The Root Of All Evil

By Heordreedenn:

There is a thought experiment – at least I hope it’s a thought experiment – concerning the best way to boil a frog. Apparently if you just chuck the hapless amphibian into a pan of boiling water it realises immediately that all is not well and jumps out at once. But if you put it in a pan of cold water, and heat it slowly, it never notices what is happening, or at least if it notices, things never get to a point sufficient to prompt it to take action until it is too late and the creature is dead.

I could have titled this talk “Who Boiled our Frog?”

That our frog has been boiled is something of which I think there is no doubt. When we compare the world outside with that of 100, or even 50, years ago, we are clearly in much hotter water than we were then. The most obvious change is the decline of the West. In 1910, Europeans ruled the world. Today we don’t rule Europe. A decline not just of our relative power but of our culture and society.

If someone in 1955 when I was born had written an account of London or San Francisco in 2010 it would have been regarded as dystopian Science Fiction. Unprintable dystopian Science Fiction.

Gay Pride Marches anyone?

Or Tiger Woods’ marital escapades?

How would they have gone down in 1955?

Who in 1910 would have believed not only that the great steelworks of Teesside would one day fall silent, but that they would fall silent because they were closed down by their Indian proprietors, Tata Steel?

What has gone wrong?

And why?

We can see some of the what: two European civil wars in the first half of the last  century –  the equivalent of the Peloponnesian wars between Athens & Sparta that wrecked Classical Greek civilization; and the export on a huge scale of capital and know-how to non-European countries over whom we have lost control – matched by the import of people from said non-European countries – followed by the export of jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry there.

Together with a steady rise in the cultural pollution  from lowest-common-denominator junk, from Hollywood trash to “sleb” slobs to soaps, sewage swirling to a common anti-European cosmopolite beat. Whilst communities and families across the West dissolve in the atomised cosmopolitan swamp, with divorce, crime and drug addiction rife.

Why? The traditional explanation is – a plot! Conducted by the ‘Hidden Hands’ of conspiratorial ‘insiders’, ‘Bilderbergers’, ‘internationalists’ and lots more recondite terms usually euphemisms for ‘The Jews’!

In many ways this is satisfying – it looks credible and absolves Europeans as peoples from any blame – because “outsiders did it to us”!

Fixing it is also simple:  get rid of the conspirators – usually in ways carefully left vague – as well as the other ills that afflict us and we’ve fixed the root cause and can go back to sleep. The ‘Final Solution’, as it were.

It used to be said of an old British nationalist Party in the 1970’s that its policy was Blacks and its ideology was Jews! But I think that is a simplistic view and an easy excuse.

For I believe we have fallen victim not to a plot but a process.

 That the roots of our misfortune are much deeper and wider than a few alien schemers with a hidden agenda corrupting an otherwise healthy society. The rot is not at the top of our society but at its foundations.

The truth is, I believe, that we did all this to ourselves, and to undo it we need not just a bit of pruning but a thorough uprooting, nothing short of, as Nietzsche put it,  a transvaluation of all our values.

I believe we must move beyond simplistic scapegoating and the confusion of symptoms and causes. Of course there are various ideological and ethnic cabals in our society promoting their own ends at the expense of the welfare of the West, but they only gained the power they have, and they are only such a visible issue to those of us who are concerned about what is happening – we who have realised we are not swimming in fertiliser but drowning in sewage – because of a much wider and deeper malaise.

There are indeed, as one well-known late personage memorably put it, “maggots infesting a body in an advanced state of decay”, but the maggots didn’t kill the body, or cause it to rot. In a healthy body, the maggots would be easily brushed away. They are only the symptoms, not the cause, of our modern malaise.

So what is the true cause, what is the real root of our current evils?

I, and radical Nationalists like me, would argue it is nothing less than the entire socio-economic system which over the last 400 years has steadily taken over the West, and used the West to spread itself across the planet. A system based on greed, selfishness and the love of money at the expense of all higher values.

A system in which money itself is power, and the way to make money is out of money itself.

One of the richest men in the World, Warren Buffett, has never made so much as a pencil sharpener. All he has done is speculate in stocks and shares. Yet he and his ilk wield far more power than statesmen and soldiers and scientists and thinkers and artists. And the process that made them wields far more power than any man or men, and wields it in the blind, thoughtless service of the imperatives programmed into it. The imperative to make money in the short term, regardless of long term costs.

The West, much of the world, is in the end controlled by the interests of the giant global corporations who control its wealth. Corporations that arose as a natural, logical outcome of a system whereby ownership and control of the economy was vested in limited liability shareholdings traded on stock exchanges.

Initially as a good way of raising money to fund enterprise, but in a way that – fatally – has an internal imperative of its own.

 Once you set up a system like that – probably when you set up any social system in fact – it generates a momentum of its own.

It’s a bit like a computer program, which once started runs inexorably according to its own internal logic, often producing results very different from what its creators envisaged or wanted.

In fact it’s like a particular kind of program called a heuristic evolutionary algorithm. You set up rules by which the components can interact, grow, fail, replicate, combine, take each other over etc., and compete – evolution by natural selection occurs – and the whole system evolves and changes, developing a momentum of its own, often one its designers never expected or wanted.

What tends to happen in the algorithm called ‘Capitalism’ – and, over the past 200 years has happened – is that a set of national economies run by entrepreneurs funded by investors – think of Rockefeller or Ford – and operating primarily within countries – has  turned into a single global economy run by institutional bureaucracies.

Whilst old style capitalists like Henry Ford could and did to some extent put values higher than short-term commercial interest first – some were patriotic and high-minded men – such individuals are now replaced by managers appointed and promoted simply on the basis of serving the values of the machine: maximising return on shareholder investment above all else, regardless of social cost.

Nobody has the power to stop the machine in which they, and we all (including me!), are cogs, the ‘Global Greed Machine’ that is devouring our civilization, our culture and our Race.

Nobody has that power because ownership and control are now totally separate. Henry Ford owned most of Ford. Now corporations like that are owned by a mass of investment  and pension funds. In fact, ironically, often by millions of people like us, through our pensions and savings. But we have no control or power over them whatsoever.

 Our money is controlled by banks and pension companies and other institutional investors who are themselves controlled by managers appointed and promoted on the basis of how well they secure “return on investment”. They in turn appoint the Boards of the giant corporations in whom they are the major shareholders. Again, on the basis of the same considerations of maximising profit and return on their money. Much of their money is our money, so we mostly go along with this. In turn, the Boards the institutions appoint promote minions on the basis of how well they fit into the smooth running of the ‘Greed Machine’.

If anyone tries to serve any end other than the end of the machine – short term (10 years maximum) profit – they will be elbowed aside by  those less scrupulous.

If any part of the machine on a large scale starts to veer off course – if a company falls behind in serving the end of maximising the making of money – there are all manner of sharks and parasites – Stock Market speculators, hedge funds and the like – ready and able to pounce and take it over, because not serving the machine optimally has a correction mechanism – your share price falls – which enables more optimal cogs to take you over.

Whilst the machine rewards efficient service in its own terms – it makes efficient and effective cogs able to buy more of what it makes, it makes them rich. Whilst in its own interests it encourages all of us to want what it makes, to be good consumers.

What you have is a vast computer program which nobody deliberately intended running on the minds of millions of people across the world. A machine they did not start and cannot stop. It is a machine that has already done us all much harm.

In its early, nationally-based embryonic form it fostered commercial and trade rivalries between European nations that fuelled the catastrophe of 1914, from which and its after-effects a generation later, Europe has never recovered. Although even then its apologists argued – as they argue today -that international trade and the rise of commerce, the relative strengthening of the manager and the businessman and the financier as against the statesman and the soldier and the adventurer, would bind nations together and make war impossible. The more so as modern technology would make it so mutually destructive no nation would really win. So prophesied Iwan Bloch in 1898 and Norman Angell in 1910!

No-one’s heard of these figures now – I wonder why? – but they were widely heeded in their day. Until that day ended in the blood and the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele.

Note that by 1913 international trade and investment, what is now globalisation, was already well advanced and indeed transferring Europe’s wealth to build up non-Europeans at a rate higher than now. In 1913 25% of all Western foreign investment was in countries with per capita incomes less than 20% of US per capita GDP – today the figure is under 5%.

The same argument used now, that binding countries together through trade and commerce, combined with the even more terrible destructive power of ‘The Bomb’, makes war impossible.  But those who remember how empty these arguments proved, and where this process actually led last time, such as the eminent  historian  Neil Ferguson, predict it will end now as it did then – in war.

Ferguson predicts that trade and commercial rivalries, together with disputes over the web of debt and job-destroying cheap imports that link them, with Taiwan acting as a potential Sarajevo Bullet flashpoint , may one day lead to a US-Chinese world war. He may well be right, and if it happens, as you cower under your radioactive sofas Protecting and Surviving remember where you heard it first!

Since the two great fratricidal convulsions brought about in part by clashes of national greed machines, the global corporate market mechanism has enjoyed ever more untrammelled power to play out its imperatives on our societies and peoples. With effects we all know and don’t love. For example:

Mass Third World Immigration – driven by the imperative to import cheap labour, undercut European workforces, and drive up corporate profits. Whilst the converse imperative drove the export of capital and therefore jobs to the cheap Third World labour pools. Pakistanis were imported to undercut Britons in the mills of Lancashire. Then when the mills were moved to Pakistan, the Pakistanis, sadly, stayed here.

How it works in practice is that in the 1950s, say, you had two Lancastrian mill owners. Mr Shufflebottom, a patriot, and Mr Sidebottom, a hardheaded moneygrubber.

Shufflebottom patriotically refuses to import Pakistanis to work in his mills at cut rates and lay off locals who have won themselves a reasonable living wage. However, Sidebottom is less scrupulous. So Shufflebottom  is undercut by Sidebottom with his lower labour costs & goes bust.

The mechanism has in this example rewarded the player who followed its rules and its imperatives and punished the one who wouldn’t. Ensuring that its imperative is followed – cheap Third World labour ends up being imported, regardless of what the poor British public may have wanted.  Sidebottom then takes over Shufflebottom’s mill and ships in more Pakistanis to work there too. Then he invests his profits in setting up mills in Pakistan,  eventually sells out his business lucratively to a global textiles corporate and retires in luxury.

Mr Shufflebottom is ruined and is last seen shoving Nationalist leaflets through letterboxes….

Social Decadence – driven by the imperative to inculcate short-term selfish material gratification in as many people as possible to maximise consumption and hence profit. Driven since the 1930’s at least by consumerist advertising.

This, like much the machine does, had unintended consequences –  self-gratification led to “doing your own thing” – hippies weren’t an alternative to selling out to ‘The Man’ and ‘The System’, they were themselves an offshoot of that system and its profit-fuelled values of hedonistic self-indulgence. But mainly it led to the general inculcation in Western publics of ostentatious materialist greed and the idea that things, and inevitably ultimately people, were there to be consumed and used to “have it all”.

 Again, this was not a plot – nobody deliberately set out to make people selfish, greedy and shortsighted, still less to cause the unintended consequences – including the breakdown of the family and community and the rise in crime and drug abuse that followed. They just intended to sell more things to make more money and thereby advance the careers of those best doing it. It’s natural selection in action – the best way of selling the most things turns out to be to play on envy and greed and so that is what was done.   Advertising that did so best worked best, companies doing it succeeded at the expense of those that didn’t. The Greed Machine is , as I say, an evolving heuristic program – it selects subroutines that best serve its overall inbuilt imperatives, thereby constantly making itself more efficient at what it does. Not necessarily in its own long term interests, as we shall see.

Internationalism – which serves the interests of global corporate capital, removing barriers to the free movement of capital and labour that impede profit. From the EU to Political Correctness – the former removing legal barriers to moving people and money about in relentless search of profit, the latter removing cultural barriers to doing so. You don’t want people resisting having cheap Third World labour shipped into their towns and cities and thus interfering with the smooth making of money. So you browbeat and brainwash them into feeling guilty about resenting what is being done to them. So in the end the victim welcomes suffering the crime.

Cultural Degeneracy – sells movies and music. It’s more profitable to churn out crap that appeals to the most primitive common tastes of the jungle than cultivate high culture – which requires educated tastes to enjoy. Allowing communities of ordinary people to make their own music, dance and culture is of course even less profitable – let them all watch MTV.

Culture and the media also provides a visible example of an unpleasant symptom of our predicament that is easily mistaken for the cause. Cohesive in-groups, looking out for each other’s interests and with values compatible with those of the System can play it to their own advantage and rise high. Hollywood is a particularly conspicuous area dominated by one ethnic in-group as a result. I’ll give you a clue – it isn’t the Kurds!

Such groups thrive like maggots in rotten meat in the system, but they didn’t make the system.

The system made them powerful, and in turn they have worked to make the system friendly to them. They can do this – as we couldn’t – because what they want – internationalism, anti-racism and so on – is basically complementary rather than in diametric conflict with what best serves the socioeconomic System.

It is an environment friendly to them, and they  welcome and feel at home in it. As they wouldn’t in our alternative. But they did not deliberately build it and impose it on us. We – Western European Man – built it and imposed it on ourselves, binding ourselves in a scaffolding of shackles up which others can agilely scramble. 

 Politics – funded by those who have prospered in the global greed machine – has come to serve it quite openly. Fifty years ago nobody would have predicted that the Labour Party in Britain would out-Tory the Tories in privatisation, whilst the USSR would be replaced by gangster kleptocracies of billionaire “businessmen”.

The long phoney war between Establishment Left and Right ended with the Left winning on social policy – ‘Political Correctness’ is a term coined by the Communist Party under Stalin, albeit now with an agenda Uncle Joe would have regarded as anarcho-Trotskyist ultraleft degeneracy (Comrade Stalin wasn’t big on Gay Pride and transgendered liberation, one suspects!) – and the Right won on economic policy (or so it thinks).

It would have been better the other way round, and the end of the Cold War certainly wasn’t a victory for the real West. It sucked societies that had hitherto – however economically inefficient and politically repressive – been racially, culturally and socially healthy –as I found when I visited the USSR myself just before its fall – into the sewage farm of the global corporate Capitalist greed machine.  The Cold War ended in the victory of that machine and another defeat for our Race.

In fact, neither side of the System politics sham fight really won. Both Establishment Right and Establishment Left sold out.

Indeed the Right sold out more, since not only did it concede the entire social agenda to the New Left but the global market system, despite the name, has nothing in common with traditional small-c conservative values of competitive free markets.

Although the advantages of consumers enjoying perfect information about the freely competing various products of producers unconstrained by barriers to entry and competition are certainly very arguable in a world of family butchers competing in a village high street, they have nothing to do with the world of Tesco and Toyota, Microsoft and MTV.

So from Mass Immigration to Gangsta Rap, most of the bad things that have happened to the West in recent decades have happened because causing them to happen, not always consciously, has maximised corporate profit and served the global greed machine. A machine that wants – except that it has no consciousness so it can’t “want”, but is programmed to blindly seek – to turn all humanity into homogenised, interchangeable produce-and-consume units in a global marketplace.

But it will not succeed…

Not necessarily because we will destroy it first – although if we want to save our civilization, our culture and our race we must try. It’s not enough just to turn the clock back to a time before Mass Immigration, the Common Market, the weakening of the West and so on as some superficial Nationalists advocate. You can turn the clock back, certainly. As G.K. Chesterton said, people who say you can’t put the clock back reveal that they don’t know much about clocks.

But that isn’t enough.

If after an epic struggle you do turn the clock back, and if then you don’t change the works inside, the clock it will just tick inexorably forward again to where it was when you wanted to turn it back!

If we don’t destroy the system that does the harm, but just undo the harm it has so far been done, we will end up like Sisyphus in Greek myth, condemned endlessly to push a huge boulder up a steep hill, only to find when it’s nearly up there it rolls all the way down to the bottom and it is all to do again.

However, even if we don’t manage to destroy the system, even if we lose, the machine cannot win, because it will destroy itself anyway, sooner or later.

The only issue is whether or not we let it destroy our civilization and us with it first.

It isn’t the deliberate creation of cunning minds, running it behind the scenes. It is the unintended consequence of an economic and social system, the result of lots of little choices made by lots of people over centuries.

It is a blind process. A gigantic cybernetic system running on billions of people – with all that implies – but such systems simply do not work.

Large complex systems, even where they were designed deliberately, are prone to inherent instabilities and crashes – as anyone who has tried to work on a PC will know. Windows is very complicated, was not designed in one go but evolved incrementally from simpler systems, partly by design, partly by chance, and partly by the forced results of earlier historical choices that constrain where the system can go many releases later. It is amazing that it works at all, not just that it is buggy and unstable, requiring constant conscious design not to collapse altogether.

The global market is a program without programmers or technical support, running on hardware designed to hunt big hairy animals with spears on Pleistocene plains, not calculate futures options. Looking out of this window at [London] the vast city of 20 million people living within 30 miles of here, and the mechanism that keeps them fed, watered, clean and clothed, one is reminded of Dr Johnson’s comment about a dog walking on its hind legs – “the wonder is not that it is done badly, but that it is done at all”.

It is a program that may well crash catastrophically. With results disastrous to everyone entangled in it. It had a Blue Screen of Death in 2008, when – blindly following its internal imperatives to maximise profit in a particularly disastrous direction, it almost imploded in the credit crunch. The global financial system that is vital to the running of the Greed Machine came within hours of total collapse, but before we cheer, this is what would have happened next….

Every bank account would have become immediately inaccessible, and every ATM hole in the wall money slot would have run dry. Card machines at shop and supermarket tills would have stopped working because the bank systems they need would have crashed with the banks themselves. Once your wallet or your purse was empty, you couldn’t buy anything, including food, nor could shops sell it to you anyway. The “just in time” systems that put food on supermarket shelves would have stopped running, so there’d soon be nothing to buy anyway.

How long before angry words in shops turn to looting, and looting to rioting, and rioting to panicky millions-strong mobs  pouring out of the cities looking for food and safety, in the process destroying both?

MI5, which knows a thing about such matters, told the Government in March 2005 that after 48 hours of such social breakdown order could not be restored outside a few small enclaves, the casualties would run into tens of millions from famine and disease, and the damage would be equal to a major nuclear attack.

The machine is very complicated and fragile. Anything that causes it to break, or even causes enough of the public to think it is broken,  will cause it to crash catastrophically, bringing civilization down with it. When we are in a position to do so, we must extricate ourselves from, and dismantle it, very carefully. As it is we are suffering from the consequences of the System’s near-death experience – something that, if it were a plot rather than a process, it is hard to understand the plotters allowing to happen. One does not easily envisage the Learned Elders of the 93^rd Degree or whatever imitating silly kids playing chicken running in front of cars on a motorway for kicks…!

In a future crash the banks may not get bunged by Governments with enough of our money in time. But even if it doesn’t simply collapse with what computing folk call a ‘Fatal Internal Error’, it is sawing off a lot of the branches it is sitting on: undermining the ties of ethnicity, community and society, the unprofitable economic externalities that hold human societies together; consuming and destroying the natural resources that sustain it and befouling and wrecking in the name of greed the world it and we must inhabit.

It must do this because it needs to grow or die. Without endless economic growth the system collapses. But there is no more room to grow…

And the system cannot sacrifice short term growth for a massive long term programme to move the growth of the human economy into Space where it could continue indefinitely, because it favours components that maximise short termism at the expense of those who would think longer term.

Simply, companies that forgo profit for decades to fund expansion into Space will be taken over by those that don’t and will be dragged back to short-term profit maximisation.

The blind nature of the machine was revealed at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

Whatever we may think about the nature and causes of climate change, there is little doubt that most of the World’s current political and business leaders do believe in man-made global warming, but even they, the Great and the Good and Gordon Brown in Copenhagen assembled, could not throttle back the global greed machine.

They could not, because it controls them, not the other way round and it has no mind to make up or change on this or any issue. It simply blindly grinds on, until sooner or later it goes over a cliff.

Whether it takes us over with it depends on whether we understand what it is and the need to escape from it entirely, rather than merely try to reverse some of the bad things it has done.  An attempt which will fail in the long run if the spots are painted over but the virus left in the bloodstream.

We must not only deal with what has gone wrong with our world, but with the causes of what has gone wrong with it – and the causes of those causes!

We need to get out of the Global Greed Machine, but even more radically we need to remove the social factors that caused it to grow up in the first place – or it will sprout anew. We need to change the rules of the socio-economic algorithm.

I’m not going to get into policy here, and there’s a debate about that to be had anyway – apart from anything else we need a programme of National Revolution that doesn’t scare the electoral horses too much – but what we need to do, however we do it, is to subordinate economic imperatives to social/political/cultural ones.

That means: either direct subordination of the economy to political control, which has serious economic inefficiencies as the USSR found but even that is a lesser evil than the subordination of politics to blind economic imperatives; or dividing control, as well as ownership of economic entities among many people – i.e. Distributism, in such a way that centralising and ultimately globalising imperatives in economic entities are effectively counterbalanced by community and social drives motivating ordinary people.

Fred Boggin’ s Family Butchers or  Barsetshire Potato Farmers Co-operative Association isn’t going to turn into a global monster shipping in thousands of Tamils to Trowbridge any time soon. Nor actually is the John Lewis Partnership. Because ordinary people, individually, as families and as communities control as well as own it, and won’t want it to. Unlike the corporate bigwigs, they know they will have to live with the consequences where they live.

We also need to move away from entanglement in a single global market and toward a world of as far as possible self-sufficient national economies. Autarky.

International trade is a bad thing per se. Sometimes it’s a necessary evil – I doubt Britain will ever be self-sufficient in tea and pineapples, unless the global warmers are even more right than they think! But it should be confined to the bartering of goods climate and terrain make difficult to produce at home.

We could, for example, swap tropical tea and pineapples for our temperate grain or potatoes.  Who now can doubt that, if we were not in a global economy, we would not now be in a global recession?

More fundamentally, its global reach gives the machine global power. It can act on a planetary scale, whilst we can at most take over states and fight back on a national scale. We must bring the economy and its imperatives down to our own national scale, so we have a chance of mastering it and making, and keeping, it our servant and not our master.

Probably all this will impose a cost in terms of economic efficiency, per capita GDP and so on, though I think it’s a cost we’d agree was worth paying for a healthy society with a long term future.

The collapse of our civilization, which is where the System is inexorably and unstoppably going, won’t half play hob with economic growth, GDP and the balance of trade figures (sterling and the dollar will take a bit of a knock too as modes of exchange vis a vis the new currency of bartering cans of beans for dog meat in the ruins).

I don’t for a moment dispute Tescos and agribusiness are more profitable in the short term than lots of small family firms and workers’ co-ops and so on. But in the long term even Stalin’s economic system would offer a better future – because even that would offer our civilization and our people some future at all. So Tescos and HBOS and the rest mustn’t be allowed to exist any more. And if I have my way their senior management – and especially the big bank bosses – will be learning the spiritual worth of sustained physical labour somewhere a long way from Canary Wharf…  

We need to ensure that, as was true a thousand years ago, wealth does not equal power.

Today, if you land in England with a billion pounds, you can command thousands to do your bidding, including half football’s Premier League. You will dwell in a mansion on Chelsea. However, if you land the leader of a thousand warriors, loyal, tough and true, they will be forcibly disarmed and taken off you and you will end up in a cell in Wormwood Scrubs.

Things were not always so. A thousand years ago, you and your brave warrior warband could have pledged your swords to the King, and been granted lands and power from that.

If you were wise and learned, the King would have valued your counsel and again granted you lands and estates. Mr Moneybags on the other hand would have had his shekels confiscated to the Crown toute suite and would have been thrown in the Tower, or herded with the rest of his alien moneygrubbing tribe into a tower and set on fire as memorably happened in York … I know which world I’d prefer to live in!

More fundamentally, we need a spiritual as well as an economic revolution.

We need to educate people away from wanting things they do not need. Beyond decent housing, food and clothing, we do not need and should not want gadgets and gewgaws and gimmicks, things that, as JRR Tolkien rightly said, end up owning us. As Hilaire Belloc said, real wealth lies in laughter and the love of friends, and I would add, in food growing from your own acres and children to carry on your life after you pass on, in a living land of whose life we are a integral part.

We should seek not wealth of possessions of money but wealth in wisdom and beauty and friendship and family and community and the community of communities that is the nation, which unlike us need never die and in which we can live on. We should honour not the merchant and the spin-doctor and the spiv and the speculator but the warrior and the artist, the scientist and the scholar. Greed is NOT good, the love of money is the root of much if not all evil. In that shared realisation is the awakening of the European mind from its long nightmare of decline and the dawn of a new day of racial rebirth.

Thank you…

By Heordreedenn © 2013

[This is the transcript of a speech delivered at a meeting of Nationalists in London yesterday, amended slightly to enable it to flow better as written prose.]

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