Choose a side

"If the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation,
then civilisation is already irredeemably lost."

~ Yaron Brook

It takes some time to decompress after an atrocity like Christchurch. Too easy to talk too soon instead of to mourn, to reflect, to maybe try to draw a few lessons that might help you process what happened, and maybe even to make some things better.

After Christchurch, after nine days of listening, of thinking, of reflection, it seems to me that there is one lesson above all we need to draw from the slaughter: that identifying civilisation by means of race -- that seeing conflict as inevitable and racially driven -- that identifying ourselves by collectives, especially racial or religious collectives  -- is as deluded as it is deadly.

And that it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

The right's adoption of "identitarian" race-based politics in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

For folk sympathetic to the Alt-Right this should be a wake-up call. For many of them subscribing to alt-right identity politics is their way of "owning the Libs." They don't realise it's them being "owned," while releasing this barbarism from the crypt where it was buried. They don't realise that the opposite of Leftist identity politics is not the alt-right and its own politics of white supremacy. These are both forms of collectivism, both of which must be shunned. The opposite of identity politics is not the creation of an identity politics of your own: The opposite of identity politics is individualism.

In the slogan of Quilliam's Maajid Mawaz, the controlling left and the alt-right must both be damned. Delete the ideas of both, and condemn identity politics altogether.

Identity politics is the politics of the group, of the tribe, of the race. Racism, as Ayn Rand identified, is "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," a "barnyard" form of collectivism appropriate only to a mentality "that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men."

Such a mentality inspired the killings eight days ago.  The quote at the head of this short post is from Yaron Brook's podcast (posted below) about those killings -- killings motivated by the thinking of the barnyard; by long-buried things crawling up from the sewer -- by the focus on the group, on the tribe, on the collective -- by the racial, tribal, false, evil and collectivist notion that civilisation is a "white creation" and that the "white race" (whatever that means) is "under threat" from "invaders" in the guise of other people who are simply human beings yearning to breathe free.

A "threat" that this entity, this thing, this murderer thinks must be met by mass killings.

This so-called "race realism" -- what in plain terms used to be called eugenics -- has been building for some time. Jeffrey Tucker documents it in his well-titled book book Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty. As we've said before here at NOT PC (it's right up there on the sidebar if you want to go look now), "it turns out that dressing up economic protectionism, white supremacism and tribalism as a defence of western civilisation has flushed out many things once deservedly dead and buried." What it flushed out in Christchurch should have alerted us, if we weren't already on guard, that the things being flushed out of the sewer require confronting.

Choose a side, people.

It's not about left versus right. Or our gang against your gang. It's about individualism against collectivism -- especially, in these times, about individualism against this barnyard form of collectivism that has been building and incubating and is now very dangerously busting out again, and in our own backyard.

There really is a real threat to western civilisation. A threat to be taken seriously -- but it's not one that comes from some kind of "invasion" by others. It's a threat that comes from within, from dangerously bad thinking, that is incubated here in the west and breaks out in places and times like last Friday week in Christchurch. The threat is not invaders, explains Yaron Brook in his podcast (posted below as a YouTube)

 the threat is we, who start classifying our own achievements, who start classifying our own culture, who start classifying our own civilisation in terms of collectivistic tribal elements. If the west resorts to tribalism in its attempt to so-call defend civilisation, then civilisation indeed is unequivocally lost. 

    [Because] western civilisation is not about the 'tribe' of the west; it's not about a white tribe; it's not about a Christian tribe ... it's about a rejection of tribalism. A rejection of racism. A rejection of fascism, or communism, and of all forms of collectivism ... of all the enemies of western civilisation.

Choose a side. Reject tribalism, or be one with the barbarians.

Anybody who is still rational, anybody who still holds onto western civilisation has and must reject [reject these ideas] in the loudest voice possible. This is the worst tribalism [in that it claims bizarrely to speak for western civilisation].

But culture is not about the colour of your skin; civilisation is not about the colour of your skin; it is about the ideas: it's about achievements; it's about science and art and philosophy and political philosophy and business achievements ... it's about ideas.

If you want to help make some sense of what happened in Christchurch, to brush up on where this vileness came from and what you can do to combat these atrocities, I highly recommend Yaron's podcast. And, since we've been covering this stuff here now for a while, I've added some related reading from NOT PC and beyond that might help you understand more the threat that Christchurch revealed was closer to home than we thought.

RELATED READING:

• In this 1977 lecture, Ayn Rand examines the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics
  'Global Balkanisation' - Ayn Rand
• "It would be a grave mistake to think that the alt-right is just some clownish marchers at some rally waving flags and shouting threatening slogans. The real problem is the underlying philosophy..."
  A brief on Alt-Right Ideology - Jeffrey Tucker, NOT PC
• "Dressing up economic protectionism, white supremacism, and tribalism isn't a defence of western civilisation."
  White Sheets & Red Golf Caps - NOT PC
• “…there is no reason for believing that civilisation is in any way a property of any particular race or ethnic group. It is strictly an intellectual matter--ultimately, a matter of the presence or absence of certain fundamental ideas underlying the acquisition of further knowledge.”
  “The Universalisability of Western Civilisation” – George Reisman, NOT PC
• “If ‘multiculturalism’ is taken to mean preserving the demographic makeup of distinct ethnic groups or clusters within a larger population, it actually fosters racism rather than diminishing it… ‘Multiculturalism’ of that kind is actually modern tribalism, and the label ‘multiculturalism’ is a vague diversion to hide the tribal nature of it.”
  What is the difference between multiculturalism and genuine racial tolerance? – OBJECTIVIST ANSWERS
• The Racist Moral Rot at the Heart of the Alt-Right – Ian Tuttle, N.R.O.
• 2016: The year the 'alt-right' breached the 'moral quarantine' on racism - Robert Tracinski, THE FEDERALIST
• The winner of the summarise-Stefan Molyneux competition - NOT PC
• Seven differences between the alt-right and libertarianism - NOT PC
• The three most pressing threats to liberty today - NOT PC
• Cashing in on 100 years of fetid ideas - NOT PC

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