Kerry Bolton The Perversion of Normality - Conclusion

 The Frankfurt School and other forms of social criticism — whatever their anti-capitalist and socialist pretensions — were and remain important to the oligarchy. The social sciences provide a scientific rationale for the destruction of traditional remnants which hinder capitalism from proceeding to its next phase: globalisation and what one of their intellectuals, Francis Fukuyama, calls ‘the end of history’. 

While much of the world turns to ‘populism’ and puts up barriers to globalisation in reaction to globalist demands for ‘open borders’, on the other hand, new identities have been created by detached individuals re-clustering into interest groups that in the name of ‘human rights’ demand to be fully integrated into the global market economy. Genders, races, families, states, nations, neighbourhoods, as supposedly fluid ‘social constructs’, can be deconstructed and reshaped at will, and such a fluidity accords with the demands of ever-fluid — expanding — production and consumption. The ‘freedom’ for which Fromm hoped has become the servitude which he feared, and about which Jung warned. What these new identities demand — identity politics, as it is called — is not self-determination or self-help, like the Black nationalism of the Marcus Garvey or Louis Farrakhan type, but ‘rights’ that necessitate dependence. Hence, the new ‘revolutionary’ identities envisaged by Herbert Marcuse et al. merely end up as clients of the System. 

In states targeted for deconstruction, which persist with some vestiges of tradition, such as Putin’s Russia and Shi’ite Islam, identity politics, especially feminism, its concomitant abortion in the name of ‘reproductive health’, and ‘gender fluidity’, are promoted by the Open Society global network, USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Rockefeller, Ford, United Nations agencies, social media corporations and thousands of others, collectively called ‘civil society’, and ‘the international community’.

Are we to suppose that the oligarchs have expended fortunes to fund this process for a century for any other reason than that of control? Are we to suppose that they are too naïve to understand what they are subsidising decade after decade? 

This detachment from organic identities and a sense of place and permanence has created what Richard LaPiere foresaw sixty years ago as the emergence of a ‘new bourgeoisie’. This new class of what might be aptly termed, to borrow Stalin’s phrase, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ has become a repository for the functionaries and CEOs of globalisation, lauded by Pascal Zachary as the next stage in evolution. 

The sensible predicate for social change is organic growth as distinct from artificial ‘social engineering’, as scientists such as Carl Jung and Konrad Lorenz1298   warned. Jung, from the perspective of analytical psychology, and Lorenz, the founding father of ethology, called the problems afflicting modern civilisation pathological, and the malfunctioning of instincts.1299  

Contrary to what ‘progressives’ state in regard to the need for man to be ‘liberated’ from his organic ‘primary ties’, and to break free of the traditions and customs by which they are maintained, Lorenz states that ‘extreme conservativism’ in retaining what has long been tried and tested, ‘is a vital property of the apparatus performing, in cultural evolution, a task analogous to that of the genes in species variation’. It is selection that decides what is to be transmitted as ‘traditional, “sacred” customs and habits’. What is disparaged by the progressives as ‘superstition’ mostly originated with genuine insights and inventions, which have been maintained over generations by taking on sacred and mythic aspects. ‘Retention’ is even more important than ‘additional acquisition’. What can be discarded as obsolete and useless from a survival perspective and what necessitates preserving as indispensable in the cultural heritage, is not something that should be casually decided.1300  

Mircea Eliade pointed out for the same reasons the importance of enduring myths, sacred places and religious rites and ceremonies, in maintaining a sense of a community’s place and purpose in the cosmos.1301   Scorned by the progressives as irrational and useless superstition and ‘magic’, as Julian Huxley put it, or as a plot by the ruling class to keep the people oppressed in the name of ‘God’, as Marx put it, there is a religious element to man’s psyche that is hardwired and should not be causally rejected in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘science’. Julian Huxley, like the Jacobins with their Cult of Reason, proposed a new cult of science with its own rites and ceremonies that would replace all traditional faiths. 

One should look askance at the Critical Theorists and other ‘progressives’ when they dogmatically state that an institution or custom is ‘old fashioned’, ‘reactionary,’ ‘regressive’, and as the cliché goes on so many issues, should not be retained ‘in this day and age’. Removing one element from a multiplicity of traditional, cultural interactions might have devastating consequences, as Lorenz pointed out.1302   ‘Being enlightened is no reason for confronting transmitted tradition with hostile arrogance…’1303

"Pathocracy" - Bolton on Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology

 

The Polish clinical psychologist Dr Andrew M Lobaczewski adopted a Greek term ‘ponerology’ (poeneros =evil)[69] to name his psycho-historical study of the affects of psychopathy on society, history and politics. Ponerology therefore appears to be analogous to Psychohistory developed in the USA. Lobaczewski along with a team of psychologists covertly studied the role of psychopaths in Communist Poland. 

Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology

Lobaczewski’s manuscript for the book Political Ponerology

 went through a circuitous process before being published in the 1980s in Canada. Lobaczewski destroyed the first draft after he was warned a few minutes before a search by State authorities. The second draft was given to an American tourist for delivery to a Vatican dignitary, but Lobaczewski was not able to discover anything further of it. Statistical material and case studies were thereby lost, and the third draft had to be written by Lobaczewski from memory in general terms when he arrived in the USA. [70] Then there were problems finding a publisher in the USA, and Lobaczewski was surprised by the extent of the influence of the American Left.[71]

Lobaczewski came to the same conclusions as Max Nordau and Lothrop Stoddard: 

To individuals with various psychological deviations, the social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world appears to be a ‘system of force and oppression’. Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule. If, at the same time, a good deal of injustice does in fact exist in a given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements emanating from deviants may then be easily propagated among both groups[72] although each group has completely different reasons for favoring such ideas.[73]

Leftist political doctrines serve as a means of recreating the world after the image of the psychopath, in the name of ‘justice’, while overthrowing those normal social laws, rules and morals that the psychopath regards as insufferable oppression.

In the psychopath, a dream emerges like some Utopia of a ‘happy’ world and a social system which does not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving the world would dominate, where they would, of course, be assured safety and prosperity. In this Utopian dream they imagine that those ‘others’, different, but also more technically skilful than they are, should be put to work to achieve this goal for the psychopaths and others of their kin.[74]

Lobaczewski points out that psychopaths quickly realise the effects of their personalities in traumatising normal people, and they are able to use this as a means of reaching goals through terror.[75] This explains why such small groups of psychopaths can lead vast multitudes of normal people through the imposition of terror. ‘Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has severe and deforming effects on his or her personality: it engenders trauma and neuroses.[76] 

On an individual basis, one might observe the effects on a normal person living with a sociopathic spouse: that normal individual will probably eventually suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or other forms of neurosis that can be severe. When psychopaths assume total rule over an entire nation, or even over a small group, the negative influence of the psychopath is thereby extended using politics or religion as a control mechanism. This influence is readily observable in a cult, but the same factors are at work in politics.

Among the categories that Lobaczewski describes is pathological egotism, in which the individual represses anything of a self-critical nature. Lobaczewski relates this to deformities or injuries of the brain, as a symptom of prefrontal characteropathy.[77] He ascribed this condition to Lenin. As we shall see, the condition relates as well to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, et al.Ponerogenic Associations

Lobaczewski was describing the effects of individual psychosis on groups and entire states, with ideologies used as a mask for psychotic aims. This involves the formation of movements and the fermentation of revolts or riots in the name of some high sounding ideal. Lobaczewski writes of this:

It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.

If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. [78]

The ponerogenic association and the doctrine that is developed to justify it is formulated and supported by individuals who sublimate their own psychological failings and free themselves from the need to abide by normal moral principles[79] The process was at work in the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Weather Underground in the USA, who undertook criminal actions in the name of ideology. Andrea Baader was a common criminal before adopting communist doctrine to enhance his life as a sociopath. Donald DeFreeze, the founder of the 1970s communist terrorists in the USA, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), was a violent criminal before intellectualising his criminality with communist doctrine. He started his criminal career at the age of 14 as a gang member in New York, and was serving a sentence in Soledad Prison, California, for armed robbery, when he adopted Leftist doctrine. He had once robbed a prostitute of $10 and had turned a friend into the police. Those who knew him in prison regarded him as an unimpressive thug. DeFreeze escaped from Vacaville Prison in 1973, and while a fugitive founded the SLA.[80] 

Despite its ideological pretensions, SLA continued serving as little more than a gang of bank robbers and kidnappers behind the mask of fighting for ‘equality’. One of the first actions of the SLA was to murder Oakland School Superintendent Marcus A Foster in November 1973 because of his endorsement of mandatory student identification cards to control juvenile crime.[81] To a sociopath such as DeFreeze such measures would indeed represent ‘injustice’, and the killing of an authority figure could be rationalised as the elimination of an oppressor. 

Considering the premises established by Lobaczewski, Nordau and Stoddard, and the techniques of both Ponerology and Psychohistory, most forms of Leftism over the past several hundred years can be seen as the sublimated masks for individuals who would in other circumstances be thieves, rapists, sadists, and murderers. With the extremist notion that the ‘end justifies the means’, and, for example, that lying and any type of deceit are justified in the pursuit of the ideal, the psychopath is given a heroic and noble sanction. Such documents as The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, or Mao’s Little Red Book and the multitude of high-sounding manifestoes issued by the Baader-Meinhoff Gang or Weather Underground are the declarations of a psychopathic war against society, or what Lothrop Stoddard called the ‘revolt against civilisation’. In this credo of the Left, morality, religion and truth are regarded as nothing more than the props of the bourgeoisie. Lobaczewski maintained that gangs, mafias and mobs[82] are of the same type as a communist group.A phenomenon common to such groups is the loss of the individual member to perceive psychotic traits in their leaders; or the ‘atrophy of natural critical faculties’. Psychotic behaviour becomes interpreted as heroism.[83] One might think immediately of the heroic qualities bestowed upon charismatic psychopaths such as Jim Jones or Charles Manson, yet the same process is at work in glorifying the actions of certain political leaders and ponerogenic associations.

Pathocracy

Lobaczewski chose[84] the word pathocracy to describe a state that is run by psychopaths:

I shall accept the denomination of pathocracy for a system of government thus created, wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The name thus selected, above all, emphasizes the basic quality of the macrasocial psychopathological phenomenon, and differentiates it from the many possible social systems dominated by normal people’s structure, custom, and law.[85]

Lobaczewski ascribes the origins of pathocracies to ‘a disease of great social movements’ that infects ‘entire societies, nations, and empires’.[86] The origin of pathocracies and ponerogenic associations among those of a common psychopathic mentality explains their similarity through history.[87] 

The ponerogenic doctrine expounds the ‘end as justifying the means’, and such rationalisations for extreme actions of a psychopathic character open the way for psychopaths to enact their tendencies in the name of ideals. An ideology thereby becomes ‘useful for the purposes’ of liberating the psychopath ‘from the uncomfortable pressure of normal human custom’. Every great social movement can thereby become ‘a host upon which some pathocracy initiates its parasitic life’. Hence a great social movement might have been marked by psychopathic traits from its start, or might have been subsequently taken over by psychopaths. [88] An example of this is the original Labour movement that began with noble and necessary aims, which was taken over by Marxist and other ponerogenic doctrines and associations. 

From: The Psychotic Left

From Jacobin France to the Occupy movement

by Kerry Bolton

Evola - The Procedures of Modern Science

 One of the principal justifications for Western civilization believing itself, since the nineteenth century, to be the civilization par excellence is natural science. Based on the myth of this science, preceding civilizations were judged to be obscurantist and infantile; prey to superstitions and to metaphysical and religious whims. Apart from a few casual discoveries, they were ignorant of the path of true knowledge, which can be reached only with the positive, mathematical-experimental methods developed in the modern era. Science and knowledge have been made synonymous with experimental “positive science,” while the epithet “prescientific” has come to signify a disqualification beyond appeal of any other type of knowledge.

The apogee of the myth of physical science coincided with that of the bourgeois era, when positivist and materialist scientism was in favor. Then there was talk of a crisis of science, and an internal critique occurred, resulting in a new phase inaugurated by Einstein’s theory. As an offshoot of this, the scientistic myth has revived recently with an appraisal of scientific knowledge that in certain cases has had curious developments. Among them, it is claimed that the latest science, having now passed the phase of materialism and cleared the field of old, useless speculations, has reconciled its conclusions about the nature of the universe with metaphysics, presenting themes and views that agree with the certainties of philosophy, and for some, even of religion. Besides the popularizers of Reader’s Digest, certain scientists like Eddington, Planck, and even Einstein have made informal pronouncements of this kind. Hence there is a kind of euphoria, confirmed by the prospects of the atomic era and the “second industrial revolution,” whose very point of departure was modern physics.

All these are only developments of one of the great illusions of the modern world, one of the mirages of an epoch in which, in reality, the dissolving processes have besieged the field of knowledge itself. In order to realize this, it is enough to look beyond the façade. If it is not a matter of popularizers, but of the scientists themselves, and if it is not a case like the knowing smiles between mystifying augurs, which Cicero speaks of, it reveals a naïveté that only an unequaled limitation of horizons and intellectual interests could explain.

None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather, it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense. The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practical necessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on things and on nature. I do not mean its technical and industrial applications, even though the masses attribute the prestige of modern science above all to them, because there they see irrefutable proof of its validity. It is a matter of the very nature of scientific methods even before their technical applications, in the phase known as “pure research.” In fact, the concept of “truth” in the traditional sense is already alien to modern science, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae that can predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena and relate them to a certain unity. And as it is not a question of “truth,” but a matter less of seeing than of touching, the concept of certainty in modern science is reduced to the “maximum probability.” That all scientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openly recognized by every scientist, and more categorically than ever in recent subatomic physics. The system of science resembles a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.

These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs to pure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageable way. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri (simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method that exchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical, purely human need of the intellect. In the final analysis, the impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to a scientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world.

I will not dwell further on these commonplace considerations. Epistemology, that is, reflection applied to the methods of scientific research, has honestly recognized all of them already, with Bergson, Leroy, Poincaré, Meyerson, Brunschvicg, and many others, to say nothing of what Nietzsche himself had seen perfectly well. They have brought to light the altogether practical and pragmatic character of scientific methods. The more “comfortable” ideas and theories become “true,” in regard to the organization of the data of sensorial experience. A choice between such data is made consciously or instinctively, excluding systematically those that do not lend themselves to being controlled; thus also everything qualitative and unrepeatable that is not susceptible to being mathematized.

Scientific “objectivity” consists solely in being ready at any moment to abandon existing theories or hypotheses, as soon as the chance appears for the better control of reality. Thereupon it includes in the system of the already predictable and manageable those phenomena not yet considered, or seemingly irreducible; and that, without any principle that in itself, in its intrinsic nature, is valid once and for all. In the same way, he who can lay his hands on a modern long-range rifle is ready to give up a flintlock.

Based on the above, one can demonstrate that final form of dissolution of knowledge corresponding to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Only the profane, in hearing talk of relativity, could believe that the new theory had destroyed every certainty and almost sanctioned a kind of Pirandellian “thus it is, if you think so.” In fact, it is quite a different matter, in the sense that this theory has brought us even closer to absolute certainties, but of a purely formal character. A coherent system of physics has been constructed to keep all relativity in check, to take every change and variation into account, with the greatest independence from points of reference and from everything bound to observations, to the evidence of direct experience, and to current perceptions of space, time, and speed. This system is “absolute” through the flexibility granted to it by its exclusively mathematical and algebraic nature. Thus once the “cosmic constant” is defined (according to the speed of light), the so-called transformation equations suffice to introduce a certain number of parameters into the formulae used to account for phenomena in order to get over a certain “relativity” and to avoid any possible disproof from the facts of experience.

A simpleminded example can make this state of affairs plain. Whether Earth moves around the Sun, or the Sun around Earth, from the point of view of Einstein’s “cosmic constant” is more or less the same. One is no more “true” than the other, except that the second alternative would involve the introduction of many more elements to the formulae, thus a greater complication and inconvenience in the calculations. For the person unconcerned with one system being more complicated and inconvenient than another, the choice remains free; this person could calculate the various phenomena starting either from the premise that Earth revolves around the Sun, or from the opposite premise.

This banal and elementary example clarifies the type of “certainty” and knowledge to which Einstein’s theory leads. In that regard, it is important to point out that there is nothing new here, that his theory represents only the latest and most accessible manifestation of the characteristic orientation of all modern science. This theory, though far from common or philosophical relativism, is willing to admit the most unlikely relativities, but arms itself against them, so to speak, from the start. It intends to supply certainties that either leave out or anticipate them, and thus from the formal point of view are almost absolute. And if reality should ever revolt against them, a suitable readjustment of dimensions will restore these certainties.

It would be good to look further into the kind and presuppositions of this “knowing.” The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imagines speed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers and symbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, without accepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request. Everything that in recent physics proceeds from that stronghold participates rigorously in its nature: physics is completely algebraized. With the introduction of the concept of a “multidimensional continuum” even that final sensible intuitive basis that survived in yesterday’s physics in the pure, schematic, categories of geometrical space is reduced to mathematical formulae. Space and time here are one and the same; they form a “continuum,” itself expressed by algebraic functions. Together with the current, intuitive notion of space and time, that of force, energy, and movement also disappears. For example, in terms of Einstein’s physics the motion of a planet around the Sun only means that in the corresponding field of the space-time continuum there is a certain “curvature”—a term that, to be sure, cannot have made him imagine anything, dealing again with pure, algebraic values. The idea of a motion produced by a force is reduced to the bare bones of an abstract motion following the “shortest geodetic line,” which in our universe would approximate an ellipse. As in this algebraic scheme nothing remains of the concrete idea of force, even less so can there be room for cause. The “spiritualization” alleged by the popularizers of modern physics, due to the disappearance of the idea of matter and the reduction of the concept of mass to that of energy, is an absurdity, because mass and energy are made interchangeable values by an abstract formula. The only result of all this is a practical one: the application of the formula in order to control atomic forces. Apart from that, everything is consumed by the fire of algebraic abstraction associated with a radical experimentalism, that is, with a recording of simple phenomena.

With quantum theory one has the impression of entering into a cabalistic world (in the popular meaning of the term). The paradoxical results of the Michelson-Morley experiment provided the incentive for the formulation of Einstein’s theory. Another paradox is that of the discontinuity and improbability discovered by nuclear physics through the process of expressing atomic radiations in numerical quantities. (In simple terms: it deals with the evidence that these quantities do not make up a continuous series; it is as if in the series of numbers, three were not followed by four, five, etc., but skipped to a different number, without even obeying the law of probability.) This new paradox has led to a further algebraizing of the so-called mechanics of matrices, used to explain them away, beside a new and entirely abstract formulation of fundamental laws, like the energy constant, action and reaction, and so on. Here one has not only relinquished the law of causality, replacing it by statistical averages, because it seemed to have to do with pure chance: in addition, in the latest developments of this physics one sees the paradox of having to relinquish experimental proofs because their results were found to be variable. The very doing of an experiment allows that one may have one result now and another later, because the experiment itself influences the object; it alters it due to the interdependent values of “position” and “motion,” and to any description of the subatomic phenomena another, just as “true,” can be opposed. It is not the experiment, whose results through this method would remain inconclusive, but rather the pure, algebraic function, the so-called wave function, that serves to provide absolute values in this domain.

According to one most recent theory, which integrates Einstein’s relativity, purely mathematical entities that on the one hand magically spring forth in full irrationality, but on the other are ordered in a completely formal system of algebraic “production,” exhaustively account for everything that can be positively checked and formularized regarding the ultimate basis of sensible reality. This process was the intellectual background to the atomic era’s inauguration—parallel, therefore, to the definitive liquidation of all knowledge in the proper sense. One of the principal exponents of modern physics, Heisenberg, has explicitly admitted this in his book: it is about a formal knowledge enclosed in itself, extremely precise in its practical consequences, in which, however, one cannot speak of knowledge of the real. For modern science, he says, “the object of research is no longer the object in itself, but nature as a function of the problems that man sets himself”; the logical conclusion in such science being that “henceforth man only meets himself.”

There is an aspect in which this latest natural science represents a type of inversion or counterfeit of that concept of catharsis, or purification, that in the traditional world was extended from the moral and ritual field to the intellectual; it referred to an intellectual discipline that, through overcoming the perceptions furnished by the animal senses and more or less mixed with the reactions of the I, would lead to a higher knowledge, to true knowledge. In effect, we have something similar in modern algebraized physics. Not only has it gradually freed itself from any immediate data of sense experience and common sense, but even from all that which imagination could offer as support. The current concepts of space, time, motion, and causality fall one by one, so to speak. Everything that can be suggested by the direct and living relationship of the observer to the observed is made unreal, irrelevant, and negligible. It is then like a catharsis that consumes every residue of the sensory, not in order to lead to a higher world, the “intelligible world” or a “world of ideas,” as in the ancient schools of wisdom, but rather to the realm of pure mathematical thought, of number, of undifferentiated quantity, as opposed to the realm of quality, of meaningful forms and living forces: a spectral and cabalistic world, an extreme intensification of the abstract intellect, where it is no longer a matter of things or phenomena, but almost of their shadows reduced to their common denominator, gray and indistinguishable. One may well speak of a falsification of the elevation of the mind above human sense-experience, which in the traditional world had as its effect not the destruction of the evidences of that experience, but their integration: the potentizing of the ordinary, concrete perception of natural phenomena by also experiencing their symbolic and intelligible aspects.

From Ride the Tiger

Evola on ascetism

 On the one hand, the pariah is a person without a caste, the one who has "lapsed" or who has eluded the "form" by being powerless before it, thus returning to the infernal world. The ascetic, on the other hand, is a being above the caste, one who becomes free from the form by renouncing the illusory center of human individuality; he turns toward the principle from which every "form" proceeds, not by faithfulness to his own nature and by participation in the hierarchy, but by a direct action. Therefore, as great as was the revulsion harbored by every caste toward the pariah in Aryan India, so, by contrast, was the veneration felt by everybody for a person who was above the castes. These beings, according to a Buddhist image, should not be expected to follow a human dharma, just as one who is trying to kindle a fire ultimately does not care what kind of wood is being employed, as long as it is capable of producing fire and light.

Asceticism occupies an ideal intermediary state between the plane of direct, Olympian, and initiatory regality and the plane of rite and of dharma. Asceticism also presents two features or qualifications that from a broader perspective may be considered as qualifications of the same traditional spirit. The first aspect of the ascetic path is action, understood as heroic action; the second aspect is asceticism in the technical sense of the word, especially with reference to the path of contemplation. Beyond complete traditional forms and in more recent times some civilizations have arisen that were inspired in different degrees by either one of these two poles. Later on we shall see what role the two aspects have played in the dynamism of historical forces, even on the plane that is related to the ethnic and racial factor. In order to grasp the spirit of an ascetical tradition at a pure state it is necessary to leave out of consideration the meanings that have been associated with the term asceticism in the world of Western religiosity. Action and knowledge are two fundamental human faculties; in both domains it is possible to accomplish an integration capable of removing human limitations. The asceticism of contemplation consists of the integration of the knowing faculty (achieved through detachment from sensible reality) with the neutralization of individual rationalizing faculties and with the progressive stripping of the nucleus of consciousness, which thus becomes "free from conditionings" and subtracts itself from the limitation and from the necessity of any determination, whether real or virtual. Once all the dross and obstructions are removed (opus remotionis), participation in the overworld takes place in the form of a vision or an enlightenment. As the peak of the ascetical path, this point also represents at the same time the beginning of a truly continuous, progressive ascent that realizes states of being truly superior to the human condition. The essential ideals of the ascetical path are the universal as knowledge and knowledge as liberation.

The ascetical detachment typical of the contemplative path implies "renunciation." In this regard, it is necessary to prevent the misunderstanding occasioned by some inferior forms of asceticism. It is important to emphasize the different meanings that renunciation assumed in higher forms of ancient and Eastern asceticism on the one hand, and in most of Western and especially Christian asceticism on the other hand. In the latter, renunciation often assumed the character of a repression and of a "mortification"; the Christian ascetic becomes detached from the objects of desire not because he no longer has any desire, but in order to mortify himself and to "escape temptation." In the former, renunciation proceeds from a natural distaste for objects that are usually attractive and yearned for; this distaste is motivated by the fact that one directly desires—or better, wills—something the world of conditioned experience cannot grant. In this case, what leads to renunciation is the natural nobility of one's desire rather than an external intervention aimed at slowing down, mortifying, and inhibiting the faculty of desire in a vulgar nature. After all, the emotional phase, even in its purest and noblest forms, is only found at the introductory levels in higher forms of asceticism; in later stages, it is consumed by the intellectual fire and by the arid splendor of pure contemplation.

A typical example of contemplative asceticism is given by early Buddhism in its lack of "religious" features, its organization in a pure system of techniques, and in the spirit that animates it, which is so different from what anyone may think about asceticism. First of all, Buddhism does not know any "gods" in the religious sense of the word; the gods are believed to be powers who also need liberation, and thus the "Awakened One" is acknowledged to be superior to both men and gods. In the Buddhist canon it is written that an ascetic not only becomes free from human bonds, but from divine bonds as well. Secondly, moral norms, in the original forms of Buddhism, are purported to be mere instruments to be employed in the quest for the objective realization of superindividual states. Anything that belongs to the world of "believing," of "faith," or that is remotely associated with emotional experiences is shunned. The fundamental principle of the method is "knowledge": to turn the knowledge of the ultimate nonidentity of the Self with anything "else" (whether it be the monistic All or the world of Brahma, theistically conceived) into a fire that progressively devours any irrational self-identification with anything that is conditioned. In conformity to the path, the final outcome, besides the negative designation (nirvāṇa = "cessation of restlessness"), is expressed in terms of "knowledge," bodhi, which is knowledge in the eminent sense of superrational enlightenment or liberating knowledge, as in "waking up" from sleep, slumber, or a hallucination. It goes without saying that this is not the equivalent of the cessation of power or of anything resembling a dissolution. To dissolve ties is not to become dissolved but to become free. The image of the one who, once freed from all yokes, whether human or divine, is supremely autonomous and thus may go wherever he pleases, is found very frequently in the Buddhist canon together with all kinds of symbols of a virile and warrior type, and also with constant and explicit reference not so much to nonbeing but rather to something superior to both being and nonbeing. Buddha, as it is well known, belonged to an ancient stock of Aryan warrior nobility and his doctrine (purported to be the "dharma of the pure ones, inaccessible to an uninstructed, average person") is a very far cry from any mystical escapism. Buddha's doctrine is permeated by a sense of superiority, clarity, and an indomitable spirit, and Buddha himself is called "the fully Self-Awakened One," "the Lord." 1The Buddhist renunciation is of a virile and aristocratic type and is animated by an inner strength; it is not dictated by need but is consciously willed, so that the person practicing it may overcome need and become reintegrated into a perfect life. It is understandable that when our contemporaries, who only know a life that is mixed with nonlife that in its restlessness presents the irrational traits of a "mania," hear mention of  nirvāṇa (in reference to the condition experienced by the Awakened One), namely, of an extinction of mania corresponding to what the Germans call "more than living" (mehr als Leben) and to a superlife, they cannot help but equate nirvāṇa with "nothingness": for non-mania (nir-vāṇa) means nonlife, or nothingness. After all, it is only natural that the modern spirit has relegated the values cherished by higher asceticism to the things of the "past."

A Western example of pure contemplative asceticism is given by Neoplatonism. With the words, "The gods ought to come to me, not I to them," 2 Plotinus indicated a fundamental aspect of aristocratic asceticism. Also, with the sayings, "It is to the gods, not to good men that we are to be made like," and, "Our concern, though, is not to be out of sin, but to be god," 3 Plotinus has definitely overcome the limitations posed by morality, and has employed the method of inner simplification (άπλώσις) as a way to become free from all conditionings in that state of metaphysical simplicity from which the vision 4 will eventually arise. By means of this vision—"having joined as it were center to center" 5—what occurs is the participation in that intelligible reality that compared to which any other reality may be characterized as more nonlife than life, 6 with the sensible impressions appearing as dreams 7 and the world of bodies as the place of radical powerlessness and of the inability to be.

Another example is given by the so-called Rhineland mysticism that was capable of reaching metaphysical peaks towering above and beyond Christian theism. Tauler's Entwerdung corresponds to Plotinus's άπλώσις and to the destruction of the element of "becoming" (or saṁsāric element) that Buddhism regarded as the condition necessary to achieve "awakening." The aristocratic view of contemplative asceticism reappears in the doctrine of Meister Eckhart. Like Buddha, Eckhart addressed the noble man and the "noble soul" whose metaphysical dignity is witnessed by the presence of a "strength," a "light," and a "fire" within it—in other words, of something before which even the deity conceived as a "person" (i.e., theistically) becomes something exterior. The method he employed consisted essentially of detachment from all things (Abegescheidenheit), a virtue that according to Eckhart is above love, humility, or mercifulness, as he explained in his sermon On Detachment. 8 The principle of "spiritual centrality" was affirmed: the true Self is God, God is our real center and we are external only to ourselves. Fear, hope, anguish, joy, and pain, or anything that may bring us out of ourselves, must be allowed to seep into us. An action dictated by desire, even when its goal is the kingdom of heaven itself, eternal life, or the beatific vision, must not be undertaken. The path suggested by Eckhart leads from the outside to the inside, beyond everything that is mere "image"; beyond things and what represents the quality of a thing (Dingheit); beyond forms and the quality of form (Formlichkeit); beyondessences and essentiality. From the gradual extinction of all images and forms, and eventually of one's own thoughts, will, and knowledge, what arises is a transformed and supernatural knowledge that is carried beyond all forms  (überformt). Thus one reaches a peak in respect to which "God" himself (always according to his theistic view) appears as something ephemeral, that is, as a transcendent and uncreated peak of the Self without which "God" himself could not exist. All the typical images of the religious consciousness are swallowed up by a reality that is an absolute, pure possession, and that in its simplicity cannot help but to appear terrifying to any finite being. Once again we find a solar symbol: before this barren and absolute substance, "God" appears as the moon next to the sun. The divine light in comparison with the radiance of this substance pales, just as the sun's light outshines the moon's.

From The Revolt Against the Modern World 

Decay of the Megapolis

As we have seen Late civilisation is marked by depopulation, after a period of overpopulation has resulted in the decay of the cities. These occurrences fulfil a pattern of culture-pathology.

Konrad Lorenz, saw in the overpopulation of the cities one of the “deadly sins” of “civilised man” resulting in the unique ability of the human organism to “suffocate itself”. The noblest traits defining what it is to be human are the first to perish, Lorenz stated. The more people are obliged to live closer together the more antagonism increased among them.

“When there is daily and hourly contact with fellow humans who are not our friends, we continually try to be polite and friendly, our state of mind becomes unbearable. The general unfriendliness, evident in all large cities, is clearly proportional to the density of human masses in certain places. For example, in large railway stations and at the bus terminal in New York City, it reaches a frightening intensity”.  15“Crowded together in our huge modern cites”, wrote Lorenz, “in the phantasmorgia of human faces, superimposed on each other and blurred, we no longer see the face of our neighbor”. “Neighborly love”, or what we might here extrapolate as a sense of kinship, “becomes so diluted by a surfeit of neigbors that, in the end, not a trace of it is left”. Lorenz makes the very pertinent comment that “we are not so constituted that we can love all mankind, however right and ethical the exhortation to do so may be”. 16The more we are exhorted to “brotherly love” for all “humanity” the less our humanity becomes. “Emotional entropy” ensues, as we try to find substitute kinship bonds among the nebulous city masses. The greater the crowding the more the individual becomes emotionally detached; the more “urgent the need not to get involved”. “…[T]hus today in the largest cities, robbery, murder and rape take place in broad daylight, and in crowded streets, without the intervention of any passer-by”. 17Lorenz regarded as “a dangerous madness” efforts to create by “conditioning” “a new kind of human being”, 18that “madness” being the ultimate objective of the presently dominate ideologies in the West and China. 

Lorenz regarded “the fast-spreading alienation from nature” of the man of Late civilisation as a symptom of “the increasing aesthetic and ethical vulgarity that characterizes civilized man”. Detachment from nature, from the awe of nature, which in traditional societies, as we have seen, is an awe and connexion with the cosmos, results in this “aesthetic vulgarity”. Culture as an expression of the neurotic city-dweller rather than as symbolic of the healthy organic rhythms of a young culture, becomes a grotesquery of what we call “modern art”, and more broadly aesthetics in general, whether as architecture, music or fashion. Lorenz wrote of this epoch: 

“How can one expect a sense of reverential awe for anything in the young when all they see around them is man-made and the cheapest and ugliest of its kind. For the city-dweller even the view of the sky is obscured by sky scrapers and chemical clouding of the atmosphere. No wonder the progress of civilization goes hand in hand with the deplorable disfigurement of town and country’. 19

Lorenz used an organic analogy to explain the process:

“If we compare the older centre of any European town with its modern periphery, or compare this periphery, this cultural horror, eating its way into the surrounding countryside, with the still unspoiled villages, and then compare a histological picture of any normal body tissue with that of a malignant tumor, we find astonishing analogies”. 20Lorenz explains that the cell of the malignant tumour differs from the normal body cell in that it lacks the genetic information required to fulfil is function as a useful member of the “body’s cell community”. The malignant cell multiplies “ruthlessly”, “so that the tumor tissue infiltrates the still healthy neighoring tissue and destroys it”. He compares the “structurally poor tumor tissues” with the modern suburb of “monotonous houses” “designed by architects without much art, without much thought, and in the haste of competition”. 21As Spengler said, “money wills in Late civilisation”, and here in Lorenz’s analogy of modern, utilitarian architecture, resulting is “aesthetic vulgarity”, money dictates style, because of “commercial consideration”, mass production, and “mass dwellings”, “unworthy of the name ‘houses’”, but “at best batteries for ‘utility people’”, as units that are “anonymous and interchangeable”. 22 Yet in the cramped conditions of multi-story apartments, alienation increases as an effort to maintain individuality.23 The equilibrium between individual identity and social kinship does not exist. Importantly, Lorenz concludes from this:

“Aesthetic and ethical feeling appear to be closely related, and people who are obliged to live under the conditions described above obviously suffer from an atrophy of both. It seems that both the beauty of nature and the beauty of cultural surroundings created by man are necessary to keep people mentally healthy. The complete blindness to everything beautiful, so common in these times, is a mental illness that must be taken seriously for the simple reason that it goes hand in hand with insensitivity to the ethically wrong”. 24This lack of aesthetic sensibility allows the man of Late civilisation to have such disregard for ecology. Again “money will”, as Spengler said. Here ethics are atrophied. “Cold calculation dictates” Lorenz perceptively observed. The “overwhelming majority” only value whatever brings “commercial gain”. “Utilitarianism, with its destructive influence, may be defined as mistaking the means for the end. Money is a means…” As Lorenz states, few today would understand that “money by itself does not represent any value”. 25 Here Lorenz, the zoologist, has discovered a great truth that few economists can conceive, but striking at the root of the money-system of Late civilisation, where money becomes a commodity, when in youthful cultures usury is outlawed and regarded as a hell-spawned sin.26

From: The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Dr Kerry R Bolton

Stephen Baskerville Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family review

 While Michelle Langley focuses on the psychology of “liberated” female sexual behavior, Stephen Baskerville’s Taken into Custody details for us the brutal police-state machinery which has grown up in the past forty years to encourage, enforce, and profit from it. Here is the reality behind such commonplace euphemisms as “marital breakdown” and “custody disputes”:

A man comes home one day to find his house empty. On the table is a note from his wife saying she has taken the children to live with her sister or parents or boyfriend, or to a “battered women’s shelter.” Soon after comes a knock on the door. He is summoned to appear [at] a family court within a few hours. In a hearing that lasts a few minutes his children are legally removed from his care . . . and he is ordered to stay away from them most or all of the time. He is also ordered to begin making child support payments, an order is entered to garnish his wages, and his name is placed on a federal government database for monitoring “delinquents.” If he tries to see his children outside the authorized time, or fails to make the payments, he can be arrested. Without being permitted to speak, he is told the hearing is over.

The man may be accused of domestic violence or child sexual abuse, in which case there may be no hearing at all . . . but the police will simply come to the door and order him to leave his home within hours, or minutes, even if no evidence has been presented against him. . . . The man may also be ordered to pay alimony and the fees of lawyers he has not hired and threatened with arrest if he refuses or is unable. . . . If he refuses to hire a lawyer he will be ordered to pay his spouse’s lawyer. Either way, he will pay $50,000–$150,000 and possibly much more. . . . If he refuses to answer questions or pay he can be jailed without a trial. . . . If he objects, he can be ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

At his “trial,” he will be interrogated about the most intimate details of his family life.

And no answer is correct. If he works long hours, he is a careerist who neglects his children. If he cares for his children, he is failing to earn as much income for them as he might. If he disciplines his children, he is controlling or even abusive. If he does not, he is neglectful. If he does not bathe them, he is neglecting them. If he does, he may be molesting them.

All this costs him “$400–$500 an hour, and the ordeal lasts as long as the lawyers and judge wish to drive up the fees.”

Whatever the outcome of the trial, for the rest of his children’s childhood they and he will live under constant surveillance and control by the court. He will be told when he can see his children, what he can do with them, where he can take them . . . what religious services he may (or must) attend with them and what subjects he may discuss with them in private. . . . He can be ordered to work certain hours and at certain jobs, the earnings from which will be confiscated. . . . If he loses his job or is hospitalized he will be declared a felon and jailed for failure to pay child support. His home can be entered by officials of the court. . . . His financial records will be demanded and examined by the court and his bank account will be raided. . . . His children can be compelled to act as informers against him. He can be ordered to sell his house and turn the proceeds over to attorneys he has not hired.

 

Baskerville notes that the very monstrousness of the injustices being committed against fathers prevents some people from accepting that they are taking place. A common initial reaction to the horror stories is “if things are really as bad as that, wouldn’t we have heard about it before now?”

There are several reasons. One, of course, is that journalists whose job it is to inform us of corruption in public life prefer to entertain us with features on “gay marriage” and movie stars’ romances. But a second is that the family courts directly retaliate against parents who attempt to organize or speak out. It is a crime in many jurisdictions to criticize a family court judge; where it is not, judges can simply issue individual gag orders from the bench. Baskerville reports instances of fathers who were arrested for talking to reporters about their cases. Sheriff’s deputies photograph protest demonstrations by fathers’ groups. Internet sites have been shut down. Archaic laws against “defamatory libel” and “scandalizing the court” have been resurrected to prosecute critics. Court officials have been deputized to monitor fathers’ criticisms of the court in the press and in their private correspondence (which they can be ordered to hand over on pain of incarceration). Meanwhile, officials are free to discuss the private lives of fathers openly in public meetings and post information about their cases on the Internet.

Family court proceedings occur behind closed doors, and most often no records are kept. In cases where they are, they have sometimes been illegally falsified by unknown persons. Judges cite “family privacy” as the rationale for secrecy. But in fact, the Clerk of Courts is required to make plenty of information about “defendants” (fathers) public: Social Security numbers, unlisted telephone numbers, and more. They are prohibited, however, from divulging the name of the judge assigned to the case. Baskerville draws the obvious conclusion: The purpose of all the secrecy and censorship is not to protect family privacy but to allow the courts to invade it with impunity.

A third obstacle to public recognition that innocent men are being railroaded is that fathers themselves believe the propaganda about “deadbeat dads.” Even after becoming victims of the system, they assume some mistake must have been made in their particular case, while other men are the “real” deadbeats the government rightly pursues. An important factor contributing to this misapprehension is a sentimental view of motherhood and female innocence left over from an earlier age but now demonstrably at variance with the facts. One writer quoted by Baskerville reports: “All the domestic relations lawyers I spoke with concurred that in disputes involving child custody women initiate divorce ‘almost all the time.’” Men more often attempt to avoid divorce: “Fifty-eight percent of men delayed their divorce because of its impact on children. Far fewer women [viz., 37 percent] had this worry.”

Many conservatives will no doubt agree that strong-arm methods are unwarranted against lawfully wedded and faithful fathers, but protest that they may be necessary against those scoundrels who “prey upon” women without having escorted them to an altar. Baskerville, however, cites evidence that even unwed fathers do not normally abandon their offspring:

An American study of young, low-income, and unmarried fathers presents a picture that, while far from ideal, does not show them abandoning their children: 63% had only one child; 82% had children by only one mother . . . 70% saw their children at least once a week . . . and large percentages reported bathing, feeding, dressing and playing with their children; and 85% provided informal child support in the form of cash or purchased goods such as diapers, clothing and toys.

Another survey, conducted in the north of England, found that “the most common reason given by the fathers for not having more contact with their children was the mothers’ reluctance to let them.” Here we see one of the reasons for marriage: not to prevent men from absconding, but to prevent women from interfering with the father-child bond.

In other words, fatherhood is natural. If shotgun marriages and child support collection agencies were necessary to force men to provide for their offspring (as so many sanctimonious male commentators imply), civilization could never have arisen in the first place. The human male simply cannot be as bad as now routinely portrayed, whether by hate-filled feminists or pharisaical conservatives.

Here are just a few more highlights from Baskerville’s relentless catalogue of divorce industry injustices:

A man in the United Kingdom received a sentence of ten months for greeting his child on the street.

Children have been jailed for refusal to testify against their fathers. A seventeen-year-old girl was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by two male police detectives for refusal to leave her father’s apartment.

Fathers have been kept away from the bedsides of their dying children.

Custodial parents are not answerable to anyone for use of child support payments, and need not spend any of it on the children. States use “child support” money to balance their budgets, or for any other purpose they please.

Some states have instituted “expedited judicial processes” in which fathers are summoned to appear not before judges but before “judicial commissioners” or “marital masters,” essentially ordinary lawyers dressed up in judge’s robes. These persons sometimes double as lobbyists for legislation relating to child support.

In Warren County, Pennsylvania, a man was threatened with prison unless he signed a preprinted confession stating “I have physically and emotionally battered my partner. . . . I am responsible for the violence I used. My behavior was not provoked.”

Private companies have been dragooned into performing surveillance functions for the divorce regime. Employers are required by law to inform on all employees, including those who have never been ordered to pay child support. The information goes into a National Directory of New Hires, maintained for use against any persons who might get behind on child support in the future. This practice “annexes the personnel offices of private companies as administrative agents of the government.” Efforts are underway to make similar use of churches and community organizations such as the YMCA and United Way.

Child support is demanded from men who have been proven not to be the fathers of the children in question. Women are sometimes allowed to collect full child support from more than one man.

In the U.K. and Australia, it has been proposed to outlaw home paternity testing kits available from private companies, so that men may be arrested for attempting to prove they are not the fathers of the children they have been ordered to support.

Also in Britain, feminist groups and bureaucrats can bring domestic violence charges against men they target as abusers on the theory that the victim herself “should be spared having to take legal action.” These third-party accusers do not have to provide evidence that the alleged victim even exists.

Some mothers in Massachusetts report being pressured and threatened by social service agents with the loss of their children if they refuse to divorce their husbands.

There are now moves afoot to prosecute “deadbeat accomplices,” meaning parents or second wives or other relatives of child support extortionees. One second wife was charged with “harboring a fugitive.” Such persons’ bank accounts may be seized to pay child support for the fathers they are “abetting.”

Teenage boys statutorily raped by adult women may be held liable for child support paid to those women.

In one weird case in Iowa, an eleven-year-old boy’s savings (from chores such as shoveling snow) were confiscated by the state in order to pay child support for himself—possible since, as a minor, his father’s name was also on his bank account.

Most disturbingly of all, to my mind: Fathers have been ordered to submit to something called a “plethysmograph,” in which an electronic sheath is placed over the penis while they are made to view pornographic movies involving children.

Baskerville lists numerous legal guarantees violated by family courts, including several Amendments to the Constitution, the presumption of innocence, the separation of powers, habeas corpus, and the prohibitions against double jeopardy, ex post facto laws, and bills of attainder. The courts openly acknowledge that Constitutional guarantees do not apply in their proceedings—justified, it is asserted, because they are courts of “equity” rather than law. Federal courts never review cases involving family law; family courts are accountable only to review boards dominated by bar associations, i.e., by lawyers with a pecuniary interest in maximizing extortions from divorced men. Baskerville rightly notes an odd circumstance: A vast literature exists castigating the judicial branch for usurping legislative power, ignoring original intent, misapplying the Fourteenth Amendment, and various other sins; but the family court system, which has a greater influence on more people’s lives, has almost entirely escaped scrutiny.

Feminist ideology certainly played a role in creating the current situation; but, as usual, more was involved than ideas having consequences. Much of the divorce industry’s growth has simply been an instance of the normal tendency of bureaucrats to seek to increase their wealth and power. For most of these persons, feminism has been more pretext than motivation. The judges, indeed, “promiscuously invoke both the traditional stereotypes about motherhood and modern ideas of women’s rights.” Probably most have no deep convictions at all in the matter.

The same gap between rationalizing rhetoric and the reality of material interest is visible throughout the divorce industry, which consists not only of judges and lawyers, but also a bevy of “experts”—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mediators, custody evaluators, visitation monitors, and instructors for mandatory “parenting education” and “anger management” classes. All are paid through forced exactions from fathers.

Psychotherapists are ubiquitous in the industry, in part because they fear insufficient demand for their services on the market. One attorney says “if you put ten psychiatrists in a room you’ll get ten different opinions.” Baskerville gives just one example: A father was diagnosed by one psychiatrist as having both a “dysthymic disorder” and a “mixed personality disorder,” which included “obsessive-compulsive behavior, rigidity, grandiose thinking, and passive-aggressive traits”; a second psychiatrist came up with “schizotypal personality disorder” instead. Such “expert opinions” are rarely presented in open court, so there is no possibility of cross-examination, and the psychiatrists may be covered by judicial immunity, so they cannot be held accountable for their testimony. As one law professor asks: “What made all these people all of a sudden lunatics and unfit to parent?”

Obviously, the job of the expert is to provide a veneer of rationality for court decisions which are either wholly arbitrary or made on other grounds, such as maximizing the amount of money extracted from the father. If a family court does not have access to some arcane art of determining “the best interests of the child,” its claim to be engaged in anything more than kidnapping collapses. (Pseudorationality of this sort is a prominent feature of managerial rule in general: Does anyone seriously believe, e.g., that corporate “diversity consultants” are in possession of some profound science the rest of us lack?) It is not altogether surprising that little training is necessary to qualify as such an “expert.” Courts may appoint “persons with only undergraduate degrees or less, one or two weekend seminars or workshops, and maybe a four-hour in-service training program.”

As always, the wielders of power claim the moral high ground. “Fathers almost universally report being insulted and harangued with the obiter dicta of judges as if they were naughty boys or juvenile delinquents,” Baskerville writes. The New York Daily News produced a credulous report on the “parent education classes” judges now commonly order divorcing couples to attend; these are said to be necessary in order to “[t]each them how to behave; maybe even shame them into acting their age.”

The author devotes twenty pages to an historical sketch of federal involvement in child support collection. It began not as a response to any widespread problem of parental abandonment but to political pressure from feminist groups and bar associations. President Ford somewhat reluctantly signed legislation creating the Office of Child Support Enforcement in 1975, warning that it was an unwarranted federal intrusion into families and the role of the states. The original rationale was that the government would save on welfare payments to unmarried mothers by getting the fathers to pay more. Critics pointed out at the time that most welfare mothers did not even have child support orders, and most of the fathers were too poor in any case to pay what the mothers received in welfare benefits.

In 1988, Congress passed the Family Support Act, with two key provisions: (1) states were required to implement presumptive (and virtually compulsory) child support guidelines; and (2) the use of criminal enforcement machinery was extended from welfare cases to all child support orders.

Non-welfare fathers are both far more numerous and wealthier than the fathers of welfare babies originally targeted. Today, non-welfare fathers account for 83 percent of child support cases (a proportion which continues to grow) and 92 percent of the money collected. Yet there had never been a serious problem of nonpayment on the part of these men. Since 1988, increasing revenue has been the real aim of the program, and the supposed need to force “deadbeats” to support their children has never been anything but a hoax intended to confuse the public.

Oddly, the program actually loses money at the federal level; it cost taxpayers $2.7 billion in 2002, for example, and the deficit continues to increase. This money gets paid out to state officials as an incentive to increase the amount they collect: The more they extort from fathers, the more the federal government rewards them, regardless of whether the men are guilty of anything. In 2002, for example, Ohio collected $228 million, while California got $640 million.

In order to receive their cut of the swag, states are required to channel payments through their criminal enforcement machinery. In other words, they must treat all divorced fathers, even those who pay their child support in full and on time, like criminals. And they do; officials boast of collecting so-and-so many millions of dollars “from deadbeats.” Criminality is simply ascribed by the government to every divorced father.

Current child support guidelines, Baskerville reports, are largely the creation of one man, a Dr. Robert Williams. In 1987, he founded Policy Studies Inc., a “private” consulting and collection agency targeting government contracts in child support enforcement. Simultaneously, in his capacity as consultant for the Department of Health and Human Services, he drew up a set of model child support guidelines. Obviously, his business interests were best served by making the guidelines as onerous as possible. In Baskerville’s words, “only by creating a level of obligation high enough to create hardship for fathers can the guidelines create a large enough pool of defaulters to ensure profits and demand for the services of his private collection agency.”

It worked. The following year, as mentioned, the Family Support Act was passed, requiring states to implement their own child support guidelines in order to qualify for federal handouts, and they were given a short time in which to draw them up. Most did the easiest thing and simply adopted Williams’ own guidelines endorsed by HHS. As government began whipping up “deadbeat dad” hysteria, his company’s earnings soared.

A number of state courts have ruled against the guidelines. A Georgia superior court described them as “contrary to common sense,” since they bear no relation to the actual costs of raising children. Furthermore, they create “a windfall to the oblige. . . . The presumptive award leaves the non-custodial parent in poverty while the custodial parent enjoys a notable higher standard of living.” A Wisconsin court pointed out that the state guidelines would “result in a figure so far beyond the child’s needs as to be irrational.” All such rulings were reversed on government appeal.

Divorced fathers have their cars booted and their driver’s and professional licenses revoked, which prevents them from getting or keeping employment. They routinely lose their houses, and many end up in homeless shelters, which one philosophically described as “better than being in jail.” Baskerville cites one case of a father being hospitalized for malnutrition because he was not left enough money to feed himself adequately.

The U.S. now has a larger percentage of its population behind bars than any other nation in the world. How many of these prisoners are fathers jailed for nonpayment of child support? For some reason, the Bureau of Justice Statistics will not tell us. We do know that proposals are being made for relieving prison overcrowding by constructing special detention camps for fathers.

Public relations campaigns are being devised to put a more acceptable face upon what is happening. A Virginia enforcement director describes the fathers he pursues as “clients” and “customers” who “are entitled to have the benefit of child support services.” Robert Williams’s company has “customer service units . . . for fostering cooperation with each customer” and “[s]pecialized customer service centers . . . for increasing responsiveness to customers.” Baskerville dryly comments: “These . . . entrepreneurs neglect to mention that customers who choose not to patronize their establishments will be arrested.”

In January 2000, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala proudly announced that “federal and state child support enforcement programs broke new records in nationwide collections in fiscal year 1999, reaching $15.5 billion, nearly double the amount collected in 1992.” At the same time, collections have gone down when measured as a percentage of what the government claims fathers “owe.” The reason? Interest and arrearages created by Williams’s guidelines are piled up on the heads of fathers faster than actual money can be squeezed out of them. Most of this fictitious debt can never be collected, of course.

The “domestic violence” we hear so much about is essentially just another aspect of the divorce game. When a woman leaves her husband, she is routinely advised to accuse him of “abuse,” whether of herself or the children. No evidence is necessary; the husband is hauled off to prison and forbidden most types of contact with his family. Courts themselves sponsor seminars on how to fabricate accusations, and there are no penalties for perjury.

Baskerville notes that the literature on “domestic violence” evinces no concern with prosecuting men directly for violent acts. Indeed, were men beating their wives, there would be no need for a special category of violence labeled “domestic”; they could simply be prosecuted for battery under the same laws that apply to other cases. The complaint of “domestic violence” activists is almost exclusively that “abusers” might retain custody or visitation rights for their children. They speak ominously of the “batterers” making “threats of kidnapping.” This simply means that involuntarily divorced fathers want their children back.

It is important to note that terms such as abuse, violence, and battery do not, in the surreal world of feminism and divorce law, have their traditional English meanings. As early as 1979, feminists were writing of men who battered their wives “by ignoring [them] and by working late.” Today, women are instructed that abuse includes “name-calling,” “giving you negative looks,” “ignoring your opinions,” and (most revealingly, in my view) “refusing to let you have money.” The U.S. Department of Justice has declared that “undermining an individual’s sense of self-worth” is domestic violence and hence a federal crime.

The usual fate of a man charged with “abuse” is to receive a restraining order (sometimes called an order of protection). This is a decree issued from the bench without evidence being presented and without the man being summoned to speak in his own defense; it prohibits a wide range of otherwise legal behavior. It declares the man a criminal and subject to arrest should he continue to live peacefully in his own home or associate with his own children. One law professor notes that “[p]art of the reason the order exists is to be violated.” Even if no evidence exists to convict him, “the protection order can provide the basis for criminal liability on the more easily proven crime of violating the order.”

Restraining orders are said to be doled out “like candy” to all who apply. Fathers who contact their children are prosecuted for “stalking,” an offense the government defines as any “nonconsensual communication.” (Try accusing the IRS of stalking you.) Even fathers for whom child visitation rights have been established remain under restraining orders which, like tripwires, can trigger arrest for the most innocent behavior. Acts for which fathers have been charged include opening an apartment door so a five-year-old son could ring the bell for his mother, putting a note in a son’s suitcase to inform the mother he had been sick during his visit, and attending music recitals, sports events, or church services at which their children were present.

Judges issue these orders because there are negative consequences for them if they do not. Federally funded feminist groups publish the names of judges who persist in trying to observe due process. A Maine judge was removed from the bench for “lack of sensitivity” to women applying for restraining orders. One retired judge says his colleagues see the harm being done, but “remain quiet due to the political climate.”

Cases have gotten into the news of husbands attacking their estranged wives “despite being under a restraining order.” Baskerville asks us to consider whether such men might not be attacking their wives because of the restraining orders. These tyrannical acts have much the character of a deliberate provocation. One journalist writes: “It’s amazing there aren’t more rampages.” Of course, to feminists, this “male violence” simply proves the need for more restraining orders. An ideology is unfalsifiable.

There are now “supervised visitation centers” where fathers are made to pay up to $80 an hour to see their children. “People yell at you in front of the children,” says one father; “they try to degrade the father in the child’s eyes.” “Even hugging your own children could end your visit,” says another. There are cameras on the walls, and social workers armed with clipboards observe the fathers minutely. The Boston Globe reports: “Visitation centers are becoming so popular with family court judges . . . that certain centers . . . have waiting lists up to a year long. That has led to visits being cut short to accommodate other families.”

Special “integrated domestic violence courts” are now being established to expedite convictions. “There is no presumption of innocence, hearsay evidence is admissible and defendants have no right to face their accusers. One study found there was no possibility that a defendant could be found innocent, since all persons arrested . . . received some punishment.” Prosecutors pile up charges to encourage plea-bargaining; in other words, innocent men plead guilty to lesser charges in an attempt to avoid having their lives entirely ruined.

“Battered women’s shelters” are another institution of the divorce industry, no longer bearing any relation to what their name appears to signify. Rather than providing first aid and other physical relief to women brutalized by their husbands, they are “one stop divorce shops.” They assist women in fabricating abuse and incest allegations against their husbands and provide “letters of endorsement” for use against fathers in family court. Women report the use of high-pressure tactics to get them to divorce their husbands; one called a shelter “an experience from hell; the message was you believe what we believe, you do what we say, or get out of here.” Many shelters are lesbian covens where heterosexual volunteers are forbidden to discuss their wedding plans with coworkers.

The great irony about the entire abuse industry is that child abuse is much more likely to occur in the fatherless homes now being created in unprecedented numbers. Sometimes it is perpetrated by the mother’s new boyfriends, but very often by the mother herself. HHS studies report that “children in mother-only households were three times more likely to be fatally abused [murdered] than children in father-only households. Females were 78% of the perpetrators of fatal child abuse [murder] and 81% of natural parents who seriously abuse their children.” One writer says “although, as a literary theme, the ‘good father’ protecting his children from the ‘bad mother’ is almost unheard of (so idealized has mothering become), in real life fathers have often played the protector role inside families.” In other words, the abuse industry is depriving children of their natural protectors and fostering more abuse.

Perhaps we may most appropriately conclude this (very incomplete) survey of divorce industry horrors by noting the effects on the children themselves. One study based on interviews with children of divorce reported that they expressed the wish for increased contact with their fathers with a startling and moving intensity. . . . The most striking response among six-to-eight-year-old children was their pervasive sadness. The impact of separation appeared so strong that the children’s usual defenses and coping strategies did not hold sufficiently under stress. Crying and sobbing were not uncommon. . . . More than half of these children missed their father acutely. Many felt abandoned and rejected by him and expressed their longing in ways reminiscent of grief for a dead parent. . . . In confronting the despair and sadness of these children and their intense, almost physical, longing for the father, it was evident that inner psychological needs of great power and intensity were being expressed.

Inevitably, there has been talk of “reforming” the system—not least by its beneficiaries, who speak of wanting to make it more “efficient.” Why we should wish to see children removed from their fathers’ care more “efficiently” they do not tell us. The government is fertile with “responsible fatherhood” programs, “healthy marriage” initiatives, “defense of marriage” acts, and suchlike. These should fool no one who has read Dr. Baskerville’s book attentively; they are nothing but further occasions for extending governmental power and patronage while deceiving the public. The next time you hear a politician promise to “strengthen” your marriage or family, pay no attention.

What must be done is clear. In the words of columnist Kathleen Parker: “The divorce industry has to be dismantled, burned and buried like the monster it is.”

Now we must consider the means for accomplishing this.

One researcher reports being told the same thing in several cities: “Shoot the judges and lawyers!” A few men do more than talk. “Statistics are scarce [why?], but judges and lawyers nationwide agree from all the stories they hear about fatal shootings, bombings, knifings, and beatings that family law is the most dangerous area in which to practice,” reports a law journal. According to the Boston Globe, judges now carry guns under their robes to protect themselves from fathers. Baskerville asserts that metal detectors were installed in courthouses specifically from fear of fathers. Previous attacks upon family court judges, he notes, went mostly unreported in the press [why?], but the June 2006 shooting of a Nevada judge received international attention. The full gravity of the situation is finally penetrating the public’s consciousness. The author pointedly asks “what judges and lawyers expect when they set about the business of taking away people’s children.”

Indeed, he is neither exaggerating nor using metaphor when, in the book’s subtitle, he describes the regime’s campaign against fathers as a war. The male obligation to military service—i.e., to die or kill under certain circumstances if called upon—has traditionally been based upon a man’s obligation to protect his family; the duty of national defense is derived from this, as the nation is itself derived from the family. In the author’s words, “this is precisely what fathers are for: to become violent when someone interferes with their children.”

Individual acts of revenge, heartwarming though they may be to read about, will not put an end to the system. The liquidation of the divorce regime can only be accomplished by organized political force. The criminals and parasites who make up the divorce industry have a big head start; they are highly organized, well-funded (largely by their victims), determined, and, in the case of feminists, fanatical. They will fight tooth-and-nail to retain their wealth and power. Fathers, in contrast, are only beginning to awaken to the full extent of the situation and to organize resistance. Dr. Baskerville himself is president of one such organization, the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.

His recommendations for reform are all moderate and sensible—which may be their principal failing. They include the enforcement of due process principles as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, a presumption of joint custody, the reform of “no fault” laws to require faithless women (or men) to take responsibility for ending the marriage contract, and holding divorce industry officials accountable for their decisions.

I am unsure why divorce could not simply be abolished as a legal category. There do have to be laws to deal with cases of spousal infidelity and abandonment, of course. Columnist Lloyd Conway has formulated a simple policy for these, which I am unable to improve upon: “If you want to run off with a chorus girl, go ahead—just leave your wallet with Momma. And if the milkman is making special deliveries, then the lovebirds can fill out your child support checks together.” Holding divorce officials responsible for their decisions will be unnecessary when they are made responsible for punching out license plates instead. Legal custody will have less practical importance in the absence of a divorce enforcement regime.

Men, I fear, will have to demand nothing less than the full reestablishment of what feminists call patriarchy—the male-headed family as the normal social unit. This may be a “radical” idea, given how far our society has gone off-track, but it is hardly revolutionary. It is really just the radical restoration of the natural and traditional order of the human family. Baskerville doubts whether a return to father custody can “find acceptance beyond the fringe of political debate.” I think he is mistaken about this. There is no such thing as a fixed “fringe” to political debate. One of the most important forms of political activity consists precisely in moving the fringe. It took much more determination on the part of homosexuals to get us to where “gay marriage” is discussed with a straight face than it would for normal men to restore the presumption of father custody. Indeed, I suspect that men, once politically united, could dictate almost any terms they wished to women.

There are interesting times ahead for men. The course we must embark on is dangerous, but it is less dangerous than continuing to do nothing. 

 

The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 1–23

Hadassah

Everywhere the Jews have gone throughout history, General, one thing they’ve always done is to groom a certain number of their most beautiful, educated, and intelligent girls as high-class tarts,” explained Cody. “They identify the most powerful Gentile leaders in their host society, noblemen and kings and churchmen in the Middle Ages, politicians and billionaires and intelligentsia today, and they more or less pimp these girls out to them. Among the Jews themselves it’s no secret that this happens. These women are called Hadass, after the Bible story, and this practice or institution of concubinage to powerful goyim is called Hadassah. Yeah, I know, there’s a Jewish women’s charity by that name. I’ve never denied they occasionally have a sense of humor. 

“But it’s more than simple pandering. The Jews are long term planners; when they corrupt someone they want to make damned sure he stays corrupted. These women are not so much spies or provocateurs, although often enough they do fulfill that function. Their purpose is to make these powerful Gentile men like Jews. You got some hot little Hebrew number in your bed rocking your world at night, you’re naturally disposed to give her people a break in the way of business during the day. 

Sometimes these are lifelong relationships, and sometimes the Gentile leaders actually marry these Jewish women. This goes way back. The Emperor Nero had Poppaea, which is why the Christians got tossed to the lions down at the Colosseum and the Jews didn’t. The Viking chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok had Meera, which is how the Jews established a brief commercial monopoly in Scandinavia when Christian missionaries were still killed on sight. Richard the Lionhearted had a Hadass, whose name I forget, which was how the Jews became what was called King’s Persons and the royal tax collectors. Richard went off on Crusade and left England in the hands of his Jews, which was why so many people supported his brother Prince John in his attempts to usurp the throne.”  “You weren’t in any of Red Morehouse’s history classes, were you?” asked Barrow in bemusement. 

“No, sir. I just hung around in the downtown library in Seattle to stay out of the cold, back when I was a street kid. Anyway, sometimes these women run through a whole string of high-class lovers, a good example being Sarah Bernhardt in the nineteenth century, who gave the Prince of Wales such a fine time of it that he became irretrievably pro-French in everything and so was instrumental in starting Europe down the road to World War One. So forth and so on. These bitches have done incredible damage down through the ages. The classic example is the old Soviet Union, where every single major Gentile Bolshevik under Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev had either a Jewish wife or long-term mistress. Stalin himself spent the last twenty years of his life shacked up with Rosa Kaganovich, Lazar the Butcher’s sister. In America we had a brief glimpse of Hadassah with the Monica Lewinsky episode under Clinton the First. Everyone wondered why Monica’s father didn’t come after Clinton with a shotgun for debauching his daughter, or at least criticize Clinton publicly. They didn’t realize that Hadassah is an ancient Jewish tradition and it’s considered an honor to have a Hadass in the family. Doctor Lewinsky was proud as punch of his little girl. He should have been. There’s every chance she put Clinton in the mood to betray the Palestinians at the 2000 Camp David summit, which brought on the second intifada and endless bloodshed.” (...)

“And if you’re right, her husband is going along with this?” asked Gair incredulously.  “Pimping out his own wife? Talk about your indecent proposals!”  “I know it’s hard to understand, but these people are actually proud of the women who do this,” Cody said again patiently. “To a Jew, the preservation of Jewish life and power is the highest of all mitzvahs or holy acts. It’s called pikuach nefesh in Hebrew, and in the Talmud the rabbis all agree that saving Jewish life justifies any sin or crime whatsoever, and there is no sin and great virtue attached to it. Anyway, if I’m right, sir, you need to bear in mind who’s most likely whispering in Stanhope’s ear at night, and also picking up on virtually everything via pillow talk and transmitting the information to points unknown.”

A Mighty Fortress

Harold Covington

BLACK DEFICIENCY IN ABSTRACT THINKING, AS SUPPORTED BY THE ENGLISH-ZULU DICTIONARY

 

‘Why Do You Need a Dictionary?’ Written vs. Oral Languages

My first inklings regarding African languages arose from a conversation with students in Nigeria about a coconut in a tree. How would you say where the coconut was – e.g., that it was about halfway up the tree? You couldn’t say that; all you could say is that it was ‘up!’. Right at the top? Nope; just ‘up!’. In other words, no gradations.

A few years later in Nairobi, two women expressed surprise that I had an English dictionary. Isn’t English your language? Yes, I said; it’s my only language. Then why do you need a dictionary? They were puzzled that I needed an English dictionary and I was puzzled by their puzzlement. There are always times, I said, when you come across a word you’re not sure about and so you look it up. But if English is your language, they said, how can there be words you don’t know? What? I said. No one knows all the words of his language.

But we know all the words of Kikuyu; every Kikuyu does. What? (even more surprised).Eventually it dawned on me: being entirely oral, their language existed only in the minds of its speakers. But given blacks’ lack of curiosity and the absence of any external input, the overall size of such a language will remain more or less constant – and, pretty much stagnant. And since such a language exists only in the minds of its speakers, they must know all its words, because if they don’t know them, where else could they be? A written language, on the other hand, existing as it does partly in the written word, can grow beyond the capacity of anyone to know it in its entirety.

Important Consequences

But if the size of a language is limited, it follows that the number of concepts will also be limited and hence that both the language and the thinking will be impoverished. African languages were, of necessity, sufficient in their pre-colonial context, and are impoverished only in contrast to Western languages and in an Africa wanting to live like the West – which, for better or worse, they certainly do. While numerous dictionaries have been compiled between European and African languages there are few intra-African dictionaries, precisely because native speakers have no need for them. (I once had a Zulu-Zulu dictionary – more like a lexicon, really; it was a small format paperback 252 pages long.)

The Concept of Precision

My queries into Zulu began when I rang the African Language Dept at the University of Witwatersrand and spoke to a white guy. I asked him whether ‘precision’ existed in Zulu prior to European contact. “Oh” he said, “that’s a very Eurocentric question!” and refused to answer. I rang again, spoke to another white, with the identical result.

So I called the University of South Africa (UNISA), the large correspondence university in Pretoria, and spoke to a young black man. What was the Zulu entry for ‘precision’. ‘To make like a straight line’, he said. Was this part of indigenous Zulu? No; this was added.

As has been my experience in Africa, we got along like a house afire. I explained my interest in Zulu. He understood and found my questions of great interest.

The Nature of Abstract Entities

Before going any further, let us consider the nature of abstract entities. First, they are usually intangible and can’t be perceived by the senses. The number seven is prime; this primeness, however, cannot be seen, felt or heard; it can only be perceived by the mind. Further, abstract entities are often things which do not exist. ‘What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere?’ refers to something that could happen but hopefully will not happen. Nevertheless, we can think about it.

Everything we observe occurs in time and everything we see exists in space; yet we perceive neither with our senses, but only with the mind. Precision is also abstract; while we can see and touch things made with precision, precision itself can only be grasped by the mind.

Acquiring Abstract Concepts Requires Self-Consciousness

How do we acquire abstract concepts? Is it enough, e.g., to make things with precision to have the concept of it? Africans make excellent carvings, made with precision. So why isn’t the word in their language? Well, to have the concept of precision we must not only deal with precision but must become aware that there is such a thing and then give it a name.

How, e.g., do we acquire such concepts as belief and doubt? We all have beliefs; even animals do. When a dog wags its tail on hearing his master’s footsteps, it believes that he is coming. But it has no concept of belief because it has no awareness that it has this belief and so has no awareness of belief per se; in short, it has no self-consciousness.

A rat conditioned to expect food after pressing a bar but who then finds that sometimes it doesn’t come, will begin doubting whether the bar will bring food; but it does not have the concept because it lacks the self-consciousness needed to become aware of the state of mind we call doubt.

The Concept of Promising In Zulu: ‘I’ll try’

After discussing ‘precision’ (with the black guy at UNISA), he assured me it was otherwise for ‘promise’. Hmmm? How about ‘obligation’? We looked it up. The Zulu entry means ‘as if to bind one’s feet’. No, he said; that was added. But if Zulu didn’t contain the concept of obligation, how could it contain the concept of a promise, since a promise is simply the oral undertaking of an obligation? For him this was a ‘light-bulb’ experience. I was interested in this, I said, because Africans so often failed to keep promises, and, never apologized – as if it didn’t warrant one.

Yes, he said; in fact, the Zulu word for promise – isithembiso – is not the correct word. When a black person ‘promises’ he means ‘maybe I will and maybe I won’t’. But, I said, this makes nonsense of promising, whose very raison d’être is to bind one to a course of action. When one is not sure he can do something he will say, ‘I will try, but I can’t promise’. He said he’d heard whites say that and had never understood it till now. In other words, as a young Roumanian friend so aptly summed it up, when a black person ‘promises’ he means ‘I’ll try’!

The problem here is clearly not linguistic. If it was, blacks would long since have learned the correct meaning; nor can it be a coincidence that the exact same ‘problem’ happens to occur in Nigeria, Kenya and Papua New Guinea. Much more likely is that they lack the very concept and hence cannot give the word its correct meaning. And that almost certainly reflects an intellectual incapacity.

FW de Klerk Addresses This Very Issue

In his decidedly milquetoast-quality book The Last Trek (1998), the last white president of South Africa, FW de Klerk, pointedly mentions the ANC’s consistent failure to keep solemn commitments and agreements. Referring to a speech during the pre-1994 negotiations, he says:

… Mandela was coldly furious about my sharp attack on the ANC and its failure to honour its agreements, and insisted on a second turn to speak. His speech, labeled a tirade by the press, was one of the most vicious personal attacks on a political opponent that most of those present … had ever heard. He accused me of being the head of an illegitimate, discredited minority regime and of being incapable of upholding moral standards … [a]s he piled insult on insult [p.233; emphasis added].

Mandela Responds In Typical African Fashion: BDO and Arrogance

Note how this illustrates an apparent failure to understand the very concept of a commitment and its attendant obligations. Mandela acts as if he doesn’t realize he’s even made agreements and shows no indication of understanding their significance. He never, however, denies that such agreements were made nor does he claim they were (somehow) kept; all of that’s irrelevant. Nor – of course – does he admit not having kept them. Instead, he attacks, demonstrating that the best defense is an offence (BDO).

Mandela’s intemperate outburst illustrates the arrogance of a black elite: I am an important person and am not to be criticized! If this is the attitude of tin-pot academic tyrants in backwater-African-universities, what can you expect from a man, said to be of royal lineage, about to become president of the most powerful country in Africa? Finally – and true to form (and as a corollary of the-BDO) – Mandela accuses De Klerk precisely of which he himself appears guilty, viz., ‘being incapable of upholding moral standards’!

‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’: Black Psychological Shrewdness

The next day Mandela acts as if all this never happened. Instead, like children with their mercurial temperaments and short memories, Mandela [began], once again, to adopt a reconciliatory tone. He played down his attack on me as something which had to be said, but was now over and done with. The following morning he and Ramaphosa made a special point of walking across the hall to shake my hand (p.224) illustrating, I believe, not magnanimity but the absence of any genuine anger in the first place and instead, typically shrewd black psychological manipulation through sham anger. I suspect that this ‘hot-and-cold’ routine is (instinctively) meant to wrong-foot one’s opponent, a bit like the good-cop-bad-cop technique, making the ‘victim’ pathetically grateful for any behaviour even remotely reasonable.

Making the Abstract Concrete

Note the huge significance of the Zulu definition of ‘obligation’ — as if to bind one’s feet. An obligation binds you, but it does so morally, not physically. It is abstract: you can’t see it, hear it, or touch it – which of course is precisely why there is no such word in Zulu. So what have the dictionary’s authors done? They have taken an abstract concept and made it concrete: feet, rope and tying are all tangible and observable – and therefore things that (all) blacks will (fully) understand, precisely as they will not (all) understand what an obligation is. The fact that they had to define it in this way is, therefore, all by itself, compelling evidence for my thesis that Zulu thought lacks abstract concepts and, indirectly, for my claim that blacks are deficient in abstract thinking.

A woman working with severely retarded children, mentioned, without any prompting, that these children’s thinking was extremely ‘tangible’: to understand something they had to see it and touch it – in other words, it had to be present to their senses – meaning that they were incapable of thinking of things which did not exist.

But if these children with IQs of 50 are less capable of abstract thought than those with IQs of (say) 70, it follows that the latter would be less capable than those with IQs of 100; etc.. And since the concepts of time and the future are amongst the most abstract, people of lower IQ will have less grasp of the future than those with a higher IQ, and that there must be a significant correlation between IQ and the ability to understand time and the future. Hence, if blacks have a lower average IQ than whites, it would follow that they have less of an understanding of time and the future.

Blacks and Time

My thinking about this began in 1998. As I pulled into my garage (behind my apartment building), several Francophone Africans drove up and stopped right in front of my garage. ‘Hey’, I said, ‘you can’t park here!’ Perfectly friendly and respectful, they asked ‘Oh, are you leaving [now]?’ ‘No’, I said, ‘but’ (stating what one would think was the utterly obvious) ‘I might later.’ ‘Park over there’ – and they did.

The point is, their thinking seemed to encompass only the here and now: if you’re leaving [now], we understand; but otherwise, what’s the problem? I had further such encounters and the key question was always ‘Are you leaving [now]?’

Future, Time and Space All the Same Word in Zulu

The future doesn’t exist; it will exist but doesn’t exist now. People who have difficulty in thinking of things which do not exist, will ipso facto have difficulty thinking of the future.

It appears that the Zulu entry for future – isikhati – is the same word as the word for time, as well as the word for space. In other words, none of these concepts exist in Zulu thought, period. It also appears that there is no word for the past – meaning, the time preceding the present. This should not be surprising since the past no longer exists, just as the future does not yet exist. Hence, people who have difficulty in thinking of things which do not exist will have difficulty in thinking of the past as well as the future. This has an obvious bearing on things like gratitude and loyalty – both of which are noticeably uncommon in blacks.

The reader may wonder why it took me more than twenty years to notice these things. Briefly, I think it is because our assumptions about time are so bed-rock that we’re not even aware of having them and so are equally unaware that anyone might not have them. Consequently this possibility is simply not on our radar – and so of course we don’t see it even when it stares us in the face.

A Metaphysical Argument Regarding Time

Imagine the universe as an absolute void containing not a single particle of matter and in which, therefore, nothing ever happened and in which there was hence no change (since there was nothing to change). In such a universe (the reasoning goes) there would be no time, since time requires change.

Now consider traditional African society as it existed for millennia before any outside contact. It was essentially static: On a macro level, little if anything happened and there was little if any change. A visitor returning after hundreds of years would hardly notice a difference: the habits, the customs, the food, the dress, the medicines, the language, the (absence of) technology, science and literature would be the same. In terms of human development there would be a void.

But if the absence of change means the absence of time passing, then to the extent that African society remained static it would be fair to say that in fact there was indeed neither past nor future. With no real history, and no reason to anticipate the future, such concepts would have had little if any purchase, and hence would have been unlikely to have arisen in their mental repertoire. As is still largely the case, there would only be the here and now.

Where Blacks Do Pay Attention To Time

Interestingly, there are areas where blacks do notice time. They see crops planted, growing and then harvested; they see children born, grow old and die; and, they plan for their funerals, because death is a certainty, while ill health is only a risk. (The Zulu entries for ‘risk’ mean ‘danger’ and ‘a slippery surface’.) Furthermore, death is concrete and observable. In short, blacks tend to be aware of time when it is manifested in concrete, observable objects and events.

Math and Geometry: A Problem for South African and American Blacks

A quote from an article noting the problems South African blacks have with mathematics (“Finding New Languages for Maths and Science”, The Star [Johannesburg]; 24-Jul-02, p.8): 

[Xhosa] is a language where polygon and plane have the same definition; … where concepts like triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon are defined by only one word.

In other words, it is a language in which these concepts simply do not exist. In America blacks are said to have a ’tendency to approximate space, numbers and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy’. In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice the identical triumvirate of abstract concepts – space, numbers and time – none of which can be seen, heard or touched. Is it just a coincidence that these are the concepts with which blacks – everywhere – seem to have such difficulties? 

The Zulu entry for ‘number’, by the way – ningi – means numerous, which is not the same as the concept of number. It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in Zulu.

Maintenance

White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later that power outages began, which have now (2007) reached crisis proportions. Part of the problem is the government’s failure to build more power plants, in spite of being specifically warned about this in 1999. More generally, it is the breakdown of existing power plants due to lack of maintenance. Maintenance is future-oriented, the Zulu entry for which is ondla, which means: ‘1. Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch (your crop)’.

In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it would be hard to argue that the absence of this concept has nothing to do with the fact that throughout Africa, the phrase ‘nothing works’ is only an exaggeration.

Motivation and Ambition

An article in The New York Times (“Schools Plan to Pay Cash for Marks”, by Jennifer Medina, 19 June 2007) reveals that New York City is considering a plan (since implemented) aimed at getting blacks to do ‘well on standardized tests and to show up for class’, which could ‘earn [them] as much as $500 a year’. Adults would be rewarded for ‘keeping a full-time job ... having health insurance ... and attending parent-teacher conferences’. Students would be paid for doing well on tests and sometimes just for taking them, as well as for regular attendance and for each book they read.

The clear implication is that blacks are not very motivated. Motivation involves thinking about the future and hence about things which do not exist. Given black deficiencies in this regard, it is not surprising that they would be thus lacking, and having to prod them is further evidence for this. 

The Zulu entry for ‘motivate’ is banga, under which I find ‘1. Make, cause, produce something unpleasant; … to cause trouble ... . 2. Contend over a claim; … fight over inheritance; … 3. Make for, aim at, journey towards …:’. But when I ask blacks what banga means, they have no idea, which tells me that whatever it means it does not mean motivation. Clearly this is a substitute definition – choosing the ‘closest’ Zulu word – as opposed to a constructed definition (‘as if to bind one’s feet’).

In fact, no word in Zulu could refer to motivation for the simple reason that there is no such concept in Zulu; and if there is no such concept there cannot be a word for ‘it’ – precisely because in Zulu there is no ‘it’. Hence the need to entice blacks into behaving as if they were motivated.

The entry for ‘ambition’ is langazela, which simply means ‘desire’ or ‘longing’. Compare this to the Encarta Dictionary: ‘desire for success: a strong feeling of wanting to be successful in life and achieve great things’ [in the future], which is a good description of precisely what blacks tend to lack.

An Evolutionary Explanation

One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the diminished understanding of time, is that blacks evolved in a climate where they were able to live day to day without having to think ahead; they never developed the ability to think of things which didn’t exist because there was no need to. Whites, on the other hand, evolved in circumstances where they did have to develop this ability – like thinking about what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store enough fuel and food for the winter – since otherwise they simply would not have survived.

Moral Shamelessness

The same New York Times article mentions a Darwin Davis of ‘the Urban League’ as ‘caution[ing] that the … money being offered [remember, this is for attending class] was relatively paltry … wondering … how many tests students would need to pass to buy the latest video game’!

Instead of being shamed by the need for such a plan, he bitches that it’s not enough! If he is unaware of how gross his remark is, he is morally obtuse. Even so, you would still expect him to know that most people would find it offensive. In fact, however, this is precisely how blacks often do ‘understand’ morality – as what others tell them or expect them to do. Yet for many blacks even this externally-based morality has failed to take hold – which makes sense, because this ‘morality’ is dependent on enforcers, and since these have disappeared, there is nothing left, neither internalized morality (the ‘real thing’) nor the external. One result is moral opacity.

GRUESOME CRUELTY EVIDENCE OF BLACK MORAL OPACITY

Jeering, Mocking and Laughing at Agony and Death

In a book review of Driving South (David Robbins [Johannesburg: Southern Books], 1993), ‘A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence ...

“It’s like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise appear normal. Young people in particular. At the slightest provocation [NB re the volatility of black emotions], their blood-lust is aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and agonising death.” [The review is in The Citizen, July 12, 1993, p.6.] A letter-writer describes ‘necklacing’ (The Citizen; “SA’s New Nazis”, August 10, 1993, p.18):

‘The petrol-filled tyre is jammed on your shoulders and a lighter is placed within reach of your hand. Your fingers are broken, needles are pushed up your nose and you are tortured until you put the lighter to the petrol yourself.’ In May 2008 Johannesburg’s black townships erupted in mayhem and murder. A headline read “FLAMES OF HATE: Reiger Park local laughs after ‘necklacing’”:

One plump woman in a knitted cap and overall couldn’t contain her laughter as she pointed to the barbarous scene and related the events to locals. [The Star, 19 May 2008, p.1.] This is all so unspeakably vile and repulsive, so beyond depravity, the human brain recoils. This is not merely the absence of human empathy, but the positive enjoyment of human suffering, enjoying it all the more when it’s ‘slow and agonising’. Can you believe – jeering, mocking and laughing at this?

Rwanda: ‘Ecstasy of Killing Beyond My Reach’

From the Chicago Tribune (“Hutu killers danced in blood of victims, videotapes show”, 14 September 1995, p.8, Sec 1) this from UN investigator Alain Siggs regarding the 1994 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda: “The ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible thought. It’s beyond my reach” (emphasis added); and there is no reason to think these were ‘abnormal’ Africans. As further evidence of their lack of moral consciousness, the murderers videotaped their crimes, ‘apparently want[ing] to record their actions for posterity’. It truly beggars belief. Unlike (e.g.) Nazi war criminals, who tried to hide their deeds, indicating that at least they realized what others would think, even that was lacking in these blacks.

Amy Biehl Trial: ‘Laughing At Woman Groaning In Pain Impossible To Explain To Rational Minds’

The following, from a book by a retired senior South African jurist, Rex van Schalkwyk, reports remarkably congruent behaviour (One Miracle Is Not Enough [Johannesburg: Bellwether Publishers], 1998 (pp.188-89):

… Amy Biehl, the American Fulbright scholar brutally murdered in Guguletu [near Cape Town] – for being white, when she had wanted only to assist in the transition to democracy – will be remembered for the tragic irony of her death. … it is impossible to explain in terms accessible to rational minds this extract from a report of the trial … : ‘Supporters of the three men accused of murdering … [her] burst out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain’ [The Star, 25 November 1993; my emphasis]. 

These incidents – and the responses they evoke (‘the human brain recoils’; ‘beyond my reach’; ‘impossible to explain … to rational minds’) – point to traits that cannot be wished away and further confirm my claim that blacks are deficient in moral consciousness.

from the book Gedaliah Braun Racism Guilt Self-Hatred and Self-Deceit