My "Fall" from Liberalism
It's time to leave the Matrix.
It's time to leave the Matrix.
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| So a chap called Mike Burke tweeted this article at me because in it he references what he calls my fall from liberalism. | |
| And because of the murder of Charlie Kirk, everyone is living in this kind of new world after such a terrible event. | |
| But my view on liberalism wasn't informed by the murder of Charlie Kirk, and I'd come to this decision long before. | |
| Now, it spends quite a lot of time in the article describing what has happened, which is all fine. | |
| I agree that these are the things that did happen. | |
| And then he gets to Matt Walsh. | |
| How Matt Walsh is quite a very quite strong conservative and very much, of course, a hardline critic of the left, and someone who himself would not be considered a liberal. | |
| And so you've got Matt Walsh, and then the article kind of bleeds in to the post-liberals, such as people like Joram Hazoni and Patrick Dineen, to speak with the voice of theory, as he says. | |
| And I've read why liberalism failed. | |
| I've read a few other post-liberal works, and I definitely would consider myself in that space. | |
| And these have got nothing to do with Charlie Kirk either. | |
| Because as he puts in the article, the terms are calm and the words respectable, but the conclusion is revolutionary. | |
| The liberal order itself is hollow, irredeemable, and must be replaced. | |
| And that's correct. | |
| That's just correct. | |
| That is the proper way to approach the problems that we are facing at the moment. | |
| Because it is liberalism that brought us to this point. | |
| If you consider, say, sort of Reaganite, Buckleyite conservatism, that is also liberalism. | |
| It is just liberalism that is going the speed limit. | |
| Whereas you can consider any kind of centre-left, progressive to quite radical, I mean, genuinely like communism, is a variant of liberalism. | |
| And this springs forth from liberal premises and principles. | |
| And all of that is a variant or a descendant of liberalism. | |
| And this has brought us to this place. | |
| This view, this worldview, the philosophy, the ideology, it is all responsible for the state of the world now. | |
| And it can only drive us in one direction. | |
| And there is nowhere else to go with liberalism itself. | |
| Now, I'll probably write a book on this, to be honest. | |
| This is the sort of thing I was covering in my master's degree and my philosophy degree. | |
| This is the telos of liberalism to push us continually to this place. | |
| And whether you've got what we can call conservatives who are liberals and are interested in getting to the place that the most radical left-wing are trying to get to, but only as long as it doesn't collapse in on itself. | |
| So you could call those the sensible liberals compared to the radical liberals who are just mental and are doing it out of spite, basically. | |
| All of these people have the same goal in mind. | |
| And I don't agree with the goal. | |
| I don't agree with what they're trying to achieve. | |
| And so I decided I wasn't just not a liberal, but I was very much against liberalism. | |
| Because actually, what liberalism is promising is basically evil. | |
| It's basically the dissolution of all of society, all of the bonds between men and place. | |
| And I'm sorry, I'm just very much against that. | |
| It's the death of all nations. | |
| It's the death of all social structures. | |
| It's the flattening of all moral hierarchies into an endless, boundless horizon of equality. | |
| And I'm not for it. | |
| I'm not for that. | |
| I'm for the distinctions between peoples, between times, between morals, between groups. | |
| I am for distinctions. | |
| Dare I say I'm for diversity. | |
| I am for these things and it is because liberalism not only doesn't understand the value of these things, but actively treats things outside of its own purview as hostile because it's created for itself an entirely new way of looking at morality. | |
| that I have actually come to the conclusion that it's not moral at all. | |
| It's actually a kind of negation of morality. | |
| It's not even evil, actually, I should say. | |
| It's something else. | |
| And that something else is kind of terrifying. | |
| Because you've got to remember with morality, morality is a fundamentally social endeavor. | |
| Morality happens between people. | |
| Therefore, morality itself happens in relationships. | |
| The relation, you can't get a person and another person, and then that thing connecting them, the metaphysical bond between them, is a relationship. | |
| And that's where morality exists. | |
| The liberal, however, doesn't agree with that. | |
| They don't believe morality exists in the relations between people. | |
| They believe in categorical morality. | |
| In fact, Kant calls it the categorical imperative. | |
| And they expect that any rational being should be able to sign up to a series of maxims that can operate as universal rules. | |
| And following these rules makes you moral. | |
| Well, I don't agree with that at all. | |
| I mean, categorical thinking is specifically non-relational. | |
| Anyone in the category, even if they're not related to each other, never met each other, don't live on the same continent, they're still in the same category, and therefore the categorical thought groups these people together inappropriately. | |
| Whereas relational thought looks at what is actually connected, what is actually together. | |
| And these relations and the character of them, the morality expressed in them, is either good or evil. | |
| It is either going in a virtuous direction or going in a vicious direction. | |
| And that, I think, is actually morality, because that requires affirmative actions. | |
| As in, it is not enough to simply not break the rules. | |
| Do not steal, because I could will that not stealing should be a universal maxim, is useful enough as a law. | |
| But it's not any good to describe a person who has never wrung their grandmother or a person who every Sunday goes over to a house and bakes her a Sunday roast. | |
| These are not moral equivalents. | |
| These people are not morally equivalent. | |
| One of them is deeply selfish and should pick up the phone and phone their nan. | |
| And the other is someone who does good for others and therefore is more morally worthy than the other. | |
| It's literally that simple. | |
| Morality is positive. | |
| It is not negative as liberalism would have it. | |
| And so I do think this attitude is irredeemable, hollow, and has to be replaced. | |
| It is what is actually, as he says, hollowing out our civilization. | |
| This is all in the endeavor of creating a world in which no person is reliant upon any other. | |
| No person has any connection to any other, at least one that wasn't expressly chosen. | |
| And this is where the social contract comes into it. | |
| You don't even, you don't even have intrinsic ties to your own civilization now, theoretically. | |
| Theoretically, this is all something that we could agree to or disagree to and change at a whim. | |
| Now, obviously, that's not true, and it doesn't work that way. | |
| Again, yet another fallacy of liberalism. | |
| But the problem with all of this is that it does create this kind of mysticism that acts as a new religion. | |
| And I'll show you how it is described as a kind of religion as we go through this article. | |
| Now, I just want to be clear: I don't know this chap, and he's not mean to me or anything like that. | |
| And so, I don't want to come across like I'm against him personally. | |
| I just really strongly disagree with the way in which this is characterized. | |
| So, it comes to me. | |
| The consequence, he says, can be seen in Britain. | |
| Carl Benjamin, once a liberal critic of extremism, rose to prominence online as Sagan of CAD, defending ordinary values against both the woke left and the alt-right. | |
| For a time, he proved that one could resist excess without succumbing to it. | |
| His anger was not misplaced. | |
| He saw clearly the cowardice of those who excused Islamist intolerance in the name of multiculturalism, as indignation was the natural response of a man who loved his country and feared for its moral spine. | |
| But in time, it's his indignation lost its shape. | |
| The righteous fury that once sought to defend the liberal order hardened into a rage against the order itself. | |
| The problem with the woke left isn't the woke part, it's the left part, he declared. | |
| A phrase that revealed not opposition to fanaticism, but rejection of liberal democracy itself. | |
| From there, his anger became identity, resentment supplanted liberty. | |
| The other was no longer merely the zealots who refused to integrate, but anyone who did not fit into a narrow envision of Englishness. | |
| So Benjamin claimed that the flag belonged only to those of English blood, and therefore Jews could never truly be English. | |
| His fall is a tragedy, the loss of a steward who once held the line against extremism only to join the ranks of those he opposed. | |
| His descent into a possible portent for a terrible turn on the American, sorry, his descent is a possible portent for a terrible turn on the American right. | |
| His journey shows how righteous anger can curdle into amorphous rage. | |
| When love of home turns into hatred of neighbor, when cultural inheritance is mistaken for ethnic possession, and when a people forgets that the truest test of belonging not lies not in ancestry but in allegiance, if Benjamin could fall, any of us could. | |
| And if America abandons its inheritance, it could fall further still. | |
| Right. | |
| So let's just dissect this, shall we? | |
| Because I don't agree with a lot of the characterization in here, obviously. | |
| But it's not done from a position of ill will. | |
| It's done from a position of liberal mysticism, believing oneself as essentially the spiritual and moral elect, which frankly, liberals just aren't. | |
| And in many ways, this conceit is the cover for those people on the radical left in particular to tell themselves that they're being good people while they're hurting others. | |
| This is what allows them to do it. | |
| To say, actually, if I have my suite of categorical imperatives and I've been told by Immanuel Kant that the only truly good person, the only truly good thing is a good will, then if I just hold a good will, I can do whatever I want. | |
| My non-action of believing something, which I could just believe something different tomorrow was at C.S. Lewis, I believe 20 impossible things before breakfast or something. | |
| You can believe anything you want, just flitting from one. | |
| Oh, I'm going to believe now in Allah. | |
| I'm going to believe now in God. | |
| I'm going to believe now in Woden. | |
| You know, like you could believe whatever you want. | |
| You could just choose and decide and come to the conclusion that at any point, it is your actions that are actually your morality. | |
| That's what's really moral, actually. | |
| You can, I mean, having good intentions is nice, but it is not sufficient to call yourself a good person. | |
| And like I said, it provides cover for those people who just say, oh, yeah, no, bro, I definitely have the best intentions. | |
| Now let's go and do something horrible to that evil, fascist, racist, Nazi, alt-right, blah, right? | |
| It's so easy to see how this provides cover for it that in that in and of itself, I really strongly object, right? | |
| But anyway, so he proved that one could resist excess without succumbing to it. | |
| I'm not in any way demonstrating an excess of liberalism, right? | |
| I am demonstrating a massive deficit of liberalism because I'm just against it. | |
| I'm just completely opposed to it. | |
| I'm not in favor of being either moderate or radically liberal. | |
| The moderate liberal is the person who looks at the status quo that got us to this point that has allowed our countries to become so deformed and scarred through the liberal experiment that they say, well, I mean, you know, this is just normalcy. | |
| This is the baseline of what a normal civilization is. | |
| Bringing in millions of people, having hate speech codes, having all these sorts of welfare dependencies, having the government increase until it essentially becomes totalitarian. | |
| This is all normal to the liberal. | |
| This is the way that the world ought to be. | |
| Because the liberal, like I described earlier, can't actually define a good or bad person. | |
| All it can define is a person who has or has not broken the rules. | |
| And actually, the rules are often a long way off. | |
| They're often far above us and actually don't inform what is actually on the ground, where we are, what a good or bad person is. | |
| And so liberalism can't teach people to be virtuous. | |
| In fact, liberalism would be perfectly at home with a civilization of devils, as long as the devils followed the rules. | |
| That would be fine for liberalism. | |
| So if everyone around was working against one another, seeking to undermine their businesses, seeking to get one over on each person, no matter how it was, even something really trivial, like, I don't know, something really trivial, like, I don't know, doing towards your neighbors or something, right? | |
| All these sorts of ways in which your neighbors could make your lives miserable, a liberal would say, well, there's no fault here because there's no law against this. | |
| And everyone agrees, actually, and this is one of the key problems with the categorical imperative. | |
| If every rational creature could assent to just work for yourself and screw everyone else, well, yeah, everyone could assent to that, actually. | |
| Everyone could say, yeah, it's totally rational. | |
| If we all do this, then we'll all get whatever we want and sold the other guy. | |
| And so you end up in a highly unpleasant world. | |
| And the liberal can only say, well, I mean, as long as they're following the rules. | |
| And that's not sufficient. | |
| That's just not sufficient to have that. | |
| And again, it's that and that's not even considering the changing of the rules to be highly liberal, as in you can impose the sort of woke morality code on a workplace or whatever. | |
| So you've got to use your pronouns, you've got to make sure you've got the kind of racial hierarchy in your minds and gender hierarchy in your minds and all that sort of stuff. | |
| Trans women are women and all that sort of nonsense. | |
| That's assuming that the codes were just actually quite neutral. | |
| Even then, you could have all sorts of trouble. | |
| But then what happens if you have these kind of uneven codes that woke morality brings? | |
| Well, you've got people maliciously applying the rules in order to hurt some people for the benefit of others. | |
| And I'm sorry, I just don't want to live in the kind of social contract society that can facilitate that. | |
| I don't think the rules are actually sacred. | |
| I think what's sacred are the bonds between people, as in, I like the people around me. | |
| I think that Aristotle was right. | |
| A civic polity, any kind of civilization, is fundamentally built on friendship. | |
| And friendship means not acting against the interests of that person. | |
| And that person will not act against your interests. | |
| And so together, you can actually work and cooperate and make a better world, regardless of what the rules are. | |
| You do it because you want to help them. | |
| And I mean, you know, you might bend the rules slightly to help that person. | |
| Like, for example, in Britain, it used to be normal for like 14-year-olds to go to the pub. | |
| And they'd get a beer or two. | |
| And everyone knew they shouldn't be there. | |
| But they'd have a couple of beers. | |
| And if they wouldn't cause any trouble, because they knew they weren't supposed to be there, the rules definitely prohibited them being there, drinking. | |
| And yet, the village would tolerate it because it would sort of teach them how to act properly in this environment, how to act in this social setting. | |
| And so it would just be normal. | |
| It'd be normal for like, you know, teenagers to go and get beers in the pub, as long as they didn't have too many beers, as long as they didn't cause any trouble, and to learn their place in the world, in this moral hierarchy. | |
| And that used to be completely normal, but a hard application of the rules would completely destroy what was otherwise a very wholesome and healthy social mechanism to incorporate young people into the tribe. | |
| But anyway, getting back to this, I'm not, there's no excess of liberalism with me. | |
| I am in opposition to liberalism. | |
| So of course my anger was not against the liberal order was not misplaced. | |
| But the complaint that my anger hardened into rage against the order itself, well, yes, because Islamist intolerance and woke leftism and all this sort of stuff, it's not that my indignation lost its shape. | |
| It's that I became cognizant of why these things were happening. | |
| Why are there millions of Muslims in my country? | |
| Why are there millions of Muslims in your country? | |
| Because the liberal order cannot determine between these two groups of people. | |
| It can't make moral judgments against them. | |
| If they're just following the rules, then this is all completely fine. | |
| Then them having mosques and like bluring the call to prayer and all this sort of stuff and proselytizing on the street. | |
| The liberal order can't take exception to that. | |
| But in a non-liberal order, in an order that cares about relationships and the integrity of communities, suddenly you can see why this is unacceptable. | |
| And that's why all across the Middle East, you know, these communities basically self-segregate as they have self-segregated here. | |
| Because you can say, well, they haven't broken any of the rules. | |
| I know. | |
| I just didn't want this because it changes the character of my country and the place in which I live. | |
| It changes the character. | |
| The thing that I found appealing and was attached to in my own country is changed on purpose by the liberal order that is blind to the notion that it should care about the character of the country that it rules over. | |
| And so we lose, by degrees, legally, our country to colonization that is done by the liberal order. | |
| Taken out from under our feet. | |
| And everyone, oh, this white flight. | |
| It's like, well, sorry, why can't we live in places that we are familiar with with people we find predictable? | |
| And the Islamist intolerance, I mean, the problem is that the liberal order is remarkably tolerant of the Islamist intolerance, isn't it? | |
| And so the people involved will have a suite of liberal ideas in their head that tells them, hmm, I need to cover up the rape gangs. | |
| I need to cover up the rape gangs. | |
| Now, from a relational perspective, obviously one community being predatory to another, the most vulnerable in this other, is a real problem. | |
| It's shockingly bad. | |
| And that community would be forced to leave. | |
| If your community is being predatory to ours, something has to be done. | |
| But in liberalism, it is to, oh, we're going to take those couple of people and we're going to put them in jail for five years and then we're going to let them out again. | |
| Sorry, do you think that's solved anything? | |
| Do you think that that has restored the moral integrity of our civilizations? | |
| Or do you think that is just essentially a way of making sure that justice isn't done? | |
| I hate to tell you this, but I think it's actually a way of making sure that justice isn't done. | |
| It's just enough to make sure that there aren't riots. | |
| That's what it's doing. | |
| And so it's hard to see how this is not part of the plan. | |
| And that's just one issue. | |
| I mean, there are various other issues with multiculturalism from other cultures that there's no point going into it. | |
| Obviously, we've litigated it so many times on the podcast and elsewhere. | |
| This is the plan. | |
| Because liberalism doesn't see groups of people and it doesn't care about cultural particularity. | |
| Liberalism interpolates each person as being an atomic individual who exists prior to society. | |
| And so by stripping away the cultural particulars of each person and putting them down to their essence, what is a man? | |
| Well, he's a rational animal. | |
| He must eat, he must sleep, he must have a family, maybe. | |
| In fact, that's not even guaranteed in the liberal order, to be honest. | |
| He must eat, he must sleep, he must have shelter. | |
| Well, and possibly occupation. | |
| Okay, well, that's the essence of a human being. | |
| That's what the universal man is. | |
| And therefore, everything beyond that is contingent. | |
| Everything beyond that is choice. | |
| And that means I can just choose to abandon all of that and just choose to integrate into another culture if I so want, which is not how any of it works. | |
| Because actually, there is no universal man. | |
| There is no pre-social man. | |
| There is no man born before society who exists before society and makes the rational decision to sign a social contract and enter into society. | |
| There's just no such thing. | |
| In fact, in reality, every person is born into a web of relations, which are a series of obligations and entitlements that they have, whether they like it or not. | |
| You will always be your father's son. | |
| You will always be your mother's son or daughter. | |
| You will always have uncles and aunties and neighbors and friends and a community around you. | |
| You'll always be a part of something that exists somewhere, whether you like it or not. | |
| And the only way to not do that is to literally ostracize yourself and become a hermit. | |
| And even then, the relations you have with your family that you don't choose and you've got no getting away from, like in the country you're born into, the tribe to which you belong, even if you segregate yourself away from it, you still have these relations. | |
| You can't choose any of this. | |
| And so liberalism was just wrong in the anthropology of what it is to be a human being. | |
| But because it believes in its own wrongness, it says, well, I mean, basically, if we're all universal men, then literally any person is the same as any other person because I don't care about the cultural particularities and therefore I'm blind to it. | |
| So I can just bring in millions of people from there, millions of people from there, millions of people from there, tell them what the rules are and say, moral people follow these rules. | |
| Whereas, of course, these different groups actually don't agree. | |
| They much more closely agree with me on that morality is affirmative. | |
| Morality means you have to do something, not not do something. | |
| And so these groups are like, oh my god, these people, the people around me have got weird and horrible, horrible morality. | |
| They do things I don't agree with. | |
| They don't do that in my country. | |
| Why do they do it here? | |
| Why are they allowed to do this? | |
| And so you get conflict. | |
| You get cultural areas of friction between these. | |
| And in fact, in this country, these cultures tend to self-segregate away from not only the majority natives, but each other. | |
| And it's one of those things where the liberal is just so blind to all of this. | |
| And it's an obvious part of reality. | |
| It's physically happened now. | |
| And it's perfectly theoretically explainable, as I have just done. | |
| And so it's just like, well, I can't believe you've got a righteous order against the liberal order itself. | |
| Well, the liberal order made this possible and did this to us. | |
| And it's currently, little by little, stealing our country away from us because it doesn't recognize the legitimacy of countries fundamentally, because it only recognizes the legitimacy of the ultimately liberated individual. | |
| It only recognizes that. | |
| And everything liberalism is trying to achieve is to generate the pre-social man. | |
| I mean, the very point of liberalism is to restore to man the theoretical rights he had when he was in what they call the state of nature, when he was before society. | |
| And that means ultimate freedom and ultimate equality. | |
| Well, I'm sorry, but you don't have that living in a society. | |
| And trying to deform society, imposing the social contract harder and harder and harder on our society in order to splinter our relations with ourselves, our neighbors, and our place of the place in which we grew up, the territory which our tribe occupies, is damaging. | |
| It's doing serious damage to society. | |
| I mean, Rousseau genuinely said the point of this project is to make people minimally dependent on one another and maximally dependent on the state because they want the state to take the place of the state of nature. | |
| They want the state to be the thing that provides everything, to give you maximal freedom that they conceived the individual had before he joined society. | |
| He just walked around plucking food off the trees and sleeping under the boughs of oaks in a literal sort of Garden of Eden fancyland, which never happened. | |
| That was just not true. | |
| None of that was true. | |
| And yet liberalism, because it wants to harmonize liberty and equality in society where they can't exist as perfect equals, it does everything it can to try and impose that state of affairs. | |
| And so you've got oppression. | |
| So you have atomization. | |
| So you have the kind of lack of recognition of legitimate claims by groups over areas to honor and dignity. | |
| You don't have these things, but these really do exist in the world. | |
| They really do exist between groups. | |
| People recognize it. | |
| People feel it. | |
| The thymotic side of a person is instinctively tapped into this. | |
| And so this is my problem with liberalism. | |
| Like I said, I'll probably write a book about this. | |
| So I can go into detail and explain with all the citations needed why I have come to these conclusions. | |
| Because it's all there. | |
| It's all in liberalism. | |
| It's all in the liberal theory. | |
| And I don't even blame them in their own time for thinking these things. | |
| Because, of course, it's not to say that a relational world can't also be oppressive. | |
| It can. | |
| It obviously can. | |
| But it's not immediately obvious and necessarily true that the exact opposite of that, which is to have no relations whatsoever, which is the goal of liberalism, no consensual relations anyway, it's not evident that that's good either, actually. | |
| The family, your unchosen moral situation, is a moral good. | |
| This is a good thing. | |
| And yet, we're in a position where the government can literally just take your children away from you if it decrees. | |
| Like in America and in Canada, you've had examples where fathers have been denied access to their children because they didn't want the state or their mothers to chop their genitals off so that fathers get the children taken away from them and they themselves get criminalized. | |
| And I'm sorry, but this might well be the social contract society where everything is done by the expressly good will that gets to choose and self-author its own future and its own person and future. | |
| But I don't agree with that. | |
| And I don't think that's moral at all. | |
| I actually think, like I said, that's veering into evil. | |
| So when we get to the part where he quotes me and says the problem with the woke left wasn't the woke part, it was the left part. | |
| And I just want to say I utterly stand by that. | |
| He doesn't understand why the woke part is merely a tool. | |
| It's a conceptual lens. | |
| The problem is with the left part, because the left part is trying to get us to the most radical form of liberalism that can exist, where we are not dependent on one another. | |
| We are maximally dependent on the state. | |
| And that's what the point of the woke part is, to facilitate the left part. | |
| And so you can say, well, the woke part keeps pointing out like systems of oppression and structures of power. | |
| It's like, okay. | |
| I mean, that's what liberalism itself originally was and always has been. | |
| Liberalism is the original woke movement. | |
| The problem, though, I mean, you could see all of these structures of power, like the structures of power between parents and children, right? | |
| You can easily give a woke analysis of the structures of power between parents and children and how parents have absolute power over their children and therefore the children and their human rights, they need to be liberated from their parents. | |
| No, that's the left part speaking. | |
| I mean, you can look from a traditionalist perspective and say, yeah, there are structures of power between parents and children, which are necessary and good for the children. | |
| I love my kids. | |
| And so I use my power to make sure they don't hurt themselves, to make sure they learn to be good people, to craft and mold them into decent human beings. | |
| Liberalism assumes that just happens by magic. | |
| It's just a coincidence that people grow into virtuous people. | |
| And when they don't, liberalism can only say, well, I guess society made them bad. | |
| But it's not just society making them bad. | |
| What it is, is they were not properly habituated into a virtuous life. | |
| And so this whole like woke left stuff, well, it's just the left. | |
| This is all it is. | |
| Just like anyone, anywhere can give an analysis of power dynamics. | |
| And the woke part is just choosing the vectors that you are going to analyze. | |
| You can choose whatever vectors you want. | |
| You're just as woke as anyone else all of a sudden. | |
| It doesn't mean that you want to destroy the relationships that bind civilization together. | |
| If anything, you could look at it from a woke traditionalist perspective and say, right, okay, these are the things that bind us. | |
| We might want to tighten those a little. | |
| We might want to make sure, we want to shore those relationships up, which is why I keep saying, ring your mum. | |
| Ring your mum. | |
| She wants to hear from you. | |
| This will strengthen the relationship you have with your mum. | |
| Ring your sisters, ring your brothers, just hang out with your friends, strengthen the relationships between you. | |
| That's what a woke traditionalist is. | |
| It's someone who's like, oh, yeah, no, good point. | |
| These relationships are important, but I don't want to liberate humanity from their unchosen bonds. | |
| I want to make sure that they're happy and have moral character in their unchosen bonds, not some sort of weird degeneracy. | |
| And so, actually, we need to do the right thing to improve these bonds. | |
| It's the left part there that is the problem. | |
| Anyway, he carries on about my English identity. | |
| And the thing is, this is important. | |
| I don't know whether you've noticed, but identity is an incredibly salient category these days. | |
| And so it's worth properly understanding because liberalism does want to take away our collective identities. | |
| It doesn't recognize them. | |
| It doesn't value them. | |
| And the ones that it does, the minority ones, you'll notice in all times and all places, it's always the minority ones that it recognizes and not the majority ones. | |
| Well, there's a reason for that because it perceives that the majority having power over the minority always oppresses them in all times and all places. | |
| It doesn't allow them to freely express themselves. | |
| Considers the normal interactions between the majority and the minority to be intrinsically oppressive. | |
| And therefore, it has to be the state feels it has to protect these minorities from the social interactions that they have with the majority, the natural social interactions. | |
| So they don't have to change. | |
| Now, you might, why should they change? | |
| Well, that's what integration is. | |
| That's what relations between communities is. | |
| One community changing. | |
| And that's not to say the majority community doesn't change either. | |
| But it's obvious which one changes more. | |
| And so this question of identity is important because in it are a series of claims. | |
| For example, the English have the claim to England in the same way that the Palestinians have the claim to Palestine, in the same way that the Indians have the claim to India. | |
| This is a thing that the left had recognized in previous eras. | |
| It's the root of decolonization that an ethnic group has a primary claim to a certain piece of land. | |
| And I'm sorry, but the English do have the primary claim to England. | |
| They are a group. | |
| We can measure it objectively. | |
| We feel it in our hearts. | |
| We identify as this thing. | |
| And so you complaining that the flag only belongs to those of English blood and therefore Jews can never truly be English is like a cat complaining it can't be a dog. | |
| But you don't understand. | |
| You are defining Jews as people from Judea. | |
| They are the people of Judea who are sent into exile by the Romans and have spent 2,000 years in exile and now have finally got their own nation state again. | |
| Which, don't get me wrong, I support them having a nation state. | |
| That's not to say I support what Israel does, but I support them having a nation state. | |
| I think everyone should have a nation state, frankly. | |
| I think the Kurds should have a nation-state. | |
| But that doesn't mean that Jews outside of their context as people from Judea are English. | |
| Otherwise, why do you even call them Jews? | |
| Why don't you just call them English? | |
| No, instead, you define them as people from another place. | |
| And then you say, well, he's saying these people from another place aren't these people over here. | |
| Yeah, that's true. | |
| That's not a judgment against Jews. | |
| That's not a judgment against anyone. | |
| That's not saying they're bad. | |
| That's not even saying they can't live here. | |
| I'm not saying anything of the sort. | |
| All I'm saying is they are not the same as the English, which is why you have defined them as something other than the English. | |
| And so, yeah, the England flag, the flag of the country to whom the English gave their name, belongs to the English. | |
| And I'm not saying that Jews can't wave the St. George's Cross. | |
| It's actually a great thing to say, no, we want to show our moral support as non-English people for the English because we live in England. | |
| That's great. | |
| I mean, if I, like, I've always said this, if I were going to live anywhere else, I'd probably live in Greece because I'm a big Hellenophile. | |
| And my God, I'd be the most hardcore Greek nationalist you would have ever ever seen. | |
| I'd be waving the Greek flag all the time. | |
| I'd be angry at Greek leftists for tearing down the Greek flags. | |
| I'd be like, how dare you do this? | |
| What are you thinking? | |
| This is your country. | |
| And you're just going to have to suck it up. | |
| You're not atomic nowhere people that are just fungible, interchangeable liberal nonsense. | |
| I would be a damn hardcore Greek nationalist. | |
| So why should Jews in England not be the same here? | |
| Why would Jews in England not want English people to be in charge of England? | |
| Why are they even living here if they didn't expect that or want that? | |
| So no, I'm sorry. | |
| Jewish people and English people are two different ethnic groups. | |
| There's nothing wrong with that. | |
| This is not a moral judgment. | |
| And I don't take this back. | |
| That's normal. | |
| It's just normal to know this, to understand that peoples belong to groups. | |
| Anyway, we'll get to the final bit here. | |
| So my fall, my fall being a tragedy. | |
| Now, the loss of a student who once hold the line, held the line against extremism only to join the ranks of those he opposed. | |
| I have not joined the ranks of the Islamists or the Muslims more broadly or the radical liberals who we could call communists or woke left or whatever you want to call them. | |
| I've not joined their ranks. | |
| I've just not stayed in your ranks because ultimately you and them agree on the same thing. | |
| You and them basically have the same principles fundamentally. | |
| The question is, just what point in the development of these principles are you prepared to stop? | |
| Well, you're prepared to stop where it's comfortable for you. | |
| But they're not comfortable with it. | |
| They want to go further. | |
| And they make arguments from the presuppositions that you hold as a liberal. | |
| And so they'll just drag you. | |
| This is why woke has took over our civilization. | |
| And it's only now you've got quite a reactionary response to it that it's on the back foot. | |
| It wasn't the center-right classical liberals that made that happen. | |
| It was people who are not liberals saying, we're not taking this anymore. | |
| We're not happy with it. | |
| But this conceit that liberalism in its deontological, non-agentive form of morality is somehow superior to traditional morality is not right. | |
| It is obviously deeply inferior, which is why the countries that we live in seem to be so permissive criminals constantly. | |
| A man should be judged by his actions. | |
| His morality, whether he is a moral person or not, is informed by the things that he does to other people. | |
| And if someone does something horrific, then we should be taking, and in fact, it is incumbent on the society to take equivalent moral action to write the balance sheet, the cosmic moral balance sheet, to permit the prospering of terrible people. | |
| And so many of the criminals, especially in America, when they've done something truly awful, you realize, oh my God, they've been in trouble with the law. | |
| They've got a huge rap sheet of all these things they've done wrong. | |
| And yet permissive judge, permissive judge, let them out, let them out. | |
| And eventually they do something absolutely abominable. | |
| The sort of thing you just think, how did that ever happen? | |
| That should never have happened. | |
| And yet it happens all the time now. | |
| All the time. | |
| The poor woman getting stabbed on the train the other day was not anything actually that unusual, but it was so horrific and graphic and unnecessary that only the liberal order could bring that about. | |
| That's just not the way things used to be in America. | |
| The more liberal America has become, the more this stuff happens. | |
| And so, no, I don't consider this to be a fall. | |
| If anything, I actually consider liberal morality to be an evil spell that's been cast over you, that you think you're being good whilst doing so many bad things, whilst facilitating so much evil, whilst going along with wrong and calling it right. | |
| And I'm just not in favor of it. | |
| I feel like I genuinely, there's a kind of like waking up from the matrix feeling of it, where you realize you've got the sludge of it all over you. | |
| And you say, oh, God, you cough out all the slime. | |
| And you realize, God, I'm actually really weak. | |
| My moral muscles have not been properly exercised. | |
| And I was living in a delusion about what right and wrong actually are. | |
| And suddenly you're blinking because you've never used your actual moral eyes before. | |
| And you realize I need to call my mum. | |
| You need to actually start shoring up your relationships. | |
| You need to start thinking about how you treat the people around you and why that matters more. | |
| It is literally the only thing that really matters in your bloody life, mate. | |
| And so this whole thing, you find yourself pulling yourself out of the sludge going, oh, God. | |
| What was I doing all this time? | |
| And honestly, that's why I apologize to Jess Phillips. | |
| I was just like, yeah, I just shouldn't have done that. | |
| Because she wasn't even arguing on liberal grounds. | |
| She was like, she was arguing on relational grounds. | |
| And as much as I dislike Jess Phillips, she's not wrong on that. | |
| That was the thing. | |
| That's why I apologize. | |
| I apologize for me to make sure that I was truly shedding this stuff. | |
| And so to just act like, oh, well, cultural inheritance is mistaken for ethnic possession. | |
| That's all it is. | |
| A culture is the product of a people. | |
| And a people is the ethnos. | |
| Like cultures don't just come down from the heavens and find themselves fully formed that anyone can just be like, oh, right, okay, I'm just going to like today it's like putting on a shirt. | |
| I'm just going to put on a new shirt and you know, I don't like this one now. | |
| I'm going to get changed into a different shirt. | |
| That's just not how it works. | |
| Like everyone knows when an American is present, regardless of what race they are, because they're obviously American because you can't help the culture and inheritance you have. | |
| Like wherever I go, everyone knows I'm English because you can't help the cultural inheritance that you have. | |
| This is not about allegiance because your allegiance can just change. | |
| Unfortunately, these things are baked into you because you were born into a civilization. | |
| It molds you in so many ways, so many myriad ways, small, tiny cultural attitudes, the character of the way that you're raised, that you can't just shed these things. | |
| You can't get rid of them. | |
| It's your accent, it's your behavior. | |
| It's the things you expect. | |
| It's the things you don't expect. | |
| It's the way that you deal with different kinds of problems or encounters. | |
| All of these things are part of you. | |
| And you can't just get rid of them. | |
| These are an ethnic possession. | |
| It's just the nature of the thing. | |
| And you can pretend that they're not and that anyone can just integrate into any society. | |
| But what is actually happening there is actually a relationship is being formed outside of liberalism. | |
| Because groups of people have always lived with other groups of people. | |
| Like in some proximity to them, whatever. | |
| And understandings exist between them. | |
| This is what banter is in Europe. | |
| There's such great banter between the ethnic groups of the Europeans. | |
| Obviously, the English, the Irish, the French, the Scottish, the Germans, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Everyone's got a stereotype for the other because that makes the other people predictable. | |
| That means you understand them to some degree. | |
| And so you can say, okay, right, I've got we've both got a shared expectation. | |
| I know that a Frenchman has expectations of an Englishman, has a conception of an Englishman. | |
| And in a lot of ways, these are worth living up to, actually. | |
| And at least it means that we don't have to be on our guard. | |
| At least they know what they're going to get from me, and I know what I'm going to get from them. | |
| And it's often going to be annoying. | |
| Just teasing. | |
| But when you bring people who we don't have this kind of cultural relationship with, well, it makes the world a lot darker and colder and stranger. | |
| And actually, you can say, well, they've got British citizenship, bro. | |
| Look, they've got a passport. | |
| But if we don't even share a language, if our peoples have never had interaction, or at least none significant that's ever made a cultural impact, like what difference does allegiance make? | |
| Like, sorry, I mean, theoretically, like, we're supposed to have the same allegiance with the rape gangs. | |
| Like, what are you talking about? | |
| Like, theoretically, they're British citizens and they pay taxes and swear fealty to the crown or whatever. | |
| And you think that I'm supposed to be in allegiance with these people? | |
| That's crazy. | |
| Your allegiance is connected to your ancestry because your ancestry is the group into which you were born. | |
| But of course, as we've covered, the liberal hates the idea that you have an unchosen obligation and so does everything to try and hide it. | |
| Anyway, that's why I don't feel like I've fallen from liberalism. | |
| What I feel is that actually a magic spell has been dispelled across me. | |
| I've come out of the matrix, covered in the slime, and I've done everything that I can to get it off of me. | |
| I'm just tired of the lies of liberalism because it is lies, right? | |
| All of the false anthropology, none of it is true. | |
| None of it is true. | |
| It is not true that freedom and equality can be equals. | |
| It is not true that it is good to have ultimate freedom or ultimate equality. | |
| It is not true that man existed prior to society. | |
| It is not true that man exists outside of his groups and social context. | |
| It is not true that morality consists in rules and so many other things about liberalism that are not true. | |
| It is not true that man is a purely rational animal. | |
| Like this is all predicated on the rational idea of the social contract. | |
| It's not true. | |
| None of it is true. | |
| And that's why I have left liberalism. | |
| It's not true. | |
| Like I said, I'll probably write a book about this. | |
| I'll probably go into extreme and very autistic detail as to why liberalism is nonsense, why it produces communism, and what an alternative might be. | |
| Because I really think that we've got to find one because I cannot stand liberalism. | |
| Anyway, like I said, I don't consider myself to have fallen from liberalism because it is a way of creating the lowest common denominator. | |
| It is to reduce everyone down to the most homogenized blank slate layer. | |
| That's another thing. | |
| The blank slate is just not true. | |
| Literally, to the homogenized blank slate layer, so that we are all the same in all times and all places forever. | |
| And I don't agree with that. | |
| I view leaving liberalism as an awakening, a coming out, a rising above this kind of demented philosophy. | |
| And this is what the post-liberals have been working towards. | |
| This is what they've been thinking about. | |
| And this is why I find myself not only researching in that area, but also reading their books. |