Ideology, hidden obstacle to reason
Don Hank
I was recently surprised to note that a prominent British libertarian [Sean Gabb] had sent out a bulk email suggesting that leaving the EU would not be much of a boon to the UK since such would not necessarily provide more “liberty” for Brits. Thus, he contends that UK “leaders” have the same totalitarian mindset as the EU “leaders” and the Brexit (exit of the UK from the EU) would not help matters. He mentioned that the UK government has at times exceeded even the legal limitations on power provided by the authoritarian EU and that offended Brits may occasionally benefit from European Court decisions that overturn excesses of UK authorities and judges. Since the European Court is an essential component of the EU, leaving the EU would therefore supposedly remove this supposed benefit.
This email did not contain the words Muslim or Islam. Yet the Islamization of the UK is one of the main concerns of those who support the Brexit.
I had tried to show my UK reader list how simply rolling over and playing dead, ie, not voting in the upcoming referendum or voting YES to stay in the EU was not an option, for one thing because it sends a signal to the EU top rank that the people of Europe have finally given up and are willing to acquiesce to total tyranny.
An article in The Atlantic reveals one very important reason why EU membership is a bad deal for the UK and all other industrial members, to whit:
“EU countries are legally barred from limiting immigration from other member states, a decision that has had a great effect on migration patterns on the continent.”
Now it is certainly true that the usurpers who have seized the internal UK reins of power (essentially Parliament and Downing Street) by deceit are, like the EU bureaucrats, also inclined to flood the UK with still more Muslims, a rapidly growing group that receives an inordinately high percentage of social assistance or welfare (as reported here and here) and which in polls is found to favor sharia law and jihad.
In 2014, Daniel Greenfield, discussing a recent poll in London, wrote
“There are about 1 million Muslim settlers in London where they make up 12 percent of the population. These figures suggest that the vast majority of them, perhaps as high as 80 percent, support ISIS.”
A NO vote on the referendum would be a signal to the Brussels oligarchs that the people are no longer the lemmings they once were and will not take rampant Islamisation lying down.
It should not surprise anyone that libertarians tend to be more liberal on the issue of immigration. Their ideology teaches essentially that all humans must have the maximum freedom possible and is refractory to considerations of reality. The freedom to cross someone else’s border and gain access to another country’s welfare rolls could be seen as the ultimate in libertarian policy. US libertarians counter the fears of ordinary mortals by contending that welfare would be forbidden in a libertarian society, but their immigration positions ignore the fact that welfare is part of the current US reality, over which libertarians have little or no control, and the current socialist context is the one in which they propose to implement their immigration positions. Like their British counterparts, they therefore generally see even illegal immigration as either a non-threat or a boon. They believe that they could soon operate in a perfect world with no impediments whatsoever to individual freedom.
The trouble with this thinking — in case you are one of the few who need this pointed out to you — is that there really are two kinds of freedom, or liberty (liberté) as the French revolutionaries, ideological second cousins to today’s libertarians, called it.
ONE kind is individual freedom.
The SECOND is more subtle and easier to overlook, and that is, national sovereignty, ie, the freedom of a nation to chart and navigate its own course without interference from other nations or entities.
Today’s libertarians almost never talk about the second kind of liberty because to them, national sovereignty is an obstacle to individual liberty at all costs, which is the non-negotiable centerpiece of their creed. And non-negotiable here means reality be damned.
Ironically, however, this neglect of national sovereignty actually severely curbs individual liberty as well, at least in the real world down here beneath the rarefied stratosphere in which libertarianism thrives.
For example, if 80% of an indigenous population desires freedom of choice in its national lawmaking, then a rigid libertarian policy of legal residency for all and sundry may well lead to veritable inundation of this indigenous population with hordes of people who tolerate and even welcome totalitarianism. After all, to them, totalitarianism is their free choice. Once these hordes reach a critical percentage of the population, the tipping point will be passed and that one-time majority will now be subjected to the will of the newly arrived hordes. And here’s the real kicker: the libertarians who persuaded their unsuspecting countrymen to accept these hordes will now also be enslaved along with the rest. So much for liberté.
Worst of all, the above is not by any means just a hypothetical example. There is a projection that the UK will become a Muslim state by 2050, and while this has been poo-pooed by the Establishment media, The Commentator writes:
“This projection is based on reasonably good data. Between 2004 and 2008, the Muslim population of the UK grew at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, making Muslims 4 percent of the population in 2008. Extrapolating from those figures would mean that the Muslim population in 2020 would be 8 percent, 15 percent in 2030, 28 percent in 2040 and finally, in 2050, the Muslim population of the UK would exceed 50 percent of the total population.”
Thus the rigid and doctrinaire libertarianism with liberty as its Grail, is from the outset on a course of ineluctable self-destruction.
History presents us with a parade of ideologies, all of which have failed one after the other. Yet some flaw in the character of Homo sapiens leads us invariably to put aside our perception of reality, our built-in logic and reason, and even our sense of self-preservation in favor of untested ideologies propped up by high-sounding rhetoric. Somehow, our species never seems to notice that, precisely because ideologies supersede and subtly supplant reason and the perception of reality, all ideologies will eventually fail, always, just as they always have in the past.
The question is: can we ever come to understand this simple fact and overcome this flaw in our DNA?
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I’m sorry to sound so depressed, but I have spent the last 15 years or so grappling with the situation that presents itself. The diagnosis is not good. There is a growing counter-push, which needs to keep being nurtured, but at the moment it is just not strong enough either in mind or in ability to force a change on these fronts.
I have skirted around societal matters, ideological matters, financial matters, media ownership, vested interests, propaganda, a certain disproportionate string-pulling tribe, their Islamic rivals and counterparts, the wider demographic dissolution/disintegration (Africans, Indians, everybody from all over the world etc)….
….and I cannot see a way out that does not require a massive concerted effort and one which may culminate in a necessity of violence of a sort that most people in this country, even myself to some degree, could not really stomach, never-mind “see the need for” or lend their support to. Times may need to change though.
We have been stitched up like a kipper, much of it on purpose in my opinion, and we are about to be smoked.
I have written many times about the vulnerability of libertarianism when it comes to the future and argued with the “open borders” brigade,who, to be fair to this site, tend to be American and not British. The future direction and decisions of the host society are going to be out of their hands, if not already. The pace and scale of the transformation is quickening.
Tens of thousands of “immigrants” venturing across the Med to get to Europe. The European Union is aiding and abetting it. It is planning welcoming centres in Africa to give them citizenship before they even set off. There are already job centres there to help facilitate their arrival here. They are engineering a EU-Africa partnership that seeks “circular migration”.
Germany, as reported in the press this week, has a demographic catastrophe on its hands. Germany and the Germans really are “doing away with themselves” – as one controversial book attested in recent years.
Focus is on “economic effects” and “job markets” for an ageing population – not the complete demographic and societal transformation that would render the Germans a “once lived” civilisation and provide them with hell on Earth as the final spiral of their demising decades comes to pass.
The economics people are suggesting that Germans need to take in over 480,000 “Non-EU” immigrants every year for the next 30 years.
France is heading the same, as are we, as are many others. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. We are the last generation capable of doing something, but nobody knows what to do or how to achieve it, considering the attitudes and the state of play in wider society – and given the powerful entities who seem to have the hold of all the levers. It could be done, but I don’t know how.
Sweden has gone truly insane with it. I urge people to watch this following video, to show the direction things are heading in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7IaCcAJQwY
There is such a gaping void between being concerned about this future and wishing to reverse the existing trends, and the wider public discourse about “prejudice” and “wearing the burkha” and “hating people who look different” to ourselves – none of which have anything to do with it.
This void has gone on for so long now, and the demographics of large towns and cities have transformed so much, as have societal relations, that there is little comprehension or appetite to comprehend such a point of view as mine.
People who are aware of it, to some degree or another, do not wish to confront it or even talk about it. They prefer to keep to lighter matters, like their new car, their planned holiday, relationship gossip, films, news, anything…. anything but that vipers nest of deeply uncomfortable and “controversial” subjects.
Others simply bumble through their life oblivious to it and/or opposing the most meekest of actions that could be taken. They cannot hide from the realities of hiding from reality, either.
A refreshingly sensible post, a rare thing here these days! I applaud you for it.
I am not Sean Gabb, so it is presumptious to speak as if on his behalf, but I think Don Hank has misunderstood what Sean said. The point was that the strongest believers in The Ideology (whatever you want to call it) are among our own Establishment; so while leaving the EU may or may not have merit in its own right, we should not expect anything to improve if we do. The best we can say is that outside the EU, the British Establishment at least would not have the “The EU Made Us Do It” excuse- which is rarely used anyway, since mostly even when policies are sourced from the EU, the local national governments pretend to be responsible for them anyway.
To take the arguments raised already, we do not have mass immigration because of the EU. The EU helps facilitate it somewhat; but it would happen anyway. It would happen because it has been the deliberate, ideological policy of governments of both “Left” and “Right”, British governments, since the 1960s. Leaving the EU will make no difference to that policy whatsoever.
The basic reason for this is that The Ideology is Anglospheric (predominantly, American) in origin. We have discussed at great length the origins of it on this very blog and I believe have a better understanding as a result of what it is and where it came from than most other people do, frankly. It is crucial to understand that The Ideology is a set of shared values- virtues and taboos- which originated from, and are most dominant in, Anglo countries- the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and NZ, even Ireland.
The first point therefore is we must stop looking for some external force to blame, and concentrate on fighting The Ideology on its home territory. Here, right here. Secondly, we should not expect any return to liberalism of any kind until we can defeat it, and no such thing will occur if we leave the EU, and instead things will probably get worse since, at the very least, the glacial pace of the EU’s bureaucracy slows things down somewhat. It takes half a decade to do what Britain’s unrestrained Parliamentary Dictatorship system can do in a week.
In fact, one can reasonably argue that the best excuse for leaving the EU would be to protect them from us, and thus somewhat slow down the poisoning of the rest of the world with The Ideology.
“The muslims are here”, not because of the EU, but because the British State, Establishment and opinion forming class want them here. They will still want that if we leave the EU. The problems we face are home grown.
Firstly, as I said to Sean, he is a gentleman and a scholar. I expected the same because he is first and foremost a scholar who is not afraid of honest debate. I am honored to have my commentary featured here..
Yes, I agree with most of what Ian B says.. The ideology in the EU and the US and their allies is Neoconservatism and it is no more American than the UK government is British. It is an alien ideology. Yes, it may be worse than the ideology of libertarianism, but no one knows that libertarianism looks like in the real world, do they? And that is the issue I have with it.
If ideologues were scientitsts they would all be out of a job. NO scientist would dare advocate a new cure for cancer, for ex, if it were untried and untested. Yet in philosophy, economics and politics, almost all of the “thinkers” squander reams of paper on ideas without it even occurring to them to test them first in the real world before advocating them.
As for Muslim immigration, it may well have come from actors within the UK more than from the EU. BUT if you want to counter Islamization (a word rarely used by libertarians), then you need to recall that the EU insists that its members accept immigrants from other parts of the EU. That, my friends, is “stealth Schengen.” You don’t need the Schengen Agreement to receive the nuclear fallout from that idea under the EU’s current terms.
As for Concerned Briton, you write
“I have written many times about the vulnerability of libertarianism when it comes to the future and argued with the “open borders” brigade,who, to be fair to this site, tend to be American and not British. The future direction and decisions of the host society are going to be out of their hands, if not already. The pace and scale of the transformation is quickening.”
I agree but libertarianism itself isn’t what’s vulnerable. Barring the chance that libertarianism will change its direction, then not libertarianism but its victims are vulnerable.
I wrote this article in hopes that libertarianism can be altered to fit real needs in the real world. Open borders should not be part of it. National sovereignty SHOULD be part of it. If a libertarian leader somewhere can introduce the idea of national sovereignty (and I don’t mean nationalism, of course) into your body of thought, then you could possibly succeed. Or rather Britain could possibly succeed.
There is only one world leader who has come out expressly in favor of honoring national sovereignties in the traditional Westphalian sense, and that is Vladimir Putin.
Note, however, that in an interview last year, Putin was asked what his ideology was and he said: I am a conservative but I do not have any ideology.
I believe that total lack of ideology is the formula to his success. And if you don’t believe he has been successful, then just wait a year or two.
“The freedom to cross someone else’s border and gain access to another country’s welfare rolls could be seen as the ultimate in libertarian policy.”
Really? I though libertarianism was also about eliminating welfare. Surely a true small government libertarian would be arguing for open borders and no welfare and a bunch of other stuff that would make sense in the round? Of course opening the borders and giving economic migrants money for coming is crazy but that isn’t libertarian or anarchist – that’s the situation right now. Taxation is theft and the only legitimage way for wealth to be redistributed is by the free market and volunary exchanges between individuals.
I presume you can come up with some bastardised definition of libertarian that favours closed borders, and all that entails, but that’s why I prefer to think of myself as an anarchist.