Entropy, disorder always increases. Life exists, a living creature exists, by increasing its own internal order, at the expense of consuming external order and excreting disorder.
A functional society generates internal order, like a living organism. So the individual organisms of the society find safety, peace, order, and secure property rights. And from these intangible forms of order, they get more tangible, individual organism scale forms of order: food in the supermarket, electricity at the switch, water at the tap. Leftism consumes the order of society to grow and live, as a parasite or a cancer consumes the order of the organism in order to live. And eventually the lights go out, as in Venezuela or North Korea.
Consider a cancer cell. On the micro scale, what it does is indistinguishable from what a good cell does. It grows, it absorbs nutrients from the bloodstream.
But it replaces the highly ordered structure of the good cells with structurelessness, with mere growth, without regard for the organismic functions that a healthy cell is performing.
The order of the organism is apparent only to teleological thinking.
The order of society is in Chesterton’s fences. Leftism takes down Chesterton’s fences, deeming them irrelevant obstacles, as bones and blood vessels and lungs and heart and brains are irrelevant obstacles to cancer cells.
The ensuing disorder becomes visible before you get to the North Korean point where the lights go out.
[…] for a functioning nation. SF from Amerika (relevant). Dear pagans. On entropy. NRx-WN debate. Private cities (part 3). Faye > > Benoist. French new reaction (and […]
[…] for a functioning nation. SF from Amerika (relevant). Dear pagans. On entropy. NRx-WN debate. Private cities (part 3). Faye > > Benoist. French new reaction (and NRx in […]
[…] ideological cadre. Indeed he would, and does. Here, for example is the blogger “Jim” on entropy and “Chesterton’s Fence”. (These themes, particularly the applicability of the Second Law to human societies, have been […]
[…] Jim is fantastic here in Thermodynamics, leftism, organisms, and Chesterton’s fence: […]
[…] Organic order. Related: What we have lost. […]
Off topic again:
Homosexuality proven to be a disease:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3265248/Homosexuality-imprinted-genes-Scientists-predict-gay-70-cent-accuracy.html
Reddit comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3o1pp1/scientists_say_they_can_predict_if_someone_is_gay/
>DNA methylation, not just DNA. This is not some simple variant that you’ll be able to get from 23andme or ancestry.com. For those unaware, this isn’t information contained in the DNA (it’s not in the pattern of A/C/G/T’s), the variation is in the way methyl groups are attached to the DNA. The study was performed on identical twins where one is gay and the other is straight, so it’s the same DNA but the methylization is different.
>Source: I was at the talk at ASHG2015 where Dr. Ngun presented this finding. It was part of a larger, equally amazing session on epigenetics.
The left must be turning somersaults right now. A test for gay babies would lead to an instant abortion with 99.9% of the population. Worse for them a treatment to fix the problem might become available.
And what, the Ancient Greeks and modern Afghans and Arabs are all just suffering from a genetic condition?
I don’t buy it.
And the jews of Holiwood. No other group is more degenerate than rich and powerful jews.
I’m not acquainted with any, and don’t consume their output, so will take your word for it.
Does not actually prove it to be a disease. Quite likely the homosexual lifestyle, creating abnormal stresses, creates abnormal patterns of methylation. I am sure a doctor could tell a homo by looking at his ass, why not his DNA? To determine cause and effect, need to check fetal DNA.
It’s obviously just perverts with a sick fetish. They should be encouraged to shut up or take a long walk off a short pier. Same with Todd Nickerson and Bruce Jenner.
Off topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/related/1wepen/why_occupy_wall_street_failed/
A post about the fall of OWS. Kind of sounds like the illogical trashing of the white males resulted the their total failure.
“everything went to shit once the white male [heterosexuals] started leaving.”
Similarly the Obamacare website. It was impossible to get the site up until the women were sent back to the kitchen, the gays to the bathouse, and the blacks back to teaching victimization. The presence of empowered victims was just too disruptive. (White males claiming to be women can program OK, and gays are not too bad, but the rest of the victims are a disaster.)
Thank you for that.
North Korea is probably the most orderly place in the world, it really does not fit into your theory.
You think North Korea is orderly, because there is an iron curtain hiding the disorder from you.
The ruler of North Korea rides the tiger. The belief system is that he is the incarnation of the will of the people. Supposedly he is elected, and from time to time elections are conducted. From time to time he has attempted to set up special economic zones in imitation of China, and has found the dangerous ideas that came with the foreign trade uncontrollably threatening. He keeps trying and failing to switch to a divine right belief system, which would in fact be orderly, because in closer correspondence to actual reality. The exports of North Korea keep falling down the tech ladder, from those of a third world country to those of a hunter gatherer economy. The central plan is utter chaos. People are commanded to produce X, from inputs Y, but inputs Y do not arrive.
The political and economic systems of North Korea are all lies, and lies are disorderly and cause disorder, because people genuinely do not know the truth, thus the processes for keeping reality in order fail.
A double entry accounting system maintains order, because it ensures value for value. A central plan is disorderly, because in practice no one actually complies with the central plan.
In so far as the central plan functions, it functions because of a hidden illegal and forbidden market economy operated by criminals and exchanging stolen goods. You cannot get much more disorderly than that.
The central plan says that the lights are on, and more lights are being lit. The lights are mostly out, and what lights remain are going out. That is disorder.
If the central plan was in fact obeyed, North Korea would be orderly. And the lights would be on. They are not on.
The only niggers they let in NK are celebrities, and unlike in Japan, said niggers are monitored to prevent them from raping (in Japan, a nigger entertainer was actually punished for raping a White woman who was a tourist, which is racism and a violation of Cathedral sovereignty over Cathedral subjects).
In NK, your job is impossible and if you say so you get shot, but in the US, if you say something politically incorrect you just get fired. In Germany, you get jailed.
In NK, you’re expected to act like you believe that Koreans are the supreme race of mankind and destined to a glorious future under the Juche whatever. In White countries, you’re expected to believe that Whites are evil and must atone by working themselves to death and not leaving any racist children.
After the Juche whatever falls, NK will be merged into .kr, eat kimchi and work for Samsung (a family friend has a Samsung washing machine that was serviced by Samsung. They sent smartly dressed English speaking Koreans. I wonder if they have their quota of niggers and dykes). If we don’t bring down the Cathedral soon, no one will eat pancakes and bacon and work for IBM.
Black markets selling South Korean DVDs, Chinese mobile phones, drugs and everything you can think of are everywhere. Corruption is everywhere.
Order besides violence takes money, which NK doesn’t have.
You are unclear. You mean you can buy South Korean stuff in North Korea, and the plan be damned?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/north-koreas-forbidden-love-smuggled-illegal-soap-operas.html?_r=0
Chinese DVD players are cheap. There’s direct flights from many cities of China to Pyongyang, and border trade is pretty big these days.
There’s also hundreds of thousands of defectors living up in Yanbian, in China, where any North Korean can get set up pretty fast if they wanna get out.
So not that orderly.
Tremendous pictures of an earlier age, which should be considered as a gold standard until something better comes around. It’s only too bad that P.B.H. (Pretty Boy Heartiste) is such a fragile aesthete and really uncapable of making sound policy recommendations. He licks the bowl clean and can’t be bothered to get up and bring back the fixings for the next batch! I think he must have French ancestry.
A.J.P.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/10/04/claim-mathematical-discovery-will-change-climate-change-debate-co2s-im0qct-about-a-fifth-or-tenth-of-what-the-ipcc-says-it-is/
Climate change is wrong apparently.
Doesn’t matter to the true believers at this point.
Environmentalist is the least powerful, but probably most popular of the Cathedral’s doctrines. They can’t quite nail it down in the way that they have done with Anti-Whitism (ie. White Genocide must not be questioned or else violent anti-white thugs or anti-white thought police come to get you and you’ll certainly lose your job, but it’s certainly Not genocide, no way…).
A.J.P.
You will probably enjoy the work of Joseph Tainter, who argued that civilisational boom-bust cycles could be attributed to diminishing returns to civilisational complexity. Societies develop institutions and cultural artifacts to deal with problems, and each new layer of complexity yields a lower marginal return as the low hanging fruit gets picked up. Eventually a big enough problem comes along that the society is unable to deal with, and a massive and rapid social simplification occurs -a civilisational collapse.
I believe radical leftism is such a problem. The comparison with cancer stands well on its own, but since reading Tainter’s book I’ve come to see leftism as a kind of autoimmune disease. By attacking old institutions and social technologies, such as the family, leftism unearths problems that were dealt with a long time ago, opens the pandora box to problems unseen until then, and also undermines any later layers of social complexity that relied on those lost institutions for their sustenance. Leftists then respond to these resurrected problems by burdening the civilisation even further with inefficient and wasteful layers of complexity, such as massive bureaucracies, entitlements and make-work programs. Rinse and repeat until civilisation collapses under its own weight.
The problem is that government is itself like a living organism in that it can grow bigger, stay the same size, or die, but it cannot un-grow back to a smaller size. Therefore any practical application of Tainter’s theory — that if adding complexity doesn’t help anymore, maybe we should try removing complexity — is a non-starter.
Dear Jim,
This is an EXTREMELY good argument. One of your best. I know you didn’t just make up the idea that life maintains internal ordeer by consuming external order (sunlight, plant life, the ur-order everything else consumes is star light) and excretes disorder (heat, crap), because Roger Penrose wrote exactly the same in The Emperors New Mind and it made by jaw drop – I thought we consume energy… somehow, even when it is non-destroyable… I was dumb.
Anyway, if there is anything even an atheist or moderate leftie can respect or see as sacred, is life. Especially intelligent life – there are good arguments kicking around the Reactor that intelligence is a way to maximize entropy excretion – maybe meaning that it is internal order maximization?
Which means if we want a consensus morality, and we don’t expect everybody to care about Jesus or tradition, it is precisely this process you described is what we must call sacred.
But you should flesh it out – where does society consume order from and where does it excrete disorder to? Just the sum of what individuals consume and excrete? I guess not.
But this has the makings of excellent, short, succint theory that could wake up many a moderate. Just flesh it out.
Best Regards,
The Dividualist
@dividualstweet
“All life is sacred” is the modern translation of “all souls are one in Christ” which is probably the most important line in the new testament. It’s from an apostle, the direct follower of the Nazirite rabbi who gave up an honorable career in carpentry to preach about how by faith alone are ye saved, meaning by arguing about who has more faith instead of doing stuff that improves your community. Jesus spoke out again right wing entryism into holiness by doing good things in his parable ‘the widow’s mite’.
This is the slogan you’re choosing?
How about this. What is sacred is civilization and its great artifacts. That’s Kim’s idea.
My idea is the 14 words. The nation is sacred; we must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.
Close but no cigar. Nationalism presupposes democracy, or at least some form of demotism. If you are demotist, you wind up sponsoring bread and circuses and a welfare underclass. Pretty soon the populares find the welfare underclass is not big enough, and want to import more from Mexico. Nazism is as full of leftist propensities as Christianity is.
National monarchism makes more sense than national socialism
>National monarchism makes more sense than national socialism
It does. However, national Monarchs have a bad habit of being replaced by Shoguns or Erich Ludendorff’s. Kings need to lead armies and be easily replaced if killed in battle.
I respect ethnic self-preservation, but only as one of the many important ideas, not the No. 1 one. It is is more part of the basis to build on than a great final goal. In 1900 ethnic self-preservation is something as natural as breathing for anyone. So while it is okay and important, it is just part of sanity, not part of the truly grand goals.
(Also, I am from a small nation that is perhaps not even 100% considered white although it is Christian enough, and I find it totally weird how for you nation and Western civ are one and the same – from our angle it is is so much bigger than we are, not even comparable. We are tiny parts of it. For us nationalism often meant waging wars INSIDE Western civ. So actually identifying with the whole of West / whites almost feels halfway liberal to us. More universalist than what we are used to.)
Crime was rampant in Elizabethan England. Crime was not rampant in 1913 England.
Transportation was secure and orderly in 1913 England. Shipping costs were minimal. Transportation in Elizabethan England consisted of a patchy network of roads where travelers were preyed upon by bandits.
In 1913 England, people living on England’s borders could be assured that nobody would attack them. In Elizabethan England, people living on the border in the North (reivers) were subject to constant raids by what amounted to Scots tribesmen (and themselves were more or less the same kind of tribesmen.) People living on the more remote coasts were subject to piracy.
Funny definition of order you have there.
When you change the definition of what crime is, often the amount of crime changes, interplaying of course with the culture at large.
i.e – If I have a state where witchcraft is illegal, obviously more people will be burnt than if I just neglected to have such a law.
1913 was highly disordered as more and more power was being transferred from the high aristocratic elite to the demotic governing forces, and their low aristocratic representatives. Of course by today’s standards it looks great, but keep things in a macro focus. Without H.H. Asquith, you don’t eventually end up with Jeremy Corbyn.
I wouldn’t call Elizabethan England a stupendous model. It has problems, those which you cite, but these are not structural, they are instead problems that are in many ways era-peculiar, and solving them was not hindered by any defect in the actual structure of the government.
OK, without Asquith you can’t get to Corbyn, but without Elizabeth you can’t get to Asquith. It’s the kyklos of history. You can’t very well pick any point in the cycle and say that all subsequent problems were derived from that point.
I don’t understand the distinction between structural and era-peculiar problems. The political structure of an era was a function of that era. If Queen Elizabeth could have afforded her own transoceanic navy, she wouldn’t have used contractors operating under a letter of marque. If she could have afforded a centralized government with a centralized budget, she would have had one instead of issuing things like personal monopolies. If she could have afforded (politically and financially) an effective nation-wide law enforcement apparatus and a functional road network, she would have had them.
The definition of the crimes I’m talking about is not very context-dependent. I’m talking about things like robbery, rape (the kind where strangers come out of the woodwork, beat you up and stick it in you, not the hangover regret retroactive kind of rape,) organized looting and pillaging, and murder. Reading contemporary descriptions makes it obvious that this stuff was a common-place occurrence in the Elizabethan period, slowly tapered down to the 1950s, then resurged. For instance, this story from 1807 where Henry Pearce, English boxing champion, is walking in a park outside Bristol in broad daylight and comes across 3 gamekeepers beating and gangraping a woman, and delivers them a beatdown (with apparently a crowd gathering to watch) is impossible to imagine taking place in 1913 Britain, but would not be out of place in today’s Britain or America, and you can see similar videos on WorldStar, YouTube and Liveleak.
http://www.jameslafond.com/article.php?id=3047
By any normal, useful definition of order, a Britain where this sort of thing was normal or at least an entertaining piece of news was less orderly than a Britain where it was unimaginable. To redefine order otherwise is a crime against language. It’s no different than today’s redefinition of rape to the point where post-sex regret retroactively makes consensual sex into rape, with a resulting “rape culture,” “rape epidemic,” etc.
From the Web site B linked:
1421 Chinese Discover America before Europeans
From this website: “prepubescent girls typically solicit sex from grown men.” So what? I like to deal with assertions as they are presented. If you’d like, I can find you any number of primary sources of public crime and degeneracy in pre-Victorian England, or you can look yourself.
(I have no idea why it’s more heretical to say that the Chinese great fleet came to America than to say that Vikings discovered it before that, or that there’s water on Mars, or whatever.)
No you cannot. You already had a go at finding a primary source for sexual degeneracy, and it turned out you had to apply the Talmudic method to your sources.
You could not find a primary source for sexual degeneracy, so I much doubt you can find a primary source for high crime levels.
You have a long history of confidently announcing primary sources which are unverifiable, and on those rare occasions when they can actually be found, do not say what you claimed they said, except to the eye of a sufficiently adroit talmudist.
>(I have no idea why it’s more heretical to say that the Chinese great fleet came to America than to say that Vikings discovered it before that, or that there’s water on Mars, or whatever.)
I know you don’t and that’s the problem. You don’t shit about history and you constantly lie about it.
Exactly so.
It is a simple fact of history that the Chinese great fleet did not do anything remarkable. It hugged the coasts, showed a marked preference for areas where waves were not too large and got a very short distance along the African coast before turning back.
The politically correct, in between inventing great accomplishments for black Africans and Muslims, proceeded to wildly improve on the quite worthy accomplishments of the Chinese.
B tends to spout absurd over the top Cathedral propaganda, much more than he spouts Jewish supremacism. He is more a Cathedralite than he is a Jewish supremacist, and he has the irritating habit of mistaking official truth for primary sources.
He is confident that official truth must be true. If you ask him for primary sources for official truth, he is completely confident that they must exist and must easily be found. When you demand that he actually finds them, he comes up empty, but applies the talmudic method to the sources he does find, reading black as white and up as down, similar to the treatment Jews give the Old Testament.
the Chinese discovery of America is dubious and, if it happened, irrelevant.
The fact that pubescent girls desire, and, if no one tells them not to, solicit sex from adult men, is the kind of thing that every mother and daughter used to know, having either been a pubescent girl or having hung out with pubescent girls and known who they said they had crushes on.
Seems to me that Zheng He’s fleet occasionally crossed fairly large expanses of open water, away from the coast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zheng_He.png
Is it possible to sail a long way across open ocean using contemporary tech? Fra Mauro seems to think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FraMauro1420Ship.png
Indeed, it’s even possible to cross the Pacific on a raft, as demonstrated by Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon Tiki expedition.
Obviously, any theoretical Chinese landing in America was a historical dead end (as was the Viking colonization of North America and Greenland.)
So what?
Because LaFond links to a video discussing this possibility, I should discount what he says about early 19th century boxers?
Wikipedia piously shows them crossing open water, but strangely, each port that they visit is the port that one would reach from the previous port by creeping along the coast in sight of land.
For example they do not visit the Philippines, Borneo, or even Japan.
If they did not make it to Japan or the Philippines, no way they made it to America They also stayed in waters shielded from major wave action.
Anywhere they went, you could make it in kayak.
You will notice he visits the islands of Hainan and Ceylon, which are in sight of the mainland, but somehow, strangely, never ever makes it to any islands that are out of sight of land.
Nonetheless, Borneo and the Philippines had Chinese visitors from long before Zheng He.
From which we should conclude that some Chinese were willing to cross one hundred and twenty kilometers of open water. But it does not seem that Cheng Ho and his great treasure fleet was among them.
Again, you know nothing about history of ships otherwise you wouldn’t have even considered the idea that huge ships could cross an ocean the size of the Pacific. They’d sink with the first storm.
It took modern steel the make large ships posible for anything other than coastal travel and lakes/ rivers.
Your ignorance and willful stupidity caused you to be suckered into believing the Chinese discovered America story is matched by your stupidity and ignorence of specifics of the gang rape/beating story. The accout cited stated that a prize fighter had a 15 minute fight with 3 rapists. That a ludicrously long period of time in a street fight. Most street fights are over in less than 2 minutes and against an actual trained fighter usally less than 30 seconds. The account reads like a prize fighter making up a story because 15 minutes is about what he’d spend in the ring during a good fight. The whole account is a fabrication.
I’m beginning think B is reporter. The mistakes he makes and the lies he belives are follow the same pattern I often see with reporters.
Calm down, sally.
Had Zheng He’s ships been of the claimed dimensions, they would not have made it across the Indian Ocean either.
Speculation is that they were small enough to be seaworthy.
As for how long it takes a trained fighter to finish a fight, it depends on the level of the opponents. The guys he was fighting were the local equivalent of cops, no strangers to violence, and there were 3 of them. It was not Wurl Star MMA Fighter KOs Thugs.
There is no evidence that they did make it across the Indian ocean. Looks like they crept along the coast sailing only in good weather. It takes waves a while to rise.
If outnumbered, the only way to win is to take your opponents out quickly to prevent them from properly coordinating. If three opponents are good enough to remain standing for one minute, they are good enough to win.
Indeed, many have strange fantasies about the pre-modern era.
Also by many measures, 2013 is even more orderly than 1913.
Most of which is just technology. The Elizabethan court would’ve been more than happy to have 1913 levels of control and the order it creates, but they couldn’t afford it.
Which is what B doesn’t seem to grasp about structure-based political analysis. Obviously if we judge order by his standard, then our current mass-abortion, feminazi, dermocratic, gay-adoption-rape utopia is the most ordered civilization in history.
B wants to define order as the Sanhedrin being the final court of appeal for disputes amongst the goyim, who all obey the Noahide laws.
In Elizabethan England, however, violations of the Noahide laws were less open.
Let me ask , how specifically is order being defined for this discussion?
Order is order, not equivalent to health. If everyone was placed in an oubliette, that would be extremely orderly, but not very functional. Similarly, a block of high explosive contains a great deal of order, but is not alive.
If wives obey husbands, orderly. If husbands obey wives, orderly but dysfunctional. If men and women each do their own thing, disorderly and dysfunctional.
All healthy states are orderly, but only a very small subset of orderly states are healthy.
Inequality is one form of order. Inequality in which competent people have power and wealth, and incompetent people obey, is orderly and also functional. The reverse would be just as orderly, but dysfunctional.
I don’t think inequality is a good proxy for order.
For instance, today’s US without NAMs would have much less inequality and much more order.
Without welfare, much more order.
With segregation, much more order.
With slavery, much more order.
You know my prescription for the NAM problem: That those who are on welfare because of laziness, indiscipline, and lack of future orientation, those that used to be called “sturdy beggars” and “the undeserving poor”, need masters.
This is irrelevant. The question is whether inequality is a good proxy for order, and the thought experiment where you remove or add NAMs shows that they can be inversely correlated.
The undeserving poor have masters right now. Those masters are irresponsible. They need responsible masters.
Your thought experiment is merely a talmudic quibble, and the undeserving poor do not, in fact, have masters, as is visible in the way that they walk down the street as if they own it.
To whom do the undeserving poor constantly appeal for justice and gibz, if not to their masters? Moldbug made the point that black slaves were not emancipated but nationalized. They are poorly managed state property.
You are not making sense.
If you could transport our current governance and societal structures to Elizibethan England and vice versa, are you going tell me that the result would not be exceptional for the modern era, and cannibal holocaust for the Elizabethans?
I too have read Moldbug.
It is obvious that Drake, Raleigh etc would, if brought to 2015 and given modern tech, take over the world.
It is also obvious that brought to 1913, they wouldn’t. There was no shortage of guys with their skill set. Like Colonel Dwyer, who took over Seistan with about 30 guys and a couple of trucks and cannon in 1915.
When you claim that Elizebethan England had a high crime rate, you rely on Pinker. Pinker is not a reliable source. All Cathedral sources systematically demonize our past.
Please produce a primary source.
I don’t have any primary sources for crime in Elizebethan England, but whenever I have checked primary sources against derived sources concerning the sins of our past, I have found the derived sources were strident propaganda, misrepresenting their primary sources if they gave them at all.
Considering how much the Cathedral lies about the Second World War, you’re correct in saying we cannot trust their account of anything.
Hard to find primary sources for Elizabethan England specifically-there’s a paucity of them online. Need to check Macaulay’s history.
For following centuries, some primary sources:
http://www.londonlives.org/static/HighwayRobbery.jsp
http://www.nb.no/nbsok/nb/508b0ebf6df31302ab0b3df545e1a911
https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1194593
https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1177103
https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1177814
http://www.elfinspell.com/CareyBio.html
Oh dear. Over a hundred years, eighteenth century Britain suffered the depredations of FIVE, count them, FIVE, highway robbers.
Sounds pretty damned orderly and law abiding to me. In London today, they don’t bother counting carjackings.
Oops, I miscounted: Eight highway robbers over the course of a century.
Oh the humanity!
I am reminded of Pinker telling us how Victorians were horrified by a crime wave of muggings. On checking, the crime wave consisted of one mugging every several months.
Each highway robber became famous. Does anyone today remember carjackers?
When you see one cockroach, you know there is a nest.
A nest of what? Highway robbers who seldom rob anyone?
I think he’s doing that millennial thing where he phrases politically correct things or things in accordance with a utopian view of the project goals in a transparently false manner and says them with a straight face for humor
I think it would be better to compare elizabethian England to other countries at the same time period. Rather than compare elizabethian England to 1913 england. There are too many variables outside of the political and religious that are different.
But even then it’s not a good test. The better test is to compare elizabethian England to Henry’s England, and do a similar comparison to other countries in the same time period.
That is, was Elizabethian England establishing order, or decreasing order relative to other countries.
Other countries had all kinds of stuff going on from which England was immune, for instance, religious and civil wars (England was able to ratchet down on the Catholics in a way that would have been impossible without a civil war had it not been an island.)
The bottom line to me is that 16th, 17th, 18th century England had levels of crime that were high enough and law enforcement that was ineffective enough that highway robbery was widespread, becoming a gentleman rogue was a viable option for rich kids who wanted to fix up their personal finances, and every time they got lucky and caught one of the bastards, they had to string him up publicly to offset all the ones they couldn’t catch.
None of these were realities in 1913 England, any more than having your kid stolen off your suburban front porch by a pack of wolves.
You might say that there were a lot more high society lefties in 1913 England who should have been strung up at Tyburn, and that’s true. But lefties are a phenomenon that only a rich and orderly society can afford (for any length of time.)
Maybe, maybe not but you don’t have any primary source material showing that. Eighteenth century women traveled long distances without a care. Highwaymen cannot have been all that common.
Highway robbery was extraordinarily rare compared to any modern crime activity. Decades sometimes went by without a single highway robbery, indicating a level of law and order unimaginable by modern standards.
“When you see one cockroach, you know there is a nest.” if the cockroach is so rare they have been given a name and become famous, then no. No there isn’t.
Sounds good, doesn’t quite hold up to analysis.
Was Elizabethan Britain more leftist than 1913 Britain? Obviously not. I can’t even imagine an Elizabethan leftist, let alone name one.
Was Elizabethan Britain better ordered, did it contain less entropy, than 1913 Britain? Obviously not.
Five more willfully and obstinately stupid comments allowed.
Of course Elizabethan England is more ordered than 1913 Britain. Hierarchy, inequality, women are not emancipated. You don’t approve of that order, but order it is. Women were not permitted to fuck around. That is order. Inequality is the social equivalent of large temperature differences in a material system. That is order. More unequal, less entropy. Less fucking around, less entropy. Similarly, if some degrees of freedom in a material system have a different temperature, more energy per degree of freedom than other degrees of freedom. Britons would not have been able to begin colonialism except that some Britons had the wealth to build ships and others had to obey them. The order in the system allows it to do external work. Chesterton’s fences kept this capability from being dissipated.
This is a reactionary blog. Of course most of the readers are going to view Elizabethan England as more orderly than 1913 England. You are wasting the reader’s bandwidth by assuming the Cathedral position is self evidently true and lecturing us on official truth as if the only reason we did not agree with it is because we are idiots and no one had told us what the official truth officially is.
Elizabethan England had no Jews. Cromwell then conspired with the Jews to let the Jews back in, and did so because he read the Bible and knew that the Jews were the chosen people of Yahweh and the race of his Nazirite rabbi who told him about leftist holiness competition.
That or they offered him a huge bribe.
yes, he was ideologically predisposed to being financed to conquer England by the Jews, so he cut a deal with the Jews in conquering England.
Would he have cut a deal with the Chinese if they had offered to finance his revolution on the condition that they would then be allowed to move freely and conduct business in England?
Would such a deal have then been denounced by his opponents as a Chinese takeover and lost him support?