The will to desecrate

A writer I respect and admire, who writes on Substack as Letters from Fiddler's Greene, a one called Dave Greene, had this to say in reference to a quoted post on X. He is talking about the implicit liberal beliefs in mass-replacement, destruction of the past, change as virtue,a etc. Greene says in a quote tweet which is it itself a quote tweet:

"But what Raspail doesn’t say explicitly is that the beautiful oak door SHOULD burn. It needs to burn. Because its beauty is idolatrous. 

Why is that? 

Examine the teleology of the door, why it was made beautifully. The door was made within the tradition of sacred syncretism, to unify the Universal divinity of God with the local spirit of the hearth, as above so below.

But then the Frenchman stopped believing in God. 

Then he stopped believing in the sacred hearth and family. 

And now he just has an ornate door, sitting alone, unable to explain its beauty or purpose, trying to justify its existence to desperate people in a dying society.

In other words, it’s an idol to a dead god. And idols MUST BURN. No human can tolerate the existence of such manifest desecration and be fully alive spiritually. We want to destroy these false promises that can’t be made real. 

The Frenchman doesn’t have the grit to destroy the false idols of the past. The migrants do. That might be the reason the Frenchman invited them in to his country to begin with."

 

— Dave Greene 

 

The amount of people who refuse to get what he is saying here is pretty telling. I have never struggled with knee-jerk denial but I find the behavior everywhere in others. Most people cope with threats to their viewpoint by using defensive mechanisms to keep information out. These defensive mechanisms constitute the laundry list of logical fallacies. I have felt for a long time that it is better to either not conflate your identity with your beliefs (that way your ego is not bruised when your beliefs are attacked), or even better to have a worldview that can absorb all kinds of new information without being threatened. 

Preferably one would do both. 

Oh sure he makes a few technical mistakes. Obviously not every Frenchmen wants to desecrate their own traditions, probably not even most, and I do not think he means to say that the writer of The Camp Of The Saints wanted replacement. But I think focusing on the trivial mistakes misses the forest for the trees. There is obviously a true point he is making, so let's go through it step by step. 

He asserts that elites who hate their own population wish to destroy the past. This is observably true. He says that the beautiful old things were made using a belief system that is largely dead to these people. This is also true.

It never occurred to me that a rigid inflexible kind of autistic mentality would be common among liberal elites, and that one would find the past culture of one's own bygone nation offensive, but I guess if you struggle to let new information in and react with a kind of juvenile rage to stuff that threatens your worldview you would find the past and it's accomplishments mysterious, inexplicable, and a challenge to your liberal progressive notions. After all, if the past is filled with bigots, and if bigots build great cathedrals, then logical consistency demands that cathedrals must be evil. 

The modern liberal needs everything he believes to be logically consistent with everything else he believes. Therefore if a single thing is challenged the whole belief architecture may come down like a house of cards. Therefore he must react with knee jerk insults and denials to keep out even the most trivial point of disagreement. Since his fixated autistic nature demands that everything be consistent with everything else he cannot allow his viewpoint to gradually evolve, and since he conflates his viewpoint with himself he has an ego investment in maintaining it. His viewpoint is brittle and in a slight change causes a crisis of faith.

I always assumed that the reason the left wanted to tear down the past is because of a fundamental misunderstanding with the nature of progress. Progress is the effect of technology, not the effect of the liberal. The liberal leftist places themselves in the position of prime mover causing social progress. This is a rather obscenely arrogant viewpoint to hold since the world is much bigger than you and governed by vast forces beyond your control. The only forces big enough to change all the values of an entire planet all at once are material forces, and the only lever with enough leverage to allow a single individual to move the material forces of the entire world is technology. 

Technology is a kind of super leveraging device for individual power to express itself as a new value system, but that process is irreversible in a way that is even more irreversible than lawmaking. Also, that process is individual, that is, it is the result of an individual inventor and not a group of activists agitating for change. What the liberal claims is that his movements for change caused progress when in reality it was inventors and their funding sources.

All problems create both political and market demand for solutions, and all solutions create new problems. This is the problems-solutions-cycle.

If you play your cards right each new problem created is of less magnitude than the previous ones and the total amount of entropy in society diminishes. If you play your cards wrong you solve your way into a crisis, that is, your solutions actually create a crisis. 

When a solution decreases entropy we call that progress. 

When a solution increases entropy we call that crisis. Modern leftists don't even believe in considering trade-offs which means they cannot avoid creating bigger problems than the ones they solve.

The liberal belief in the right side of history is caused by a series of cognitive mistakes: they refuse to give proper credit to technology, instead reserving that credit for themselves. This is arrogance. They despise the past and the people in it for reminding them of their own spiritual and aesthetic ugliness. This is petty resentment. They only ever imply their values instead of stating them out loud. This is cowardice. They hate their culture because they hate themselves. Self-hatred is a form of narcissism. They believe everyone else is racist  so they may get away with being racist towards conservatives. This is hypocrisy.

How many deadly sins can one group commit? 

It should also be noted that if you build all your highways at the same time then you will have to repair them all at the same time. If you build all your bridges today then you will have to replace them all in like 30 years.

And if you solve all the problems at the same time then all the new problems created by those solutions will arrive at the same time. Then you'll have an era of crisis. 

You want to feed people so you harness fossil fuels. This solution creates the problem of global warming. 

You want to cure people so you create antibiotics. This creates the problem of antibiotic resistance. 

You want to stabilize your population so you no longer have to fight endless wars to feed your children, so you create birth control. This creates feminism and population collapse, among other things.

You are tired of people going blind from malnutrition so you build an interstate highway system that allows you to deliver food grown in one place to other places. You also need to be able to move your troops from one side of the country to another in an increasingly globalized world with foreign threats to your soil, but building the interstate highway system creates auto-dependent culture.

Problem --> solution, problem --> solution, over and over. The problems are solved in waves, the new problems are created in waves. When a whole bunch of problems get solved at once that's a golden era, when the new problems all arrive at the same time that's a crisis era. The RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY is just the gap between two eras. It's the drug high you get when you are riding the wave before it crashes.

It is also the might-makes-right ideology of the American left. Now that we are in an era of crisis they say capitalism is the cause, not themselves. They were eager to take credit for all the social progress caused by technology, but now that those solutions are creating new problems somehow someone else is to blame.

But I like Dave Greene's explanation because I felt like there was something missing in my own viewpoint, that I had worked out the process by which this occurs but not the exact psychology of it's people. I understood that technology creates values but has never fully grasped the pettiness and rigid thinking of the professional managerial class. It had never occurred to me that PMC's could have autistic traits. I always saw them more as schizophrenics on the schizo-to-autism scale.

And while we are at it let's talk about racism. White people did not invent racism, nor colonization, nor extermination, nor slavery. The PMC belief in progress must also be justified by a condemnation of the past and it's inhabitants, by a condemnation of the original European culture. This is a political formula designed to support their power, but having a political formula that gives you power does not mean you have discovered some profound truth. Your political formula can "work" and still be shit. I guess the human mind is just not flexible enough to both espouse a political formula while knowing it is bullshit. 

But I think the political formula is destined to collapse because progress doesn't seem to be happening. If the political formula of a group is that they are on The Right Side Of History this implies that history must continue to progress. What happens when it doesn't? What happens when it goes backwards? What happens when PMCs can no longer deliver on never ending progress? This would appear to be a huge flaw eating away at the left. 

We are in an era of crisis because the bill for our innumerable past solutions is all coming due at the same time. This is going to create a tremendous snapback effect and may cause future generations to view liberalism as mistake and not just what came before it. Condemnation of the past moves on and condemns the liberal progressive. Every generation gets high on its own farts. All  liberal children are convinced of the superiority of their own values relative to their ancestors.