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Letters, Letters...

When columnists run out of things to say, they invariably take letters from their audience. I've still got ideas plentifully, but figured for a mid-week break, I'd wax democratic and see what "the people" have been saying about the writings on this site. I'll say this: they're no worse off than the "professional" critics, and often a good deal more honest.

One great problem of philosophy is how to create an abstraction which also works when applied to itself. Our modern society operates on the principle of universal justice, but rapidly runs into paradox when it tries to assert this justice as a solution for those who don't agree with it; if we have "freedom," don't we have the "freedom" to disagree with "freedom"? We do not - modern society is a do it our way, or get bombed and starved, proposition.

Look at your letter above. You scorn bin Laden's philosophy, assume that al-Qaeda have no reason behind their beliefs (they're "psychopaths" who "murder people and then blame their religion"), and claim that American/English dead are blameless while, by implication, the civilians starved, bombed, shot and tortured in the Iraq war and previous thirty years of Anglo-Israeli aggression were not. There's a contradiction there: if every life is sacred, and we all deserve justice and freedom, these people are getting neither under your system.

My view is nihilism; in nihilism, one removes all pretenses outside of physical reality. In physical reality, no two people or populations are identical in outlook or abilities or needs, thus one golden standard of justice and "freedom" makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, in my view, it's little more than an excuse for bigger countries to impose their order on smaller countries, which is pathetic because it's an excuse. If you need their oil, take it, but don't waste our time with excuses.

In fact, it's quite interesting how your language mirrors that of G.W. Bush. We are "innocent people" who have been "murdered"; They are "stupid extremists" who should "go to hell" for being "psychopaths." In other words, We are innocent, they are aggressors. But what about history before that event, in which we've invaded their countries and bombed their citizens, not to mention starved them for oil embargoes? What about all of our movies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s which portrayed every terrorist as a Muslim, and their countries as uncultured slums? You'd think we would be more considerate, seeing how the Crusades weren't that long ago either.

George W. Bush said something about how "terrorists hate our freedom." You basically say the same thing. Sorry, I've been around too long to put that much faith in a single word, "freedom," especially since that's been the excuse in every American war since WWI - the Nazis "hated" democracy, the Vietnamese were going to be "liberated," the Koreans could be given freedom, we were going to "free" Grenada from Cuban Communist oppressors, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," etc. etc. It's an excuse and nothing but.

What's amusing is that not only G.W. Bush, but the left as well, spout this rhetoric. Where the right focuses on political and economic stability of countries, the left is obsessed with the "freedom" of individuals, and so embarks on any number of civil rights causes, peace marches, and the like. But the rhetoric at its core is exactly the same as what the right says, and what you say.

Something stinks to high heaven about this. It reeks of distraction, and as our problems as a species worsen, I have less tolerance for these excuses. I know them for what they are: the promise of some absolute like Heaven that is so big and sounds so wonderful we're expected to do everything for it. Like a prize on a gameshow, or shore leave to sailors. That's the carrot that leads us to oblivion, and the stick is fear of what you're doing: fear that if we grow some balls and strike back, we'll be accused as the Aggressor, thus assumed to be automatically wrong, and will then have to defend ourselves against the misguided multitudes.

In this context, al-Qaeda is working for the benefit of the West, by showing us the delusional nature of what we assume and accept is political truth. "Freedom" is illusion. Focus on reality instead.

Hi Paul. Thanks for writing a polite letter. I think you summarize the concept of why racial mixing is insane quite well; it's succinct and grasps the point. I see racial mixing as destructive in the same way that human environmental policy is, in that we replace natural diversity with a same, single-form-factor reality, whether that is concrete streets or a generic race of humans.

For people who are already mixed, I suggest forming societies of similar mixes, and breeding those to a higher level. I'll use the example of the US and Britain: these societies are composed of mixed tribal elements. For those who are 3/4 pure something or another, I suggest they rejoin that relatively pure tribe - German-Americans, Latvian-Americans, Filipino-Americans, etc. For those who are truly of mixed tribes there should be a tribe united by race alone, which should strive hard to develop a culture to match its race. One will have to be patient in such a situation; it will need to evolve both race and culture over a thousand generations. At the end of that, however, it will be a distinctive and healthy tribe.

For those who are of mixed race, I suggest finding areas where racial mixing is traditional. Some parts of the middle east and South America come to mind; there people can create a new racial designation and breed accordingly. It's important to remember that there are only three basic racial groups (Asiatic, Euripid, Negroid) and that some tribes such as American Indians are overwhelmingly one of these. You'll note I didn't say "Native Americans," because they're not Native and it's in scientific doubt as to whether they were here first. So no, I don't support repatriation of US whites to Europe.

I don't have a problem with people of mixed white tribes, although I think their task is the hardest, as they do not have a common racial-cultural bond to unify them, only a racial one. Thus I suggest to English, Americans, Canadians and Australians: get a real culture. Adopt some traditions, develop your language, and take on a national cuisine apart from the economically-motivated choices such as burgers, fish 'n' chips, etc. French Canadians have a cultural-racial bond; mixed-tribe Americans/Canadians/Britons/Australians do not. Even if these groups arbitrarily adopt culture, for example from the Germans, they will "personalize" it to their own ethnic mix - a hybrid of Nordic-Germanics, Mediterraneans, Slavs and Semites - over time, and if they breed well, will eventually remove the grossest elements among them.

Gilgamesh is something I haven't studied much, but it may well be based upon Indo-European epics, as several with this theme were written before it in India. It could also be that another society touched upon the same values. It is irrelevant to me, as I'm only concerned with my own race/tribe, that of the Indo-Europeans, and their values. For this reason, I think your "value systems may be unrelated to ethnic character" is jumping to conclusions, especially as here at least you've based it on a single example.

Nihilism, as I've always said, is a gateway philosophy. It's a way of determining what is real and important, and beyond that, one must interpret reality itself; "pure" nihilism reduces itself, as to believe in nothing is to begin not believing in believing in nothing, and so forth. For this reason, the person who has been a nihilist for more than a half-hour starts believing in things, but putting them in the context of nihilistic values, which is a stripping aside of judgments and preconditioned anthrocentric thinking, and seeing nature and the cosmos as a continuum. In this sort of view, preserving nature and preserving our racial heritages are necessary corollaries to recognizing their existence.

I offer Terror. Even worse, I offer that Terror, Warfare, Death, Suffering, Evisceration and Sodomy are inevitable parts of life. Even more, they're necessary; conflict shapes the world. My idea is that suffering should mean something, and some ideal should be achieved by it. Unnecessary suffering is pointless and annoying.

However, I don't believe we have "liberty" in the West. We have the freedom to get some stupid job, commute to work and spend most of our money on health insurance, property insurance, life insurance, etc. to pay for the constant instability of modern society and the pollution that is steadily giving us all cancers. I don't believe we have liberty of thought, as clearly some things are so taboo you'll lose your job and your house and be forced to live in the tumor of the open streets. I also don't believe our society offers the "liberty" of thinking about any social order but its own. So, in short, "liberty" is a word, and it can mean something or mean nothing, or be simply ambiguous, which benefits the person using the word but not the person reacting to it.

We live in a "free and democratic" society - for a critique of "freedom," see above. To all you defenders of democracy, I'd like one answer: all of us acknowledge that there are hordes of stupid people out there. Why do you want to give them political power? Shouldn't we concentrate power in the hands of the most able? I'm not sure I care about having a "democratic" society, either - I'd rather have a society of shared culture and values, so we don't have to create a vast governmental bureaucracy to force some kind of abstract values upon us all.

It's possible that we've all been misled regarding this "freedom" and "liberty" and "democracy" thing. Under these ideals, have we had fewer wars - no, we've had more destructive wars, although they may be less frequent. Have we had a better life? We have better technology, including medicine, but it still screws up all the time and brings us side effects like pollution and cancer. Are people smarter and braver now? Consensus says no. Is life more meaningful? Etc.

All they have to do in order to fool us is to get us asking the wrong questions. While we're all kvetching around about liberty, freedom, and other promises of a used-camel salesperson, our inner life and our culture life - what holds our society together - is disintegrating. Therefore, there's always an enemy, and always a war on to eliminate the enemies of "freedom." Wouldn't you feel silly if you got manipulated by this rhetoric?

You've nailed the basic difference: existentialism, truth is personal; nihilism, there is no truth, and reality is impersonal, but meaning is personal. Nihilism could be classed in the vernacular as a more extreme and less individualistic form of existentialism. To my mind, the defining statement of existentialism, "existence before essence," is somewhat reversed by nihilism, which understands that most of our essence is defined before we come to consciousness, e.g. by our genetic past and inherent abilities. If I had to summarize nihilism, it would be a belief that there is nothing besides reality, and reality is self-explanatory, if we have brains/spirit/ears to hear.

Ultimately, much of the reason the two seem similar is historical context: coming on the heels of philosophies with a Jewish origin, such as individualism and humanism, both seem troubling because they reject the idea of an absolute truth which determines all people. In individualists systems, that "truth" is the idea of moral logic designed to keep people from stopping each other from pursuing whatever crackhead vision that grabs their fancy; this is clearly the ethics of a used-camel-selling group of sandal-wearing nomads, and is designed to justify and facilitate dishonest commerce more than build a great society (history agrees). Christianity was the vehicle of introducing this Jewish thought into the West, but Communism, liberalism and Bush-style conservatism are all carriers of the same disease. Existentialism reversed this pursuit of absolute truth into a pursuit of individual truth, but it was still a passive belief that truth is found and not made. In nihilism, reality is truth, and what matters is the shaping hand of order upon it.

Dear Sir - I've been around long enough to know that there's a big difference between what a person, business or religion says is their agenda and the actual psychology of their agenda. One has to delve into the latter to figure out what's really going on, because anyone can say their religion is about peace, love and harmony. I'm not as unfamiliar with Buddhist doctrine as you'd like to think, and I believe my point stands: world negation in itself increases egoism, not reduces it. Of course, as seen in Evola's The Doctrine of Awakening, the sickness in Buddhism is recent.

You may find it easier to interpret this way: Buddhism, Christianity and other religions of negation, in their populist form, make the Self into the World. They do this by denying the value of the world in favor of "pure" and objective abstractions, possibly good/evil in the Christian/Jewish line or a generalized, pacifist humanism in the Buddhist line. The most ancient of religions, Vedanta, saw things differently: one should like a nihilist focus on reality and do what must be done to bring it to its most exhalted, e.g. most highly evolved, state.

The point of my article was that these flaws in modern Buddhism and Christianity point toward the changes which must be made in any philosophy in order to make it ready for the future, after millennia of delusion based in the frailties of the Self-as-external-image. I encounter plenty of people, like yourself, who seem to believe that out-of-the-box Buddhism is philosophically different from any of the other ills of this time. It's not. It's just more disciplined in its pursuit of certain mental powers, but as unfortunately it is founded upon illusion, it devotes even those to often well-intentioned pursuits, which have negative long-term consequences.

Hi Matt. These are good questions, but relatively straightforward ones when we establish the context of what we're doing.

First, the main reason to want culture is that culture is shared values and a familial sense of obligation and love for others; it holds together societies far better than bureaucratic government can, as history witnesses. We cannot achieve what is needed with bureaucratic solutions alone. For this reason, in areas which are working toward a stable population even if of mixed ethnic origins, I recommend letting local custom decide the population makeup. Exclude the newcomers and obvious foreign elements, and breed well, and the population will have a distinct look within a few hundred years, much as the English once did.

Nietzsche rattled on at one point about "there is no pure blood." What he was defending against, in his typical somewhat spastic way, was the potential ideology of pureness of race being the sole qualifier for membership in a society. I believe the racial question is inseparable from the eugenics question, and we should get the racial issue generally correct and then handle the rest of the breeding question through culture and societies designed to let the best rise. Social Darwinism, or the idea that the best will automatically become the wealthiest, is mostly lies; the best tend to statistically be wealthier, but many individuals and types of personae slip through the cracks as they are too confident or focused on other issues to spend the time required to accrue wealth.

I don't believe the values of the French can be summarized in a paragraph, or shared by outsiders. It may look to you like you share those values, but this psychology is akin to that of a tourist deciding Aruba is the bestest place on earth, forever and ever, amen. Culture is fairly tolerant of variation, but if you introduce something radically different, you destroy it, and that's why you exclude an ethnic Jew or black person even if they "seem to" share the traits and values which are used to describe that culture in a paragraph.

Into Everlasting Fire - what a classic song. See, I have something in common with everyone, if you look hard enough. Lots of people want me to trust them in that they wouldn't lie to me. Many want to sell me cars, ports in Paraguay, or bridges in Arizona. But the fact remains: words are words, and the world is the world. Even if I were a fanatical Christian, I would still act as I do, because I believe the finest form of spiritual practice is to celebrate reality by working within it according to nature's rules. After all, if your omnipotent God created this world, cleary nature is his mechanism, and by acting naturally, I do his will.

Hello Jason. I think you raise some good points, and one that is forgotten by nearly all: the disease of society is pervasive and it causes all of us to exist in a duality between reality and public image. My main problem with white nationalists, greens, democrats, republicans, etc. alike is that almost none are willing to tackle the issue as a whole, e.g. the problem that got us in this position in which we now stand: our society has degenerated, in part because it uses the opinions of the crowd to pull down any independent and intelligent opinions until it dumbs them down to a democratic, bureaucratic, utilitarian standard.

Your experience is not wholly unique for one born with a brain into this time and this "culture." You summarize it well as a distinction between doing what is socially acceptable, and what is a personal truth, but even more than personal, this truth is enduring - it's a perception of reality itself. The forces of socialization like "new" things and so invented the myth of progress; they like not being criticized, so they invented absolute "freedoms"; they like dysfunction, so they invented lots of fancy ways (psychology, politics) to justify them. They don't like reality, and this places the person who can see reality in a difficult spot.

My advice at this point in time is to learn to like loneliness, and yet to keep your normal social life. Do what you want with your friends, but remember that you're an actor, like Ronald Reagan or Katie Holmes. Your job is to get what you want (fun, socialization) out of an imperfect situation without revealing what you feel. If your friends are smart, I will bet money they're doing the same thing. Self-preservation, in its rawest and most effective form. While you're being social, keep the big issues away, but when you're lonely, think on truth and develop it in your head.

The kind of truth you have to adopt is one that will always be unpopular. People don't want to think about what sacrifices they have to make in order to preserve nebulous intangibles like culture, ethnicity, environment, values and breeding. They would rather distract themselves with television, bong hits, bars, cars, and degenerate sex. The latter categories are easy stimulus to accept, but the former requires long term planning. Hammer out your own beliefs until you have no doubt, and then keep them alive in your heart.

You will pass these on to your children not through what you say, but what you do. If Daddy doesn't watch TV, and doesn't care that he does not have a shiny car, and won't drink himself into a stupor to get back to work the next day, it means Daddy has something else going on; something else for which in part he lives. This is how values are communicated, as to truly value something is to make it a cornerstone of why you live. If you try to to communicate this in words, you will end up having problems, f'r example:

Person A: I'd rather have one Beethovens and millions oppressed, than millions "empowered" to create Britneypop while there's no Beethoven.

Person B: How dare you deny their rights! You hate our freedom! You're a Nazi! A bigot! A totalitarian! A Communist! etc.

Instead, work on what you can, and act according to your beliefs. You might have to play the social game, but over time people will come to trust you as a person, and at that point, it's the little things that count. Don't bother getting seriously involved in discussions over politics. Let your actions speak. Listen to Beethoven, celebrate culture, be an honorable person and don't waste time with distractions. Most people cannot socialize outside of drugs/drink and talking about things they've seen on TV. Be the exception, and people will follow. At least, so goes my experience.

I think what I've suggested is a balance between action and self-preservation. Do what is right for you first, and then branch out as you can. However, at some point, taking some form of action, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is part of what sustains you, in that it will make you feel less helpless. Anytime you can put your hands to something and make a positive change, your life has more meaning and you're less lonely, and thus you are succeeding where most others fail. Only by working on your own health, and later the health of your culture around you, can you overcome the deepest of diseases, which is the denial of the decline that most people use to obscure their sorrows. July 7, 2005