Collapse: The Blog

The Case Against Gay Marriage (and Why Everyone Should Care)

The degenerates' lobby continues its remorseless march through the institutions of American society -- and if you believe certain alt-right bloggers, apparently we're all supposed to not care.

Such is the story from Ferdinand Bardamu, Advocatus Diaboli, Alte, and others. From Ferd:

No really, I don’t care, and neither should you. If you’re expending any serious amount of energy opposing gay marriage, there’s something seriously wrong with your head. Defending the integrity of marriage in America at this point is like defending the chastity of a crack whore. No-fault divorce and feminist family courts, among other things, have so debased marriage that letting gays join the club isn’t going to so much as leave a ripple in the pond. Marriage has been long dead, and all the people in the gay marriage debate are doing is playing tug-of-war with the corpse.

And from AD (a deeply unimpressive and unoriginal thinker whose close connection to Ferd and the alt-right hub that is IMF makes him a useful barometer of whatever horrible thing the alt-right is about to adopt or succumb to):

I have a question-

Why do some people oppose gay marriage?

Given the absolutely pathetic state of heterosexual marriage in developed countries, especially the USA, is it even possible to debase the “institution” of marriage any further? What part of this pathetic institution can you still desecrate?

Have you ever seen shows like Bridezilla? If you think that they are fiction, you have probably never overheard a group of women talking about their upcoming wedding. Here is the unpleasant truth-

‘Empowered’ women have debased heterosexual marriage beyond repair.

Two guys marrying each other might actually raise the state of marriage. In any case, the married life of two guys is likely to be less fucked up than its heterosexual equivalent.

Some commenters at IMF argue that we should focus our efforts on combatting financial fraud rather than wasting it on gay marriage.

First, I agree completely that financial fraud is a very important issue and should be first and foremost in the attentions of our political class, especially because it's a side-effect of our unsustainable and catastrophe-bound monetary system. But that's a condemnation of the left, for distracting us from the issue by harping on about peripheral ones, not a condemnation of the right for resisting them.

Financial fraud stems from the collapse of public morality of which "gay marriage" is part and parcel. Homosexual behavior, to the extent it is self-evidently contrary to natural law, is also part of that collapse. And all morality stands and falls together. There is no sense arguing that one has an obligation to respect justice while arguing that the foundation for that justice -- that is, morality, from which sexual morality also derives -- doesn't exist or is irrelevant, as many alt-right bloggers and readers do.

But they cannot do otherwise, because to do so would be to expose the rank disorder of their own lifestyles. Most of the "game" practitioners at IMF do to unsuspecting women what bankers do to unsuspecting borrowers: they take advantage of their ignorance and simple-mindedness to screw them (literally in the former sense, figuratively in the latter). Thus, their complaints about financial fraud and the injustice propagated by our feminism-mired legal system amount to so much utilitarian argument from self-interest: they have no sound moral basis from which to criticize either, after all, since it would entail criticism of themselves, as well.

To quickly get back on topic, it's worth asking ourselves what the purpose of marriage is. The left says that justice demands that gays be allowed to marry, but obviously that is only the case if it is unjust -- that is, contrary to the purpose of marriage -- that they are denied from marrying in the first place. If it "same-sex marriage" is obviously contrary to the essential purpose of marriage, then permitting it is unjust; and if it is not contrary, then forbidding it is unjust. Either way, justice demands some positive position on same-sex marriage: "I don't care" is simply not acceptable, and is in fact a position borne of thoughtless cowardice.

Marriage as both a social and a legal institution historically was understood to arise from natural law: that is, an understanding of the general normative behavior of things which derives not from convention but from nature itself. It's a simple observation to note that men and women's physical sexual configurations exist and are different from one another because some aspect of human nature (specifically, the need to propagate the species by procreation) demands it. Thus the simple reality of physical sex (that is, the male/female dichotomy) points toward some end: procreation.

Because procreation can naturally occur only in the context of the reality of the sexual dichotomy and because male/female conjugal relations are therefore the basis for the continuity of society and the species, a number of rights and obligations follow. First, because it is good for parents to care for their children (in the sense that nature demands that they do so), parents have both an obligation to care for their children and a right to do so against the claims of society; likewise, children have a right to be cared for, and by their own parents. Marriage law is simply a legal framework within which these rights and obligations are subject to society's impetus -- society, after all, has a vested interest in the care and disposition of children, since raising children is not only a matter of individual good but of the health of the community and the state, as well.

Clearly, then, "love" is not the purpose of marriage. We might say that it is a necessary condition for marriage to operate but not a sufficient one, else it would imply a right to incest that virtually no society has ever recognized. Moreover, there is no compelling reason why the state ought to legislate based on the whims of the human heart; if it were, in fact, the case that marriage law was simply about recognizing love and commitment, that would be a case for abolishing it entirely, not extending it to include others. Obviously, "commitment" is not the purpose of marriage, either, since commitment is not an intrinsically good end in itself. Parents, after all, are generally speaking committed to their children, and children likewise to their parents, but no one would term this relationship a "marriage" (even though it, too, clearly involves love). I'd argue, too, that to say that commitment is the purpose of marriage is rather a non sequitur, since commitment is, by nature, rather causally prior to marriage.

Nor is "consent" a foundation of marriage, except in the sense that it is necessary but not sufficient for it. For one thing, to say that "the purpose of marriage is to consent to be married" is rather profoundly retarded and a non sequitur. For another, to say that consent is a sufficient basis for marriage would mean (a) that there is no compelling reason for the state to limit marriage to two people (which would imply a right to polygamy that no advanced society has, to my knowledge, ever endorsed); (b) that there is likewise no reason to limit marriage to human beings (which would imply a right to bestiality* that, again, no advanced society has, to my knowledge, ever endorsed); and (c) that there is no reason to forbid people from, say, marrying inanimate objects for which they have fetishes (like the neurotic child-abuse victim who recently "married" the Eiffel Tower and apparently masturbates with a bit of fence post for which she's developed an attraction).

Rather, the purpose of marriage is intrinsically bound up with man's conjugal nature. It is impossible to separate it. Marriage is heterosexual sex (although not all heterosexual sex is marriage). Thus, "same-sex marriage" is an ontological non sequitur.

The usual objections to traditional marriage are easily dispatched by an understanding of natural law. Because natural law is concerned with the norms that arise from nature, marriage, too, is normative: that is, because the essence of man and woman is fertile, the essence of marriage is simply the union of a man and woman, even if individual couples may, by happenstance, be unable to have children. A  marriage in which, say, the woman has had a histerectomy and therefore cannot have children may not as perfectly instantiate the essence of marriage as a fertile couple,  but it is nevertheless still a marriage. By contrast, "same-sex marriage" does no such thing because a same-sex union is intrinsically infertile.

Of course, a gay  man can still (hypothetically) have children with a woman. But under the law, he is free to marry that woman if he chooses. The typical leftist response, that people said the same thing about laws against interracial marriage (i.e., "blacks can still marry other blacks") and that opposition to gay marriage is thereby analagous to irrational racial bigotry is, again, a non sequitur: race is irrelevant to the end of marriage; sex is not.

This is what conservatives mean when they say that gay marriage is an affront to the nature of marriage : by treating marriage as any ordinary contract, it reduces it from the status of an organic institution arising from human nature to the level of a manufacturer's warranty on an old air-conditioning unit.

What's most maddening about all this is that gays in no meaningful way had their rights restricted under a traditional marriage regime. As Reason points out (in a pro-gay marriage puff piece that proves decisively that mainstream libertarianism is really just left-wing libertinism), gays were already free to go to churches and exchange rings and vows and even go around for the rest of their lives saying they're "married" and absolutely no one could do anything to stop them. And, of course, if they truly wished to enjoy marriage in a manner consistent with their nature, they could foreswear their homosexuality and  marry someone of the opposite sex. Yet this, apparently, wasn't enough: they demanded not just the freedom to practice their degeneracy but the whole of society's endorsement of it, an endorsement to which they were in no way entitled by natural law or the common good. And by way of their bullying and the sinister judicial warfare of their leftist co-conspirators, they have finally succeeded in getting that endorsement at the expense of all reason, justice, and order.

Alte, a Catholic, comes closest to making sense here:

Yeah, I don’t care either. Notice I have not been reporting on it. It’s all irrelevant. Legal marriage is totally and permanently dead. Over. Done for. The RCC needs to stop defending it, and start boycotting it.

Take a stand on something, Mother Church.

If the church hadn't already completely surrendered in the cultural war, it'd have arrested this trend years ago -- for instance, by excommunicating all the pro-gay "marriage" Catholic politicians for scandalizing the public, and perhaps even absolving married Catholics of their moral obligation to obey the legal terms of their marital contract, which has been absurdly renegotiated without any respect to their own conditions. The wages of Vatican II is moral confusion and impotence.

If the right (even the alt-right) follows suit and lays down its arms because gay marriage is "irrelevant," they will forfeit preemptively every battle to come. If morality -- including the justice that the bankers' gross criminal behavior demands -- is all a matter of personal subjectivity and irrational value judgments (a concession automatically made by declaring one's uninterest in the sanctity of the marital institution), then there is no such thing as justice, and therefore no reason to care about its violation. Seriously, can you even think of any reason to care that is not somehow related to natural law? By giving up on this, you surrender all rights in perpetuity to complain that modern society is not organized to your liking. Not that most of the alt-right would ever do anything but complain, anyway.

What happens next? These few inches being grudgingly conceded, the relativist left will proceed to demand the next several miles. Within a decade, there will be a concerted movement to compel state recognition of polygamous relationships, probably spearheaded by some celebrity degenerate, most likely in the form of expanding "civil union laws" to allow multiple-person contracts. (Ultimately, people united under such laws will be folded into marriage law by Supreme Court fiat). To the extent legalized polygamy is opposed by the left at all, it will only be because of its continuing association with the Mormons, although that may not prove to be too strong a consideration since it would demand just as equally censure of some Muslims. Prohibitions against bestiality and certain forms of incest will probably be eased (don't believe me? At least one leftist paragon is already on board). No doubt the future will be one in which people are permitted to sign contracts in life to sell their corpses after death to necrophiliacs, or allowed to donate their bodies for that purpose in a manner similar to how they're currently permitted to donate their organs.

And why not? If you divorce "marriage" (indeed, the sexual act itself) from its procreative context, all manners of absurdities follow. There is nothing except personal distaste stopping one from rationalizing those absurdities as "good." And personal taste, as the devolution of attitudes toward homosexual behavior just these last ten years suggest, is subject to revision.

*Of course, the libertarian (who sees consent as the basis for all social interactions and cannot even conceive of a nonconensual arrangement) will respond that we forbid bestiality because the animal doesn't consent. But we do not get animals consent before we kill, cook, and eat them, or sheer their excess wool to make clothes, or test hygiene products on them. Animals are by nature subordinate to man, and thus in his interactions with them it is his consent alone that ought to matter. Even this, I think, would be outrageous: to claim that consent can legitimate just any interaction with an animal. Man has a duty to cultivate the capacities that are essential to his nature, and one of these capacities is compassion, which obviously requires that animals be treated, if not necessarily with the "respect" that would accrue to a human person, certainly with no more violence or cruelty than would be justified.

**The liberal will argue that this is a "slippery slope fallacy," betraying in the process his total ignorance of rhetorical principles. The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy in and of itself; it is fallacious only when it rises (or falls, rather), to the level of a non sequitur because no clear logical relationship is demonstrated between the present act and the forewarned future ones. I have clearly so demonstrated a relationship: if sex does not exist for the purpose of procreation, and if marriage does not exist to attach society's impetus to the intrinsically fertile heterosexual relationship, then there is literally no compelling reason whatsoever to impose any further limitations on what sexual behaviors may be tolerated.

Why Hegel?

For those not already familiar with it, I cannot strongly enough recommend Throne and Altar, a blog run by an American monarchical Catholic reactionary under the pen name Bonald (as in Louis de Bonald, the French counterrevolutionary). I don't endorse everything Bonald writes -- for one thing, I'm quite alright with democracy, at least in principle -- but it's certainly refreshing to see that, contrary to the left's intuition, the "far right" doesn't end in the miserable intellectual cul de sac that is fusionism, and the clarity of his writings (and his general social vision) have added some refinement to this blog.

Of particular noteworthiness is Bonald's taxonomy of the right. He notes that the right, as a general ideological coalition, has been fractured along a number of ideological lines, the most prominent of which are the romantics in the tradition of Edmund Burke and (more recently) Russell Kirk who quite literally wrote the book on modern conservatism before it became infected with a virulent strain of libertarian dogmatism. Bonald classifies himself as a "social conservative," which he defines not in the typical sense understood today (classical liberalism with a dash of Protestant evangelism) but as an essentially anti-Enlightenment counterrevolutionary movement that emphasizes the value of tradition, community, and legitimate authority.

My own blog falls under what Bonald describes as right-Hegelism, which he defines as follows:

Hegel himself (the Hegel of Philosophy of Right) was a conservative of sorts.  His emphasis was on building a social order that would fulfill people’s need for the world to make sense to them and thus remove their alienation from the world.  The Left-Hegelians (Marx, etc), starting from some of Hegel’s less fortunate (or less understood) speculations, have had a large but deleterious effect on the world.  The Right-Hegelians were prominent in pre-WWI Prussia, but then fell into obscurity.  Today, this tradition is carried on by the British conservative Roger Scruton.  Right-Hegelism is similar, and complementary, to social conservatism in a number of ways.  Methodologically, the former relies on phenomenology, while the latter relies on a combination of natural law, virtue ethics, and divine command.  Thus, the Hegelians work from a “first-person” perspective (the subjectivity of members of a polity), while the social conservatives take a more “third-person” view.  Hegel and his followers are also more reconciled to industrialism, although they favor sensible regulation and a degree of corporatism.  They have no desire to resurrect home production or an agrarian economy.

Scruton's writings have influenced me to a great extent, especially his observation (in The Meaning of Conservatism) that people's perceptions of the reality of the world about them are often as important, if not moreso, than the truth about that reality. But one of this blog's greatest influences is, without a doubt, Peter Drucker, who in the years before and during World War II provided the only systematic understanding of the causes of fascism, its true nature, and how it might be overcome by a return to a kind of conservatism.

As I have argued repeatedly on this blog, much of the woes of modernity have stemmed from the apparent unintelligibility of our social order, thanks in part to changes to the social reality in the form of industrialization and chronic unemployment and in part to the corrosive critical force that is liberalism, a movement that is capable only of destroying social orders but which cannot provide anything to fill the vacuum. Thus, the key task of our generation is to imbue society once again with reason and order -- or at least the appearance of these things -- so that the individual and the community may once again be integrated into a common purpose.

As Bonald notes, my own philosophy differs from his in that I am concerned with the appearance of rationality in the social order where he is concerned with the objective truth of that rationality. I am, of course, sensible to the claim of objective truth -- the only way to escape the logical reality of natural law is to embrace leftism -- and it is probably true that a society founded on that truth would look more like the society Bonald envisions than, say, a society in which the military is the decisive social institution.

Why, then, am I a right-Hegelian and not a reactionary? For one thing, I think the ship has simply sailed on the social orders of old. The war is lost and the world forever changed. I see my own philosophy as an effort to make the best of a bad situation. I am thus reconciled to modernity in a way Bonald isn't, even though I recognize it, as he does, as a source of destruction and evil in the world.

But I don't see right-Hegelism -- that is, the concern for having a community and society founded on some rational principle -- as necessarily a concession to leftism. It is pretty much impossible, after all, to perceive intelligibility where none exists. Thus, any rationally-ordered society is going to capture and reflect some of the logos inherent in the universe. It is therefore still capable of achieving something like godliness, if only imperfectly so.

And that's certainly better than nothing.

Our Ongoing Collapse Opera: Flash Mobs and Alienation

I've noticed lately a sudden and dramatic surge in "wildings," essentially flash mobs that storm and rob stories and attack anyone that gets in their way, sometimes for apparently racial reasons. The news has been awash with reports of wildings lately, including recently, in Peoria, Illinois, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Ohio, and various other cities. (The DC appears to be little more than a rowdy street brawl.)

I'm naturally suspicious of anything the media reports given that they are among the most staggeringly incompetent people employed anywhere today (and there's reason to believe that some reports may have been overhyped). But the possibility of incompetence can only cast doubts on one bad story, perhaps two; half a dozen in a few few weeks is conspicuous, and of course what I've cited above is only a small sampling of the number I've seen reports of in the last two months or so.

Let's assume, for a moment, that general instances of mob violence are on the rise nationwide, and that the reports are accurate that these flash mobs and flash robberies are largely racial in nature, or at least that the mobs are racially homogeneous (i.e., black). I'm not a conspiracy theorist so I doubt there's some sinister black-uprising conspiracy or something; rather, it's reasonable to assume that they are responses to some phenomenon that is relatively uniform across the country.

Naturally, I'm inclined to believe this is all tied to our ongoing social collapse. The ongoing deterioration of the American economy, and the resultant reduction in Americans' quality of living, is inculcating a sense of desperation in everyone (not juts blacks); and as national allegiance breaks down people are reverting to their baser passions of class and race. Blacks, being generally poorer on average than everyone else, get this effect doubly: their class identification is only amplified by their racial grievances (hence why wealthy, talented blacks who go to college to escape the miserable privations of the black subculture are demonized as "turning white").

Black Americans, I think, have always been more intimately bound up with the Society of Economic Man than whites ever were. Slavery, of course, exposed them to it directly, and upon their manumission, they came to see in that society a promise for equality and freedom that whites largely took for granted. Get rich or die tryin is a grim and perverse expression of that promise, which has been revealed as utterly, hopelessly hollow. Economic society, they believe now, can never really give them the freedom or the equality they yearn for. Thus, rising mob violence is, like the rise of totalitarian fascism, a reaction to the reality of collapse and the exposure of the vacuum beneath our decomposing social order. It is a protracted howl of despair and alienation, a plaintive elegy in the ongoing opera of our collapse.

Of course, I'm not trying to excuse such violence -- managing your despair and angst is your own responsibility, after all, no one else's, and those who try to do so by breaking the law deserve long prison terms -- but merely to understand it. And I think the best way to understand it is that blacks are maladapting to the unpleasant realities of modernity. White men kill themselves; black men kill each other (and sometimes others). We tend not to think of suicide the same way we think of criminal behavior and homicide but it seems to me that the distinction between self-oriented and other-oriented aggression is irrelevant to a corpse. In either case, the aggression is a form of rebellion against the appearance of injustice and irrationality of modern society. And it will persist, if not intensify, until and unless we succeed in once again endowing society with reason, order, and purpose.

Libertarians: Right or Left?

Back when I identified with libertarianism, I always considered myself to be on the political right. In retrospect, I realize now that this was probably because I had fundamentally conservative sensibilities that had yet to be developed, not because of anything about libertarianism in particular. In fact, as I look at the libertarian movement today, I'm compelled to wonder where they actually fall on the right-left spectrum.

Let's dispense, for a moment, with the banalities. Yes, political affiliations can probably be measured more easily along a number of orthogonal factors than on an arbitrary continuum. Fred Kerlinger made this point back in the early 1980's, when he developed separate scales for liberalism and conservatism that were only modestly negatively correlated (a phenomenon John J. Ray attributed to response set artifactual to the scales' construction, not any latent orthogonality in the ideologies themselves). But this doesn't change the fact that politics, at least in the United States, are coalitional and oppositional in nature, and that even though a lot of competing ideologies fall under the umbrella terms "right" and "left," these terms are still both meaningful and useful.

Obviously, people on the far right (i.e., Bonald, whom I couldn't help but notice leaves libertarians off his taxonomy of the right) are apt to view libertarians as left-wing. And those on the far left are likewise apt to view libertarians as right-wing extremists (see the left's visceral reaction to the moderately-libertarian Rand Paul branding him as, well, a right-wing extremist). And I think its reasonable to conclude that some libertarians are more "right-wing" than others, based solely on what issues carry the highest valence with them in terms of passion and engagement. A libertarian who's all about free sex and drugs and so on could reasonably be said to be to the left of a libertarian who's all about, say, repealing affirmative action, even though they probably both agree with one another on the exact same issues. What Kerlinger called criterality -- the relevance of a particular attitude-item to a person -- is as important as the strength of that attitude when it comes to determining where a person falls on the spectrum.

The philosopher Edward Feser sees something like a natural alliance between libertarians and conservatives, even as he notes that many prominent libertarians (such as Reason's Nick Gillespie) in fact think and behave like leftists. Feser has also previously noted that libertarianism is predicated on a very un-conservative rejection of classical natural right, which leads it to all manners of circular absurdities, such as the claim that people's rights derive from self-ownership -- including the right to property ownership which the assertion of self-ownership must presuppose.

On the other hand, as I've noted before, libertarians are really just reactionaries, seeking to freeze in amber the political policies and social order of 1776 even though the social reality is clearly no longer suited for them. Reactionaries are, of course, traditionally associated with monarchism, but I see no reason why a desire to restore the conditions of one time period should be considered any more or less reactionary than a desire to restore the conditions of another. Reactionaries are typically lumped on the right, but I have to wonder if even the heuristic left/right divide remains meaningful at its extremes. At some point, a difference in degree really does become a difference in kind. Obviously, that's not an argument for libertarianism being left-wing; it's simply an argument that it's not necessarily right-wing.

But to go back to the first hand, that libertarians are reactionaries doesn't necessarily mean they're conservatives, especially if you take the view that America from the time of its founding onward was foundationally liberal. Economic freedom, democracy, religious neutrality, and so on were all pretty left-wing by the standard of the day, and that conservatives today have adopted them as their standards doesn't imbue those positions with some essential conservatism, it simply means the conservatives of today are actually just old-school leftists. Is it entirely fair to define an ideology solely by what its living practitioners believe? Is there no historical continuity to these things?

Granted, if we take that to its logical conclusion, there is no meaningful "right-wing" anywhere, at all. Which certainly would explain a thing or two.

Based on personal experience alone, I'm inclined to think that libertarians lean somewhat to the left. First, libertarians are in thrall to a great social blueprint, and social blueprints are nothing if not un-conservative. Second, while the left doesn't always much like libertarians, it tolerates them; the relationship is similar to, say, the runt of a gang who gets made fun of relentlessly by his peers but who tolerates it because that's the price one pays to remain in the group. Hence why it's fashionable to be libertarian nowadays but not, say, a monarchist. Concordantly, most libertarians are actually perfectly OK with liberal policies, even those that vastly increase the power of the state, provided it vanquishes those hateful conservative attitudes that judge them for indulging in premarital sex. Look no farther than Reason magazine bragging that libertarians helped get gay marriage passed in New York (a move so flatly contrary to their own principles that I cannot make sense of it otherwise).

Put simply, where libertarians align with conservatives, it always seems an alliance of convenience. Where they align with liberals, it always seems like a homecoming.

Drugs, Individualism, and Consequentialism

Some interesting discussion going on over at In Mala Fide concerning the war on drugs, with Ferdinand Bardamu posting a grisly image of a victim of the drug cartels having been carved to bits (very not safe for work, obviously) and arguing that such violence constitutes an impetus to end drug prohibition.

Personally, I'm not convinced, and I see his arugment as kind of a red-herring, anyway. Most people don't support drug prohibition for reasons of morality, but because legalized drug use in our modern, degenerate republic would be a recipe for catastrophe.

Imagine people toking up at work, snorting lines of coke off the lunch table in the break room or heading off to the park to inject some H. Imagine people hopped up on meth waiting in line to vote (for more welfare, naturally). Imagine the highways peopled with PCP addicts driving beat-up clunkers unsafely.

Oh, it won't happen! the libertarian says. Social conventions will spring up to guard good behavior. Heavy drug users will get fired from their jobs and businesses will be free to tell users to take a hike if they disapprove. And government can still pass laws to make sure drugs are used safely and legally.

Horse. Shit.

What social conventions? What could our famously corrupt society possibly do to guard itself against, say, the prospect of corporate marijuana giants and left-wing "human rights" busybodies suing and lobbying to erase every sign of social disapproval against its product? These are the same social conventions that not only tolerate but positively fetishize the kinds of behavior that contributed to the HIV/AIDS "epidemic" it's spent billions of taxpayer dollars trying to wipe out. Its political class can't even say "no" to the objectively undeserving we have today, much less the even-less-deserving people of tomorrow.

Five years after drugs get legalized, it will be illegal to discriminate against drug users for employment. Then it will be illegal to ask them to leave the building to use their drugs; employers will be required to set aside special rooms for users. Ten years later, drug users will qualify for Medicaid coverage. Fifteen years and they'll be teaching kids how to use needles in sixth grade home ec class.

The notion that society will police drug use itself hinges on the notion that social conventions built up in the context of a pre-legalization society will persist post-legalization. They won't. Drug use, even heavy and destructive drug use, will not only be legalized and tolerated, it will receive explicit legal and financial protections, including welfare, health care coverage for the inevitable tidal wave of public health problems that would result, some kind of disability insurance for those rendered useless and unemployable, etc.

Not to mention, there's not even a shred of evidence that ending drug prohibition would do anything to strip the cartels of power. Drug manufacturers will inevitably be subject to restriction, regulation, taxation, FDA approval, and so on. So you can buy your drugs for $150 from Wal-Mart (with a prescription!) and then pay sales taxes and maybe a special drug tax on top of that or you can get them from Paco for $50, tax- and hassle-free.

(People likewise imagine legalizing prostitution will take care of our illicit prostitution problem. Nonsense. Legal prostitution is subject to all manners of expensive regulation; it's still far cheaper and easier to pick up a streetwalker. Which is why illegal prostitution remains a problem in Nevada, the only U.S. state where it's legal).

Liberalized drug laws can function only under a few, very specific circumstances. The first is a relatively homogeneous and close-knit society in which the moral consensus is self-enforcing and requires no government intervention. The other is the kind of heartless libertarian tyranny in which anyone left out in the cold by industrialization, free trade, or mass immigration simply starves to death; in that case, we wouldn't have to worry about drug users, anyway, since they'd all go extinct.

Everyone instinctively knows this is true, except the violently deluded libertarian reactionaries who think the spirit of 1776 will mystically reassert itself if only if we elect President Ron Paul. The truth is, in our degarded open-kimono welfare society, an end to drug prohibition would be catastrophic for nearly everyone -- the drug users included.

The argument that Americans should unilaterally surrender to the unproductive lotus-eating elements of society in order to spare the poor Mexicans of their violent crime problem is rank consequentialism. That there is a cartel problem in Mexico (and parts of the United States) isn't evidence that we ought to abandon the war on drugs -- it's evidence that we ought to take the war on drugs a lot more seriously. The very fabric of American society is violently threatened by brutal criminals and their functional co-conspirators in the states. More on how to take it seriously later.

But surrender we will, because the vile goose-step of individualism continues onward through history, and we will never learn that the answer to our alienation and despair is not to heap more alienation and despair on it by further severing the connection between the individual and society.

He's Got a Way With Words

While Ben spoke, the bears ruled:

Our whole financial system is built on faith -- irrational faith, at that. And people aren't seeing much to justify that faith any more.

What I Mean by Collapse

It occurred to me that I use the term "collapse" in different ways at different times throughout this blog, so I thought I'd provide a brief run-down here of the different ways in which I use it.

The most common way I use it is in an economic sense. When talking about "collapse" in posts tagged Economics, I typically mean a financial crisis that snowballs into a full-blown deflationary depression, with mass unemployment, destruction of wealth, and collapse in GDP; in some cases I also mean monetary system collapse, that is, the failure of debt-based fiat currency, which is a logical conclusion of economic collapse. I also generally include under the umbrella of "economic collapse" the possibility of an American sovereign debt crisis, sovereign debt being the last thing filling the hole in the shrinking American economy.

Such a collapse will sharply impoverish much of the country (and perhaps the world) and result in severe supply-chain disruptions. For a time, at least, food will not be delivered to stores nor gasoline to gas stations. Virtually every business reliant on credit to finance its day-to-day operations (pretty much all major businesses and many small ones) will shut down. Such a collapse will probably be very violent, especially if accompanied by a sovereign debt crisis that will destroy the government's ability to care for the dispossessed.

I also use "collapse" in a social sense -- more precisely, in one of two social senses. The first is the collapse of faith in the social order, which is more or less still economic even though the social reality moved beyond that order almost a century ago. This sort of collapse has already happened. People simply do not believe the economic creeds of yesteryear, whether capitalist or Marxism. They have traded in the promise of economic progress guaranteed by the turbulent economic policies of the 19th century and before for the promise (however vain) of economic security guaranteed by the government. In their desperation to banish the irrational demons of economic society, they have even resorted to blind faith in monetary miracle-workers. Despite their dissatisfaction with the nominally free-market order of old, people appear no more satisfied with the Marxist conception of economic man -- they know that the problem of the bourgeoisie is fatal to Marxism, they know that it cannot guarantee a free or an equal society, and the fact that it impoverishes and murders them to boot is mere icing on the cake.

The other social sense in which I use the term "collapse" refers to the collapse of the facade of economic society, which has yet to occur. The coming economic collapse will shatter the people's faith, once and for all, in the ability of government to mitigate or constrain the worst excesses of economic society. It will compel them to demand a reorganization of our economic system, one predicated on economic stability and full employment, to match the realities of our industrial (and, to some extent, post-industrial) economic reality.

Finally, when I say collapse is coming, I mean some combination of all the above: the collapse of the economy and the exposure of the social vacuum that lurks beneath it. I generally mean this in a foreboding sense, since I assume the coming collapse will be traumatic and perhaps fatal to American society, and possibly that of the West in general.

I hope this post clears up whatever confusion may exist regarding my liberal and, at times, confusing and inconsistent use of the term collapse.

Which, I shall never fail to remind my readers... is coming.

The Social Consequences of Economic Collapse

The United States is not new to periods of extraordinary economic turbulence, although it has, obviously, been generations since we experienced one of any extraordinary magnitude. We often think of the Great Depression as the most severe such period of economic turbulence,  but in fact it was quite tame in comparison to earlier crashes and its severity has been aggravated by social-psychological factors that were largely absent during previous crashes. The following interesting chart (borrowed from Wikipedia) gives us an idea of historical inflation in the United States and colonial America, which highlights perfectly the relatively instability of our economy over the centuries:

Obviously, the blue spikes above the line correspond to periods of inflation, the green spikes below the line to periods of deflation. Note that the green deflationary spikes corresponding to the Great Depression are actually quite mild in comparison to earlier spikes in the early and late 18th centuries and late 17th century. Also note that, following the Great Depression, the movement has been almost entirely inflationary owing to the total domination of the federal government over the monetary supply.

This is worth note, because the advent of government control over the monetary supply changed qualitatively the nature of monetary policy and its consequences. Depressions post-Federal Reserve Act became a qualitatively different thing than depressions beforehand.

As monetary policy shifted away from commodity-backed money toward debt-based fiat money, depressions became credit-oriented, as I outlined previously. In our modern debt-based economy, money and credit are fungible and depressions stem from inadequate growth of the monetary supply through credit creation that cause a self-reinforcing tidal wave of defaults, destroying wealth, taking down banks, and causing economic activity to screech to a halt. It's for this reason that the government gets involved in every stock market crash: since the whole system is built on faith, anything that disturbs that faith has the potential to obliterate the entire economy in a matter of days.

But when money was backed by commodities (specifically gold), depressions were actually engineered by cartels that bought precious metals and hoarded them (causing deflation as the supply of gold and the price of it, and thus the value of the dollar, rose) and sold them (causing inflation as the supply of gold rose and the price of it, and thus the value 0f the dollar, fell) whenever they saw fit.

You can see why this might be a problem. Suppose I issue a billion dollars of loans one year. Six months later, I engineer monstrous deflation, causing the value of my loans to rise. Once they're all paid back, I engineer equally-monstrous inflation that drives people to take out loans to make ends meet. The process repeats. You'll notice that inflation, in one brief period around the 1740s, peaked at about 40%, and was immediately followed by stinging deflation.

There was never much danger of a systemic collapse under this system since the market was reigned in, in part, by the demands of metal-backed currency. But the system could be abused in such a way as to enrich the few at the cost of extraordinary economic suffering for everyone else. The predictable result is extreme economic turbulence, with one bubble bursting after another and those well-positioned to do so profiting immensely from it.

People tolerated this system because they were in thrall to an ideology that perceived it as vital to the realization of their supreme social value: economic progress. That's why the Panic of 1873 and the ensuing "Long Depression," despite being objectively more severe than the Great Depression that began in 1929, resulted in nowhere near the level of social and political instability that was caused by the latter.

We are in a uniquely problematic position in that we are both on the verge of an economic collapse probably unequaled in history and lack a social structure capable of ordering it. Peter Drucker, in The Age of Discontinuity, noted that the social reality was moving away from an economic or even an industrial society to a society characterized by a pluralism of powerful organizations, each of tremendously greater size and social power than anything that had previously existed. Yet our society was still governed by economic attitudes, economic perceptions, economic values, economic ideas. This is the reason why, in the face of an alarming labor force nonparticipation rate, our political class continues to demand that we import more unnecessary laborers and send more jobs to the Third World through free trade.  They are still ideologically enslaved by books written centuries ago, in the context of a preindustrial frontier society of subsistence farmers and skilled artisans.

The coming economic collapse will probably destroy our fledgling organizationally-pluralistic society and plunge us back into a social dark age unparalleled since the wake of the Great Depression, and perhaps unparalleled in all the history of man. As I've documented previously, the social reality of the future may well be militaristic in nature, given Americans' newfound warlike spirit, nationalistic belligerence, and blind deference to the mounting demands of the national security state.

 The economic collapse that is shortly due will, therefore, not only be extraordinarily painful economically, but socially, as well. If people derive their social status and function from their participation in one of a variety of large, powerful organizations (whether the big business, hospital, church, trade union, farmers' co-op, military, university, etc.), and if these organizations will largely be destroyed by a deflationary crunch, people will be stripped of their employment and livelihoods and, by extension, their integration into the polity. The result will not be a sharp impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people but a sudden spike in social disintegration and alienation. The result will likely be violence; political extremism; and the resurgence of racial and class enmities once suppressed by a marginally-functional social order.

Get ready. Collapse is coming.

The Problem of Credit (or, Why Economic Collapse is Mathematically Inevitable)

There isn't a bank in the world that has enough money in its vault to pay its depositors. It's all built on trust, and we are so very close... Morgan-Stanley and Goldman are an inch away. If the other banks stop trusting them, if they pull back on interbank lending, it's over in a matter of hours. From there, it goes too fast to stop. A run, not just on one bank, but on the whole system. Average people wondering 'is my money safe?' They start pulling their cash, and then lines outside the banks, smashed ATMs... a couple of weeks, there's no milk in the stores."

--William Hurt, playing U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in Too Big to Fail (2011)

 Most people don't truly understand the nature of the Western monetary system, and thus they largely disbelieve the possibility of it all collapsing. In fact, our monetary system is absurdly unstable and, worse still, unsustainable. Its collapse is not merely a possibility; it is a mathematical inevitability. Here's why.

Under our fractional-reserve banking system, banks are required to retain only 10% of their deposits on hand. They are free to lend out the other 90% of their deposits in the form of loans. Now, this is important because a loan that I write today becomes a deposit somewhere else tomorrow, meaning that that money can be loaned out again -- and again and again and again.

An example: Suppose I deposit $10,000 at my local bank. They are required by law to keep $1,000 in reserve, and may lend out the remaining $9,000. They do so; the recipient of that loan deposits it at their bank, which is, again, required to keep only 10% ($900) on hand and which may lend out the remaining 90% ($8,100). They do so, and that $8,100 winds up in yet another bank, where 10% ($810) is kept in reserve and the remaining 90% ($7,290) is loaned out.

This process continues until the total amount of debt in the system hits a mathematical limit, that is, when it reaches the point when new debt cannot be issued without dipping below the reserve requirement. This limit is expressed by the money multiplier, the inverse of the reserve requirement, which represents the total amount by which a dollar deposited at a bank can be multiplied through fractional-reserve banking. Given a reserve requirement of 10%, the money multiplier is 10 (as .1^-1 = 10); thus, every dollar deposited at a bank multiplies into $10 of actual money and credit in the system. (You can see that, as the reserve requirement approaches 100%, the money multiplier approaches 1. Thus, a system with a 25% reserve requirement would have a money multiplier of 4, as .25^-1 = 4, while a system with a 99% reserve requirement would have a money multiplier of .99^-1 = 1.01. This fact is noteworthy but irrelevant to the rest of our discussion.)

This system works because most people keep their money in the bank. If everyone tried to take their money out simultaneously, the bank would implode; it simply wouldn't be able to reimburse all its deposits. But so long as everyone agrees to trust the banks and keep their money deposited there, the system continues. (In fact, even buying something on credit doesn't really affect this balance, as all that happens is that money is transferred from one account to another -- a bookkeeping entry, really). Since most of our day-to-day exchanges actually involve credit or debit rather than cash, there's generally no risk of a run happening; runs occur only when physical cash is withdrawn.

This is important because it implies that credit is a cousin of money. In fact, the two are fungible. Having $10,000 on hand is as good as being owed $10,000 by someone else, because, if I need to, I can just sell your $10,000 debt and have cash-on-hand immediately. In other words, your debt to me is an asset with recognizable value and is treated as such on banks' balance sheets.

The other important thing about this is that the amount of debt in circulation will always exceed the amount of money in existence, by a 9:1 ratio in 10% reserve requirement systems. It cannot be otherwise. As William Hurt said, there really isn't a bank in the world with cash on hand sufficient to pay off its deposits. Sure, it could start selling debt; but this presupposes the availability of a buyer. If no one's buying, that debt is worthless.

If, in any given monetary system, people are in debt for more than the amount of money that exists, how does the system run? How do people even manage to pay interest? Simply put, since the act of lending itself involves the creation of money, so long as credit is continuously being created at a certain rate, the monetary supply grows by enough to serve the existing debt.

You can see why this is problematic. If money comes into existence as debt, then the amount of debt every year must continually increase. And since the money loaned into existence to pay interest is itself debt, the amount of credit in the system must rise exponentially year-over-year.

To assume that levels of credit actually can rise at such a rate is to assume that people's rate to take on debt is also rising exponentially. Obviously, it isn't. Thanks in part to free trade and mass immigration policies, real incomes have not kept pace with the expansion of credit. That's why people's ability to take on additional debt hit a wall around 2007 or 2008.

What happened when we hit that wall? Well, when the rise in credit outstanding falls below the rate necessary to grow the monetary supply enough to finance existing debt, we find ourselves in a state in which the interest payments on debt exceed the amount of money in existence. (That's real money, not credit, which exists only on paper). Thus, some of the debt in existence mathematically must default. Those closest to insolvency will default first.

Since money is credit and vice-versa, these defaults (which wipe out debt) have the effect of shrinking the monetary supply. That is, they reduce the amount of money available to service debt even further, so the next-most-insolvent people are also forced into default. This, again, destroys more money, forcing more defaults, in a rapid outward-to-inward deflationary collapse.

It's a painful thing when one bank collapses, especially when it's insured other banks' debts. A collapsing bank seeks to cover its shortfalls by dumping its assets on the market, reducing the prices of those assets immediately and thus tightening the balance sheets of the remaining banks. If that bank holds CDS' (credit-default swaps, essentially a form of insurance against the possibility of default) on other banks' debt, those banks lose the ability to list that insurance on the positive side of their balance sheets, forcing them to recognize liabilities that didn't previously exist and possibly driving them into insolvency, too.

The end result is a rapidly-dominoing collapse of the financial sector, the monetary system, and, ultimately, the economy that depends on both of them.

The years since the financial crisis have represented a concerted effort to keep this from happening, first by infusing the banks with cash in the hopes of jump-starting the credit creation necessary to keep the system running and, when that failed, simply printing up the difference and loaning it to the government.

This effort will fail, for two reasons. One, credit creation cannot be restarted because people lack the ability to continue taking on debt. And two, inflationary money-printing without attendant increases in nominal wages (the lack of which, recall, is exactly the reason credit creation can't restart) guarantees margin compression,  as suppliers cannot raise prices without losing customers and are forced to eat the increased input costs. If this continues long enough, we wind up with a deflationary depression, anyway. The end game of this is in sight, and that end game is economic collapse.

The banks will begin to go under; their failures will instantly send shockwaves through the global economy, destroying wealth and driving every business reliant on credit to finance its day-to-day operations into immediate bankruptcy. The damage will far exceed the FDIC's ability to insure deposits, obliterating peoples' savings and pensions. Credit cards will stop working. Trucks will stop delivering gasoline and lunch meat and toilet paper. Tens of millions of people will be out of work, hungry, homeless.

And the government will be unable to do anything about it. Having tried to fill the credit bubble with sovereign debt, there'll be no one left to finance its day-to-day operations, either. The bond market will implode as revenues shrink along with the economy. It will be the Great Depression all over again, but worse, and without enough money for a New(er) Deal.

The government had a good opportunity to prepare the country for this; they could've set aside the $700 billion in TARP money to set up emergency shelters for those left hungry and homeless by the collapse. But they didn't. They gave it all to the bankers and the bankers pissed it away.

 I hope people grasp the seriousness of this. There is literally nothing that can be done to prevent an economic collapse. It is mathematically determinate. The only questions remaining are how society will handle it: how much violence there will be, how many will die, how quickly we'll impose a new economic paradigm over top the ruins of the old, and whether or not there'll be justice served to the bastards who brought the world to its knees.

The Tragedy of the Fall of Economic Man

A while back, I wrote that one of the best pieces of evidence for the collapse of the society of economic man was the people's blind faith in economic miracle-workers, citing the hysteria surrounding the election of Barack Obama (whose campaign was predicated without evidence on a promise to banish the irrational demons of economic society) and the "cow-eyed deference" with which the political class servilely bows to the Federal Reserve. The money line:

That everyone agrees on how ludicrous it is to believe that our future prosperity really just hinges on finding the right velocity of money or determining the right amount of stimulus money to spend only makes this deference more pathetic: in a world apparently bereft of reason, people have resorted to blind faith in miracles for their salvation.

And then, as if on cue, we get word of the market buoying on the news of renewed hope for a "Greek miracle."

This is pathetic; worse than pathetic. Virtually everyone knows Greece cannot be "rescued." But maybe if we just throw a little more money at them...

The crisis that's coming will be a powerful one, indeed.