Collapse: The Blog

The True Law of History: Benda on Collapse

In 1927, a French philosopher named Julien Benda published a book called La Trahison des Clercs, commonly translated today as "The Treason of the Intellectuals." In it, he argued that Europe's intellectual class -- the philosophers, priests, scholars, and so on -- had betrayed their duty to call man to a common brotherhood and to urge transcendence of the divisions of the material world, embracing instead the rank demagoguery of race, party, class, and nation. They had, he said, abandoned idealism in favor of realism; universalism in favor of particularism; transcendence in favor of substance; disinterest and reason in favor of passion and hatred. He identifies several offenders by name (including his fellow Frenchmen Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras) and reserves some of his harshest criticism for the Germans, whom he identifies as the source of virtually everything wrong and terrible about modern thought.

His epilogue (in which he predicts the coming world war) includes a very poignant thought about human nature, one I've often pondered over but never been able to articulate. I reproduce it below:

Let me point out in this respect that insufficient attention is perhaps paid to the fact that there are always only a very tiny number of instances in history on which are built up a "law," which claims to be valid for the whole past and future evolution of humanity. Vico says that history is a series of alternations between periods of progress and periods of retrogression; and he gives two examples. Saint-Simon says history is a series of oscillations between organic epocs and critical epochs; and he gives two examples. Marx says history is a series of economic systems, each of which casts out its predecessors by means of violence; and he gives one example. I shall be told that these examples could not be more numerous, owing to the fact that history, at least known history, is so short. The truth, implied by this very reply, is that history has lasted too short a time for us to be able to deduce laws from it to enable us to infer the future from the past. . . .

I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring. People forget that Hellenic rationalism only really enlightened the world during seven hundred years, that it was then hidden (this a minima verdict will be granted me) for twelve centuries, and has begun to shine again for barely four centuries; so that the longest period of consecutive time in human history on which we can found inductions is, upon the whole, a period of intellectual and moral darkness. Looking at history, we may say in a more synthetic manner that, with the exception of two or three very short, luminous epocs whose light, like that of certain stars, lightens the world long after they are extinct, humanity lives generally in darkness; while literatures live generally in a state of decadence and the organism in disorder. And the disturbing thing is that humanity does not seem to mind these long periods of cave-dwelling.

To come back to the realism of my contemporaries and their contempt for a disinterested existence, I must add that my mind is sometimes haunted by a dreadful question. I wonder whether humanity, by adopting this system to-day, has not discovered its true law of existence and adopted the true scale of values demanded by its essence? The religion of the spiritual, I said just now, seems to me a lucky accident in man's history. I shall go further, and say it seems to me a paradox. The obvious law of human substance is the conquest of things and the exaltation of the impulses which secure this conquest. Only through an amazing abuse were a handful of men at desks able to succeed in making humanity believe that the supreme values are the good things of the spirit. To-day humanity has awakened from this dream, knows its true nature and its real desires, and utters its warcry against those who for centuries ahve robbed it of itself. Instead of waxing indignant at the ruin of their domination, would it not be more reasonable for their usurpers (if there are any left) to wonder that it lasted so long? Orpheus could not aspire to charm the wild beasts with his music until the end of time. However, one could have hoped that Orpheus himself would not become a wild beast.

I spend a lot of time documenting the general decline of the West. The decline of its economic strength, ruined by its newfound puritanical distrust of corporatism. The decline of its literature, of its philosophy (which appears today to have vanished entirely), of its ability to string together coherent sentences. The decline of its morality, and the rank barbarism with which modern Western man treats his peers, even without provocation. I have often thought that the coming period of darkness would be an interruption to the flow of history. Perhaps it will simply be a great historical correction -- an epoch-ending regression toward the mean.

Perhaps man, having tired of the sunlight, will at last go home to the darkness of his cave.

On the Plus Side

At least that coming economic collapse will stave off the coming peak oil crisis.

The Wages of Feminism...

...is spinsterhood.

Oz Conservative brings us the unfortunate story of a woman robbed of all her life's fulfillment by the sinister social conspiracy of feminist self-entitlement and hyperambition:

I'm a 42-year-old woman and have never been married, which often surprises the people I meet. I have the usual list of attributes ... attractive, kind, quite intelligent and with a warm and loving heart. I'm educated, cosmopolitan, responsible and self-sufficient ... a very normal, grounded woman who grew up in a loving home.

Why didn't it ever happen for me? I don't know ... I have been looking for a good man since my 20s and have always wanted to marry -- I didn't put career first or any of the usual excuses. I guess it is a combination of choosing the wrong men (or having them choose me), having high expectations, or maybe just plain bad luck. I was never willing to settle. I wanted a husband who was my equal, whom I was compatible with, and whom I could love and respect with all of my heart, as he would me. I didn't think this would be impossible -- many women find Mr. Right -- I just didn't and it never worked out with the men I was with. My friends have a similar profile, and are in the same predicament.

Now the problem. I do not want to be, or like, being single and sometimes I look at a future that seems empty and desolate and it frightens me. There are days when I don't know how to go on -- the sadness runs so deep. I have started to withdraw from friends and acquaintances who have a husband and children -- I feel like the odd one out, and the one who is to be pitied. I won't go to my high-school/college reunions for the same reason. It seems more acceptable to be divorced with kids than having never been married. Dating? After my last disappointment, I assume no one wants to settle down with a 40-something-year-old woman -- an eligible man will invariably choose a younger, more attractive option to date and marry. And the fact that I am too old for children causes me a quiet but intense feeling of grief.

It's tempting, of course, to blame the woman for her own woes. Several of Mr. Richardson's commenters do precisely that. "Women brought this on themselves," the argument goes, and so they reap what they sow.

But there is no such thing as "collective responsibility," only collective consequences. It wasn't this stupid woman who destroyed America's unwritten sexual constitution and corrupted gender relations; it was the generations of her mother and grandmother. But she must suffer for the delusions she's inherited nevertheless.

Not every woman is a sinister, blackhearted harridan out to rob men blind for the glory of her own sex. Most who buy into feminist claptrap do so in good faith -- they genuinely believe in the whole notion of equality, of being special and not settling for anyone, etc. And they don't have the metacognitive ability to discern the absurdity of the idea of not settling. That's the problem with perspective: you never have it when you need it, and you can't use it when you have it.

I remind every woman I meet who says she won't settle of the simple truth of the dating market. Women want wealth, status, and power in men -- something they accrue with age. Men want beauty and fertility in women -- something they lose with age. By definition, women must settle when they're young. By the time the men in their cohort start living up to women's standards, women cease living up to men's. Buy low, sell high, as the saying goes.

The simple truth is that the corruption of the modern Western mating ritual doesn't just suck for men, it sucks for many women, too. It's why the women (and their white-knight cabana boys) who advocate squandering your youth and beauty riding the alpha cock carousel before settling down with one of the beta-male providers you spurned back when your genitals still functioned properly should be held accountable for the social mischief they've wrought. There is literally no one, except a tiny elite of depraved sluts and cads who, in better times, would've been publicly executed, that benefits from the degradation of courtship.

Sadly for her, this woman's life really is over. The biological imperative for mating is all-consuming, and I wouldn't be surprised if her failure to heed it sends her spiraling into depths of life-destroying depression -- an end that's already visible in her writings. The advice columnist's mystical nonsense notwithstanding (and note that it's easy to lecture people on the irrelevance of marriage to personal satisfaction when one is already married), there is no meaning in life to be acquired now. There's only love, and she won't find it.

This whole story calls to mind a lesson I've learned very well over the past few years, which is simply this: most women are total messes. They simply cannot be afforded any degree of social power, whether on a purely individual scale, within the context of a relationship, or in the broader realm of social order. They will not only make themselves miserable, as this poor creature has, they will destroy the lives of everyone around them (In Mala Fide documents this trend very well). It's probably the reason virtually all societies in history have kept women on a short leash, and why women themselves are evolutionarily programmed to respond to socially dominant men. Feminism must be destroyed -- for women's own good.

Black Women and Beauty

Psychology Today recently published an article asking why black women are objectively less attractive than other women. Naturally, feminists have reacted with (what else?) sputtering, impotent rage. (Hat tip: Sofia).

Note the usual conventions of left-wing outrage: overuse of the word "wow" (or its ugly cousin-construction, "Wow. Just wow.", which appears once in the comments); overuse of the words "racist" and "sexist" (a combined total of nine times); overuse of sarcastic air quotes (nine times); and, of course, gratuitous vulgarity. All of these conventions appear to even greater extremes in the comments section. Not much in the way of argumentation, either, just vapid emoting; if you want to see the rare spectacle of an intelligent woman engaging both hemispheres of her brain, as usual, Sofia's your gal.

To answer Psychology Today's original question ("Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?"), the only thing that amazes me is why people would ask a question that so obviously answers itself. Black women are, generally speaking, fat, crazy, and mean. There's a reason virtually everyone has known, at some point, a black man/white woman couple but not a white man/black woman couple. Contrary to feminist tripe, men don't like or appreciate sass. It grates on us. It's a usurpation of the power that falls to us naturally as the dominant partner in a relationship. Nor do we like fat (what they euphemistically call "curves" or periodically have the temerity to suggest is actually natural and not the product of gross overeating and a general aversion to physical labor). Or filicide.

The feminist harpies, of course, insist there is no such thing as "objective" beauty. Well, I'm partial to that argument, if by "objective" we mean "reliably measurable." We use BMI as a proxy, of course, and it certainly accounts for a large portion of the variance in what we consider to be beautiful, but it's only a predictor at the end of the day and not a substitute. I think it's more scientifically sound to operationalize beauty as the aggregate of everyone's subjective conceptions of beauty. But clearly, black women lose out this way, too, since nobody wants to date them or marry them.

Naturally, the career of the article's author is now over and Psychology Today has folded utterly and removed the article from their site. Every once in a while I think my field is doing something right, as in the trend toward self-control as a key variable in understanding human behavior rather than the gross biological mechanism and social determinism that dominates the grim leftist worldview. Then I remember that this is the field that basically gave us the Nazis.

The Inadequacy of American Female Politicians

Evidently, some high schooler challenged Republican Minnesota Congresswoman and possible Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann to a debate, challenging her general ignorance and vapidity. (Hat tip: Glittering Opprobrium).

Possibly the best evidence that Bachmann is not, in fact, a total moron is that she's declined to acknowledge the challenge at all. And good for her, because she'll wind up either the bitch that humiliated a high schooler on national TV or the idiot who got shown up by said high schooler on said national TV.

The kid does have a point, though:

Though I am not in your home district, or even your home state, you are a United States Representative of some prominence who is subject to national media coverage. News outlets and websites across this country profile your causes and viewpoints on a regular basis. As one of a handful of women in Congress, you hold a distinct privilege and responsibility to better represent your gender nationally. The statements you make help to serve an injustice to not only the position of Congresswoman, but women everywhere. Though politically expedient, incorrect comments cast a shadow on your person and by unfortunate proxy, both your supporters and detractors alike often generalize this shadow to women as a whole.

Ignore, momentarily, the gross gender particularism which the kid probably thinks is edgy and fashionable (why else do kids subscribe to leftism?) despite having been criticized by Julien Benda in 1927. Ignore, too, the awkward constructions ("to not only"), odd word pairings ("help to serve an injustice"), and tortured efforts to sound smart ("cast a shadow on your person").

American female politicians really do suck.

Granted, the male ones are no better. The American economy wasn't run into the ground by Betty Crocker, after all. But the male ones at least achieve the appearance of competence in the face of mountains of evidence of its absence. Their female peers, by contrast, come across as either shrewy and evil, agonizingly stupid, breathtakingly incompetent, unpleasantly awkward, gratuitously bitchy, or some combination of the above; the least offensive of the bunch are either virtually unknown outside their own states or else just as desperately in thrall to the usual grim moneyed interests as the men they serve with. Virtually no American female political leader has anything like the gravitas of a Barack Obama or a John McCain.

Part of this, I think, is that the truly competent women stay out of politics altogether. Success in politics requires aggressiveness and a willingness to play dirty, which are naturally masculine traits and which people therefore expect of men. To see a woman exhibiting them is incongruous with evolutionary adapted and socially programmed expectations and frankly off-putting. Liberal women always seem to come off as the ball-busting feminist harpies they actually are deep inside their black hearts, and it's hard, of course, to take seriously any woman espousing conservative values while she spits in their face by inverting traditional gender roles, running for office while her husband cares for the kiddies.

But surely that's not entirely it. People took Margaret Thacher seriously, and Angela Merkel, and Indira Gandhi; they are presently taking Julia Gillard and Marine Le Pen seriously, as well. The buffoonish and disgusting quality of female politicians seems peculiar to us Americans. I wonder what gives.

A quick note: after reading the kid's blog, I couldn't help but notice the ludicrousness of her own positions, such as demanding that people oppose a fiscally necessary school consolidation program on the basis that it could tank property values! Jesus, 16 years old and she's already in thrall to the "prices must rise forever lest the entire economic chain-letter scam come to an explosive end" bank-fellating crowd. She's still got time to wake up if she devotes herself to a life of the mind and begins devouring books, but suffice to say I doubt she'll be reading much in the way of sophisticated philosophy where she's (probably) going.

The Judgment Day That Wasn't

The day of reckoning has come and gone and the world is still as it was.

Mr. Camping's folly reveals to us the peril of making predictions about the future. I am a believer in absolute truth, but I also acknowledge that there are fundamental, epistemological roadblacks to absolute knowledge, namely the rank inadequacy of human reason and the physical reality of the universe itself, which conspires to deny man anything but a poorly-lit glimpse into the workshop of creation. As a statistician, I recognize that the business of extrapolation is a probabilistic one -- that's why I (try to) avoid making definite assertions about the future and, instead, suggest probable outcomes with a reasonable interval of confidence and accompanied by a measure of error.

Frankly, making such predictions is gross arrogance, an attempted usurpation of divine knowledge, and all those who believe him are in the grip of firm delusion. If there is to be a judgment day, God and God alone knows when it is. It is precisely this kind of arrogance, the product of the infuriating (and essentially leftist) belief in the supremacy of human reason and the determinacy with which the universe operates, that landed us in our current economic and social mess, a brewing disaster concocted by social engineers and economic meddlers convinced of their own great wisdom.

If there is one thing I hope the coming collapse (if, indeed, I'm right that it is coming) teaches Western society, it's this: there is no secret formula, no scientific law, no pattern to the unfolding of history that you can discern to bring about utopia on Earth. And any efforts to find them will not only fail, it will condemn people to extraordinary levels of misery.

My Mental Health Weekend

A brief break from blogging is coming up. After a horrible chain of events that started with me getting some bad news via letter and then text and culminated in me getting 90 minutes of sleep, stepping barefoot in a pile of dog shit, and threatening to harpoon my boss in the thorax if he didn't give me two days off work, I've spontaneously decided to drive four hours to the Gulf to see and touch the ocean for the first time in my life.

New posts no later than Monday!

America the Wicked

A recent post by Bonald over at Throne and Altar drummed up an old idea that's been lurking at the back of my mind for months now. I remember, years ago, seeing Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (disclaimer: I hate the entire franchise and was only dragged along to see it by friends on pain of spending a Friday evening alone) and stewing with anger at the vapid female lead's questioning "what if we're the bad guys?" I was a neocon fool back then and therefore mired in unthinking nationalism, and George Lucas' tactless and indiscrete anti-war activism grated on my nerves.

Today, I find myself dwelling on the same question.

Ours is a nation that is deliberately endeavoring to impoverish hundreds of millions of people just to prop up banks that would have collapsed under the weight of their own fraud and greed if nature had been permitted to run its course, and which tolerates the rampant injustice of allowing them to continue their schemes without molestation by the law. We're a nation that tolerates the slaughter of a million unborn infants a year, that exports by military force it's cultureless hedonism to nations that want nothing to do with it, that sells its childrens into the slavery of student loan debt in exchange for an utterly hollow promise of prosperity by education, that treats the rule of law as yet another bit of patronage to be divvied up among favored constituency groups. We're a nation of narcissistic  sluts and assholes who have run their economy like a chain-letter scam, turned some of their once-greatest cities into Third World slums, and deprived their children of even a basic education in literature or mathematical competence -- a nation that celebrates the violent, belligerent depravity of its minorities, whose gradual numerical conquest it welcomes with open arms, as it so loathes itself that it cannot tolerate one more generation of life.

We've always been a nation of shallow culture; our genius has historically been economic and political. But we've subordinated our economic genius to reflexive and reactionary demagoguery and our political genius to pathologically dishonest schemers (at best) and bumble-brained pygmies (at worst). No sooner had global power been thrust upon us than we proved ourselves utterly unworthy of it. Our greatest export now is inflation, misery, and cultural entropy. Speaking personally, I have met a total of maybe half a dozen people who could be called anything like "good." Ours is an exceptionally cunning brutality, because its practitioners are so convinced of their benevolence.

If there is a God, and if he has any love for the world, he will spare it the ongoing depradations of this modern-day Gomorrah.

Thoughts like this are terribly depressing to me, but there is one coda to them that gives me comfort:

Collapse is coming.

Geithner: "[Crisis] Will Come Again"

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner thinks another financial crisis is in the works:

At a New York screening of the new HBO adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that not only is our financial system not too large to go bust--but we're headed for another crisis.

. . .

“It will come again. There will be another storm,” warned Geithner, who in early 2009 succeeded Paulson as treasury secretary. “But it’s not going to come for a while.”

Under mostly gentle questioning from Pulitzer Prize-winning financial writer Liaquat Ahamed and New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of the book on which the film is based, Geithner said “I’m certain we will” experience another catastrophe—he just couldn’t say when or what kind.

“You will not know,” he answered when Sorkin tried to pin him down. “It’s not going to be possible for people to capture risk with perfect foresight and knowledge.”

"Perfect" foresight and knowledge, no. But I give it as few as six and as many as 18 months. And it will be as blandly predictable as the last crisis was for everyone who didn't have their heads hollowed out with an ice cream scoop and their brains replaced with a tennis ball:

As a result of deliberate greed and the political necessity of constantly levering up the economy to keep our debt-based monetary system from collapsing, banks bent and broke the rules to give loans to people who didn't have the credit to justify them. Consequently, those people defaulted (as they inevitably would), the banks blew up, and all the debt that the banks had insured through credit default swaps defaulted, as well. Hence, the entire economy blew up.

Bailing the banks out changes nothing. They are still committing fraud. They are still overexposed. And as soon as quantitative easing ends, there will still not be enough money in the system to service existing debt. I'd go so far as to argue that the current rout in commodities is in fact an anticipation of the coming rout in stocks (and, ultimately, bonds) that will begin to emerge as QE2 winds down.

Absolutely nothing of material importance has changed since the 2008 crisis. Not a damn thing. And as such, we will see an exact repeat of it again, and soon.

A Cure for AIDS?

A San Francisco Bay area man may have been cured of AIDS thanks to an experimental new treatment:

A 45-year-old man now living in the Bay Area may be the first person ever cured of the deadly disease AIDS, the result of the discovery of an apparent HIV immunity gene.

Timothy Ray Brown tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but has now entered scientific journals as the first man in world history to have that HIV virus completely eliminated from his body in what doctors call a “functional cure.”

. . .

“I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since,” said Brown, who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community.

 Brown’s amazing progress continues to be monitored by doctors at San Francisco General Hospital and at the University of California at San Francisco medical center.

 “I’m cured of HIV. I had HIV but I don’t anymore,” he said, using words that many in the scientific community are cautiously clinging to.

What I'm about to say is not something that anyone would dare to utter in polite society. But I'll say it, anyway, because everyone whose brain hasn't been pickled beyond usefulness in the brine of political correctness knows it's true.

If there's any justice in the world, future generations will judge Western society's efforts to combat HIV/AIDS as the most colossal misappropriation of limited scientific resources ever seen.

It affects virtually no one except a few vocal minorities (namely, blacks and gays). Its means of transmission are largely voluntary, and one can reduce to the point of vanishingly small rounding error one's probability of contracting HIV by making a few simple lifestyle changes -- namely, not having unprotected sex with hundreds of people or using other people's needles to take intravenous drugs. In other words, if you live like a normal person, you will basically never, ever get HIV/AIDS.

The billions of dollars squandered on combatting the spread of HIV/AIDS and attempting to find a cure constitutes little but a monument to the overwhelming influence of the feminist grievance lobby, which can never tolerate anything like accepting responsibility for the consequences of the free-sex cultural mores they foisted on the rest of us. It's money that would have been better spent on, say, cancer research or really any disease that affects an appreciable number of people who get no say in the matter, which is a testament to how fall our society has fallen that even utilitarianism is too reasonable for it to accept.

If, in fact, HIV/AIDS has been cured, expect a dramatic uptick in the hedonistic and predatory sexual culture that characterizes the black and gay subculture, culminating most likely in the discovery and spread of some new disease for which we will all be guilted into subsidizing research to cure.

To hell with this degenerate world.