Month: April 2017

Last time we looked at the differences between the “Left” as manifested in the mainstream political discourse and those of a number of authors, blogger and thinkers that I’ve (somewhat arbitrarily) lumped under the umbrella of the Alt-Left. We listed a lot of their views, but what lies at the heart of the Alt-Left’s critique?

I think an answer to that question might be illuminated by this article: Kanth: A 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding (Institute for New Economic Thinking)

The article describes the ideas of a thinker named Rajani Kanth. Like some on the Alt-Right, Kanth is highly critical of many of the ideas which came out of the European Enlightenment. Kanth’s critique, thought, centers around what he calls Eurocentric Modernism, which he feels had come to define the current world order, pushing out any alternatives:

We’re taught to think of the Enlightenment as the blessed end to the Dark Ages, a splendid blossoming of human reason. But what if instead of bringing us to a better world, some of this period’s key ideas ended up producing something even darker?

In [author Rajani Kanth’s] view, what’s throwing most of us off kilter…was…a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes of existence, many quite ancient and time-tested, and eventually rose to dominate the world in its Anglo-American form…Kanth argues that this framework, which he calls Eurocentric modernism, is collapsing….

Many of the authors previously mentioned are critical of Eurocentric Modernism, even if they are not familiar with that concept. What is Eurocentric Modernism?

The Eurocentric modernist program, according to Kanth, has four planks: a blind faith in science; a self-serving belief in progress; rampant materialism; and a penchant for using state violence to achieve its ends. In a nutshell, it’s a habit of placing individual self-interest above the welfare of community and society.

Eurocentric Modernism is also intrinsically tied up with the concept of the One Big Global Market put into place by European economic liberals using strong centralized states and top-down state violence. The Market itself is the greatest “social engineering” project ever conceived, and is currently showing signs of fraying around the edges (or even collapsing outright):

Eurocentric modernism…delivered a society which is essentially asocial — one in which everybody sees everybody else as a means to their own private ends…[and] consigned us to an endless and exhausting Hobbesian competition. For every expansion of the market, we found our social space shrunk and our natural environment spoiled. For every benefit we received, there came a new way to pit us against each other…[P]eople are not at all like Adam Smith’s homo economicus, a narrowly self-interested agent trucking and bartering through life. Smith…turned the human race — a species capable of wondrous caring, creativity, and conviviality — into a nasty horde of instinctive materialists: a society of hustlers.

In fact, economics has been called the “crown jewel” of the Eurocentric Modernist project. Rather than any sort of actual “science,” it is a code of ethics and philosophical justification for the world as it is under Eurocentric Modernism. It prevents any challenge to it, depicting the current order as “scientific,” “natural” and “inevitable.” (i.e. “There is no alternative”). According to its adherents, any criticism of it is contrary to “human nature.” Every day, millions of people in every corner of the globe are indoctrinated in its tenets, like a modern-day religion. You can’t understand the political regime of Eurocentric Modernism without its philosophical handmaiden—Economics.

Modern orthodox economists frequently theorize and propose their models wrapped in algebraic expressions and econometrics symbols that make their theories incomprehensible to anyone without a significant training in mathematics. These complicated mathematical models rely on sets of assumptions about human behavior, institutional frameworks, and the way society works as whole; i.e. theoretical underpinnings developed through history. Yet, more frequently than not, their assumptions go to such great lengths that the models turn out utterly detached from reality.

This approach was promoted during the 1870s, in an effort to emulate the success of the natural sciences in explaining the world around us, and so transform Political Economy into the “exact” science of Economics. The new discipline, born with a scientific aura, would provide a legitimate doctrine to rationalize the existing system and state of affairs as universal, natural, and harmonious.

It is understandable that economists wanted their field to be more like the natural sciences. At the time, great advances in physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy had unraveled many mysteries of the universe. Those discoveries had yielded rapid development around the world. The Second Industrial Revolution was well underway, causing a transition from rudimentary techniques of production to the extensive uses of machines. Physics and mathematics were validated to a great extent with the construction of large bridges, transcontinental railroads, and the telephone. There exists extensive evidence to establish that this success of the natural sciences and the scientific method had a big influence on the mathematization of what had been the field of Political Economy. Early neoclassical theorists misappropriated the mathematical formalism of physics, boldly copied their models, and mostly admitted so. Particularly guilty of this method were W.S. Jevons and Léon Walras; credited with having arrived at the principle of marginal utility independently…

The Borrowed Science of Neoclassical Economics (The Minskys)

Not only did it borrow the language of science, at around the same time it eliminated all class/institutional power relations from consideration, instead depicting us all as “equals” making mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges.

…Power was originally recognised as important by the Classical economists like Adam Smith. However this changed with the rise of socialism. Wealthy industrialists and rulers feared this threat and sought to find an economic theory that would debunk socialism and protect themselves. It was for this reason that economics began to downplay issues like inequality and poverty. It also de-emphasised production and therefore any resulting questions about social relations. Instead economics switched to discussing marginal utility of hypothetical individuals where none had power over the other. There was no boss or servant, but rather groups of individuals voluntarily interacting in mutually beneficial arrangements.

Crucially, economics became depersonalised and it was no longer possible to make value judgements. A dollar spent by a rich person on a loaf of bread was the same as a dollar spent by a poor person on the same loaf. It was no longer argued that one person may need the dollar more or that the starving may need the loaf more than the fat. Economics abandoned the idea that people have needs and assumed we only have desires. This change in focus did not happen by chance or due to superior argument but due to the politics of the time…

Economists and the Powerful (Whistling in the Wind)

Rather than the pseudoscience of Economics, Kanth suggests we take our social inspiration from a different source—human anthropology:

Utopian dreamers have often longed for a more hospitable way of living. But Kanth believes that when they look to politics, economics or philosophy for answers, they are missing the best inspiration: human anthropology…without which our forays into economics, psychology, sociology, and pretty much everything are hopelessly skewed…the Eurocentric modernist tradition, influenced by the Judeo-Christian idea that we are distinct from the world of nature, seeks to separate us from the animal world. We are supposed to be above it, immortal, transcending our bodies and the Earth…

As Kanth sees it, most of our utopian visions carry on the errors and limitations born of a misguided view of human nature. That’s why communism, as it was practiced in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, projected a materialist perspective on progress while ignoring the natural human instinct for autonomy— the ability to decide for ourselves where to go and what to say and create. On flip side, capitalism runs against our instinct to trust and take care of each other.

[D]idn’t Eurocentric modernism…give us our great democratic ideals of equality and liberty to elevate and protect us?…Kanth…notes that when we replace the vital ties of kinship and community with abstract contractual relations, or when we find that the only sanctioned paths in life are that of consumer or producer, we become alienated and depressed in spirit. Abstract rights like liberty and equality turn out to be rather cold comfort. These ideas, however lofty, may not get at the most basic human wants and needs.

The key is not to project ourselves into the future, but to learn from the practical, beneficial ways humans have lived in the past and still do, in some cases, in the present…

Now let’s introduce a related concept here called High Modernism. This concept was developed by James Scott in his book Seeing Like A State. It has some similarities and overlaps with Eurocentric Modernism, but is distinct from it.

Seeing Like a State (The Easiest Person to Fool)

Book Review: Seeing Like A State (Slate Star Codex)

High Modernism is associated with the project of state-building. To this end, it is intrinsically tied up with many elements of the mainstream Left/Right view–democracy, meritocracy, top-down technocratic management, rationalism, materialism, educational attainment, laissez-faire capitalist markets, centralized power, standardization, multiculturalism and globalism.

High Modernism is the attempt to standardize and regularize the world so as to make it legible for rational management and top-down planning by centralized bureaucracies. It places a premium on maximizing “efficiency.” The ultimate purpose is taxation–the funneling of resources from a periphery to a core. In Scott’s view, this process defines the creation of what we normally term “the State.” However, this process often has unforeseen consequences.

[James] Scott defines [High Modernism] as[:]

“A strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”

…which is just a bit academic-ese for me. An extensional definition might work better: standardization, Henry Ford, the factory as metaphor for the best way to run everything, conquest of nature, New Soviet Man, people with college degrees knowing better than you, wiping away the foolish irrational traditions of the past, Brave New World, everyone living in dormitories and eating exactly 2000 calories of Standardized Food Product (TM) per day, anything that is For Your Own Good, gleaming modernist skyscrapers, The X Of The Future, complaints that the unenlightened masses are resisting The X Of The Future, demands that if the unenlightened masses reject The X Of The Future they must be re-educated For Their Own Good, and (of course) evenly-spaced rectangular grids (maybe the best definition would be “everything G. K. Chesterton didn’t like.”).

Clearly both the Mainstream Left and Right are adherents of High Modernism. But more importantly, even the major so-called “Leftist” or “collectivist” movements of the Twentieth Century, such as Soviet Communism, were just as wedded to ideas of “progress” and High Modernism as was Western “libertarian” capitalism. The distinction between Left and Right breaks down here.

Many adherents of Communism were moved by Marx’s descriptions of Capitalism’s flaws and shortcomings, but they attempted to construct a “new and improved” top-down hierarchical system in its place which was just as much based on a flawed conception of human nature (the Soviet “new man;” a “classless society”). To keep this utopian project going also required state violence and oppression. Yet we forget that our Capitalist Systems rely just as much on state violence and social control. Note that the “free” societies of the West have now become just as much carceral/surveillance states as the fallen regimes of Eastern Europe, if not more so. As John Gray commented, “The Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. “

Both ostensibly “Left” and “Right” movements were obsessed with an idea of “progress” that left millions of dead bodies in its wake. As I’ve written before, we are taught to believe that One Big Capitalist Market came about organically through the “scaling up” of primordial farmer’s markets due to our “natural” instincts to “truck barter and exchange.” Yet this is horribly wrong. It’s another part of economics indoctrination.

As Karl Polanyi demonstrated, the One Big Global Market was an artificially constructed by aggressive top-down state violence. The Enclosure Movement, the Highland Clearances, the Poor Laws, Speenhamland, Work Houses, Debtor’s Prisons, the Luddite Revolts, the Corn Laws, Game Laws, Colonialism, the Gold Standard, state-granted corporate charters (e.g. the East India Companies), national banks (the Bank of England), and many other historical changes brought it about.

Millions of people perished in the construction of the Market, from Native Americans, to English peasants, to Irish subsistence farmers, to Indian and African villagers (to the unemployed coal miners overdosing in rural Appalachia today). Many institutions we take for granted in the modern world are band-aids put into place as a result of popular demands for some sort of protection from the destructiveness of this project (e.g. popular democracy, the Welfare State, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, environmental protections, etc.). These people were victims of Modernism just as much as the victims of the Holdomor, yet they have been erased from history. The top-down creation of the Market by central governments is what allowed Capitalism to form in Northern Europe and to project itself around the world.

It may be hard to believe given how much we’ve become inured to it, but the social dysfunction we take for granted today, with its rampant homelessness, mental illness, unemployment, abused children and elderly, beggars on the street, and so forth, would have been unthinkable to traditional societies. What was once shocking has become normal.

Scott describes in detail the processes by which local knowledge is supplanted by regularized systems. Some examples he gives are: the replacement of small-plot peasant agriculture with large-scale, “efficient” mechanized farms of monocrops, assigning people permanent last names (and later ID numbers), bulldozing neighborhoods of crooked streets and replacing them with planned, rectangular grids of wide-open streets, replacing vernacular architecture with cookie-cutter high-rise housing projects, the supplanting of regional dialects with a single “national” language, universal childhood education, and the standardization of money, weights and measures. For example:

…Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants [in 18th century Prussia] were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones…

With the advent of globalism, the High Modernist concept now has the entire world in its grip, and is driving us off a cliff. From the countless environmental catastrophes, to the breakdown of entire nations like Syria and Afghanistan, to the ultimate High Modernist project of China, it seems like this project has run its course and is leaving us with a destabilized climate and social situation.

Unemployment, violent crime, war, violence, depression, obesity, environmental catastrophe, social chaos, extreme inequality, mass incarceration–all are getting worse, and our leaders have no answers besides enriching themselves! No wonder we’re desperately searching for alternatives.

I see a lot of the criticism of the Alt-left stemming from a critical view of both Eurocentric modernism and High Modernism. The similarities between them are that both are fundamentally a Procrustean bed for humans, as opposed to the anthropology-centered approach advocated by Kanth.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we, the human beings inhabiting this planet, try to solve problems of great significance and complexity with the…Procrustean method. Instead of making the bed fit the travelers, we stretch and cut off limbs to do the inverse.

One example Taleb points out are schoolchildren who we pump full of medication so that they adapt to the unbelievably flawed education system, instead of altering the curriculum to suit the children. It couldn’t be that the 10-year-old boy is not meant to sit in the same chair inside the dull classroom for hours on end every day, and when he starts to fidget he’s diagnosed with ADHD, considered hyperactive and has a learning disability, which of course needs to be corrected by tinkering with his brain chemistry.

Situations like this are everywhere around us and they often bear grave consequences…[The Bed of Procrustes] represents Taleb’s view of modern civilization’s hubristic side effects:

• Modifying humans to satisfy technology
• Blaming reality for not fitting economic models
• Inventing diseases to sell drugs
• Defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom
• Convincing people that employment is not slavery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRN_KT17mNo

Philosopher John Gray writes in Straw Dogs:

The chief effect of the Industrial Revolution was to engender the working class. It did this not so much by forcing a shift from the country to towns as by enabling a massive growth in population. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new phase of the Industrial Revolution is under way that promises to make much of that population superfluous.

Today the Industrial Revolution that began in the towns of northern England has become worldwide. The result is the global expansion in population we are presently witnessing. At the same time, new technologies are steadily stripping away the functions of the labour force that the Industrial Revolution has created.

An economy whose core tasks are done by machines will value human labour only in so far as it cannot be replaced. [Hans] Moravec writes: ‘Many trends in industrialized societies lead to a future where humans are supported by machines, as our ancestors were by wildlife.’ That, according to Jeremy Rifkin, does not mean mass unemployment. Rather, we are approaching a time when, in Moravec’s words, ‘almost all humans work to amuse other humans’.

In rich countries, that time has already arrived. The old industries have been exported to the developing world. At home, new occupations have evolved, replacing those of the industrial era. Many of them satisfy needs that in the past were repressed or disguised. A thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques has sprung up. Beyond that, there is an enormous grey economy of illegal industries supplying drugs and sex. The function of this new economy, legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which – though it is busier than ever before secretly suspects that it is useless.

Industrialisation created the working class. Now it has made the working class obsolete. Unless it is cut short by ecological collapse, it will eventually do the same to nearly everyone. ..Bourgeois life was based on the institution of the career – a lifelong pathway through working life. Today professions and occupations are disappearing. Soon they will be as remote and archaic as the ranks and estates of medieval times.

Our only real religion is a shallow faith in the future; and yet we have no idea what the future will bring. None but the incorrigibly feckless any longer believe in taking the long view. Saving is gambling, careers and pensions are high-level punts. The few who are seriously rich hedge their bets. The proles – the rest of us – live from day to day.

In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

What is Kanth’s alternative?

Kanth thinks what we’d much prefer is to live in what he calls a “social economy of affections,” or, put more simply, a moral economy. He points out that the simple societies Europeans were so moved by when they first began to study them, conjuring images of the “noble savage,” tended toward cooperation, not competition. They emphasized feeling and mutual affection. Karl Marx got his idea of communism from looking at the early anthropological studies of simple societies, where he was inspired by the way humans tended to relate to each other.

“Today we are taught to believe that society doesn’t owe us a living,” says Kanth. “Well, in simple societies they felt the exact opposite. Everybody owed everybody else. There were mutual ties. People didn’t rely on a social contract that you can break. Instead, they had a social compact. You can’t break it. You’re born with it, and you’re delighted to be part of it because it nurtures you. That’s very different from a Hobbesian notion that we’re all out to zap each other.”

Note that this is very different from the Alt-Right, who celebrate capitalist Markets as Social Darwinist winnowing mechanisms eliminating the “weak” and “unfit” and argue that one’s intrinsic value as human being is solely a function of one’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and money-earning power. They celebrate a society of constant, unremitting conflict, where all one is entitled to is what he or she can claw free from the impersonal market, nothing more and nothing less.

The Alt-Right is, as one commenter observed, obsessed with the idea of inequality–between people, nations, and various “races.” They believe that the strong are entitled to rule, and that the weak must yield. They believe in a society where the “best” climb to the top, and anything that retards this, like “democracy” or “collectivism” is bad and leads to dysgenics or some sort of ill-defined cultural rot. The Alt-Right wants an “every man for himself” predatory world of relentless individualism, where society owes you nothing and you owe nothing to society, and the strong are free to prey upon the weak at every turn (“There is no such thing as society…there are individuals, and there are families…”).

In my view, one of the major mistakes of the Alt-Right is their refusal to accept that modern globalized libertarian capitalism is a project of the High Modernism of the Enlightenment, rather than a permanent feature of the human condition stemming from our “natural instincts” to “exchange value.” Note that “exchanging value” is not the same thing as maximizing profits. Most ancient thinkers saw profiting at the expense of others as unnatural, since by definition it implies an unequal exchange of value (which it must be). Furthermore, they made no distinction between “the economy” and the rest of society. This was a creation of economic liberals of eighteenth century Britain.

While there’s always been an elite with a lust for power, the desire to hoard and accumulate possessions was not a major factor until fairly recently. Neither was acquiring large amounts of money. The Alt-Right accepts the economics creed as gospel—that markets are “natural”, that we are instinctively inclined to maximize our own self-interest, and that anything that restricts this behavior is an affront to “freedom.” However, most societies before the present day recognized that runaway greed and self-interest would tear society apart and lead to collapse, not to “higher” states of civilization. They put certain limits on self-seeking behavior. It was the centuries-long process of breaking down communitarian values and privatizing the commons that led to market-based capitalism (along with mechanization). Capitalism is simply impossible without strong centralized states (meaning that “anarcho-capitalism” is an oxymoron).

The Alt-Right looks to the Victorian Era (and perhaps the Roman Empire) as their ideal society. Men rule, and women’s sexual behavior is extremely regulated. Constraints on social behavior are strictly enforced by restrictive social norms. Political control is restricted to the “best” people (the wealthy and property-holders) rather than the “rabble.” Monarchy is still a valid system of government, and power is often hereditary. The gap between rich and poor is extreme, and there is no “welfare state” to support the useless eaters. In this Dickensian economy, people are forced to struggle just to survive, and this breeds “achievement culture.” The winners (usually white males) are rewarded with higher reproductive success, driving Darwinian evolution to “superior” lifeforms. Without being able to satisfy their carnal urges, people instead channel their efforts into work and duty to empire. Europe is not on its back foot, but ruling over much of the globe (including Africans and Muslims) with no apologies, as it should be. The Market dominates the globe without all the pesky rules and regulations imposed by nanny states to protect the weak and unfit. Large-scale heroic engineering projects are launched on a weekly basis, from bridges to canals to railroads. Anything that departs from this ideal society is “decline”–an obsession with the alt-right.

Personally, I don’t think that most people want to live this way.

We may be able to perform dazzling technical feats, like putting a colony on Mars, but we will pay for it by working even harder and longer hours so that a few may get the benefit. A whole lot of lost time and suffering, and for what? Kanth points out that the Bushmen do not have a Mars rocket, but they do have a two-and-a-half-day workweek — something that most modern humans can only dream of. What’s more significant to the lives of most of us?

“We have become unhinged from our own human nature as heat-seeking mammals,” says Kanth. “What we really crave is warmth, security, and care — the kinds of things we get at home and in close social units.” Our greatest human need, he says, is something far more humble than launching rockets: we want to huddle.

The Alt-Left, from what I can tell, is much more focused on creating a well-functioning society where the rapacity of the elites is held in check. They believe in communitarian values–things like common ownership and worker self-determination. To this end, they oppose authoritarianism, institutionalized hierarchy, slavery, gender inequality, racism, bigotry, and conflict. They advocate that the needs of business and the market be subordinated to the needs of a healthy society, rather than society arranging itself according to the requirements of the global marketplace. They advocate environmental stewardship and living in harmony with the natural world (e.g. Permaculture in place of the industrial food system).

If there’s once commonality I see in many of the Alt-Left’s arguments, it is the replacement of large-scale, depersonalized, centralized, high-tech, authoritarian systems with communal, locally-based, more informal ones based in face-to-face relationships and intrinsic social ties such as family, friendship and community. This does not advocate isolationism; only that one’s local community is intact and more important than abstract notions of globalism. It is a vision of a convivial society. There is often more than a hint of nostalgia in their writings.

Thus, for example, James Howard Kunstler argues that we need to downsize and downscale, abandon suburban sprawl, move back to small and medium-sized towns, grow our own food in local farms and gardens, get the old train system up and running again (NOT build new high-speed rail) and reactivate downtown main streets in place of Wal mart. He sees much ill in the alienating suburban infrastructure America has built around automobiles (“Happy Motoring”) and big-box consumerism.

His fictional World Made by Hand series of books depicts a future America where we live essentially like modern-day Amish–with pre-Civil war technology in small towns connected by horses, canals and railroads, growing food locally and living in line with the seasons. Computer scientists, business executives and telemarketers have been replaced by dirt farmers, carpenters and blacksmiths. But the key is, he depicts this way of life, harsh as it is–as far more meaningful and emotionally satisfying than life in modern-day America, which is increasingly resembling the hellish dystopias envisioned by cyberpunk authors in the 1980’s.

When I go around the country, there’s a great clamor for ‘solutions.’ Whenever I hear that world solutions, it’s always invariably in connection with the wish to keep all our stuff running. The amount of delusional thinking that’s being generated by this set of very vexing problems is staggering. There’s understandably a wish to keep all the stuff running that we’ve got up running. That’s the psychology of previous investment. The only conversation they want to have at the Aspen Environmental Institute is all the nifty new ways we’re going to run our cars.

The most impressive part of the situation at the moment is our failure to construct a coherent consensus about what’s happening to us, and what we’re going to do about it…I think the young people especially are going to have to discover that hope is not something that is given to them by a politician or a corporation or by anybody else. Hope is something that you generate inside yourself by demonstrating to yourself that you’re competent–that you understand the signals that are coming to you from the universe…Life is tragic, and history doesn’t care if we pound our civilization down a rathole…

https://youtu.be/qSKSjsBv7uQ

John Michael Greer advises us to “collapse now and avoid the rush.” He argues that we will increasingly be unable to sustain our extravagant ways of life due to decreasing net energy available to industrial civilization. This means that more and more people will inevitably be thrown into what is considered poverty by modern American standards, and we had best learn to live with it. He looks to the past to find inspiration about different and less resource-intense ways to live. He is highly skeptical of new technology, seeing them as “solutions in search of problems.”

His recent fiction work imagines a world where modern cutting-edge high technology has been replaced with older, simpler, more resilient technologies (Retropia). The imaginary country has “fallen back” to earlier levels of development, but these are far more stable and politically functional that the world depicted “outside” where the status-quo is failing and a slavish devotion to technology and “innovation” is increasingly becoming a burden for most people rather than a blessing.

First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided…Second, while it’s easy to suggest that we can simply replace fossil fuels with some other energy source and keep industrial civilization running along its present course, putting that comfortable notion into practice has turned out to be effectively impossible. No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need…Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit…

Fourth, while it’s fashionable these days to imagine that this process will take the form of a sudden cataclysm that will obliterate today’s world overnight, all the testimony of history and a great many lines of evidence from other sources suggests that this is the least likely outcome of our predicament. Across a wide range of geographical scales and technological levels, civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall, and there is no valid reason to assume that ours will be any exception…Fifth, individuals, families, and communities faced with this predicament still have choices left. The most important of those choices parallels the one faced, or more precisely not faced, at the end of the 1970s: to make the descent in a controlled way, beginning now, or to cling to their current lifestyles until the system that currently supports those lifestyles falls away from beneath their feet…

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush (Archdruid Report)

Dmitry Orlov advises us to disengage from the money economy and formal work arrangements, and instead develop informal, face-to-face relationships based on shared commonalities. He advises “investing” in practical skills and land rather than opaque financial instruments. He himself lives a peripatetic life based on sailing.

His book “Communities that Abide” looks at what are considered minority “out-group” cultures that nonetheless have managed to sustain themselves even as big, top-down hierarchical political systems have collapsed around them (like the Soviet Union, the original focus of his writings). These groups all have durable, time-tested ways of living that have largely resisted Scott’s “High Modernism” and retained earlier lifeways, for example, the Roma (Gypsies), The Old Order Mennonites (Amish), the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan, and others. His latest book, “Shrinking the Technosphere” describes how our dependence on centralized high technology is increasingly antagonistic to genuine freedom and autonomy, and describes ways to minimize dependence on such technologies in our daily lives.

He cynically believes that large-scale institutions, including state, national, and local governments, are irreformable, and that any attempts to “fix” them are doomed to fail. Politics is nothing more than show business. Instead, he argues, we should actively disengage from them to the greatest extent possible, refuse to participate, and tend to our own business by forming ways to attend to our daily needs which do not rely on the existence of any large-scale institutions, whether public or private.

I would argue that all of the above authors are all “Small-C” conservatives, in the true sense of the word. They are highly suspicious of anarchic capitalist markets and banks and skeptical of all the new technology being foisted upon us. They see “innovation” as more often than not a dirty word. They all advocate less dependence on top-down hierarchical systems, an emphasis on local community, self-reliance for one’s daily needs, and a slower/simpler way of living.

According to Ran Prieur:

If I defined an alt-left, it would explicitly take no position on race, or on racially charged subjects like immigration. The core of my alt-left definition would be economics. Libertarians want a “level playing field” but I want a playing field slanted so hard that trying to turn a lot of money into more money would be like climbing a mountain, and being content with just enough money for basic dignity and comfort would be like coasting downhill on a bicycle.

http://ranprieur.com/archives/053.html

Rather than the Victorian Era, the Alt-Left looks back much farther—to the hunter-gatherer past—in search of answers. It was a world of equality, sexual openness, freedom, spontaneity, abundance, and leisure. They are likely to see our decline as starting with the transition to sedentary agriculture where elites gained control of the political system, women’s reproductive behavior began to be strictly regulated, war became endemic, slavery was established, yawning gaps between rich and poor emerged, we destroyed our natural habitats, population exploded, people got sicker had to work far longer and harder to support the ruling class.

Or, perhaps they might look for inspiration to the European High Middle Ages, with the dissolution of the centralized Roman State and the re-emphasis on small-scale local economies. While the mainstream Left sees this as a time of backwardness caused by adherence to religion, the Alt-Left sees much to admire in societies not based on acquisition and overproduction, but instead focused on humanism and spiritual values (even if the behavior of the Catholic Church was less then admirable):

The Alt-Left has many antecedents, what Morris Berman calls the “alternative tradition.” This ranges from the old-school communist/anarchist thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Owen, and others, to the American Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson, to voices from the 1960’s–Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, Richard Theobald, Kenneth Boulding, Jane Jacobs, Barry Commoner, and others. These views have always been suppressed by the dominant culture, which is dedicated to the religion of progress.

However, the religion of progress seems to be breaking down. It’s telling that many of the above writers are put in the “collapse” camp. Perhaps when Eurocentric Modernism has run its course and consigned to the dustbin of history, we can rebuild something more healthy and durable. Assuming there are any of us left, that is.

Kanth…senses that a global financial crisis, or some other equivalent catastrophe, like war or natural disaster, may soon produce painful and seismic economic and political disruptions. Perhaps only then will human nature reassert itself as we come to rediscover the crucial nexus of reciprocities that is our real heritage. That’s what will enable us to survive.

Hopefully it won’t come to that, but right now, we can learn to “step out and breathe again,” says Kanth. We can “reclaim our natural social heritage, which is our instincts for care, consideration, and conviviality.” Even in large cities, he observes, we naturally tend to function within small groups of reference even though we are forced into larger entities in the workplace and other arenas. There, we can build and enrich our social ties, and seek to act according to our moral instincts. We can also resist and defy the institutions that deny our real humanity. Rather than violence or revolution, we can engage in “evasion and disobedience and exile.”

We had better get to it, he warns. To put it bluntly, Eurocentric modernism is not compatible with human civilization. One of them has got to go.

First, let’s state the obvious: people are turning to alternative narratives, whether Alt-Right or Alt-Left, because the mainstream narrative is increasingly falling apart. There is a very narrow range of “acceptable” opinions anymore, which is why so many things are increasingly falling under the “Alt” label.

There is a pervasive sense out there that society is spiraling out of control, and that our leaders have no answers. Their “solutions” seem useless and ineffectual; their proscriptions seem counterproductive; and their “leadership” seems craven and self-serving.

It seems like elites and the media live in a different world entirely from the rest of us, whether it’s the enclaves of Manhattan, Silicon Valley, the City of London, “Versailles on the Potomac,” or the “Acela Corridor.” They seem to have no clue as to what 90+ percent of us are experiencing “out here” in the rapidly decaying societies of America and Western Europe.

I first began to think about the existence of an alt-left while contemplating several bloggers and authors/speakers whom you are probably already familiar: James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, John Michael Greer, as well as bloggers like Ran Prieur, Nicole Foss, the late Michael Ruppert, Charles Hugh Smith, and many others. I’m also thinking of a lot of the people regularly published on Resilience.org, for example– Gail Tverberg, Ugo Bardi, Chris Martenson, Richard Heinberg, Albert Bates, Nate Hagens, Charles Eisenstein and many others too numerous to mention.

A lot of similar critiques can be found in the Deep Green/Transition Town/Permaculture/Neo-Luddite/Slow ‘X’ movements as well. These are also well outside of the mainstream Left critique. I’m thinking of people like Derrick Jensen, Kirkpatrick Sale, John Zerzan, Rob Hopkins, Chris Smaje, among numerous others.

Now, I don’t think anyone would lump these people together with the Alt-Right as commonly understood. Typically, in today’s climate they are placed on the “leftward” end of the political spectrum. However, Their views diverge pretty dramatically from those of the Mainstream Left as currently constituted, even people considered to be at the “far” end like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They certainly diverge from the narratives put forward in the current “Left” media, which seems to have degenerated into little more than a non-stop Trump hate-fest (e.g. The Huffington Post, Slate, Salon, The Nation, MoJo, The Atlantic, etc.).

Many of these writers came out of what was known as the “Doomer,” “Collapse” or “Peak Oil” community. While their analyses did include Peak Oil/collapse concepts, their critiques went far beyond that.

A lot of writers have subsequently tried to distance themselves from the “Doomer” label, for example, Ran Prieur, who describes a couple of the alt-left’s key points:

April 12. …Today I want to distance myself from doomers…it’s tricky to say where I disagree with the normal collapse idelology [sic]. I agree with a lot of the details, for example that economic growth can’t continue on a finite planet, and that modern life is a worse fit for human nature than most of the ways we lived in the past. But I don’t think the human response to these crises is limited by my own imagination, that just because I can’t see a way through, billions of people at the edge of survival will just roll over. I have a lot of respect for unknown unknowns.

So who are these people? Maybe they constitute an alt-left? By coincidence, after I began thinking about this, an event was held grouping three of the above writers together on stage. You’ve probably already seen the panel discussion:

John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Chris Martenson, Frank Morris, and Dmitry Orlov Discuss Trump, the Inequality Taboo and Other Hot Topics (Naked Capitalism)

So, by having these thinkers together on one stage, I think it’s safe to say that there is some sort of coherent enough philosophy that we might be able to outline its key principles and define it as something we can term an “Alt-Left.” But what are those principles?

The Mainstream Narrative

I’ve already discussed the mainstream Left’s views on multiculturalism and diversity in my previous entry. Now, let’s focus on some other aspects of the mainstream left. From a recent post by Peter Turchin:

One of the most interesting passages in [the book] Listen, Liberal is [Thomas] Frank’s characterization of the Republicans as the party of 1 percent—nothing new here—and the Democrats as the party of the 10 percent—which is the interesting part, and a new idea, at least to me.

What does he mean by “the party of the 10 percent”? It is generally agreed that back in the days of FDR, Truman, and Johnson the Democrats were the party of the Working America (even if the leaders were often recruited from the “aristocracy”, like FDR). Today, however, they are the party of “professionals”: “doctors, lawyers, the clergy, architects, and engineers—the core professional groups—the category includes economists, experts in international development, political scientists, managers, financial planners, computer programmers, aerospace designers, and even people who write books like this one.” And college professors. (Parenthetically, although I and my university colleagues would surely object to be called the “elite”, that’s how the fly-over America thinks of us. We are branded as the “East Coast Liberal Elite.”)

Returning to Frank’s point, the 10 percent are the technocracy, the credential class, the meritocracy (“meritocracy is the official professional credo—the conviction that the successful deserve their rewards, that the people on top are there because they are the best”). They believe in the power of education. “To the liberal class, every economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.”

Listen, Liberal – Part II (Cliodynamica)

Now, Frank is ostensibly writing about the “New” Left, but I think he successfully defines the world view of both the Mainstream Left and Right today. The Mainstream Left and Right have, to a great extent, merged–and abandoned the vast majority of citizens in countries around the world in the process. Although Frank is writing of America specifically, his analysis can extend to elites in Europe and Asia as well. They have become a transnational globalized “merit-based” elite, occupying a handful of global cities while the rest of the planet has been converted into basically a heavily-policed colony for resource extraction to support them.

The idea that “more education” is the solution to each and every problem we face, which Frank notes above, extends to both the Mainstream Left and the Right, I think. This has given rise, for example, to the “education-industrial complex” in the U.S. Yet, despite already historically unprecedented levels of educational attainment, problems with joblessness and social decay persist and are getting worse.

The idea that “more education” cannot solve our current problems is alien to the mainstream narrative. The Left wants to make education “more affordable” by extending cheap loans, while the Right clamors for ineffective “market-based” solutions and offers tax shelters (which only benefit children of the already wealthy), but neither is willing to accept that the need for educated workers is dropping, and more schooling alone does not equal a more educated and capable population.

Related to this is the idea that the System is working just fine, and only needs a few tweaks to resolve all of our current issues. The top-down technocratic management of society by the union of Big Government, Big Transnational Corporations, and the Banking Cartel is fundamentally sound. In other words, we’ve hit a temporary hiccup in our progress, but soon the kinks will be worked out and we’ll be back on our regularly scheduled trip to Utopia. Perhaps a TED Talk will have the answer!

Another is a belief in social engineering. “Nudge theory” is only the latest manifestation of this. We are bombarded every day with messages that tell us how we “should” behave (or how elites think we should). The mainstream Right likes to denounce social engineering but engages in it just as much as the Left; they just want different outcomes (docile, obedient cubicle serfs quietly serving their corporate masters and paying taxes). Advertising/marketing/PR itself is just social engineering on a large scale.

I would also posit that an important link between the mainstream Right and Left is the idea that globalized Markets are fundamentally superior and the only valid way to organize society (a.k.a. Neoliberalism). The Left and Right may differ, of course, on how much regulation of the Market they feel is required, or how generous the social safety net should be, but neither of them differ on that fundamental point. The Left may prefer a bit less inequality, the Right a little more, but they all agree on the fundamental points of Neoliberalism and Austerity.

It’s the “end of history” hypothesis. For the mainstream Left and Right There truly Is No Alternative—Globalized Markets and Liberal Democracies have triumphed. Any alternative is unthinkable; there is no going back. We just need a social program or two, maybe fiddle with the tax rates or add a few regulations here and there, and everything will work out just fine.

Another is an almost theological belief in technological innovation as the solution to problems. This attitude was described by Vaclav Smil in an interview with WIRED Magazine:

Today, as you know, everything is “innovation.” We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions—innovation like manna from heaven falling on the Israelites and saving them from the desert. It’s like, “Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.” You people at WIRED—you’re the guilty ones! You support these people, you write about them, you elevate them onto the cover! You really messed it up. I tell you, you pushed this on the American public, right? And people believe it now.

Both mainstream Left and Right are wedded to the notion of eternal Progress–the idea that things are perpetually getting better and better for everyone. They love to deploy statistics compiled by, for example, the late Dr. Hans Rosling and Stephen Pinker, demonstrating how much richer and safer the world has gotten over the past hundred years under their “enlightened leadership,” and how much wealthier the “poor” nations of the world have become. This is their justification for moving forward with the Neoliberal project. To that end, any dissent from the status quo amounts to a return to barbarism! The “sacrifice zones” of the industrial heartlands of America and Europe are simply the price to pay for global progress. I call it “omelette ethics”—the idea that “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs…”

Neither side deals with the idea that there are fundamental limits to growth, or that we have lost a great deal in our relentless push to modernize. None of them deal with the crises of unemployment, obesity, mental illness, or pollution, for example. To them, every problem we face can be solved with either more education, more economic growth, more markets, more migration, more regulations, or more technology, full stop.

Expanding and growing the economy is imperative for both the mainstream Right and Left; on this issue, there is no difference. Neither of them question the basic assumptions of our current society on a deeper level. I summarized them last time: productivism (growthism); top-down technocratic management; centralization of power; educational meritocracy; multiculturalism; cosmopolitanism; globalism; corporatism; consumerism; financialization; technological progress, laissez-faire capitalism; natalism, meliorism, scientific rationalism, materialism, the belief in “progress,” and so forth.

For a good overview of “mainstream” Left thinking, you would be hard-pressed to do better than this “Big Idea” VOX article: 7 reasons why today’s left should be optimistic. Among the highlights:

Science and Technology are our friends—Presenting an almost giddy techno-optimism straight out of the movie Tomorrowland:

From smart phones, flat screen TVs, and the internet to air and auto travel to central heating and air conditioning to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet — the list is endless — technology has made people’s lives both much better and much longer than ever before. The average person today is far, far better off than her counterpart in the past. As the Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, the so-called good old days were old but they were not good.

And what do we have to thank for all these spectacular advances? It’s technology that has made possible the new goods, machines, medicine and so on that we consume, and that has fueled the economic growth that allows us to consume at such a high level. One would think, therefore, that the left would embrace techno-optimism: After all, if the goal is to improve people’s lives, rapid technological advance is surely something to promote enthusiastically.

Yet many on the left tend to regard technological change with dread rather than hope. They see technology as a force facilitating inequality rather than growth, destroying jobs, especially for manual workers, turning consumers into corporate pawns rather than information-savvy citizens and destroying the planet in the process. We are far, far away from the traditional left attitude that welcomed technological change as the handmaiden of abundance and increased leisure — or, for that matter, from the liberal optimism that permeated the culture of the 1950s and ’60s, the optimism that offered up tantalizing visions of flying cars and obedient robots.

The mainstream Left and Right embrace a muscular techno-optimism, and decry those who don’t as ignorant Luddite “pessimists” standing in the way of even greater progress. Oh, and in case you’re worried about the millions of people already unemployed under the current regime of technology:

Continuing technological advance is unlikely to produce a future of no jobs. It will lead instead to a future of different and more highly skilled jobs… the history of technological advance is full of transformations that put workers out of jobs in one sector only to have more jobs created in others as demand for new products and services grow.

Jobs for the already wealthy and well-connected 10 percent, perhaps. For the rest of us, not so much. According to the mainstream Left, we can just teach everyone to code and problem solved! (c.f. Frank’s comments above). After all, look how well “more education” has worked out thus far. Gee, I can’t imagine why people are abandoning the Mainstream left narrative in droves.

Globalization is a force for Good: – Basically the old “The Chinese are Getting Richer” argument:

Many on the American left seem to miss this, but the world is getting to be a much better place. Since 1950, the proportion of the world’s citizens living in extreme poverty has declined from 72 percent to under 10 percent, while world life expectancy has increased from 48 years to 71. These remarkably positive changes have actually accelerated in the past 25 years, as globalization has intensified.

And they’ve gotten much richer by making all our stuff (although some have argued that subtracting China would make all these alleged global gains disappear). And what about those poor, unfortunate, losers out in the Rust Belt? Just a minor wrinkle; nothing to trouble yourself with:

Of course, it is true that globalization has had some negative effects — for example, on manufacturing jobs in developed countries — but these are exaggerated. The decline of industrial employment is a very long-run trend that predates the sharp rise in globalization toward the end of the last century. If you plot the share of manufacturing jobs in overall US employment since 1948, there has been a steady decline from a high of about 35 percent to less than 9 percent today. This decline can be traced to rapidly rising productivity in the manufacturing sector — the same output could be produced with fewer workers — combined with shifts in demand toward services, reflecting a rise in consumer affluence.

Affluence (even of the American middle-class variety, not the Jeff Bezos variety) leaves more room in family budgets for non-necessities: 46 percent of consumption spending was on the basic necessities of food and clothing in 1947 compared with less than 18 percent today.

A rise in consumer affluence? Wait a minute, in 1947, most families could sustain themselves comfortably on a single income, even without a college degree. I know because my grandparents (and everyone they knew) did it. What’s going on here? From the Turchin post cited above:

…American workers are not stupid and they know that they are fed bullshit. When you go to a meeting with your company’s CEO and other corporate officers and they tell you that you either accept a pay cut, or they will move the factory to Mexico—who are you going to believe, your own experience or the Theory of Comparative Advantage? And then, a couple of years later, despite you having agreed to a wage cut, they still move the factory to Mexico.

Yet both the mainstream Left and Right support unfettered globalism and “free trade,” and denounce anyone who doesn’t as a xenophobic racist.

So, I guess, never mind that opioid deaths are reaching AIDS-epidemic crisis levels in Middle America, the Unnecessariat has plenty of money to spend on McDonalds and iPhones. What are you liberals whining about, anyway? Just ignore those tent cities springing up all over the country.

Besides, the mainstream Left argues, that White demographic is rapidly dying off anyway, and that’s a good thing! All we have to do is sit and wait it out for a few more election cycles:

Consider how strong Democratic growth will be. The share of white non-college voters is dropping 3 points every presidential cycle, replaced by ever more minorities and college-educated voters. The growth of minorities is particularly striking. Right now, there are only four majority-minority states: California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. But the next two majority-minority states, Maryland and Nevada, should arrive in the next three years. After that, there should be four more in the 2020s: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey. In the 2030s, these states should be joined by Alaska, Louisiana, and New York — and in the 2040s by Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

And if White people don’t die off fast enough, hopefully the elderly will:

Together, millennials and Gen X-ers accounted for 57 percent of eligible voters in 2016, an advantage that was tamped down by the relatively higher turnout of older generations. But by 2024, millennials and Gen X-ers, plus the emerging post-millennial generation, will constitute fully 68 percent of eligible voters. What’s more, the millennials and Gen X-ers will have aged into much higher turnout years. Silents, the most conservative generation by far, will be down to a mere 7 percent of eligibles.

Gee, I can’t imagine why White Heartland voters aren’t turning out for the Democrats in droves, can you? Maybe it’s because the Democratic party can barely conceal their glee over the extinction of this demographic, rather than, you know, actively trying to engage with their concerns. Reading stuff like this, you can really understand where the idea that the Democratic party actively hates white people comes from.

The clean energy revolution is underway – Electric cars/Elon Musk to the rescue!!!

In the past few years, even as fossil fuel prices have declined, world investments in clean energy, chiefly wind and solar, have reached levels that are double those for fossil fuel. Renewables now provide half of all new electric capacity worldwide. (And two-thirds in China, which has drastically cut its plans for new coal plants.) It’s increasingly common, at least in some countries and some regions of the United States, for clean energy to be cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

The rapidity with which clean energy is becoming cheaper and more available is underappreciated. The cost of solar has fallen to 1/150th of its 1970s level, and the amount of installed solar capacity worldwide has increased a staggering 115,000 times. These exponential trends are hard to properly assess, even for those whose business it is to do so. For example, Ramez Naam, a US technologist and proponent of clean energy, posited in 2011 that solar power was following a kind of Moore’s Law for energy. (Moore’s Law projected that microchips would double in efficiency every two years.) Such efficiency gains would allow solar energy systems, which had by then fallen to about $3 a watt, to drop to only 50 cents a watt by 2030. However, Naam noted in the spring of 2015 that he had been way too conservative: Solar power systems by early 2015 had already hit the 50 cent mark.

Another variation on the “innovation will save us” argument (c.f. Vaclav Smil, above).

Naam, who was a former VP at Microsoft, is emblematic of the kind of rootless, cosmopolitan elites hovering above us that Frank describes as the being the core of the new mainstream Left:

Ramez Naam was born in Cairo, Egypt, and came to the US at the age of 3. He’s a computer scientist, futurist, angel investor, and award-winning author…Between stints at Microsoft, Ramez founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world’s first company devoted entirely to software tools to accelerate molecular design. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

http://rameznaam.com/about/

No wonder he’s so stoked for the future!

Implicit in this view is that renewable energy will simply plug in to where fossil fuels were with no changes whatsoever to our living standards or economic arrangements. We will not have to change our extravagant lifestyles–or at least the upper 10 percent will not.

The idea that we have to fundamentally alter our living arrangements—along with our blind dependence on growth at all costs—will never enter the mainstream left narrative. And speaking of growth:

Trump can’t solve people’s problems. The left can. How? Through more economic growth, of course!!!

Nowhere is that opening greater than on the issue of growth that leads to better jobs and higher living standards. The Democratic Party is more or less united around a programmatic approach to the economy that could actually produce such growth — an approach some of us call “equitable growth.” It pushes back on inequality, seeing current high levels as an active detriment to growth, and seeks to combine support and opportunity for the broad middle class with investments to make the economy more productive.

This includes universal pre-K, free access to two years and some four-year colleges, paid family leave, subsidized child care, higher minimum wages, a commitment to full employment, and robust investments in infrastructure and scientific research, especially around clean energy.

How strong growth can be with a better approach is a matter of debate. Certainly, the 4 percent annual rate bandied about the Trump administration is fanciful. But, as Jason Furman, chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, recently pointed out in Vox, we should “do everything that [we] can for growth, because over time a few tenths of a percent really do matter” And of course, the point is not just to grow faster but to better distribute that growth. The left’s approach will do both.

Yes, according to the mainstream Left, growth will solve all our problems, won’t it?

The idea that we can have some sort of magical “equitable growth” not based upon trickle-down seems like a pipe dream given the current political climate, as is the idea that we will have either the political will or the resources to establish the laundry list of big government programs listed above. Our government is entirely captured by special interests. Also, notice how many of those government programs boil down to “more education.”

And, of course, unlike the gloomy realism pessimism of the Alt-Left, the Mainstream Left presents a sunny view of our future, where things are getting better and better for everyone all the time (e.g. “America is Already Great!”):

It’s time for the left to realize that pessimism is an absolutely terrible selling point — and to downplay that aspect of left self-presentation. If things were terrible yesterday, are worse today, and are likely to get even worse tomorrow, this does not motivate the typical person to engage in heroic struggle to change the world. It is more likely to make them cautious, guarded, and determined to hold onto what little they have. To the extent the left wallows in a slough of despond [sic] about the state of the world, it only manages to undercut its ability to mobilize ordinary people. Optimism, by contrast, mobilizes people…Leftists and liberals should promote … a sense that positive change has been, is, and will continue to be possible. That will make it far easier to mobilize their fellow citizens.

Maybe a “heroic struggle” to “change the world” is what got us into this predicament in the first place. Gee, I wonder who could possibly be this clueless and delusional:

Ruy Teixeira’s new book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Ah, yes, the mainstream Left’s think tanks are all about “Progress,” aren’t they, while the Right’s are all about “Freedom.” Neither offers much in the way of progress or freedom to anyone besides a small technocratic elite.

Techno-optimism, perpetual economic growth, multiculturalism, globalism, more education, “just desserts” meritocracy—there is really not much difference between the mainstream Left and Right anymore, is there? No wonder people are increasingly flocking to alternatives, including some very toxic ones.

***

By contrast, the Alt-Left have very different ideas. We can summarize some of the major points as:

– Infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible.

– There are limits to the growth of both resources and population.

– Economic expansion has been enabled by the exploitation of fossil fuels over the last 200 years: coal, oil, natural gas, shale, tar sands, etc.—energy resources which are finite in supply and will eventually be exhausted. Other resources like fresh water, topsoil, fertilizer, and rare earth metals are also critical to our continued economic expansion are also finite in supply and are rapidly being depleted.

– The massive release of these fossil fuels is destabilizing the relatively stable Holocene climate on which human civilization depends.

– Our relentless economic growth has engendered countless environmental catastrophes: the erosion of topsoil, species extinction, algae blooms, the Pacific Garbage Patch, polluted water, air saturated with soot, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, felled rain forests, desertification, depleted aquifers, bleached coral reefs, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, ozone holes, and on and on and on. Our economic system is basically committing ecocide.

– Capitalism and the Market only work in conditions of growing surpluses. They cannot achieve a steady state; only growth or collapse. Issues like extreme inequality and the unfair distribution of resources are ignored by society’s leaders by focusing only on perpetual growth.

– More and more technology is not inherently better. Increasingly, technology is being deployed to solve problems caused by previous technologies, and often ends up causing more problems than it solves. Technology is increasingly delivering diminishing returns. Not every problem has a technological solution.

– The notion of eternal progress is a myth. History is cyclical—periods of growth are always followed by periods of dissolution and collapse.

– Markets are not the idealized, perfectly-calibrated information-processors headed towards equilibrium described in economic textbooks, but rather come about through the interaction of flawed, irrational, ignorant and greedy human beings. They do not lead to the ideal distribution of resources, but rather extreme inequality and instability. They are prone to regular speculative bubbles, manias, panics and crashes. Economic systems are built around things like trust as much as anything else, which are ephemeral, unmeasurable and unpredictable.

– Corporations’ only goal is to maximize profits by any means necessary. To this end they privatize profits and socialize losses to the greatest extent possible. For this reason, they have become threats to human freedom and the natural world. Trusting them to provide for all our needs is dangerous and delusional.

– Money has utterly corrupted representative democracy. We live in a plutocratic kleptocracy. Bankers and financiers—not voters—call the shots.

– Debts always grow faster than the ability to repay them. Building an economy around usury is unsustainable. Without some sort of debt forgiveness, the majority will end up in hock to a tiny minority, hollowing out society.

– Financialization does not produce real wealth, only the illusion of wealth. Speculation is out of control. Banking should be a public utility.

– Extreme inequality has historically torn societies apart, not pushed them to “higher” levels of development.

-The media exists primarily to distract, not inform. Much of it is propaganda put forward to further the agenda of wealthy elites.

– The economic system we have built is inherently fragile. Having us all be dependent on vast supply chains extending across the globe even for our daily needs is a recipe for disaster. We are all roped together like mountain-climbers–any problem anywhere in the system can bring everything crashing down quickly.

– Small, scale, local, regional solutions are more responsive and resilient than large-scale, top-down, centralized solutions. People should have agency to make their own decisions about their own communities. Top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions often do not work.

– Local economies work because money circulates through them. Large corporation suck wealth out of communities and deposit it on Wall Street and other remote financial centers.

– People should be able to meet their daily needs using local resources, including their food needs.

– The idea that we can create enough jobs for everyone, or send everyone to school, and that this will solve all our problems, is delusional.

– The profit motive leads to things like rent-seeking, monopolies, planned obsolescence, lower-quality goods, frivolous patents, etc. It also leads to the wholesale plundering of the natural world.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

There are also a number of social concepts that arise from the above notions:

– We are social creatures. Our way of life is fundamentally at odds with the kinds of close-knit tribal communities we evolved in for hundreds of thousands of years.

– No man is an island. We are not isolated “rugged individuals,” but part of a broader social fabric, with basic obligations to one other.

– An environment centered around work, the acquisition of material goods, and status seeking, has left us feeling empty and sad.

– “Our archaic firmware just can’t keep up in this evolutionarily novel socially networked environment.”

– Depression and mental illness are epidemic because we are living in environments that are highly toxic and unsuited to basic human psychological needs. Advertising stokes our feelings of dissatisfaction and inadequacy in order to get us to buy things we don’t really want or need.

-Our work today is increasingly boring and alienating. Our jobs are precarious. Our need to move around for the economy’s needs prevents developing any sense of community. We are cogs in a machine. Our dependence on “jobs” where we get paid a salary by some big institution, often to do socially useless work, is a historical anomaly.

– We incorrectly believe that economic expansion will somehow solve all of our social problems. In fact, the social sphere is often in conflict with the imperatives of economic expansion.

– The impersonal capitalist Market turns us all into cutthroat competitors, undermining social cohesion. A “dog-eat dog” mentality leads to an environment where sociopaths climb to the top.

– Progress for the few leads to immiseration for the many. Extreme inequality is detrimental to the health and well-being of both the rich AND the poor on multiple levels.

– There IS such a thing as culture, and we abandon it at our peril. The amoral relativism of modernism where “everything goes and nothing matters,” leaves people unmoored, isolated and confused. People inherently want to belong, and they want to be part of something larger than themselves.

Again, I could go on, but that gives a good summary of some of the major points.

If you believe in the above propositions, well, then, you may be part of the Alt-Left. I suspect many people who might identify as part of the Alt-Right will agree with quite a few of these sentiments as well. The differences, as I see it, are in the Alt-Right’s embrace of extreme inequality, individualism, anti-collectivism, anti-democracy, laissez-faire libertarian capitalism, unlimited wealth accumulation, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, hereditarianism and Social Darwinism.

Next time, we’ll take a look at what lies at the heart of the Alt-Left critique.

In this post by Matt Breunig at Medium, he makes the case that many on the nominal Left are slowly and reluctantly coming around to the idea that diversity makes social safety nets difficult or impossible for societies to create and sustain through undermining social cohesion, and that this realization is fairly recent. The argument is that people do not wish to contribute to the collective social good when they believe it primarily benefits people who are unlike them. In addition, divide-and-rule strategies are easier to deploy by elites of diverse societies to keep the people fighting amongst one another and enable kleptocracies.

I think this realization largely comes from the political climate of the last few decades. Since Civil Rights, the Left has stood by and watched helplessly as pro-corporate forces have used white racial grievance and hot-button “wedge” issues to dismantle the social safety net piece-by-piece, roll back worker protections, and return wealth disparity back to Guided Age levels. The white working class has consistently voted against their own interests since Reagan, and it’s pretty hard to explain by the myth of the “rational voter.” Phenomena like “white flight” in response to well-meaning attempts at social engineering have also contributed to this resignation.

At the same time in Europe, areas hollowed out by deindustrilization have been filled by ethnic migrants from poorer parts of the world (places which, not coincidentally, were impoverished by the imposition of corporate globalism). These enclaves have in many cases, failed to integrate into society, especially with the mass migration of recent times, causing a lot of consternation among Europeans, even those who would never consider themselves racist. The resurgence of domestic terrorism centered around Islam has exacerbated this unease.

This has led to a change in views among the many on the Left that people simply will not contribute as much to a diverse society where people are perceived as being not like them. A social safety net will not work if it applies to all comers, that is, if it is without bounds. And, in turn, attempts to dictate social policy without taking this into account are doomed to fail. Breunig argues that this has been the traditional conservative position all along:

The argument…is that diversity leads to racism, which leads to lower support for the welfare state, and thus creates widespread economic immiseration at the bottom of society. [VOX writer Zack] Beauchamp does not explain why exactly he thinks this is, but other liberal commentators, such as Ned Resnikoff, have attributed it to the “ancient, tribal section of the human brain.”

What follows from this particular argument is pretty clear: you can have diversity or you can have economic justice, but you can’t have both.

Traditionally, this has been the arch-conservative position, especially when you bring in the biotruth of the human lizard brain. It is conservatives who say that we cannot mix different kinds of people, lest we increase social distrust, disharmony, and distance. It is conservatives who say that we need to monitor diversity levels in immigration to ensure that the immigrant share of the population does not get too high and to ensure that the immigrants who do come in are aggressively assimilated so as to erase the differences they initially bring with them.

Not keeping diversity down and different groups separated from one another, conservatives maintain, will destabilize society, turn politics into a dangerous racialized contest for political power, and immiserate people in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And it’s not just white conservatives who say this either. The black nationalist/separatist movements also hold these views…

Liberals and diversity (Medium)

That may have been the traditional arch-conservative position historically, but I think it’s been embraced by many on the nominal Left now, especially based on the political observations during last fifty years in the United States. In their opinion, diversity for its own sake just doesn’t work. The ongoing conflicts between Muslim/North African immigrants and natives in Europe has led many there to the same conclusion. We can consider this as one position which overlaps between the alt-right and what I’m classifying as the alt-left.

Breunig finds this disturbing. He contrasts it with the “traditional” leftist view:

When I was coming up back in the day, this was not the liberal view on diversity…The view then was that racism is a historical development, not an impenetrable feature of the tribal human brain. On this view, human beings are fundamentally the same and socially constructed categories used to divide them… can be overcome by uniting around what human beings have in common.

On this view (which I share) there are obviously frictions caused by difference, especially when a particular difference has been historically weaponized to subordinate people, but those frictions can be overcome by organizing along lines that cut across those differences. The clearest candidate for that is organizing along economic lines that aim to unite working class people of all stripes into political and civil institutions together. But it is also conceivable to organize people along ideological or subcultural lines as well.

If you think that view is wrong, then you should actually explain what you think the consequences of it being wrong are. If diversity and justice really are at odds with one another, then which one should you pick and why? For myself I strongly support both, do not believe they are mutually exclusive, and understand this to be the standard left position.

Breunig may believe what he states above, but I think departing from this “standard left position” is one of the distinguishing features of the alt-left. They might not believe in the strident racism and white supremacy peddled by the alt-right with its questionable science, but they do acknowledge that humans are hard-wired to like cooperate with people like them on some basic level.

Breunig points out the incoherence of the standard liberal position. If the left truly believes that diversity undermines support for the welfare state and social justice, how,then, can they continue to support things like open borders, birthright citizenship and sanctuary cities?

More and more, it seems like liberals in The Discourse agree with this basic conservative assessment of how diversity affects society. But, despite that underlying agreement, they somewhat bizarrely resist the conservative conclusion. Despite telling you that they think increasing diversity will result in children going hungry, as well as the mass incarceration and widespread discrimination of minority groups, they nonetheless support it.

If liberals are going to adopt the conservative view on how diversity operates in society, then they really do need to also work out what they think the implication of it is. Conservatives are very clear: diversity has all these problems and so it should be restricted. But the liberal view — that diversity has all these problems and yet it should be expanded without restraint — is just incoherent on its face.

The Alt-Left has no such contradictions. They do question multiculturalism and diversity, not because of white supremacy or genetic determinism, but because they realize how it undermines social justice and social cohesion when handled poorly (as, indeed, it had been). What makes the alt-left different is that, unlike the alt-right, they really do want a healthier society and less inequality, rather than Social Darwinism. Concerning the question above that Breunig poses, the alt-left does believe that diversity and justice are at odds. And unlike the “mainstream” left, they have made their choice: justice.

Both the mainstream Left and mainstream Right are firmly in the open-borders/diversity camp. I think it breaks down something like this:

Mainstream Left: Humans are all fundamentally the same, and differences are only skin-deep. The trend since the dawn of time has been for larger and larger group connections; for widening “spheres of affiliation.” We went from tribes to nations, to states, to transnational, global networks—it’s a general pattern of history that is inevitable and cannot be reversed. Only ignorance stands in the way, and that ignorance can be defeated by teaching education and tolerance. The elite “thought leaders” of society need to fight back against these attitudes by whatever means are at their disposal. Opposition is solely based on troglodyte racist attitudes by a small fringe and should be ignored. Eventually, these racist attitudes will naturally change as they have in the past—after all, even Southern Europeans, Jews, and Irish were once considered out-groups and they have now successfully integrated into mainstream “white” society. We just need to educate and wait it out. Using the power of the state to make disparate peoples live together is morally acceptable. Besides, we need immigration to maintain economic growth rates and provide for retirement funds in the face of low native birth rates.

Mainstream Right: We are dedicated to smashing labor and maximizing returns to capital and the wealthy, regardless of the effects on the social fabric. From that standpoint, open-door policies bring two simultaneous major benefits: 1.) Bringing in the poorest and most desperate workers from around the world to compete against native-born workers keeps wages low and workers fearful and desperate (and has been SOP in America since its inception), and 2.) We can then then use “divide and rule” strategies to play the workers against each another for the scraps we throw them from the table. They will too busy fighting one another to demand things like decent pay, protective regulations, or social safety nets, or to recognize the true source of their misery: the wealthy and globalized corporate monopolies. As Jay Gould once said, “I can always hire half the poor to kill the other half.”

Now, it’s worth noting that one of the tactics of the mainstream Left is promoting the kumbaya platitudes of the first position, while secretly being motivated by the second. I’m looking especially at Silicon Valley and its enthusiasm for H1-B visas here. A common tactic is to play the “racist” card against anyone who questions these motives.

The Right, by contrast, happily militates against open borders and scapegoats various out-groups, even while secretly supporting policies that ensure continued mass immigration without limit. They distract their followers from this obvious contradiction by using classic misdirection: reliable hot-button emotional issues like guns and abortion (e.g. it’s the “Hollywood liberals’ fault!!!), and a tightly-controlled information-dissemination apparatus (FOX News, etc.). Trump was a rather uncomfortable wrinkle in this tactic.

Both positions boil down to the same thing: continued economic growth at all costs, society be damned. Both support large-scale globalized corporate structures over small-scale, local, communal ones.

Both the mainstream Left and Right are united behind “mainstream” economic theory. They may have their preferred economists–Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty on the Left; Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen on the Right, for example; but they are solidly behind the current economic paradigm of infinite growth, productivism, corporatism, globalism, cosmopolitanism, meritocracy, technocracy, financialism, and so forth. They just differ on some of the details. They agree, in principle, with economists that we are homo economicus transacting through impersonal markets to exchange value rather than what we really are–tribal and social creatures who have needs beyond what the Market can provide.

What I hear very often from commeters is that the stable, prosperous societies of places like Scandinavia and Japan are only possible due to ethnic homogeneity. For people who truly believe that, and who support these types of societies in principle, it makes sense to be skeptical of unlimited immigration and open-door policies.

It also makes sense if you want something to bind people together besides tenuous market relations and formalized contracts. Prior to the One Big Market, people related to one another through various extra-market relationships. They related through family and blood ties; through village affiliation (Neopolitians); through ethnic affiliation (Italians), through religious affiliation (Catholics), through status (Prince and peasant), through occupation (wool merchant), through secret societies (Masons, Jesuits) and numerous other sources. Anthropologists generally designate kinship as the glue which held traditional societies together. Kinship is biological, but transcends biology; marriage is part of it, as is “fictive” kinship. Ibn Khaldun used the term assibiyah to designate a shared communal sense of social identity and the ability for members of a society to act cohesively.

Now, as I described earlier, the alt-right believes that certain people and cultures are inherently “superior” and “inferior” to others. They believe that culture—everything really—flows primarily from genes. They believe that all human cultures are locked in a “winner take all” Darwinian struggle to the death. I don’t think what I would consider the alt-left believes that; at least I hope not. I certainly don’t. In other words, I don’t think the alt-left hates anyone.

No, I think the alt-left simply opposes the rootless globalism and top-down social engineering engaged in by the technocratic elites of both parties to make “globalism” work for a tiny handful of transnational, cosmopolitan elites, while leaving devastated and hollowed-out societies for the remaining 90 percent of us. And , of course, many of the current “mainstream” opinion shapers, both on the Left and the Right, are included in that 10 percent.

They also recognize the cultural devastation that takes place in order to make this cosmopolitan globalism happen. It’s not a natural process. Long-standing, durable ways of life are shoved aside to produce a deracinated class of precarious economic migrants that can be plugged in to the global economy at will and milked for profits. Again, who benefits from this arrangement? Neither native-born nor migrants. As Dmitry Orlov put it:

National borders are very inconvenient from the corporate point of view. Corporations like to treat labor as a fungible commodity, basically shipping it to whereever it’s required and then shipping it out again when it’s no longer required. It creates this homogeneous, cosmopolitan society where nobody is invested in any paricular place, and that makes them very easy to manipulate and control, and destroys any sense of place that they might have had.
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The alt-left wants to preserve traditional lifeways and sense of place because these things are often more respectful of fundmental (Maslovian) human needs and much more resilient. They need much less top-down government and social engineering to function. They are not dependent on the vagaries of transnational markets and the impersonal machinations of finance and money, which routinely tend toward bubbles, manias, panics and crashes. To this end, I would say the alt-left is much more suspicious of libertarian capitalism than the alt-right, which sees libertarian capitalism, even in its current globalized form, as something “natural” and independent of government action (e.g. capitalism works better without government, just like baseball works better without rulebooks or umpires/s)

They also realize that beneath all the happy talk of multiculturalism and spurious accusations of racism by technocratic elites, what’s really going on is breaking the back of labor to maintain the privileged lifestyles of those technocratic elites.

The alt-left believes that the mainstream Left obstinately refuses to acknowledge the reality of tribalism and the fact that we are hard-wired to some extent to naturally want to be with our own kind. Unlike the alt-right, they don’t believe this tendency is a GOOD thing; far from it. Nonetheless, it is still there. We evolved in small-scale tribal societies for millions of years, and that legacy is still with us still. Yes, we’ve managed to overcome that to a great extent, constructing past cosmopolitan societies (for example, The Roman Empire, and even parts of Islamic empires-e.g. Muslim Spain), and on a scale never-before seen in modern times. But, in their view, that’s not a justification for constantly doubling-down and attempting to construct a global society by steamrolling any sense of locality or place, consequences be damned. As this comment puts it:

I’ll tell you what I think, and I fully expect to get flamed to hell and back. We could argue genetic racial differences all day, but regardless you’re never going to get past the fact that humans are tribal. Ran [Prieur] has said on this blog… multiple times… that it’s something we need to learn to get past (I think he called it shit-flinging money tribe war consciousness), but my opinion is that we WON’T get past it so long as the average human has an IQ of 100. You have to get it through your head that most people don’t think about anything, EVER.

Now, some final points I feel are necessary.

1.) I do think diversity is a good thing, in principle. I live in a diverse neighborhood in a diverse city, and I don’t have to– that is by choice. I’m fascinated by different cultures, I love to travel, and I have friends who come from all different parts of the world and from different backgrounds. I would not want it any other way. I think the sharing of cultures contributes immensely to your experience of life. In fact, I ofen tend to get along better with non-Americans than with my own people (who tend to be narcissistic careerists focused on little else besides climbing the status ladder, accumulating goods, and watching spectator sports.)

However, I know that everyone is like me (sadly). I’ve studied enough psychology and anthropology to know that, tragic as it is, the tendency toward nationalism and tribalism is there, as well as the urge to trust one’s own kind, and pretending its not is wishful thinking. Now, we have managed to mitigate it to an extent that was impossible in the past, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But the thing is, this happens slowly, over time, by natural means; it cannot be imposed from above or socially engineered by well-meaning bureaucrats.

In short, diversity is a good thing, but like anything else, you can have too much of a good thing.

2.) America is a diverse society and always has been since its inception into the Eurocentric world order. We cannot hope or wish that away, so we’d better just stop whining and find a way to deal with it. We’re not going to be Denmark, so let’s stop trying to pretend we can be.

From day one we’ve had native inhabitants who were shoved aside by invaders from Western Europe. Slaves by the millions were imported from Africa to work in the cotton and tobacco fields. Coolies from all over the world were brought in to keep labor costs low and build infrastructure, such as from Asia. The Southwest is culturally Hispanic and was taken through conflicts with Mexico. Central European peasants flooded in to cities after the Civil War. All these groups are here now to stay, and they’re not going anywhere.

We’re never going to be Japan or Scandinavia, so should we just throw up our hands and give up all hope? We Americans need to find some way to make a functional society despite this legacy. Yes, it makes it harder, but just because something is more difficult does not mean you should not attempt it. You just have to work harder. I’m not a fan of defeatism. Obviously, the situation in Europe is somewhat different.

Or else, we can just wait a few centuries while everyone mates with everyone else and such distinctions disappear as they have in Europe (anyone remember the Goths or the Vandals?). Hopefully we won’t go extinct in the meantime.

3.) I think much of the current ethnic/racial/gender hostility is not caused by diversity per se, but from the zero-sum, musical chairs completion for jobs under globalized corporate monopoly capitalism. That is a problem with our economic arrangement, not with the human “lizard brain.” The Social Darwinism promoted by the alt-right would ensure that this trend becomes ever worse, thereby causing it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy (“see, we’re ‘hard-wired’ to compete against and hate each other!”). They can then claim that such conflict is “natural” and inherent to the human species (instead of being imposed by artificial circumstances, which it is)

If someone’s living comes at your expense, then of course you’re going to hate that person. If it doesn’t, you are much less likely to do so. Capitalists have been using this feature of the Market to their advantage wherever it has been imposed on traditional cultures. It’s led to many flare-ups of ethnic conflict over the years which are subsequently blamed on “fundamental human nature,” or (in the alt-right’s case,) “Low I.Q.”.

Would there be as much resentment and hostility against Hispanics if jobs were plentiful? Against women being economically independent? Against hiring quotas? I think not. These are exacerbated by economic conditions, but we’re told never to think about that. Is it a coincidence that these divisions are flaring up at the same time as jobs are being consolidated and automated away at an increasing rate? Again, I think not.

We’ll explore some other aspects of what I’m calling the alt-left next time.

My musings on the alt-right seems to have engendered a larger reaction than I anticipated. It seems that there’s quite a bit of sympathy for many of the alt-right’s positions by people who wouldn’t typically self-identify as “right-wing” or with many of their other positions, which was, after all, a point I was attempting to make in the first place.

First, it’s worth noting that these observations are subjective by nature. No one—and I mean no one—can plausibly give a definitive definition of such a broad and amorphous category, and certainly not one that doesn’t simplify and exclude to some extent. I am basing this mainly on personal observations of what I have seen online. To some extent, anyone’s personal definition is the correct one: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

But what I mainly wanted to do was point out what I saw as the core linking all of the seemingly amorphous ideas together, and that, in my view, was clearly Social Darwinism. I do not recall seeing that fact pointed out anywhere else, even in the Wikipedia entry or the widely-cited Yiannoplis article (which defines the alt-right much more broadly).

Furthermore, Social Darwinism also links the modern alt-right to earlier strains of right-wing authoritarian thinking, including those which happened to be prevalent in Nazi Germany and other parts of Europe (and, it should be noted, in many circles of corporate America as well during that same time period). I stand by that assessment. To the commenter who claimed that the article I wrote amounted to nothing more than screaming “These are the NAZIS….baaaaahhh!,” well, I think you need to go back and reread it a bit more carefully and engage with some of the arguments. I feel the post was more explanatory that polemic or oppositional. It is you are throwing a tantrum, not I.

It’s worth pointing out that I did not systematically refute all of their points because 1.) That could run to book length; 2.) That was not my goal; and 3.) There are parts of their ideas and philosophies that are worth contemplating to some extent, as with nearly any political philosophy. My purpose was to engage, not to disparage, even though that’s exactly what I was accused of doing. I wanted to find commonalities between the alt-right and the alt-left (which I will define later). However, the sum total of the philosophy I do find objectionable on various grounds.

First, let’s stipulate that humans are animals. They (we) are biological creatures, and thus subject to the same laws of differential reproductive success and descent with modification as all other creatures. That includes the laws of physics and thermodynamics as well. This means that, of course, Darwinian selection is operating on us too. This can be a powerful tool for analysis of the biological world, and, yes, to some extent, human societies, as the recently-developed structural-demographic theories of history attest.

It’s the value judgements that get us, though. Right now, grey squirrels are outcompeting red squirrels in England. Does that mean that grey squirrels are better than, or “superior” to red ones? By what criteria? You could say that their very outcompeting makes them superior, but that statement is such a tautology as to render it meaningless–outcompeting in a biological niche makes them superior by the standards of outcompeting in a biological niche. Are invasive species by definition morally superior?

And besides, what do you do with this information? Does it necessarily lead to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau? Are we condemned to forever repeat this tragedy? One is reminded of Whitaker Chambers’ famous review of Atlas Shrugged, which seems applicable to the alt-right in general:

…the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them.

From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture — that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive…

“From almost every HBD post and Neoreaction subreddit, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding…”

J.M. Greer had a good insight in response to a comment to one of his posts. Imagine, he said, if you gave chimpanzees the power to direct their own evolution. What would they select for? Most likely enhancing the very things that chimps already do – climbing trees, building nests, hunting colobus monkeys, etc. Or, very likely, aspiring chimp parents would select for the traits that make for an alpha–aggressiveness, physical intimidation, social cunning, and so forth.

Would you ever get to humans this way? No, you’d just have “super chimps.” And the arms race to become an alpha would most likely undermine the viability of the species anyway. That’s a slap in the face to the Social Darwinists who want to select for the traits that allow for success in “free and open” markets and think this will somehow lead to the “next phase” of human evolution. I’m sorry, the idea is just ridiculous.

Now, do the wealthy tend to survive more than the poor? Yes, just as before the advent of modern medicine, all things being equal, healthier people reproduced more than sick ones, and attractive people have more mates than ugly ones. But none of this is due to explicit social design. To some extent, this is unavoidable–it is a law of nature. It stands “outside” of social or economic design; you cannot prevent or encourage it. That was just as true of the middle-class society of the post-war era as the winner-take-all society constructed under Neoliberalism that we currently inhabit.

But that’s a long way from saying that we should intentionally design our societies to kill off large numbers of undesirables “for the good of the species.” Or that those we designate as undesirable in modern-day America truly are so. The bottomless greed, tolerance for risk and Stakhanovite work ethic that makes a good capitalist would probably not have been quite so adaptive in most historical time periods. Who can say which traits will be useful five hundred years from now?

For example, someone may have a mental illness that precludes them from achieving much success in the Market–especially in America where your willingness to blindly follow orders and engage in pointless hoop-jumping seem to have become the main criteria for success. But those same genes may lead to genius a few generations down the line. We simply don’t know, so wiping out those who are unsuccessful at making money right now would most likely backfire. Consider that many of our greatest artists would not have found much success in the Market–Vincent Van Gogh famously sold only a handful of drawings and paintings in his lifetime and was dependent on the charity of his relatives.

Someone posted this article: Survival of the Friendliest (Nautilus). That raises an important point. The Alt-right is very enthusiastic about “science” when it’s confirming their political biases, but when something goes against their preset beliefs, it is simply handwaved away–the very same behavior they accuse their critics of engaging in. Many on the alt-right will solemnly nod their heads at the irreproducability of a lot of scientific research, but then take the most wild and fantastic HBD speculations–devoid of any research at all–as the unvarnished “truth!” (not to mention their faith in economic pseudoscience). Any scientist whose conclusions do not align with their weltanschauung, regardless of the evidence, is a “Cultural Marxist.” Indeed, that’s the only consistent definition of the term I can find. And, yes, there are those on the nominal left who also wave away inconvenient facts as well–it’s not good when anyone does it.

Social Darwinism is based on a simplistic misunderstanding of evolution. Peter Kropotkin pointed out long ago that any species where the members were constantly at each other’s throats would not survive very long. Instead, competition is primarily with outside forces, i.e. securing adequate sustenance and avoiding predators. To accomplish these things, species’ primary strategy is cooperation not competition. And no species cooperates more than man, which is the very key to our success. Undermining that, as the Social Darwinists are wont to do, is suicidal! Yes, there are highly regulated and circumscribed competitions in various arenas, of course, especially for mates. But these are very structured and “ceremonial” in most species. Males butt heads, and then go home. They are certainly not constantly fighting with one another! If they were, they would make an easy meal for predators.

Kropotkin expected to see the brutal dog-eat-dog world of Darwinian competition. He searched high and low—but nothing. “I failed to find, although I was eagerly looking for it,” Kropotkin wrote, “that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.”

Instead he saw mutual aid—everywhere. “In all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes,” Kropotkin wrote, “I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species and its further evolution.” And it wasn’t just in animals. The peasants in the villages he visited were constantly helping one another in their fight against the brutal environment of Siberia. What’s more, he noted a correlation between the extent of mutual aid displayed in a peasant village and the distance of that village from the hand of government. It was just as the anarchists had suggested. “I lost in Siberia,” he wrote, “whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist.”

The Russian Anarchist Prince Who Challenged Evolution (Slate)

I read once that the old Roman saying “Man Is A Wolf To Man” (homo homini lupus) is disingenuous to wolves! Wolves, of course, cooperate on the hunt. And wolf packs do not typically fight one another; each has a circumscribed territory. To hear the Social Darwininsts tell it, every wolf would be in constant competition with the Alpha for even a morsel of food, and wolf packs would be constantly fighting each other for every scrap of territory. That’s not what happens. If that were the case, wolves would have gone extinct long ago. And certainly not even the Alpha claims 95 percent of the pack’s “resources.”

The ultracompetitive drive of market capitalism is a historical aberration, and demonstrating that has been the focus of my writing for much of this past year. The analogy between the Market and the competitive pressures in nature is fundamentally flawed. The idea that success in the Market somehow signals evolutionary fitness in a Darwinian sense is ridiculous (which is why Darwin never said it). It also ignores the fact that markets have been tangential throughout most of human history and yet somehow brought us to the society of the 1870s–the very society that produced Darwin, mind you–without any explicit recourse to eugenics, and for most of that time with economic systems based around combinations of reciprocity, redistribution, householding, religious sympathy, and mutual aid. It bears repeating: over 90 percent of our species’ existence has been as hunter-gatherers. It could just as easily be argued that the expansion of markets have made us less intelligent and capable, as indeed some have argued.

The idea that the anarchic market somehow always rewards the best and the brightest is absurd on its face. It’s hard to believe that George W. Bush and Donald Trump are truly the finest the human species have to offer in terms of competence or leadership qualities.

And now, there’s the emerging science of epigenetics, which is just getting started. Environment effects genetics! Our knowledge of evolution (like many scientific concepts) is constantly evolving and quite incomplete, so to say that we “understand” human evolution enough to justify Social Darwinism as policy is a political, not a scientific, stance. People are “undesirable” from a current economic–not a genetic–view. That’s a problem for our economic system, one that should theoretically be dealt with, not simply accepted as beneficial or “inevitable.” Is it truly the case, as Social Darwinists argue, that “if a person doesn’t produce quantifiable value, they are, objectively, not valuable. Everything else is sentimentality.” I don’t think it is.

Plus, there’s the old “ought-is” question. Even if nature were really as unremittingly harsh and cruel as the Social Darwinists depict it, does that means we should necessarily design human institutions this way? Or should we design them instead to lift up our species in general–all of us–and engage in symbiotic cooperation with each other and our natural environment, which is more likely the key to evolutionary success rather than the “war of all against all” promoted by Social Darwinists. It’s the classic Naturalistic Fallacy–the idea that anything “natural” is somehow good:

…In nature the weakest (least fit) die, so the naturalistic fallacy says that we should dismantle welfare states and withhold charity and health care, to leave poor and ill people to die, or even to exterminate the weak. This ignores Darwin’s actual definition of “fit”; not the strongest but the most adaptable and responsive to change, meaning that “Darwinism” would encourage social safety nets and disaster relief.

Appeal to Nature (Rational Wiki)

Social Darwinism rests on two premises: there exists a constant struggle for survival in nature, and nature is a proper guide for the structuring of society. This is not a scientific idea at all, as it is not a statement about what is but rather a statement about what some people think “should” be.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection describes the propagation of hereditary traits due to the varying “success” of organisms in reproducing. Basing a moral philosophy on natural selection makes about as much sense as basing morality on the theory of gravitational success: rocks rolling down the furthest are the best rocks.

Social Darwinism is basically a circular argument. A group that gains power can claim to be the “best fit” because it is in power, but then the group claims to be in power because it is the “best fit”. Any group in power can use Social Darwinist arguments to justify itself, not just right-wing groups such as fascists. Communists can claim that Communists are the best fit wherever Communists are in power. Ironically, many eugenicists and other racists will insist that DA JEWWS! are secretly in power, yet will never use this logic to insist that Jews are the “best fit”.

Social Darwinism (Rational Wiki)

If we design markets to wipe out large numbers of the human species, does that somehow guarantee “progress?” Who is “good enough?” Who makes that call? Claiming that these questions are somehow settled by “science” is not scientific, it is political. if you want large numbers of people to die, just come out and say it; don’t hide behind some sort of pseudoscientific claptrap.

Just like the fact that human are animals, I think we can also stipulate that they differ greatly in abilities, personality, intelligence and so forth. We aren’t blank slates, as some on the Left have argued, and things like gender are not merely “artificial constructs.” I’m not sure I’d classify those views as hereditarianism, however.

What I mean when I use that term is using genetic determinism to exclude all other factors, including institutional factors of class and power, and to bolster notions of Just-Worldism. Who are the wealthiest? The most capable. Why are they the most capable? Because they are the wealthiest!

To reiterate, it’s hard to believe that leaders like Dubya and Trump got where they are through dint of superior I.Q. Child poverty has exploded in one generation. It’s pretty hard to chalk that up to genetics. The share of income going to the one percent has increased by leaps and bounds within the span of a few decades. Are they getting smarter by the day? How can that be chalked up to genetic rewards to talent? It’s when genetics are used to justify all of this that I object.

[William Graham] Sumner was unabashed in his admiration for millionaires, and indignant at criticism lobbed in their direction. “The rich are good-natured,” he insisted, model citizens to be applauded for their initiative and patience with lesser souls. He approved the “aggregation of large fortunes” as “a necessary condition of many forms of social advance.” Toward that end, he argued strenuously against restrictions on Wall Street stockjobbing and other forms of speculative gain. “To denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud is ridiculous,” he wrote. Also to be avoided were government investigative commissions, increased taxes, and Sunday-morning haranguing about how the rich owed something to the poor…

Sumner’s list of deadbeats and drags on society will be familiar to any casual observer of modern conservative politics. First were the social reformers (usually well-educated Northeasterners, preferably women), whom Sumner chastised for their arrogance, hypocrisy, and dangerous utopian schemes. Next came government bureaucrats, typified by the “obscure clerk” whose small-minded enforcement of rules threatened to crush the nation’s visionary spirits. Finally, there were the poor themselves—often “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be,” Sumner argued with his trademark bluntness. He even went so far as to denounce democracy itself, viewing mass voting as a modern experiment perilously close to mob rule.

“A Drunkard in the Gutter Is Just Where He Ought To Be” (Slate)

Recall that the One Big Market is less than a couple centuries old, and even then only in Western Europe. Even the most “rapid” evolutionary traits which have been studied, such as lactase persistence and malaria resistance, take dozens if not hundreds of generations to propagate through a population by even the most generous estimates by geneticists. Evolution did not produce the Market.

By the same token, if you look at inequality in societies, it’s pretty hard to believe they are just due to “natural” genetic differences in ability, capability, intelligence, and so forth. Debt, nepotism, inheritance, the Law of Cumulative advantage, political factors, and just pure, dumb luck also play a role. Hereditarians would have us ignore all of this in favor of “Da Genez.”

Recall too, that nation-states are only a few centuries old, and then, too, only in Western Europe. To claim that entire nations are failures due to poor genetics and low IQ scores ignores the fact that boundaries were drawn up just a few generations ago around arbitrary and unrelated peoples in much of the world, who were then ruthlessly colonized and exploited. Somehow these “Low IQ” countries managed to be viable societies before Europeans arrived on the scene with the One Big Market, the Hut Tax, National Debt burdens, and other social “innovations,” (albeit at a lower level of technology). As much as I rip on mainstream economists, they did have a potent refutation of Clark’s hypothesis: a photograph of the Korean peninsula at night taken from outer space. Here was a population separated for only half a century, and yet half the peninsula blazed bright from one of the most advanced economies in the world, while the other half was almost entirely dark, mired in one of the planet’s most repressive political regimes.

How much lower I.Q.’s do the North Koreans have than the South, I wonder? Or from North Americans? Is it genetics? Or is it something else?

When Westerners first came to Japan with their technology, many Japanese were quick to identify themselves as inherently inferior, and argued that their only hope was to systematically breed with the foreigners. Contra Clark, Japan managed to industrialize much faster than England did–bad news for the “genetic” theory. Now they are known for cutting edge high-technology. By the 1980’s the shoe was on the other foot–Japanese were depicted as clearly “superior” to lazy and spoiled North Americans. But then, their real-estate bubble burst and economic growth for all intents and purposes came to a halt. Now their society is quite stable, but their birthrate is among the lowest on earth.

So, are they superior or inferior?

The use of IQ testing has strayed very far from its initial origins. It was never meant by its developers as a winnowing mechanism and all-purpose silver-bullet explanatory variable that it has become in the fevered musings of the alt-right:

“Where did the IQ test start? When Alfred Binet came up with the IQ test, the point of it was to measure where people were as a way to target how they could improve. And then Lewis Terman and the eugenicists hijacked the IQ test and made it this permanent thing. Alfred Binet in 1909 said that this pessimistic tendency [had] developed in terms of what the I.Q. test is, and we have to fight that. If you talk to Carol Dweck who does all the growth and fixed mindset stuff, she’ll tell you that her whole career is basically devoted to undoing the damage of Lewis Terman. This is now a century old…”
[Tangentially Speaking, Episode 234, 41:00]

I.Q. was designed to assess people and help them improve. That’s a nice idea, isn’t it? And improve they have, as the Flynn Effect demonstrates. Its wasn’t meant to determine who was inherently superior or inferior, who is rich and who is poor, and certainly not who should live and who should die. Interpreting all of human history and social structures solely through the narrow lens of IQ and Darwinism, as the alt-right does, leads one down the path to the nihilistic and deterministic thinking that pervades their writings. Yes, using these as tools can be useful, but in the end they are just tools.

Of course, Social Darwinism and heritarianism cut across strict political boundaries, and have for a long time. The right loves to point out that many figures in the Progressive and other past social movements nominally considered “leftist” (mainly due to their efforts to reform capitalism) were proponents of eugenics. “You see, the left are the REAL Nazis!!!” Er, no, not really.

The idea that societies are structured as levels as if in a video game is also not a scientific proposition, and is consistently decried by actual scholars of sociology and anthropology. The concept that our ultimate destiny lies “among the stars” and that this is the end goal of the human evolution is just as much theological as the idea that it is the purpose of humanity to glorify God and sit at his right hand for all eternity. Is a high-tech civilization “better?” By what criteria? As with grey squirrels, by shoving aside competitors, perhaps. But I’m sure readers aware that by most measures of human happiness, well-being, health and sustainability, so-called “primitive” societies have us beat by a long shot: Were we happier in the Stone Age? (Guardian)

Finally, there is the thorny issue of tribalism. As one commenter wrote, “The alt-right is much more focused on the conflict’s [sic] generated by multi-racial or multi-ethnic empires/nations. They are also much more concerned with maintaining a high trust society for white people (europeans).” That’s a tricky subject I’ll wade into next time.

With all the talk of the alt-right lately, people have attempted to figure out if there is an alt-left.

I do believe there is one.

But before we can talk about the alt-left, we should at least attempt to define the alt-right.

Much of the commentary about the alt-right seems to me like the proverbial blind men grasping different parts of an elephant and not understanding the nature of the animal they are attempting to describe. They merely define a laundry list of features (e.g. antisemitism, Neo-Nazism, nativism, Islamophobia, antifeminism, homophobia) without attempting to define the core belief system that holds it all together.

In my opinion, the core principle that defines the alt-right is Social Darwinism. This ideology ties together several other often-noted features of the alt-right: racism, white supremacy, misogyny, extreme market libertarianism, disdain for democracy, authoritarianism, reactionary politics, and technophilia. From their Social Darwinist belief system flow all the other seemingly unrelated features.

At least that’s my take on what I’ve been able to gather from reading their writings and opinions where I’ve had the misfortune to encounter them.

There is, it should be noted, a strain of the alt-right that differs from this; one that is influenced by Catholic theology and is suspicious of the market and its morals. This is, however, a less important and influential strain.

From what I can tell, much of the alt-right are die-hard hereditarians. They are utterly obsessed with ideas of race and IQ. In their belief, IQ determines everything from individual success, to the success of entire nations.  Wikipedia defines hereditarianism this way:

Hereditarianism is the doctrine or school of thought that heredity plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of genetics to explain human character traits and solve human social and political problems. Hereditarians adopt the view that an understanding of human evolution can extend the understanding of human nature. They have avowedly rejected the standard social science model in favor of applying the scientific method to human social structure.

Pastore has claimed that hereditarians were more likely to be conservative, that they view social and economic inequality as a natural result of variation in talent and character. Consequentially, they explain class and race differences as the result of partly genetic group differences…The Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 to support academic research into the problem of heredity and eugenics and the problems of human race betterment, is now a leading source of funding for scientists wishing to investigate hereditarian hypotheses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditarianism

The alt-right believes that races are real; that is, they believe in race essentialism. Furthermore, they believe that there is a clear hierarchy of races, with greater and lesser races, that is superior and inferior ones. Furthermore, they believe that culture is derived from genes.

One of their “sacred texts” is A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade, which asserts that race is a real, measurable phenomenon in the human species. While Wade himself condemns racism and the idea that certain races are superior to others, the alt-right itself embraces that idea with gusto. They believe that Europe and the West got to the top (whatever that means) by having superior IQ’s, and that other races have inferior intelligence. They love to trade charts which supposedly correlate GDP and average I.Q., as if the West’s control of institutions and the legacy of colonialism somehow don’t matter. Or, alternatively, they assert that the expansion of the West merely proves the superiority of Europeans, and why they are the fittest to rule.

This ties together their white supremacism and their fear of immigration. Since they believe that culture is derived from genes, they believe that Muslim and African immigration will destroy Western culture by eroding its gene pool. There are all sort of “facts” asserting the inferiority of, for example, Muslim immigrants heading to Europe. One of the more bizarre theories that is circulating now claims that Muslims are all inbred since they all marry their cousins!

Their view of human history is derived from something called the Human Biodiversity Movement, which asserts that culture is shaped primarily, if not exclusively, by Darwinian forces acting on the gene pool. For example, one popular assertion is that the banning of cousin marriage by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages forced Europeans to deal with strangers more often. This caused the West to from institutions which allowed people to deal effectively with strangers, and hence to capitalism! In other words, capitalism, too derives from genes (about which, more below).

They believe, then, that Westerners are not just a different culture, but are genetically distinct from other populations. To that end, they are opposed to “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” They believe that Western culture is clearly superior, that its superiority is what caused it to dominate the world, and that this superiority derived from the genes swashing around in the Western European population, honed by thousands of years of Darwinian evolution. The stagnation of the Muslim world (once by far the most advanced civilization on the planet) in their view was caused by inferior genes, and that these genes are now flowing into the West thanks to the craven political class.

In America, this belief system usually manifests around the alleged inferiority of African-American I.Q’s. To this end, another “sacred text” of the movement is Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. In other words, African-Americans are poor because they are stupid, European Americans are rich because they are smart. Full stop. Any attempts to explain this result not using genetics is “feel good liberalism” and, to use their favorite epithet, “Cultural Marxism.” African-Americans are depicted in much of the alt-right as little more that apes. Such people like to call themselves “race realists” (as opposed to “racists”) and claim that the only thing to do with inferior Africans is to exterminate them. To this end, some of the more extreme factions of the alt-right have no qualms with advocating a “final solution” type scenario for those people and races they feel are “inferior” (as determined by them, of course).

It follows then, in their view, that society is, and has always been, a pure meritocracy determined by IQ. That is, the social structure and institutions don’t matter. The cream rise to the top, the scum sink to the bottom, and it’s all based on the packet of genes inherited from mom & dad, no matter what social system happens to be operating. And white males, having the best combination of high-IQ’s and aggressiveness, are the “natural” leaders of such a society. All the “politically correct” denigration of white males in favor of “diversity” and “feminism” is causing society to fall apart, they believe.

So this ties together racism, white supremacy, male chauvinism, Islamophobia, and a hatred of diversity, multiculturalism, and immigration. Misogyny also springs from this same root, but is a bit harder to describe.

In the alt-right, women are depicted as mere “breeding machines” blindly following the dictates of their reproductive instincts above all else. This is tragic, because women’s “natural” instincts will cause the to mate with less intelligent “cavemen” type-men, especially dark-skinned men from regions of the world where women are still treated as chattel. Women are naturally attracted to these “aggressive” males and repulsed by men of their own race because they have been “pussified” by  generations of feminism. This will lead to the gradual elimination of the superior genes that made Western civilization–and laissez-faire capitalism–possible, and cause us to fall back into the Malthusian trap, preventing us from reaching the “next stage” of human evolution (more about that below).

As the alt-right tells it, women will happily join the harems of aggressive dark-skinned foreigners, shunning the intellectually superior, high-IQ men of the West that they ideally should be mating with, and it’s all thanks to feminism and the loss of control over the political and economic institutions of society by white males (they don’t like Angela Merkel and REALLY hate Hillary Clinton).

Furthermore, women are promoting immigration because they inherently want to mate with these aggressive, dark-skinned males. That means, of course, that these men are depicted as both genetically superior AND inferior at the same time.

Womens’ natural reproductive instincts will lead to the downfall of society, the Alt-Right argues, because the superior genes that built the West will no longer be passed along if women’s natural urges are not channeled and controlled by society. Financial independence for women is a grave threat, because women are no longer dependent on high-IQ male “providers,” and inferior genes will begin displacing the superior ones that have brought us to this “high point” of human civilization. This video pretty much explains this philosophy: Why Women DESTROY NATIONS (caps in original)

Might Makes Right and Libertarian Capitalism

So how does libertarian capitalism fit into all this?

Another “sacred text” in addition to those mentioned above is “A Farewell to Alms” by economist Gregory Clark.

Clark asserted that it wasn’t institutions, or social structures, or historical contingencies, or geography, or even the harvesting of half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels, that caused the Industrial Revolution. Rather, what really caused it was the fact that the rich had more surviving offspring than the poor. He bases this on an analysis of wills from a couple of centuries in medieval England. According to Clark, the Industrial Revolution is all down to genetics.

This rest on a few assumptions 1.) The rich have “superior capitalist genes” that they pass along to their offspring. Clark hypothesized these as intelligence, literacy, a willingness to cooperate with strangers, a tolerance for hard work and long hours, and, most especially, time-preference for delayed rewards (creating a propensity to save instead of spend surpluses). And, 2.) That this was unique to medieval England. He argues that in other cultures, the elites were not merchants, and thus were more focused on martial superiority and did not possess the superior “bourgeois genes” that the English merchants did. Or, the rich did not have as much of a reproductive advantage, and the hapless poor were able to pass along their inferior genes, keeping other societies mired in the Malthusian trap. Only England, with its dead peasants and “downward mobility” of the rich was able to escape.

In short, the Industrial Revolution was caused by the ants out-breeding the grasshoppers.

Now, despite this thesis being rejected by almost all economists, geneticists, historians and anthropologists, the alt-right has embraced it with gusto. It follows, then, that Western capitalism is a “superior” system that relies upon the “inferior” poor dying off as fast as possible.

The best way to ensure this result is laissez-faire (leave alone) capitalism! Only the anarchic market devoid of any rules allows the naturally strong (i.e. the genetically superior) to climb to the top. This is where their love of Ayn Rand and her writings comes into play. Like Rand, they believe that it is the “natural order” for the strong and talented to dominate the weak and feckless (and they invariably depict themselves as the strong and talented, and their opponents as less capable and intelligent). And only capitalism–with as few restrictions on the behavior of the elites–is an effective Darwinian mechanism. Of course, the naturally strong and talented people at the top of society tend to be disproportionately white males.

This is the reason they despise the existence of the state and intervention in the “free” market–it allows the weak and feckless to survive at the expense of the strong and capable. Social safety nets, which keep the poor alive, are bad, because they allow the genetically inferior to survive and breed. They are particularly contemptuous of notions of “fairness.” Things which help traditionally disadvantaged members of society–things like quotas and welfare–are undesirable because people on the bottom are there for a very good reason–that’s where they naturally deserve to be!

They embrace an absolute “Might Makes Right” ethos. Any attempts at justice, fairness or solidarity are doomed to fail, they argue, because society is a constant, unremitting struggle of all against all, and always has been. Furthermore, they believe that this is a profoundly good thing! Not only is it a good thing, but we should strive to create as much of a “winner take all” society as we possibly can, because only such a society will Darwinian evolution be driven to the fullest extent. They believe that human nature is fundamentally competitive and acquisitive. Thus, they take capitalism as “natural” and anything else as “unnatural” and therefore “social engineering.”

Thus, the “free” market is not the best means to ensure prosperity for all, as the original market liberals claimed. Rather, suffering and death must be built into the system because only that allows it to act as an appropriate Darwinian winnowing mechanism permitting the “survival of the fittest.” And who are the “fittest?” Those who rise to the top and make the most money are the “fittest” in this system. And these are, inevitably, those with the highest IQ’s thanks to genetics (tying together economics and hereditarianism).

Thus, they tend to oppose anything that might theoretically make society less brutal and competitive. In their view, it must be capitalism red in tooth and claw or nothing! They tend to virulently oppose “redistribution” and applaud extreme inequality as the “natural” reward for the superior rich. Redistribution is “unfair” in their view, and self-defeating, because it takes from the people who produce the most value and gives it to the useless eaters.

This ties into their dislike of the liberal state, which is based on the principle that “all men are created equal” and gives each man a vote (unlike past systems where only property owners mattered). They believe this  allows the mob of “weaklings” to dominate the natural leaders of society, retarding progress. They are fond of citing something called the Tytler calumny, which asserts that democracy is doomed to fail thanks to the hordes of feckless poors:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

Peter Thiel famously echoed this sentiment when he warned that democracy and capitalism were incompatible because democracy allowed the majority to place checks on the the behavior of the rich and the chaos of the anarchic market. In his view, it was democracy that had to go, and the alt-right wholeheartedly agrees. Many of these beliefs are prevalent among the oligarchs of Silicon Valley (because autism tends to depress empathy).

Directional View of History

Finally, the alt-right believes that not only is society a fundamentally Darwinian “survival of the fittest”, but that evolution is teleological–that is, it is purpose driven and has a logical end goal.

Now, every serious scientific student of evolution knows this to be the most common and pervasive misunderstanding of evolution that there is. Evolution is only concerned with survival in a specific context at a specific point in time. It has no end goal other than that.

The alt-right, however, will have none of it! Their view is that human societies are like stages in a computer game, and the goal is to continually progress to the “next level.” The end goal of this Darwinian evolution is to push human civilization to the “next stage”–from the caves to the stars! To this end, they embrace artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, cyborgs, cloning, nootropics, “better living through chemistry,” and the lot of it. Society is destined to move faster and faster, and anyone who can’t keep up needs to be left behind. Anything that slows or retards this progression to the next level–such as allowing inferior people to breed–must be stopped or curtailed. Along with the notion of “Might makes right;” in their ethics, the ends justify the means.

The “end goal” is variously defined as artificial intelligence, machines displacing human life, or humans becoming some sort of immortal transdimensional space-faring cyborgs. Many believe the so-called “Singularity” is the end goal for evolution. Anyone not directly contributing to this end goal (like neckbeard computer programmers or sociopathic Wall Street financiers) needs to die off as quickly as possible–for the good of the species, of course.

This ties together the last remaining strands of the alt-right–their love of Ayn Rand, laissez-faire libertarian capitalism, Silicon Valley and futurology. Thus, I think we’ve described the elephant rather than the leg, trunk, tail. etc.

The alt-right shares with its more mainstream cousins the “bootstrapping” “make your own luck” just-world belief systems, to wit:

Americans are more inclined to believe that people make their own luck than people in countries with more developed welfare states. According to a Pew global attitudes survey, 31% of Germans think that success is determined by forces within their control, whereas 57% of Americans say the same. It follows from this that those who do not have insurance could get it if they only worked a bit harder.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718885-one-way-seeing-fight-over-health-care-clash-between-two-different-wagners

NeoLiberal ideology has an axiom that “jobs are created by those who have money.”  On the face of it, this seems obvious: nobody without the ability to pay you has ever given you a job, I’d bet. The corollary of this is “the more money that rich people have, the more jobs there will be”. So, under Neoliberal ideology, you funnel money to the rich and corporations and they create jobs. Doesn’t actually work, mind you, but that’s what the ideology says.

The ideology also says “money is earned by people because they fill the needs indicated by the market, which represent what people and society want.” Which means “if you have a lot of money, you deserve to have it because you got it filling other people’s needs”.  It also then follows that people with a lot of money are the sort of people who are good at providing what other people want, so therefore they should have more money so they can provide even more. Poor people, by this ideology, do not deserve to have much money, because if they were doing something that other people wanted a lot of they’d have a lot of money. Etc, etc…

http://www.ianwelsh.net/ideology-precedes-policy-which-determines-outcomes/

These beliefs drive their approach to political decision-making: cut regulations, cut safety nets, deregulate, put as few restrictions on the ability of the rich to accumulate wealth and do as they like as much as possible (i.e. low taxes and no workplace regulations), oppose redistribution, encourage technological innovation with no restrictions, etc. Since the world is a just world based on genetic superiority, institutions don’t matter much anyway. So long as the Market is designed according to a Darwinian “survival of the fittest,” type scenario then “progress” is assured.

New Wine in Old Bottles

Now, none of this is really new. It’s essentially a repackaged version of the same old Social Darwinism that was prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century. This time, their supporters claim to have “science” on their side, but, then again, so did the Social Darwinists back then. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the popularity of this philosophy tends to be directly correlated with the level of social inequality present.

For example, see this article:

[Herbert] Spencer adapted Charles Darwin’s notion of natural selection and applied the theory to human society in a philosophy that became known as “Social Darwinism.” It was Spencer who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” using it to apply to the fate of rich and poor in a laissez faire capitalist society. Spencer argued that there was nothing unnatural — and therefore wrong — with competing and then rising to the top in a cut- throat capitalist world.

“Spencer told [Andrew Carnegie] that it was a scientific fact that somebody like him should be getting to the top,” says historian Owen Dudley Edwards. “That there was nothing unnatural about it, wrong about it, evil about it.”

Not only was competition in harmony with nature, Spencer believed, but it was also in the interest of the general welfare and progress of society. Many successful capitalists of the late 19th century embraced Spencer’s philosophy. These captains of industry used his words as justification to oppose social reform and government intervention. As Spencer said, these would interfere with the natural — and beneficial — law of survival.
“The concentration of capital is a necessity for meeting the demands of our day, and as such should not be looked at askance, but be encouraged,” Carnegie wrote, paraphrasing Spencer. “There is nothing detrimental to human society in it, but much that is, or is bound soon to become, beneficial.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/peopleevents/pande03.html

Furthermore, the notion of superior Western Europeans and inferior darker-skinned peoples is essentially unchanged from the philosophy of the Third Reich–the only thing changed is who is superior and who is inferior and why. Many of the more toxic beliefs that followed from the Third Reich belief system also find their expression in the modern alt-right as well: the notion of a lost golden age, an obsession with decline and fall, a disdain for intellectualism and “degenerate” modernist culture, a low tolerance for ambiguity, the embrace of a “strong” leader and authoritarianism in general, a scapegoating of out-groups (Muslims, immigrants, blacks, homosexuals), and so forth.

And while there is some scientific validity to the study of how cultures affect genetic expression, the alt-right has the tendency to cherry-pick the studies which confirm their pre-existing biases and ignore those that do not. They also ignore science when it tells them what they don’t want to hear–such as the idea stated above that evolution has no purpose or end goal.

The alt-right also takes these ideas and engages in the most wild and fantastic speculation in order to make their racist ideas sound like”scientific” facts. The way they tell it, genes explain EVERYTHING, from the tendency to haggle among Middle-Easterners, to the collectivism of “Orientals,” to the promiscuity of African-American women, to the “laziness” or southern Europeans, to the tendency of Jews to become lawyers (from the Rabbinic tradition of course), to the high math scores of the Chinese (due to the old Imperial examination system). Many of these so-called “explanations” are nothing more than ridiculous speculation, but are treated as gospel truth on the alt-right.

The alt-right is pouring wine into new bottles, but it’s the same old wine!

It’s an astonishingly sociopathic and nihilistic view. Yet it seems to have acquired a certain cachet among a species of online intellectual who claims that only he or she (yes, sometimes she) is a “realist” and that anyone who disagrees with any subset of these ideas is a wishful-thinking touchy-feely “nonrealist” who refuses to face the ugly truth of human nature, or a “cultural Marxist.”