George Rebane

Conservetarians believe in global diversity and national cohesion; progressives believe in global conformity and national diversity.  The former resists global autocracy, the latter sustains global autocracy.

Nationally prominent commentator and executive WSJ editor Gerald Seib recently wrote ‘The Wall Marks a Deep Cultural Divide’ (in the 21jan19 WSJ) a piece describing attributes which divide America that focused on “character differences”.  In his piece Seib said, “One question asked whether immigration adds to the character and strength of America by increasing its diversity and bringing in new talent, or detracts from American character by putting burdens on government services and creating language barriers”, and then cited the disparate responses of the Trump and resist-Trump supporters.

While I agreed with Seib’s subsequent analysis, I felt that he did not reach deep enough to a more basic, revelatory, and explanatory level (in the sense of being able to reliably predict derivative attitudes and behaviors).

I emailed Mr Seib a brief explanation of my critique: Mr Seib – Our divide goes much deeper than can be discovered with pabulum questions about “American character”.  If these surveys were structured and administered so as to discover what kind of future world order Americans would like to see the US being a part of (i.e. Westphalian sovereign nation-states vs a peerage of jurisdictional fiefs of a global government), then the answers would be more revealing (and reliably predictive) as to the respondents’ attitudes about border security, immigration policy, cultural diversity, paths to citizenship of illegal aliens, etc, since all these are dependent on how people value culturally cohesive (vs fragmented) nations, and whether/how such a community of nations should continue to organize the world’s peoples.

In his reply he thanked me for “an exceptionally thoughtful note” with which he agreed that “these issues run much deeper”.  With this exchange I was heartened to identify one more prominent national thinker who concurs with the seminal Great Divide perspective I have tried to communicate to RR readers.

These issues do indeed run much deeper in the sense that there are meta-beliefs (such as described above) that give rise to the more readily observed, perceived, and discussed derivative beliefs reported in the daily media and which are extracted with surveys, no matter how clumsily constructed and administered.

Today, people continue to embrace dimly and/or misunderstood concepts of political systems, components and roles of culture, and the meanings of a small blizzard of terms they hear pundits spray at them as if extracted off stone tablets from Mt Sinai.  To confirm this, one need look no further than our own RR comment streams.  The bottom line comes down to whether a person instinctively hews to the siren song of security promised by globalized collectivist orders like progressivism, Nazism, socialism, communism, … that are lumped under the Left label.  Or the countering socio-economic ideologies like libertarian, conservative, conservetarian, republican, Westphalian, capitalist, … lumped under the Right label.  (Of course, per the Alinsky teachings, the Left instinctively denies the outcome of its public policies, and accuses the Right of exactly the very same socially toxic practices.)  

My own lifelong opposition to collectivism, as practiced above the bounds of family (clan?), derives primarily from my family’s experiences and my own education/training, combined with a long career in business and academe.  Collectivism has always been unnatural in the sense of organizing and solving problems in the opposite way from the way Nature does.  Anthropology teaches that over the ages evolution (starting in the Cambrian explosion) always pruned every errant branch of life that attempted to control and manage large critters and cultivations from one central location. (Some large dinosaurs actually attempted two separately located brains for more efficient control.  And the architectures of our own and other modern critter brains are composed of functionally separate, layered, neural modules that can operate individually or in various concerts with other modules to perceive and perform.)

Collectivists (e.g. progressives, liberals, socialists, communists, nazis, …) promote large scale central planning and control by experts and elites a fortiori carried out by/through big governments.  In doing so they exhibit the ultimate hubris of Man, attempting to observe the unobservable, and control the uncontrollable.  Conservetarians instead adhere to the natural order exemplified by organizations based on maximally distributed knowledge and control, which therefore promote smaller governments in social orders.  And concomitantly such distributed social structures naturally inhibit autocracies, and also reduce them to the extent that they are allowed purchase in any existing system of governance.  (Our progressive elites give no evidence of acknowledging this, and their compliant constituents don’t even understand the concept – cf comment stream below.)

Because of its inherent inflexibility to successfully micro-manage its target social order, collectivist governments must needs impose further unnatural policies of uniformity – the ‘one size fits all’ laws, regulations, punishments, values, mores, … – all imposed in the name of ‘social justice’, ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘racial equity’, ‘gender equity’, and ‘inclusivity’.  Citizens in opposition to such resulting policies are then automatically ascribed/exposed, and dealt with as social misfits and extremists, even though their opposition has nothing to do with these politically correct attributes.  In short, the propagandized basis for each collectivized policy automatically identifies and segregates its opponents into established aberrant categories (see also the Chinese social metric applied to all citizens),.

Collectivism’s ‘inflexibility to appropriately micro-manage’ arises from technical reasons that describe the design of our universe.  These reasons are really meta-constraints that are scientifically established in the fields of measurement, estimation, (system) identification, and prediction.  In short, since time immemorial ‘civilized’ collectivists (e.g. absolute monarchies) have attempted to govern people by means that inherently cannot work, and therefore in their desperation to stay in power, have made the lives of billions into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” existences.  Today’s collectivists, informed of this history, are therefore evil in their purposive promulgation of it; or if ignorant of the history and the whole science of planning and control, are then Lenin’s useful idiots who base their beliefs on sugar-coated slogans and elevator speeches made acceptable by an education which lobotomized whatever critical thinking ability they might have had.

[For the technical reader, the above described reduction of predictive attributes to the indicated globalist vs. Westphalian (GvW) minimum can also be explained via the mathematics of principal component analysis.  PCA would efficiently abstract the GvW discriminant that can subsequently be used to efficiently and reliably predict a more extended list of derived/attendant behaviors expressed within a complex social system like, say, the socio-political preferences of individuals in present day America.]

[27jan19 update] Re the Steven Frisch contribution – some of our readers perceived that this commentary was also a thinly veiled invitation, nay, command performance for those of our liberal readers who can include intellecting with their inevitable invective.  Mr Frisch is the local progressive poster child for that.  Without contributions from the likes of him, it is clear that RR would only be an echo chamber of conservetarian thought.  However, here the regular participation of about five or six liberals, with the occasional enraged progressive reader thrown in, makes these comment streams both enlightening and entertaining (although I cringe whenever ‘one of ours’ can’t keep it together and goes for tit-for-tat ad hominems.)

Mr Frisch has again demonstrated that the only way he can enter a debate/discussion of contending ideas is when he takes control of both sides of the argument by putting words into the mouths of his opposites, and then slaying the (paper mâché) dragons he has brought to life.  Here he could neither understand nor debate the seminal socio-political discriminant I identified (which was perfectly clear to Gerald Seib), so he made up another stream of pabulum that attempted to convey that somehow the Westphalian convention (principle) was badly outdated, to be replaced by a relatively minor post-WW2 tweak that the UN added.  In the restructuring of world order by western civilization, Westphalia is the seminal root of the tree that has given rise to a number of derivative branches, of which Mr Frisch is at least familiar with the one he presents.  Those not encumbered with union taught revisionist history immediately recognize such attempts as the comparison of low grade ore with the mother lode, this was made clear by no less than Dr Kissinger (another unknown to the liberal mind because of his relationship with Nixon).

But again, that was not the point of my commentary and reply to Gerald Seib’s contribution in the pages of the WSJ.  We must not miss the thing in Mr Frisch’s favor, and that is that none of his constituents have any better understanding, if even that, of the issue here presented.  To those, who can parse the topic of a paragraph, Mr Frisch’s sonorous snark, sprinkled with irrelevant details, carries the day.  However, that constituency is a very wide one that flexes its muscle daily across our land – when the Right lost the country’s public educational system, the tipping point, as predicted by Lenin, was passed.

What is more revealing about Mr Frisch’s counter, is the added extra where he had to again denigrate my immigrant status – for what it’s worth, I have been a US citizen longer than Steven has been alive.  In the past he has called me everything from a traitor to a Nazi – again displaying that he doesn’t even understand the definition of collectivist, and cannot ascribe the correct historical forms of governance to collectivism.  But most recently hereunder he resorts to labeling me as “the master race propagandist of Tallinn” and “Tallinn Man”.  Now, attributing someone white and from northern Europe with pejorative labels to their country of origin is perfectly allowable and politically correct for the progressive sensibility, but don’t you dare try to refer to someone in the same vein as a the ‘Mexico City Man’ or ‘Tegucigalpa Man’ or the ‘Kinshasa Man’.  You’d be immediately branded as a racist xenophobe, with no further evidence needed to march you to the wall, should they ever achieve their dream.

The bottom line of this comparative analysis is that there is absolutely no middle ground with the Progressive Left, simply because there exists no intellectual concordance with any of them – as witnessed here once more, there is nothing joining us that provides a bridge or supportive platform for productive dialogue.