Separating Cause and Effect
In philosophy, the solution to any problem is formed by building a
metaphor ladder, with each rung composed of a logical thought that
leads to the next, leading from cause to effect. This is one reason
there are so many therefores, thuses, and accordinglies in
philosophical language. If any one rung of this ladder is defective,
even if the one after it appears to correct that defect, the whole
thing is liable to fall apart.
With the political situation in Western civilization today, it is easy
to confuse the origin and conclusion of the ladder we'll call "fixing
the problem(s)," because most people recognize effects, assume they are
causes, and are then confused as to why their adamant railing against
the effect did not reverse the cause. Because the cause is most
commonly invisible even when one has gained some depth on the problem,
it requires a thorough analysis and produces often surprising results,
and thus is usually ignored: surprisingly origins of common problems do
not communicate well to a broad audience. The unnoticed disease is the
cause, while the symptoms, its effects, are visible.
The most common place this phenomenon can be seen is in the bigotry of
political groups. The left is bigoted against those with wealth, those
who are of Northern European heritage, and anyone who is better at
doing something productive than others - they're perfectly OK with
people who write better liberal essays, or shoot better liberal films,
but they're biased against those who build things of a practical value,
in part because they fear "inferiority" and "superiority" complexes in
themselves and others. A common target for the left is the corporation,
which is assumed to be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy whose goal
is to oppress non-whites, women, homosexuals and drug users.
On the right, the same situation prevails, but here the evil identified
with society is different: leftist Jews are infiltrating and destroying
our basic social values, violent Negroes are creeping into society with
their plans to make it more convenient for their own existences, and in
general, values against what we perceive as tradition are being forced
upon us by a hostile media and the leftist establishment in the arts,
academia and government. The right seems to be fine with large
corporations that do not have leftist values, and of course, those who
actually produce something of value, because the right is less
cosmopolitan and more pragmatic than the left.
The scary thing is that both groups are correct: they have identified
symptoms of the problem. Large corporations do overrun our values and
conspire to turn us all into profit fodder; leftist Jews have come to
America and begun preaching their own culture as perfect for all of us,
part of their "Tikkun Olam" or "repairing the world" mythos, and are
over-represented in media, academia and government. The wealthy do not
truly care about the future of the country, and are content to oppress
everyone regardless of race, class, ethnicity, color or sexual
preference. And yes, African-Americans do seem to have a high rate of
violent crime in every country they've ever been in. All of these are
correct, but they're not diagnosing the problem, and thus the
"solutions" advocated amount to little more than bigotry.
Until we find the root of this problem, it is impossible to diagnose,
much less solve. Bigotry will in fact exacerbate the problem, by
creating enemies among your own people of those who would otherwise be
sympathetic to your cause; no one likes someone obsessed with hate
instead of creation, and to misdiagnose the problem is to fail to see
what can be done about it in a creative, positive sense, all without
giving up what you hold dear. Further, a violent revolution in this
mindset will eliminate symptoms but drive the cause of the problem
deeper within you, guaranteeing that the next conflagration will be
fatal.
To find the cause, we backtrack. Why are we in a multicultural society?
Because a large number of our people believe it's a good idea. On what
principle do they believe that it is a good idea? Why, the equality of
all people, of course. Why do they believe this principle is important?
In that view, it's the only way to achieve "freedom" and "justice" and
other "good" things. Why do we believe some things are good, and some
bad? There's this Absolute rule, see, that to respect the life of
another is the highest good; you can see it in Christianity, and
liberalism. What kind of thinking would motivate this rule? Fear of
other people, fear of predation, and fear of death; if we're all equal,
none of us can be interrupted or criticized by others, and that's
"freedom," remember. What made us abandon the idea of making a
stronger, more natural society for this strange plastic equality?
Probably the same fear, and the loss of belief in something worth
fighting and striving and dying for on a daily basis.
Aha. The root of our modern society, with its egalitarian sentiments,
is fear of other people, and fear of being inferior. Fear of being
proven, as occurs in nature, unequal to a task, and having a predator
walk away in victory licking his chops; fear of having judgment passed
over us. Fear of nature as an Order, and the desire to impose our own,
based on the individual so that none might fear predation. And what
might we call this belief? Well, since it no longer affirms that some
things are worth striving for as a whole, and instead relies on defense
of what already exists, we'll call it passivity. It's the antithesis of
heroism: the belief that nothing is worth sacrificing for on a constant
basis.
Sure, we have wars. But we view ourselves as provoked into those, and
only a small subset of the population faces the battlefield; they're
paid to do it, in fact. It's like any other job. Some go to offices,
and some to dusty graves in fields strewn with the shell casings and
burnt plastic and metal detritus of warfare. But on a daily basis, do
we confront death, and do we affirm that it's worth risking death for
anything? Hell, no, we don't. We run in fear from that very vision. So:
the root of our social situation at the current time is fear, and it
manifests itself in a passive philosophy that, unlike heroic beliefs,
is unified by a desire to avoid the possible risk of death, thus
negating the idea that any constant ideal is so worthy that we would
give up our security of life for it.
Of course, since our civilization is slowly falling apart, that
security of life is an illusion; it will take more time for this to be
apparent, but at that point the whimper and not a bang will already be
in effect, and the middle class mostly absorbed by either the thronging
masses or the ultra-elites who live for money, to earn money, and
consider themselves superior on the basis that they earn more money.
That is the ultimate end of liberal democracy, and all passive
civilizations, as the Greeks found out; both Plato and Aristotle
disagree on many aspects of this, but their hint to us future survivors
is that once democracy and passivity take hold of a population, it
cannot make any decisions but the most candy-coated and obvious, and
the most bigoted - as we bear witness to, through history, in the form
of the state-sanctioned murder of Socrates for leading the youth of
Athens to dangerous ideas.
History repeats itself, and here in the United States, in Europe, and
in the East, that's our future as a species. Democracy will reach a
fever pitch and then collapse on itself, leaving in its wake a trail of
leaders who rule by authority for the sake of authority, with no higher
goal. Passivity is the root of this, even though it will beget violence
as grotesque as anything witnessed in history so far; the ultimately
casualties will not be the hordes of morons out there who can barely
manage to drive through an intersection while the light is green, but
the thinkers and creators who will stand out and thus be tempting
targets when a subliminally panicked population begins looking for
evils. No amount of bigotry will hold off this end, because bigotry
aims at outside influences, while the fear is within.
While an influx of foreign races may seem like the problem, they are
mere symptoms. Each race has its own ideal society, bred into it
through tens of thousands of generations of upholding the values of
that society and living by its laws, and each is as distinct from
another as night from day. Once you recognize the principle that
different races have different ideal societies, the behavior of
African-Americans is no longer "bad" or "good," but their tendency as a
race and one that will not mix well with any other tribe, as the values
of any other tribe mix poorly with it. There are many good people among
them, and while their ways are different from ours enough to cause vast
internal conflict, the problem isn't African-Americans, but the fact
that admixture is viewed as necessary for our "freedom" and "good" -
admixture being a necessary component of multiculturalism, although no
public figure will admit that on tape.
Similarly, the case of the Jews is a tragic one; their own culture was
formed by fear and desire for revenge. When the people of Europe
streamed out of the Arctic at the end of the last ice age, they
expanded into every nation on earth and left behind cultural artifacts
and often, partial DNA; from this we got mixed tribes like the Northern
African Semites, who, if truth be told, are a fine population in their
own right with many good people among them. Judaism, as a religion of a
small and often-subjugated trading colony, was based on instilling an
order based around the individual, originally as a means of civilizing
those conquerors so the tribe could advance. With time, it too has like
a cancer consumed the Jewish population, causing them to come into
conflict with every host population they have, and thus making them
inclined toward aggressive cultural domination wherever they go.
Once again, the problem is the mixture, not the ingredients. If you
accidentally dump chocolate into your asparagus souffle, you don't
blame the chocolate; the problem is that the list of ingredients for
that dish is now composed of incompatible elements. Might as well pitch
in some cayenne pepper, too, at that point, since nothing will make it
worse. The cause of that admixture is your inattention, because you
were fixated on personal issues - perhaps a new car you wanted to buy,
the question of where you'll rank in the afterlife, or the plight of
the homeless in Seattle under the brutal doctrine of the Bush
administration. Either way, you were distracted from the goal, which
was to make an edible dish, not the unpalatable wreck you've now
concocted.
The solution to this distraction is to back off from passivity. If your
life depended on making that souffle, you wouldn't be dropping
chocolate into it in a daze of distractions and fond thoughts of
ecclesiastical deliverance; your survival at stake, you'd be very
focused on making that dish correctly. But who in a modern time would
give up the convenience of being able to simply throw out the disaster,
and order up another from the local Wal-Mart? That is the face of
passivity, and once you let it into one part of your life, thus your
mind, it rapidly spreads, because it is more convenient than facing
personal mortality or the seriousness of life itself. It's like being
on heroin, except there are no visible signs of the addiction.
Our goal, if we are dissidents to this society who wish to build one in
the traditional model of Indo-European societies, which is a feudal
order based on achieving excellence and forever moving to higher ideals
(not forward in some fantasy "progressive" notion of increasing
"freedom" without a collective ambition), must be to formulate a plan
against passivity and to recognize, for now, that all else is a symptom
of it. Only by this will we achieve victory because we will rip the
parasitic mind-virus out of our collective consciousness by the roots,
instead of snipping away at branches that regrow constantly. By using
an active and assertive philosophy, we grow consensus among us, and
from this consensus, the basic tasks are made clear, and from that the
secondary treatment of the symptoms unquestionable.
An initial step in overcoming passivity is to stop trying to "prove"
your beliefs to the crowd, because that in itself is populism and a
passive means of accomplishing your goal; instead, what you must do is
thrust out before them a vision of the order you desire, and say with
all of the virile certainty this phrase carries in such situations,
"This is what I will, and my preference is immune to your criticism; it
is irrefutable." When you do this, you've crossed the line between
having to cajole, threaten, plead and bribe your way to victory, which
is a passive means, to creating something new to which others can
adhere if they still have the courage and foresight. This avoids the
disease of a modern time, and indeed the extreme forms of this disease,
such as Judaism, liberalism and evangelical Christianity. It also
guarantees you a shot at defeating causes while others are still
slashing at effects.
January 11, 2005
http://www.*****.com/zine/articles/cause/
.
|
