The liberal creed

Quotes:

“Two, four, six, eight; western civ has got to go” (A popular chant at Berkeley University student protests).

“The Left has had to restrict individual freedom of thought and deed in order to destroy the concept of judgement and undermine notions of right and wrong that have been held nearly universally for millennia.” Tammy Bruce in The Death of Right and Wrong.[1]

Any movement determined to restore western civilisation needs to be wedded to a classical western world view.  That world view never placed reliance in an all-powerful state, with its limpet-like grip on everything, nor did it insist on free-ranging entitlement and rights. Liberals insist that centralised socialist power, where experts make the decisions for the people, irrespective of democracy, is the only way.  It is now quite clear that the liberal experiment has been a manifest failure. Making the state a god, with its kingdom on earth, has never worked in any environment where human rights could flourish. Any comparison of the state-orientated history of the Soviet Union, or Spain and Portugal, and their possessions in South America, is easily contrasted with the much more individual and free enterprise history of Northern Europe and North America.  The latter has been far more successful.

The general western populace was, until about the 1960s, under the sway of classical liberalism, although serious inroads into its dominance had been made earlier, especially with the advance of socialist policies, made tenable by the Great Depression.  Remember, the prefix ‘classical’ means the former, or the traditional – those western cultural principles and practices, canvased already, that produced a self-regulating society, constantly growing around an individual rights model, inviolate to statist control, but under the rule of law.  Liberals like to call themselves ‘progressives’ but there has been little social and economic progress on liberalism’s watch.  As it has tightened its grip social and economic progress has either regressed or staggered forward at much retarded rates. As an ideological elite gain too much power and rigidly apply their dogmas they invariably abrogate natural law and constrain human endeavour – as we have seen over centuries in the Spanish-Portuguese, African, Chinese and Islamic spheres of influence.  It was the relentless desire to be free of ideological imperatives that prompted the British civil war and the French and American revolutions. British, American and European constitutional developments all revolved around reducing the role of the state and maximising the natural rights of people. 

Sadly, classical liberalism began to morph under enlightenment influences leaving us with two warring streams: conservatism, with its libertarian off-shoots and modern liberalism, with its neo-conservative, anarchic and communist cohorts.[2]  As philosophers gained sway over western intellectualism the ‘purity’ of classical liberalism began to dilute along nihilistic and empty existentialist lines. Darwin’s evolutionary theory helped drive this movement after the 1850’s.  If humanity is simply a species of animal and life ends in the extinction of each individual there is ultimately nothing for anyone beyond a transitory and pointless existence. We live, we die. At bottom our existence has no intrinsic meaning or worth. As intellectuals moved away from the Judeo-Christian tradition, where the opposite view prevailed, they were left with a world which just nihilistically is.  There is no transcendence and no immutable values; just the nihilist’s empty pointlessness. 

The liberal creed rests on these existentially empty premises.  Ultimately, it devalues humans as individuals. People are just another species of animal; stock units to be managed through life, culled at birth perhaps and terminated towards life’s end, if euthanasia is eventually introduced. People are not treated as the ‘cosmic phenomena’ I describe later in Against Our Night. The liberal creed is therefore an impenetrable barrier to realising the uniqueness and nobility in each individual. No politically focused liberal will be prepared to countenance the reforms I will propose because they cut to the very heart of liberalism’s ideological strictures and will to power.  Liberals insist there are no timeless truths; no values that should not be expediently discarded. The great academic and philosopher (author of the Narnia books), C.S. Lewis, had this to say of a people stripped of their values base:

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests [no character – Author] and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the gelding to be fruitful.” [3] 

Given its antecedents liberalism corrupts social and human capital by insisting people must be bureaucratically managed. It collectivised natural justice and thus usurps individual rights. Liberals got that idea from Bismarck’s centrally managed Prussian state.[4] The spheres of trust and cooperation drain from communities to become artificially sustained at a distance by politicians and their public servants. Without local autonomy communities are less confident in their own ability and less able to pursue opportunities.  Inevitably, they turn into hollow shells.  Fewer developments take place, individuals withdraw into tighter circles of comfortable familiarity. The will to plan for the future wilts under the uncertainty of regulatory oversight.  Hope slowly dies as people, without real command over their own lives and communities, see little point in taking personal initiatives and risks.  Under these conditions the human spirit withers and social progress in all its forms slows to a painful crawl. Any number of behavioural studies have confirmed people, given the freedom to be independent actors, perform much better and are happier than those who are tightly controlled.  Despite their claimed rationality liberals are oblivious to the significance of these studies.

Existentialism, popularised by Jean Paul Sartre, bathed liberalism’s bleak concept in a warmer glow, despite the fact that Sartre advocated terror to keep others in line and accepted his atheism was unliveable.   A rich existentialism champions the obvious point that life gains meaning when individuals infuse it with their hopes, dreams, endeavours, ambitions and actions. They create for themselves a measure of richness and happiness that overwhelms the angst and anxiety of a nihilist reality. Encouraged by Marx, amongst others, liberalism guts this existentialism by radically and rigidly departing from classical liberalism to embrace equality, moral relativism, toleration and state-ism as keynote values. Feminism, the sexual revolution of the sixties and multiculturalism were birthed from these values. They sound good but equality and toleration are the natural enemies of true individual liberty.  As Tocqueville observed:[5]

“…one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom… Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power...  As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage…”

You cannot have social equality coexisting with the freedom to pursue personal objectives.  Nor can you tolerate the right to free association, moral standards and free expression if it conflicts with toleration for just about anything.  Champions of tolerance have therefore to be hypocritically intolerant of anyone who does not unquestionably accept their doctrines. Equality, entailing a levelling out of socio-economic peaks and troughs, by introducing government sponsored welfare programmes, is a hallmark liberal imperative, even if it consistently and manifestly fails to work.  From there it is only a short hop to a more pervasive paternalism. Government interprets the social contract as an obligation to protect and provide for everyone using complex systems of regulation, wealth transfers (taxation), strict party political discipline and private rights controls. The herd has to be farm managed, starting at primary-elementary schools.  The only trouble is this rigid formula has only served to atrophy social progress, damage lives, create massive inequalities and deny personhood itself.  The nihilistic existentialism offered by atheism has no staying power.  Operating under its imperatives the Soviet Union lasted only 70 years.  China’s Marxism has had to be given a capitalist face to survive.  The liberal’s world view allows the individual only instrumental worth.  Every human being’s latent worth and potential is lost in control, processes and social stratification.  The liberal elite have nothing to offer us but the grey world of government control and the serf-like lives of workers submitted to a neo-liberal economic order.

Classical liberals, like me, find all of this intolerable.  We look on in anguish as the West dies numerically, morally and culturally.  We despair at what the world will become as the most advanced culture in human history is systematically dismembered.  We want a society where people can maximise their potential, in a world where personal responsibility and the good of society tempers regard for things that undermine civil society.  Put more clearly, I should be free to pursue my personal interests under a values regime that expects I will act responsibility for both my benefit and the good of society as a whole. Freedom exists to make choices across a range of options that are all right and good. Altruism and responsibility reign when individuals are at liberty to express their own individuality and understand what that liberty requires as a social response.  In his book, The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo explains the social science research that demonstrates this to be so. In essence, western societies grew up around acceptance that freedom and responsibility had to be held in tension.  The Victorians understood this well; modern liberals do not. They think people should have a licence to do what they like and then they regulate and tax to impose some sort of order on the chaotic monster they have birthed.

Before launching into the liberal creed keep in mind that most people in the West have been propagandized or coerced into faith in contemporary liberalism and the guilt-ridden deprecation of their own civilisation.  Given the electoral record of libertarianism in the U.S.A. it is alarmingly clear that the numbers able to distinguish clearly between classical liberalism and contemporary liberalism are small.  It is much the same across the western world. The tragically thin world view offered by today’s liberalism has been so inculcated, by constant propaganda, into the western mind that most hypnotically follow the pied piper.  They are no longer able or willing to question liberalism’s veracity, or its long-term viability. Even when confronted with vast debt, social dysfunction and massive inequality they assume all will eventually be solved by more taxation and more government programmes.

Corporatism on the other hand is more exposed to critique, exemplified at the moment by the widespread resentment over the secretive trans-pacific partnership negotiations. There is every reason to believe it will be a further advance along the global-corporatist road. Liberalism is far more seductive and difficult to see past. That is almost certainly why corporatists keep themselves closely aligned with the liberal political elite.  They can hide behind their coat tails, using their money and power to keep liberalism in control and avoid full exposure to valid criticism and legal sanction.  The bail-outs after the global financial crisis proved how fully the liberal elite understand the symbiotic nature of this power partnership.

The main elements in the liberal world view creed are contained in Table Seven in Against Our Night.  This is an important resource, so please download Against Our Night to study the table.

[1] Ibid.

[2] It is regrettably true that conservatism can swing towards anarchic liberalism when it embraces an exaggerated libertarianism.  Libertarian liberals are simply liberals who have renounced state-ism, but in all other respects accept liberalisms exaggerated individuality and rights to an extent that many liberals are not happy accepting.

[3] From Lewis’s 1947 book, The Abolition of Man.

[4] Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, p.240.

[5] Ibid. Alexis de Tocqueville (1851), Democracy in America.