Checking in on the West’s slow-motion suicide
The clash in Gaza has created a crisis of faith for many of those in the West who have dedicated themselves to the liberal project. While the actual conflict is centered many thousands of miles away, a mixture of ideological fanaticism and hubris has convinced most Western nations to import large populations who have carried their centuries-old feud into their new host countries.
As Hamas supporters smash the doors of Grand Central Station in New York City, tear down American flags, and clash with pro-Israel protesters in the streets across the United States, many good liberals have started to wonder how their nation seemingly changed overnight.
The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. None of this was sudden. The consequences of transforming the population of Western nations should have been obvious, and progressives have been keen on doing exactly that for decades.
It is only now, as the symbols of Western nations are pulled down by mobs of protesters bearing foreign flags, that liberals begin to grasp the consequences their ideology has wrought.
“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote the conservative political theorist James Burnham. “When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism — the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future — falls into place.”
At the core of liberalism sits the mistaken belief that humans are a blank slate onto which any form can be pressed. It is the culture and institutions of a civilization that form the people, not the people who form the culture and institutions. This means that any individual or group could be replaced with any other individual or group with more or less the same result.
If people are fungible and the West is simply an “idea” or a set of institutions, then there is no reason to restrict immigration to maintain the culture. The floodgates may be opened and the magical dirt of America or Britain will suddenly transform any new arrival into a good citizen.
Liberalism holds that humans are rational actors who, when presented with compelling arguments, will sort through the available options and select from among them the ideas that are most advantageous to the civilization in which they live. No systems or beliefs are objectively true or inherently superior but only those that can provide the most efficiency or prosperity to the individual.
The invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas should, in theory, guide the democratic process that will produce the most rational and advantageous outcome. But it is difficult to watch armies of clashing protesters re-enact a conflict half a world away and believe that liberalism has selected what is best for the citizens of the United States.
It must be completely obvious to any rational, critically thinking individual that the immigration policies that have been put in place since World War II have had one object, and one object alone, and that is the destruction of the western world in general, and of the United States in particular.
Everything should be that simple to understand.
Post World War II immigration and migration policies have been 100% disastrous. There have been absolutely no benefits whatsoever.
Classical liberal economics says that humans are rational at times and the extent to which they are irrational, is either random noise or the subject of study for a different field. But classical liberal economics does not make any assumptions about the values people are trying to maximize. THOSE are very culturally dependent. Do you place your money in a retirement plan or use it to make suicide weapons to punish the descendants of those who mistreated your ancestors? Either course of action can be considered rational -- assuming different underlying values.
In our society being a pop singer has more prestige than being a nuclear physicist. In certain east Asian societies singer has the same prestige as circus clown. So whether you pursue physics or pop music is going to be culturally dependent -- assuming rationality.