via
Western Spring
Western Spring Editor's Note: There
follows the transcript, slightly modified, of a very enlightening and
incisive speech, made by Greg Johnson of Counter Currents at a meeting
of the London Forum in October 2015. This speech is well worth listening
to, and can be found on the internet,
and the words and arguments used well worth studying and inwardly
digesting for use when encountering debate with ‘right-wing’ individuals
in particular, who have not yet progressed to nationalism:
The Refutation of Libertarianism
The
title of my talk is a refutation of libertarianism, but it could be
sort of an autobiographical thing, because it really is the story of how
I started out as a libertarian individualist and ended up being a
racist and an anti-Semite, and a kind of fascist!
How did that happen?
Well,
it’s not an uncommon progress of thought, it’s not an uncommon thing,
in fact in the United States in the past five or six years after the Ron
Paul kind of movement got big, a lot of people got interested in his
brand of libertarian individualism and slowly migrated further to the
right, to ethno-nationalism and to White nationalism and so forth. And
I’m familiar with that intellectual dialectic because I went through it a
long time before hand.
So what is libertarianism?
Libertarianism is basically the politics of individualism, and individualism is both a metaphysical and a moral thesis.
What is metaphysical individualism?
Well,
it’s basically the position that only individuals exist. Meaning that
groups are just collections of individuals with no independent meaning
and reality or identity. Groups are just groups of individuals and every
trait they have is derived from their constituent parts.
Metaphysical
individualism is connected with a view that I call universalism, and
universalism is the idea that there is only one race, the human race. We
hear that all the time? Which is just a collection of individuals.
So
universalism implies no meaningful distinction between in-groups and
out-groups, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. There’s just one big race and we’re
just a bunch of individuals. Therefore politics as Carl Schmitt defined
it is impossible. Politics for Schmitt is all about the distinction
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. And for the libertarian
individualist ultimately politics exists only on the sort of waning
views of these smaller groups, these in-groups and out-groups that we
imagine to be important, but they aren’t, and we need to get over our
identification with these groups.
Therefore
partiality to your in-group, as opposed to out-groups is morally
illegitimate because there ultimately is no real ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Therefore, we have to come up with a way of dealing with one-another –
it’s not ‘us’ and them, it’s just ‘you’ and ‘me’. We’re just
individuals.
So
how can you and I get on with one-another? That brings us to the moral
question of individualism, and that answer that the libertarian has is
basically this:
If
there are no real groups, then there are no group values, there are
just individual values, individual preferences, and the purpose of
social institutions is just to allow individuals to pursue their own
individual preferences. It’s all about the pursuit of individual
happiness.
The great facilitator of individuals pursuing their own aims is capitalism.
And what is capitalism?
Well if you have something that I want and I offer you a good price for it, we can trade, right?
It’s
mutually beneficial, it’s voluntary, we’re both satisfying our
self-interest — and if you have nothing that I want and I have nothing
that you want, well we just walk on by. We just leave one-another alone,
you know, we are just ships passing in the night, or strangers passing
in the street.
The
market place requires only a minimal ‘night-watchman’ kind of state to
protect us against force, and fraud, and breach of contract. And as
individuals we have to practise a certain kind of individualistic ethic.
And what is the ethic of individualism?
It requires us to treat individuals as individuals. It’s very simple, right?
So
what that entails is that we have to blind ourselves, if you will, to
the various morally unimportant groups that are vestiges from our past.
Groups we must blind ourselves to are: race; we must blind ourselves to
class; we must blind ourselves to sex differences; we must blind
ourselves to religious differences; to national differences, to all the
things that divide us. Because these groupings are unreal and ultimately
unimportant, we’re all just individuals.
The individualism ‘game’, is highly effective and advantageous for all players.
If
there are no in-groups and no out-groups, just one race of individuals,
then the scale of social organisation and social co-operation is
implicitly global.
What does that mean?
It
means we can have vast institutions where people are co-operating to
change the world and the West has changed the world. What we call
modernity, the transformation of the world in the last couple of hundred
years has come about by individuals co-operating with one-another to
create large scale institutions that have transformed the world.
If
you live in a tribal society – a low trust tribal society – where
strangers are regarded with suspicion, the scale of social order is
severely constricted and once you run out of first and second cousins
there’s really nobody you can trust, nobody you can co-operate with, and
so that constrains society. Whereas the individualist game means that
everybody who plays can trust everybody else, co-operate with everybody
else, there’s no in-group or out-group, and that means that we can scale
up to global civilisations, to galactic civilisations eventually,
there’s really no end point to it, as long as everybody plays by these
rules.
Now,
the trouble with the individualism game though is that people cheat.
Now, of course in any game people can cheat, but the individualist game
has a unique disadvantage?
How do you cheat an individualist?
By working as a member of a group. But individualism prides itself on being blind to people working as members of groups.
Individualist
are always slow to catch on when selfish groups are working with
one-another against them. They’re always slow to catch on, because they
are proud of being blind to groups. They might think, well, there’s
something a little suspicious here, but I’m bigger than that. I’m just
going to just keep playing the game that way I have been taught, and
hope maybe, that I’ll set a good example, that I’ll change these
tribal-minded people, these cheaters, they’ll want to be like me.
And
the underlying assumption of all Western liberal individualists, is
that everybody can be like us, everybody wants to be like us, we don’t
even have to try really, to assimilate them, we’re just, our way of life
is so wonderful, right? They can be like us, they want to be like us,
they will be like us, we just have to persevere in showing how open and
good we are – showing them the fruits of our civilisation, and they’ll
come here and participate. They won’t come here to take it away from us,
they’ll come here to participate in making everything grow and be
better.
Now,
it’s interesting that the most important founder of modern
libertarianism, of race and nation blind libertarianism was Ayn Rand.
She was born in Russia as Melisa Rosenbaum, she was ethnically Jewish
and it just so happened that the intellectual movement that she created
called objectivism, was overwhelmingly Jewish in its leadership, but of
course the followers were piously blind to that uncomfortable fact.
It was obviously just meritocracy, right?
That
they were all just rising because they were so good. It wasn’t because
they were all first cousins from Winnipeg, which is actually true, and
before that it was Minsk, or somewhere like that!
It
was just meritocracy at work, colour blind meritocracy, and if you’re
uncomfortable you’ve got to close your eyes because the virtue of
objectivism is blindness, not objectivity, when it comes to race and
ethnicity.
In
that, libertarianism is sort of like the Frankfurt School, which is
another Jewish intellectual movement. The Frankfurt School basically
teaches ‘us’ that we have to be maximally open to the upward mobility of
disadvantaged groups, previously excluded groups, and all
these minority groups are just proxies for organised Jewry basically.
The
goal of the new left really, is to create maximum upward mobility for
organised Jewry, and all these others are there as a part of their
coalition to help them move forward. It’s there to create upward
mobility for them and to also blind us to the fact they’re working
together and colluding together as a tribe, and it’s a very, very
effective tool. It’s a very effective ideology.
What kind of people preach blindness as a virtue?
People who are up to no good!
So, what is the refutation of libertarianism?
Well,
it’s a self-refutation in a way. The individualism game blinds its
players to collectivist cheats, and the only way to save the game of
individualism is to exclude the cheats. That could be any group that
comes into Western individualist societies and demand that you treat
them as an individual in every interaction with them. They demand that
you give them a fair shake.
When
you come to them and expect reciprocity, somehow it’s always their
cousin who’s better qualified for the job. And so if you play a game by
those rules, it doesn’t take many rounds, many iterations of that game
before you start losing your power, your wealth, your society, to the
people who cheat. And so libertarian individualism is a sucker’s game if
you don’t exclude the cheats.
Well, when you start thinking that way though, you are no longer a libertarian individualist are you?
You start thinking, how do we get these people out. How do we physically remove these people from where we live?
That’s fascism, right?
Just ask anybody who reads the Guardian what that is, they’ll say, ‘aha, aha, that’s fascism!
This
is how it’s happened, this is how so many former Ron Paul fans right,
in the last few years, just through struggling with online debates
basically, and it’s been taking place a lot online, have moved from
being libertarian individualists to being White nationalists for want of
a better term.
They
realise that if they really value the individualist capitalist model of
society, they cannot practice that without creating a bubble around it,
and that bubble is a bubble of violence that has to exclude the cheats,
the tribes, the parasite tribes.
And what’s the best way of defining that bubble?
Well,
it turns out the most practical way of defining it is in terms of
ethnic groups, of nations, and so suddenly they’re nationalists and that
dialectic has been happening over and over again and I’ve been helping
it along a bit, I’ve been rehearsing these arguments for years with
people, and I’ve decided that I wanted to write this out and boil this
down because I want to put it in a little book I’m working on called the
White Nationalist Manifesto. There’s a need for a kind of primer
arguing for racial nationalism and part of arguing for racial
nationalism is excluding the false alternatives that a lot of people get
distracted by. And those false alternatives are primarily on the right,
and those are conservatism, that conserves nothing, and libertarianism,
which can only be practices by excluding the parasite tribes, which
means that you have to be a nationalist.
So,
the end-point of this intellectual journey for people is the
realisation, that individualism is not universal. Individualism is a
product of the unique evolutionary and cultural history of Europeans,
and it turns out that the more northern the European, the more
individualistic they tend to be, and the less ethnocentric they tend to
be. There is a writer named Will Rogers who’s famous for saying that “a
stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet”. That is a totally Nordic
individualist attitude.
There’s
no Armenian or Hebrew equivalent of that phrase. There’s no equivalent
of that from South Europe, there’s no equivalent of that from the Near
East, no equivalent of that from the Far East or Africa, or Papua, or
any place else. They don’t think that way. They don’t think that way
because their mentalities are the product of different environments and
different social histories, different cultural histories.
Well, if a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet, what does that mean?
It
means you’re out trekking looking for a mammoth to hunt and you meet
another band of people. If you are open to them rather than suspicious,
if you take certain risks to approach them in friendship, and you are
capable of co-operating, you’ve increased your social scale. And that
pattern has basically been perpetuated for thousands of years and it is
the reason why Northern Europeans in particular have been able to create
large scale, high trust, societies with very little public corruption,
large scale businesses and non-profit organisations. It is tremendously
advantageous until we admit people who cheat.
And
then the virtues that made our civilisation possible are turned against
us. Our willingness to be open and take certain risks to be open are
not reciprocated, they’re just regarded as ‘bugs’, as flaws to be
exploited. And there’s nothing more obscene than being exploited for
your virtues, because of your virtues.
I
once got some people mad at me when I said you know, there should be a
difference between the punishment meted out to a guy who coshes you over
the head from behind and steals your wallet, and the guy who comes up
to you in the bus station with a sob story, and says, “Oh, I lost my
wallet, and I’m trying to get home, my wife’s about to have a baby,
could you … “, and he’s lying, right?
The
first guy steals your money, but he doesn’t undermine the trust that is
the basis of our civilisation, but the second guy, not only swindles
you out of your money, he undermines civilisation itself.
I swear, I’d put them on the gibbet for that!
You
have to preserve the foundations of civilisation, and that means the
ability to trust strangers, for us. We are wired to be open to others,
and our sense of high mindedness is caught up with taking risks to
extend sociality. And when people exploit that, they have to be called
out, and they have to be excluded, and if we have leaders who say, “No,
no! We are defined by the value of openness and trust”, and they keep
pushing this line even though it’s obviously the case that it is not
being reciprocated and that we’re being exploited, then we have to
relieve these leaders, of their powers and responsibilities. Which is my
nice way of describing Kai Murros’s National Revolution, right?
So, that was about twenty-one minutes, so that’s good, libertarianism doesn’t take very long to be refuted.
Most of these bad ideas are maintained by the suppression of better ideas. That’s how the system works!
The
enemy controls the media, because they have to control the media. They
control academia, because they have to control academia.
If there was open discussion of these things, their ruling consensus would evaporate, practically overnight.
So, I want to thank you all for being part of the London Forum, because it’s a safe space for doing this kind of thing.
Eventually,
I think we’re going to reach a day, and it’s going to come very
quickly, when we’re all going to be surprised how brittle and hollow the
reigning consensus is. And how its ability to maintain order by
supressing dissent and by making dissenters feel alone breaks down.
At
the beginning of 1989 all the smart money said that Communism would be
around for a lot longer. They were totally unaware that the system was
hollowed out, that people were cynical, that it was very brittle, that
very were willing to kill or die to maintain it, and it was only a kind
of momentary glitch, kind of unpredictable glitch in the system’s power
to intimidate people and to make dissenters feel that they were alone,
that allowed the streets to fill up in Dresden and Leipzig and for
people to realise that they were not alone, that they were the majority
and that the system was hollow. And the system started imploding from
the top.
I
think that the system that we’re in today is just as hollow and just as
brittle, and is based on the same lie as Communism was. And what going
to destroy it is the day when people realise that their dissent is not
alone.
The
media works by broadcasting signals out from a central point to
isolated consumers of information, and that’s how they reinforce their
narrative. They would love it if we were all alone in apartments,
watching the TV or the Internet, watching it flicker, pumping their
information into our heads. They would love it if they could do that
because they can control our minds and control the narrative, right?
As
soon as people start speaking face to face with one-another, they can’t
control that, yet. The only way they can control that is by
intimidating people, making feel like, “well I’m alone, I can’t speak
out”.
That’s how they control us!
I
was in Sweden a week ago today, and I was sitting in the breakfast room
of the hotel, with some people who were hosting the event that I was
speaking at, and I said, “You know, one out of four people in this
breakfast room is a Sweden Democrat, you don’t know who they are”.
“One out of four people you ride with on the subway in Stockholm is a supporter of your views and you don’t know who they are”.
There
has to be a point where we become more visible, and therefore in
person-to-person interactions, we can break down the power of the
establishment to control how we think.
That point will come, eventually. I don’t know how it will come, there’s no party here like there was a few years ago.
The
Front National has a huge support base, the Sweden Democrats have 27%
of the electorate on their side. It would be possible in those
countries, for there to be a day when everybody comes out as a
nationalist, and suddenly you see people wearing a little Front National
ribbon or a little Sweden Democrat ribbon on their lapel, and suddenly
you realise, “Wow! These people are not disproportionately: rural;
uneducated; violent and stupid” like the media would have most people
believe nationalists are.
They’d
realise, “My, gosh! My veterinarian is a nationalist, the person I
entrust my dog to, is a nationalist. The person who helps children cross
the street at the public school, is a nationalist”.
They’d realise that we’re smarter than average, better educated than average, and so on and so forth.
The
average Frenchman believes Front National supporters are rural
bumpkins, whereas in fact they are overwhelmingly: urban; they have
higher than average education; they have higher than average incomes,
and they’re younger than people think they are on average. But as long
as the party is invisible, the false narrative of the enemy will reign.
So
there will come a day I think, sometime in France, sometime in Sweden
and sometime in England, when their power to maintain those false views
will be disrupted. And when that is disrupted, and their ability to
contain our ideas breaks down, I think you will see a … perhaps a viral
outbreak of nationalism.
Anyway, I want to leave you with that thought and thank you for having me here.