The Dark Enlightenment

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,”

Well obviously if they were not created equal, which plainly they were not, then they were not created with certain inalienable rights either.  Rights are quite alienable.  If men were created, they were created by a God that wrathfully ordained Monarchy for sinful people who were unwilling or unable to govern themselves (first book of Samuel), a God who similarly also approved slavery. And if instead men are the product of the blind forces of natural selection, are risen killer apes, rights come from fire and steel, or the threat thereof, the second amendment being the father of all of the others, in which case you can rightly be enslaved individually for individual fecklessness, or collectively for collective stubborn but incompetent war making.

Rights and equality sound very nice, but it’s all fake, and we are being destroyed.

A lot of people do not want, and cannot competently exercise, real rights.  So “equality” means you start giving them such “rights” as “freedom from hunger”, meaning that someone more competent and thoughtful than they are has to provide them with food that they are too feckless to obtain for themselves, so the superior person’s real rights are destroyed to provide the inferior person with fake “rights”, the right to hay and a barn for human cattle – that being the only way that naturally unequal people can be rendered equal.

Rights and equality are fundamentally incompatible.  If you want rights, cannot have equality, because some people do not deserve, do not particularly want, and cannot competently exercise, real rights.  You are not going to make a below average IQ person with short time preference into a real citizen, independent, free, self sufficient, and property owning.  If some people are going to be free, they are going to be more free than such people.

And if you let such people, inferior people, vote, they will always vote against other people’s rights and other people’s property, being themselves incapable of exercising rights, and themselves too feckless and destructive to have nice things.  If they vote, they vote to drag everyone down to their own subhuman level, a desire politicians are eager to fulfill.

And if God created woman, he created woman to be a help meet for man. And if the blind forces of natural selection shaped women, they shaped women to function in a role profoundly unequal to her husband and her father, for in the ancestral environment, women were completely dependent upon men, resulting a female psychology that is apt to produce bad results for independent women, as is readily observable as one walks past a fertility clinic and looks at the clientele going in and out.

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55 Responses to “The Dark Enlightenment”

  1. […] constructs and everyone personally experiences that not all men or women are created equal. It is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in […]

  2. […] prevents men from acting in ways that make them attractive to women.  The rejection of egalitarianism is also a core principle of the dark enlightenment, so there is no conflict […]

  3. hosswire says:

    Equality is the consolation prize that we are willing to settle for when we realize that we can’t get everyone to agree that we are superior.

  4. […] In Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment series he never actually defines it, so I am going to go by Jim’s description: that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.   https://blog.reaction.la/culture/the-dark-enlightenment/ […]

  5. […] prevents men from acting in ways that make them attractive to women.  The rejection of egalitarianism is also a core principle of the dark enlightenment, so there is no conflict […]

  6. Atavisionary says:

    A prig is a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner. Also, A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
    Prog is an abbreviation of Progressive. Among other things, the progressive believes in egalitarianism in such a way that it is more accurately thought of as an example of faith, rather than an objective appraisal of human nature. Since egalitarianism is incompatible with biological and even some cultural explanations for disparities and the occurrence of under-represented groups, progressive leftoids have to assume that hypoagency (See also) of those groups result from the unfalsifiable hypotheses of institutionalized racism and sexism. Being unfalsifiable, these concepts clearly fall within the realm of pseudo-science, despite the idea being popular among left-wing social academics.

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    Therefore, a prig prog is an irritatingly self-righteous person who demands or displays precise conformity and exaggerated propriety towards moral precepts founded on progressive ideology in order to signal their self-perceived moral superiority. This mostly revolves around promoting egalitarianism, but can occur with other pet progressive issues. Progressive ideology in this context has also been termed political correctness.
    In example, during an interview with NPR Adam Carolla experienced the absurdity of a white male prig prog being very offended on behalf of an Asian thede that he is not actually representative of. The key motivation of this interviewer was to project a sense of his supposed moral superiority relative to Carolla to NPR listeners, who would vicariously be able to experience this false moral superiority. This situation is a great example of the religious character progressive dogma. Only a profound sense of pompous self-righteousness could lead him to actually believe he has any idea about how Asians might feel or react to this clip, let alone know that they would be hugely offended. In fact, given that it was the Asian comedian who committed the blasphemy, it is clear how little he actually understands the other group.
    One of key features exposed by situations like this is the ironically paternalistic and objectifying attitude that prig progs display in their concern for supposedly oppressed groups. The group in question is considered so weak and sensitive that constant censorship is required or else they will be forced towards bad outcomes despite any and all efforts on their own part. They are simply helpless objects floating in the breeze with no control of their direction or destination. The prig prog position is one of the worst examples of a discriminatory and objectifying attitude they rancorously denounce.

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    Update:
    Examples:

    A Prig Prog chastises Trader Joe’s for playing a popular rolling stones song.
    Bill Maher shows how prig progs use their pseudo-morals to silence criticisms from whites
    Prig Prog bureaucrats will attempt any tactic to get the Washington Redskins to change their name. Free northerner had a post on this.
    Prig Progs are getting more careful in advocating blankslatism

    What is a Social Justice Warrior
    Prig Progs attacked labor secretary Daniel Moynihan when he attempted to save blacks from family break-down.
    Prig Prog Zeinab Khalil (and friends) vandalized a columnist’s door for satirizing prig progs.

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  7. […] is a abbreviation of Progressive. Among other things, the progressive believes in egalitarianism in such a way that it is more accurately thought of as an example of faith, rather than an […]

  8. […] eyes, and not see things that are obviously not there. I’ve quote it before, but the words of Jim Donald drip with timeless […]

  9. […] Dark Enlightenment Defined The Dark Enlightenment Explained The Path to the Dark Enlightenment The Essence of the Dark Enlightenment An Introduction to […]

  10. […] by patent lies? The cannot. In the immortal words of atheist and leading secular right thinker Jim Donald: If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was […]

  11. […] ‘The Dark Enlightenment’ (Jim) […]

  12. Michael says:

    It puzzles me than an American wrote this, which I presume is the case, because your country is precisley the result of liberal Enlightenment thought. If you follow your thought to its logical conclusion, and your ideal state is pre-Enlightenment, then you end up with something akin to the ancien regimes of Europe, that is, an absolute monarchy with no individual rights. That’s what your ideas seem to be aiming at; a hierarchical society with an aristocratic class of rich people at the top.
    It need hardly be pointed out how inimical this idea is to the vast majority of people both in America and Europe.
    As for the Enlightenment being over-optimistic about the state, if you read Chomsky’s essay “Government in the Future” you can see demonstrated how libertarian socialism (that is, non-state socialism) is the logical conclusion of Enlightenment liberal thought. It is in fact, what the whole history of Europe, from Athens onwards, has been tending towards: Greater autonomy for the individual and small group, a strengthening of the social principle and a weakening of the authoritarian principle. The conflict between these two principle forms the anarchist view of history, as opposed to liberal progressivism, or Marxist Hegelian dialectics.
    In as much as history, and people themselves, have been moving away from authoritarianism, for every good reason, not the least of which is the havoc authoritarianism and rigid hierachy wrought in the twentieth century, you would seem to be on the wrong side of history, and, in truth, in every sense a reactionary. Reactionaries, in fantasising about some past golden age, always forget that one cannot turn back the clock, even by as much as five minutes. The truth is that the ancien regimes of Europe were embodiments of injustice and privilege which were long overdue for abolition. To try and recuperate these social structures and ideas of privilege and artistocracy in an American setting strikes me as bizzare and absurd, and either a fundamental misunderstanding of history or the work of a fantasist or someone near schizophrenia.

    • jim says:

      It puzzles me than an American wrote this, which I presume is the case, because your country is precisley the result of liberal Enlightenment thought. If you follow your thought to its logical conclusion, and your ideal state is pre-Enlightenment, then you end up with something akin to the ancien regimes of Europe, that is, an absolute monarchy with no individual rights

      An “Absolute” regime which had no authority to increase ancient and traditional taxes. We could do with that sort of absolutism

      I don’t like the pre revolutionary French regime because it was, like last Czars, leftist. Under King Louis it was an extremely bad career move to notice that there were differences between races, prefiguring twentieth century PC. The King advocated democracy, while for ordinary people advocating monarchy was almost as unwise as noticing racial differences. The pre revolutionary French situation was much like “McCarthyism”, in that the regnant left made loud noises that their rights were being trampled in order to shout down any opposition to them trampling down other people’s rights. The French revolution was the left wing Gallican state shaking off the remaining limits to its power, in order to conscript, to tax, to confiscate, to print money, and to terrorize its opponents.

      I am pretty keen on Saga period Iceland and the wild west. I am also pretty on Restoration England, King Charles the Second to George the third, or possibly to Queen Victoria before she was crowned empress, which is to say, before the London bureaucracy stole the empire from the colonials.

      What did the enlightenment give us?

      It gave us a totalitarian terror regime that set Europe on fire, and, like Soviet Communism, swiftly self destructed. The American Revolution invoked both the enlightenment and, contradictorily, the Traditional Rights of Englishmen (aka the restoration). That it invoked the Enlightenment is why we are in this mess. The Enlightenment blew up France, blew up mainland Europe, and is now destroying the Anglosphere. That the American revolution also invoked the restoration is why we took longer to self destruct. The restoration inspiration led the founders to incorporate obstacles to democracy in their system, which obstacles have been swept away.

      Moldbug is a big fan of monarchy, but kings are inherently weak, and therefore tend to become, or permit, mobile bandits. A king is only strong as the coalition leader of a martial aristocracy, and we don’t have martial aristocracies any more. If we could reliably get martial and charismatic Kings who inspire the army, that would work, but most kings are distinctly uninspiring and not particularly martial. Martial aristocracies might re-emerge, in view of the weakness of current states, which are as contemptible to their enemies as they are terrifying to their subjects, but such re-emergence would take a long time.

      It need hardly be pointed out how inimical this idea is to the vast majority of people both in America and Europe.

      Ah, the Zeitgeist, the times, the left is winning, and therefore supposedly will always win. We are moving leftwards, and are moving leftwards faster and faster. We shall supposedly continue moving leftwards faster and faster forever and ever.

      I don’t think so. Trees do not grow to the sky. This has to end. It has happened before, and ended badly before. Trees grow till they fall. The left has utterly crushed all opposition except reality itself, but reality itself shall win in the end.

  13. […] 1) If you’ve found your way to this dark and irrelevant corner of the internet, you likely know (whether you accepted all the logical conclusions or not) that everyone is not created equal. […]

  14. Charles says:

    Charles…

    […]The Dark Enlightenment « Jim’s Blog[…]…

  15. RS says:

    > The “Occupy” protests showed that a handful of rentacops could do what an army of police were reluctant to do: Deal swiftly, efficiently, effectively, quietly and undramatically with a horde of Occupiers.

    Occupy seems have been pretty pussy on average. The conquerers of Detroit and vandalists of England were probably more vigorous, in any case it seems to me that Brahmin magic was the real active force, preventing the police from stopping the disorder.

    > The underclass […] are only a problem because they vote.

    > If the underclass stop getting free obamaphones, free food, free medicine, and free housing, and are prevented from stealing and rioting, those of them that are capable of competence will get honest jobs, and those of them that are not will disappear one way or another.

    Sure, they tended to starve fairly peaceably most of the time in West Europa and East Asia. Though, first of all, that happened because others were psychologically prepared to let them go (including by suppressing rioting), because of the hardness of their own lives and millieu. Even in the upper classes, they all lost young friends and family to black death and pox — and for centuries more after the latter stood in partial abeyance, to typhoid, septic surgery, and TB. It being a slow death and sometimes no death at all, many opinion makers had TB themselves even as they worked at opinion-making. And many grew up more than a little hungry. They accepted a hard fate for men. The same might not be accepted in the same way today. Perhaps it oughtn’t be. But my point is more that it may not be.

    Second of all I hope you are not modelling the behavior of all humans from a look at West Europids and East Asians, that would be some sort of a mistake. I mean I’m joking of course, I know you are more alert than that. It’s just that one must careful to underline all these variables mentally before one can envisage the future.

    For example, fifty or seventy years from now, you or I or our intellectual inheritors could probably explain to a polity of English or Japs that they have been misruled by liars, that all has been a lie, and many of them will have to be subsistence farmers on land grants and live in self-constructed housing for the next n years, and that it is necessary according to basic science fact to limit those receiving these grants to one child — and since this is against their individual economic incentives and probably affective inclinations, we shall have to enforce it.

    Actually, racial English or Japs wouldn’t decline enough dysgenically and culturally over 70 years for that to be necessary, and they start off from a high eugenic and economic condition. They probably wouldn’t end up in that kind of mass poverty soon. So suppose it’s actually a society purely of ethnic Greeks or Armenians or Thais, that we’re talking about.

    This would be satisfactorily orderly and satisfactorily non-evil. Our Armeni and Thai subjects would even comprehend it, basically. It’s not that complicated.

    To sanely resolve the problems of America as it might exist 60-80 years from today, will not go as orderly/easily as it would if America consisted solely of a bunch of Armenis and Thais with a Nordish/Jewish/Chinese overclass. Of course you realize this, but I think it’s worth making this kind of concrete rehearsal of how we would plan to ‘land’ America safely without causing major bloodbaths or wars or famines, or denuding the land of its last wild mammal.

    Ending democracy, terminating the leftward singularity, and tempering Euro-Jewish conflict are incredibly ambitious goals, but we might still have our work cut out for us after doing all three. And to think that one may even want to do it humanely, whilst also effecting White preservation. It’s kind of a tall order, hard to see it going off entirely without a hitch, though overall I think it’s possible. Anyway what else to do? Nature gets to say jump and we get to say how high?, it’s always been that way.

    • jim says:

      The “Occupy” protests showed that a handful of rentacops could do what an army of police were reluctant to do: Deal swiftly, efficiently, effectively, quietly and undramatically with a horde of Occupiers.

      Occupy seems have been pretty pussy on average. The conquerers of Detroit and vandalists of England were probably more vigorous,

      Floyd Lee Corkins opened fire without warning, but an unarmed rentacop took him out with no fuss.

      No ship with private security on board has been taken by Somali pirates. A very large number of pirates, probably the majority, have quietly disappeared at sea without a trace. To the extent that rentacops can evade or ignore government restrictions, they are pretty vigorous themselves.

      Resistance to the ethnic cleansing of Detroit was paralyzed by the extremely vigorous application of federal and local government power on the side of the ethnic cleansers, combined with a propaganda offensive identifying defense as racism.

      They accepted a hard fate for men. The same might not be accepted in the same way today. Perhaps it oughtn’t be.

      Perhaps it should not be, but I seriously doubt the claim that actual virtue has increased.

      People have never been all that much concerned with the fate of strangers far from themselves and different from themselves. Recall all the caring about the big Ethiopian famine during the rule of Mengistu “We are the world, we are the children”. If the famine had been caused by mere lack of food, it could have been solved in a heartbeat, but the famine was artificial. The Ethiopian government was systematically destroying peasant’s crops, and marching them into slave labor camps, and all those terribly caring people averted their eyes from the politically inconvenient causes of the famine – because if you happened to notice that there was a civil war going on in Ethiopia in which the government was slaughtering unarmed men, women, and children, this made you low status because unprogressive, therefore uncaring, whereas if you cared about feeding children (by raising money and giving it the government that was murdering the children) this made you caring, therefore progressive.

      People “care”, because it is progressive and high status to “care”. When it is unprogressive and low status to care, they don’t care. The reactions to the Chinese, Ethiopian, and Cambodian democides show an extraordinary brutal indifference that was not paralleled during medieval times. We have an apparatus of propaganda that is apt to turn the caring up to levels far higher than was typical in medieval times, but also turn the caring down to levels lower than was typical in medieval times.

      Westerners get excited about the fate of the poor for much the same reasons as Muslims get excited about insults to the prophet. It is a move in the status game played by elites against other elites. Your gut reaction to the fact when you paid for your phone, you also paid to give a black woman with bad teeth a phone, is your real reaction to the poor, even if you theoretically believe in a more generous and humane reaction. When you summon up the socially approved reaction to poverty, you imagine people like yourself being poor, for example poor Oliver Twist, and when you summon up the socially approved reaction to unjustly acquired wealth, you imagine people unlike yourself unjustly acquiring wealth, for example the Jewish miser Fagin.

      But, by and large, the actual poor are much like the woman on the Obamaphone video – people who are not like us. The ones with wealth, with savings and investment are thrifty like you and me, not miserly like the Jew Fagin.

      What is the difference between thrifty and miserly?

      If someone saves money and is like us, he is thrifty, and we correctly perceive that it is horribly unjust to take away from him what is his. If someone saves money and is unlike us (the Jew Fagin), miserly, and we are easily persuaded that it is totally good, virtuous, and humane for the benevolent state to take his stuff for the good of the poor.

      The progressive project works by manipulating our identification with far away strangers. Obamaphones are part of Obama’s supposed program to protect the middle class, against those rapacious evil rich people. The video is “racist” because everyone who pays for their own phone, on viewing the video, suddenly realizes that they are one of the supposedly rapacious evil rich people, one of the supposed Fagins, and that poor people are not much like Oliver Twist.

      Ending democracy, terminating the leftward singularity, and tempering Euro-Jewish conflict are incredibly ambitious goals, but we might still have our work cut out for us after doing all three. And to think that one may even want to do it humanely, whilst also effecting White preservation.

      One can sort out political conflicts humanely when there is order. Obtaining order in the face of widespread disorder and determined opposition to various proposed forms order is necessarily going to require extremely inhumane measures – and in practice progressives had no problems in averting their eyes from what was required to impose their preferred form of order and destroy other people’s forms of order.

  16. RS says:

    > Why do people assume that things can be handle maturely?

    I do see your point, and do think you have one. It’s not like avoiding massive strife, and downward spirals, will be trivial. My guess is that not only supreme analysis is requisite, but some kind of real sagacity. To understand or comprehend things is not enough.

  17. spandrell says:

    >>RS

    “You seem to be assuming that their numbers and degree of degradation will be ameliorated ‘in the long run’ but I don’t see why.”

    Well there’s this guy called Malthus. Nigeria is projected to have 500 million people in 2100, I think. That will not happen. It can’t happen.

    • RS says:

      Agreed. However, letting them all come here is not possible. Like Alrenous and Trivers are always saying, people have two (or three, or four) layers of awareness of things ; they are almost all aware that importing 200 M Africans would simply end society. One stone wouldn’t be left standing on another. There’s just no significant constituency for such a move, not the non-Whites already in the West, and not even the SWPLs and Jews.

      I doubt its even necessarily possible — speaking, as I already have been, from a totally detached ‘physics’ perspective — to semi-enslave the White world to feed them all. The bill will be too large, with the hungry mouths going up exponentially, and the cost of, and competition for, vegetal production going up more modestly but still appreciably. The Chinese are going to feed that vegetal matter to farm animals. So am I. Unless I start taking all my own meat with a bow, for reasons of ethics, fun, primality, and mental cultivation. The Indians are going to feed it to their hundred-millions of highly incapable people. As always it’s possible some technical breakthrough will negate the above analysis, but maybe not.

      But there’s not even that much space in our own societies, as they exist now as closed systems (if they were closed). We won’t run out of physical space, or food, but the narcotizing Goodthink will start to unravel, badly, the more you force normals, bourgeois of various sorts, to encounter and deal with rough people. As you know, normals have a fucking gigantic latent capacity for getting rough themselves.

      What naturally comes forth is informal segregation. You’ll start to see a lot of private security guards with scarcely a Goodthought between their two ears. The state’s own police already are not the profoundest of Goodthinkers. Everyone will appreciate their work. The Right Kind of people will try to fight it, but they cannot overawe a broad consensus of the productive classes that comes straight from ‘physics’. Their astounding silver tongues and imaginary worlds cannot accomplish literally anything. There are some hard limits. And yes, the blue and white collar productive classes are enormous, especially when you count those who are mostly productive, with just limited rent-taking. Is the economy like 35% bullshit, of course, but that still leaves countless myriads of people. They are needed, therefore they have some power.

      In Brasil, I understand from some academic paper, if you are a certain race — mainly I think if you are pretty Afro — you shall not move into certain neighborhoods. This is not policy, it’s grassroots ; the policy, in e.g. uni admissions, is quite the opposite, is standard issue USG stuff. I didn’t get the impression that the means tended toward real nastiness — something more like distinct rudeness and maybe petty vandalism, but I’m just speculating.

      Similarly, women will be disproportionately eased out of some kinds of work — though not by all that much — especially IQish kind of work that doesn’t load all that hard on C or on social perception. Also, work that loads heavily on the exertion of dominance over others, or on harshly realistic appraisals of affairs, as men are obviously more natural for these two things. None of this will have anything whatever to do with any kind of ‘policy’. However, I am not one who thinks that women largely go to work to screw around, and accordingly have a poor work product to show for it, all that much more than men do. Somewhat more, yeah. But there will be other reasons for women’s employment outside the home to decline, such as the fact that they aren’t /all/ that crazy about it anyway. In Netherlands, once the propaganda lost its novelty, enormous fractions of women stopped working full time. It might partly be a function of high marginal taxation, but it’s not that only, and it can only spread, even though it largely hasn’t yet.

      Again the ruling complex will try to fight any such trend, as they will try to fight informal segregation (which many say has already increased by a fair degree in this country) — but the ‘idea dollar’, the social capital dollar, is already about as fucked up as the literal dollar, the euro, and the yen. Well, only the euro is truly fucked up, and barely functioning as a market object, such that the superstate has to send Spain giant transfusions of the stuff ; the yen and dollar are looking bad though.

      The NYT also inflates, fades by degrees, like the dollar. The fancy ‘expert’ on how we ought to behave, inflates, sounds tinny. The plumber, the mechanic, do not wax in volume or salary, but does not wane (at least not in volume, his salary may sink some). The roboticist is admittedly the shit, though he still needs a toilet, a car, a roof, food, electric current, (a share in) an accountant and a secretary, etc — whereas one truly /needs/ quite little else.

      • RS says:

        Which is part of what Jim’s emphasizing in that essay. ‘They’ have depleted and debauched lots of things, not just the dollar or the American woman. They’re fresh out of /everything/, basically… so things that can actually grow and propagate independently, outside the endless arrays of hothouses, are necessarily going to be growing back some. Natural things.

        There’s no malthusian crisis of food in the West (so long as there be no war in the land), but there’s a sort of malthusian crisis of general value, and a general eating of (metaphorical) seed corn.

  18. […] Jim on the Dark Enlightenment. I’ve got a few quibbles, but this is good: The fundamental realization of the Dark […]

  19. RS says:

    There’s a traditional way of receiving the Secret News of inequality, psychologically. It should really be within the reach of all alleged adults. There must be few of us who never envy the nature of others, but inequality does not put anyone in a unique position. We all have betters. Nature enjoins us to listen to them ; it is wise then to do it — in truth it is a requirement and implication of enlightened egoism, and enlightened familialism, and even to some extent enlightened nationalism.

    • spandrell says:

      The problem is heredity. Most adults are not equipped psychologically to deal with the idea that them and their descendants are forever useless in a modern economy. And there’s not even a nice god to compensate in the afterlife if you behave.

      • josh says:

        The idea that unskilled human labor is useless in a modern economy is ridiculous.

        • Nick Land says:

          Perhaps, but it’s certainly less than useless in a ‘modern’ (Cathedralized) political economy.

          • jim says:

            High minimum wage, politically encouraged bad attitude, high legal risk of employer being sued for big prizes.

            Unskilled labor that can take direction, and can be trusted to not steal whatever is not nailed down, and refrain from assaulting the customers is still valuable – though less and less common.

          • Nick Land says:

            Plus, voting for acceleration into the left singularity.

          • josh says:

            agreed

        • spandrell says:

          Well they answered for me.
          Humans, skilled or unskilled, are, besides labor, political actors, and that also affects their economic output.
          Robots and AIs are not political actors, which makes them cheaper in the long run. Way cheaper.

          • RS says:

            However many robots one builds, one still has the expanding, and probably worsening, underclass. Have robots made them less problematic politically? You seem to be assuming that their numbers and degree of degradation will be ameliorated ‘in the long run’ but I don’t see why.

            Robots, along with free migration, along with the underclass’ numerical expansion (partly from free migration), and probable worsening — all make them more and more problematic. For one thing it’s a bitch for them to make a living ; that’s not going to improve. The result is a much lower standard of life for them, and also for the upright lower class and the lo-middle class.

            • jim says:

              Have robots made them less problematic politically? You seem to be assuming that their numbers and degree of degradation will be ameliorated ‘in the long run’ but I don’t see why.

              The underclass, and the increasing numbers of working class people dropping into the underclass, and the increasing numbers of middle class people dropping into the underclass, are only a problem because they vote. The “Occupy” protests showed that a handful of rentacops could do what an army of police were reluctant to do: Deal swiftly, efficiently, effectively, quietly and undramatically with a horde of Occupiers.

              The underclass are only a crime and riot problem to the extent that, as in Britain, they are very heavily favored by police, only to the extent that police can successfully deter the victims of the underclass from resisting.

              If the underclass stop getting free obamaphones, free food, free medicine, and free housing, and are prevented from stealing and rioting, those of them that are capable of competence will get honest jobs, and those of them that are not will disappear one way or another.

              The riot problem was at its most severe in the sixties and early seventies, when Detroit was ethnically cleansed by gangs of thugs lead by “community organizers” backed by cops. Since then, in the US, whites have been re-arming themselves. We now have much bigger, more ethnically diverse, yet far less dangerous underclass.

              When politicians corrupt the masses by pandering to their worst inclinations, they not only destroy the capability of the masses to be productive, they also destroy their capability to make trouble.

              As the voting power of tax consumers increases, their potential military capability is decreasing. In the Occupy movement, the elite mobilized as many underclass as they could with free food, free housing, and police favor, and yet the only things they could occupy were those things already under the control of the radical left, for example universities, government offices, and government businesses.

          • guest says:

            For reference:

            Walter Block: Defending the Undefendable
            http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0E73CFA92EA01B1

            Walter Block defends the following kinds of people:

            – The Denier of Academic Freedom
            – The Non-Contributor to Charity
            – The Slumlord
            – The Ghetto Merchant

            And more.

    • Thales says:

      Unfortunately, the ability to learn from others is one of those things that makes some better than others. Catch 22.

  20. guest says:

    Compare:

    Well obviously if they were not created equal, which plainly they were not, then they were not created with certain inalienable rights either.

    And if you let such people, inferior people, vote, they will always vote against other people’s rights and other people’s property, …

    You are willing to acknowledge the existence of “other people’s rights”; Such things can only exist if their definition is determined by something other than us.

    Otherwise, the definition of “rights” amounts to the tautology, “Whoever has property has property.”; In which case, the “superior” people are obviously thosee collectivists who can convince others to fight for their cause.

    That someone were feckless would not be a meaningful assessment.

    • guest says:

      Apologies for my block quotes not working.

      Here’s where I quoted two parts of the OP:

      “Well obviously if they were not created equal, which plainly they were not, then they were not created with certain inalienable rights either.”

      “And if you let such people, inferior people, vote, they will always vote against other people’s rights and other people’s property, …”

    • jim says:

      You are willing to acknowledge the existence of “other people’s rights”; Such things can only exist if their definition is determined by something other than us.

      If God created rights, which I doubt, the Old Testament makes it perfectly clear that those rights were not for everyone, but only for individuals and groups capable properly exercising them.

      If, on the other hand, we are risen killer apes, which it rather looks like we are, see “Natural Rights” for my explanation of why honest peaceful people capable of supporting themselves have rights.

      • Nick Land says:

        That (Natural Rights) article is a real treasure — a strong candidate for the most brilliant ever written on the topic. It also provides one of the very few slender threads for optimism, because it suggests that when things re-boot they do so from real, game-theoretically determined natural rights, and not from the insane political status quo at the time of collapse.

        • Thales says:

          Indeed. It is the one I link to as needed or hand physical copies of as “assigned reading” in rare meatspace discussions of the matter.

        • josh says:

          Well, shit, I guess I better go read it then. Brb.

      • guest says:

        Looking at the first several paragraphs of your “Natural Rights” article, it seems like we would agree on what are natural rights, even if we wouldn’t agree on the grounding issue.

        I was going to originally respond to the OP with a reference to the grounding issue surrouding atheists’ belief in morality because I thought it to be analogous to my position on natural rights; but I didn’t want to risk a tangent.

        So, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it got some treatment in your article.

        Let me go through it, and I’ll get back to you.

      • guest says:

        While it took some time for me to get back to you, you’ll be happy to learn that I was sufficiently shamed into refraining from doing much else in the way of writing until after I had finished reading your “Natural Law and Natural Rights” article.

        Let me first say about the article that it was well thought out and I’m glad I read it. I would be willing to reference this article to show that just because someone is racist doesn’t mean they want to violate anyone’s rights.

        About half way through the article, I noticed that the grounding issue was probably finished being addressed earlier in the article, and by that point there was quite a bit of history that had been explained about how this or that group approached the topic of rights and the state; so I figured that the rest of the article would probably be dedicated to similar historical assessments.

        As a philosopher – though not a relativist, or one who refuses to empirically observe – that suspicion factored into my personal shortcoming that was my less than timely response, in that: a) I hold that empirical observation can only exemplify laws, rather than prove them, and b) I dislike reading, as it is (though somehow I end up reading more these days than before; Incremental progress, I suppose).

        I hope to never attain to your impressive level of erudition, by the way; Though, having to argue with the collectivists has revealed such a skill [as exemplified in others] to be invaluable. To the extent that you advance the discussion and demand well-reasoned answers before acquiescing to another’s claim on your behavior: thank you; You model best practices in conflict resolution and the preservation of liberty for the rest of us.

        (Aside: The issue you brought up about Mises, and his theory of Human Action [I haven’t read the book] seeming only to apply it to allocation of resources, was addressed by Tom Woods, recently:

        (Critics Say, “You Libertarians Are Soulless Materialists”
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZGtcNcyyTI )

        Regarding the article, my assessment is that since obligatory laws require a law giver, it’s not enough to say that by behaving in at least such and such a manner with one another we each (as individuals) have a better chance of prosperity/survival.

        That may be true, but so what? Why OUGHT I to behave in such a manner? Preferences are not obligations.

        I would agree with you that the economic laws based on the Austrian axiom of human action can be determined without a belief in god(s). But my contention would be that it would require suspension of further inquiry to maintain that view.

        And here I hope to make my point more compelling by way of analogy in the form of the grounding problem involved when atheists say they can be moral without a belief in god(s) (you’ll remember that I brought this issue up in an earlier comment).

        True enough, as far as it goes, but, as argued in the following video [length: 5:07], the atheist must borrow from a theistic worldview the concept of “ought”, in order to do so:

        Grounding Morality (Video)
        http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2010/03/grounding-morality-video.html

        I figure that the analogy is helpful because the problem is the same as the grouding of rights. But if it seems to beg a tangent, then I won’t be offended if it’s ignored. I thought I’d try it out.

        Thanks for your time. You all have been hospitable, here.

        • jim says:

          I would be willing to reference this article to show that just because someone is racist doesn’t mean they want to violate anyone’s rights.

          If you define racist in such a way that reality itself cannot be racist, then I am not a racist.

          If, on the other hand, any deviation from political correctness, and in particular any acknowledgement of human biodiversity is “racist”, then indeed I am a racist.

          I believe that everyone should be dealt with as they deserve. But, of course, we cannot truly know what other people deserve, and have to take into account all available information to form a Bayesian judgment, have to profile. Race, sex, and parental performance are relevant factors that need to be considered. One should be more suspicious of a black loan applicant than a white loan applicant even if they have same credit profile, because a black is three times as likely to default as a white with the same income and credit history, thus blacks deserve, if not necessarily a smaller loan, a more carefully scrutinized loan with a higher down payment. Blackness is not as good an indicator of propensity to steal or fail to repay as past stealing or past failure to repay, but it is close. Similarly, white male homosexuals have a higher loan default rate than white male heterosexuals, and females a higher default rate than males. Parental performance should also be taken into account, for the apple does not fall far from the tree.

          Similarly in selecting people for advanced training, tests are only one indicator, and not a very reliable one. All available indicators that someone is well suited to effectively utilize advanced training should be considered – in particular parental performance. Probably sex and race are weaker indicators than parental performance or test results, but they are not negligible indicators.

          And if you regard that as violation of people’s rights, I do not.

          • guest says:

            Well, no one is entitled to a loan, so discrimination for any reason by a private property owner is not a violation of another’s righs.

            And I think that we’re largely in agreement that track records are helpful and that certain track records have been characteristic of certain race based communities.

            So, just because a bank refuses to loan to a black person, for example, doesn’t automatically tell me that the bank was being racist; And even if they were, it’s their property, so they can be racist with their loans if the want.

            But, my position is that ideology has chosen the race, and not the other way around.

            Free market economics is not, as the race baiters say, a “white” economics – it’s based on logic. And if the race based communities would abandon their collectivist economic ideology, they would not be suffering “disproportionately” to other “races”.

            • jim says:

              Well, no one is entitled to a loan, so discrimination for any reason by a private property owner is not a violation of another’s righs.

              You are using a libertarian definition of racist, rather than the standard definition.

              What then makes you think that I am a racist?

              And if the race based communities would abandon their collectivist economic ideology, they would not be suffering “disproportionately” to other “races”.

              American blacks are nearly one standard deviation lower than whites in IQ, and about one and half standard deviations higher in criminality and aggression. Thus, in a free market economy, would suffer disproportionately.

              Among groups selected on some criterion, for example university graduates, the in group standard deviation is much smaller than the whole population standard deviation. In consequence when women or blacks are affirmative actioned into such a group, the difference, though smaller than the whole population variance, is much larger than the in group variance, so one is likely to get a situation where almost every black, or every woman, within the group is markedly and strikingly inferior to almost every white male within the group.

  21. jim says:

    We’ve got the Blacks, but Blacks have no elite (dysgenesis) and were never very organizable even when they had one.

    “Amos and Andy” depict a black society socially dominated by the black middle class. Contemporary reactions to that depiction suggest that that was a realistic depiction. People today find it odd, but people then did not find it odd. This is consistent with the trend we observe today, that black society is more and more socially dominated by the underclass. Extrapolating backwards, it had to be less and less socially dominated by the underclass in the past.

    Possibly Jim Crow, rather than whites just being stupidly nasty for stupidly nasty reasons, was an effort to manufacture a black elite trained in white middle class values in segregated universities where they did not face competition from whites, and impose that well behaved black elite on regular blacks to keep them in line.

    In Amos and Andy, we see that regular blacks were kept in line by black judges, black cops, and black lawyers, all of whom firmly backed the black middle class against the black underclass.

    This resembles the Caliphate system of organizing people by ethnicity, religion, and culture.

    Twenty first centurians find the sight of blacks being dealt with by black lawyers and black judges rather bizarre and confusing, but checking reactions at the time, everyone thought that that was pretty normal, took for granted that what was depicted on Amos and Andy was the way Jim Crow and segregation generally worked. Segregation not only protected low level white jobs from black competition, it protected black middle class jobs from white competition.

    By and large, today, a black software engineer trained at a historically black university can do software engineering, a black software engineer trained at a historically white university usually cannot. When they desegregated historically black universities, this was bad for the black middle class.

    Back then the black middle class had real jobs managing black society. Now they have fake jobs, welfare in disguise, which destroys them.

    • RS says:

      I pretty much believe in those depictions of old time Blacks — or I’m prone to — because I know the unemployment rate, or labor force nonparticipation rate or whatever, used to be the same for Blacks and Whites, before it diverged to a present-day ratio around two.

      It seems Black American ethnonationalism (not necessarily separatist or secessionist) had some honesty and vitality in the past, as well as a lot of popularity. Like in the era of nondecadent progressivism, the 1920s or something. Just imagine Blacks today — in mass numbers — like totally caring about the ‘condition and future’ of the Black man, in a pretty serious, pretty honest, and responsible mode…. not an emetic beyond-malarkey mode. You sort of saw a last glimmer of this with the Million Man March — though my guess is it was kinda cheesy/ kinda not. Obviously the Black movement of the 1960s oozed plenty of decadence and mendacity — pretty long on plaintiveness — though it was impressive compared to Black culture today.

      Data collated by Lynn show ~2x worse dysgenic fecundity for Blacks (vs Whites) going way back — by educational attainment. Yet I don’t see divergence in NAEP scores in recent decades, or know of other objective ‘readouts’ of an increasing B-W gap in IQ, Conscientiousness etc. These NAEP books might be kinda cooked ; not saying they are, but then again hell if I necessarily believe them. It does seem like one can see a worsening B-W gap in overall sociocultural level.

      I agree fake jobs will not raise your spirit up, and doubtless Blacks were super-vulnerable to the glorious social revolution 1965-2008, but I fear a lot of the problem could just be biological decline.

      We have generally seen, across the West, adult height stop increasing around the 1980 birth cohort…. that’s also when the Flynn effect quit. The FEffect is so large that it can’t all be ‘real’ for whatever sense of ‘real’ is relevant — but in light of the secular increases in height petering out at the same moment (1980), it seems sane to think /some/ of the FEffect /pretty likely/ represents actual phenotypic improvement in the brain. It just ‘smells’ like something

      1 good
      2 biological
      3 not genetic
      4 ergo possibly epigenetic, or whatever, but in any case environmental at root

      was happening up to the 1980 birth cohort………… and one of my fears is that biological decline will be more salient (in all races) now that this mysterious enviro-rooted change has ended. In other words, overall quality of phenotype may not have declined all that rapidly up to the 1980 cohort, and /could/ now decline much faster — though I would note I have no ‘output’ empirical data in any way supporting this. Thirty-two years worth of people have now been born since 1980… I’m not necessarily real optimistic about their phenotype — all of them, all races. What really worries me is what things could be like by 2050…

      IMO the mysterious enviro-rooted changes pretty much have to have affected the White brain positively. Otherwise it just seems like White society would have been more palpably degraded by 1990 — and not just morally-spiritually-culturally degraded. After all the differential fecundity of Whites by class is considerable and goes way back, to like 1890 or before — maybe like 1860. I just don’t have the feeling that we are missing /that/ much White brainpower in 1990 that was present in 1900… we are spiritually malaised, artistically ruined, but there are armies of super-smart Whites around. I’m also not too sure we are worse-looking. Thus the dire predictions of the dysgenicists of 1900 probably did not really come to pass, at least not in full — but I kind of fear they will come to pass, more, starting after the 1980 cohort.

      Whoever loves high art, which tends to mean White people’s high art, cannot deny that it has gone to shit ; this is 10-40x more obvious when you look at it per capita, since our population has greatly increased. Tallis, Shakespeare, the painter of the Armada Portrait, and a bunch of slightly less astounding dudes all lived together in an England of 5 M people. There were a few masterpieces in the 1970s, but come on, the 1910s-20s-30s were exploding with masterpieces, the world was writhing and dying of sheer beauty and genius. Today there are almost no supreme masters at work ; there’s Arvo Part, whose great works might all date from the 80s for all I can say — I just listen to the stuff. I guess there’s the Taverner funeral canticle, I find that pretty electrifying. But IMO there’s no way this deflorescence isn’t largely biological. Sure, crap art gets promoted, but the love of sublime art is natural. Good stuff still rises to the top often, such as the rock/post-rock efflorescence of the 1990s — Portishead, Smashing Pumpkins — Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction — plenty of stuff that is flipping great, only it’s not on that truly Olympian Tallis-Bach-Kokoschka-Michaelangelo plane.

      One White in a million, or today more like one in a billion, gets up on that plane….. easy to ascribe this change to bio, then, because we know a tiny difference at the means makes a large difference at the far extreme. The very greatest scientists may or may not also be ‘missing’ in the same way, despite the aforementioned armies of super-smart Whites — this would be far harder to detect as science can still do a decent amount without them. But high art cannot do without Bachs and Tarkovskys, it’s entirely different for obvious reasons. (Tarkovsky’s only really good movie is Mirror, but it’s the masterpiece of the whole 20th C in my eyes. There are two different translations, one is better overall.)

      • Johnny Caustic says:

        I don’t think it’s biological. I think it’s spiritual, or at least metaphysical. Artists have to believe in truth and beauty to create it.

      • jim says:

        There are about thirty mutations per generation. This guarantees fairly rapid biological decline even in the absence of dysgenics

        The policy of preferentially accrediting females, and operating society on the basis of credentials, removes the highest performing females from the gene pool, causing severe dysgenics.

        Uncle Sam the big pimp requires females to produce bastard spawn to get a hand out, whereas higher income alpha males would prefer their girlfriends not reproduce, due the law that males are responsible to support offspring even if they did not agree, while women get choice. This creates profound incentives for higher reproduction among the beneficiaries of state handouts.

  22. spandrell says:

    I had a chat in person with Nick Land about the Dark Enlightment.

    It seems to be that many of us don’t realise the consequences of a world that acknowledges the incontrovertible facts of human variance.

    If HBD is public policy, what would happen to the 100m NAMs you got over there? And that’s just the beginning.

    • RS says:

      Segregation basically, favelization. Not necessarily along racial lines, nor necessarily (all) very formal.

      Concomitantly, greater or lesser neglect of the unfortunate low-borns. Letting them be ruled by gangsters a la favela (which may or may not be as bad as it sounds, I don’t know). I’m not volunteering to go in and keep them from violencing each other 24-7, and I won’t be pleased to see too much of my labor product go to pay for such policing.

      You probably realize we have a ton of the young Blaxx in jail, total incarceration /head is up over 4x since 1980 while Black population fraction is nearly unchanged. Accordingly, dysgenesis //on the very low end// is somewhat slowed though probably not stopped. Probably some 7-10% of crime-aged Black males are in the slammer at a given time, not sure. A huge fraction have done time, like a third.

      Ideas won’t have much to do with ‘progress’ along these lines, it will happen anyway ad hoc. Ideas can deflect things a little one way or another — or a lot, but this seems much less likely — but cannot change the basic situation, which also cannot be avoided. White and similar-tempered commoners will only tolerate so much violence and no more. They put up with a lot, but there’s a line, and they can and will get frisky. Being balanced and humane and foresighted by controlling the population, but allowing unemployable women one child for humaneness’ sake, is intelligent but not super likely anytime soon.

      Mexico, the Mideast, Europe, seem just as fucked. We’ve got the Blacks, but Blacks have no elite (dysgenesis) and were never very organizable even when they had one. Mideast, with its population problems (probably combined with dysgenesis), will in some areas be Africa-lite — relatively rapid bio-demographic changes in religiosity also potentially scary (depending on what subfactors of religiosity are being selected, is it fervor, is it obedience). As for Europe, how would you prevent overt conflict in the long run (50 years)? –Not trivial. Even constant petty conflict can be a pretty big pain I’m sure.

      I’m pretty sure dark enlightenment helps you handle these things maturely as opposed to running around going crazy and the whole world having a demotic meltdown. The ratio of demotics to normals and creative semigeniuses is probably not improving……. I have often mentioned that demotic revolution is by far the worst specter brought forth by dysgenesis. Losing 1/3 of GDP won’t kill millions (if properly responded to) ; demotic revolution can do literally anything, possibly including sterilizing the face of the earth, not to be hysterical. It seems that everyone seeking to suppress the secret enlightenment might as well be out to promote the virtues of demotic meltdown (with all the fixins).

      • spandrell says:

        Why do people assume that things can be handle maturely? If it were that easy we wouldn’t have the problems we have. HBD has been staring at us for 200 years, yet nobody cared to notice. There’s reasons for that.

        Segregation doesn’t work. There’s always a Marius member of the elite who wnats power and uses the plebs to do his bid. Democracy didn’t happen for nothing, it’s the necessary conclusion of representative government.

        Also Africa-Middle East: at the present rate this people will start to starve in 20-30 years. At the present we feed them. Will we stop feed them? Watch how hundreds of millions starve?

        It’s an interesting world we are going to live in.

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