for neutral ground whereon the life of all mankind can rest, and whereupon everyone can seek his own ends, can find its end only in a true neutrality and indifference, and that is nowhere to be found in man except in his unpersonhood. Wherefore it is that liberalism’s struggle to settle the life of mankind can find its end only in the death of personhood; and it is for this reason that the struggle against liberalism is the final and most profound one. Liberalism is the greatest evil that mankind has yet faced, and there is almost no-one to withstand it. That lack of withstanding, owed to liberalism’s having swayed almost everyone to its side, is partly why it is the greatest evil.

1] Aristotle, Politica, Bk.I: 1253a:28-9, tr. B. Jowett, in The Works of Aristotle, Vol.X (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).
[2] A. Kolnai, “Privilege and Liberty” (1949), in Privilege & Liberty & Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed.D.J.Mahoney(Lanham, Maryland:Lexington Books,‘99),p.21-2.

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While defending our ghetto square and the merits of strengthening our grass roots community by preaching there to its choir, deepening our understanding and resolve, it seems that at this point Majority Rights could also do well with forays to visit those down some side streets - to pursue interviews not only with those who are most aligned with our views, but also to follow a path of those who might be slightly off - i.e. slightly antagonistic to our views in a somewhat liberal direction, at least explicitly, while having some implicit sympathy through connection to our square, our cause; such that MR’s platform might bring-out that connection with their underlying fairness in concern for our people and our kinds. The more public, known or respectable the person, perhaps the better. They might come to us with an intent to criticize us or save face in cover inasmuch – fine. Perhaps we can stand corrected. That’s not so much the problem as coming-up with good candidates for this kind of discussion/debate, those who may be lurking in what are the shadowy side-streets for us. Therefore the reason for this post is to ask for suggestions as to fairly prominent/respectable liberals, etc. Those fairly askance of our views, but not so antagonistic as to be futile to hope to engage. Rather to pursue those who might be ripe to debate GW or another MR representative, to at least hear-us-out. We might see where the dimly lit path takes us…

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“Attorney of the damned”, author of “Defensive Racism” dies imprisoned by ZOG

“Get the story out folks” - Stan Hess

From: Cyndi Steele, Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2014 8:35 PM
Subject: News about Ed that I prayed I would never have to deliver!

                               
                                                    Cyndi Steele

“The past 4 years Ed and my family have been living in a nightmare. Today, my greatest fear has come to life or maybe I should say death. Please read the message below that is being posted on the Free Edgar Steele website and sent to all of his supporters as I type this. It is with great heartbreak and devastation that I send you this news.”
______________________________________________

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George is addressed with a consideration of acting-into an altercast position in conflict with his less than socially ideal plans.



As opposed to a libertarian, prioratizing dreams of individual adventure and world travel, George contemplates acting-into, shaping and crafting the specificatory structure altercast by Mary, who addresses him as a man of ideals, which of necessity compel adjustment of those priorities to practical duty: to a position rather as husband and community builder, upheld against capitalist destruction thereof.

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Analysis: John Shotter’s Social Accountability and the Social Construction of “You” Part 2

In pursuit of this analysis, we may usefully trace background to Shotter and Harre’s negotiated concerns here:  “The Verum Factum Principle”

From Wikipedia:

“Giambattista Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) (“On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language”).[7] The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.” This criterion for truth would later shape the history of civilization in Vico’s opus, the Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), because he would argue that civil life – like mathematics – is wholly constructed.”

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In considering this comment by ukn_leo  

“I have learned so much from reading Leon’s posts, Dan. As someone with natural conservative leanings”…

As someone who has natural conservative leanings as well, I thought a discussion might be useful to move toward a better understanding of what we mean by “conservatism”, and to help European peoples better discern the fraudulent “neo-conservatism” being put across to the public: taking the example of David Mamet’s fraud awakening.

Notice in the clip provided below, the slick, Jewish deception that Mamet, via Hayek, makes with the idea of constraint - to focus on limiting government.

To limit and constrain government is Not a big problem for we true conservatives, but it is not the fundamental point.

The fundamental point of true conservatism is constraint on demographics.

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Long-standing readers of MR will know that, over the years, we have enjoyed not just warm but quite heated relations with Perry de Havilland’s uber-libertarian blog, Samizdata.  Having placed a comment of the usual incendiary kind on the thread to a Telegraph article titled Greece is slipping into the abyss, who should come along to bludgeon me with his critical-rational logic (or is it rational-critical, I never know) but Samizdata founder Perry de Havilland.

OK, so you don’t actually need to know what follows and, yes, I am being self-indulgent.  But Perry was one of the first people to ban me.  So he stands at the head of a small army of mad on-line liberals who have trespassed against me in that way, and he’s the only one I know by name, damn it!  At the very least, he deserves to be turned into a foil for an explication of our Weltanschauung.  Thus:

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