MORE ON COMING APART : SALON’S ARTICLE : RESPONSE 2
DECEPTIONS IN THIS ARTICLE
1) NATION: A ‘nation’ describes a body of people with similar genetic, linguistic, cultural, normative, and religious properties. When we discuss a diverse populace we do not use the term nation, we use the term EMPIRE. All diverse states must be either federations(voluntary and excitable) or empires (involuntary and non-exitable). If a diverse body of people contains a minority that cannot succeed then it is an empire. China is an empire. America is an empire. Labeling the USA as a nation is a dishonest attempt to label a heterogeneous voluntary polity with the legitimacy of a homogenous nation state, when in fact, it is merely a heterogeneous empire with a record of violence to oppress attempts at secession.
2) MORAL AND “CHOICE” RATHER THAN ECONOMIC AND “POSSIBLE” ARGUMENTS
—“Yet somehow the republic kept experiencing what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom,” thanks only partly to the fortuitous confluence of two oceans’ protection, a vast continent’s ever-alluring frontier and unending streams of aspiring immigrants:”—
Lets not be dishonest here, and cast this as a moral argument. The reason for American economic success is that the colonists used british weapons and might to conquer a continent, then steal that continent for themselves. Then sell it off to immigrants, and profit from it. It has been the most profitable conquest and sale of a territory in history.
Even today, for all intents and purposes, the american economy consists largely of the housing business. As the housing business goes, so does the american economy. The problem is that we have run out of immigrants from high trust societies, from nuclear family societies, from empirical societies, from rule of law societies, and from truth-telling societies. And contrary to dogma, the evidence is that immigrants from these cultures are not adapting to the (a) absolute nuclear family (b) meritocracy (c) self-supporting productivity (d) minimal statism, (d) civic society, (e) common language, that was what was required of immigrants in order to participate in the american dream of having land so that one could control one’s destiny. WIthout those norms and habits, america has evolved from a polity of ideas, to a simple empire of increasing totalitarianism as the productive classes are slowly farmed to service the unproductive classes, and single motherhood and requisite poverty of single motherhood, has now reach near majority status. Thousands of years of suppressing single motherhood and its endemic poverty and dependency have been reversed in less than a century.
3) ECONOMIC TRUTH vs MORAL JUSTIFICATION
Economic history is the only form of truth we can extract from the past. Humans justify their wants, given the conditions that they live under. This article is not much different from ‘god wills it’ because its arguments are allegorical and moral, with a thin veneer of rationalism. Whereas a scientists would look at the economy, the incentives, and demonstrated human behavior and dismantle the authors entire line of argument as a series of childlike justifications of pre-cognitive, non rational, counter-productive human cognitive biases – just as easily as he could dismantle the composition of a rock by mass spectrometry, and just as accurately.
The truth is quite different. Humans act as tribes, and these tribes make best use of the circumstances that they can to increase their status and reproductive ability. SOme of theses strategies are successful (rapid population expansion of poor peoples) and some are unsuccessful (progressive status seeking at the expense of child bearing). Time determines winners, not words.
*Words are used to deceive.
We deceive in order to steal.
The only true words are operational words.
Everything else is analogy.
And almost all analogy is a lie.*