And the sub-mediocrities shall inherit the earth . . . well, its governments. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
why woke, ESG, and DEI are so seductive to weak leaders
one of the most ineffacable truisms of organizational structure is this:
A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s.
it’s just basic human nature. excellence seeks to surround itself with excellence that it may achieve and mediocrity seeks to surround itself with sub-mediocrity that it may prevent itself from being supplanted.
there is nothing mediocrity fears more than excellence. it’s how you get turfed out of the cushy gig you do not really merit. positions of power are slippery and when you have one that consciously or merely instinctively you know that you do not deserve and are not truly qualified for, the last thing you want is some high caliber competitor coming up behind you, showing you up, and taking your chair.
A’s don’t sweat this because competing is what they do. but B’s live in terror of it. and this is why the B’s and C’s love “woke”, ESG, and DEI:
these alleged philosophies of inclusion are, in fact, ideologies of exclusion.
and what they seek to exclude is excellence and meritocracy.
it’s the literal point of the practice and it’s the reason that so many weakling leaders gravitate to them: it’s job security for the unqualified wrapped up in a neat little philosophy that makes self-serving nepotism and plunder look like virtue.
Ideas are the foundation of the brain standard, one of which is that only individuals have rights. This cuts through the collectivist dreck that passes for thought among most of the world’s so-called intellectuals. The variations of collectivism all disguise nothing more than brute force hiding behind propaganda. Their inevitable failures stem from their essential flaw: those that control the collective claim rights that negate those of the individual.
There are grounds for hope. From the ruins of impending collapse there will be some who reject collectivism and are committed to rebuilding on a foundation of individual rights. How they will protect those rights and whatever territories they stake out are what theoretical physicists sometimes call “engineering problems.” One advantage they’ll have, though, as the brain standard constituency—they’ll be smarter than their adversaries. Attention, imagination, and intelligence will be keenly focused on building from the ruins and protecting what they’ve built.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine someone invents a cheap, portable device that defends its bearer and his or her property from all violence from all sources, but has no offensive capability. The device is so cheap that virtually everyone can buy it, and charities are set up to donate it to those who can’t. The device is universally available and creates a world without violence.
How would such a world function? People would have to produce to survive, but absent mutual agreement no one would have an enforceable claim on anyone else’s production. There would be no coercive transfers of money or property. Disputes would be settled by negotiation and mediation. A body of civil law similar to English common law would develop. Surely such a society would figure out a way to deal with nonviolent crime.
The negation of violence would eliminate government’s nominal rationale: protecting citizens from violence. In the absence of government (and its violence), individuals and society as a whole would be free to advance as far as their capabilities will take them.
This extreme hypothetical offers a stark contrast with the absence of anything resembling freedom anywhere in the world today. Government and collectivism are top-down codependents based on violence and coercion. Their current manifestations are replaying the dreary and what should be the common knowledge lesson of history: they inevitably fail, often after a great deal of bloodshed.
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In the current jockeying among collectivist governments for the things over which they jockey, Russia’s and China’s are doing a better job than the U.S.’s. The former are the co-leaders of the Eurasian alliance and represent substantial politic and economic power. The latter is bankrupt, embroiled in yet another war it won’t win, and stands accused of sabotaging its most important European ally’s oil pipelines. At home, the U.S. government and its fellow travelers are in thrall to brain-dead ideologies that hasten the country’s disintegration.
There are those that do and those that think. It’s not generally the former who screw up a society. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:
Just this weekend, I spoke at one of my favorite venues, the Liberty Forum in New Hampshire, which is an annual conference center on the Free State Project. It’s designed to encourage people to pick up and move to the freest state in the country for community and to help protect the state from the fate that befell Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
My first time speaking there was 2012, I believe, and I came away with an interesting revelation, which I can summarize as “Liberty is a hands-on task.” In my career until that time, the problem of economic and political matters were mostly matters of theory and I had spent most of my time reading and distributing high theory, a task I loved and still do.
But coming to this event in New Hampshire I found something else entirely; a group of people who were busy doing things in practice to live freer lives. They were small business people, real-estate agents, people with alternative currency systems, people raising and selling food on and from their own farms, organizers of houses of worship and community centers, homeschoolers and school entrepreneurs, and much more besides, including office holders focusing on laws and legislation.
It was here, for example, that I acquired my first Bitcoin, which in the early days showed great promise finally to recreate money in a way that government could not ruin. It struck me at the time as among the greatest inventions of the human mind. Tellingly, it did not come from academia (so far as we know) but from tinkerers who wanted to solve the problem of double spending on digital monetary units. It was genius. The economics journals ignored it for many years, of course.
The meritocracy has nothing to do with actual merit. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:
The American Left has decided that the so-called meritocracy is a bad thing. In a typical example from the Los Angeles Times this week, Nicholas Goldberg points to a number of issues exploring how merit is not actually the key to power and riches in America:
The United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. The story goes that if you work hard and play by the rules, especially with regard to education, you can compete, rise and succeed here. . . . But Americans are realizing that’s not always the case. The playing field just isn’t level.
Goldberg claims that the much-lauded meritocracy is less about merit and more about controlling access to elite institutions. It’s hard to argue with some of this. It’s easy to see the lie behind the claims of meritocracy when we look to the very top of the artificial hierarchy. It’s likely not a mere coincidence people like George W. Bush and Al Gore—a son of a US president and a son of a US senator, respectively—went to elite Ivy League schools. All of Al Gore’s four children, and one of Bush’s, went to Harvard. To think that these seven people got into these schools because they had more “merit” than all the rejected applicants requires gargantuan levels of credulousness.
Much of the Left’s rhetoric against the meritocracy has been in the service of justifying racial preferences and standardized testing in university admissions. Defenders of the status quo have subsequently fallen all over themselves to support the supposed meritocracy of the government-university complex. For example, Victor Davis Hansen, in a meandering and unconvincing article, recently attempted to blame the United States’ repeated foreign policy failures on an alleged decline of meritocracy. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz insists that today’s law schools are full of mediocrities—unlike when he and his friends filled elite universities with untrammeled brilliance.
A society’s well being is directly calibrated to its adherence to the brain standard.
The world is moving towards multipolarity. One axis, the West, is led by the U.S., the other—Eurasia and the global south—by Russia and China. Ukraine currently serves as a cauldron of the military conflict between the two axes. Taiwan may become a second such cauldron.
Through sanctions, the West has made economic and financial warfare a part of the conflict. The longest arrow in the U.S.’s quiver is the dollar’s reserve currency status. Western economies are based on credit. Central banks serve as the focal point of fiat debt issuance and monetization, interest rate manipulation, and currency debasement. Russia, China, and their cohorts are exploring alternatives to the dollar’s role and the West’s fiat currency, debt, and financialization, discussing arrangements based on gold and commodities, and economic activity centered on agriculture, mining, petroleum, manufacturing, and trade.
It’s a common sense conclusion that these are a more durable economic foundation than fiat debt, whose value is wholly dependent on the ever-shifting whims of politicians and monetary functionaries. Several commentators have hailed the shift away from the West’s fiat currencies and credit to that which is tangible and real. Currently, however, Russia and China’s currencies and credit are just as fiat as the West’s.
Oil was as tangible and real in 1600 as it is now. Why was it regarded as a useless nuisance back then and now it trades at around $76 (or about 1/24th of an ounce of real money, or gold) per barrel? What made oil valuable, the linchpin of the global economy, for which countries have been invaded and wars fought? Somebody figured out how to unlock and control oil’s energy and use it to generate light and power, and to distill it to derive chemicals now used in everything from fertilizers and plastics to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
Direct barter is the means of exchange in primitive economies. Money is the intermediary agent that allows a producer to indirectly trade his or her production for someone else’s, to the benefit of both parties. Gold’s suitability as money has been recognized for millennia. Credit allows those who consume less than they produce to invest their surplus in economic activity that generates returns higher than the interest charged.
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There is no mystery what the best and brightest seek: freedom to think, express, and produce; protection of property and contract rights; security from crime and war. The conundrum is how few times those conditions have even come close to being fulfilled. They stand out like isolated lighthouses, beacons shining through history’s all-too-frequent darkness and tempest tossed seas. There are no such beacons today; the world shuns the brain standard.
It is the human mind and productive activity that imparts value to oil, gold, and credit. The mind is the fountainhead of human progress and wealth. The world has always run on the brain standard. A society’s well being is directly calibrated to its adherence to that standard. Its requirements are not conceptually complicated, but throughout history its sporadic implementation has proven problematic.
Once they’ve got you renouncing your own perceptions of reality, they’ve got you. From Doug “Uncola” Lynn at theburningplatform:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
– Arendt, Hannah. (1951). “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Part 3, Ch. 13
On the same day, a video entitled “The Negation of the Real” was posted on another website and with the following introduction:
If you want to impose a totalitarian system, you have a problem on your hands: reality. The real is in your way and will eventually veto your project. Far sooner, people who can perceive reality will step in and prevent you from taking society over a cliff. Therefore, the only way to install a totalitarian system is to negate the real in the minds of those over whom you would rule. This is accomplished by creating an interpretive frame that deliberately causes people to misunderstand reality, sometimes called a “second reality” or “pseudoreality,” or even a “hyperreality,” which loses all contact with reality through its images and constructions.
The original video was posted 4 days earlier and is the first of a series from a December 2022 conference entitled “Mere Simulacrity” which is a transmogrification of “Mere Christianity”, another book written by C.S. Lewis.
The entire video series is posted at SovereignNations.com and contains tabs at the bottom of each article that connects to each video in order.
For those who have the time, the video series is highly recommended. And, for those who can’t spare the 10+ hours to view the entire set, it is the intention of this article… at the very least… for now… to summarize this first 2-hour video only. I believe it contains key insights as to how the Matrix of Clownworld was constructed.
Degenerate cultures generally produce degenerate art, and our degenerate culture is no exception. From Nora Hoppe at thesaker.is:
The culture and arts of a society, of a civilisation can be seen as a barometer of its development and the quality of its statehood. Confucius, who saw music as the noblest of all the arts, said: “If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.”
The arts – in their truest and noblest forms – have always posed a serious threat to despotic powers because they represent a freedom of spirit and independence of thought.
During the Third Reich, the Nazis engaged in “Cancel Culture” by censoring various forms of music, literature, films, theatre plays that were considered an “an insult to German feeling” and which they condemned as “Entartete Kunst” [degenerate art]. Instead, they promoted works that exalted the “blood and soil” values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.
In times of Roman imperial decay the arts had no fertile soil from which to develop as the previous arts had either been “cancelled” or perverted for propagandistic purposes. Edward Gibbons described the state of culture during the Decline of the Roman Empire: “…this age of indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition. […] The beauties of the poets and orators, instead of kindling a fire like their own, inspired only cold and servile imitations […] The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”
“Tough” is now a dirty word instead of an essential aspect of survival, part of unacceptable toxic masculinity. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.substack.com:
An evolution of free range kids in the neighborhood, from coarse rough necks to soft and feeble captives of safety-first parents.
Your children are overrated and overvalued. You’ve turned them into little cult objects. You have a child fetish and it’s not healthy.
— George Carlin
At the turn of the past century, the people of the northern working-class industrial towns of England were as hard as they come. Before child labor laws were strictly enforced, the iron smelts and coal plants churned out rough necks of all ages.
In early 19th century Britain, the average age that children started to work in factories or fields was 10 years old. The average in the northern industrial centers was as young as 8 years old. Life expectancy in towns of factory production and industrial manufacturing in the 1840s was just 29.
A few started as scavengers, crawling beneath the machinery to clear it of dirt, dust or anything else that might disturb the mechanism. In the mines, children usually started by minding the trap doors, picking out coals at the pit mouth, or by carrying picks for the miners.
Child labor in Britain sparked a library of literary works from Dickensian classics A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, to lesser-known works in Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, and Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies.
The campaign against child labor culminated in two important pieces of legislation—the Factory Act (1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The Mines Act raised the starting age of workers to 10 years.
The gatekeepers are trying to destroy, not preserve civilization. It looks like it’s up to us. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
Keeping civilization alive has fallen to us. A lot of us grew up believing that Democracy would deliver the best of all possible worlds, but that pleasant promise has become very obviously false. Rulership is not equipped to supply honest and humane living; what they are equipped to supply is ever-more rulership, aka, enforcement.
And so there’s no one to cultivate civilization but us, and we must do this. As briefly as possible, I’ll describe our situation, then move on to what we must do.
The Present Ruling Model
As I noted recently, there are two primary models for attaining a civilized, humane, high-trust way of life:
Cultivate civilization within people.
Enforce civilization upon people.
In the best of the old days, governments contented themselves to deal with exterior threats, leaving any number of religions and philosophies free to cultivate civilization within the populace.
Since the the 1970s, however, we’ve seen a hostile takeover of morality… of the enforcement of moral norms by the state. (Via the regulation or criminalization of everything.) Under this model, the state must enforce proper speech and sexual procedures; it must punish and repress the original sin of racism; it must enforce Green to prevent an apocalypse… it must eliminate threat after threat, ultimately bringing us to a promised land.
If the world didn’t want to be deceived, a lot of alternative media sites, including SLL, would have a thousand times the readerships they have. From Edward Curtin at off-guardian.org:
My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries.
I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:
There are great puddles of blood on the world where’s it all going all this spilled blood is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk funny kind of drunkography then so wise…so monotonous… No the earth doesn’t get drunk the earth doesn’t turn askew it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons rain…snow hail…fair weather never is it drunk […] It doesn’t give a damn The earth
But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.
I could, of course, quote liberally from truth-tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true.
I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.
For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media. And the people who believe them.
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STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 