The dominant ideology of modern Western societies upholds equality as an absolute moral good, which must, therefore, be pursued for its own sake. The morality of egalitarianism is never questioned by the establishment power structure or by the vast majority of citizens; it is, in fact, a taken-for granted assumption that exists outside the scope of acceptable debate. Predicated on the arbitrary assertion that all humans are born equal in dignity and rights, and bearer of such rights by the mere fact of being human, able to reason, or endowed with dignity (note the circular reasoning) it makes of anyone questioning the moral goodness of equality into an individual of questionable humanity. Even conservatives dare not question the moral goodness of equality, focusing instead on critiquing the methods of application. Yet, equality, despite the high-flown rhetoric surrounding it, is far from an absolute moral good. On the contrary, when we examine the consequences of equality, it is an evil. This article will first explore some of the ways in which equality is an evil and will then put forth an alternative paradigm, founded on a theory of difference.

Unfair Distribution of Reward

The pursuit of equality’s most obvious consequence is the unfair distribution of reward. Because individual capabilities are always different, equality cannot be achieved without taking rewards from the deserving and reallocating them to the undeserving. Thus, talent, industry, thrift, diligence, discipline, initiative, and perseverance are penalised, while inability, idleness, profligacy, indifference, negligence, inertia, and inconstancy are rewarded in the name of social justice. This is egregiously apparent in the policies of universities in the United States, where the pursuit of racial equality has led to differential admission standards that privilege the scholastically inept at the expense of the scholastically apt. In the wake of unequal outcomes in SATs by different racial groups, millions of bright, hard-working students have been excluded from the universities of their choice, particularly where these have been ivy-league universities, in the effort racially to equalise outcomes.

The irony is that an argument for egalitarianism has been the need to combat the unfairness of what egalitarians commonly refer to as ‘privilege’. Egalitarians deem ‘privilege’ bad because it is unmeritocratic, allowing some to enjoy unearned benefits. Yet, since, as we have seen, egalitarian policies still create privileged classes of individuals, who unfairly enjoy unearned benefits, it achieves the opposite of its stated goal, merely transferring ‘privilege’ from one group to another.

Unfair Distribution of Resources

Closely related to the above is the unfair distribution of resources that accrues from pursuing equality. An example has been provided by recent a news report about universities closing or scaling down science departments to make room for diversity or equality officers. It seems the salary for one such officer would be enough to fund two cancer researchers. Being an absolute moral good, for egalitarians equality needs no logical justification, but the truth is theirs is an ideology that inflicts misery and costs lives. Let us be specific with the implications. Imagine you have a young loved one who has cancer or some other degenerative medical condition. Prognosis is early death in ten or fifteen years without a medical breakthrough. The research is making slow progress. You hope science will make the breakthrough before it is too late. Then, suddenly, the relevant research centres begin closing down or scaling down science departments, while, at the same time, these centres create positions for well-paid diversity or equality officers, allocating their departments generous funds. The research now moves more slowly, pushing back that medical breakthrough you are hoping for. Your loved one now faces a more protracted illness, possibly death before a cure or a more effective drug therapy is found. And what if you are a primary carer? Misery is thus inflicted upon you too, since the cure, or the new drug therapy, takes longer or comes too late. The worry and the sorrow also affect every close relative. It is difficult quantify the extent to which this is the case, particularly as no one seems to have researched this area, but the above scenario is not unreasonable. Can equality be a moral good when these are the consequences?

Negation of Difference

In recent decades, diversity has been a catchword among egalitarians, yet the affirmation of equality is simultaneously the negation of difference. The occasional phrase ‘different but equal’ has been the egalitarians’ attempt to have their cake and eat it, but it is a logical contradiction and therefore nonsense. The argument that the equality referred to is merely equality before the law does not hold, because were it so there would be no need for a policy of differential (unfair) treatment of university applicants. The argument that the equality referred to is merely equality of opportunity does not hold either, because were it so there would be no consternation at unequal outcomes in test results among students in different racial categories, and therefore no need for unfair admissions policies. The affirmation of equality is a straight negation of difference across the board, even to the point of denying the biological existence of one of the primary sources of difference—race and gender—and of pretending that these are pure, arbitrary fictions.

Diversity is predicated on difference. The elimination of one implies the elimination of the other. Modern egalitarianism’s celebration of diversity, and its proclamation of diversity as a good worth pursuing for its own sake, are, therefore, contradictory. What is more, by criticising opponents of diversity as immoral, egalitarians fail to meet their own professed standards of morality, making egalitarians themselves immoral.

The negation of difference implies, by extension, a negation of quality, both in the sense of distinguishing attributes and of superiority. The logical end product of equality is, therefore, sameness and mediocrity, a denial of all the things that make life good and worth living. A system of belief that takes the joy out of life, a system of belief that is, ultimately, anti-life, cannot be considered moral.

Negation of Individuality

Difference is what makes us individual. To assert that everyone is equal, therefore, is to negate individuality, because individuality implies uniqueness, autonomy, non-interchangeability. None are compatible with equality. The demand for uniformity— even when made in the name of individualism—entails a demand for conformity, a renunciation of the self, a demotion or degradation of the individual. This is not just another contradiction, but an affront to so-called ‘human dignity’, and since dignity is human, equality is inhuman. A philosophical outlook that simultaneously exalts and affronts dignity is not a coherent outlook.

There are two forms of collectivism: voluntary and imposed. The state- and institutionally sponsored pursuit of equality falls under the second category. Consequently, we can describe egalitarianism as imposing a degradation of the individual in service of an abstract collectivity—a collectivity that, because abstract and therefore dehumanised, does not exist empirically. Is this moral? Not in any way we could accept.

Agent of Oppression

As we have seen from the development of egalitarianism in modern Western societies, the logic of equality presupposes the equivalence of all humans. A result is that unrestricted immigration and racial diversity become ideologically unproblematic. Because humans are differentiated on multiple levels, racially diverse societies have become, by contrast, problematic, necessitating the proliferation of norms, regulation, laws, surveillance, penalties, bureaucracies, and additional taxation in pursuit of harmonious and continued functioning. The progressive limitation of freedoms never ends, because the above-stated measures address only symptoms, not the underlying cause: difference remains, and results in different responses to each measure, which in turn create the need for further measures. Worse still, because of the need to address an increasing number of areas in an increasingly disparate population with few or no shared values or assumptions, the regulatory effort becomes not only ever more invasive and prescriptive, but also increasingly ill-fitting for everyone. (Jack of all trades, master of none.) Freedom is also eroded economically due to the growing costs of regulating, policing, enforcing, penalising, and administrating social behaviour.

Modern Western societies provide innumerable examples of this process’ oppressive nature. This goes beyond the lost careers, ruined reputations, fines, and imprisonment that may result from expressing a politically ‘incorrect’ opinion, because being consequent with politically correct opinion can also result in adverse outcomes, such as rape, robbery, rioting, and murder, all of which are linked to and are a function of racial diversity. Forcing people—and specifically one class of people—to live under increased levels of personal danger lest they wish not to lose their livelihood, reputation, and freedom constitutes oppression. Since oppression is immoral, on this count too so is equality.

Cause of Apathy and Alienation

Robert Putnam linked racial diversity in communities to apathy and alienation: individuals in racially diverse communities tend to exhibit lower levels of community engagement, higher levels of mistrust, and greater reliance on television. According to Putnam’s study, the phenomenon becomes more pronounced with greater racial diversity. The conclusion is that individuals living in racially diverse communities enjoy a lower quality of life than individuals living in racially homogeneous communities, and that the greater the diversity, the lower the quality of life. The elevated levels of crime concurrent with a declining proportion of Whites in a community further accentuate this trend. Since racially diverse societies in the West have resulted directly from the pursuit of equality, equality is causally linked to declining quality of life, and not the opposite.

Equality is not immoral if pursued voluntarily, even if those pursuing it experience a decline in their quality of life as a result. However, it is immoral if it is imposed, by the state (with its implicit threat of violence) or through social pressure, upon those who have no wish to pursue it. And it is doubly immoral if the nonconformity of those in the latter group are, as a result, and as we have seen, denied their humanity.

Destructive System

As has become apparent by now, equality is a destructive force on several levels. Firstly, it is destructive of individual quality, since traits that contribute toward making individuals salient in some way, including activities or ways of behaving, are disincentivised, degraded, or denied. Secondly, it is destructive of the things that make life worth living, for the same reason. Thirdly, it is destructive of human dignity, even though it claims to be for it. Fourthly, it is an agent of oppression, even though it claims to be against it. And finally, it is destructive of quality of life and communities, even though it claims to aim at improving both.

Immoral Practitioners

Aside from the intrinsically destructive nature of the equality ideology, the latter is further tainted by the immorality of its practitioners, for equality activism almost invariably works—though this is not always explicitly stated or even acknowledged—to the detriment of one particular class of individuals: Whites. By their actions, equality practitioners can be safely assumed to have anti-White attitudes, or be anti-White, even though in most cases they are White themselves. It is, therefore, ironic that equality practitioners deem themselves highly moral, and even arrogate to themselves the preaching of morality.

Perhaps more egregious are the crimes of communists, who justifiably comprise the most notorious class of equality zealot. Communists have murdered, imprisoned, and condemned millions to a life of misery, including artists, writers, teachers, and intellectuals. Communists have deprived Europeans of some of the latter’s best people. Communist atrocities are, indeed, the worst in world history. Even on a smaller scale, communist and congenial egalitarians have often been prone to street violence, and as their breed of activist seems more eager than any other to engage in violence when faced with divergent opinions. This may be because egalitarianism has a terrorist history, beginning with the French Revolution, a movement comprising criminals, psychopaths, alcoholics, defectives, and sociopathic geniuses. This may also be because egalitarianism attracts the worst elements of any population, since they are the ones with most to gain by equality policies.

Psychopathology

From the above it is difficult not to see White egalitarians as suffering from an undiagnosed psychopathology, particularly when their equality activism’s long-term effect is to cause massive damage to their race, perhaps even its eventual destruction. Being perfectly analogous, such behaviour can be conceptualised as a collective tendency towards self-mutilation and / or suicide. In the case of Whites, it is reasonable, then, to treat egalitarianism as a moral defect or mental disturbance. (In the case of coloured people, egalitarianism is paid lip service in the interest of extracting concessions; in the case of a subset of Jews since the nineteenth century, egalitarianism is a strategy aimed at making Western societies more amenable to Jews.) Mental disturbance and defective morality are often linked.

The term ‘mental disturbance’ may seem disproportionate to some, given that many egalitarians sound and act like normal, well-adjusted members of society, and given also that, at least on the surface, egalitarianism represents the consensus opinion. It must be remembered, however, that this semblance of normality is a fairly common phenomenon. ‘Racism’ is now commonly considered the epitome of evil, but ‘racist’ attitudes and opinions, not to mention ‘racist’ legislation and government policies, represented until recently the consensus opinion, and were considered perfectly normal—so normal, in fact, that they were not always easy to identify, and even now new forms continue to be ‘discovered’. Identifying, and then changing, them has been the modern egalitarians’ self-imposed mission and raison d’être. We must not, therefore, allow ourselves to be deceived by apparent normality or by the apparently normalising effect of a consensus. Also, we must keep in mind that dominant ideologies always seek to perpetuate themselves by representing orthodoxy as healthy and normal, and heterodoxy as pathological and abnormal.

Difference

The pursuit of equality has been tied up with notions of social justice for so long that many may find it difficult to separate the two, and may therefore find an alternative unthinkable, or at least an evil to be avoided. Certainly, this is how egalitarians think and would like everyone else to think. We would propose, however, that the reverse is true, and that a superior paradigm might be one based on the desirability of difference.

A theory of difference is not ‘diversity’ as egalitarians understand the term. The ‘diversity’ of egalitarians refers to humans who may look different, but who, apart from individual personality and socially constructed differences, are essentially equivalent and interchangeable. This, of course, is too one-dimensional to constitute diversity, for it denies the validity of group attributes that contribute to identity. A theory of difference defines diversity as it is meant to be defined, and embraces the multidimensionality of human difference, both at the individual and collective levels.

Under a difference paradigm, therefore, we would expect individuals and groups to be different, even to diverge significantly from our own baselines, rather than expect them to be the same or to have failed when they showed no sign of convergence with us. We would respect difference as a matter of individual or group prerogative. And even where difference may result in instances that are repugnant to us, we would not for that reason cease to consider difference generally a font of riches, for the possibility of difference is a precondition for excellence and the extraordinary.

Sample Policy Implications

Alert readers who are familiar with my earlier writing on Haiti and Sub-Saharan Africa should immediately see the policy implications. Below are some examples.

Firstly, if difference is good and a matter of prerogative, it follows that allowing genetically and culturally distant settlers from the Third World to settle in Western nations is detrimental to the uniqueness of those nations. Immigration is not necessarily an evil, but under a difference paradigm immigrants would be immigrants, rather than settlers, and therefore appellants to the established authority, whose prerogative it would be to grant or deny admission on the basis of the incomers’ potential for assimilation. Diverse regions or nations would be seen as inimical to a diversity of regions or nations, for the ability for each to define themselves on their own terms would be a precondition for that diversity.

Secondly, an earthquake in a country like Haiti would not be a call for reconstruction. Haiti cannot be regarded as a Western nation, even if it is geographically in the West and was originally a European colony, for it is not populated or run by descendants of Europeans. At the same time it is right and proper, and often advantageous, that nations cooperate with one another. Under a difference paradigm, Haiti’s economic performance and political instability would not be seen as a failure, as it is under an equality paradigm, but rather the result of artificially imposing Westernisation on what is essentially a remote West African outpost. Any international assistance, therefore, would aim at de-escalating Westernisation and facilitating convergence with West Africa’s historical baselines. (I say historical, because West Africa is presently also still suffering from a European colonial syndrome.) Efforts would aim at environmental recovery and Haiti’s gradual, managed conversion to a sustainable non-industrial society. It would then no longer be measured or included in international corruption, transparency, or ‘development’ indices because these Western parametres would have become irrelevant. Should at any point Haitians decide to pursue a Western-style model, it would be their prerogative, but they would be left to do it—indeed succeed or fail—on their own terms, not by terms imposed by any Western nation.

Thirdly, while it would be possible for a Black African-descended student to apply for admission at any Western university, admission would be conditional on the availability of spaces and on meeting the same minimum standards of academic aptitude as those of the White European-descended students. The curriculum would be defined by Whites, for Whites, and it would be assumed that any non-White student attending the university was there to study that curriculum and to be measured against Western academic criteria. No effort would be made to increase the proportion of Blacks simply on the basis of statistical under-representation, as all else being equal this would be considered the result of difference, rather than a problem. Tests would be revised for accuracy of measuring the academic aptitude of Whites, not for improving the academic performance of Blacks or any other group’s. Conversely, Black-run universities would not be expected to meet criteria set up by Whites for other Whites, but rather to meet criteria set up by Blacks for other Blacks.

Finally, a non-Western nation’s success or failure would not necessarily be a function of their degree of Westernisation. A prehistoric society could well be considered successful if it thrived on its own terms; its prehistoric nature would not necessarily be seen as a deficiency, for it may well be that a recorded history, complex organisation, and techno-industrial development are not relevant to, or needed, in that society, in its particular environment. We would no longer use the euphemism ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ or even ‘poor’ to refer to nations that do not meet Western baselines of wealth and complexity. In fact, techno-industrial or economic development would not be an objective measure applicable to all nations, for difference theory would in many cases regard these as irrelevant. A desirable consequence would probably be the reduction of debt, for many regions of the world would eventually fall off the horizon of the money system—a matter with significant ramifications.

Concluding Remarks

This, and the theory of difference in general, is a big topic and I can only sketch it out here in very general—and for some perhaps vague or overly abstract—terms. It will need much more serious elaboration across a range of contexts and disciplines, so for now it will be up to the reader to tease out the talking points and formulate them in ways that resonate emotionally. The potential benefits, however, are huge, for if the morality of equality were to be dismantled completely, the egalitarian Left would be delegitimised in the public discourse as an untenable proposition, and the equality project would implode as evil and absurd.

Matthew Lyons is a leftist writer of  the "watchdog" variety and has in the past worked as a co-author with Chip Berlet. He currently operates a blog called "Three Way Fight" which previously featured a critique of AlternativeRight.Com from a hard left perspective. More recently, Lyons published an extensive critique of the ideas and work of yours truly on the socialist New Politics website. I have since produced a three part response. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Lyons has posted a very brief reply to my reply. Readers of AltRight may find the exchange interesting or at least amusing.

While watching the video of efforts by left-wing thugs to disrupt Richard Spencer’s recent talk on affirmative action at Providence College, I was reminded of a conversation I had sometime in the late 1980s with a former member of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society who had been involved with the movement to oppose the Vietnam War since its inception circa 1962. He recalled how in the early days of the antiwar movement, protest organizers were thrilled if they could get fifty people to show up for a rally. To publicly oppose the war at the time was physically dangerous, and such rallies were always at risk of being physically attacked by vigilantes shouting epithets like “communist” at the protestors. If organizers of the rallies could get police protection at all, they were happy to have it. Not only were public demonstrations in danger of such assaults, but so were quiet and peaceful meetings of those who opposed the war held in church basements or on university campuses. Of course, we all know that the anti-Vietnam War movement morphed into a mass movement just a few years later.

So it is indeed ironic that half a century later it is those who challenge the established dogmas purveyed by the Left who similarly experience the disruption of their efforts to peacefully speak and organize, who become the targets of epithets like “racist,” “sexist,” or “classist,” and who are threatened with physical violence. Incidents of this type are exceedingly common. It is now widely known that conservative speakers on university campuses, even entirely mainstream neocon-friendly “movement conservative” types, are routinely shouted down and threatened by leftists. As most readers are probably aware, right-wing organizations outside the mainstream, such as American Renaissance, have endured even worse attacks. At times, simply attending an anti-illegal immigration rally can be all that it takes for one to become the victim of a physical assault.

A number of observations could be made concerning the demeanor and behavior of the disrupters of Richard’s presentation at Providence. One is the obvious fact that they are so certain of their own moral superiority and the nobility of their crusade that they feel ordinary rules of civilized discourse or common courtesy no longer apply to them. Another is that far from their image of themselves as enlightened, free-thinking rebels, they come across more like brainwashed zombies similar to members of the LaRouche cult or the Moonies I used to encounter selling flowers on the streets of Washington, D.C. years ago. Their level of intellectual prowess seems to amount to little more than thinking that merely throwing labels at people and ideas they find disagreeable counts as a valid refutation of the opposing viewpoints.

Judging from the hysteria of their reaction, one would think that Richard was advocating genocide rather than arguing for the fairly standard right-of –center position that affirmative action is a bad idea, a position that even some minority scholars and analysts hold. It is also rather difficult to see how Richard was arguing for “white supremacy” given that the data he was presenting actually showed Asians to be the top performers with regards to SAT scores. As Richard pointed out in his talk, it was he who was the moderate and the protestors who were the extremist nutjobs.

For the diversitarians, affirmative action is not merely a policy preference, but a sacred article of faith, like the Holy Trinity or the Immaculate Conception. Affirmative action is a political tool the liberal establishment utilizes to maintain the loyalty of one of its core allies and constituent groups, the black elite and the middle class professional sectors of the black population. Affirmative action is an entitlement used as a reward for political loyalty from these sectors. It is doubtful that AA is of much benefit to genuinely impoverished or disadvantaged blacks, many of whom do not even finish high school, much less attend college or obtain professional-level occupations. And as Richard pointed out, if the goal of AA was to help the poor and disadvantaged in the first place, AA would be class-based rather than race-based.

Indeed, “black conservatives” like Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright have documented a myriad of ways in which policies implemented by the welfare state and civil rights bureaucracy that has meta-morphed in recent decades have severely undermined the organic economic, cultural, and family life of urban black communities, and contributed exponentially to the social pathologies often found in those communities. Likewise, the black libertarian economist Walter Williams has produced rather extensive evidence indicating the contribution of efforts at intrusive economic micromanagement to high unemployment rates among urban blacks.

Additionally, there is some evidence that black children who are educated in culturally specific Afro-centric schools perform much better than black children who receive conventional public schooling. The reasons as to why this is so are inconclusive but what is interesting is that the efforts of either conservative and libertarian black scholars like Sowell, Wright, or Williams, or of Afro-centrists with a nationalist or separatist outlook, are routinely attacked or dismissed by white liberals and the captains of the civil rights industry alike. Indeed, such people are often reviled by the Left. The obvious reason for this is the fanatical egalitarian-universalist ideology that has come to dominate the Left, an ideology that just happens to coincide with the political and economic self-interest of those who push it. It is an ideology that seeks a society where all resources are controlled and managed by the state and administered according to a spoils system the ostensible purpose of which is the imposition of bureaucratically-managed “equality.” The ultimate outcome of totalitarian humanism taken to its logical conclusion would be a totalitarian state organized as a kind of caste system whereby individual rights are assigned on the basis of group identity and group rights are assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed or on the victimological family tree.

Given these considerations, it might be apt to compare our present day lefto-fascist, stormtroopers-on-granola with the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were, of course, bands of youthful vigilantes who scurried about China during the 1960s smashing up cultural artifacts deemed “old” (e.g. conservative, traditional) and engaging in vigilante violence against persons deemed “reactionary” (mostly dissident intellectuals and those labeled “bourgeois” or originating from politically incorrect cultural or class backgrounds.) We see a similar though milder version of this today in the West today with attacks on expressions of traditional culture (like Christmas celebrations), historical artifacts considered to be reactionary (like Confederate Civil War monuments or streets named after Confederate generals), and vigilante actions against people given labels like “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” or “classist.”

I suspect that these “antifa” types, these Red Guards-on-tofu, would be every bit as murderous and destructive if the authorities would sanction it, as Chairman Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. We’ve seen hints at this already with the nonchalant attitude of the authorities towards threats of murder and arson against innocent people made by the Antifa in response to American Renaissance’s planned gathering in 2010. Plenty of other incidents have occurred where destructive or violent behavior by those claiming to act in the name of noble causes like “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism” have been overlooked or dealt with leniently by authorities convinced of the purity of their motives or restrained by political pressure.

The great irony presented by the Antifa is that despite all of their posturing as radicals and revolutionaries, they’re essentially doing the establishment’s bidding. The attitudes they subscribe to are not fundamentally different from those of the liberal elite overlords of the wider society. The Red Guards-on-tofu are simply a smellier, more ill-mannered, undisciplined, more in-a-hurry version of the liberal establishment itself. Wouldn’t it be an even greater irony if indeed the growing counterculture of the alternative right were to grow into a large influential movement as the leftist counterculture and antiwar movements did in the 1960s, with the Antifa and their ilk assuming the role of the “hardhats”?

In my prior article I made reference to the “…religious nature of the Secular Humanism…” that fuels the emotional fervor of the disparate social elements that one might broadly classify as the Left. This is actually a misuse of the term and I should begin this article by correcting myself and acknowledging that I am referring instead to the pastiche of incongruent ideological, moral, cultural, and political elements that should more rightly be defined as Egalitarianism. I posit—and I am not the first to do so— that Egalitarianism is indeed the regnant religion of this era. It is important to grasp that it is, indeed, a religion in order to best understand it and its followers; to comprehend the danger inherent in it; to possibly identify any weaknesses that may be exploited; and to predict its progression through the organic and finite life of such belief systems. I shall begin by establishing the case that Egalitarianism is, indeed, the state religion for the West.

What is Egalitarianism? There is no use in trying to define it as some cogent and definable set of beliefs. It is rather a tumor in the mind of the collective body of Western man, diffuse at the extremities and interconnected with an infinite number of outlying elements—some of which, ironically enough, are actually shared with various elements of Rightist thought. However, the center of the tumor is thick with notions of the overarching equality of men, the outright rejection of even the possibility of natural differences between human populations, convictions of the inherent evil of Whites and especially of white men, sentiments of the moral superiority of colored races and of women, support for the uses of state power to correct inequality wherever it may be found—as its presence can only be the result of the abuses of appropriately colored or sexually oriented groups by the aforementioned white, heterosexual men, conviction in the unquestionable good of “freedom” and “democracy," the importance of tolerance and cultural relativism, and lastly, the firm belief in Progress and the perfectibility of the temporal world. The logical incongruities obvious to even the casual reader between most of these notions—e.g. the idea that all races can at once be completely equal, while at the same time, Whites can be more evil than the others—do not hinder the true believer in the least. Indeed, the faith in these principles, regardless of their inability to coexist in a coherent philosophy, is one of the first indicators of the religious nature of this system of beliefs.

To a significant extent these beliefs—most particularly the notions of the unquestionable equality of man and of the original sin (of the White man in this case)—are ironically inherited from the Christian religion that is to no small degree despised by the modern, secular Egalitarian. It could in fairness be said that modern, secular Egalitarianism is in fact the transmogrification of Christianity into a religion that is now true to its theoretical principles to an extreme degree but that is now paradoxically devoid of its deity in the supernatural sense, the male God-figure having been killed off. What has replaced Him within the context of the religion in question is not entirely clear to me. But certainly one can identify Christ-figures such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and elements of religious taboo.

Regarding the former, note that the dear reverend is the only man for whom a National Holiday exists in the United States. And this at a time when Easter (the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) and Christmas (His birth) are themselves becoming completely devoid of acceptable, public religious meaning. With regard to Easter—ostensibly the most important Christian Holiday period—this process is essentially complete. With regard to Christmas, the process has reached such a level of maturity that in many cities of the United States, references to the Tannenbaum as a “Christmas tree” are considered gauche. Anyone who still doubts whether Christianity has been replaced as the State religion of the West need only ask himself one question: Is it more socially acceptable in today’s polite society to be a Satan worshipper or a racist? Marilyn Manson does an entertaining job of pretending to be the former. It would be interesting to see how many albums he would be allowed to sell if he pretended to be the latter.

The Daily Mail reported the other day that British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is studying the possibility of imposing compulsory quotas for women in company boardrooms—a demand previously made by Labour’s Harriet Harman, and previously derided by the Conservatives while in opposition. Apparently, Mr. Cameron is drawing inspiration from Scandinavian countries, where companies are required by law to ensure that at least 40% of board members are women.

No mention has been made of exactly how this will improve operational efficiency, the quality of products and customer service, or profitability.

I have no problem with women in boardrooms if they are there for the right reasons—meaning, they are the most skilled persons for the job not currently employed elsewhere. But I do have a problem with the government, which knows nothing about my company’s needs, telling me whom I must hire and whom I must promote, to what positions, and how soon.

Having long known management consultants whose clients have been either among the industry leaders nationwide or prestigious multinationals (indeed, one of the consultants, now retired, worked for one of the latter), one certainly cannot dismiss the famed glass ceiling for women in management as pure feminist agitprop: although this is less the case nowadays, there has been, and there still is, a tendency among some to take women less seriously in corporate environments, and this has inevitably impacted on promotions. (If executive women are sometimes unpleasant, masculine, and abrasive, it owes as much to the need to be heard and be taken seriously as it owes to feminism. This would be consistent with social identity theory, which predicts that in conflict situations competing groups will grow to resemble each other, even if ingroup members’ perceptions of the outgroup come increasingly to exaggerate ingroup-outgroup differences, real or perceived. In a male-dominated environment, women competing for resources, and equipped with an adversarial group identity by the feminists, will inevitably adopt male tactics and characteristics.)

Having said this, however, and with the caveat that mediocrity and incompetence abound all the way up and down the corporate ladder, irrespective of sex, there are also women who do not deserve to be taken seriously, who are hypersensitive, and / or who, found lacking in efficacy and / or industry, exploit equality legislation to obtain undeserved advantage. And, more importantly, there are also many women who do not dream of being ball-busting executives: indeed, many are content to have economic autonomy, while others would rather be at home looking after their families.

The underlying assumption with quotas is that (a) every person has the same potential to do a job as well as any other given the same opportunities; and (b) when a person who is not a member of a protected category is not successful with a job application it is always unjustified, unless another member of a protected category has been successful instead.

Mr. Cameron’s brand of feminism cannot accept that women may tend to order their priorities differently from men, and that his may have contributed proportionally to different outcomes vis-à-vis the corporate ladder. As usual, inequality of outcome is equated simplistically with inequality of opportunity.

Were it not because the imposition of quotas is a zero sum game, where every person who is favoured by the quota system is another person who is displaced in turn, I would be thinking that this is not about equalising outcomes, but about maximising tax revenues: after all, more women in senior executive positions means more women in the high income tax bracket.

What is certain is that any quota system will result in less qualified women displacing better qualified men. Definitely not in every case, as there are many very talented women out there and many incumbents who do not deserve to be where they are, but it will definitely happen. And where this happens, the quality of the decision making at boardroom level will be lower, which will impact negatively on the entire organisation, and even the consumer.

Any quota system will also impact negatively on women, as those attaining boardroom positions will fall immediately under suspicion of being there because of the quota system rather than because of professional merit. You can well imagine the rage and frustration of a genuinely deserving woman executive—one who probably had to strain to be taken seriously—in the presence of sceptical male colleagues who will now, in addition, have reason to see her as an affirmative action beneficiary, rather than a fully qualified partner. And, in addition to undermining this women’s authority at the boardroom level, quotas will also undermine their authority among those directly below them, for the better-qualified men who were passed over for promotion will certainly not take their new woman bosses seriously. Some men, demoralised, may engage in passive aggression and reduce their output, possibly going on strike by doing exactly no more and no less than what they are paid to do, interpreting instructions literally and keeping strictly to the 9 to 5 schedule, even, or especially, when there is a crisis. Some may take a page from Hermann Melville’s novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener, and practice outright passive resistance. Other men, infuriated, may work double-time actively to undermine their new woman bosses.

Aware of this, women executives, whether at boardroom level or on their way there, will certainly notice and act accordingly. Quotas are likely to exacerbate an antagonistic climate of competitive nastiness.

This will be far from helpful when organisations are already rife with all manner of intriguers, sycophants, back-stabbers, opportunists, hypocrisy, deception, bruised egos, pettiness, and personal hatreds; and where there are plenty of free-loaders, time-servers, gossips, and blunderers who rise purely because of their adeptness at blame transferring and gluteal osculation.

As usual, feminism, rather than reconciling the sexes in a spirit of teamwork, drives a wedge between them and sets them at war with each other. This is not how the alternative Right would approach matters of sex and gender: over here we view the sexes as complementary, each endowed with their own unique skills and ways of doing and seeing things, but ultimately working in concert. Feminism is all about us-versus-them; it is a force of destruction and revenge, not a constructive effort towards synergistic harmony between the sexes.

And there is also the matter of free association. Supposedly, we enjoy it in our democratic society. In reality, we are often denied it: millions of people we do not want around us are imported or allowed in, with government collusion or sanction, and settled in our communities, making them, the high streets, and the transport system, far more unpleasant than it needs to be. And now, as employers, should Mr. Cameron go ahead with Labour’s idea, and should less-qualified women be promoted over better-qualified men to meet minimum government quotas, we will have to suffer annoying, odious, incompetent partners and directors on the boards of our companies, holding positions of immense responsibility, being paid large sums of money, and causing more headaches than it is worth, rather than the persons we would have chosen on the basis of merit, talent, and personality.

And what next? Previous experience suggests this is to be thin end of a wedge, which will open the way for further, and even more unpleasant, impositions; more quotas, to ensure the full spectrum of colour, creed, gender, age, IQ, disability, HIV status, and sexual orientation is uniformly represented in every area of private and professional life, irrespective of relevance or merit, without the option to choose whom we would rather work or associate with. So much for meritocracy and free association.

Perhaps the response will be greater automation, and the dispensing with of humans whenever possible, for fear of whom one may be forced to work alongside with. Perhaps the response will be emigration: many companies, fed up with the previous Labour government’s predatory tax code, relocated their businesses out of the United Kingdom, in favour of more fiscally amenable pastures. Perhaps the response will be outward compliance, followed by subterfuges and workarounds—subtle psychological warfare to force resignation of affirmative action beneficiaries in hopes that another, better candidate will fill their positions. Or perhaps the response will be a call for more women in coalmines, construction, and oil drills.

Personally, I would prefer a system and a culture based on merit and teamwork, where men and women contribute with their own unique perspectives and approaches to action in the effort solve the different problems in life. Whatever the wrongs of the past, quotas is not the solution.

Well before Labour’s seizure of power in 1997, I knew Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would be trouble. Even my most pessimistic forecasts were eventually exceeded by the dynamic duo. And now, in the six months following 13 years of heavy-handed Labour government, with the nation groaning under the iron heel of that miserable party, it is clear that under David Cameron’s coalition we are in for yet more of the same.

The forces behind the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), namely homosexual activists, the media elite, Obama, leading Democrats, and some Republicans, have portrayed their efforts as a matter of “fairness,” “equality,” and “inclusion.”

Overturning the Clinton-era law isn’t about allowing individual gay servicemen to serve honorably as airman, sailors, soldiers, or Marines. What the repeal of DADT really comes down to is power and influence—the never-ending recognition and affirmation of homosexuality as a publicly sanctioned alternative “lifestyle”—and the political establishment rewarding an important constituency of liberal activists.

It is the latest attempt to normalize behavior that society has historically considered destructive and debauched. It is about extending group rights and privileges, societal recognition, and acceptance to a previously shunned subculture.

Author and Philosopher Michael Levin has identified the crux of what lies behind activist agenda:

It is commonly asserted that legislation granting homosexuals the privilege or right to be firemen endorses not homosexuality, but an expanded conception of human liberation. ... A society that grants privileges to homosexuals while recognizing that, in the light of generally known history, this act can be interpreted as a positive re-evaluation of homosexuality, is signaling that it now thinks homosexuality is all right. ... Many commentators in the popular press have observed that homosexuals, unlike members of racial minorities, can always “stay in the closet” when applying for jobs. What homosexual rights activists really want, therefore, is not access to jobs but legitimation of their homosexuality.

Supporters of the repeal of DADT frequently argue that purging the armed forces of homosexuals hurts the operational effectiveness of the military since many homosexual servicemen and women are highly skilled professionals. Hence, not allowing homosexuals to openly serve as homosexuals drains the military of much-needed talent. But it’s hard to imagine that a serviceman can’t adequately perform his job without announcing to everyone his sexual orientation.

The DADT repeal ultimately marks an attempt by activists to keep homosexuality before the public until this subculture is fully integrated into all spheres of American society. Today the military, tomorrow marriage.

In voting to repeal DADT, Sen. Richard M. Burr (R-NC) stated that repeal was “generationally right” and argued that Americans “don’t think exclusion is the right thing for the United States to do.” However, exclusion—maintaining high standards for selecting qualified applicants—is what has historically made the U.S. armed forces an effective and efficient fighting force. Stripping away the military’s exclusionary character, lowering standards for politically correct social experimentation, will eventually erode its combat effectiveness.

Every year, thousands of applicants are rejected from serving in the military because these prospects do not pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a multi-aptitude test. Scores in four critical areas (arithmetic reasoning, word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, and mathematics knowledge) comprise an applicant’s Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score. Passing the baseline AFQT score determines whether or not applicants are qualified to enlist in the U.S. military. (A recent report by the Education Trust found that 23 percent of high school graduates fail to meet the minimum threshold on the enlistment test to join any branch of the U.S. military.)

The ASVAB is discriminatory in the sense that it weeds out unqualified applicants and the results often have “disparate impact,” in other words the disqualified applicant pool has a greater impact among ethnic and racial minorities.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that the use of an IQ test for employment selection is discriminatory under Title VII of Civil Rights Act because of the test’s “disparate impact” on racial minorities. The U.S. military has, by law, been exempt from discrimination lawsuits under the Civil Rights Act.

Granted, the military has recently both dumbed-down admissions as well as begun to eclipse the private sector in terms of “Diversity” hiring, but the point is that the cohesiveness and operational effectiveness of the U.S. military and the military’s primary mission of national defense depend upon preserving this exclusionary factor in recruit selection. The United States Armed Forces should remain isolated from egalitarian coercion—external pressure to conform and shape our military to contemporary fads and fashions.

Lifting DADT is indicative of what author John Kekes describes as the “Rhetoric of Toleration” in his book, The Illusions of Egalitarianism:

The truth is that egalitarian liberals advocate toleration of discrimination in favor of minorities and women (but not against them); of obscenity that offends religious believers and patriots (but not blacks and Jews); of unions’ spending large sums in support of political causes (but not corporations’ doing the same); of pot smoking (but not cigarette smoking); of abortion (but not capital punishment); of the public lies of Clinton (but not of Nixon); of hate speech against fundamentalists (but not homosexuals); of sex education in elementary schools (but not prayer); of jobs open only to union members (but not private clubs open only to males); of lies about American imperialism (but not the Holocaust); of sacrilegious language (but not of language that uses he to refer to all human beings); of scientific research into just about anything (except racial differences in intelligence); and so on and on.... [E]galitarian liberals are unique in favoring limits on what they dislike while claiming to champion toleration.

Repealing DADT is simply the removal of one more exclusionary barrier that egalitarians find contemptible. In the not too distant future, given the repeal of DADT, one can easily foresee “Gay Enlisted Clubs” and “Gay Officer Clubs” or the “Gay Leatherneck Association” or the Marine Corps branch of the Mattachine Society as the extension of this privileged group reaches new zeniths within the ranks of the U.S. military.

Worse, would not a logical extension of “non-discrimination” be granting the disabled—including the blind and lame—full “rights” as soldiers? Don’t laugh, moves in this direction have already been made.

Is it really worth jeopardizing the cohesiveness and combat effectiveness of an overwhelmingly macho institution such as the USMC for the sake of accommodating the agenda of the Stonewall Brigade?

More Deficits

In a democracy, politicians cannot help promising more than is deliverable. Even if the system is rigged to perpetuate its founding ideological paradigm; even if on every election voters are asked to choose between nearly identical options—as a minimum any given politician seeking to keep his job or improve his personal and professional prospects needs to ensure that he is regarded by voters as the least bad of available options. The similarity within, and between, the parties and the individual politicians creates a highly competitive environment that provides every motivation for politicians to overcommit, stretching the truth, if not outright lying, before an election, and worrying about how to obfuscate broken promises once (back) in office.

Any attempts to reduce budget deficits will be driven by the sudden fear of economic consequences likely to lead to social unrest; after all, social unrest could develop into a revolution where they end up in exile, in prison, or worse. Because in a capitalist system the economy becomes all important, growth being an ends in itself; because disciplined restraint and aim-directed privation are anathema to a consumer culture; because elections run in four or five year cycles—avoiding pain and creating the illusion of a recovery within the electoral horizon takes priority over creating an economy that is stable in the long term; thus for 2011 the premium will remain on reflating bubbles, on quick fixes, using every imaginable subterfuge to levitate economic indicators for as long as the ruling party remains in power. The obvious and most election friendly method to achieve this is running deficits—or, expressed more honestly, money-printing, which enables incumbent politicians to spend immediately without raising taxes or cutting social programmes, while also deferring the consequences (taxes, inflation) until after the next election.

Although there has been some alarm at the high deficit levels, and although there is anger at the bank bailouts, the economic pain currently being experienced by the voter is still being attributed to the recession, a recurring economic phenomenon with varying and nebulous causes. Therefore, I suspect ruling politicians will suffer further loss of prestige (mainly through their failure to get the economy going fast enough), but they will be able to manage the decline for another year. 

I read with interest Denis Mangan's recent article, calling for an end to Western foreign aid to Africa.

I deployed the same arguments, and many more, in the Anti-Geldof Compilation CD I organised five years ago (and which comes with a 28-page booklet, containing a 7,000-word refutation of the Live8 / anti-poverty campaign).

But in 2010 my position is even more radical, in that I reject not just aid, but the idea of 'development' altogether.

Development is a byproduct of the Western liberal ideology, which is founded on doctrines of equality and progress, the former of which implies a totalitarian mindset while the latter implies a linear conception of history. I ask, why do sub-Saharan Africans need to be 'developed'? The egalitarian view is that given equal opportunities, even the Kalahari bushmen will eventually 'develop' themselves into a European-style, techno-industrial civilisation, with only minor anatomical differences. My view and that of others (see Guillaume Faye) is that it is absurd to think that all the peoples of the Earth can and need to be developed. Firstly, our type of civilisation presupposes certain inborn capabilities, temperament, and proclivities that are not present in all humans and cannot be implanted through education. Secondly, and as Faye points out, were the whole Earth to be developed into a global European- or American-style techno-industrial civilisation, the planet would likely not be able to withstand it: the demands on the environment would be too great and have catastrophic results.

If the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa never developed techno-industrial civilisations, it is because they never had any need for it. What is more, even some of the fundamental features of civilisation are baffling to the peoples of Africa even today, such as what they see as an obsession for counting and measuring everything: hence why so many Africans have no idea of how old they are and why a traveller will find many parts without street names of numbered houses (natives use landmarks to find their way around).

For these and other reasons, some of which you can find in the researches of Profs. Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, and others that you can find in Lothrop Stoddard's Revolt Against Civilization (1922) and Hesketh Prichard's Where Black Rules White (1900), Africa needs to be allowed to deindustrialise and to regress to pre-colonnial conditions. The nation states created there by the European powers must be allowed to disintegrate, and Africa as a whole must be allowed to re-organise along traditional, tribal lines. While North Africa will certainly remain more advanced, sub-Saharan Africa needs to be declared a natural and anthropological reserve.

Most importantly, the West must reconcile itself to the idea of a multi-tiered world, with parts of it organised along traditional or neo-Mediaeval lines, reflecting the capabilities, the temperament, and the proclivities of the peoples who inhabit those regions. This would have the further advantage of being more sustainable environmentally, as traditional and neo-Mediaeval societies do not place so many demands on the Earth.

Of course, this is a long way from happening yet. And if it happens, it will not happen because our political leadership finally reflected on their follies and decided to stop being so foolish, so selfish, and so delusional. If it happens, it will be the consequence of a systemic collapse and a fundamental realignment of values in the West.  

During my recent trip to Nashville, I caught up with my friend James Edwards of The Political Cesspool radio show. 

Paul Gottfried and I were on The Political Cesspool for the third hour on Saturday night (MP3 here). We discussed the upcoming HL Mencken Club meeting as well as the issues of Jews in the media and the trajectory of the Left in 20th and 21st centuries, in particular the idea of "equality" that died with the Soviet Union and the one that has triumphed in the United States.