The Invidious

Competition is beating others as opposed to creating something, including a company. The competitive spirit ruins all: business, friendships, marriage, child-rearing, art, science. We are no better off because Newton acted like an ass toward Leibniz.

When we say of anyone: "He's very competitive," we are not saying he's a friend. He is not even a friend to people who come up with new ideas or products. He is only for stealing the ideas or products.

Of course, the exact opposite is taught to everyone from infancy. We are told Competition is the end-all and be-all, the fount of virtue and money. Good to see a person of genuine accomplishment pointing out that the emperor is naked. (HT: Steve Sailer)

The drive to achieve has nothing to do with competition. At most it has to do with impressing your peers in order to encourage them, creating virtuous circles.

The competitive types are the wolves on the edges of the campfire site, picking off the people who built the fire and then warming themselves with it. But they thus ruin the conditions under which fires are built, and why they are built.

The upward progress of man is to get away from the parasites - aggressive or passive. This means not other than making a space free from the invidious.

(The classic gateway texts to this subject are No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn and Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior by Helmet Schoeck.)

Fiction and propaganda

No successful fiction work (unless one dislikes it) reads like a screed for a political point of view. None consist wholly of speechifying. Often they contain people, and descriptions, and feelings; and the people's actions are of necessity complex in origin and implication. To make fictional characters seem like people, their author must breathe life into them - and life is precisely un-simple and non-schematic.

That's what makes fiction very effective as a propaganda vehicle: while the author or creator can invent a reality that obeys any worldview, fiction resists the appearance of being propaganda. Nevertheless, fiction can be propaganda.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a clever plea for Civil Rights, inspired by the Scottsboro Boys case.

Ask yourself how, exactly, you might write a novel to make that plea. To be successful, you would do what author Harper Lee did. You would set your novel in the South (with obligatory atmospherics). For the lead character, you would have a heroic lawyer, and exemplify his heroism in his fighting for a black defendant in a heated case with strong similarities to the Scottsboro Boys case. You would center your novel's climax around that fight. Your masterstroke would be to write from the point of view of a child, in order to place your readers in the position of a naïf being taught lessons.

You would use your hero's fight for Civil Rights in the South as the quintessential example of his honorable nature. All his speeches about walking in other people's shoes and disprizing hasty judgment, you would "pay off" (as writers say) in that fight.

You would equate empathy and honor and warm feelings and courage and integrity and all Good Things and support for Civil Rights in the South. But, as part of breathing life into your characters, you would show their support as not being wholehearted. You would make clear, however, that the ideal would indeed be wholehearted support.

You would, of course, include much about seasons, relatives, townies. As I said, you would include local atmospherics; the town drunk and such. Although the bad characters would still be people and not cardboard cut-outs, still the theme of trashy people vs. the hero's uprightness (the main example of which is his battling for Civil Rights in the South) would obtain in every incident, including the shooting of a rabid dog.

Your readers would take away not only a renewed appreciation of honor and empathy, integrity and courage, but also this: your equating those things and the fight for Civil Rights in the South.

That people ought to demonstrate integrity is a truism. But writing a story in which integrity is best evidenced by absolute support for a black defendant in the South is a viewpoint, a political position…and to convey it is to be engaged in a form of propaganda. It's propaganda in fiction.

That "integrity is well evidenced by one's absolute support for a black defendant" is the core meaning of To Kill a Mockingbird is clear to the large majority of readers, and has been clear for more than sixty years. The point was well taken. The past six decades of commentary and appreciation is surfeited with evidence of that. Here is a tiny slice of it, assembled more or less randomly. One could as convincingly deny that Uncle Tom's Cabin is really about slavery as deny that To Kill a Mockingbird is really about Jim Crow.

Whether or not Mockingbird's message is meritorious is a separate question. I want only to point out what should be uncontroversial: it's as loaded as any novel (screed?) written by Alissa Rosenbaum ("Ayn Rand"). It is the Atlas Shrugged of the antiracists.

Saturday Thought

"Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine. It isn't money, for genius seldom gets any. It isn't fame: fame is too uncertain and, more closely considered, of too little worth. Nor is it strictly for its own pleasure, for the great exertion involved almost outweighs the pleasure. It is rather an instinct of a unique sort by virtue of which the individual possessed of genius is impelled to express what he has seen and felt in enduring works without being conscious of any further motivation. It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish." - Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (1876), Vol. 2, "On Philosophy and the Intellect"; translated by R. J. Hollingdale

The intellectual case against Iran

Like a drunkard who inadvertently reveals an embarrassing secret, a hack on Yahoo! Contributor Network recently blurted out the neocon elites' core intellectual argument for starting a war on Iran, a country full of peaceful people. That argument was supposed to remain implicit, never, ever to be brought into the sunshine for examination. But in a rambling screed attacking Pat Buchanan, Mark Whittington writes:

The Soviet Union during the Cold War, just as Iran is today, was run by murderers and thugs. Yet the Soviets did not launch a nuclear strike at the United States because it knew that the USSR would have been annihilated by the retaliation attack. By that logic, Israel's nuclear arsenal would provide a sufficient deterrent against Iran['s] using whatever nuclear weapons it acquires.

Only [Israel's nuclear arsenal] won't [deter Iran]. Unlike the leaders of the old Soviet Union, THE RULERS OF THE IRANIAN THEOCRACY DO NOT CARE IF THEIR COUNTRY IS DESTROYED IN A NUCLEAR WAR.

There it is, emphasis added. We are to believe that the leadership, secular and religious, of a modern industrialized nation, playing the big game of international diplomacy and power politics for decades, not only wouldn't mind, but also positively craves, being burned up in a fire, though they are under no mortal threat.

Well, these are crazy Muslims, after all. They believe crazy things. Just size up this holy quote:

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Wait, that's God's marching orders to Moses. Never mind.

The hack piles on:

Indeed there is a thread of Shiite Islam that concerns a figure known as the 12th Imam, a mythical personage who will return to bring about the end of the world and a new era of universal peace and brotherhood after a period of war and chaos. A few years ago, the UK Telegraph ran an article that suggested that Iranian president Ahmadinejad is a 'twelver' who believes that the advent of the 12th Imam can be hastened. A nuclear war with Israel would fit the bill nicely.

So the Telegraph ran an article suggesting that Iran's (secular*) president adheres to a thread that concerns a figure whose advent he may believe can be hastened.

That wouldn't make the cut of a Jim Marrs book, yet it's apparently the neocons' ultimate justification for dropping bombs on innocent people who are in Israel's way.

An A-plus in reading comprehension goes to anyone who marked the discrepancy between "the rulers of the Iranian theocracy do not care if their country is destroyed in a nuclear war" and "[they want] a new era of universal peace and brotherhood." If they are destroyed, then how will they enjoy peace and brotherhood?

That miasma of contradictions is less in the head of Dr. Ahmadinejad than it is in mouths of liars (and their shills) who are looking for excuses to expand their very real this-worldly power.

* Note: Someone castigated your humble blogger for saying Dr. Ahmadinejad is "secular." Well, he is no less secular than, say, Rick Santorum. I submit in evidence this from Foreign Policy magazine, in which is said, among many similar things:

Ahmadinejad and his cohorts in the executive branch of Iran's government increasingly reference secular Iranian nationalism. They recently celebrated an exhibition honoring Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire over 2,500 years ago; they have also been known to castigate influential mullahs for diminishing Iran's greatness, going so far as to encourage the separation of religion from the government. Meanwhile parliament speaker Ali Larijani and his legislative supporters present themselves as adherents to the fundamentalist traditions of Shiite Islam and as true believers in the velayat-e faqih, Iran's system of governance by Muslim jurists. [Emphasis added.]

The upshot of this article, as I take it, is that any Islamic leader's claim to being devout must be regarded with at least as much skepticism as his claim that he is secular. In other words - they're all politicians. And this is assuming that the FP article is objective, which is probably isn't. In this context, it's perfectly valid to identify Dr. Ahmadinejad as "secular" in contradistinction to his fellow blowhards.

Saturday Thought

"Peace of mind is impossible without a considerable amount of solitude." - Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, 1851

Penis as Weapon

E. Michael Jones observes that Jewish subversives' crowbar of choice has changed over the past 20 years, from blacks to homosexuals. To oppose the homosexing of America is now considered proof of one's Total Evil - of being Absolutely Wrong (AW) in the same way and for the same reasons that being anti-black and anti-Semitic is AW. The revolution of the culture-critiquers continues.

"The homosexing of America" does not mean lightening the loafers of every man, woman, and child in the country, an impossibility. It means manufacturing consent for regarding sex per se as the indiscriminate and short-range hole-hopping most characteristic of male homosexuality. Manufacturing that consent is the aim of norming the merely notional "relationships" or "families" intrinsic to homosexual community (gay and lesbian) as contrasted with relationships rooted in reproduction. The latter are to be cast into a conceptual and psychological ghetto, perforce undermining the cultural ecosystem necessary to generating and rearing whole and successful families. As such, the homosexing of America is not more than a late or terminal stage of the Sexual Revolution, which was (and is) a deliberate infliction of an injury on the biological cohesiveness of the gentile host population.

For the revolutionists' avant-garde are Jews*. And they are aware that their revolution isn't "good for Jews"; Dennis Prager's "Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality" shows that fairly convincingly. It's Prager's contention that Western Civilization owes its positive development to a Jewish revolution in morals. It's Jones' contention that the latest such revolution is aimed at undoing Western Civ or colonizing it.

* A small and uncontroversial recent example: the key sponsors of the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act are Gary Ackerman, Howard Berman, John Adler, and Shelly Berkley. [Addendum: "But I mean every name." HT: Edmund Connelly, The Occidental Observer]

Franklin, translated

Steve Sailer writes:

[S]omebody should post a more readable version [of Benjamin Franklin's Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind] with modern spelling and without Franklin's surfeit of capitalization -- this is one of the key documents in intellectual history, Franklin->Malthus->Darwin, but it's hard for 21st Century people to read in the original.

I rose to the challenge, and the result is below; however, to make Franklin's text truly readable for 21st Century people I had to take it out of the original. I did more than Americanize the spelling and remove the surfeit of capitalization. I paraphrased a great deal.

But I'm confident that the content and spirit of Franklin's great paper remain unaltered. If you want to read the original, it's here. A Wikipedia article is here.

(This has been a work-in-progress from November, 2011 until May, 2012. Earlier versions were posted during that period, some of them with glaring errors. The only serious error stemmed from my misunderstanding an economic point. I don't promise that more errors, as yet undetected, don't lurk in the present version. Still, you may be heartened - or maybe not - to know that Franklin didn't promise this paper was free of error, either.)


***

Observations on Population Growth and Nation Building (1751)

When thinking about population statistics, it won't do to look at tables of marriages v. births, deaths v. births, married people v. total population, etc., if these tables are based on death and birth certificates in big cities. Big cities are different from nations. It's equally wrong-headed to compare fully settled old countries like those in Europe with new nations, such as America.

The reason is simple. More people marry, and marry earlier, when families can be supported easily, and in cities (where all trades, occupations, and offices are) it's costlier to raise a family. Many city people remain single for life, as servants to families or as journeymen to trades. The population of cities isn't even at replacement level. Roughly the same goes for fully settled countries. All lands in them are already occupied and improved to a great degree, and people who can't get land there must work for people who have land. When such workers are numerous, their wages are low, and it's a hard thing to support a family on low wages. That deters many people from marrying. Out in the countryside in fully settled countries there are more marriages and the population is above replacement level so long as there is emigration to the cities, which makes more room in the countryside.

Greater Europe is fully settled with farmers, manufacturers, and others, so it can't sustain a large increase in population now. America is chiefly populated by Indians, who make their living mostly by hunting. While hunters need the most land of all (farmers needing less, and gardeners still less, and manufacturers the least of all), hunting grounds are sparsely populated, so Indians were easily persuaded to give sections of their lands over to us. They did so because we didn't interfere very much with their hunting and because we furnished them with many things they wanted.

This means available land is abundant in America. Land is so cheap here that a working man who understands farming can in a short time save enough money to buy a plantation-size section of land and raise a family on it. Men who can do that aren't afraid of getting married. Even if they worry about how their children will fare after Father is gone, they assume, reasonably enough, that more land will be available at prices about as good.

It's estimated that Americans now marry at twice the rate of Europeans and have twice the children. Since Americans marry earlier as well (age 20 is common), the American rate of population growth is probably twice that of the European rate, even were child mortality here to be double that in Europe. It's possible our population is doubling at least every twenty years. Even so, North America is so vast that it will take ages to settle it fully. And until that happens, labor here won't be cheap. Over here no man works for others for very long; instead he gets a plantation of his own. No man here works as a journeyman to a trade for very long; he hangs out a shingle among newcomers as soon as possible. Labor in Pennsylvania is no cheaper now than it was thirty years ago, even with all the newcomers who have been flooding in.

The danger that Americans themselves might flood back into Great Britain and take English jobs and English business is too small for the Mother Country to worry about. On the contrary, because of mushrooming consumer demand in America, protected British manufacturers not only will have a field day but also will find that they have bitten off more than they can chew, even were they to confine their trade to the American market only. Britain would harm herself if she restricted American manufacturing. If British industry, because of American economic demand, raises prices very high, foreigners who can sell cheaper will drive Britain out of foreign markets, thereby encouraging and increasing the foreigners, even Britain's enemies, who might grow more populous and powerful. The economically strangled American colonies would be of no help to Britain then.

It's a mistake to think that America can compete with British manufacturing by using slaves. Slave labor can never be as cheap as the labor of working men in Britain. Look at the numbers. Inflation here is 6-10%. Slaves cost thirty pounds sterling per head (averaged). Add up the first purchase of a slave, his health and life insurance, his clothes, his room and board, his sick days, the loss caused by his slacking (slacking is natural to the man who is prevented from making a profit), the expense of hiring a whip-cracker full-time to keep him at the job, and shrinkage (almost every slave is a thief), and then compare all that with the wages of a manufacturer of iron or wool in England. You will see that labor is much cheaper there. So why do Americans buy slaves? Because slaves aren't free to leave. Here a hired man invariably deserts his employer and goes into business for himself just when his employer needs him most.

Because population growth depends on the encouraging of marriage, the following things diminish a nation.

1. Being conquered. Conquerors enrich themselves on the backs of the conquered. The conquered are thereby impoverished and discouraged from marrying and having families. So the conquerors' population gradually overtakes that of the conquered.

2. Losing territory. Wales and England give us an example of this. Driven into Wales by the Saxons, the Britons were crowded together in a barren country. Since the number of living people is related to the amount of available food, the number of Britons declined. Meanwhile the Saxons got fat on the lands they had driven the Britons off of. That is how the British Isles got to be full of English people. If some foreign country were now to drive the English into Wales, the English population in Britain would drop until it matched the current population of Wales.

3. Losing trade. Exports bring in money to raise families on. If a nation reduces its exports and creates no new or replacement jobs, then that nation will experience a decline in population sooner or later.

4. Losing food. Suppose a nation has a fishery. The fishery not only employs a lot of people but also makes food less costly. Now suppose another nation takes over the seas and ruins the fishery. The loss of employment, and the increase in food prices, will undermine the forming of families.

5. Having a thieving government. Not only do people flee from countries where the government is crooked, and become citizens of other countries and help to build up their new countries; but also the people who stayed behind are broken by the official thievery. High taxes tend to reduce population.

6. Introducing slaves. Importing blacks to the English Sugar Islands has badly hurt the whites there. Poor whites lost their jobs, and a handful of other whites got rich and lost their minds. The latter blow money on luxuries and coddle their children until the same amount of money that might have supported a hundred people can barely support one spoiled brat. By not working, slave owners go soft and don't have as many children. And the slaves, being worked too hard and fed badly, die like flies, so even more of them have to be brought in from Africa. The northern colonies have more white births because they don't have many slaves. Slaves also corrupt their masters' families: the children of the masters become disgusted with the whole idea of working and are rendered unfit to make an honest living.

From all this, we can identify the men who are the true "fathers of their country." They are:

The prince who acquires a new territory and, if it isn't already empty, removes the natives to give his own people room -

The lawmaker who works to promote trade, employment, the improvement of land by more or better farming, the provision of more food from fisheries, the safeguarding of property, etc. -

The creator of new trades, arts, or manufacturing businesses, or one who makes improvements in farming.

These are properly called "the Fathers" because they boost the nation's means, which encourages marriage and increases the number of their people.

(As to legal privileges granted to married couples, such as the jus trium liberorum* among the Romans, they do help to restore the population of a country that has been wiped out by war or disease or that otherwise has empty territory; but they cannot increase a people beyond the people's means.)

By this reasoning, we can see that imported consumer goods grow the population of the exporting nation and shrink the population of the importing nation. Laws preventing such imports, and promoting exports, may therefore be called "generative laws." Such laws strengthen a nation by increasing its population and by decreasing that of its neighbors.

Smart European nations refuse to allow imports from India. They should forbid them to their colonies, too. Any gain to the merchant is offset by the loss to the nation.

Fads and fashions indulged in by the privileged help to fatten the nation's manufacturers (who supply these luxuries). This helps the nation, since manufacturers greatly outnumber the privileged, and the privileged are weakened by such luxuries. The more money any type of people squanders on fashions and fads, however, the more cautious they are about getting married. Therefore luxury should never be allowed to become commonplace.

The great increase of offspring in particular families is not always owing to their greater fecundity, but sometimes only to their having a positive regard for hard work. This regard enables their children to provide for themselves better, and their marrying early is encouraged by their prospect of a good living. So if, for example, some religious sect were to teach frugality and hard work as religious duties, then that sect would surely make more babies than any British sect does.

Allowing immigration in excess of what the nation's economy requires won't increase the nation's population in the long run unless these immigrants are more frugal and industrious than the natives. For in the process of growing their own population, the immigrants will otherwise be eating the natives out (or outworking them).

But it isn't necessary to permit immigration in order to fill vacancies in population. Any such vacancy (assuming good laws and a good government) will soon be filled by new births. Where is the population vacancy made in Sweden, France, and other warlike nations by the plague of heroism forty years ago? Or the population vacancy caused in France by the expulsion of the Protestants? Or the population vacancy in England caused by the settlement of her colonies, or the population vacancy in Guinea caused by one hundred years of exporting slaves (which has blackened half of America)? (The low population of Spain is owing more to national pride and laziness and other causes than to the expulsion of the Moors or the founding of new settlements.) In sum, the only limit to how much plants and animals will reproduce and spread is their crowding out and interfering with each other. If the earth had no plants, then it might be sowed and overspread with one kind of plant only - for example, fennel. And if it had no people, then over time it might be replenished with one people only - for example, Englishmen.

It's estimated that there are more than a million Englishmen in North America and not even 80,000 came by boat. Yet England isn't short one man; its population has probably increased instead, on account of the employment Americans give to British manufacturers. Even if it happens just once every twenty-five years, adding a million people to America's population will make its inhabitants outnumber England's in just one century. At that time, the larger number of Englishmen will be living here. What a boost to Britain's power that will be! What a surge in the Empire's trade and navigation, in the number of its ships, its sailors! Englishmen have been in America not even a hundred years yet our privateers in the last war had more men and guns than the whole British Navy had in Queen Elizabeth's day. Think how important it is for Britain to be careful when drawing borders between her colonies and the French. In the treaty now being made, the Mother Country ought to try hard to give her colonies much territory to grow in. After all, the future population growth of her people is at stake.

Finally, a well-governed nation is like Hydra. If you cut off one of its limbs, then it soon grows a replacement limb. If you cut it in two, then each part will generate a replacement for the part that's missing. Just as you can make ten Hydras out of one if you have enough living space and food, so you can grow ten nations from one if you have the same conditions. But it's better to increase ten times the population and strength of one nation.

And since British detachments of Englishmen to America will be so quickly replaced over there, and breed at least as fast here, why should we let Germans flood into our settlements and (by herding together) plant their language and their ways to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens? These people will soon outnumber and Germanize us, when we should be Anglifying them. They will never adopt the language or customs of a minority. To think they will is as absurd as to think their skin hue will change to ours by magic.

Which leads me to add one thing. The number of purely white people in the world is relatively very small. All Africa is black or tan. Asia chiefly tan. America (except for us) even more tan. Even in Europe, the Spaniards, the Italians, the French, the Russians, and the Swedes are mostly what we call swarthy, just like the Germans are. (The exceptions among Germans are their Saxons, who are the only other purely white people in the world, besides the English.) I think there ought to be more purely white people. After all, we're cutting down the woods in America and making this side of the globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of Martians and Venusians, so why darken humanity at the same time? Why encourage the breeding of more Africans by importing them? We have a good opportunity to exclude black and swarthy people from this country and see an increase in beautiful rosy white skin. I suppose I'm biased toward the complexion of my countrymen, but that is a bias everyone naturally shares.
_____

* From Wikipedia (accessed November 5, 2011): "The ius [or jus] trium liberorum (or 'right of three children') was part of the social legislation of Augustus aimed at motivating larger families by granting privileges to parents of three or more freeborn children. It was formally introduced as part of the Lex Papia Poppaea of AD 9, though there were instances of it being granted prior to that. For men, privileges included the advantages in political careers and freedom from jury duty. For women, the privilege freed them from the necessity of having a formal guardian (tutela) and gave her certain legal right of inheritance."