June 8, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 16 concluded the section on American Philosophy. This segment (segment 17) is the first segment of the last section of the Nihilism series: The American Culture. Segment 17 will put forth the traditional view of our culture (labeled Unionist in the excerpts) as well as the view of the Social Justice advocates (labeled Disintegrationist in the excerpts). The contrasts between the two views will continue through the remaining segments of the series (segments 18 thru 23).
My Takeaways:
Traditional View of Our Culture
Our culture for the last 245 years has been one of rights:
Social Justice View of What Our Culture Should Be
A culture of protection by the government, the only institution worth protecting:
Commentary:
The Rule of Law is not mentioned in the excerpts on Culture in this segment but is a decided choice in your consideration of what you want our culture to be. The traditional culture view is that the Rule of Law is always to be upheld and enforced. If the majority of the people decided it needs to be changed then the legislature amends, discards the existing law and enacts a new one. The Social Justice View is to just ignore the existing laws whether it be those of immigration, rioting, policing, or prosecuting and proceed with what they deem to be right.
Next:
Segment 18 is titled “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity (DIE for short). DIE is the quasi-religion of Western universities. It promotes equality of outcomes supported by Critical Theory whereas traditionalists promote equality of opportunity. The segment will look at both sides of the debate.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 16 concluded the section on American Philosophy. This segment (segment 17) is the first segment of the last section of the Nihilism series: The American Culture. Segment 17 will put forth the traditional view of our culture (labeled Unionist in the excerpts) as well as the view of the Social Justice advocates (labeled Disintegrationist in the excerpts). The contrasts between the two views will continue through the remaining segments of the series (segments 18 thru 23).
My Takeaways:
Traditional View of Our Culture
Our culture for the last 245 years has been one of rights:
- Tolerance for rights of others even if we may not like how they use those rights.
- Robust support for the social institutions who are virtuous of those rights and provide a basis for their morality, in particular family and church.
- Willingness to defend those rights for ourselves and others, most particularly against tyranny, including the right to bear arms. The willingness to value freedom over security.
- The right and encouragement to pursue economic risk-taking via emphasis on individuality, hard work, and meritocracy. A culture that celebrates success.
Social Justice View of What Our Culture Should Be
A culture of protection by the government, the only institution worth protecting:
- In which individual rights are replaced by “the common good” as determined by the federal government, the sole repository of power.
- Where the vision of rights is transformed to the perception of victimhood recognized by entitlements.
- A complete focus on the oppressed and repressed to the exclusion of all else.
- A culture wherein the government guarantees freedom from want and fear, duties created by mob advocacy, policy dictated by a cultural elite, and nothing can be challenged or debated.
- A culture reliant on the risk-adverse nature of individuals, weakness of social institutions and a desire for security over liberty. A rejection of family, church and individuality in favor of the collective.
Commentary:
The Rule of Law is not mentioned in the excerpts on Culture in this segment but is a decided choice in your consideration of what you want our culture to be. The traditional culture view is that the Rule of Law is always to be upheld and enforced. If the majority of the people decided it needs to be changed then the legislature amends, discards the existing law and enacts a new one. The Social Justice View is to just ignore the existing laws whether it be those of immigration, rioting, policing, or prosecuting and proceed with what they deem to be right.
Next:
Segment 18 is titled “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity (DIE for short). DIE is the quasi-religion of Western universities. It promotes equality of outcomes supported by Critical Theory whereas traditionalists promote equality of opportunity. The segment will look at both sides of the debate.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 17
THE AMERICAN CULTURE – EXCERPTS
Excerpts in this segment are from How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro
UNIONIST VIEW: OUR RIGHTS: America is a country of rights. From the very a beginning, we’ve been a people unified by our belief in rights. We’re a country of rights because the American philosophy rests on the fundamental, self-evident truths that human nature exists, and that we have individual rights springing from that nature; that human-beings are equal in their rights under the law; and that governments are instituted to protect those rights, and not infringe on them.
What culture must prevail in order for our rights to remain robust? The Unionist culture relies on four chief characteristics: first, tolerance for the rights of others, even when exercise of those rights cuts against our benefit; second, robust social institutions inculcating virtue and providing the basis for moral unity; third, stubborn-headed willingness to defend the rights for yourself and others against tyranny; and finally, a heady sense of adventure, of economic risk-taking, or willingness to value freedom over security.
Rights Require that We Defend the Rights of Others – Even if We Don’t Like How They Use Those Rights: What is the basic nature of the rights we must respect and defend? You have a right to life, because others have an obligation not to kill you. You have the right to free speech, because others have an obligation not to meet speech with violence. Legal rights only exist as protections against those who violate your rights. This includes the government. We recognize clearly and absolutely that any government with the authority to restrict speech and thought may use that authority to quash its own opposition. The first move to authoritarian governments is to prevent the dissemination of dissent, to restrict freedom of speech, the press, and thought on grounds of danger.
Rights Require a Robust Social Fabric Promoting Virtue: Rights alone do not guarantee virtue. Virtue lies in our nongovernment social fabric. The founders were deep believers that duty lies in the morality and religion taught by strong social institutions. They recognize that rights are an excellent bulwark against tyranny, but they don’t provide a strong framework for decency. Rights mean that we leave each other the hell alone, which means we can live together. But, if we hate each other, those rights won’t last for long. To inculcate such social values, the founders relied on robust social institutions, particularly family and church. The founding fathers fully recognized that without a culture of duty to support a culture of rights, both rights and duties would collapse, requiring a massive, interventionist government – precisely the kind of government they sought to escape.
Rights Require a Spirit of Adventure and Risk-Taking: The precondition to economic prosperity is rights, not government cram-downs. Americans have celebrated wealth creation rather then condemning it. “The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to struggle against the evils and obstacles of life.” The Unionist culture is a culture of entrepreneurialism: a culture of striving and strain of toil and hard work, a culture that celebrates success rather than seeking to punish or confiscate it. It is not a culture that recognizes that the only guarantee in America is the guarantee of an adventure.
Conclusion: Our culture of rights surrounds us and suffuses our conversations. It also unites us. The Unionist culture brings us together in recognition that an invasion of the rights of one is an invasion of the rights of all – and in realization that only a dutiful people can sustain a free country. Our culture of rights recognizes that we must respect the rights of others, even at our own expense; that we must work to build and protect the social fabric that inculcates and reinforces virtue; that we must be willing to jump to the defense of our own rights.
THE DISINTEGRATIONIST CULTURE: A Disintegrationist culture sees individual rights as a challenge to collective power, and that treats government as the only institution worth protecting. The Disintegrationist culture warns that freedom is a rough business, cruel and unsparing. This culture warns that social institutions that inculcate duty are in face merely instruments for separating us from one another – that only a unified rule from above can instill a sense of true, broad duty sufficient to maintain unity.
Social Justice hopes lie in more race-based thinking. “The concerns of people of color should be driving politics today and into the future.” All of this is deeply divisive. But in the Disintegrationists view, the true anti-unity forces lie among advocates for traditional Americanism. Scientific investigation is deemed bigoted, and meritocracy itself is derided as discriminatory. Belief in free markets is evidence of America’s roots in slavery. Adherence to American institution like federalism and the Electoral College is castigated as inherently discriminatory. The system itself is oppressive and repressive and must be fought.
A Progressive era of rights is one that transforms perception of victimhood into entitlements, entitlements into rights, and natural rights into throwaways. Our rights used to be against the encroachments of government; now those rights are obstacles to the utopian visions of our political masters. To subsume the rubric of rights under the higher priority of “common good”; this is the mission. The Disintegrationist culture seeks to tear away the social fabric, seeing in it the bulwark of unjust power hierarchies, and to substitute in its place top-down government as moral arbiter.
Once you redefine rights to mean anything you want – and replacing rights with the “common good” does just that – rights no longer have any meaning, and you lose all protection. There is no way to ban hate speech without granting the government the power to destroy free speech. You cannot mandate “economic fairness” without giving the government the power to destroy entrepreneurship. You cannot mandate racial tolerance without granting the government the power to destroy freedom of association. There are costs to rights. But there are far greater costs to making government the arbiter of right and wrong, as well as the sole repository of power.
Rights Must Be Destroyed to Prevent their Misuse: The new woke religion comes along with the creed of political correctness, with the priesthood of media elites, with sin and absolution and sainthood defined by the mob. No longer does man labor to serve a father in heaven; now he serves to win the praise of his cultural betters. The new church persecutes heretics and rewards true believers. Those who dissent are subjected to witch trials or public confessions. We find solidarity with one another in tearing down those who violate the ever-shifting lines of political correctness. The mob doesn’t want to discuss an unpopular view; they want to silence it. The mob doesn’t want an explanation; excuses make them angrier. The mob doesn’t want an apology; blood in the water encourages a feeding frenzy.
Social Institutions Must Be Torn Down to Let Government Unite Us: Unionist culture celebrates church and family as the bulwarks of American greatness. Disintegrationists attack precisely those institutions at the center of American life as the barrier to decency, rather than as the promulgators of decency in American society. A culture of rights is a culture of discrimination, according to the Disintegrationists. Today the Disintegrationists have launched a vast assault on the last vestiges of church in the United States. This demonization of traditional churchgoing has become part and parcel of the Disintegrationist culture. The destruction of religion and family leaves a gaping hole in the social fabric of the country.
The Spirit and Adventure of Freedom Must be Quashed: Disintegrationism preaches that true justice can only be obtained when economic freedom is overthrown. They argue that because life circumstances require people to work at jobs they don’t love, they are therefore “exploited” by their employers. Disintegrationists posit that the economy is “rigged” by the wealthy. This is the case social justice advocates routinely makes: “Even while macroeconomic numbers like GDP, the stock market and the unemployment rate are strong, millions of the middle class and working people struggle to keep their heads above water, while the billionaire class consumes the lion’s share of the wealth that we are collectively creating as a nation.” But the “billionaire class” isn’t a class in any real sense – they are entrepreneurs, the vast majority of whom didn’t even begin as millionaires. Furthermore, they are not “consuming” any wealth created by a collective, because wealth isn’t created by a collective. It is created by employers working with employees, funded often by capitalists, to produce products for the satisfaction of individuals across the globe. In reality the social justice advocates rely on capitalism to generate wealth and calls for government to redistribute it.
Free markets not only do not exploit workers generally, but they have lifted the vast majority of the globe from crippling poverty over the past four decades, provided the source of nearly every major technological innovation in history, and made nearly every product better, cheaper, and more available. Those who attempt to crack down on that natural system leave misery and poverty in their wake. No single economic system has generated more wealth than economic freedom, particularly for those at the bottom end of the economic scale. But trusting an elite caste to determine which group ought to benefit at the expense of other groups, cuts directly against a rights-based society – and in the end, against bother individuals and the success of the nation.
Conclusion: Our Unionist culture motivated by the understanding that individual rights, must predominate, and must be balanced by our social institutions. But that balance – individual rights, protected by the government and social duties, promoted by social institutions – has been overthrown by the alternative Disintegrationist culture. The Disintegrationist culture promises instead individual guarantees provided by government – guarantees of positive “freedom” from want and fear, rather than negative freedoms of speech and adventure – and duties created by the mob, dictated by a cultural elite at best indifferent to and at worst openly opposed to the institutions of church and family. The Disintegrationist culture is winning because it is a culture of expectation rather than a culture of duty.
The Disintegrationist culture dismisses freedom on behalf of security. In enervates rather than energizes; it urges a spirit of solicitation rather than a spirit of enterprise. In the end Unionist culture was a culture that relied on the ambition of individuals, the strength of social institutions, and the desire for freedom the founders believed characterized the American experience. The Disintegrationist culture relies on the risk-averse nature of individuals, the weakness of social institutions, and the desire for security over liberty. The Disintegrationist make a better bet – that human-beings are venal, greedy, and self-serving, that human beings would rather invade the freedoms of others than absorb the pain of others’ freedom. That bet, however will end in tragedy. Our culture is like a marriage: it will succeed only when the partners respect one another and when the partners expect more from themselves than from their counterparts.
Source: How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE AMERICAN CULTURE – EXCERPTS
Excerpts in this segment are from How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro
UNIONIST VIEW: OUR RIGHTS: America is a country of rights. From the very a beginning, we’ve been a people unified by our belief in rights. We’re a country of rights because the American philosophy rests on the fundamental, self-evident truths that human nature exists, and that we have individual rights springing from that nature; that human-beings are equal in their rights under the law; and that governments are instituted to protect those rights, and not infringe on them.
What culture must prevail in order for our rights to remain robust? The Unionist culture relies on four chief characteristics: first, tolerance for the rights of others, even when exercise of those rights cuts against our benefit; second, robust social institutions inculcating virtue and providing the basis for moral unity; third, stubborn-headed willingness to defend the rights for yourself and others against tyranny; and finally, a heady sense of adventure, of economic risk-taking, or willingness to value freedom over security.
Rights Require that We Defend the Rights of Others – Even if We Don’t Like How They Use Those Rights: What is the basic nature of the rights we must respect and defend? You have a right to life, because others have an obligation not to kill you. You have the right to free speech, because others have an obligation not to meet speech with violence. Legal rights only exist as protections against those who violate your rights. This includes the government. We recognize clearly and absolutely that any government with the authority to restrict speech and thought may use that authority to quash its own opposition. The first move to authoritarian governments is to prevent the dissemination of dissent, to restrict freedom of speech, the press, and thought on grounds of danger.
Rights Require a Robust Social Fabric Promoting Virtue: Rights alone do not guarantee virtue. Virtue lies in our nongovernment social fabric. The founders were deep believers that duty lies in the morality and religion taught by strong social institutions. They recognize that rights are an excellent bulwark against tyranny, but they don’t provide a strong framework for decency. Rights mean that we leave each other the hell alone, which means we can live together. But, if we hate each other, those rights won’t last for long. To inculcate such social values, the founders relied on robust social institutions, particularly family and church. The founding fathers fully recognized that without a culture of duty to support a culture of rights, both rights and duties would collapse, requiring a massive, interventionist government – precisely the kind of government they sought to escape.
Rights Require a Spirit of Adventure and Risk-Taking: The precondition to economic prosperity is rights, not government cram-downs. Americans have celebrated wealth creation rather then condemning it. “The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to struggle against the evils and obstacles of life.” The Unionist culture is a culture of entrepreneurialism: a culture of striving and strain of toil and hard work, a culture that celebrates success rather than seeking to punish or confiscate it. It is not a culture that recognizes that the only guarantee in America is the guarantee of an adventure.
Conclusion: Our culture of rights surrounds us and suffuses our conversations. It also unites us. The Unionist culture brings us together in recognition that an invasion of the rights of one is an invasion of the rights of all – and in realization that only a dutiful people can sustain a free country. Our culture of rights recognizes that we must respect the rights of others, even at our own expense; that we must work to build and protect the social fabric that inculcates and reinforces virtue; that we must be willing to jump to the defense of our own rights.
THE DISINTEGRATIONIST CULTURE: A Disintegrationist culture sees individual rights as a challenge to collective power, and that treats government as the only institution worth protecting. The Disintegrationist culture warns that freedom is a rough business, cruel and unsparing. This culture warns that social institutions that inculcate duty are in face merely instruments for separating us from one another – that only a unified rule from above can instill a sense of true, broad duty sufficient to maintain unity.
Social Justice hopes lie in more race-based thinking. “The concerns of people of color should be driving politics today and into the future.” All of this is deeply divisive. But in the Disintegrationists view, the true anti-unity forces lie among advocates for traditional Americanism. Scientific investigation is deemed bigoted, and meritocracy itself is derided as discriminatory. Belief in free markets is evidence of America’s roots in slavery. Adherence to American institution like federalism and the Electoral College is castigated as inherently discriminatory. The system itself is oppressive and repressive and must be fought.
A Progressive era of rights is one that transforms perception of victimhood into entitlements, entitlements into rights, and natural rights into throwaways. Our rights used to be against the encroachments of government; now those rights are obstacles to the utopian visions of our political masters. To subsume the rubric of rights under the higher priority of “common good”; this is the mission. The Disintegrationist culture seeks to tear away the social fabric, seeing in it the bulwark of unjust power hierarchies, and to substitute in its place top-down government as moral arbiter.
Once you redefine rights to mean anything you want – and replacing rights with the “common good” does just that – rights no longer have any meaning, and you lose all protection. There is no way to ban hate speech without granting the government the power to destroy free speech. You cannot mandate “economic fairness” without giving the government the power to destroy entrepreneurship. You cannot mandate racial tolerance without granting the government the power to destroy freedom of association. There are costs to rights. But there are far greater costs to making government the arbiter of right and wrong, as well as the sole repository of power.
Rights Must Be Destroyed to Prevent their Misuse: The new woke religion comes along with the creed of political correctness, with the priesthood of media elites, with sin and absolution and sainthood defined by the mob. No longer does man labor to serve a father in heaven; now he serves to win the praise of his cultural betters. The new church persecutes heretics and rewards true believers. Those who dissent are subjected to witch trials or public confessions. We find solidarity with one another in tearing down those who violate the ever-shifting lines of political correctness. The mob doesn’t want to discuss an unpopular view; they want to silence it. The mob doesn’t want an explanation; excuses make them angrier. The mob doesn’t want an apology; blood in the water encourages a feeding frenzy.
Social Institutions Must Be Torn Down to Let Government Unite Us: Unionist culture celebrates church and family as the bulwarks of American greatness. Disintegrationists attack precisely those institutions at the center of American life as the barrier to decency, rather than as the promulgators of decency in American society. A culture of rights is a culture of discrimination, according to the Disintegrationists. Today the Disintegrationists have launched a vast assault on the last vestiges of church in the United States. This demonization of traditional churchgoing has become part and parcel of the Disintegrationist culture. The destruction of religion and family leaves a gaping hole in the social fabric of the country.
The Spirit and Adventure of Freedom Must be Quashed: Disintegrationism preaches that true justice can only be obtained when economic freedom is overthrown. They argue that because life circumstances require people to work at jobs they don’t love, they are therefore “exploited” by their employers. Disintegrationists posit that the economy is “rigged” by the wealthy. This is the case social justice advocates routinely makes: “Even while macroeconomic numbers like GDP, the stock market and the unemployment rate are strong, millions of the middle class and working people struggle to keep their heads above water, while the billionaire class consumes the lion’s share of the wealth that we are collectively creating as a nation.” But the “billionaire class” isn’t a class in any real sense – they are entrepreneurs, the vast majority of whom didn’t even begin as millionaires. Furthermore, they are not “consuming” any wealth created by a collective, because wealth isn’t created by a collective. It is created by employers working with employees, funded often by capitalists, to produce products for the satisfaction of individuals across the globe. In reality the social justice advocates rely on capitalism to generate wealth and calls for government to redistribute it.
Free markets not only do not exploit workers generally, but they have lifted the vast majority of the globe from crippling poverty over the past four decades, provided the source of nearly every major technological innovation in history, and made nearly every product better, cheaper, and more available. Those who attempt to crack down on that natural system leave misery and poverty in their wake. No single economic system has generated more wealth than economic freedom, particularly for those at the bottom end of the economic scale. But trusting an elite caste to determine which group ought to benefit at the expense of other groups, cuts directly against a rights-based society – and in the end, against bother individuals and the success of the nation.
Conclusion: Our Unionist culture motivated by the understanding that individual rights, must predominate, and must be balanced by our social institutions. But that balance – individual rights, protected by the government and social duties, promoted by social institutions – has been overthrown by the alternative Disintegrationist culture. The Disintegrationist culture promises instead individual guarantees provided by government – guarantees of positive “freedom” from want and fear, rather than negative freedoms of speech and adventure – and duties created by the mob, dictated by a cultural elite at best indifferent to and at worst openly opposed to the institutions of church and family. The Disintegrationist culture is winning because it is a culture of expectation rather than a culture of duty.
The Disintegrationist culture dismisses freedom on behalf of security. In enervates rather than energizes; it urges a spirit of solicitation rather than a spirit of enterprise. In the end Unionist culture was a culture that relied on the ambition of individuals, the strength of social institutions, and the desire for freedom the founders believed characterized the American experience. The Disintegrationist culture relies on the risk-averse nature of individuals, the weakness of social institutions, and the desire for security over liberty. The Disintegrationist make a better bet – that human-beings are venal, greedy, and self-serving, that human beings would rather invade the freedoms of others than absorb the pain of others’ freedom. That bet, however will end in tragedy. Our culture is like a marriage: it will succeed only when the partners respect one another and when the partners expect more from themselves than from their counterparts.
Source: How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 17_nihilism_long_american_culture_--_segment_17.pdf |