VDH has a great article up on American Greatness today. I was struck by one line, where he says that “meritocracy” , now, of course, just as dirty a word as “aristocracy”, is what distinguished Western civilizations in the FIRST place from the old ones with a hierarchy based on race, class, wealth. If you’re smart and hardworking, you could rise to the top no matter where you started.
We took that for granted for so long, it was just background noise, a cliché, and we really couldnt have imagined that in America, people would ever again be told that race, class, gender were destiny. You CAN’T escape or, Heaven forfend, “deny” them. We the Rightly-Guided still can’t believe it, we keep expecting it to just….fade out, go away, but: it ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Yeah so what exactly is “progressive” about that? In any possible sense of the word, it is a REgressive idea whose time has come. Again.
Meritocracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, gerontocracy – whatever system happens to be in vogue, the real problem is the “-cracy” part of that concept. Whenever one person makes rules for multitudes of other people, society is on the slippery slope to Hell.
In theory, the answer is “democracy”, where We the People make rules for ourselves. But experience shows that too many of us are willing to line up, take the clot shot and all its boosters, put on masks, and spew hate at Putin. The abject failure of “democracy” leaves us wide open to domination by one of the other “-cracies”. The fault is in ourselves, not in our stars.
Progressive is a lie . Everything it wants is couched in a lie.
Why , because everything they want is at war with God . They are at war with God . If God is the arbiter of Truth. Then they won’t have that and demand the opposite . The opposite of Truth is a lie .
Precisely—the fundamental problem is that any individual, class, group, or other power should exercise any but the most limited authority over the freedom of the individual to live their life as they wish.
Read the essays collected in Michael Malice’s 2021 The Anarchist Handbook (not to be confused with The Anarchist Cookbook). The anarchist tradition is deeply rooted in history, and has supporters on both the political left and right. Both agree that the individual is the fundamental component of society, and any structure that subordinates the individual to a larger collective is not only unproductive but evil. As myrmecologist E. O. Wilson said of communism, “Good ideology, wrong species.” (more specifically, “It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.”).
The God of Jews and Christians was satisfied with ten rules for behaviour and, with few exceptions, most functioning societies pretty much agree on them, even those who have never heard of that particular deity or detest those who believe in it. In the year 2010, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations passed more than one million specific regulations with an estimated new one being added every two hours and nine minutes. Nobody can possibly comprehend this, no less comply with it, and it is utterly impossible to evaluate the cost of these constraints on economy or to the liberty of those who must comply with them.
This is the Greek root “-κρατία” (power, rule, or authority) gone crazy. It isn’t so much who rules, but how much they rule. If the scope of their authority is severely limited, as it was in U.S. prior to 1912 and especially before 1860, the only interaction the typical citizen has with the supreme government is dealing with the post office. The idea that every single aspect of life was decided in a remote, imperial capital, was thought to be something dating from antiquity or confined to oriental despotisms. And yet, within my lifetime, it seems to have become something people consider normal and not to be questioned.
Fortunately, the whole thing will collapse when it consumes the last of the seed corn of the society. This is inevitable, just as the collapse of the Soviet Union was, even when “experts” were predicting it would persist for another century or more. Whether what comes after is better or worse depends upon how individuals react to its demise.
Problem is, people have no memory. We see all these Orwell memes, f’rinstance, but I doubt most people know what he actually wrote.
An unrelated example: I’ve been struck by the fact that nobody seems to know/remember that Kevin McCarthy was on the verge of becoming speaker back in 2015. He was all but already elected in the morning, and withdrew by noon, in the wake of accusations of adultery (how quaint!)
So the fact that—although it’s well within living memory(wait, lemme check my pulse…ok yuh I’m alive) people can’t see the parallels, inter alia, between the old segregationists, who wanted to enforce “identity politics” by physical and cultural separation, and modern Progs who are on every level seeking to do the same thing. Also, in re “meritocracy”, with the rabid anti-intellectualism of Mao and of the Khmer Rouge—at one point, executing any one who wore glasses…