Scott Locklin

You can't help feeling a little bad for the lower class. On the surface, it looks like they were born to it, and, really, in many ways, they more or less were. Most lower class people are lower class because they have terrible folkways, like, say, smoking crack and not having a job. They got them from their environment to be certain, but if we allow for personal responsibility at all (rather than assuming we're all inevitable products of our environments), they are in part personally responsible for their predicament. Since most of this series of essays is a sort of comedy of manners, this one is probably most clear of all. And the most sad. Many in the HBD camp would simply dismiss the lower class as low-IQ orcs. It may be statistically true in prison inmate populations, but it's well known to not be true in general. I can testify from experiences, some of the smartest people I've ever met were lower class.

How do you get along with or suck up to the lower classes? Well, you pretty much do not do so at all. But there are two ways of getting along with a lower class person at least to a limited extent. The first way is to beat the shit out of them. They deserve it anyway, and most people lick the boots that kick them. They do respect strength, in a sullen sort of way, and they really don't have much heart, like lower middle class people do. The second way, recommended for anyone who isn't a lower middle class hobgoblin with scars on your knuckles, is to give them stuff. Give them money. Give them beer. Give them drugs. They will be nice to you for a little while anyway. Maybe. Really, you should probably just throw down your wallet and run away.

From the New York Times:

 

One of the nation’s most iconic nonprofit organizations, founded 166 years ago in England as the Young Men’s Christian Association, is undergoing a major rebranding, adopting as its name the nickname everyone has used for generations.

“It’s a way of being warmer, more genuine, more welcoming, when you call yourself what everyone else calls you,” said Kate Coleman, the organization’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

Realistically speaking, the Y has had the "men's Christian organization" out of it for decades now. It was founded in 1844; a part of the first great awakening: a religious movement responsible for, among other things, ending slavery in the West. It was designed to keep young men moving to the big cities during the industrial revolution away from temptation, and give them a place to exert themselves in a positive way. Its foundational principles are "healthy spirit," "healthy mind" and "healthy body." Now, it's "youth development," "healthy living" and "social responsibility"-typical meaningless virtue words of the early 21st century. The links to their new mission statements are worth a look; they sound like something out of an ACORN mission statement.

We are a powerful ally and advocate for our communities. Our experience and strong relationships in 10,000 neighborhoods across the nation mean that we are able to organize grassroots efforts and influence public policy around a range of social issues including child welfare, education and public health.

Serving families has always been at the heart of the Y.

Among the cultural innovations of the YMCA: invention of the game of Basketball,  educational reform in pre-communist China, foundation of several colleges and universities, invention of the idea of "night school," and countless charitable activities during wars. Since the 1960s it's been a public policy NGO with a gym franchise. Even the Village People aren't amused by the change. Kind of hard to rebel against the old prune-faced christian and male YMCA now that it's run by the same prune faces who run everything else.

Two articles of interest to the Alternative Right. While Richard is trying to craft an intellectual movement of the disparate pieces of the disposessed Right, we should give some thoughts as to how the political sausage is made. While intellectualizing is important, the real strength of the movement is how  people live it internally. This Policy Review article on the Tea Party phenomenon points this out nicely. The Tea Party movement is the closest thing to a break in the neoconservative hegemony we have. It has virtually no intellectuals of note, no real new ideas; it is an attitude and a warning to the ruling elite. Intellectuals (I prefer to refer to them as "technocratic elites") think they're leading movements. The point I take away from this article: they may be running things, but they're not leading any movements. Furthermore, the article points out a dimension of how the present elite's social control works: social aspiration. If you're a middle class schlub in an office job who wants to think of himself as better than your fellows, how do you do it? Well, the same way the middle class has always done it -- by apeing the folkways of the social class immediately above them, in this case, the class consisting of technocratic professionals who run the place.

A governing elite that has a monopoly over the allocation of prestige has immense power over a culture. It can decide what ideas, thinkers, and movements merit attention, while it can also determine what ideas, thinkers, and movements should be dismissed with scorn and contempt — assuming that the elite even condescends to notice their existence. Needless to say, such a setup will lead to a high degree of intellectual cronyism, in which members of the “in” group mutually endorse and reinforce each others’ prestige; but like crony capitalism, this is standard operating procedure of all elites and should come as no surprise. Relying on the natural human desire to gravitate towards prestige, the intellectual elite has no need to resort to the ham-fisted methods of Orwell’s Big Brother.

What sparked the Tea Party revolt is mounting dissatisfaction at living in a society in which a small group has increasingly solidified its monopoly over the manufacture and distribution of opinion, deciding which ideas and policies should be looked upon favorably and which political candidates will be sympathetically reported. Even more, the Tea Party rebels bitterly resent the rigid censorship exercised by this elite over the limits of acceptable public discourse. Those who have the power to rule an opinion “out of order” do not need to take the trouble to refute it, or even examine it. They can simply make it go away.

It is the Tea Partiers’ indifference to the whole idea of intellectual respectability that renders them immune to the prestige pressure that molds and shapes the ideas and opinions of those who do care about being intellectually respectable. To put it another way, the Tea Partiers can escape the otherwise all-pervasive influence of our cultural elite because they are the people who Gramsci called marginalized outsiders.

The whole article is worth a read.

Coming at the problem from another direction is Fred Reed. Fred is acutely aware of social class, since he comes from what Christian Landers would call, "the wrong kind of white people." You know, like the Tea Partiers.

When I read columnists or listen to talking heads on the lobotomy box, they strike me as delusional. What are these decapitated crania prattling about? From what morgue did they escape? What country are they from? Certainly not the America I grew up in. I conclude that they suffer from Commentator’s Disease, which consists in the confluence of several disabilities, the first being high intelligence.  ...

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain. They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Fred is essentially pointing out the same thing: the loons in charge of the booby hatch we call America have very little real connection with the actual human beings who live here. While an Alternative Right should generate new ideas, and dust off some useful old ones, if we want to have some impact on the world, we need to connect with the people who live in it.

Most people on the Alternative Right are decidedly not in favor of our open-border policy in the United States. They complain of the program of race replacement, foreigners stealing our jeeeebs, committing crimes, and generally lowering the property values in the joint. I sympathize with these arguments, but, personally, I hope we make allowances for the kind of immigration I like to date. You see, I belong to an oppressed sexual minority: American men who prefer foreign women. There is power in naming things, and so I'll just come out and say it: I am an American xenosexual man.

It took me a while to come to realize my sexual preference. It was never conscious until fairly recently, and I figure it's time for me to come out of the closet, so my xenosexual brothers won't feel alone. It isn't a realization that I'm particularly happy to have had, as it makes life in the Republic incredibly inconvenient. In my long and sordid career as a bachelor, the only women I have been able to maintain a romantic relationship with have been at least raised in other countries.

"There is something very genuine, very great and very manlike to the Norse system. A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterizes the Norse system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain strides. Untamed thought; great, giantlike, enormous!"

I was pleased to see the essay by Stephen McNallen. While I don't believe in any deities, if I did, it would be in the gods of the Northmen.

My last name means "Northman" in Gaelic, so I suppose it's in my blood to some small extent. Even if I were of some other kind of extraction, there is something appealing about the old Norse gods that is missing from other mythological systems. Just as Carlyle said, the Norse gods seem giant, epic, and mighty. All the other kinds of gods I can think of either seem monstrous and sinister (Shintoism, Hinduism, Voodoo) denatured and pathetic (Greek gods, Buddism) or just sort of vague (Taoism, Animism). The gods of the Northmen are giant, honest and brave. They are worth emulating. They're often incredibly silly, but that makes them more endearing to me.

When I'm trying to get away from the Internet and the telephone to get some work done, I often end up in the University library. When in need of distraction, I often look at the old journals. One of my favorites is the London Times Imperial Trade and Engineering Supplement. Considering recent events, the era between 1929 and 1941 are of particular interest.

Between the advertisements for valves, the new wonder metal of aluminum, Vickers airplanes, coal mine ventilators and diesel motors there is a great deal of history and food for thought. In olden times, one could write a report in a general interest economic publication on the health of the local plywood industry, or the national fruit canneries. While this sort of thing sounds like total rot today, it's somehow a lot more satisfying than reading about the latest facebook swindle in Business Week. Personally, I would like to know how the local plywood industry is doing. The gouty old fussbudgets who could write a detailed (and interesting) report on the state of the British paraffin wax industry were actually far more perceptive and less susceptible to "deferring to the expert syndrome" than modern financial writer nincompoops.