I have the map to a much better future for humanity – but here is the best news of all: We’re headed that way already.Photo by: Ben Francis
What brought me out to play? Obsession, more than anything else. I have been building my argument for – yikes! – forty years by now, but the work I’ve been doing since 2014 is making me progressively more sanguine.
Within the next few generations, Ds will regain both social and demographic dominance in the West, plausibly never to lose it again. This is not an ‘arc of history’ but simply the necessary eventual consequence of trillions of individual choices:
So long as people retain the technology to reproduce only by choice, only Ds will be reliably prolific, and, accordingly, every other cultural and familial leadership strategy will be gradually self-eradicating.
People will be free from each other because almost no predators will be cultivated, with those few easily dealt with. This is the only way people have ever been free, but now the enemies of liberty are graciously volunteering to exit the future. Sic semper tyrannosauris.
That’s good news, and I keep hammering on it because more good news falls out from it every time I do. I am not arguing with you, but I am always arguing with me.
I’m going to quote some of what I wrote yesterday, if only to hang onto it, but first here’s something I wrote four years ago, when I was taking my first tentative steps in this direction:
I am the only source of new theory in a host of disciplines of interest to people seeking less government. If you’re reading anyone but me, you are wasting precious time to your own peril.
I think that’s more true now than ever before. I know almost nobody understands what I’m talking about – and I am boundlessly grateful for those who do. But while there is always a new flavor of the month repackaging old ideas, and while there is always a brand new even-more-unreadable Third Thing protection racket slouching toward Bethlehem, as far as I can tell I am the only person detailing a map to human redemption – to the restoration of the qualities of character – and to the consequent peace and plenty – of our most-admirable forebears.
From the debate: Tim O’Keefe asked: “True or false? Imposed laws and rules are for those without values?” In truth, I’m not sure what he’s asking: “We need rules because ‘here there be monsters’?” I didn’t challenge that, nor the commonly-held misapprehension that human beings can exist in the absence of sine qua non human attributes: Values, empathy, compassion, etc. I’m not accusing Tim of anything, but we all imply in our displays that “he doesn’t think my way” and “he is irredeemably incognate” are equivalent claims.
I ignored all that and flew my own kite instead. Here some of the things that I liked in what I said:
Rules and laws are artifacts of paranoia. Every living organism is autonomous and every living human being is sovereign – not subject to any sort of external control. People at war with this simple fact erect fortresses of verbiage, behind which they cower and eventually sunder.
[….]
Laws are the means by which we pretend to have magically conjured wise and peaceful choices in other people, when in fact these emerge solely from self-responsible husbandry – from good fathering.
As a way of checking that math, observe that civility always decreases as the number of laws, rules, proscriptions and prohibitions increases. If the objective is peace and plenty, coercion and compulsion are their opposites.
[….]
The offspring of well-fathered families are reliably wise and peaceful in their choices. Everyone else less so. Not only will legislation not alter this fact, it undermines fatherhood and thus creates still more of the maladies it professes to cure. The good news? “Family planning” results in fewer bad parents, so the proportion of well-fathered children will tend to increase going forward. The future will be civilized because less-that-perfectly-civilized people are “free” by now to refrain from replicating their poor choices.
[….]
Twenty thousand gun laws don’t stop school shootings, and neither will forty thousand. Only the offspring of well-fathered families exhibit the characteristics people falsely attribute to laws, rules, edicts, prayers and incantations.
[….]
What deludes us about government – secondly; we are first deluded by thinking that it’s something other than usurpation and larceny by sleight-of-hand – is that we live at the end of a golden age of good fathering, yet we attribute the peace we have known to government, when in fact civility is solely caused by the self-governance that we learned from our fathers and other self-responsible men in our lives. In consequence, we think the problems occasioned by coercion, compulsion and despoliation will be solved by still more coercion, compulsion and despoliation. In fact, though, only a ‘herd immunity’ of Ds fatherhood can save the West. That will be restored, as discussed above, but it will take some time.
[….]
‘Herd immunity’ is a metaphor for the way healthy herds forestall contagion. When we had a lot of good fathers, grandfathers and uncles around, we could abide a few bad ones and still grow underfathered boys into good fathers. Now that fatherhood has been chased out of the family, and Ds has been supplanted as our civilization’s leadership cadre by Ci, we no longer have that herd immunity. This is the cause of the chaos that champions of ever-bigger government decry.
You can have dads or you can have cads, but you can’t have both. Cad societies sunder in poverty, tyranny and crime. But because of “family planning,” all DISC strategies except Ds are infecund-by-choice and only Ds is reliably prolific. This is why Ds will take the world back – not from its virtue, so much, as from the gradual self-eradication of every other approach to human life.
Fifty years ago, we lived in a very different America. Fifty years from now, we’ll be on our way to recovery.
[….]
The catastrophic failure of government is not an anarchy – a blackout is not an alternative energy plan – but the inevitable catastrophic failure of government is an excellent argument to organize your polis without a government in the first place, or to dismantle the one you have. Government is predatory when it’s healthy and it is genocidal in demise.
People have made claims about stateless civilizations from the past, but the only one that matters to me is the culture of the Hoplite Greeks: The existing state – colonization by the Persian Empire – had failed and withdrawn, and the people living in the Hellas were left to fend for themselves. The men were all about equally-matched in weaponry and marital prowess. They organized to support each other against brigands and against any one of them who might try to dominate the others as a king – an archon, hence an-archy. They eventually ruined it all with “democracy,” alas, but they discovered and taught us all about freedom from all would-be tyrants.
None of this matters, though: People do as they please. That’s how we’re made. Some predators can be temporarily delayed by threats, but the choice not to do wrong is not a choice to do right, and moral goodness is enduringly constant, not episodic. Civil order exists when the vast majority of people choose to live continuously in peace, and it fails when a resolute minority opts for predation instead. When the parasites overwhelm the host, the polis fails – catastrophically – even though no one planned for that outcome. But because people do as they please, organizing the polis around predation while claiming the purpose is civil order – that is to say, organizing a government – assures that eventual catastrophic failure.
Just as compulsory public schooling is the only way to achieve universal illiteracy, government is the only way to slip every neck into the same noose. If only blackouts were this good at propagandizing their victims… 😉
I know why – now more than ever. I can help – if that’s what you want. I repay effort – if you dare to make one. But: I grow regardless. In four years’ time, I have dealt with every last objection to anarchism – including Somalia, Somalia, Somalia – all without talking about anarchism at all!
I have the map to a much better future for humanity – but here is the best news of all: We’re headed that way already.
