Indoctrinated free thinkers

Over at the reddit men's rights page, a young person left a message hostile to the idea of a men's political movement:

LOL men's rights?! Are you kidding me Reddit? White men own this entire planet, lock stock and barrel.

Come on, is this a joke? Please tell me this is a joke...

So here is someone who believes that white men own the entire planet and are therefore privileged oppressors who don't need a movement on their behalf.

I responded briefly as folllows:

white men own this entire planet

Is that meant to be a joke? First, women own more of the world's wealth than you imagine:

Women will be the richer sex by 2025, owning 60 per cent of the UK’s personal wealth compared with 48 per cent today, research has revealed. The study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research also found that UK millionaires aged under 45 and over 65 are more likely to be women than men. There are 24 per cent more female millionaires aged between 18 and 44 - 47,355 compared to 37,935 men. Female millionaires aged 65 and over also outnumber their male counterparts - 71,369 compared to 67,865. Researchers found the expected change in personal wealth was due to women performing better in education than men, having higher levels of single home ownership and a longer life expectancy.

Second, whites are being matched by Asians, particularly East Asians, when it comes to wealth and power. In the U.S., for instance, Asians have higher average levels of income than whites. China is now the world's largest export nation; Japan and South Korea also have powerful economies.

So why would anyone imagine that white males own the world? Because it fits into an ideology which tries to explain inequality in terms of one group of people (white men) socially constructing itself and othering everyone else in order to enjoy an unearned privilege. This means that the task of politics becomes to deconstruct the oppressor group.

It's an ideology which never should have been accepted, but these days it's becoming more obviously antiquated.

The reply of the young person to my comment was very interesting:

I don't know, I went to a school that prides itself on free thinking and allowing students to make up their own mind, and it's general consensus that the white male has not only dominated the world the last 3 centuries, but that it has caused by far the most suffering against other people, both for women and other cultures and races.

It shows how clever liberals have been: their indoctrination has had two parts, first, that white men are the evil agents responsible for oppression in society and, second, that the repeated, unceasing promotion of this belief in schools is not indoctrination but is part of a culture of "free thinking and allowing students to make up their own mind".

In other words, they have camouflaged the brainwashing.

In my experience, there are students who don't entirely fall for this: as they get into the senior years they are at least dimly aware that an agenda is being pushed on them that they are expected to go along with. But clearly there are at least some students who go all the way through high school and come out with the views they have been indoctrinated to believe in, including the belief that they have not been indoctrinated but have made up their own mind as a free thinker.

Tim Wise: the sound of your demise is beautiful

Tim Wise is the ugly face of the left. He's a self-styled "anti-racist" activist, with a brimming hatred of whites.

Wise was clearly upset by Republican gains in the mid-term elections. So he wrote an open letter to American whites, in which he takes comfort in the impending demise of white people:

You need to drink up.

And quickly.

And heavily.

Because your time is limited.

Real damned limited.

So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.

The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.

Already there are two big questions to be asked here. One is why Tim Wise hates whites so much. The second is why he thinks that the Republican Party is devoted to the defence of whites.

But, first, here are some more of the charmless thoughts of Tim Wise:

you will lose...

It is coming, and soon.

This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.

It is math...

The kind of math that proves how your kind -- mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like -- are dying.

You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

So on to the first question. Why does Tim Wise hate whites?

I think the answer has to do with how left-liberals explain the existence of inequality. Liberals believe that inherited group characteristics, such as our sex, our race or our sexuality, should not matter when it comes to our life outcomes.

That means that liberals take it very seriously if one group appears to be advantaged in any way (in liberal-speak "privileged").

Inevitably, such advantage does exist. So liberals have to explain why advantage exists and how it can be overcome.

To answer that it exists because of differences between groups in talents or interests is not accepted by liberals. Liberals generally assume that talents and interests are spread evenly amongst different groups. To answer that advantage exists because one group forms an historic majority is also considered illegitimate.

The answer generally given by liberals is that group advantage exists because of discrimination by one group against another, motivated perhaps by prejudice or bigotry. Right liberals tend to believe that all groups are capable of such bigotry but that progress and enlightenment will overcome historic injustice.

But there are left liberals who spin the theory a bit further. They hold that one dominant group (men, whites) deliberately created a system of discrimination to uphold an unearned privilege at the expense of the excluded "other".

So the dominant group becomes the barrier to the historic achievement of justice and equality. It becomes the "cosmic enemy" of humanity. So to overcome oppression and inequality you have to set about undermining the dominant group, deconstructing it, bringing it down.

Don't believe me? Listen, then, as Tim Wise continues his rant:

in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn't matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

Most leftists don't express the "cosmic enemy" idea as strongly as Tim Wise does. Some do not express it at all (e.g. some of the left-liberals in the men's rights movement). But the beliefs I described above are not that uncommon on the left. They are to be found, for instance, in the whiteness studies courses to be found in dozens of universities. And they explain, too, the more general feeling to be found in modern Western politics that it is somehow progressive for established white communities to be broken up (I've had two principals apologise to me in job interviews for the number of white students at their schools).

As a typical example of the "whites as cosmic enemy" theme, there is the article "Privileged whites" penned by Jennifer Clarke, a teacher at the Australian National University. In this article, Clarke describes Australia as a "regionally anomalous white enclave run largely by white people to our own advantage", in which anti-discrimination laws should be applied more effectively so that "a majority of Australians would no longer be of northern European ethnic heritage".

Tim Wise wants the same sort of solution for the US. He doesn't want an armed pogrom against whites. He just wants them to die out and be replaced by other races:

It's OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it...

Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.

They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion...

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims...

And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now -- we are -- your destruction.

And I do not mean by that your physical destruction...

We just have to be patient.

And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well...

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

Which brings me to the second question. Wise assumes that the Republicans are a pro-white group.  But this isn't obviously true. The Republican leadership has been keen to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and the party has done little to stem the demographic transformation of the US.

But the left-liberal theory assumes that the system is run in the interests of the dominant group. The theory works better if the Republicans are assumed to be acting in the interests of the white majority (even if there is little evidence that this is so). Therefore Wise portrays a Republican victory as a victory for those who want to keep America as a majority white country.

And what about our response to Tim Wise? First, we have to recognise that Wise is correct about the demographic transformation of the US and its long-term consequences. So we need to continue to build up opposition to open borders in the US and elsewhere.

Second, we need to criticise the liberal assumptions about equality that lead on to hostility against whites. It's utterly wrong for liberals to try to make race and sex not matter in a society. They do matter and should matter.

If, for instance, the Danes are the historic majority in Denmark then of course they will be the "dominant" group. Yes, they will have the "advantage" when it comes to representing the cultural norms of that society or filling most of the positions of power and influence in that society.  But that doesn't represent an illegitimate, immoral privilege. It's a normal aspect of a nation of people maintaining its own existence.

Yes, whites in America have been the "dominant" group in the above sense. Perhaps that does confer an advantage on whites in America in the sense of representing cultural norms or occupying a large number of public offices. But that is a perfectly normal and proper kind of advantage, one that occurs in every living nation, including those in Asia and Africa. What is improper is for liberals, with their abstract, ideological approach to equality, to seek to undermine this kind of "advantage".

Are white Americans privileged in other ways? Yes and no. In terms of income, education and family outcomes, Asian Americans do better than white Americans. It's true that white Americans tend to do better than hispanics and blacks. Liberals assume that talent and interests are spread evenly across groups and that such unequal outcomes must therefore be due to discrimination. But if the problem is discrimination by white Americans toward the excluded other, why then do Asians do so well? Why do they do even better than whites?

We need a better, non-liberal approach to equality. The current one delivers us the absurdity of Tim Wise, an "anti-racist" who treats one particular race as a cosmic enemy and who will not rest until the historic majority is no more.

A destructive white god?

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a woman of West Indian descent living in Melbourne. She responded to the Haiti disaster by writing a poem, which was published on the website of Overland, a leading left-wing literary journal.

The gist of the poem? God and Jesus must be white men. That would explain their visiting of death and destruction on brown people. She asks the "pale trinity" if crushing Haiti felt as good as similar acts visited on coloured peoples, such as the tsunami.

The poem attracted one comment, from a white reader, which was just as bad as the poem itself:

I think destruction comes naturally to us white men. It is almost like a religion to us that we will worship, forever creating new and more devastating ways to blow shit up.

The bonus is, when armagedon comes, it will be us what brings it and we’ll dance and sing and laugh at all the pretty flashing lights caused by the world falling to pieces as lava advances on the homes of those too poor to fly off to the moon where the best seats for the show will be.

That’s very well said Maxine, personally I don’t like to point the finger at God for natural disasters. Maybe because I’m a atheist.

Right. So white men worship destruction like a religion. We'll laugh when we finally destroy the world, just before we fly off to the moon, leaving the poor to their fate.

Overland, by the way, gets funded by the Federal Government, the Victorian Government, Arts Victoria, Victoria University and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Update: The actor Danny Glover has claimed that the Haiti earthquake is a consequence of global warming. A reader, Ned Wilobane, has written some lines to Gaia in response. His poem is beautifully subversive of Maxine Beneba Clarke's original:

Seems Gaia
That big Momma
that swallows us whole dying
must be a commie / to me
else what the hell she want / taxing
the hell outa
the brave
& the free
the state entity
takes my money in their fist
did it feel as good in
Russia / Germany / or China
what tickles her the best
giant cavernous devouring,
swallowing down the free man
Gaia is a commie / i’m sayin
Gaia is now a commie / to me

So who is getting the axe?

This is Waleed Aly writing in the Melbourne Age a few months ago:

In a financial crisis the axe falls on those who have played the least part in its creation - women and migrants.

No clear, consistent ideological principle seems to explain this, which suggests it has just as much to do with the differing values we assign to people.

It is difficult to resist the suspicion that the key determinant of winners and losers in this crisis will not simply be sound policy. It will be social policy.

Waleed Aly's argument is that the decision to axe workers in a recession is not made on economic but on social grounds: those who are treated in society as lesser human beings are those who will lose their jobs.

Interesting then that axe has fallen most heavily, in the US at least, on blue collar male workers:

Rodney Ringler is an unemployed blue collar male without a college degree. He's hardly alone. Men like him have been the main victims of the current recession in the United States.

"I haven't worked since December of 2007, around the time this recession started," Ringler, a 49-year-old computer technician, said as he walked his dog in a Dallas suburb.

One statistic that stands out in America's recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: in April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 percent versus 8.9 percent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 percent.

... "In the 2001 recession, 51 percent of all job losses were for men. It was evenly split. But in this recession 80 percent of the jobs that have been lost have been men's," said Andrew Sum, a labor economics professor at Northeastern University who has studied this issue in detail.

Men also incurred about 80 percent of the job losses in the 1990-91 recession ...

So by Waleed Aly's logic it is men, particularly blue collar men, who are treated as having lesser value. It is men who bore the brunt of job losses in the 1990-90 recession as well as the current one.

This completely upsets the image of society Waleed Aly was trying to convey. He wants us to accept the idea that white males are an oppressor class who have taken a privileged place in society, with a higher human value, at the expense of others - with this being a fundamental breach of human equality.

This image of the privileged oppressor male hides what has really been happening for several decades. Even in economic terms men have been losing ground, with the value of real wages for men declining since the 1970s:

The fact that American males without a college degree are especially vulnerable in this cycle point to more hard times ahead for the U.S. working class, which has endured stagnant and declining wages for the last three decades.

The skilled and semi-skilled jobs they traditionally held have been moving overseas to places like China and Vietnam. The jobs that remain pay less, amid declining union membership.

One study by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution think-tank found median U.S. family income rose to $53,280 by the middle of this decade in 2004 dollars from $37,384 in 1964. But for males aged 30 to 39, average annual personal income fell from the mid-1970s by around $5,000 to $35,000.

American men are now being paid significantly less than their fathers were. At the same time they have to put up with a hostile view that they are enjoying an unearned privilege which belongs to others.

A conservative laureate?

If Australia has a poet laureate it is Les Murray. I bought his newly released Collected Poems today and was interested to find how openly conservative some of his work is.

For instance, there is a poem titled "A Brief History" from the volume he published in 1996, Subhuman Redneck Poems. In it Murray actually defends the maligned majority population of Australia against the attacks launched against it by the political class.

For instance, the fourth stanza sums up the state of the nation in which Aboriginal culture, with its dreamings, is treated favourably as "our one culture", whilst the white majority is blamed for whatever goes wrong, with another group, the "Ethnics", being excused from the blame.

Our one culture paints Dreamings, each a beautiful claim.
Far more numerous are the unspeakable Whites,
the only cause of all earthly plights,
immigrant natives without immigrant rights.
Unmixed with these are Ethnics, absolved of all blame.

(Think about the fourth line. It catches the strange, no-win position the Anglo majority is placed in by the political class.)

In the next stanza, Murray writes of the failure of the political class to take its own tradition seriously, even to the point of declaring Australia to be an Asian nation.

All of people's Australia, its churches and lore
are gang-raped by satire self-righteous as war
and, from trawling fresh victims to set on the poor,
our mandarins now, in one more evasion
of love and themselves, declare us Asian.

The lines "in one more evasion/of love and themselves" get to the heart of what's wrong with a political class which is willing to declare null their own nation's historic identity.

Finally, Murray sympathises with Australians turning away from high culture, given that it has already turned against them in the name of empty ideology.

Australians are like most who won't read this poem
or any, since literature turned on them
and bodiless jargons without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion and biology,
compared with bloody History, the opposite of home.

I like especially the part of the stanza I've highlighted. Murray perhaps is identifying the tendency for a liberal politics, as a "bodiless jargon," to consider illegitimate the real, embodied forms of identity and connectedness felt by most people.

What does the last line mean? I think it's a reference to the political class also running down the things valued by most Australians because they are "ordinary" - they aren't associated with the glamour of the great conflicts of history, with "bloody History", which Australians might shy away from as "the opposite of home".

Murray has been a prolific writer, so it will take me a while to read through the entire volume of his work. When I've done so, I'll write another item and try to provide more of an overview of his poetry.

Are men the cosmic enemy?

There are enemies, and then there are cosmic enemies. What is the difference?

Let me explain it this way. There are liberals who believe that humanity can be decisively liberated, so that the "new man" who is free and equal can triumph and thereby achieve the proper end of history (i.e. of human progress).

But what is stopping this decisive victory of the new man? Why can't we move forward and be liberated?

Some political moderns (usually radicals of various kinds) answer: there is an enemy group, an oppressor group, which is frustrating the arrival of the new free and equal man.

This oppressor group comes to be seen not just as a normal political rival or opponent, but as a powerful "cosmic enemy" whose existence prevents the realisation of our true humanity.

The hand of the cosmic enemy is detected in all the problems we suffer, to the point that the normal rules of morality are put aside and it is thought desirable to abolish the very existence of this enemy.

But who exactly has filled the role of this cosmic enemy? If we go back to the time of the French Revolution, the aristocracy were seen to be the enemies of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and a considerable violence was meted out to them in order to abolish the ancien regime.

So this represents, perhaps, the first development of the idea of a "cosmic enemy".

At the time of the Russian Revolution, it was the bourgeoisie who were thought to be the natural enemies of a workers' state, again with violent measures attached.

However, the fullest development of the idea came with Hitler, who identified the Jews as the cosmic enemy, and who violently sought their annihilation.

And since then? There still exist whites who see the Jews as a cosmic enemy. But it is more mainstream now for gentile whites themselves to be seen this way.

The most obvious example is the politics of Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard professor, who publishes a journal with the motto "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". Ignatiev has written that "The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any oppostion".

Finally, there is also a current within feminism which views men as a cosmic enemy. Consider the following quote from Higginbottom and Roy in Feminist Action 1 (1984):

Men's minds are not true ... We must learn about men and their archetypes in order to put them back in their place - they are an aberration and out of control ... Men won't exist for much longer.

Here we have feminists yearning for the very abolition of men. The Sydney Morning Herald published another feminist piece earlier this year, by American columnist Maureen Dowd, which also breezily contemplated the extinction of men.

Dowd quotes a male researcher, Dr Bryan Sykes, who has perfected the "men as cosmic enemy" line. According to Dowd,

He fantasises about "a world without men", a version of the mythological "cult of Diana" hunter-gatherer societies where women were in charge and men were just there for entertainment, where there would be "no Y chromosomes to enslave the feminine, the destructive spiral of greed and ambition diminishes and, as a direct result, the sickness of our planet eases. The world no longer reverberates to the sound of men's clashing antlers and the grim repercussions of private and public warfare."

It is this kind of thinking which is the most dangerous kind of "hate speech", because it is not merely a criticism of an opposing group, but a totalising world view in which the enemy is responsible for a failure to achieve the promised land, so that the abolition of the enemy, even by violent means, is eagerly anticipated.

But note that this notion of a cosmic enemy stems from a "progressive" politics. It rests on the idea that the arrival of a "new man" is imminent, but is frustrated by the cosmic enemy.

It is difficult for conservatives to understand this mentality. For us, the human condition does not allow an "end point" to history. There will always be a struggle to achieve what we think is ideal in society, not just because of the challenge of outsiders ("enemies"), but even more so because of the inevitable frailties existing within our own natures.

(Hat tip: this post, including the term "cosmic enemy", was suggested by comments made by the American traditionalist, Lawrence Auster, at his website View from the Right, as well as ideas expressed at the same site by the commentator Matt.)