From Zerohedge:
“The owners of China’s largest social networks have partnered with the government to create something akin to the U.S. credit score — but, instead of measuring how regularly you pay your bills, it measures how obediently you follow the party line.”
This is to become compulsory in 2020. Scary stuff. And it’s easy to see how America’s “War on Terror” could take a similar turn, eventually leading to abuse of political dissidents, for example those speaking against corruption.
While this “statism” is frightening, I always find it ironic how Libertarians portray individualism as the antithesis.
If seeking truly anti-statist societies, one would venture to the divided Middle East or to Africa, places where man continues to be organised by tribe and faith.
A roadmap to “statism” would look like the following: tribalism –> individualism –> socialism. The individualism phase serves to break down group bonds, allowing for individuals to then be absorbed by the state.
Most of us would not view tribal chaos as utopian, but resistance to statism would seem to involve a degree of return to a more-tribal or more peasant-like existence, perhaps something like the Catholic ideal of subsidiarity. And were the state to collapse, society would naturally return to a tribal existence in the absence of the security provided by a state.
Since Marx is still the bogeyman of the Libertarians, I call attention to Marx’s “Theory of History“, which I can just pull up from wikipedia (though I have the relevant book if demanded of me).
Marx argues that capitalism is the predecessor to socialism. Capitalism breaks man down into a proletariat mass that owns little capital, depends on wages. And it is dominated by a small capitalist elite. Modern society looks somewhat different, but the point is that capitalism is seen by Marx/Engels as a natural predecessor of socialism. And it is this breaking down of traditions (creative destruction) and the wealth gap that creates the environment ripe for socialist revolution.
So, if truly wanting to oppose socialism, it would seem desireable to encourage a larger middle class, wider distribution of capital, perhaps a larger domestic (things made domestically as opposed to purchased) economy as well. (Note: a large middle class is not the same as opposing hierarchy. A hierarchy of wealth is not the only form of hierarchy possible in a society.)
And yet, we see so many on the Right defending wealth gaps, promoting individualism, declaring even that “greed is good”, working for the environment most fertile for the very socialist revolution they claim to oppose.
And individuals and nuclear families cannot hope to both work and master finance (investments), politics, culture (for raising their children), and charities. As individuals, we’re inevitably reliant upon either individual strangers or the state. A society broken into individuals is a society of patsies just begging to be manipulated and exploited. If we aren’t captured by an Orwellian nightmare, we’ll suffer some other doom. And no superior IQ, no Nietzschean will, no Social Darwinism should be relied upon to naturally make some individuals superior to others. In modern society, groups triumph, which is largely why Jews are so dominant and why individualistic whites are so weak.
Thus, what are needed to resist “statism” are group ties and a questioning of classical liberalism, the opposite of what most Libertarians call for.
With Defenders of Freedom like this, who needs “Statists”? To cure our societal ailment, we should go to the root of the problem: classical liberalism and the Enlightenment.
Conservative Heritage Times 