The top 10% of gasoline superusers consume as much gas as the bottom 60% of users.

You Won’t Survive As Human Capital by Ash Milton palladiummag.com, November 24, 2023

You and I operate as human capital: an input in the process of social reproduction, rather than its master or even its goal. Much of our life from childhood onward is dedicated to proving our value within this paradigm. No one living today is responsible for this mode of life. Some people more directly enforce its norms, a few try to resist them, and most go along as best they can.

Our talents and abilities are quantified by large organizations like state bureaucracies and private corporations. The intangible aspects of our personalities that we think motivate our decisions—loves, hates, desires, fears—are conditioned in organized ways. These organizations only rarely answer to particular people, but rather to their own and often seemingly mysterious internal logic.

We all know this isn’t quite right, yet most of the world has staked out its existence on this logic. The places that don’t are increasingly rare in a world where even the Taliban of Afghanistan submit to the advantages of a professional bureaucracy. No one has yet come upon a different material logic to outcompete it.

Some of the shortcomings of the underwriting assumptions are becoming clearer as we travel deeper into the twenty-first century. One of the most important is reproduction: having children has become an inconvenient and inefficient trade-off. Many of our friends and relatives will never do so. No known form of natalism has been able to reverse the great dying taking place within advanced societies. Unable to exist without its human substrate, yet also unable to sustain it, this technocratic paradigm has a fatal contradiction within it: despite its hegemony, it is incompatible with life.

Already in 1945, the writer H. G. Wells had a fit of despair as the specter of extinction loomed over all of humanity’s apparent advances. He laid out his fears in an essay that was strangely discordant with his career as one of the century’s great utopian modernists: “[T]he human story has already come to an end…The stars in their courses have turned against [man] and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly upon mankind.” The various strains of transhumanists and accelerationists are only Wells’s latest disciples, finding a solution to the paradox of high modernism without people in the potential emergence of new beings. None of them have yet produced humanity’s successor.

For now, the human element is still the load-bearing one. As members of that element, you and I will only come out the other side by prioritizing our own success in biological and material terms over our usefulness to others as human capital. For our own lineages to increase in power and fame in the centuries to come, it is necessary for us to establish a completely different paradigm of life.

“Us” Is a People
When populations converge on a material and social paradigm of life that powers their expansion, history records it as the coming into being of a new people. Often, a truly great civilization can be traced to a very small founding population at its origin. At this stage, a shared form of life shapes a powerful in-group consciousness, kinship against enemies, stable intermarriage, and endogenous reproduction. The population shares a niche of material activity and production. They absorb or displace rival communities, and their form of life grows increasingly distinct and defined against those of other populations.

The name for this kind of event is ethnogenesis. Often, ethnogenesis begins with a population on the order of several thousand families, of which perhaps only a few hundred are really dominant. Sometimes, these groups rule over still-larger populations, in which case the initial population may become one dominant endogenous caste or class within a conquered society. An early status of nobility is a good heuristic in these cases since it often designates those families that helped establish a social order.

This pattern holds quite well throughout history. Roman historians record that the original patrician families of Rome numbered about 200 or 300 families that were descended from the very earliest senators, a number that expanded after the first generations. Classical Athens and Sparta ranged about 20,000 to 40,000 male citizens at their greatest heights, a number which was surely much smaller at their outset.

Centuries later, the numbers don’t change much: about 8000 Norman landholders are estimated to have settled and ruled England after the Conquest; in France, the number of noble families in the realm never grew to more than several thousand even on the eve of the French Revolution—and only a small number of these had truly feudal roots. At the time of the American Revolution, the major centers of power—Boston, Philadelphia, the Virginia plantations, and so on—were generally each run by insular collectives of hundreds of families, which eventually intermingled as the most prominent among each group established the national WASP elite.

The reason for such consistent numbers is that this is a practical and useful scale for an “us.” The range of a few hundred to a few thousand families is what makes up a collective in-group capable of real bonds, cooperation, and a sense of common destiny. This is the scale of a real community that can cohesively act on the world. This is far smaller than any modern nation-state or even large city. Populations may rise and fall, but the scale of agency stays much the same: in a solar system where 100 billion humans span multiple worlds and moons, it will still be coordinated groups of thousands of people that drive history.

When collectives of this sort rule far larger populations, as the Romans, Normans, Franks, and WASPs did, they make up the foundational element of the resulting regimes. Their marks are often felt centuries after the founding people themselves disappear as a distinct population: Latin remained an institutional language for millennia, and the modern British parliament still ritually uses Norman French phrases in procedures like royal assent to a bill. Such vestiges reflect that the state itself was initially an organized representation of a particular people’s interests and so reflected their mores, language, culture, and religion. Without their distinct state-founding people, those nations and empires as we know them would not have existed. At their founding, the formal purpose of such governments was to pursue the common interests of those groups that had established them.

The identity of state goals with the organized interests of a people defined by kinship and common consciousness is straightforwardly assumed by the ancient authors on politics—for example, Aristotle’s Politics and Cicero’s De re publica—and is also part of the English concept of the commonwealth. A state exists to handle the most general level of a community’s affairs, and doing this it all assumes that a defined community with a common purpose and interest actually exists.

The Modern State Is Not a Political Community
Western debates over topics such as immigration highlight a divide within liberalism on just what defines the body politic. Some countries, like France and Hungary, embrace an older mythos in which the democratic state rests on a real national community, either civic or semi-ethnic, that is capable of collective agency; others, like Britain and the U.S., have rejected this mythos, or see it as undesirable, and reserve collective action for special minority interests while seeing citizenship proper as focused on individual rights. In either case, the body politic is an ideological construct. The sort of collective action and identity possible among small groups of founding elites is not possible in a national population numbering tens or hundreds of millions. It was not mass populations that founded these states, but much smaller, highly coordinated subsets of those populations.

Like all institutions, states tend to drift away from the purposes for which their founders created them. In the course of time, the community that once erected the state often loses its original vitality, then hegemony, and finally its central position within its own regime. The displacement of the old Roman senatorial class, by upstart Latin-speaking generals and politicians of plebeian ancestry traces these steps.

When institutions become powerful and entrenched, the logic of state interest begins to override the more fundamental interests of continuity. The qualities which brought the state into being may ultimately conflict with and upset its stability and end up suppressed. The militant hero culture of the old patrician families gave Rome its empire, but also contributed to the civil wars that plagued it whenever expansion slowed or imported slaves conflicted with free plebeian interests.

The reformations of Julius Caesar and Augustus saved the institutional Roman state and its power, but they could not reverse the demise of its founding families. Plebeians had risen into Roman institutions for centuries at this point, and eventually, foreigners did so too. By the imperial era, the Roman state was at its height but most of the original patrician lineages that had built it up were extinct. The institutions of a people had parted ways with that people itself, and the former survived far longer than the latter.

Confusing your own material interests with the reifications that exist in the culture around you, whether those be symbols or institutions, is a lethal generational poison. You and I likely grew up in a culture where attachment to “patriotism” or “freedom” or “democracy” served an ideological purpose. These words stirred the feeling that we were part of the ruling regime’s own in-group. This assumption is at least notionally shared by nearly all modern states from North Korea to Canada.

Those reifications are echoes of a past era, but do not reflect the present. Not only does the regime you live under not represent your fundamental interests, but many Western regimes have no such conscious in-group at all. They are either no longer in the hands of those who once established them, or else their current descendants have substantively ceased to identify with their own forebears. They are not even in the hands of a new people—no process of ethnogenesis is underway in Paris or Berlin. Rather all these people and structures have become fuel for the technocratic world.

However, you still possess interests that you can examine and discover yourself. And further, you share those interests with your kin and collaborators. Your own biological existence and that of your lineage are tangible interests. So is the successful exploitation of a novel material niche, the continuity of a way of life, and the ability to pursue transcendent or spiritual goals. Once reifications distract from these goals, it is better to jettison them.

Modern states view their populations as human capital fully replaceable first by immigration, and then eventually by technology. A citizen may have rights and privileges, but these do not constitute a community that could make those real. The community of interest can’t be brought into being through paper. The idea that such a society can have a res publica is a fantasy, but the res publica of you and yours is not. It is only with the people with whom you undertake these things that you can share political life—the common matters of a real people that the ancient writers saw as the business of government.

Implicit in the technocratic paradigm under which we live is the idea that something other than human beings could be the agents of history: technology, institutions, good legal mechanisms, labor relations, or even the post-human intelligence yearned for by Wells and by modern AI accelerationists. In fact, no such replacement has arisen, nor is there any certain pathway to one in the near future.

Instead, we are left with a logic that leads to suicide. Either its expansion stalls due to forces beyond its control, or the process that has consumed all advanced countries finishes engulfing the entire world, eventually running out of resources and territory for further expansion. In any case, the result is the same: stagnation and decay under irreconcilable contradictions.

Your Material Future
Despite the dead end of the technocratic paradigm, it remains the null hypothesis of all thought and action, and the state to which all failed attempts at exit eventually return. This is exactly the process that is plaguing one of the most famous groups to resist modernity: the Amish.

The fanatical dedication of the Amish to a form of life, founded on religious conviction, determined their material existence. And despite their lack of explicit concern for material power and expansion—and outsize genetic maladies—they have won both these things. In the last 100 years, they grew from 5000 to 370,000 people, acquired huge amounts of land, and began to dominate the counties in which they were the most concentrated. While easy to romanticize, the Amish are showing more and more shortcomings.

The Amish spiritual vision translates in material terms into the life of the family farm based on communal manual labor. When prioritized, this translates into rapid expansion, because land quickly becomes locally expensive and so new colonies continually have to be founded. But despite the apparently large number of colonies being founded, new ones often house only a small number of people. The actual number of new colonies should be far, far higher, and the membership of each far larger, if the community wants to maintain its original vision of life.

When they deviate from the communal family farm, things degrade fast. In Holmes County, an Amish hub in Ohio with nearly half the state’s Amish population, one can find Amish men and women sporting smartphones and Adidas sneakers. Between a fifth and a quarter of the state’s Amish kids attend mainstream public school. The results are almost instantaneous: the fertility of non-farming families drops by a quarter, and that’s just in this early stage of the process.

When Amish families do not prioritize the material niche necessitated by their fundamental spiritual mission, they lose their center of gravity and assimilation follows. The smartphone and the public school are vectors of a more powerful rival consciousness. The only way to avoid it while maintaining the benefits of smartphone hardware would be to establish a closed Amish-only intranet for the hardware to operate on with a strict firewall against digital leaking from the mainline internet. Whether the Amish survive likely depends on whether they can achieve these kinds of collective-level updates instead of allowing their unprincipled exceptions to become new de facto norms which then eradicate their form of life altogether.

The collective consciousness that a form of life sustains is the most important thing your community shares. For your economic incentives to align with your social and biological ones, the work you do to secure material wealth should rely on the communal bonds formed under your collective consciousness as assets, not liabilities. If the bonds become liabilities, the incentive already exists to trade off against them—and even short-term gains on this front seem to guarantee defection. This is the major principle that the Amish get right, and their assimilation begins insofar as they stray from it.

But the Amish way of life is not relevant to our interests or ideals. There is no value to you or me in fleeing to the woods or the countryside. Fortunately, the principle is not unique to them, nor is it synonymous with a primitive form of life.

Industrial civilization itself leverages numerous traits: a population that is competent at it must be able to command loyal manpower, coordinate across large spaces with tight information, unite around high-risk ventures, and do all this while enduring physically and mentally demanding conditions. These are inherently valuable traits. Industry often seeks out such populations through offshoring precisely because this cultural complex is so hard to cultivate in a workforce that doesn’t already possess it, or which has lost it.

Our own task is not to preserve modernity or industrial society for its own sake, though we may yet preserve some parts of them. The real vital forces behind its development are not unique and could survive and thrive in other paradigms. Advanced technical achievements will continue only insofar as some part of the human substrate of technocracy finds a way out of this ideological trap.

This also means that advanced society is dependent on an agency that is willing to construct it for some higher purpose. It’s unlikely that agency can be constructed, but it seems that latent agency can be activated under the right conditions. Industrial titans like Matthew Boulton or Thomas Edison often had intense personal drives and motivations that can’t be replicated at scale, and fields like rocketry even depended on fully-fledged theologies motivating its pioneers to get off the ground. The same holds true of the corporate structures that make up the social organization of modernity: the first global corporate structures were religious orders and charter companies that drew adventurers to the ends of the Earth.

Historically, those periods where people shift from one way of life to another in ways that magnify and increase their best traits are extremely generative and can define entire epochs. The prerequisites of industrial and technocratic society itself—the corporate organization and commercial capitalism—themselves were born as English, Dutch, and French populations spread around the world. A mix of material, political, and religious factors led to significant populations becoming free landholders and merchants across the ocean, and eventually vectors of empire for the Old World. Their recent ancestors had lived in feudal serf societies where their talents were expressed in categorically different ways.

Acting on goals and ambitions that could not be expressed in the societies they lived in, these people formed an array of settlements, colonies, charter companies, pirate bands, religious orders, and other structures adapted to their particular goals and natures. Later empires told the stories of their growth as highly coherent and predestined affairs. But this was post-hoc myth-making. Their foundations were laid on the same scale of action that all founding populations historically act on: thousands of people, not millions.

These groups possessed common goals and ambitions that could not be expressed in the societies they lived in. The forms of life that they eventually developed could not be completely planned in advance, but grew in fits and starts. Our task at present is to identify those capable of this kind of action, and to enter into community with those who share our most tangible interests. It is only once we achieve a shared consciousness on these terms that a new “us” can exist, and with it the foundation for a new way of life.

p469

…The first phase was a rapid decolonization, the gaining of independence. It was characterized by a universal optimism, enthusiasm, euphoria. People were convinced that freedom meant a better roof over their heads, a larger bowl of rice, a first pair of shoes. A miracle would take place—the multiplying of loaves, fishes, and wine. Nothing of the sort occurred. On the contrary. There was a sudden increase in the population, for which there was not enough food, schools, or jobs. Optimism quickly turned to disenchantment and pessimism. The people’s bitterness, fury, hatred was now directed against their own elites, who were rapidly and greedily stuffing their pockets. In a country without a well-developed private sector, where plantations belonged to foreigners and the banks to foreign capital, the political career was the only road to riches.

…Everything is eaten, down to the last crumb. No one has any supplies, for even if someone did have extra food, he wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it, no place to shut it. You live in the immediate, current moment; each day is an obstacle difficult to surmount, and the imagination does not reach beyond the present, does not concoct plans, does not dream.

Bars contain one thing for sale - a beer: …The beers can be various—banana, corn, pineapple, palm. Generally, each of these women specializes in one kind. A glass of such a beverage has three merits: (a) it contains alcohol, (b) being a liquid, it quenches thirst, and (c) because the solution at the bottom of the glass is thick and dense, it constitutes for the hungry an ersatz nourishment. Therefore, if someone has earned only a shilling in the course of a day, he will most probably spend it in a bar…

…Modern civilization has not reached us,” he concludes. “There are no electric lamps here, no telephones, no television. The only aspect of it that has penetratred is automatic weapons.”

…it is true that what strikes you most in a place like Rwanda is its deep provincialism. Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail…

“Hatari?” I ask after a while (some kind of danger?).

The Amba are a highly unusual social group. Like other tribes on the continent, they take seriously the existence of evil and the danger of spells, and thus fear and hate wizards, but contrary to the widely held view that wizards dwell among others, that they act from without, from a distance, the Amba maintain that the wizards are among them, within their families, within their villages, that they form an integral part of their community. This belief has resulted in the gradual disintegration of Amba society, corroded as it has become by hatred, consumed by suspicion, confounded by free-floating fear. Anyone can be a wizard, brother fears brother, son fears father, a mother fears her own children. The Amba rejected the comfortable and comforting view that the enemy is the stranger, the foreigner, the man of a different faith or skin color. No! Possessed by a peculiar kind of masochism, the Amba live in torment and distress; at this very moment, evil can be under my own roof, asleep in my bed, eating from the same dish as I. And there is an additional difficulty: it is impossible to determine what wizards look like. After all, no one has seen one. We know they exist because we see the results of their actions: they caused the drought, as a result of which there is nothing to eat, fires keep igniting, many people are sick, someone is always dying. Plainly, wizards never rest, endlessly occupied as they are with raining misfortunes, defeats, and tragedies down upon our heads.

The war flares up, dies down, then explodes again. Although it has gone on so many years, I have heard of no one trying to write its history. In Europe, there are shelves of books dedicated to every war, archives full of documents, special rooms in museums. Nothing of the kind exists in Africa. Here, even the longest and greatest war is quickly forgotten, falls into oblivion. Its traces vanish by the day after: the dead must be buried immediately, new huts erected on the site of burned ones. Documents? There never were any. There are no written orders, no ordnance maps, cryptographs, leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, letters. The custom of writing memoirs and diaries does not exist (most frequently, there is simply no paper). There is no tradition of writing histories. Most important—who would do this? There are no collectors of memorabilia, curators, archivists, historians, archaeologists. It is actually just as well there are no such people nosing about the battlefields. They would be quickly spotted by the police, imprisoned, and, suspected of spying, shot. History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears. What exactly is it? Why has it chosen us to cast its evil eye upon? It is better not to think about it. Better not to pry.

People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and the bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics. Khartoum restricts the number of flights bringing supplies for the hungry. Many of the planes that reach their destination are robbed by the local chieftains. Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of the soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.

In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell—for six muskets and one trunk of beads—the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors—to Africa. Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population…Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit. Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free.

History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly. In such instances, it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing—more, who do not want to know, who reject the possibility with disgust and anger. We see them hastening toward their own destruction, forging their own fetters, tying the noose, diligently and repeatedly checking whether the fetters and the noose are strong, whether they will hold and be effective.

The increasingly important question in the world is not how to feed all the people—there is plenty of food, and preventing hunger is often only a matter of adequate organization and transport—but what to do with them. What should be done with these countless millions? With their unutilized energy? With the hidden powers they surely possess? What is their place in the family of mankind? That of fully vested members? Wronged brothers? Irritating intruders?

Between the people of the Sahara and the sedentary tribes of the Sahel and the green savannah there had existed for centuries in this part of Africa a form of commerce known as silent trading. The inhabitants of the Sahel traded salt and received gold in return. This salt, a highly coveted and priceless commodity, especially in the tropics, was carried from the interior of the Sahara on the heads of the black slaves of the Tuareg and the Arabs, probably to the River Niger, where the transaction took place. “When the Negroes reach the river, they proceed as follows,” tells a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto. “Each of them forms a little hillock out of the salt he brought, and marks it. Leaving the salty piles arranged in one straight line, they retreat a half day’s travel time in the direction from whence they came. Then, people from another Negro tribe arrive. They come on large boats, probably from nearby islands, disembark, and place next to each mound of salt a certain amount of gold. Then they, too, withdraw, leaving behind the gold and the salt. When they are gone, those who brought the salt return, and if they deem the amount of gold to be sufficient, they take it, leaving the salt; if not, they take neither the gold nor the salt, and go away once again. Then the other ones come back and take those piles of salt that have no gold next to them; next to the others they place more gold, if they consider it appropriate, or leave the salt. In this manner they conduct their commerce, never seeing one another and never speaking. This practice has gone on for a very long time already, and although the whole business sounds improbable, I assure you that it is true.”

The African market is a great repository of everything and anything. A veritable mine of the cheap and the shoddy. A mountain of rubbish, gimcrack, and kitsch. There is nothing of any value to a Westerner here, nothing to catch your attention, arouse your admiration, tempt you to possess it. At one end are stacks of identical red and yellow buckets and bowls; at the other, billowing piles of thousands of identical undershirts and sneakers; someplace else still, pyramids of multicolored calicos and glittering rows of nylon dresses and men’s jackets. Only in such a place can one fully appreciate the extent to which the world is swamped with material tenth-rateness, how it is drowning in an ocean of camp, knockoffs, the tasteless and the worthless.

One of the differences between African and European societies is the latter’s division of labor: specialization, strictly defined expertise, professionalism. These principles are only marginally in effect in Africa. Here, especially these days, one must try one’s hand at dozens of occupations and do many things, most frequently not for long and—alas!—not too thoroughly. In any event, it is difficult to find anyone who has not had a brush with Africa’s prime life force and passion: the exchange of goods.

Noticing that inter-cultural contact is usually initiated by conquistadors: …intercultural exchange was monopolized by a class of ignoramuses. As one consequence, interpersonal contacts were informed from the outset by the most primitive criterion: skin color. Thus racism became an ideology according to which people defined their place in the world.

Interesting commentary/history concerning:
-Idi Amin
-Hutu/Tutsi conflict ~1960-90
-Dinka/Nuer conflict
-Monrovia and the ascension to power of former American slaves (Liberia)
-Tuareg/Bantu conflict

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The problem with the view of the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make women faithful wives and mothers.

Modern societies are faced with men who either reap the fruits of sexual liberation through easy copulation, or men who for any number of reasons won’t or can’t put up with the stress of this chase and instead become apathetic, at least so far as women are concerned. The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out, isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don’t care.

Men seek status above all because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status serves precisely this purpose. Only males of high status breed.

breeding practices and human inequality are connected at the root.

Behind the Greek obsession with citizen quality, with excellence, with personal and generational biological improvement, lies the converse, a depreciation of the life of the slave, or, more generally, of the type of man who lives only to live, who is willing to survive at any cost, or who is willing to accept subservience to avoid death. To speak of superior and inferior ways of life is necessarily to deny that every form of life has dignity or meaning. But, in particular, the net effect is to deny that mere life has any worth.

If one can speak of one type of life being superior and another being inferior, it’s only a few steps to this conclusion. For this reason Nietzsche begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has no value. The fundamental Greek insight is the “nihilistic” insight of Silenus: “Better never to have been born, and if born, to die as soon as possible. Mere life, a drudgery and bleak terror, is not worth the trouble.

The connection between philosophy and tyranny at bottom has to do with the necessities of educating the first philosophers. Such an education, in an era in which philosophy does not exist established as a tradition, that is, when philosophy is in its beginnings, necessarily risks the production instead of a tyrant—it depends on encouraging a political orientation that is tyrannical from the point of view of the polis; and it trains certain skills and abilities that are “tyrannical.”

The development of such a class of functionaries [magicians] is of great importance for the political as well as the religious evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour, wealth, and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own advantage.

The pitfalls which beset the path of the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor.

The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect…Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress.
or extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

The opponent of intelligence is the rule of the elders, the institution through which the rule of custom, the rule of the ancestral, is made concrete.

By contrast, in other parts of the world magicians and medicine men manage to make a relatively complete break with the rule of elders and the totality of custom…In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings…

nomos: ancestral law, custom, convention

phusis: nature, blood, body, (inheritance)

Nature of man only manifests itself in great deeds and in victory in contests… nature and heredity may lie fallow for a generation or two, but if they exist, they only manifest and prove themselves in great deeds that overwhelm the perceptive observer as an outward visible sign. Aside from this there is only convention, “tradition,” empty speech, chatter.

When nomos or convention outsteps this or pretends to, when it is forgotten that “he who wins rich renown in the games or in war” belongs to a different reality and owes his origins to a different principle, then nomos becomes something else, it becomes a systematic and perverse covering-up of nature, party to the forgetfulness of nature and the hierarchy between man and man that exists in nature. The highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an educational program of nomos.

Men pursuing high achievement should strive according to nature [marnasthai phuai] and not be misled or “educated” by convention or teaching. The “standard” high achievement for a man is to possess areta—and let us remember that “virtue” here refers ultimately to the ability to be a good leader in war, namely to possess andreia and phronesis, battle prowess and ability to give good war counsel

The primary function of nomos is “social control,” homogenization, taming, tribal survival, the continuation and preservation of mere life—through a regime of commands, speech and teaching that covers up and suppresses nature. Excellence, virtue, on the other hand, is a matter of nature, of blood, and it cannot be taught. [ccv] Maybe the climax of Pindar’s thoughts on nature are revealed in this explicitly negative attitude to teaching, the taught, what we might call the “try-hards”…

Machiavelli: You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.

One of most absurd mystical religious beliefs is in equality of humans would you agree? Another is the belief in rights. Still another is the belief in the dignity of life or of labor. Another is belief in Creation out of nothing.

Very descriptive and disturbing narratives of diseases and pests that can attack the human body. Must reading for any aspiring jungle explorer. Will provide you with a greater appreciation of the comforts of civilization.

A Sane Solution to the Student Debt Crisis – Josiah Lippincott

Republicans should support student loan forgiveness…with some important caveats.

For the record, this is not a self-interested call to action. I have zero student loans and never did. Nor did I receive financial assistance from my parents; I do not come from a wealthy background. I paid for my private school college education using academic scholarships and cold hard cash that I earned from summer work. My argument here is political, not personal.

After three years of the COVID panic induced interest rate freeze, the 43 million Americans with student loans are set to begin paying on their loans in less than a month.

At a time of sky-high inflation and economic uncertainty, that additional financial burden will hit millions of households hard, as the average student loan borrower owes $37,000. It is no wonder that Joe Biden and the Democrats are eager to try and find a way to stave off this financial hit. The minute the economy stops limping along and plunges into full-on recession, there will be an enormous price to be paid by our political class. Resuming student loan payments could very well hasten that day of reckoning.

The conservative response to this situation has been to flip the bird to the student loan borrowers: “you took out loans, so you pay them back.”

That’s right, suck it up cupcake!

This response might be emotionally satisfying (“take that, you avocado toast-eating, Prius-driving, Joe Biden-voting, college-educated libtard!”) but it papers over key considerations. For one, student loan holders are a huge voting bloc, and a politically diverse one at that. Telling any group of voters to shove it, even if they have no intention of supporting you, is politically risky.

It’s also bizarre to see conservatives on the side of big banks and the federal government. Why is it always “you took out a loan, so pay it back” and never “you loaned out money to an 18-year-old who wants a gender studies degree; you’re an idiot”?

Mainstream conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro treat student loan debt as more sacred than marriage vows. This is an inversion. Paying back a bank is far less important than keeping your family intact. Many have rightly pointed out that student loan forgiveness is unconstitutional, which is true. But it was unconstitutional for the federal government to loan out that money in the first place. There is no provision in our founding documents that says the feds are supposed to subsidize higher education for the whole population. Indeed, it was the federal government pouring money into the university system that caused the price of college to skyrocket to such absurd levels. From 1963 until now, the price of a college education has tripled, after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted starting salary for college graduates has remained flat at around $55,000 per year.

At the same time, mass immigration and outsourcing has hammered wages for non-college educated jobs. This economic situation has placed young people in a vise grip: either take on massive amounts of debt in order to have a shot at a middle-class life, or accept a place in the unstable and often grueling world of blue-collar work. Even today, a bachelor’s degree confers a 75% boost to lifetime earnings over a high school diploma.

Colleges have become the government-sponsored gatekeepers to economic wellbeing. The point of college in the modern degree-mill university system is to gain the social and political capital necessary to have access to high paying and high-status work. What is respectable today is liberalism. College is where young Americans acquire the social skills to navigate the politically correct world. In order to get a high paying job in finance, law, government, media, or the non-profit world, you need to know how to speak fluently about how much Black Lives Matter, “female penises,” and the pandemic of “disinformation.”

America doesn’t need re-education camps; we already have them in the form of our colleges. The American Right, therefore, has an enormous incentive to shatter the stranglehold that a college degree holds on economic success. Student loan forgiveness offers a powerful tool on this front. Republicans should support forgiving the vast bulk of the publicly held student loan debt in this country with the condition that the federal government stop giving out student loans altogether. Congress should forgive all of the current student loan debt AND pull all future higher education funding. That means no more Pell Grants, no more FAFSA, no more earmarks for colleges.

Right now, the federal government holds $1.65 trillion in student loan debt. Leaving the taxpayers holding the bag on these notes is fiscally painful, to be sure. But there are ways of meliorating that blow. For one, the total value of all college endowments in America is $800 billion. Along with student debt relief, Congress should pass a one-time 100% endowment tax that affects all colleges and universities that take federal aid (my alma mater, Hillsdale College, would be one of the very few institutions of higher education that would not be affected, because it takes zero dollars in federal aid). This one-time tax would cut the taxpayer’s burden in half. Cutting all federal aid to higher ed would save another $150 billion per year. That means that in less than 6 years, the combination of the one-time endowment tax and the savings from future student aid would make the student loan forgiveness pay for itself. Instead of punishing non-college-educated Americans, my plan for student loans would punish the people responsible for putting so many students into debt: the colleges and universities themselves.

The upside of this tax and cut plan is that our institutions of higher learning would have to figure out how to survive without suckling on the taxpayer teat. A lot of schools would go bankrupt. Good. I say this as someone working on his PhD: the best thing that could happen to American higher education would be the complete elimination of all state money from the education system.

The influx of taxpayer cash has corrupted academia, turning the whole enterprise (with the exception of a few holdouts) into a repulsive grifting operation. Our country would be a better place if we razed every college in this country to the ground and started over.

Most people do not need college degrees. The best way to learn how to run a business, for instance, is not by getting a business degree but by working in a business. The same is true for most trades. The system of credentials and government licenses that dominate our lives are shackles on the creativity and productive power of the American people. The massive debt burden on the college-educated gives corporate human resources departments a powerful tool to wield against politically incorrect employees. Without a high paying job, most college- educated Americans cannot afford to pay the mountain of debt that comes along with access to middle class life in modern America.

In medicine, the massive debt load that doctors must take on ensures compliance with the regime’s edicts. Much of the corruption in the medical field that we’ve witnessed over the last several years is traceable to the rigid political enforcement that flows from financial dependence. A free market in education would make America’s colleges much healthier. In reality, the only type of person who needs college is the sort of young person who wants to read Plato in the original Greek, or who wants to dedicate years of their lives working through the more complex and pressing questions connected to human learning. The inducement to higher education should not be salary and compensation but spiritual fulfillment. In turn, the quality of American high school education should become better. An army of unemployed PhDs from the implosion of American higher ed would mean that the worst scholars would have to get jobs more fitting for their natural talents…such as cleaning toilets, picking crops, and sweeping streets. Better teachers would find a place in America’s public schools, providing high quality education to high school students free of charge.

Forgiving student loans might not make college-educated voters support the Republican party, but it could very much weaken the motivation these voters have to go to the polls against the GOP. More importantly, forgiving student loans now—with the right caveats attached—would severely weaken the liberal academic stronghold. Democrats don’t have an answer to this proposal. If they refuse to go along with debt forgiveness, then they lose face with their voters. If they allow future cuts to higher education, they weaken their ideological grip on the populace. Either way, the Left loses and the American people win.

p487

…The ultimate individual form of human deceit is self-deceit. Since we have developed very subtle ways of detecting lying and cheating in fellow humans. lying itself is a difficult art. It follows. then, that the most effective way of telling a lie, especially a self-serving one, is to be convinced that you are, in fact, telling the truth. The ultimate forms of collective self-deceit developed by our species are religion and ideology. Religion is the denial of mortality. Ideology is a sophisticated belief system the purpose of which is to facilitate the transmission of credible, self-serving lies…

…Ethnocentrism is one such rudimentary ideology, and so are sexism and “ageism.” Men use rudimentary ideologies to control women, and adults to control children….

…In stateless societies, collectively organized violence has a long history. Hominids early became both predator and prey to their own species. Beyond killing and eating each other, early hominids perhaps began to steal each others’ women as well….

… Indeed, the very essence of the state is the centralization of power in the hands of the few in order to extract surplus production from the many, within the same society. Police, courts, taxation, forced labor and slavery are so many coercive institutions that thrive together with the development of states…

…Culture is our species’ `way of evolving and adapting much faster than would be possible by genetic selection alone…

…No doubt, in the long run, our species is as doomed as dodos and dinosaurs. It is only a matter of time before all life forms become unsustainable…

…Bodies are, in Dawkins’ words, mere mortal and expendable “survival machines” for potentially immortal genes. Such genes, therefore, as predispose their carrying organisms to behave nepotistically will be selected for, because, by favoring nepotism, they enhance their own replication. …

…great mental and emotional strain on the human brain to “ know” more than a few hundred individuals. We can recognize by sight many thousands, but our ability to associate complex personalities with faces and to make reliable enough predictions about people’s behavior to render interaction sufficiently unstrained is quite limited. Urban life constantly strains these physiological limits, and when we must constantly interact with a larger and rapidly changing cast of characters the very nature of the interaction changes drastically…

…The prototypical ethny is thus a descent group bounded socially by inbreeding and spatially by territory. Until the last few thousand years, such groups were of limited size as witnessed by many surviving “primitive” societies. The natural ethny in which hominids evolved for several thousand millenia probably did not exceed a couple of hundred individuals at the most…

…Since females invest much more in the reproductive process than males, they maximize their fitness by being choosy about their mating partners. They seek to pick the best possible mates in terms of genetic qualities and resources they have to offer. The male, on the other hand , maximizes his fitness by being promiscuous and by outcompeting his rivals in access to reproductive females….

…Men jealously “protect” “their” women from men of other groups. deeply resenting ethnic exogamy on the part of women, while at the same time seeking access to women from other groups. In ethnically stratified societies, this double standard takes the form of polygamy of the dominant-group men, with subordinate-group women becoming secondary wives and concubines. Where several ethnies live side by side in an unstratified system, the groups constantly raid each other for women. This sexual asymmetry of endogamy has, of course, one important consequence-namely that no ethny is a completely closed breeding system…

..Between ethnies, men use power and violence to secure access to women from other groups, and this reduces the level of inbreeding. When the ethnies in presence are equally matched. male competition for foreign women takes the form of interethnic raids. After an ethnic hierarchy has been established, subordinate-group men loose all or part of their control of “their” women and their reproductive success is curtailed, while upper-group men are polygynous and incorporate subordinate-group women. An ethnic hierarchy, therefore, generally results in a reduced fitness for subordinate-group males. The classical scenario for conquest is to rape the women and kill, castrate or enslave the men….

…Asymmetry of reproductive strategies for males and females has another important corollary for ethnic relations. In a situation of ethnic hierarchy, ethnic solidarity between men and women is undermined. The men of the subordinate group are always the losers and therefore have a reproductive interest in overthrowing the system. The women of the subordinate group, however, frequently have the option of being reproductively successful with dominant-group males. Indeed, even where forced into relationships with dominant males, they must cooperate in the interest of their children…

van den Berghe’s definition of race/racism:
…What is meant by “race” here is a social label attributed to groups of people in particular societies at particular times, on the basis of inherited phenotypical characteristics. If phenotypic criteria are socially used to categorize groups (usually, if not always, invidiously), then races are said to exist in that society, and the ideology supporting that classification and its social consequences is called racism…Where relatively inbred subgroups of the human species are meant, we will speak of “ populations” in the genetic sense.

What can be used as ethnic markers:

1. a genetically transmitted phenotype, such as skin pigmentation, stature (as with the Tuzi of Rwanda and Burundi), hair texture,
2. man-made ethnic uniform. Members of one’s group are identified by bodily mutilations and/or adornments carried as visible badges of group belonging. These markers range from clothing and headgear to body painting, tatooing, circumcision, tooth filing and sundry mutilations of the lips, nose and earlobes.
3. behavioral. Ethnicity is determined by speech, demeanor, manners, esoteric lore

…One can therefore expect racism to appear only where long-distance immigration has suddenly put in presence substantial numbers of people whose physical appearance is different enough as to make genetic phenotype a reliable basis for distinguishing between groups. People must migrate across genetic gradients before their physical appearance can be used as a reliable basis of inferring group membership…

…miscegenation, which typically accompanies conquest and slavery, often blurs racial distinctions within two or three generations…If racism is to continue over several generations, it must be buttressed by severe barriers against miscegenation, a rare situation found in only a few countries such as South Africa and the United States …For these reasons, racism, as the primary basis for group distinctions, has been the exception rather than the rule.

…Ethnic (and racial) sentiments often seem irrational because they have an underlying driving force of their own, which is ultimately the blunt, purposeless natural selection of genes that are reproductively successful. Genes favoring nepotistic behavior have a selective advantage. It does not matter whether their carrying organisms are aware of being nepotistic or even that they consciously know their relatives…

Four stages of ethnic relations: (1) autarchy, (2) trade, (3) symbiosis and (4) parasitism.

On cannibalism amongst the Maori of New Zealand:

It was largely restricted to fighting men and to what is technically called “exocannibalism” (eating people of outside groups), but it was consciously thought of as the most convenient solution to the logistical problem of feeding the troops in the field. Slain enemies of all ages and both sexes were often eaten on the spot. Surplus meat was carried in baskets by war prisoners, who, as the supply dwindled, were themselves in constant danger of being slaughtered and eaten. Even slaves of long-standing were often killed and eaten (Vayda, 1 960, pp. 67-72 ) . In fact, humans were the only large land animals that constituted a regular part of the Maori male diet.

On tourism (When wealthy and nosy eccentrics like Alexander von Humboldt were few, their travels in search of the exotic were called “explorations”, rather than
“tourism.” ):

Exoticism becomes a marketable resource: “authenticity,” or a reasonable facsimile thereof, is the ultimate commodity. In exchange for putting himself on show. the native receives material considerations: a shilling for a photo, a dollar for a song or a peso for a dive. If necessary, the exoticism is carefully cultured and stage-managed to satisfy tourist demand. The situation is clearly a transient one; the tourist is, by definition, a short-timer with a tenuous, peripheral and indeed very special status. He is at once a privileged guest and a ridiculed, unknowledgeable outsider; a pampered recipient of mercenary deference and an impersonally exploited resource. The very type of ethnic contact created by tourism militates against that ultimate goal of the tourist experience: authenticity. But, when the tourist is tired of being given that very special treatment reserved for his breed, he goes home and becomes a native again. Each ethny is a resource for the other, simply by being different. Each specializes in being itself, in cultivating its uniqueness for the amusement of the other.

…The human capacity for conscious deceit (through ideology, inter alia) further enhances our species’ capacity for group inequality beyond anything known in other species. Human systems of group inequality, especially the ones perpetuated by all large, centralized states, are almost invariably bolstered by an ideology that disguises the parasitism of the ruling class as either kin selection or reciprocity. Subjects are told that they are ruled (i.e. exploited) in their own best interests, either by a benevolent despot who claims some kind of fatherly interest in them and who supposedly saves them from their own greed and ineptitude, or through a supposedly freely entered social contract wherein the rulers are held to be chosen representatives and servants of the people entrusted with promoting the common good and arbitrating and regulating individual conflicts of interest…The second and more recent justification for tyranny and exploitation-often misnamed “democracy,” either of the liberal or of the socialist “ people’s” variety-is characteristic of industrial societies since the French Revolution…

Some definitions:

A state is a collectivity headed by a group of people who exercise power over others (who are neither kinsmen nor spouses), in order to extract surplus production for their own individual and collective benefit.

A nation is a politically conscious ethny, that is, an ethny that claims the right to statehood by virtue of being an ethny. Such a ideology is called nationalism.

A nation-state is a state made up almost exclusively of a single nation. (Swaziland is used as an example)

A multinational state is a state made up of two or more nations. (Rwanda is used as an example)

A multiethnic state is a state made up of two or more ethnies that do not claim statehood.

Imperialism is the domination of one or more ethnies over others.

Colonialism is long-distance imperialism, usually over noncontiguous territory and over culturally unrelated ethnies.

…Clearly, multiethnic states face a problem of legitimacy that is incommensurable with that of nation-states. It is true that the larger, the more bureaucratized, the more centralized and the more exploitative a nation-state becomes, the thinner the fiction of common kinship wears, and, thus, the more problematic legitimacy becomes. Still. common nationhood, so long as the fiction of common descent retains the appearance of plausibility, remains a powerful rationale for state power. Being plucked by people who speak your language, share your customs and values, and are, however vaguely and remotely “your people” is more tolerable than being exploited by foreign conquerors.
Perhaps the soundest reason why foreign conquest and domination are so deeply resented is that they almost invariably represent a direct threat to the biological fitness of the conquered. The very reproductive success and, hence, biological survival of the conquered group is at stake. It is no accident that military conquest is so often accompanied by the killing, enslavement and castration of males, and the raping and capturing of females for purposes of enhancing the fitness of the conquerors.
Even when conquest is relatively mild and not openly genocidal, the subordinate group in an ethnic hierarchy almost invariably “loses” more women to males of the dominant group than vice versa. Hypergamy (mating upward for women) is a fitness-enhancing strategy for women, and, therefore, subordinate-group women do not always resist being “ taken over” by dominant-group men. But subordinate-group men lose fitness by loosing potential mates from their group without any hope of access to dominantgroup females. It is not accidental that the most explosive aspect of interethnic relations is sexual contact across ethnic (or racial) lines; nor is the asymmetry of the resentment surprising. No group is concerned about gaining women; every group resents losing women…..

Since colonialism is usually imposed on ethnies that are very different both physically and culturally from the conquerors, the social gulf between rulers and ruled is all the greater and the more unbreachable, and the restraints on exploitation are practically nonexistent…colonial regimes are maximally coercive and exploitative…

…Conquered populations can either be assimilated to the conquering group, selectively at the elite level or in toto, through persuasion or coercion, gradually or brutally: or ethnic separation can be tolerated , encouraged or maintained by force, and conquered groups can be administered through a system of indirect rule. Native institutions are modified to suit the conqueror, but otherwise left as undisturbed as possible; religious, linguistic and cultural diversity is tolerated; and the local elite is allowed to keep some of its privileges in exchange for becoming auxiliaries of the imperial regime…

Much discussion of middlemen (MM) who interpose themselves between a ruling class and the mass of the population by performing roles that the upper class does not want to perform and for which the lower class lack special skills, capital or other advantages. Those roles are often, but not always, mercantile. They frequently involve providing, distributing and marketing goods and services in a preindustrial economy with an expanding market and monetary system…Classical MM occupations are the import-export trade, retail and wholesale shopkeeping, money lending, buying and reselling of cash crops, specialized craft production in owner-operated cottage industries, specialized laborintensive services such as restaurants and laundries and the provision of transport facilities (mule trains, buses and trucks). Most of these forms of entrepreneurship are started with little capital and are initially very labor intensive. An example of MM would be asian indians in British Africa.

Population numbers in British East Africa:

This thinly scattered European minority, numbered barely 90,000 out of a total East African population of some 25.1 million in 1 962, i.e. just before (fur Kenya) or after (for Tanzania and Uganda) independence. More than half of them (56,000) lived in Kenya, mostly in and around the capital of Nairobi, center of the “White Highlands,” but, even there, they were outnumbered by Africans at least 20 to one. Europeans lived in a gilded ghetto of their own making. In every city of any size, they reserved for themselves segregated residential areas where they built large, comfortable villas and were served by African domestics. They send their children to all-white schools, staffed by white teachers. They imposed racial segregation in hotels, restaurants, bars, public transport, cinemas, theaters-in every conceivable facility, public or private. Indeed, social apartheid, at least in Kenya, was as rigid as in South Africa. Europeans also had a privileged legal status, and the entire governmental and legal apparatus buttressed the racial supremacy of the whites, whether colonial officials or private settlers…Economically, the standard of living of Europeans was so vastly greater than that of the Africans that there was virtually no overlap in their income or wealth distributions…Naturally, the European community was almost totally endogamous, although white bachelors often took black mistresses. The latter were completely excluded from European society, however, as were their mulatto children. These liaisons were socially frowned upon and were tolerated only for bachelors. Most Europeans came to East Africa with their wives and children, especially in Kenya where the highland climate was considered ideal for European settlement…Leisure-time activities were also entirely segregated by race. The whites attended their tea parties at Government House, their Sunday afternoon horse races, their polo, cricket and bowling matches, their classical music concerts, their steeple chases and so on, among themselves, although always served by a numerous staff of African domestics. In Nairobi and environs, the British minority even managed to stamp out local vegetation and introduce a tropical version of the English countryside-fake Tudor manors, manicured lawns and all… At the bottom of the social pyramid of East African colonial society were, of course, the Africans. They made up about 98% of the region’s 25 million inhabitants in 1962, and over 90% of them were either pastoralists moving across vast stretches of semiarid savannah with their flocks of cattle and goats, or poor subsistence farmers eking out a meager livelihood from small plots cultivated by swidden agriculture. Additional reading concerning the British in East Africa.

..Overpopulation grew worse and worse throughout the colonial period, as some groups, especially the Kikuyu, were dispossessed by the white farmers, and as European preventive medicine caused a population explosion…

…the ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves. Therefore, a dominant group, like South African whites, can be expected to sacrifice a great deal of economic efficiency if it perceives that alternative policies threaten its survival.

Jefferson on slavery: nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [ i.e. blacks) are to be free” is frequently cited. But after a semicolon, he continues, “Nor is it less certain, that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinions have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them”…One solution, strongly advocated by many 18th century abolitionists, including Jefferson, was deportation to West Africa. The American Colonization Society, strongly supported by Jefferson, was founded for the purpose of settling free blacks in Africa, and later the American quasicolony of Liberia in West Africa was established to implement that purpose.

Lincoln (the Great Emancipator): “…there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race”

On Affirmative action:

1. It has heightened racial consciousness and thus partially reversed the trend to deracialization of American society. In order to enforce school busing, affirmative action in hiring, preferential admission of blacks to universities and so on, it became increasingly necessary to classify people by race and to reverse the previous trend toward the deletion of all racial information on all application forms and official records. Affirmative action, whatever its intent, gives the stamp of official approval on the recognition of racial and ethnic differences and on the legitimacy of treating people as members of groups rather than on the basis of individual merit. It, therefore, contains a profound internal contradiction because it necessarily entrenches what it purports to eliminate: racial distinctions. Affirmative action also legitimizes the dubious concept of collective guilt for past actions, since the rationale for reverse discrimination is that one group is to be advantaged compared to another to compensate for past discrimination.

2. Affirmative action has raised serious problems of equity and aroused a considerable white backlash against what is seen as unjust racial discrimination against whites, or more specifically as anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism. Poor, educationally disadvantaged whites legitimately have asked why they, too, should not be the beneficiaries of affirmative action and they have begun to organize politically, often against blacks…

3. Affirmative action increases the class gulf between the black middle class and the ghetto subproletariat. It clearly benefits some of the former, but does l ittle or nothing to alleviate the very serious and worsening problems of the latter

4. Affirmative action demeans the groups it is supposed to help since the rationale for it implies inferiority. Its philosophy is clearly paternalist, and it often creates a quasicolonial structure for blacks (in the form of “offices of minority affairs,” “black studies programs,” racially labeled scholarships, awards and positions, and the like).

5. The more blacks (and other minorities) are given preferential treatment, the more questionable the qualifications of all blacks become. Affirmative action is therefore resented by many qualified, competent blacks as not only an insult to them, but an impediment to their careers. Another aspect of this problem is the perpetuation of white stereotypes of black inferiority…

…Consociationalism is a special form of elite domination based on ethnic proportionality. It can work if it is based on ethnicity (or some special feature of it, such as language or religion), but not if it is based on race; race is intrinsically invidious and, therefore, cannot become a principle of egalitarian group association…

Consociationalism analyzed in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada - arguably the 3 best cases where it may survive, but nonetheless the author argues persistence is unlikely.

The high birth rate of French Canadians in Quebec is referred to as “la ravanche des berceaux” - the revenge of the cradle.

A term used to describe Quebecois: les negres blanc d’Amerique - in aligment with the US civil rights movement.

Concerning black ethnic revival of the 60’s:
…Blacks lack a separate and distinct cultural tradition, a contiguous territory and the necessary resource base to make nationalism work. What blacks do have, however, is an ability to frighten whites. The spectacle of the urban riots in Watts in 1965, in Newark and Detroit in 1967 and in many cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1 968 led many whites to irrational panic. This panic was privately translated into an acceleration of the flight to the suburbs and of the consequent deterioration of the central cities and their public school systems. Publicly, panic was converted into a massive change of policy. Whereas the thrust of the civil rights movement in the 1 940s, 1 950s and early 1960s had been the elimination of all considerations of race, now all kinds of government agencies competed with each other to compel school authorities, employees and others to pay great attention to race, to allocate resources on the basis of racial quotas, to bus school children according to their skin pigmentation,t to overlook seniority rules to atone for past racial guilt and so on…

…We have not been genetically selected to use phenotype as an ethnic marker, because, until quite recently, such a test would have been an extremely inaccurate one. Racism is thus a cultural invention, a simple one to be sure, that is readily invented when the circumstances of long-distance migration across a wide phenotypic gradient make “race” a good test of kinship; there is no evidence that racism is in-born, but there is considerable evidence that ethnocentrism is…

Numerous other examples of the manipulation of ethnic identity for gain have been generated by the policy of "affirmative action" in the United States... All kinds of people suddenly rediscovered American Indian roots. --The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981) Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

A different context in which ethnicity is consciously manipulated for individual gain is in the fierce competition for access to positions of power and hence to the public purse with its vast potential for graft, corruption and embezzlement, which is evident in many "new nations" of the Third World. In the African context, Andreski (1968) has aptly called the new multiethnic ruling class of these countries "kleptocracies," --The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981) Pierre L. Van Den Berghe (Web master's note: this was written in 1981. Today we know it also applies to the U.S.)

…It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat which went rotten…

On being outnumbered by cannibals:

…I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest—not because it occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own to you that just then I perceived—in a new light, as it were—how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped, that my aspect was not so—what shall I say?—so—unappetizing: a touch of fantastic vanity which fitted well with the dream-sensation that pervaded all my days at that time…

Describing Kurtz’s report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs:

..He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them (savages) in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc.

Musings on the meaning of life post Kurtz’s death:

…The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets…This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it.

…resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety…

Yad Vashem

…the official Israeli Holocaust agency, Yad Vashem. This institution tracks all known Holocaust victims—Jews only, of course. On their Web page they maintain an online database of victims. Six million? No. Today, 70 years after the fact, they have “an estimated 4.3 million” names (as of 2014)…the actual death toll attributable to Nazi actions is lower still: about 300,000….

Hitler

Hitler wanted to evict (not exterminate) the jews: The German word ‘vernichtung’ can be translated as extermination or evict: …In other words, to exterminate something is to drive it out, beyond the border, and thus to rid oneself of it—by any means. It does not demand the killing of the thing in question…

…Hitler obviously had no reason to hold back his language when speaking amongst such close colleagues. If he had truly wanted to kill the Jews, he would have said so—more than once, and in no uncertain terms. Instead we find not one instance of such talk. Perhaps this is why so few of our traditional historians cite these monologues of Hitler…

…to this very day no document has been found, which orders the mass murder of Jews… In fact, not even a bureaucratic trace of such an order or directive exists” (Rudolf 2011: 146). Irving (1978: xvii) observes that “there was not the slightest written evidence” of a Hitler order. Perhaps somewhere in the massive diary of Goebbels? No. As Irving (1996: 388) again remarks, “Nowhere do the diary’s 75,000 pages refer to an explicit order by Hitler for the murder of the Jews.”…

Nuremberg trials were show trials

…They were victor trials, conducted by the winning side, anxious to punish the losers, to portray them as barbaric madmen, and to justify the Allies’ own actions(the Allied fire-bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne; the killing of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians by the victorious Allies after the formal end of the war; the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which incinerated 170,000 women, children, and elderly) that resulted in mass civilian casualties—actions which might well have been declared criminal had they lost the war. It was predetermined that the Germans were guilty, that they committed mass murder, and that no act of retribution could be too harsh…

…testimony did not have to be confirmed with material or forensic evidence. The IMT could accept virtually any statement as fact: opinion, hearsay, rumor, inference, belief. Furthermore, any facts that it chose to take as “common knowledge,” no matter how they were obtained or how improbable they were, required no proof or evidence at all. This is known as “judicial notice.”..Once the court has taken judicial notice of something, it stands as an established fact. If the defendant should happen to disagree, he has no recourse.

On the difficulty of burning/disposing of bodies

Under normal conditions, the Nazis would have needed roughly 160 kg (350 pounds) of wood per body to fully incinerate it.[130] If we accept the traditional picture, the figures for the Reinhardt camps are astounding:

– Belzec: 590,000 kg (675 tons) per day. In total, 88 million kg (100,000 tons).
– Sobibor: 197,000 kg (225 tons) per day (peak). In total, 36 million kg (41,000 tons).
– Treblinka: 1.2 million kg (1,400 tons) per day. In total, 144 million kg (164,000 tons).

As with Chelmno, these are unbelievably large amounts.

The Germans excelled at chemistry, but:

…The majority of the so-called gas vans were diesel trucks, which were supposedly modified as killing machines.[25] But there is an immediate problem here: diesel exhaust, under anything approaching normal operating conditions, contains too little carbon monoxide, and too much oxygen, to kill people in any reasonable time…

…diesels produce very little carbon monoxide—only about 0.1% for most of their operating range.[100] The average person could breathe 0.1% CO for one full hour, and experience little more than a severe headache or mild nausea…

Gas chambers

…Typhus is easily transmitted by lice. In order to prevent a catastrophic epidemic in the camps, one which could spread to the local population, it was necessary to regularly disinfest the people and their belongings. The most effective lice killer of the day was hydrogen cyanide gas (hydrocyanic acid, or HCN), concentrated into small gypsum pellets, under the brand name Zyklon B…

…By all appearances, the American military modified the existing barrack once they gained control of the facility, to create a “homicidal gas chamber” from what was, originally, an ordinary shower room. The ceiling seems to have been substantially lowered. New, heavy-duty, vault-like doors were installed. And two “Zyklon chutes”—small metal fixtures mounted in the outside wall—seem to have been mortared in place after original construction of the building. Thus we have some evidence, at least, that the American military committed fraud at Dachau, in order to further the gas-chamber story and perhaps to justify their own atrocities there and elsewhere….

Same at Auschwitz: Sadly, it is not made clear to visitors that they are seeing a reconstructed, redesigned gas chamber; though, if they ask, they are told—if they ask….Several buildings… were reconstructed with major errors and presented as authentic.

Russian report on Auschwitz: claim without evidence over 4 million people killed there …the Soviets autopsied 536 corpses and found not a single death due to cyanide poisoning. Instead, the most frequent cause of death was “exhaustion.”

…The case of Bergen-Belsen is particularly instructive. This camp was the source of some of the most horrendous photos of dead bodies—huge piles of corpses found by the British. But as far as we can tell, the vast majority of these people were victims of typhus, not murder. Today even a staunch anti-revisionist like Zimmerman can say, flat-out, “Bergen-Belsen did not have gas chambers”…

Burning bodies on pyres

Huge amounts of wood are required. Under normal conditions, the Nazis would have needed roughly 160 kg (350 pounds) of wood per body to fully incinerate it.[130] If we accept the traditional picture, the figures for the Reinhardt camps are astounding:

– Belzec: 590,000 kg (675 tons) per day. In total, 88 million kg (100,000 tons).
– Sobibor: 197,000 kg (225 tons) per day (peak). In total, 36 million kg (41,000 tons).
– Treblinka: 1.2 million kg (1,400 tons) per day. In total, 144 million kg (164,000 tons).

…the total volume of ash [expected] at each camp is remarkable:

– Belzec: 13,000 cubic meters
– Sobibor: 5,300 cubic meters
– Treblinka: 21,600 cubic meters

No aerial evidence (smoking chimneys) of large scale burning

Eyewitness testimony

Many ‘eyewitnesses’ had no concept of large numbers, volumes, chemistry:

Many ‘eyewitness’ claims are ridiculous:

– Soap made from Jewish human fat (claimed by famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal).[192]
– Lampshades, book bindings, gloves, purses, and other personal items made from Jewish skin (claimed at Nuremberg).
– Blood gushing out in “fountains” from mass graves (claimed by Elie Wiesel).
– Human fat ladled from open-air cremations and used to hasten the burning of corpses (claimed by Höss, Tauber, and others).
– Babies tossed in the air and shot like clay pigeons (claimed at Nuremberg).
– Sausage made from Jewish flesh (claimed by David Olère).
– 20,000 Jews annihilated by some kind of atom bomb (claimed at Nuremberg).
– Claims of walking out of the gas chamber alive.

A number of Holocaust books from alleged ‘witnesses’ turned out to be heavily falsified or pure fabrications:

–The 1965 book Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
–Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1996) - won a number of awards including the National Jewish Book Award (US), Prix Mémoire de la Shoah (France) and the Jewish Quarterly prize (UK).
– Bernard Holstein’s book Stolen Soul (2004)
– Misha Defonseca’s book Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997). has been translated into eighteen languages and was made into a French feature film. Defonseca earned millions as a result. In February 2008 it was revealed that the author was in fact a Belgian woman named Monique de Wael, who was not even Jewish, and who had fabricated the entire story.

• Most recent (2023) confessed liar Joseph Hirt admits Auschwitz escape story is phony.

Holocaust ‘victims’ cannot be cross examined: …There seems now to be a general position held by courts of law around the world: Holocaust witnesses shall not be interrogated. They can testify, but they can never be subjected to rigorous cross-examination. Apparently the feeling is that they have been too traumatized by the entire event to withstand hostile questioning, and so their statements go unquestioned.

Elie Weisel is a fraud

…there have emerged credible claims that Wiesel fabricated much of his life history, and actually stole the identity of a real Auschwitz survivor…Elie Wiesel has no Auschwitz tattoo…

Jews control the media, congress and hence the narrative:

-we can refer to Lipset and Raab’s (1995: 27) claim that nearly 60 percent of leading directors, producers, and writers, in both television and cinema, are Jews

• on-air staff at NPR is over half Jewish.
• the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)… has been one of the most powerful and most feared organizations in Washington. A 1997 Fortune magazine poll rated them the second-most powerful lobby, behind only the 38-million-member American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).
• AIPAC conducts a rigorous vetting process to determine who are the ‘true friends’ of American Jews, and these candidates, once ‘certified kosher,’ can expect financial support from around the entire country.

-In 2003 the Washington Post reported: “Democratic presidential candidates depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60% of the money raised from private sources” (13 Mar, p. A1)

Jewish largess has the effect of:

1. Universal agreement to ignore, censor, or harass revisionists and revisionism generally.
2. The creation of a ‘Holocaust Industry.’
3. The deployment of the Holocaust story toward political ends.

Holocaust education/reparations is a gravy train for the Jews

-Finkelstein notes that “with little if any external pressure, [Germany] has paid out to date some $60 billion” (p. 84). Rudolf (2011: 45) puts the actual figure at $100 billion, and in recent public lectures Finkelstein raised the estimate to over $120 billion.
-we now have a situation in which the children of survivors are filing their own claims, asking payment for their psychological pain and suffering. The AP reported (15 Jul 2007) on a group of 4,000 Israelis called “second-generation survivors” who are seeking about $10 million annually from Germany. These children are “incapable of working,” “live with an irrational fear of starvation,” and suffer “bouts of depression.” They “cannot ride buses because it reminds them of the transports their parents took to the concentration camps”; they also “fear dogs because they were used by the Nazis to control crowds.” The Germans viewed this as “opening an indefinite channel for future claims

Summary statements

Points of agreement:
– Hitler and his top men despised the Jews, and wanted a society cleared of them.
– As a consequence, they initiated a ruthless de facto policy of ghettoization, deportation, forced labor, and murder.
– Many thousands of Jews died of non-homicidal causes while in German custody—in the ghettos, in the camps and in transit. They died from typhus, exposure, exhaustion and related ills.
– Many thousands more were directly killed through mass shootings, hangings and torture.
– Of these alleged crimes against the Jews, there is a near-complete lack of material evidence—especially for the death camps, the bodies and the means of killing.
– The total number of Jews who died, or were killed, is not known with any certainty.

Points of contention:
– The total number of Jewish deaths.
– The number of Jewish deaths, by cause, at each location or camp.
– The use of Zyklon gas chambers for mass murder.
– The use of diesel engine exhaust for mass murder.
– The veracity of the eyewitnesses, and the postwar testimonies.

• The method, and quantity, of bodies incinerated—both in crematoria and open-air.

Suporting information

Why did Hitler want to evict the Jews? pornography and usury

One Third of the Holocaust has eyewitness interviews.

Debating the Holocaust