Ari Ben Canaan <ari@this.group.invalid> whined:
Keith Willshaw wrote:
The headers on this post indicate it was posted on a South African
server. Someone is faking posts.
Yeah. And it is not so difficult to guess which "someone" it is.
"mweb.co.za" happens to be the server used by the rabid hatemonger "Grantland".
What a strange coincidence...
Let's grant him that this kind of faking behavior matches very well the moral
values he has been demonstrating.
Ari.
American Dissident Voices Broadcast of August 26, 2000
Behind America's Moral Decay
by Dr. William Pierce
Hello!
Today I want to talk with you about a topic that I believe is
extremely important. It's a topic I have been thinking about for a
long time but that I have hesitated to talk about because it's a big,
complex topic, and I don't have much in the way of scientific data on
it: I don't have a lot of hard statistics, just a number of general
observations and a good bit of specific anecdotal material. Because
this topic is so important, however, I have decided just to plunge
into it. Perhaps our listeners will be able to contribute to this
subject if we discuss it more than once.
The subject is the general decline in moral fitness of White
Americans. In fact, I believe this moral decline is an affliction not
just of Americans, but of White people nearly everywhere. I don't want
the word moral to be misunderstood here. I'm not talking at all about
the same thing some Christians refer to when they lament the decline
of morals in America. I'm not talking about sex, for example.
By moral fitness I mean such things as strength of character,
toughness, degree of self-discipline, willingness to endure hardship.
But moral fitness is more than that. Being morally fit also means
having an internal code of behavior and sticking to it. It means
having values and standards that one applies in a systematic way to
guiding one's own behavior and to judging the behavior of other
people. It means having some purpose in one's life and directing one's
life in accord with that purpose.
What I see around me in America today are very few people with much
moral strength -- fewer, at least, than we had 50 years ago: fewer
men, for example, of whom we can say with confidence, "he is a man of
his word"; fewer men and women who are willing to work really hard
over a long period for the achievement of a goal. And I see many more
men and women -- especially young men and women -- who are soft,
self-indulgent, undisciplined, and with neither moral standards nor
purpose in their lives.
Well, that's a bit too general to have much meaning, I'm afraid. Let
me try a few specific examples to illustrate my point. I'll begin with
glassblowers. Before the Second World War every chemistry department
and every physics department at a university large enough to sustain
any sort of scientific research had a glassblower on the staff for
making specialized glassware. Glass is not especially easy to work
with, and learning how to make glass scientific apparatus with it, and
make it well, requires much training and much practice. But before the
war there were enough young Americans willing to spend several years
in apprenticeship to an experienced glassblower in order to learn the
necessary skills. They could then count on secure employment at a
university or at a company engaged in scientific research or in
manufacturing scientific apparatus. By the 1950s, however, good
glassblowers were becoming hard to find in America, even though more
jobs were available and salaries were going up. Some large companies
had their own training programs, but universities who needed
glassblowers generally had to import them from some place such as
Germany, where apprenticeship programs for skilled trades were still
the rule.
I mentioned the shrinking supply of glassblowers, because that is
something with which I had personal experience, but my impression is
that the phenomenon is more general than that: young men are less
willing to enter trades which require long periods of training before
they are fully qualified and can earn more than an apprentice's wages.
I'll generalize even further: Americans are less willing -- in fact,
less able -- to postpone gratification than they were half a century
ago. Of course, we all would like instant gratification -- but we used
to have the willpower and self-discipline to postpone it a bit when
that was advantageous. In talking with young people especially, I get
the definite impression that there is much less willingness to focus
on long-range goals.
Another example of this is to be seen in the spending habits of
Americans. Before the Second World War young families went to a bank
to borrow money to buy a house, but that was about it; everything else
required cash. If you wanted to buy a piece of furniture or a radio or
a new suit, you had to have the money first. Even in buying a car, the
common practice was to save the money from one's salary, and when one
had enough one purchased the car. Credit cards may have been around,
but they certainly weren't as common as today. In order to acquire the
things they wanted, Americans had to plan ahead and exercise some
self-discipline.
In today's age of plastic credit that is much less the case. And it
seems to me that there has been a real loss in self-discipline. The
average American today ends up paying much more for things simply
because he not only can't wait until he has earned the money for the
things he wants, he can't pay off his credit card debt at the end of
every month and avoid interest. He just doesn't have the willpower. He
can't control his desire to have more shiny junk and to have it now,
and so a good bit of his income goes to paying interest. If he had the
willpower to wait, he could avoid interest and actually own many more
things.
Of course, we always had people without self-discipline and who were
unwilling to postpone gratification. There always were people who had
to be paid every week. If you paid them only once a month they would
spend their whole paycheck in the first two weeks, and then they would
starve during the next two weeks until another payday. It just seems
to me that the problem is worse today than it used to be.
Here's another example for those of you who are employers. I've had
many people who are in business for themselves complain to me about
how difficult it is to find young Americans who are good for any kind
of work. And I've noticed the same thing myself. A young employment
prospect seems eager and enthusiastic; he talks a good line. But you
give him a real job to do, and you quickly discover that he has no
conception of what work is. He really believes that a plausible excuse
is a satisfactory substitute for performance. He believes that going
through the motions and putting on a good show of working is the same
as working. He never accepts responsibility for the results of his
work. Responsibility is an alien concept to him. It is as if the work
is not quite real, and he doesn't quite grasp that the consequences of
adequate work or inadequate work, of success or failure, are real too.
Poor work habits are part of this problem. Young Americans these days
have not had much experience at real work as they were growing up.
Most of them have not had to deliver newspapers or mow lawns or wash
cars or do anything else to earn their own money from the time they
were 11 or 12 years old. Delivering morning newspapers is an
especially good discipline: it forces a young boy to crawl out of his
warm bed at three o'clock in the morning and go out into a dark, often
cold or wet, world and do hard work by himself for a couple of hours.
And he must do it every morning, whether he feels like it or not. It
is inevitable. Most young White Americans never have been faced with
the inevitable choice of no work, no money; they've always had a way
around it, and not having had to face that inevitability has stunted
their moral growth.
Well, it's worse than that. I refer to these young people who can't
cope with real work as members of the Star Trek generation. On Star
Trek a meteoroid hits the spaceship and knocks a big hole in it. The
air is rushing out into space. Electrical wiring is arcing and
sparking. Fires have broken out all over the ship. Vital systems have
stopped functioning. So the crew members grab fire extinguishers and
screwdrivers and run around for a few minutes fixing things up, and
pretty soon everything is more or less back to normal -- whereas in
reality everyone would be dead. Kids raised on television have been
given a grossly distorted conception of reality, a distorted reality
in which there are no really painful consequences for failure, a
distorted reality in which every problem has an easy solution.
And it's not just television. It's also a welfare system, which
protects people from their own folly and weakness and vice and keeps
them aware that if they fail at whatever they're trying to do, there's
something to fall back on, so they don't really have to succeed. And
it's an educational system which has shifted away from rigor and hard
rules and performance toward fuzzy concepts and lots of verbalizing
and social conditioning. Problem solving, with exact answers required,
is out; being able to wave your hands and talk about a concept is in.
Using language with precision and understanding the structural
functions and relationships of words, are out; that's too masculine
and analytical. Studying the history of our people and our
civilization and learning the values and traditions that gave us
strength in the past are out; that doesn't mesh with multiculturalism.
In fact, the schools in America have abandoned completely the task of
building character and instilling values in young people. If you think
I'm exaggerating, go to your library and check out a set of the
McGuffey's Readers that were used widely in American public schools in
the latter part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century.
McGuffey's Readers not only taught young Americans how to use their
language far more precisely and elegantly than young Americans are
taught today; they also taught children values. Every anecdote and
story and reading selection in the McGuffey's Readers taught a moral
lesson: a lesson about courage or honesty or perseverance or loyalty
or correct behavior. Compare the quality of the language in the
McGuffey's Readers and their content with the reading material in
America's elementary schools today.
None of these aspects of moral decay I've mentioned is new -- with the
possible exception of the loss of a sense of reality resulting from
watching thousands of hours of television. We've always had soft,
lazy, self-indulgent, irresponsible people with a short attention span
who had insufficient self-discipline to postpone gratification. But
the problem is substantially worse today than it was 50 years ago.
There's more hedonism and less responsibility, more softness and less
perseverance, today than in the past. There's less purposefulness in
young people's lives and less willingness to work long and hard and
carefully to achieve what they want. Of that I am certain, even though
I don't have hard statistics to prove it.
So what are the causes of this moral decline, other than television,
and what can we do about it?
Undoubtedly the sustained material prosperity of the past half century
has been a significant contributing factor to our moral laxity. The
natural conditions of life that kept us hard and morally tough in the
past have been abated to a large extent by our relative material
wealth.
Soft and ill-disciplined individuals who would have perished a century
ago and who would have been kept at the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder 50 years ago are so sheltered from Nature's selective forces
today that they are able to thrive almost as well as more fit
individuals.
The morally debilitating effects of wealth have been recognized for a
long time. The Roman patrician, Cato the Censor, railed against the
moral decay of the citizens of the Roman Republic 2200 years ago, and
he directed most of his criticism against his fellow aristocrats and
their self-indulgence. He called upon them to return to the Spartan
ways of their ancestors and to raise their children with the same
rigor and austerity that had prevailed during the time of their
grandfathers. Cato undoubtedly had some effect, but he lacked the
authority to enforce measures sufficiently severe to stem the tide of
decay. Then as now, most people, rich as well as poor, were inclined
to take the course of least resistance, with little thought for the
consequences; as long as they could indulge themselves they did.
Nevertheless, the Republic lasted another two centuries -- which is a
lot longer than America is going to last.
The destruction of the American family certainly is a major cause of
our moral decay. Before the Second World War the nuclear family was
the norm among White Americans, with the mother at home to take care
of the children. That was true in working-class families as well as in
the middle class. There were no daycare centers for preschool
children, and when the kids came home from school their mother was
waiting for them.
Children, in other words, got vastly more parental guidance and
influence then than now. And they got a lot less permissiveness.
You know, it used to be that there was a clear distinction between
childhood and adulthood. A child was fully under the control of his
parents, and he was completely dependent on his parents. An adult, on
the other hand, was on his own. He was independent; he could do
whatever he wanted; but he was completely responsible for himself. As
a child approached the magic age of 16 or 17 or 18, he looked forward
with eagerness to becoming an adult and having his freedom. He looked
forward to other things too: sex, being able to choose a mate, being
able to buy things for himself and choose his own life-style, being
able to have a car. But he understood that he would be responsible for
himself. He would have to support himself, and he would be held
accountable for what he did. His parents no longer would be there to
support or to shield him.
This distinction between childhood and adulthood is a very fundamental
distinction, and among humankind it has been nearly universal, from
every European society of which we have records down to the most
primitive non-White tribes -- until now. Among White Americans the
distinction really has become blurred since the Second World War. On
the one hand the parental control and the restrictions that formerly
were characteristic of childhood almost have disappeared. Nowadays
young kids have money, sex, freedom to do almost anything they want --
but no responsibility. And on the other hand far too many young men
continue to be supported by their parents well into their 20s or even
into their 30s. They shun independence. It's an unhealthy situation
all around.
There's another reason, in addition to the softening influence of too
much wealth and television's loosening of the grip on reality and the
lessening of parental guidance, for the decline in moral strength of
Americans today. That reason is a deliberate policy of moral
destruction which has been implemented with increasing effectiveness
during the past half century. In every society there are factions who
want to push social or political changes in particular directions.
There are egalitarians, for example, who really believe that people
ought to be equal even if Nature didn't make them that way. They have
combined forces with the feminists to reduce competition in the lives
of children at school and at play. They have downgraded the idea of
winning or losing, of success or failure, of excellence or mediocrity.
They have instilled into children's minds the notion that cooperation
is better than competition, that working in a group or on a committee
in which no single person is responsible for the outcome is better
than individual striving, that a uniform level of achievement is
better than having some individuals excel and some fail. In addition,
the feminists have played a major role in the destruction of the
family, not just by teaching that the family is a repressive
institution which is unfair to women, but by using their political
influence to push policies which have undermined the family.
Then there are the multiculturalists, who are absolutely determined
that we must integrate Blacks and Vietnamese and Mexican mestizos into
our society in a way in which the various non-White minorities will be
happy and successful. They are determined to change White social
institutions in any way necessary to facilitate their goal of a
happily integrated society. Lowering achievement standards in the
schools and performance standards in the workplace and in the armed
forces in order to accommodate Blacks, for example, seems to them a
small price to pay for successful integration. Likewise, they are
happy to phase out the teaching of history to young people in order to
weaken their sense of European identity and make them more willing to
accept multiculturalism.
The fact that people with a weak sense of identity tend to be people
without strong values is not half as important to them as achieving
integration.
There are people -- White people -- who actually prefer the moral
situation we have today to the one we had before the Second World War.
They feel more comfortable with weak, indecisive, self-indulgent, and
irresponsible people around them. They don't like strong,
self-confident, independent people.
We've always had this interplay of ideological factions in our
society. What's really new is the role of the mass media in favoring
some factions over others. In the past the factions with really nutty
and destructive ideas didn't have much influence over policy. A
faction that believed the family repressive and wanted to weaken it,
for example, would have a hard time prevailing over the general
feeling that the family ought to be kept strong -- unless Hollywood
began backing the anti-family faction. A faction that wanted to lower
performance standards so that Blacks could do better relative to
Whites wouldn't have made much headway -- without media backing.
When the Jews began gaining control over the mass media of news and
entertainment early in the 20th century, they began using their
growing influence over public opinion to favor the factions with the
most destructive ideas and goals. The Jews not only backed feminist
policies, for example; they actually supplied most of the feminist
writers and propagandists themselves. They not only supplied most of
the money and brains behind the postwar drive for a muticultural
society, they also launched programs to weaken the opposition by
undermining the character of the White population. In the 1960s,
during the drive to weaken and discredit the forces of tradition, the
Jews were the prime movers, and the mass media were their
indispensable weapons.
I apologize for this crude and unscientific explanation of the fact of
the moral decay of White America. I believe, however, that if you look
soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will find
that there is much truth in what I have said.
Think about it -- and thanks for being with me again today.
.
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