The New Leviathan
An article from the Guardian newspaper, home of Damien Walter, who in times past has been kind enough to give Larry Correia writing advice, and who is gifted with sufficient foresight to have predicted the end of my career just before I won the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
It seems their political writer, one Mr. Robert Shiller, brings the same sagacity to bear on national and international affairs:
“For the past several centuries, the world has experienced a sequence of intellectual revolutions against oppression of one sort or another. These rebellions operate in the minds of humans and are spread eventually to most of the world, not by war, which tends to involve multiple causes, but by language and communications technology. Ultimately, the ideas they advance, unlike the causes of war, become noncontroversial.
The next such revolution, likely to occur in the 21st century, will challenge the economic implications of the nation state. It will focus on the injustice that follows from the fact that, entirely by chance, some are born in poor countries and others in rich countries. As more people work for multinational firms and get to know more people from other countries, our sense of justice is being affected.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/19/the-looming-anti-national-revolution
Please reread that line to savor the implication:”It will focus on the injustice that follows from the fact that, entirely by chance, some are born in poor countries and others in rich countries.”
Translation: nature, by placing you at your point in time and space at birth when it did, committed an injustice, either by elevating you unfairly above your peers, or delivering you to parents, neighborhood, nation, continent or planet adorned with less wealth and fewer advantages.
Why, the very cosmos is unfair!
And it is both the privilege of omniscient man to foretell and yet undo natural woes and within his omnipotent power to do it! For who else can rewrite the laws of nature aside from the godlike beings our mental and moral superiors on the Left conceive themselves to be?
Why, I myself often brood over the remarkable injustice done me by requiring me to be born here on Earth, among humans, rather than on the island of Houyhnhnmland, my natural home, or planet Vulcan.
You might ask, since justice means giving to each what he has earned by his merit, how I, or any man, before his birth, could have, by his own effort, earned the right to be born one place or the other, and by what act someone could have deprived me of what I was due, or who that someone could be?
Since no one with the power to deflect the stork from its assigned missions has yet been discovered, best to assume, without evidence, that your deserved spot of being born as the Emperor of the North Pole was taken from you by the cruelty and cunning of whatever prenatal blastocyst was fortunate enough to be born into a good family in America or a high caste in India. Hence, whoever has anything you crave, without any investigation as to how these circumstances came about, is the proper prey for your resentments.
Fret not! Because in this generation the toxic socialism of the Old Left has turned into the Alt-Left, their brains have turned entirely to mush, and what were once bleeding hearts full of pity, have withered like prunes, soured, shrank, and darkened. (Think of the ending of HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS with the film being played in reverse gear.)
According to the Old Left, justice means taken from someone who deserves and giving it to the undeserving. If, for example, you live in a nation where your forefathers sacrificed, sweated, strove and bled to create and protect a wholesome, safe, and prosperous land to give to you, their beloved child and heir, as an heritage, the Left wishes Caesar to rip from you all worldly goods and bestow them where he will. Since the poor people in First World nations are usually owners of automobiles, cellphones, and houses with running water, some vaster supply of poverty is needed to justify the nationalization, socialization, and theft.
In the usual course of things, this means earmarking food and supplies for starving peons being delivered to the hands of wealthy warlords and petty despots, or it means taking money from bankrupt widows and giving it to international banks or terrorist groups who donate heavily to Leftwing causes and political parties.
In the old days, the Old Left would have used the excuse that charitable concern for the poor, hitherto the work of the Church or private charities, was now to be handled by the brutal efficiency of the State, and therefore the number of poor would, in a generation, double and triple. This might seem counterproductive to anyone who actually had some pity for the poor, but it is very productive in terms of job security for the bureaucrats placed in charge of keeping the poor trapped forever in wretchedness and poverty. Their moral stature is, of course, the same as a doctor who routinely poisons his wealthy patients in order to exact ever greater fees.
According to the new and improved Alt-Left, justice mean taking from you, punishing you, fining you, harming you, insulting you, killing you, inflicting pain on you. And they do not bother with reasons or explanations or thinking. They have devolved past the need for petty things like human thought.
Let us turn to Mr. Shiller for more insight:
For now, this recognition faces strong competition from patriotic impulses, rooted in a social contract among nationals who have paid taxes over the years or performed military service to build or defend what they saw as exclusively theirs. Allowing unlimited immigration would seem to violate this contract.
This is the same as Old Left talk, which is based on a satanic mockery of the way Christ speaks of the poor: as if nothing you own is yours. Now the idea is being introduced that your nation, heritage, neighborhood and family is not yours. They are instruments of an unjust privilege.
You did not built that. You belong to Caesar as livestock. Your happiness and good fortune is an injustice: by inflicting misfortunes on you, the cosmic balance will be restored.
You see, the Alt-Left simply hates you for being White and happy, and seeks to punish you. This punishment at first will be a fine or tax levied on you for the crime of being born in a harder working nation with a history of peaceful and civilized behavior. Happiness is crime.
Mr. Stiller now moves to the means needed to produce perfect equality of good, of fortunes, and (somehow) of good fortune to spring from the abolition of the nations.
In a perfect world, people don’t have to move to another country to get a higher wage. Ultimately, they need only be able to participate in producing output that is sold internationally.
To achieve factor-price equalisation, people need a stable base for a real lifetime career connected to a country in which they do not physically reside. We also need to protect the losers to foreign trade in our existing nation-states. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) traces its roots in the US back to 1974. Canada experimented in 1995 with an Earnings Supplement Project. The European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, started in 2006, has a tiny annual budget of €150m (£128m). US President Barack Obama has proposed to expand the TAA programme. But, so far, this has meant little more than experiments or proposals.
Ultimately, the next revolution will likely stem from daily interactions on computer monitors with foreigners whom we can see are intelligent, decent people – people who happen, through no choice of their own, to be living in poverty.
There is a saccharine implication here that getting to know people creates the desire to ameliorate their misfortunes and presumes that it is indifference, rather than malice, which hinders the philanthropic impulse. If this were true, then indeed improved communications would be a panacea to abolish the indifference to the unhappiness of others, and the world, as each man grew to know all others more intimately, would become as loving and neighborly as a rabbit warren. In reality, the example of the enmity between English and Irish, or Mohammedan and Jew, mocks the notion. The closer they live and the better they know each other, the greater their mutual detestation.
He concludes thus:
This should lead to better trade agreements, which presuppose the eventual development of orders of magnitude more social insurance to protect people within a country during the transition to a more just global economy.
My Houyhnhnm brain is simply stunned by the juxtaposition of declaring free trade agreements to be subject to taxpayer funded charity to pay back those allegedly harmed by lowering protectionist barriers. How this will lead to the nationless utopia envisioned is left in a happy but mysterious pink cloud of thought-free verbal fluff.
Free trade leads to social insurance? The concept is Orwellian, and belongs in the same category as ‘Freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength’.
Real free trade is a mutual agreement by two nations to allow the goods to pass without tariff.
Unreal free trade is the erection of European Union-style monstrosities where unelected bureaucrats make rulings on the curvature of cucumbers, and otherwise impede national sovereignty.
Absurdly unreal free trade is the erection of a global world order that has supranational authority over all aspects of the economy, wages, working conditions, goods produced, including insuring that whoever loses money is paid by the taxpayer. It is, in fact, a global system of quotas and manufacture by fiat.
I am not saying Mr. Shiller is proposing absurdly unreal free trade. He is not clear enough to say what he proposes, merely that talking over the internet to bankers in Nigeria will somehow produce the will to fold all nations into something like the EU, which will then pay whoever has fewest customers the most. Or something. Despite what the plan is, absurdly unreal free trade always ends up in working out to helping the Party Bosses who own and take the fruits of the slave labor in China.
Indeed, the whole idea of Caesar doing anything to help the free market other than making rules about the weight of coins and the legal definition of contracts is absurdist: an unfree free market.
In reality, Caesar helps Caesar’s friends.
(See the economic history of the United States over the last eight years for details, starting with bad loans commanded by the government, cresting with government takeovers of banks and motor car industries, and ending with taxpayer bailouts of banks with friends among the Party Bosses in Washington.)
Mr Shiller is elliptical. Let us ignore him and point at the rest of the ticker tape parade of modern articles of which this column is merely one flake of confetti.
Leaving aside everything else Mr. Shiller says, I am saying that the abolition of the nation state in the name of free trade is an argument so wicked, illogical, and vile, that it would turn a firebreathing libertarian freetrader into a staunch isolationist nationalist in one stroke.
I am saying that if the premise is that having nations, in and of itself, is an injustice, so too are all human institutions, and, indeed human life itself.
If the mere presence of wealth in some nations and poverty in others is a sufficient excuse for abolishing nations, then, so too is the mere existence of any virtue, merit, or talent in one man sufficient excuse to enslave him for the benefit of the vicious. It is a no-fault excuse; a justification for whatever powergrab you like, an excuse that never fails, tires, falters, or runs dry.
They are complaining about reality. Reality, merely by being real, is redefined as injustice.
The word for transferring wealth to the poor is not justice; the word for that is charity when it is voluntary, and when it is not, theft.
Likewise, the word for erecting supranational organizations under control of no voters is not free trade; the word for that is globalism, or, more to the point, the word for combining big business and big government into one inescapable and worldwide system of command and control is called despotism.
In the same way that government-run welfare state measures are a satanic parody of the charitable giving to the poor done by the Church and private charities, so too is the global socialist plutocracy a satanic parody of the international order which obtained in Europe in the Middle Ages.
One idea of particular power and verve which, since 500 A.D. or so, has given Europe its energy and progress is the idea of individual spiritual merit: every king and slave was to be stripped of earthly rank at the Judgement Seat, and rewarded and punished not due to his father’s works, not due to his rank held by birth, but according to his own individual sins or virtues, or according to the mercy of one willing to pay the blood penalty in his stead.
This separation of social rank from spiritual worth is unique. Neither in Asia, Africa, or the precolumbian Americas is there any such concept.
In Europe, it was well known that kings could be sinners. In India, the Brahmans were both rulers and, thanks to the Karma of their birth, spiritually superior, saints by birth not by deeds. In China, the emperor was the Son of Heaven, and in Japan, the son of the Sun Goddess. Likewise the ancient despotism in Egypt or Babylon. The social order, called dharma or maat or me, was part of the cosmic order. The kingship was divinely ordained by the gods and the kings were the descendants of demigods, and Caesar was divine.
But in Christian Europe the rulers were not holier than the ruled. They may be higher in secular rank, but they were not more saintly. Even Emperor Theodosius could be forced to do penance, or the Emperor Henry IV could be forced to walk the Road to Canossa, barefoot in the snow, weeping for his sins. Such humility in emperors is impossible for a pagan world. No one calls god-kings to repent.
This is because even kings, in the Christian world, answer each man for his own sins. God is no respecter of persons.
Socialism hates and despises this individualism and has done all that can be done to dishonor and blacken the idea, and bring it into disrepute.
Using economic groups as the collective was the fashion in Queen Victoria’s day, and using the differences between colonizing nations and natives was the fashion later, and later still all possible differences between races, between the sexes, between the chaste and the perverse, were made the collectives which determined each man’s fate. Now, all those things over which a man has no control, his race and place of birth, his sex, have become matters of separation, envy, and recrimination.
Only those things over which he has no control can be used as a measure of his guilt or innocence, please note. Any socialist foolish enough to introduce individual merit or individual free will into the discussion would find the foundational assumptions of collective guilt ergo collective retribution for collective wrongs to evaporate.
So all question of merit, of justice, of right and wrong must be eliminated in order for the collective program to gain an appearance of legitimacy. This is not just your hard work you have done in your life that must be declared illegitimate hence unprotected from expropriation, but your background, history, homeland, culture, and all. The hard work of the statesmen who founded and the soldiers who died and the industrialists who built your city must be defined out of existence, blotted out of the record, before the collective can raze the city and loot it, allegedly for the benefit of some aborigine in another hemisphere crouching in a bush.
This is because the aborigine and the collectivist are of one mind. This is best explained as the mind set of the Melanesian Islanders, who, seeing European aircraft fly by overhead, developed the cult belief that they, not the Europeans, were the rightful owners of the cargo aboard, endless wealth that came out of nowhere for no reason, bestowed by the gods and meant for the islanders: the White Devils had unfairly and unjustly, via perhaps witchcraft, stolen the godly wealth meant for the islanders, and therefore various ritual practices (including building convincing models of landing strips and airplanes out of bamboo) would rectify the theft.
The globalists have the same belief and same agenda. They believe nature bestows wealth on all persons in equal measure, except where White Devils, unfairly and unjustly, via perhaps witchcraft, had taken more than their fair share. The mere existence of the difference, without the slightest hint of why such a difference exists or what causes its degree of separation, is regarded by the modern Cargo Cultists as injustice.
One major difference is that the ritual actions of the moderns versus the Melanesian Islanders to undo the nature of reality are far more vicious and counterproductive. The Melanesian Islanders were not burning airfields and shooting down planes in order to redirect the cargo to themselves.
The New World Order people are doing the exact acts needed to prevent economic activity: they are establishing unfree trade in the name of free trade; putting control of manufacturing, sales, and working conditions into the hands of remote Mandarins whose income is either (1) unrelated or (2) inversely proportional to their efficiency; organizing to take money from the productive and giving it to the unproductive after driving down wages and insuring dumping and flooding of low quality goods on the various national markets.
Since there is also no gold standard, the international bodies are also manipulating credit, which always leads to depression. Continued interference, bail outs, antitrust laws, regulation and red tape prevents industries caught in a depression from liquidating stock and selling it to areas of the economy where the consumers, by their buying and investment decisions, have shown they want the resources to go.
The whole point of this rule by international Mandarin system is to prevent the sovereignty of the consumer. It is to make sure the money in your pocket cannot be used as a reliable store of value over time; that you cannot buy what you want with your own money when you want it.
What is their motive? In the case of the few remaining Old Left Liberals, their empty chuckling heads are no doubt echoing with the concerns of Marx in Queen Victoria’s day about the working conditions of Oliver Twist and similar orphans. They want a government controlled wage and price system because they think money comes from nowhere for no reason, and needs to be taken back from the witches and given to the Melanesian Islanders. They actually think that making the rich poor and making the poor destitute somehow helps the poor. Because they are idiots.
The motive of the Alt-Left is easier to read, and I do not include Mr. Shiller among their number. They merely hate you. They want to see an international order, something like a secular version of the Catholic Church, a New World Order.
These people are not in it for money and power, not in the main. The New World Order is not intended simply to control the economy and the laws. That is minor.
They crave spiritual and temporal power over all civilized nations, in order to compel people what to think, which vices are impermissible and which virtues are mandatory.
The vices and virtues, of course, are the opposite of the real Church.
We call pride a sin, and call for humility; they call self esteem a virtue and call for every participant to get a trophy.
We call envy a sin, and call for kindness; they call envy justice, and call for merciless retribution for every micro-aggression, for rioters to burn houses and shops, and for blacks to shoot cops, until those who have wealth and success suffer and die.
We call gluttony a sin and call for abstinence and, in their due seasons, fasts; they call for consumption of marijuana and alcohol and mass entertainments to intoxicate the senses, immediate gratification and spending all one’s pay on Friday, and call self-discipline a white privilege.
We call lust a sin and call chastity a virtue needed to combat it: they call abortion a medical necessity in a world of sexual anarchy, call for contraception to be paid for by Catholic academies and the Little Sisters of the Poor. Mere toleration of pederasty, pornography, sodomy, and endless sexual perversions they call insufficient: your uproar of infinite applause is a constitutional right.
We call wrath a sin and patience when you are wronged a virtue; they call being victimized a virtue, the greater the victimization, the greater the moral stature gained; and wrath is what they need to drive voters to the polls. They are never angry at anything which can be solved. Solutions would defeat the purpose. They are angry at history, at nature, at things over which no human hand has control.
We call avarice a sin and largesse a virtue; they call avarice their entire system and theory of government.
We call sloth a sin and vaunt diligence as the virtue needed to combat it. They deny even the possibility of diligence in worldly matters, as if hard work was neither needed nor wanted nor possible. As for spiritual matters, the Left are diligent only in silencing, neutering, demeaning and destroying the Christ’s followers on Earth, a job they have done admirably and thoroughly. Ancient Christians in the Middle East have nearly been exterminated by the ISIS organization the Obama Administration created, and, via payments to Iran, funds.
That is the world they wish, and that is the world they are on the brink of achieving: a world entirely occupied by ignorant, brainwashed savages, arrogant with inflated self-esteem, unkind and eager to riot, consumers without self control, sexual perverts and serial adulteresses unable and unwilling to raise children in families, always nursing a grudge over some imagined or exaggerated wrong, greedy but only for unearned gain, and godless through and through.
All Cathedrals torn down, all churchbells silent, cities looted, families forgotten, all song choked, all poetry dead, all laughter gone, except for the caws of sadistic mirth that erupt from such dead-eyed folk at the sight of the innocent suffering. And from horizon to horizon, a wreckage of waste, despair, and hopeless misery. And still they will not be sated.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
