Back from Finland, the Zman is thinking about what a post-Buckleyite right should call itself, now that the alt-right seems to have crashed and burned. He wants a "dissident right" to represent a non-blank slate view of human nature and society.
Above all, for him, the right should not be a clean-up crew after the latest lefty eruption of radicalism as most right-wing movements of the last 200 years have been.
What we need to found ourselves upon is English biologist William Donald Hamilton rather than Nietzsche, he writes. Hamilton's signature achievement was to show the limits of "altruism" and actually found Darwin's notions in biology.
Whereas the traditional right assumes that "traditions, customs and institutions are the result of accumulated wisdom."
Only I would say that human society is the result of all of the above: custom and tradition; privilege created by force; and the roots in biology. I would say that religion and culture and politics are social experiments that, if successful, will end up encoded in the biology.
You need both Hamilton and Nietzsche. But you probably also need the failed experiments of the left. Why? Because humans really do proceed through the debris of failed experiments. For instance, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was an attempt to learn the hard lessons of the wars of religion. You need the bloodbath of the 20th century socialist states to become sadder and wiser about Heaven on Earth politics. When will these hard lessons be encoded in the genes? Not any time soon.
I think that the failure of the right has been to concentrate its thinking and its politics on the social and cultural world view of the middle class and to ignore the interests of the workers and peasants of the world. Also to fail to understand what is going on in the minds of the creative class and the left.
That, of course is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to demonstrate. There are people in the world that think and feel like subordinate peasants. Our politics and our economics must accommodate their needs at least to the point that they don't opt for bloody rebellion. But we middle-class deplorables also deserve a voice. Human culture and politics and economics must allow us middling ones to wive and thrive in the way that satisfies us. And the creative educated class deserves to live in their way, as artists, writers, activists, and LGBT, provided they don't pollute the water for the rest of us. Yes, every way of life has its toxic waste. Even artists and writers and LGBT and especially activists.
But. I think a true "dissident right" would focus on the needs of the non-deplorables. We know what we want, but we also want other people, people not like us, to get what they want too.
What do I mean by that?
I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Subordinate Self want. They want someone that fights for them. They want job security. They want someone to do the thinking for them, provide them with the infrastructure to get an education for their kids, and get training for a job for themselves. And then there are women. I think that we need to do the thinking that will mend the sexual and family chaos that the welfare state has visited on the poor. That means creating a culture that helps women find a partner that will be a decent husband for them and a good father to their children. I feel that this should be done as much as possible outside government through labor unions and fraternal organizations and churches that socialize and raise up people that think of themselves as subordinate and powerless. That's because these community organizations can only thrive if they benefit their members every day. Government and politics seem unable to pull back from failure and stasis.
I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Creative Self want. Actually, this is rather presumptuous, because, according to the developmental psychologists, we deplorables don't have a clue about the consciousness of the creative people. But I am conceited enough to believe that I can; this is because, I feel, I think and feel along snowy ridges way above the dusty plain of the thought of the People of the Creative Self.
But let us start with what the People of the Creative Self should not want. They should not want to be the saviors of the victims. That's because everything they have proposed thus far for the victims amounts to a Great Reaction to reinstate the worst features of the past. Their socialism is neo-slavery; their welfare state is neo-feudalism; their identity politics, from class to race to gender politics is neo-tribalism. So on the one hand we should damn the creative left to hell with a brutal narrative of assertion that blames them for all the sorrows of the world, and as the culprits for all the crimes of the last century. On the other hand we should neutralize the left's victim politics by offering a positive agenda for the People of the Subordinate Self that helps them integrate into the city culture and economy, on the road to the middle class from victims to responsibles, showing that we care about people like them.
Another thing we need to do for the People of the Creative Self is encourage them into creative lives that are actually beneficial rather than corrosive. I mean by this a narrative that tell the creatives that aspiring to be an artist or a writer is fine and dandy, but it is hard. Society does not owe them a living as a creative artist; indeed all the narratives down the ages tell us that if you want to be a hero, it means being a sacrificial hero, who really gives up his life that others may live. If this hero ends up the dictator or president for life then he is living a lie, the opposite of the hero and nothing but a villain.
In other words, the creative life as political activist is nothing but a lie. We know that for two reasons.
The first is that almost all the political activism of the last two centuries has been a mixed blessing at best and a crime against humanity at worst. I mean by this that the activism for the working class led directly to the white working class dying of despair because the creative class did not teach the working class how to wive and thrive in the city but merely to live on the liberal plantation as slaves or serfs that were abandoned when the political weather changed. Needless to say, any candid socialist politics has led to mass graves and/or starvation. Period, full-stop, end of story.
The second reason is that we now know, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we need a lot less politics and government in the world than we used to. We humans thrive best in a self-adjusting and self-creating culture and economy that is governed by law rather than executive fiat and the price system rather than administrative regulation. But this is poison to our creative friends because in their dull world view they imagine that political power is the highest and noblest of callings. In this they are a weak echo of the faith of the feudal lords.
Obviously the effort to create a cultural narrative that can lord it over the People of the Creative Self is not going to be easy, but it is essential. We deplorables need to put the People of the Creative Self on the back foot, and develop a good cop bad cop narrative that on the one hand scorches them for their vile activism and reactionary faith in politics, and on the other dangles before them the truth about the creative life that it is not a free lunch but a descent into the underworld and a dangerous Hero's Journey along the boundary between Order and Chaos. To choose the creative life is not to idly "want to be an artist or writer" but to descend into the fearful underworld of the unconscious and live to tell the tale.
You can see that it is far too early to imagine that we can create a "dissident right" and push back against the left. Not right now. There is too much thinking to be done. But we can do it. And the effort to do it starts today.
What I have suggested is not new and untried. It is the accumulation of thinking and understanding among all kinds of thinkers in the past 200 years, of whom the only common denominator is that they are Not Left. They are all, I believe, thinkers that have asked the question: Now What? What is it about the modern age that has changed and how should we humans live in it? The only thing is that nobody has put it all together so that we have a combined narrative that makes sense of the past and its traditions, the present and its challenges, and the future with its unknowns.
It's not that hard, and it shouldn't be that hard to get the left on the back foot and gasping for air.
Above all, for him, the right should not be a clean-up crew after the latest lefty eruption of radicalism as most right-wing movements of the last 200 years have been.
What we need to found ourselves upon is English biologist William Donald Hamilton rather than Nietzsche, he writes. Hamilton's signature achievement was to show the limits of "altruism" and actually found Darwin's notions in biology.
Whereas the traditional right assumes that "traditions, customs and institutions are the result of accumulated wisdom."
The dissident right, in contrast, thinks of traditions, customs and institutions as evolved solutions to human organization that are peculiar to a people, because of their peculiar evolutionary arc.So, students in a high school cafeteria self-segregate by gender race, intelligence, everything you can think of.
This is not the result of accumulated wisdom in the form of custom or the result of tradition. It is not the result of mystical forces like white privilege or social constructs. It is the nature of humans to attract to those with whom they share fundamental connections, which are rooted in biology. Their hierarchical relationships are similarly rooted in their biology.So politics and culture must deal with this reality. I think that Jordan B. Peterson was making this point with his famous lobster story.
Only I would say that human society is the result of all of the above: custom and tradition; privilege created by force; and the roots in biology. I would say that religion and culture and politics are social experiments that, if successful, will end up encoded in the biology.
You need both Hamilton and Nietzsche. But you probably also need the failed experiments of the left. Why? Because humans really do proceed through the debris of failed experiments. For instance, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was an attempt to learn the hard lessons of the wars of religion. You need the bloodbath of the 20th century socialist states to become sadder and wiser about Heaven on Earth politics. When will these hard lessons be encoded in the genes? Not any time soon.
I think that the failure of the right has been to concentrate its thinking and its politics on the social and cultural world view of the middle class and to ignore the interests of the workers and peasants of the world. Also to fail to understand what is going on in the minds of the creative class and the left.
That, of course is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to demonstrate. There are people in the world that think and feel like subordinate peasants. Our politics and our economics must accommodate their needs at least to the point that they don't opt for bloody rebellion. But we middle-class deplorables also deserve a voice. Human culture and politics and economics must allow us middling ones to wive and thrive in the way that satisfies us. And the creative educated class deserves to live in their way, as artists, writers, activists, and LGBT, provided they don't pollute the water for the rest of us. Yes, every way of life has its toxic waste. Even artists and writers and LGBT and especially activists.
But. I think a true "dissident right" would focus on the needs of the non-deplorables. We know what we want, but we also want other people, people not like us, to get what they want too.
What do I mean by that?
I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Subordinate Self want. They want someone that fights for them. They want job security. They want someone to do the thinking for them, provide them with the infrastructure to get an education for their kids, and get training for a job for themselves. And then there are women. I think that we need to do the thinking that will mend the sexual and family chaos that the welfare state has visited on the poor. That means creating a culture that helps women find a partner that will be a decent husband for them and a good father to their children. I feel that this should be done as much as possible outside government through labor unions and fraternal organizations and churches that socialize and raise up people that think of themselves as subordinate and powerless. That's because these community organizations can only thrive if they benefit their members every day. Government and politics seem unable to pull back from failure and stasis.
I mean we should be thinking about what the People of the Creative Self want. Actually, this is rather presumptuous, because, according to the developmental psychologists, we deplorables don't have a clue about the consciousness of the creative people. But I am conceited enough to believe that I can; this is because, I feel, I think and feel along snowy ridges way above the dusty plain of the thought of the People of the Creative Self.
But let us start with what the People of the Creative Self should not want. They should not want to be the saviors of the victims. That's because everything they have proposed thus far for the victims amounts to a Great Reaction to reinstate the worst features of the past. Their socialism is neo-slavery; their welfare state is neo-feudalism; their identity politics, from class to race to gender politics is neo-tribalism. So on the one hand we should damn the creative left to hell with a brutal narrative of assertion that blames them for all the sorrows of the world, and as the culprits for all the crimes of the last century. On the other hand we should neutralize the left's victim politics by offering a positive agenda for the People of the Subordinate Self that helps them integrate into the city culture and economy, on the road to the middle class from victims to responsibles, showing that we care about people like them.
Another thing we need to do for the People of the Creative Self is encourage them into creative lives that are actually beneficial rather than corrosive. I mean by this a narrative that tell the creatives that aspiring to be an artist or a writer is fine and dandy, but it is hard. Society does not owe them a living as a creative artist; indeed all the narratives down the ages tell us that if you want to be a hero, it means being a sacrificial hero, who really gives up his life that others may live. If this hero ends up the dictator or president for life then he is living a lie, the opposite of the hero and nothing but a villain.
In other words, the creative life as political activist is nothing but a lie. We know that for two reasons.
The first is that almost all the political activism of the last two centuries has been a mixed blessing at best and a crime against humanity at worst. I mean by this that the activism for the working class led directly to the white working class dying of despair because the creative class did not teach the working class how to wive and thrive in the city but merely to live on the liberal plantation as slaves or serfs that were abandoned when the political weather changed. Needless to say, any candid socialist politics has led to mass graves and/or starvation. Period, full-stop, end of story.
The second reason is that we now know, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we need a lot less politics and government in the world than we used to. We humans thrive best in a self-adjusting and self-creating culture and economy that is governed by law rather than executive fiat and the price system rather than administrative regulation. But this is poison to our creative friends because in their dull world view they imagine that political power is the highest and noblest of callings. In this they are a weak echo of the faith of the feudal lords.
Obviously the effort to create a cultural narrative that can lord it over the People of the Creative Self is not going to be easy, but it is essential. We deplorables need to put the People of the Creative Self on the back foot, and develop a good cop bad cop narrative that on the one hand scorches them for their vile activism and reactionary faith in politics, and on the other dangles before them the truth about the creative life that it is not a free lunch but a descent into the underworld and a dangerous Hero's Journey along the boundary between Order and Chaos. To choose the creative life is not to idly "want to be an artist or writer" but to descend into the fearful underworld of the unconscious and live to tell the tale.
You can see that it is far too early to imagine that we can create a "dissident right" and push back against the left. Not right now. There is too much thinking to be done. But we can do it. And the effort to do it starts today.
What I have suggested is not new and untried. It is the accumulation of thinking and understanding among all kinds of thinkers in the past 200 years, of whom the only common denominator is that they are Not Left. They are all, I believe, thinkers that have asked the question: Now What? What is it about the modern age that has changed and how should we humans live in it? The only thing is that nobody has put it all together so that we have a combined narrative that makes sense of the past and its traditions, the present and its challenges, and the future with its unknowns.
It's not that hard, and it shouldn't be that hard to get the left on the back foot and gasping for air.
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