How is it that "human rights" can be used to persecute citizens?
From my discussion with Harrison Pitt at the European Conservative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TcL0fttjJs
How is it that "human rights" can be used to persecute citizens?
From my discussion with Harrison Pitt at the European Conservative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TcL0fttjJs
How is it that "human rights" can be used to persecute citizens?
From my discussion with Harrison Pitt at the European Conservative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TcL0fttjJs
Even where the communists and fascists disagree with the liberals, I mean, like, look, none of the communists believed in the state of nature, but they inherit the value set of the state of nature regardless.
Like Marx Engels Kropotkin is really guilty of this, because in Kropotkin's day, by the end of the 19th century, the archaeology had all been done.
And so in his book, Mutual Aid, he just lays, and it's a mutual aid is a great book, actually.
And what it is, is an anti-communist book because in mutual aid, he lays out, oh, yeah, humans were never in the state of nature.
There was no equality or liberty.
What there was is essentially groups of tribes, hierarchical organizations that were struggling to survive against a really hostile wilderness.
And they worked together, I mean, mutual aid being the theme of the book.
They worked together to make sure that everyone survived and carried on.
And so, okay, well, then why would we be communists?
Because what are you talking about?
We're not having equality in any way.
And they don't really have liberty.
What they have is a howling wilderness full of teeth that they're afraid of.
So actually, order and structure and security would be the things that they would value.
Like, you know, from their own perspective, the early man did not value liberty.
Liberty was a terrible curse.
It was basically a byword for insecurity.
Exactly.
It was a swift death.
And this is why in the ancient world, it was a punishment.
No, you're ostracized.
You're exiled from the society.
No, good luck.
And people don't understand in the modern era, you know, the modern era where you've got one of the great things about capitalism is the anonymization of society, right?
As in, you can just go to any town in the country and rent a room.
You can't do that in like, you know, 2000 BC.
If you're not a member of that tribe, they're not taking you in.
Why would they take you in?
You're on your own.
Good luck.
And so the issues that these men would have had are very different to the issues that the 19th century sort of communists have.
But the communists at no point challenge the assumptions of liberty and equality.
They inherit the liberal assumptions, the liberal values, even while rejecting the way that they came to these values.
And for some reason, just none of them said, is this really what we're after then?
At what point do we admit that, okay, if the black slate isn't true, if the state of nature isn't true, where are we going?
And yet Marx and Engels uncritically adopt these, Kropotkin uncritically adopts these.
I mean, Rawls uncritically adopts the values.
And it's like, if the values are built on a false mythology, then they're not going to produce something that is true, real, and good.
They're going to produce something artificial.
They're going to produce something that is opposed to what humans actually need and was opposed to human nature.
And this is where we have found ourselves now.
And so we've gone through the 20th century and the sort of slow normalization of communism and liberalism into whatever we call it now.
I don't even know what we want to call what's happening now, the sort of the managed command economy.
Where like the values that underpin these are expressly liberal values because what they're trying to do is create freedom in a certain compass and equality to a certain degree.
So, for example, Dan did a video the other day talking about how in Britain, the average wages are somewhere between 30 and 50,000.
You mean you know when Dan taps at the lowest universities, yeah, sorry.
He's an economist and this is the sort of thing that fascinates him, that the average income is somewhere between 30 and 50,000.
Because if you're above that, obviously your taxes are really rising to the point where it's just not worth earning any money.
But if you're below that, even if you're working, the government tops up your wages.
So you're in this band.
So you're not equal, but you are very equal in a historic sort of sense.
And this is a sort of anti-freedom position.
So you are free.
And the interpretations of freedom, of course, change.
But You're free to engage in any kind of licentiousness you want, practically, but you're not free to earn more money than your neighbor, right?
Like, you're not, you're not really free to do that because the state will intercede.
Anti-Freedom Position00:05:25
Um, so you've got the nate another thing as well with the concept of universal human rights, right?
So, this is another liberal innovation that has dramatic downstream consequences that no one really thought about.
So, um, the rights of Englishmen make a lot of sense, they're historically contingent, they're fixed, you can point to the people that they are residual in and why those people have them, and they've been historically negotiated, they are a product of historical negotiation and they make a lot of sense.
They're also something that a lot of people have been envious of, right?
Because, I mean, why wouldn't you be?
If you're in 17th century France, yeah, look at the English.
Why do they get to have habeas corpus?
Why do they get to have jury trials?
Why do they get to have what was at the time an incredible amount of political freedom?
Why is it that the British Empire was mostly a private endeavor?
Like, that's not possible in most other times and places.
Like, look at the Roman Empire.
No, it's the state, like it's Pompey conquering the East.
Well, he's part of the triumvirate.
You know, it's Julius Caesar conquering Gaul.
Even our manner of conquest was permissive.
Incredibly.
It was literally.
I mean, you can find now.
Do you think, lads?
Yeah.
You can find now, like newspaper articles, like adverts wanted, you know, 200 strong men, high risk of death, you know, but maybe great glory and treasure.
And it's just like, yeah, you because you were free, you could go and do this.
And it was a very enviable thing, right?
To people in France who are in a strictly hierarchical caste system.
And so it's just, okay, well, yeah, I would like what they have, but you have to rationalize how you're going to get there, right?
And you can't say, well, I'd like the rights of Englishmen, please, because they'd be like, well, you're a Frenchman.
You're a German.
It's not a simple copy and paste job.
No, it's not.
And the abstraction of liberalism away from the rights of Englishmen into universal rights.
Totally agree with this.
This is a powerful thing.
And this is what Burke puts in his reflection on the revolution.
He's like, in the principle of liberty, I see a powerful spirit, but I don't know where it goes.
Yes, yeah, that's right.
And he was very wise to be nervous about that because, of course, then it leads into the French Revolution, which he predicts almost word for word in advance of it.
And so what you have is the desire for a certain outcome being applied to a society that doesn't have the historic infrastructure to get there.
And this is why the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution all take on the same sort of aspects.
Oh, no, these are levelers.
These are leveling revolutions because none of the society brought us to the point of English liberty.
And so, okay, well, we've just got to get rid of all of this then.
And it's like, okay, but that's insane.
That's a hugely damaging thing.
And what it does is it makes the government the guarantor of your rights.
That's not how it works.
We're against the government.
The government is the infringer of our rights.
But now the government has found itself as the guarantor of our rights, which is like, okay, that's kind of like an abusive relationship.
Yeah, they actually.
They become a form of state largesse rather than something natural or even inherited.
Exactly.
It should be local communities resisting centralized authority.
And that's what it would be if it wasn't for the way that the modern state operates.
Because the modern state says, okay, well, yeah, universal rights for everyone under every condition all the time.
And I'm going to bring in a bunch of foreigners.
They have the same rights as you.
And now I have to defend them against you because your majority demographic power is actually infringing on their right to religion or on their right to free speech or whatever, you know, their right to not be discriminated against, you know, all sorts of things.
And so now the government has actually positioned itself as the defender of these minorities against the majority.
And this is why you've got, you know, 12,000 people a year processed through the courts or whatever, you know, however many it is, in defense of a minority.
So the government has actually kind of flipped itself into being essentially kind of the victim of the wider society.
And this whole thing is only possible through liberal philosophy.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, rights understood as a kind of like generous state guaranteed, state underwritten largesse necessarily burden the state.
And by extension, burden in our back-to-front societies, the people who are forced to subsidize the state in its activities, many of which actually are not in our interests.
Just a quick thing on that.
What it does, though, is it conceptually renders the people being oppressed by the state as the oppressors of the people the state is trying to protect.
So it creates a demented view.
The state takes on a demented view of its own responsibilities.
Oh, yeah.
So the state is there.
No, I have to like, we saw this at Southpool where Kierstan was like, right, 24-hour courts, you are going down for this.
It's like, well, what happened?
Well, these people have had foreigners imposed on them, and those foreigners are killing their children.
The state choice, this was a matter of government policy to inflict horror on the people of England, and the state accuses them of being the oppressors of the people who are victimizing them.
And so it's a demented interpretation of what governance is.