Enemies of democracy and reason such as fundamentalist religion and leftist ideology interrupted a good historical trend which unleashed a disaster for the world the last century with the growth of the fascist, theist, militarist and communists states. Before democracy, power in The Ancien Régime relied on three segments of society: the monarchy, clergy and aristocracy, divided into three sections: the First Estate, (clergy), Second Estate, (nobility) and Third Estate, (the rest of us poor suckers). The Ancien Régime with the help of old money, has reasserted and transformed itself into modern times. Its First Estate is now the Military Industrial Complex, the Second Estate is the modern autocratic paper monetary oligarch (including the press and political machines) and the Third Estate is still the rest of us suckers. The New Ancien Régime like the old has its privileges: In the First Estate: the right to earn a living at war; war for the sake of war. In the Second Estate: the right of politicians to support the growth of the state and the right of intelligentsia to support Keynesian/socialist monetary policies no matter how thoroughly both these ideas have been refuted, (and no matter how dangerous they are to democracy and the future of the world). In the Third Estate, we have the right to consume no matter how little we’ve produced–we have a right to sit on the sidelines and pray. It is a good life for pets; God is on our side.
In The Future of Freedom, F Zakaria maintains that countries which simply hold elections without broad-based modernization, including economic liberalization and the rule of law, end up becoming illiberal – or welfare – democracies. Institutions of law, governance and liberty must painstakingly precede democracy. If this is true, then we must wait centuries before the world is democratic. It will be too late!
In the world of ideas – the ethereal domain – militarism, pro-statist-philosophy and socialism have lost all the intellectual battles they’ve fought, yet today, they are the true power brokers of the First and Second Estate. How have they won for losing? It’s a little like a riddle. In Canada the First Peoples Nation has literally been put on the welfare roles since the beginning of confederation. Shame provoked it. Capital “L” Liberalism maintained a bankrupt idea through the decades. It hasn’t served the First Naions' peoples well; some would conclude it has oppressed them. They represent four percent of the population and receive annual subsidies in the billions of dollars, pay no sales tax and receive many economic incentives, yet their homicide rate is higher by a factor of five, they make up 20 percent of the country's prison population, 35 percent of their numbers on reserves are on welfare and they have three times the suicide rate of non-aboriginal youth. They’ve been allowed to take a pass on the hard task of wealth creation. To get a work ethic, economic reality must force you to get out each day to work. A work ethic is a tough thing. Nobody will do it unless they have to do it, but to do it, is the only way to economic independence and happiness – this then is human nature – if you knew a gift of a million dollars would destroy you, you’d probably take the money anyway.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world.
First you take the people’s money quietly
Then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. (Thomas Sowell)
We need to reduce the influence of the New Ancien Régime before democracy is directly threatened. The Military Industrial Complex, which historic circumstance has foisted on the world, (i.e., WWII and The Cold War), can be transformed by a revolution of peaceful democratic nations uniting under one banner of producer economies to lower military power per se. When America’s business system collapses due to its unsustainable debt load this well may be a time for radical economic change: a switch to Classical Liberal philosophy for the world. The last great depression triggered by the “Fed” was blamed on Wall Street. The statists of both the Left and Right are trying to do the same thing again; to them, everything is about the state.
Think on my side. If the US government and it’s citizens owe -$100 trillion, (see, Debt), – they are indebted much more than this, – and are printing up $800 billion for banks and $25 billion for cars, why not print $100 trillion and become totally solvent? If only you could write a check to yourself to pay your bills. You know in your heart and mind that what the governments around the world are doing is treating currency like magic. You know they don’t know what they are doing. None of it makes sense. The cost of the growth of this much state is your liberty. The autocratic monetary oligarch which America has crafted over the last 90 years in paper money can be widely restricted with a monetary gold standard, the banning of lobbyists at all levels of government, the prohibition of any state licensure to any and all groups, the protection of the press from global corporatism, public financing and time modifying of elections. It is not all about the state. In the new regimen, business and government should be separated as much as possible. Institutions like the Federal Reserve Board should be replaced by direct government arbitrating the market, guided by conservative international financial rules, i.e, the banks themselves as unregulated institutions.
From Democracy in America, Tocqueville, (envisioning what soft despotism would look like in a democracy): I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone . . . Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood . . . Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
Just in case you thought this is an exaggeration, from, A Nation of Takers:
That the belief in socialism, (top-down economics ordered by politicians) is true, is very easily refuted from so many respected sources that one sighs in despair at socialists' economic ignorance over the decades; their Confirmation Bias must be extreme to say the least, and this puts them, NOT in the ideology camp, but in the religious camp. They're fundamentalists, believing in a thing all evidence to the contrary. How is it Leftist intellectuals don't like the philosophers of reason; why is it that they find them tedious? It is because reason isn't the blood and drama of transformation (Rousseau), or dreams as universal synchronicity (Jung), ideals as transcendentalism (Kant), political authority as Absolute Spirit (Hegel), psychoanalytic sexuality as unconscious agency (Freud), intuition and mystical revelation as truth (Kierkegaard), will to power as morality (Nietzsche), rape and war as greatness, (Heidegger), art and music as zenith experiences for humans (Schopenhauer), drunkenness and risk-taking as the Storm and Stress of reality (Herder), class tension and revolt 24/7 (Marx), and all & any such like matters. Reason may appear lacklustre and plodding to all the intellectuals who produce bad philosophy; however, it is in fact extraordinary: it gives you the red pill, a chance to see the really real: it leads to the skinny, hard-working, fasting, exercising, reading science, in fact reading everything you need, challenging our biases, methodically going forward with both work and play, indeed, working for a living and having joy for life itself, and ambition, learning, and motivation, living an inspired life by example in action not the pale words of the state-subsidized academics. It is independent living, independent judgment and real friendship and love you can depend on, and even bank on; fathers you can rely on, mothers who never betray, friends who are steadfast and ready to help, and so forth: the difficult stuff. The philosophers of reason like Szasz, Sowell, Mises, Santayana, Blanshard, Popper and Hayek are a bother to emotional philosophers like Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Kant and Hegel (and many, perhaps even most, others), who have helped bring about the new, (yet exceedingly ancient and autocratic), revolution to achieve the verboten: heaven on this side of the grave. And of course, actually helping create its opposite in many ways, as with the totalitarian states of the last century, and all the statists' nonsense of this one. One of the most annoying things in this whole debate is that Leftist critics of capitalism, (or most of them), will include in their definition of it, Atlantic slavery, Native Indian genocide, industrial accidents, colonial exploitation (of empire and state), crimes of Western imperialism, and so forth. So, they want you to see Marxism is its best light (and communist murder in the lowest possible figures), but to examine capitalism in the worst possible manner. If you are a free-market libertarian like me, and see the state and its crimes in its worst way, than your view is “an insult to the concept of literacy.” It is so absurd.
Lastly, though, females of the current regime who embrace single motherhood and the welfare state which supports it, the psychological devastation over the years, to men without wives, children and work, who have been entitled to trade off: fat over skinny, play over work, dependency over independence, stupidity over intelligence, lust over love, entitlement over earning, drunkenness over sobriety, social meandering over purposeful fatherhood, etcetera, is soul-crushing, and radical politicized feminism, (at least in part), is responsible for this trade-off. Whether or not women need men is unclear, what is certain, is that men need women in their lives or most will become a pale shadow of their best selves. Fatherless homes are bad for women, really awful for men, horrible for daughters and a complete disaster for boys as reading Manufacturing Crime or others works on incarceration will easily show. By analogy, then, for LGBTQ+ who want to raise children, get and stay married if you can find true love, do your best to live a stable, moral life, filled with shining bright lines of behavior, (the rules), to find significance and possibly happiness for you and your kids. These are general guidelines which can be found in many of my articles and the book recommendations inside of them. However, I digress, and what I really need to ask now, then, is a most reluctant enquiry: has current (radical) gender-feminism injured men? Yes, indisputably in some sense. There is no going back to the patriarchy, right-wingers and nationalists must surely see this; nevertheless, men without an essential role in fatherhood may drift into the indifference of cultural malaise and come to feel that they are a social dispensability. Biologically, women are hard-wired for parenthood, men less so. Having said this then, nothing has hurt men more than the Industrial Military Complex (i.e., wars which kill boys and men), the incredible foolish War on Drugs, the extraordinary bloating of the welfare state, the unemployment (and under-education) of the most vulnerable of boys and men (who usually come from fatherless homes), and lastly, the incarceration of millions of these boys and men into the fastest growing commerce in the West, prisons.
BTW: Men have more dangerous jobs and take more risks which result in the startling figure that over 90 percent of work place fatalities are men and over 95 percent of war deaths are men. Homicide rates are just as skewed: over 80 percent of the victims are men, and over 95 percent of the perpetrators are men. Males are three times more likely to commit suicide, more liable to die younger of heart disease, more prone to avoid doctors, and men are twice as likely to have serious substance abuse issues and gambling problems. They makeup over 70 percent of ADHD cases, 60 percent of conduct disorders and are four times more likely than females to develop autism. Males account for over 70 percent of passenger vehicle driver deaths, over 45 percent of passenger vehicle passenger deaths, over 95 percent of large truck driver deaths, over 65 percent of large truck passenger deaths, 70 percent of pedestrian deaths, 85 percent of bicyclist deaths and over 90 percent of motorcyclist deaths. To conclude: according to the UN, the global life expectancy as of 2023 was 70.8 years for males and 76.0 for females and that these global stats above are some of the main reasons: that is well over five years extra living for the 51 percent privileged majority whose radical representatives (academian feminists), claim they are as an identifiable class, oppressed and aggrieved.
