The Buddha Complex or What the Right Should Know About Young People.

For the prevention of disease people need to develop immunities. Immunities develop as a result of coming in contact with germs. Too much contact with germs and one becomes infected and dies. Too little contact with germs, and one doesn’t develop the necessary immunities to fight off other germs. So, while parents must provide clean environments for their children, an antiseptic environment is actually unhealthy for a child. The child becomes accustomed to being protected and cocooned from the germs all around. Only coming in contact with some amount of dirt and germs will help bolster the mechanisms within the body allowing it to fend off diseases.
This is also true of a society’s ability to defend itself. It is through constant practice and experience that the army of a nation grows strong, flexible, and adaptable. Why did mighty Sparta lose the war to the weaker Thebes? It’s because Spartans became accustomed to winning with their supposedly invincible strategy. Spartans locked themselves within their own martial logic, and threw away the key. So sure of the caliber of their fighting men and strategy, they stuck to the pure and true Spartan way. Thebans studied the holes in the Spartan fighting formations and devised a brilliant new tactic that defeated the Spartans in battle. For this reason, the fighting force of any society or nation must constantly be tested through new ideas and trials on the battlefield. As long as the defeat isn’t fatal for the entire nation(like WWII was to Germany and Japan), it generally makes the nation stronger in the long run. US lost the Vietnam War, but the defeat was far from fatal and proved to be quite instructive. And, the current troubles in Iraq also teach us about the complexities of desert and urban warfare, occupation, insurgency, foreign policy, diplomacy, etc. Anyway, there’s no such thing as permanent victory, pure cleanliness, or absolute truth, at least in the human world. Inspect the air closely and it’s filled with zillions of bacteria, fungi, and other germs. All sorts of insects carry germs. No matter how many times you wash, germs thrive on the skin and shit fills the guts. Your body is constantly in the process of eliminating waste and dead cells. The entire world is in a constant flux, chaos, war. No living form can just stand apart from everything-that-is-bad-or-harmful and live in its own plastic bubble. All living forms need to grow stronger, adapt, or change through new contacts and new challenges. The main reason why the natives of the Americas were helpless against Europeans was their lack of immunity to diseases brought by the white man. Similar calamities didn’t befall Asians or Africans who were immune to those diseases.

What is true of the body and germs is also true of the soul/mind and society/history. The world isn’t divided up between simple Good and simple Evil, between an absolute West and absolute East(or South), nor between tradition and progress. It isn’t true that one side is all good while other side is all bad. One of the problems of conservative-oriented history has been the romanticization or idealization of one’s own heritage and narrative at the expense of all others. Growing under this kind of influence, children grow up thinking they live in the best of all possible worlds. They believe that just about everything on their side is good, noble, and wonderful while other peoples are worthless or far inferior. This attitude may lead to a united, proud, and militant social consciousness, BUT it doesn’t develop the proper immunities against countervailing principles, ideas, and arguments. Espousing a simplistic view of history and morality, it is inadequate to handle complexities, ambiguities, ironies, and evidence to the contrary. It is a sense of history based on Faith in one’s people and history. While loyalty to one’s race or group and remembrance of history and heritage are crucial to the survival of a people and a culture, the failure to develop a sufficiently self-critical, self-examining, and open-minded mentality leads to a rigid, stagnant, and ultimately enfeebled consciousness. Paradoxically, a society with the least amount of doubt will one day be filled with the most amount of doubt. Extreme idealism leads to extreme cynicism. This is the danger of any overly idealist mindset, whether conservative or leftist. Of course, conservatives may claim that conservatism is pragmatic and realist as opposed to idealist, but this isn’t necessarily true. (For one thing, even realism is a form of idealism. All -isms are, for the simple reason that they assume to offer the best possible system of thought, approach, or practice.) There is indeed a school of realist conservatism pessimistic about human nature, but there are also schools of conservatism imagining a clean, pure line running from the dawn of time to the present and validating/justifying everything that had been done in the name of the Cause or Blood & Soil. It is a selective kind of Panglossian worldview, with ‘my world’ being the ‘best of all possible worlds’. Though children and the simple-minded may be content with such view of the world, more thoughtful or intelligent minds will inevitably spot the holes in this narrative.

There is a film by Margaretha von Trotta called "Marianne and Juliane" telling the story of two German sisters growing up in the post-war order. The older girl is rebellious from a young age. She reads Sartre and challenges her parents’ authority. The younger sister is obedient, dutiful, and seemingly happy. Her conservative parents prefer the younger daughter and love her dearly. But later, it is the older sister, who’s better adjusted to capitalist Germany than her younger sister, who’d become an extreme leftist-terrorist. The older sister, having come in contact with opposing ideas in her younger days, had become somewhat immune to the imperfections of her country and the false promises of radical ideas, and found a useful place in society. She’s unhappy with the status quo, but she’s accepting of the system. To an extent, she’d outgrown and sweated out the fevers of radical ideas. Because of her earlier introduction to radical or anti-social ideas, she can properly see them as the infatuations of angry youth. Her younger sister, on the other hand, had a childhood of greater simplicity, and as such, she could only replace one simplicity–conservative–with another–ultra-radical.
The younger sister grew up thinking Germany was a wonderful place, her parents were perfect and all-knowing, and all was fine in the world. She never asked questions and was happy with the life that she knew. She loved her older trouble-making sister but never understood what all the rage and discontent were about. But, one day at school, she sees a film of Holocaust atrocities, and her view of everything totally shatters. In adulthood, she is hooked up with violent radicals. Having grown up knowing ONLY the good and wonderful Germany, she was shocked beyond belief when she came in contact with the injustices and evils of German history. She never developed immunities that might have allowed her to see things in moral/historical context and accept the imperfections of her people and country for what they were. Lacking such immunities, she was completely helpless and vulnerable to the germs of leftist radicalism which claimed to espouse righteous rage and justice. Now, suppose the younger sister had been raised by more thoughtful and complex parents who not only exposed her to good things about bourgeois living, the noble traditions of German history and culture, and the soundness of the German character BUT ALSO about the dark sides of German history–the wars, the religious oppression, the crimes of Nazism, etc. Knowing about the darker sides of German people and history would have spared her from the shock of discovering Germany’s gruesome and evil chapters and would have prepared her for understanding Germany as a nation among others with triumphs and tragedies, crowning achievements and criminal barbarities. Thus prepared, when confronted with the darker side of German history and culture, she would have known how to accept it, process it, and make peace with it–as all nations and peoples must make peace with their histories which are stories of both wonders and horrors. This is another way of saying that if you’ve allowed to see with PG-13 movies, you’re better prepared to handle R-rated movies. It’s a much greater shock to the system to know only G-rated movies and then see an R-rated movie. Her parents could have told her about other countries, cultures, and histories and their bright and dark sides. So, Germany isn’t all good and others aren’t all bad. With this knowledge, it would have been less likely for her to fall for a radical ideology that condemns everything about capitalist or bourgeois Germany. She would have realized that Germany has been both good and bad, but whatever the moral scorecard one must care about one’s country like one cares about one’s family.
After all, the main reason for sticking by one’s own culture, people, and history has less to do with morality than with a sense of belonging. Even peoples who never created great works of art, philosophy, or erected one of the seven wonders of the world naturally feel a need to defend one’s own culture, heritage, and history. Why do many families keep albums and artifacts of their ancestors? Because their ancestors were great people? No, 99.99% of all people never did anything great but lived out their entire lives as working stiffs.People remember their forbearers simply because they have an EMOTIONAL attachment to blood kin and ancestors. It’s a way of understanding and reminding ourselves that we didn’t pop out of the thin air. We all owe something to the past, good and bad, that paved the way for us to exist in this world to find happiness(and to suffer).
Anyway, the younger sister in the movie wasn’t introduced to the complexities of the world. She was raised as a Good Girl, and she was indeed the perfect Good Girl in her youth. She was not taught how to think but merely how to follow and please people with authority. Had she lived in the 18th century, her upbringing and outlook might have been enough for her to be happy in life. But, she lived in the modern world with freedom, choices, competing ideas and values, and various temptations. In the modern world, one needs a complex and critical mind. One can no longer believe in absolutes in terms of morality, culture, history, etc. There are mountains of data, information, news, perspectives, and opinions available to all of us. So, we can no longer embrace the simple tribalism or moralism of yesteryear that defined the world in terms of black vs white OR us vs them. In order to preserve a sense of national/cultural/racial identity and a set of values near and dear to us, we can no longer just rely on old truisms but must constantly seek and put forth new and better-devised arguments and creative visions. We can’t simply rely on Faith in ourselves or in our history as if that alone means we are good and worthy. In a contentious world, everything must be contended, explained, fought, and won. This is true even of the ‘gay marriage’ debate. It’s not enough to say ‘gay marriage’ is wrong because tradition says marriage is between a man and a woman. Nor, can we rely simply on Faith in Scriptures since modern governments are founded on secular principles. We must make a better argument based on how biology connects with morality, and how these principles are the underlying foundations of civilization and social values. And, we must also counter the enemy by exposing how they are promoting ‘gay marriage’ not really to extend justice and equality to gays but to undermine the very assumptions of conservative and timeless values so as to loosen moral foundations, following which greater radical changes can be wrought on a value-free and corrupt society.

We must constantly be aware of the challenges to our order, our history, and our race. But, we must also challenge our own history, our own values, and our own failings. And, we must also expose ourselves and our young ones to the arguments made by the other side. The trick is not simply to make our kids read leftist or anti-Western literature but to make them familiar with it, at least to the extent to which it can be countered and annulled by better arguments on our side. A conservatism that has been exposed to and has overcome the leftist temptation is more resilient and healthy than a conservatism that is entirely ignorant of the other side and only knows the simplistic truisms of the Right. Such simple minds are the easiest candidates for being converted to leftism since they haven’t been exposed to and made immune against the temptations of leftist thought. Those who simplemindedly cling to the Right can easily be simplemindedly seduced to the Left.
Only through proper exposure to leftist ideas can we develop immunities to them. (I understand many people fear this exposure since they are incapable of coming up with better counter-arguments, which leaves them with two unpleasant choices: admit that the Left is correct and go over to the other side OR cling to the intellectually battered Right unmoored from its moral foundations. The moral insecurity of the Right is evident in how they try to undermine the Left by accusing it of ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ as though the Left commits its worst sins when acting like rightists. Or, consider how often conservatives try to tag the Left with Nazism and fascism than with communism or Marxism. Many on the Right seem to believe that the evil of the Right is worse than the evils of the Left, and therefore, the Left must be smeared with rightist tendencies. By the way, the conservative argument that Fascism and Nazism are really more of the Left is unconvincing.) If we make the claim that we are all good and perfect, then legitimate and valid criticism of the West can prove fatal to our confidence since it would have been founded on the notion that we are blameless. It would be a kind of moral narcissism and arrogance which can easily be deflated by evidence since no people or nation is without great sins and evils. It is the perfectionist or narcissist who is quickest to lose faith in one’s achievement or in oneself since the faith happens to be based on an impossible self-delusion. Since nothing is perfect, it would be easy for your antagonist to point out where the flaws or bugs in your system are. So, admitting and understanding the flaws of one’s own people and culture is the first step in developing a confidence that can take the criticisms and hard knocks of life. Since one doesn’t claim to have a perfect record nor necessarily superior way of life, there’s no undue shock nor reason to be depressed when the flaws in yourself or your achievement are exposed. You can admit that it is indeed true, and this is true for all people, individuals, systems, and ideas. That said, since you belong to a certain culture, race, and nation, it’s natural where your main loyalty would be. Your values wouldn’t solely be based on some highfalutin sense of moral superiority that you parade before the world but on something more mundane and solid like Blood and Soil. Your claim would be that you try to be a good person and try to make for a better society for all, BUT you are also aware of limitations of what people can do and the force of human nature that sees and experiences the world in terms of flesh and bone than just abstract principles and high-minded ideas.
But, the fact remains that there is still an element in American conservatism that wants to simply wave the flag, bake the apple pie, and espouse a simple-minded view of America that is either G-rated or just plain narcissistic. If the Christian Right prefers the G-rated America of good mushy feelings, the rising elements of white nationalism embrace a rather stupid kind of ‘my people are noble and great’ mentality that is little more than a brutal kind of Mickey Mouse feel-good-ism.
And so, it’s not surprising that many intelligent people who were raised under simple conservative values, Panglossian "don’t worry, be happy" free-market theories, or simple vision of American or White History end up going over to the Left. They’d grown up thinking of America or Western civilization as the paragon of virtue, goodness, decency, and nobility. Therefore, when later confronted with the fact of America’s failings or crimes, they were shocked beyond belief and lost ALL faith and trust in America. Also, even if they were never met with the temptation of radical leftism, intelligent people simply want a more nuanced, sophisticated, and knowledgeable take on the world. They want to read more books, hear different views, and be open to ideas and cultures from all over the world. It’s no wonder that intelligent people prefer NPR to conservative talk radio which dishes out the same predictable mantra to the choir. Of course, there’s a lot of dumb left too–Michael Moore. But, there is a still a culture on the liberal and leftist side that is more open to inquiry, different ideas, culture, art, cuisine, and views. The knee-jerk reaction of many conservatives is "I’ll stick to mine, and keep that strange or foreign stuff away from me.". The first reaction among many leftists and liberals is, "I want to know more about ideas, peoples, and cultures." Now, which attitude is more appealing to intelligent people? The turtle-like conservative attitude or the pawing-and-clawing liberal attitude? And, keep in mind that even when liberals act stupid, they tend to be wittier–thus more appealing to intelligent people–than conservatives who get their ideas less through wit and brilliance than through volume and emotionalism. Now, it may be that people who care more for other cultures but know nothing of their own are idiots. But, it also happens to be true that your average liberal is more interested in Western Culture than your average conservative. For many conservatives, The West is an emblem, really a codeword for racial unity than a history or culture worth studying and learning about. Worse, many on the White Right who do read up on Western history get their information form dubious sources presenting Nazi-esque cartoons about the superiority of the so-called "Aryan" race. This isn’t true history but identity politics as baseball-card-collecting. The lack of thoughtful attitude, curiosity, open-mindedness on the Right has been fatal in the cultural and academic spheres for quite a long time.
Too often, the Right has been inquisitional than inquisitive: arrogantly pointing fingers than placing a finger on the chin to think.
Just consider the many white suburbs which used to be conservative and vote for the GOP. Why did many of them turn liberal? It’s because suburbanites are generally well-educated and want to be(or want to be thought of as) open-minded, fair-minded, and thoughtful. When they see that the GOP is closely associated with Southern Evangelicals who insist on Creationism or Intelligent Design, they turn away from the party and go over to the Democrats. Or, if they can’t stomach the Democrats either, they choose to be Independent. Also, the vast number of white suburbanites are middle class, so does it make sense for the GOP to slash taxes on the very rich(especially when the majority of them happen to be liberals?) Sarah Palin is a wonderful person, but she cannot appeal to the masses of educated suburbanites who know that Earth is older than 10,000 years. Until the GOP can develop a culture of thought and intelligence, it will keep losing the votes of people with college degrees. This isn’t to say that liberals are necessarily more intelligent in the objective sense. What’s so intelligent about Oprah, Barbara Walters, Ellen Degeneris, Jon Stewart, and the people who watch those programs? There’s plenty of stupidity to go all around. But, when it comes to the aura or cult of intelligence and open-mindedness, the liberals outshine conservatives. And, among the genuinely intelligent and thoughtful, it’s true that the vast majority do tend to be liberal or even leftist. But, this isn’t to discount the fact that many liberals and leftists are politically correct, dogmatic, and censorious when it comes to views that undermine their ideological assumptions which are so crucial to their agenda. Indeed, it’s been true for a long time that open-mindedness and inquisitiveness on the part of liberals and leftists are selective than all-encompassing. This is especially true on the issue of race, sex, and sexual orientation. Most liberals and leftists may be open to ideas, cultures, and views from around the world, but they cannot tolerate the idea that races may not be equal because to admit or even to explore such likelihood could very well destroy the entire liberal house-of-cards constructed since the end of WWII.

Anyway, children raised by conservatives need to be better prepared for the complex, contradictory, and conflicted world. Unless they develop immunities to problems of doubt, they may lose faith in conservative or right-wing ideas and values which may suddenly appear childish, stupid, or deceitful. This may well be called the Siddhartha or Buddha Complex because the Indian prince was raised in a protected and cocooned environment where all seemed well, everyone was happy, diseases and illness were nowhere to be found, and sorrow didn’t exist as a word. There was no need for thought, no need for ambiguity, complexity, irony, or nuance. As far as Siddhartha was concerned, every corner of the world was just like his little world–perfect, wonderful, idyllic. There was no death, no suffering, no decay, no hags on The View. But one day, Siddhartha wandered from his cloistered garden paradise and saw the world outside. He saw poverty, wickedness, disease, death, suffering. Because he’d never developed psychological or spiritual immunities to such things, he freaked out and never fully gained his senses. Shocked and dismayed, he rejected the entire world and sought truth in an imaginary Nirvana. We see the same pattern among many people raised under a simple-minded form of conservatism or rightism. As children, they grow up with Old Glory, apple pie, themes of God and country, America as City on the Hill, and wonderfulness of American people and history(and a good deal of contempt for non-American peoples). Now, a person who never comes in contact with any other historical, cultural, or moral perspective may indeed be more or less satisfied with this kind of simpleminded narrative. Or, if a person is dumb and cannot think for oneself, he may go along with ‘my people uber alles’. But, an intelligent or thinking person raised with such simple-minded ideas will face a crisis when he comes in contact with counter-perspectives which point out the failings and dark sides of the West and America. With insufficient immunities against this kind of intellectual and political onslaught, he may fall for the ultra-leftism condemning America altogether. Of course, not everyone lurches to the left in reaction to the moral or psychological crisis. Some lurch toward libertarianism which blames all the evils and crimes of America on the Government and embrace the fantasy that an America with a smaller government would have avoided committing all those evils. Libertarianism seeks for a form of secular Nirvana by meditating away the government as an Evil Illusion. Of course, libertarians pretend to think objectively, but as they ignore the Real World or the world-as-it-really-is but only carry on with their theories of how the world ought to be and how people should really think(when, in fact, most people will NEVER think or live like libertarians), it’s best to understand libertarianism as a sort of personal religion. If communism has its roots in the collective strains of Christianity, libertarianism has parallels with some of the individualist strains in Buddhism. Of course, Buddhism isn’t individualist, but it is a ‘religion’ or system of ideas that says even all the gods are really illusions and truth can only be found through one’s own personal journey to the Nirvanic state. Though personal prayer is important in Christianity, there is sense of a community working together on Earth and striving toward Heaven, where we shall we meet again. The whole point of Buddhism is to separate oneself from everyone else, from the world, from even the gods, and seek that Nirvana which is truth beyond all categories. (The reader may ask why I didn’t employ something like the ‘Adam and Eve Complex’. Such complex would not apply to the modern world where people are free and have choices–and would rather blame others than themselves. It’s true that Adam and Eve, like Siddhartha, was situated in some kind of paradise. But according to the Old Testament, it was a genuine paradise, unlike the false paradise of Siddhartha’s youth. And, if Siddhartha was wronged by his well-meaning but foolish and delusional father, Adam and Eve brought upon their fall on their own. Therefore, Adam and Eve understood that the Fall of the Garden was their fault and that they had to suffer as a result and strive to redeem themselves. There was a time when people were less free and more dependent on the community for well-being, identity, and meaning of life. As a result, they never regarded themselves as being separate–as individuals–from society. The failing of society was deemed to be their own failing. Also, as the most people looked up to the ruling class, they were humble before their lords and took the moral burden of social ills on themselves. This kind of mentality among the people was prevalent in Russia prior to WWI and even through much of the 20th century. Consider the loyal party members who were tortured and killed by the communist regime but still believed in Stalin as they ‘sacrificed’ their lives for the Revolution–though they’d been wrongfully charged. There was a time when the rulers blamed the people for the failings of society. Even today, there are many Cubans who don’t blame Castro for the national failings but blame themselves for having failed to live up to the high and noble standards of Castro and Che. But, in the free democracies the rules of the blame game have been reversed, and the people blame the leaders for the problems. For this reason, many white people who learn about the dark side of American history don’t necessarily put the blame on themselves. Conservatives often accuse white liberals of being self-loathing, but this isn’t necessarily true. If anything, white liberals and leftists are among the most morally arrogant and narcissistic. They dump ALL the blame on white people OF THE PAST or on white CONSERVATIVES who supposedly stand in the way of True Progress. White liberals may have supported Obama less out of white self-loathing than out of self-aggrandizement, as if to show off their open-minded wonderfulness, ‘tolerance’, and to display their hipness and coolness in supporting a super black guy. Of course, there is an element of self-loathing among liberals, and one can argue that white liberal moral pride, arrogance, and narcissism are rooted in self-loathing. This is true to some extent but not true enough since many white liberals no longer even have a white identity. As far as they are concerned, they are not part of the white race but of the HUMAN RACE, and as long as they identify with billions of people all over the world, they no longer feel special guilt for what happened in the past. They are into accusatory–against ‘evil conservative whites’–mode than in self-bashing mode. As far as white liberals are concerned, whiteness is passe and bogus. So, white guilt is only for those who cling to white identity. If, as a white liberal, you embrace the HUMAN RACE and multiculturalism as your main identity, you’ve baptized yourself of guilt and evils associated with whiteness. You can stand with rest of humanity against the evil remnants of the white race as represented by white conservatives, rightists, and nationalists.)

This isn’t to suggest that most liberals, leftists, and libertarians are ex-conservatives who’d lost faith. Indeed, many of them grew up as liberals, leftists, or libertarians from cradle. But, if we examine the deeper roots of value systems such as liberalism, leftism, and libertarianism, it appears they partly developed partly in reaction to the overly simple-minded truths of conservatism. Of course, given the nature of the human mind and history, all these ‘progressive’ ideologies also developed their own simple dogmas and demanded Correct Faith from their followers. Political correctness too is instructive as a warning against simple-mindedness because its simplemindedness has turned many liberals toward libertarianism or even conservatism. Indeed, liberalism too has suffered the same fate of conservatism when it came to espouse a simple set of ‘progressive’ faiths and social assumptions which were not to be challenged but merely accepted, such as the biological equality of races or even the notion that ‘race is a myth’. But, the denial of the reality of race is a simple-minded ideological stance undermined by new scientific findings, and many intelligent and truth-seeking people have turned away from this secular religion though they hate to admit for our culture is so rabidly and viciously anti-racist. (By ‘anti-racist’, I mean that political correctness refuses to acknowledge that races exist and that racial differences may play in a factor in why societies turne out the way they do.)
For a thinking mind, simplemindedness cannot win over complexity. Of course, we must not confuse simplemindedness with simplicity which is a virtue. We want facts and truths to be as simple as possible. Genuine complexities are constructed of sound simplicities. There’s no sense in needlessly complicating a simple idea. But, the human world–cultures, histories, psychology, morality, arts, etc–are very complex, and no simple idea or theory can explain everything. To believe in a set of ideas or values without thinking or questioning is merely to be programmed. Even if it’s true that many people are content to be programmed, the fact still remains that thoughtful and/or intelligent people want to know more, question more, and want come neaer to the truer truth. If such people–who often end up as the elite of society–are not to lose total faith in the values and ideas they grew up with–hopefully conservative ones– , they must be introduced to complexity and multiplicity of reality from a young age and be prepared for a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the world and the people in it. Respect for one’s own culture must develop in tandem with respect for other cultures, knowledge of one’s people’s narrative must not reject or deny the rightful narratives of other peoples, the appreciation of one’s own history must acknowledge the validity of other histories. One must not only be mindful of the wrongs done to one’s own people but also of the wrongs done to other peoples by one’s own people.

This is true of child rearing too. Parents who tell their kids that their own family is the best as opposed to all the other families are stupid and simple-minded. If you tell kids, "we are richer than all the other families, more intelligent than all the other families, stronger than all the other families, more talented than all the other families, etc", what will happen when the kids grow older and realize that it isn’t so? The kids will be shocked to discover the good or superior things about other families and lose faith in one’s own family as a den of small-minded deceit. Good parents teach their kids of the importance of family unity, loyalty, and even a degree of pride, but they also teach their kids to respect other families, learn from other peoples, and be self-critical of the families own failings.
It is a stupid and simpleminded alcoholic parent filled with vain pride who never addresses his own problems but scapegoats everyone else, especially next door neighbors. Egomania is bad for the soul, and ethno-mania is bad for the national or racial soul. It makes one blind to one’s own failings and blind to the legitimate successes of others. Kids who grow up under ethno-mania develop an arrogant and cocky sense of the superiority of their own people over other peoples. They disdain thought and only maintain a habit of feeling glibly good about themselves. But, the problem goes even further, whereby the sense of superiority isn’t merely racial, tribal, militaristic, or nationalistic but moralistic. ETHNO-mania can join together with ETHO-mania, or mania of ethical superiority. For much of American history, there was a kind of etho-mania, the idea of America as a City on a Hill. The Chinese, though not expansionary like the West, also developed both ethno- and etho-mania, whereby they came to see themselves as not only culturally and ethnically better than other people but also ethically superior. For 1000s of years, the Chinese were convinced of the superiority and didn’t think they had much to learn from other peoples and cultures. To be sure, United States was far more open-minded, self-critical, progressive, experimental, and reform-oriented than China was, and American white ethno-mania had been checked somewhat by Christianity which stressed the universal soul-hood of man and by the Constitution which stated that no race should have unfair dominance over others. Because America had usually been so ahead of the curve of most nations in terms of social progress and freedom, most Americans felt a great deal of pride in their moral values and ethical practices. But, the fact is white Americans had, one way or another, often practices ethno-mania up until the 1950s/1960s. All said and done, white Christians had been favored over other peoples, sometimes through institutions such as slavery or by war & conquest.
Sooner or later, the strains of ethno-mania and etho-mania were bound to clash in American history. On the one hand, Americans took great pride–even arrogant pride–in being a progressive moral nation that judged everyone on individual merit than by race or color. On the other hand, America had mostly been a white nation where white people took special pride in being white and used racial identity and unity to keep down other races. So, the etho-mania that took pride in color-blind and non-prejudiced justice came in confrontation with the ethno-mania that based its pride in a ‘white power’–and until mid 20th century, Protestant–nation.
Far more useful and sensible for America would have been a system of ethics that aimed for fairness but didn’t assert an ‘exceptionalist’ superiority that filled Americans with much moral pride about themselves and inadvertently supplied ammo to anti-Americans eager to expose the failings and hypocrisies of America. Had Americans been more honestly aware of their nation’s ethical failings and double-standards and incorporated them in their understanding of history, later generations of Americans would have been less shocked or upset when facing the darker side of American history.

Perhaps, the Great Depression followed by WWII had something to do with the rise of etho-mania. The Great Depression was an example of a major failing in the American economic and political(even cultural) system. Many people were driven to desperation and lost hope in the future. Many thought America as a great prosperous nation was finished and things would never get any better. Then came WWII. It too was horrible, and soldiers returning from war wanted to put the awful experiences behind them and get on with their lives. So, the generation that grew up with the Depression and WWII–the so-called ‘greatest generation’–wanted the good life after so much misery in poverty stricken children and bloody warfare. They didn’t want gloom and doom, darkness and ambiguity. Not for themselves and not for their children. So, what developed was a kind of amnesiac conservatism that came to define much of the postwar 40s and the 50s. After the Depression and the War, Americans wanted to feel good about themselves, pursue happiness, and believe that everything was well once again, and they simply did not want to look back to a time of want and blood.
Though many boomers came to resent their parents for being conformist and repressive, their parents were mainly trying to protect them from hardships, doubts, and miseries of life. The Greatest Generation parents wanted their kids to have the good things in life, think good thoughts, feel good about America, and find great happiness. They wanted their kids to grow up with etho- and ethno-pride as Americans. America was said to be great because it was the freest, most just, richest, and most powerful nation in the world. It had defeated evil Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, and it was defending the Free World from Godless communism.
All of this was all fine and dandy except the narrative was too simple-minded and necessary historical contexts were missing. Though America was a better nation than most, was it necessarily a virtuous nation without sin? Though US was on the right side of history during WWII and during the Cold War, was US really saintly and noble–with God on our side–with the other sides being absolutely evil? The conservatism of the 1950s insisted it was so and thus created a very simple-minded and even stupid kind of political/cultural faith. Its worst excess was, of course, Joe McCarthy, whose anti-communism was so simple-minded that he ended up strengthening the enemy. Conservatives were so eager for a solid, conservative, and patriotic America as opposed to all those evil commies and their liberal dupes that they lost all sense of nuance, moderation, common sense.
Though not all conservatives admired or were on the same wavelength as McCarthy, he did come to embody the face and thrust of conservatism in the 1950s which painted a very simple picture of the world and morality. In time, even hardcore conservatives lost faith in this kind of childishness by the late 50s. (This was to repeat itself during the years of Bush II. Conservatism offered by Bush was so simple-minded that ‘conservative’ followed ‘liberal’ in becoming a epithet. People like Rush Limbaugh, with their cartoonized conservatism, didn’t help much either. In some ways, George W. Bush’s conservatism was worse than that of the 1950s for at least clear lines were drawn during the Eisenhower era. With Bush, except for support of Israel and tax cuts for the rich, it was hard to figure out what conservatism was supposed to be. It wasn’t that Bush’s conservatism was complex or synthetic but muddled, compromised, whored out, and shoddy. Though Bush’s outward stance was of one firmness and being principled, it was hard to figure out what the principles were except cutting taxes for the rich, supporting Israel 100%, handing foreign policy to the extremists among the neocons, pandering to the stupidest of the Evangelicals, handing over the entire SW territories of America to Mexican Illegals, and increasing spending in the name of ‘compassionate conservatism’. Never was an ideology so confused and contradictory in reality yet so adamant and assertive in its rhetoric. It was as though Bush stood firm on quicksand. He confused standing firm with firm ground to stand on.)

Observers understand the wild and rebellious 60s as a revolution against the dull and conformist 1950s, and there’s some truth to that, but that explanation is too simple to understand why events unfolded the way they did. To an extent, the 60s have to be understood as the SYMPTOMS of the diseases that the simple-minded cultural assumptions of the 1940s and 1950s failed to treat or develop immunities against. True, kids in the 1960s went ‘crazy’ partly because of the rise of new forms of music, drug use, Vietnam War, and racial tensions and riots. But, the influence and impact of radical leftism and anti-social behavior might have been less potent IF the majority of boomer generation had been inoculated with greater complexity and ambiguity in matters such as culture, history, and values during their youths. A generation that was raised on good manners, apple pie, pledge of allegiance, and America-is-best-in-the-world was shocked to realize the falsehood of conservative American assumptions as they grew older and saw changes all around them. Since they’d been raised to think that America is all good, evidence to the contrary convinced them that EVERYTHING good about America was just a big shining lie. Having no immunities against views challenging pro-Americanism, they caught the flu of radicalism and they shook with the fever which became the counter-culture madness of the 1960s. Suppose you were raised on meat and potatoes and apple pie for dessert and told that it was the best food in the world. Suppose one day you come upon the wonderful cuisine from other countries. Wouldn’t you feel betrayed by the fools who told you that meat and potatoes and apple pie are all there is? Wouldn’t you overreact by totally rejecting meat and potatoes and apple pie and, instead, go looking for cuisines of other nations in the conviction that they must be better than your own stuff?

We need only look at anti-drug education and propaganda to see how this simple-minded approach doesn’t work for anyone past the age of 12. All those simple-minded anti-drug films that said if you smoke a marijuana, you’ll go crazy or automatically end up using harder drugs and turn into a crazy junkie actually had a counter-productive influence on drug use among kids. As kids grow older, they become more curious, intelligent, searching, and experimental. What scared them as mere children has less control over them. Indeed, simple-minded propaganda only prepares them for total loss of faith in authority. (Why is it that Catholic girls often turn out to be the worst sluts?) For example, a kid who’s told that marijuana is a killer drug that will destroy one’s brains(and that only losers use it) will be shocked when he or she discovers, in college, that many decent people use it(responsibly), get good grades, and succeed in life. So, this kid who’d been raised to think marijuana is the weed of the Devil may now come to see marijuana as magic medicine. He may also come to see his parents and teachers(and by extension all institutions of authority) as deceitful and bogus for having told him simple-minded lies. Of course, all drugs are hazardous to some extent, and marijuana use is certainly not good for kids(nor for that matter for adults if people smoke too much). But, it would have been much preferable to tell kids the complex truth about marijuana than employ simple-minded and moralistic scare tactics. If you tell kids about the complex realities of marijuana–both its negative and positive effects, its uses and abuses, its history, and the latest scientific data–kids are likely to develop a greater immunity to the drug. Kids may still use it but they won’t regard institutions of authority as bastions of deceit nor will they see marijuana as Forbidden Fruit Magic Wonder Drug that gives the middle finger to The Man or unlocks the gates to utopian bliss. (This is also true of black sexuality. White girls, especially in the South, had been told that having sex with black males will lead to pussy-explosion-syndrome. Supposedly the large black sexual appendage was too big and beastly for the tender vaginas of white women, and good many white girls believed this. This lie worked as long as white girls lived in their segregated and protected cocoons, but once society became freer and more equal, it only made white sexual conservatism sound stupid. There’s a scene in the movie "Next Stop Greenwich Village" where some southern gal says she loves having sex with Negroes despite, or especially because, of all the warnings she had heard from her parents when she was growing up. Telling lies eventually makes the teller of lies look ridiculous. Like the kid in the story of Never Cry Wolf, the liar loses all legitimacy even when he finally speaks the truth. Because so many racial lies have been told in the past, it’s difficult to tell truths about race. In the minds of many people, all things related to race are associated with the lies of the past. So, simple-minded lies are best avoided. What white women should have been told is that, yes, black men do have bigger penises and are more muscular, and for that reason, skanky white girls might indeed feel a degree of jungle fever. BUT, blacks are not generally not conducive to maintaining civilization, and spreading black genes far and wide among the wider population through miscegenation will undermine civilization as a whole. Also, it is a form of race betrayal for white women to go with the men who are beating up and brutalizing their own men. It would be like French women going with German invaders in WWII. One must speak the truth and then make an argument taking into account that truth–among other truths. But, telling girls that they will experience the pussy-explosion-syndrome is childish and will only work in a repressively ignorant society, not ours.)

To further illustrate the point, consider the ideal way to introduce kids to music and movies. The thing is to develop immunities in children and young people against mindless filth and garbage. As with germs, too much filth and garbage(especially of the pointless or gratuitous kind)will destroy the hearts and minds of young people. Stupid stuff like Marilyn Manson, Satanic Heavy Metal, or Gangsta Rap have little or no moral, cultural, or artistic value. Exposing children to a lot of that stuff would be like letting them swim in cesspool or play in a garbage heap. They will become PART OF the disease.
But, if you only allow G-rated goo-goo movies or elevator music for kids, they won’t develop immunities to the dark complexities of the world. Kids will grow up seeing the world as cute and darling. Now, what happens when such ‘good’ kids reach puberty and enter school? They feel like total dweebs with their thumb-sucking fairytale view of the world while other kids are into ‘badass’, ‘cool’, and ‘edgy’ stuff. At this juncture, the goo-goo kid has two options. Stick to his/her simple-mindedly bland and simple-minded moralistic view of the world–as a G-rated OR try to fit into the BADASS world of COOL thugs, skanks, or deviants.
This is the problem faced by many people raised under a stupid simple-minded version of conservatism. They reach a point where their only option is to remain simple-minded OR join the other side. (But, this can happen from the other ideological spectrum too. Communism under Stalin and Mao infantilized the masses respectively in Russia and especially China. Entire generations were raised on the Simple Truths of Marxism-Leninism, and they saw the world according to a simple good vs evil dichotomy. As long as the people didn’t know the world outside communism–which explains why communist governments were shut out foreign influence–, the simple Faith was adequate to their basic psychological and ‘spiritual’ needs. But, when Russia and China increasingly opened up their nations to the outside world, their peoples were often unprepared to deal with new complex realities. The governments of both nations had long denied anything good or just existed in the capitalist world. Many living under communism, though mired in backwardness or poverty, had come to accept the Official Lie–that they were lucky to live under a communist system. So, when the eyes of Chinese and Russian youths were opened to the advanced state of the West(and the capitalist East), they freaked out and came to detest and reject their own government, system, and official values. In China, it led to the Tiananmen Square Incident. In Russia, the loss of faith in communism led to the wild chaos of the. After roughly ten yrs of political turmoil, both nations had to rely on nationalism and economic growth to restore pride, unity, and order. The failure of communism and the angry reaction against it were the product of the decades of simple-minded lies which had to be swallowed whole hog or couldn’t be swallowed at all. When Chinese and Russians came to see the advanced state and the abundance in the West, they could no longer swallow communism. But, Russians soon discovered they couldn’t swallow the simple-minded promises of radical capitalism either which, in the 90s, only enriched the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else. So, simple-minded communism was followed up by simple-minded capitalism, and the Russians finally settled for a kind of moderate fascism under Putin.
In China in the 1980s, the realization of the failure of communism wasn’t followed by failure of capitalism as in Russia. Capitalism took root in China and seemed to do wonders. The political turmoil was rather the culmination of the success of capitalism and the open cultural policy allowing educated Chinese to see the developed capitalist world and realize how richer and more advanced it was in contrast to China. Even so, it was a reaction to the simple-minded official ideology of the Chinese communist party which no longer seemed to be a legitimate moral basis for power. The educated and thoughtful people in China were no longer buying the party line. Indeed, many felt repulsed by it, just as European youths in the 1960s felt betrayed by and lied to by their elders. It didn’t matter that European youths in the 60s and Chinese youths in the late 80s lived under different political systems–democratic in Europe vs. autocratic in China. What both groups had in common was that they had been raised by parents, schools, and politicians who had preferred and professed simplicity over complexity. As such, young people failed to develop a complex enough view of the world that would be immune to radical promises of a Better World. (Even so, it must be admitted that while European youths of the 60s were demanding something outrageous and ridiculous, the Chinese youths of the 1980s were only asking for basic freedom and human rights. Their goals were different, but their disillusionments with the status quo shared certain common psychological characteristics.)

Returning to movies and music, it’s no good to make one’s kids see only G-rated Disney fare or let them see every corrosive garbage and filth on TV. The G-rated stuff fails to develop the proper immunities and complexity of mind while filthy stuff corrupts and poisons the child’s mind and soul, succumbing them to ugliness, inhumanity, and rot So, what is to be done? It’s best to expose kids to movies that show the world-as-it-really-is(with all the darkness and ambiguities) but within a certain moral context. Violence presented within a context of moral, social, or philosophical seriousness is okay but pointless gratuitous violence is not. Dark and disturbing themes are welcome as long as they are treated intelligently. Also, instead of movies where cowboys are always good and Indians are always bad, it’s better to introduce them to movies where good and evil exists on both sides. We need not worry that such exposure might undermine a child’s commitment to one’s own people since most people naturally feels greater loyalty to their own race and nation. At any rate, a thoughtful person must be able to think beyond ‘my side, right or wrong’. That isn’t thought or morality but merely law of the jungle. To be sure, there are times when ‘my side, right or wrong’ is necessary: when the other side thinks the same way and wont’ reciprocate good will on your part.

Anyway, a person brought up under an intelligent and thoughtful culture is less likely to fall prey to the garbage that dominates much of our popular culture. Even if a thoughtful person enjoys trash once in awhile, he or she will recognize it as fun trash than as the Meaning of Life. If you raise a child to appreciate and love all forms of great music, he or she may enjoy stupid dance songs once in awhile but will never mistake Thalia or Britney Spears for Beethoven or Wagner(or even the Jazz masters). But, if you only allow a child to listen to G-rated goo-goo music, his or her mind will be filled with mush; eventually, goo-goo mush will be vulnerable and lose out to filthy or stupid caca music. If all knows is Alvin and the Chipmunks, there will come a time when he’ll fall prey to Goth or Rap.
If conservatism is about hierarchy, young people must be exposed to and introduced to all elements within the hierarchy. Only then will they able to distinguish the noble from the ignoble, the higher truths from lesser truths, beauty from ugliness, reality from falsity, and so on. If you only expose children to dumb or simple-minded conservatism(as The Truth), they won’t develop immunities and will later be defenseless against the charms and seductions of the wilder and more orgasmic forms of cultural expressions OR be impressed by and cross over to the highly intellectual forms of leftist ideology. Chomsky is an A-hole but a fierce intellectual, and the cult of his intelligence and intellect alone have won over many acolytes. Many young people think he must be a great man simply because he’s smart and wrote so many books and essays on the subject of politics. To make kids immune to jungle boogie of Afro-jungle-music and to the radical venom of the left-wing Jews, they must be exposed to art and culture that rise high above mere goo-goo stuff and to ideas of the Right that are just as formidable and complex as the grand theories of the Left.

Controlling as Opposed to Denying Hate.

If you listen to liberals, there’s nothing worse than HATE. Indeed, they want to suppress ‘hate speech’. But, is hatred always or necessarily a bad thing? Don’t liberals hate certain ideas, things, and peoples as well? We need to consider two issues. What is the true nature and purpose of hate, and how do liberals define hate? Once that’s well understood, we’ll better underst the role of hatred in human nature, experience, values, and destiny.

What do liberals mean by hate? When liberals speak of ‘hate’, they really mean a specific kind of hate. In their warped minds, only these specific kinds of hate are truly hateful while other forms of hatred are simply regarded as moral outrage or righteous anger. This kind of hypocritical or self-delusional thinking goes back to Christianity or even earlier. Consider the Christian concept of HEATHEN-ness or HERESY. To a Christian, a non-Christian is a heathen filled with ignorance and superstition. If you were to tell a Christian that he himself is also ignorant and superstitious–in the sense that he only knows the Christian God or that Christian theology is a fairytale–, he would angrily reject the characterization since Christianity is, of course, the True Knowledge and since Christian view of God and the Universe is the infallible Truth. In other words, a Christian believes that he cannot be Ignorant since Faith in God reveals all essential TRUTH. What does it matter if one is ignorant of other religions, other cultures, other systems of thoughts, or scientific theories? As far as a Christian is concerned, the only Real Ignorance is not knowing the Truth of God. If one knows the Truth of God, then his ignorance of other matters is trivial, insignificant, or meaningless; truth outside Christianity is deemed non-essential. A Christian feels the same way about Love and Hate. To a Christian, only feelings between God and Man constitute REAL LOVE, and the only True Love that can exist between man and woman is one blessed by God and Jesus. All others forms of spiritual love in other religions or social arrangements are really DEMONIC, and the love between man and woman without the blessings of the Christian God is just animal lust driven by the Devil. Christianity has a way of totalitarizing words and concepts. John said in the beginning there was The Word. And, Jews who came up with the original religion said there is Only One God. The One and Only God is the True God while all other gods are false gods. There is only one Truth and all else are lies. So, the totalitarian roots of modern leftism can be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And since Islam also shares the common spiritual root, I would suggest that we call radical Islam "Islamo-Marxism" than "Islamo-Fascism".

Anyway, according to Christian moral understanding, Christian Love is True Love but Christian Hate can never be hate but just another form of love. Conversely, since pagan people worship the devil, their love can only be wanton lust and their hate can only be ugly and wicked. In contrast, Christians cannot hate. (In the movie ‘Fanny and Alexander’, the sadistic step-father minister is convinced to the very end that he’s acting out of love when harshly punishing and tormenting Alexander.) Christian hatred of heathens and heretics was said to be tough love, moral outrage, righteous anger, or a profound despair at the wickedness of mankind. So, it didn’t matter if Christians burned people alive, tortured people, enslaved heathens, or destroyed the cultures, monuments, and temples of pagan peoples. Such acts could never be forms of hatred since Christians love all mankind and reject Satan. It didn’t matter if Christians suppressed, banned, or eradicated the cultures of other peoples and used all manner of force to cram Christianity down their throats. Since the deeds were carried out in the name of Truth and Love, it never occurred to the Christians that they were acting out of blind ignorance, intolerance, or hatred. As far as the Christians were concerned, non-Christians were the ones who were hateful, ignorant, and deceitful since they didn’t know nor accept God, Jesus, and the Bible.

Now, one must admit there is a certain logic to the Christian way of thinking. Whether Christian theology is right or wrong, one could argue that Christians had a ‘higher’ or ‘nobler’ goal than most other peoples. One could say Christians were sincere in trying to spread the Word of God, Love, and Salvation throughout the world. And considering the arbitrarily cruel and oppressive nature of most cultures around the world, we can’t deny that the spread of Christianity did a lot of good for mankind. Even so, Christianity had a totalitarianizing, totalitarizing, or totalizing impact on language. It’s one thing to say that Christians felt morally justified in their hatred or that their hatred was of a higher kind, but to say Christian hatred wasn’t hatred because Christians served God is malarkey. Hatred is hatred, just like anger is anger, and ignorance is ignorance. One can argue that certain forms of ignorance are more tolerable or acceptable than others. For instance, most of us are ignorant of the cultural habits of some half-naked New Guinea tribe, but that kind of ignorance is more acceptable in modern society than ignorance of the cultures of Greeks, French, British, Chinese, or Americans. There are things that are worthier and more demanding of knowledge and attention. A person who knows the batting average of every baseball player yet knows nothing about the Constitution or American Presidents of the 20th Century can be said to be more seriously Ignorant than someone who knows the Constitution and the political history of America but knows nothing of Yogi Berra’s batting average. Even so, ignorance of baseball statistics is still a form of ignorance–even if ignorance of something of trivial relevance to most people. Similarly, even hatred in the name of Love is hatred.
Also, there’s no such thing as all-inclusive Love. Even if one professes to Love all of Humanity, it is only one kind of universal love, and each kind of universal love comes with its own conditions, and all conditions have their list of loves and hates. For instance, Christianity loves the potential soul that maybe saved in every individual, but it doesn’t love everyone unconditionally. Indeed, Christianity had powerful hatreds for certain ideas, values, and attitudes. A Christian may say that he doesn’t hate the person per se but only the values, ideas, and attitudes the wicked person espouses; but can we so conveniently separate a man from his values? It’s too simple to say that if a Christian hates a Muslim, he only hates the Islamic(demonic) faith that has taken control of the man’s soul but still loves the soul itself that may one day be turned brought before the light of Jesus.
Indeed, it is true enough that religions like Christianity and Islam encourage and welcome conversion of heathens or infidels to the Truth Faith, and as such, are to be distinguished from an ideology like Nazism that said all Jews are subhuman regardless of what they believed or espoused. But, it’s still been the case that Christianity and Islam only accepted people who embraced the Core Theology, thought Correct Thoughts, and lived the Redeemed Life. Neither could accept humanity AS IS without its conversion to the True Faith. This didn’t necessarily entail violence or forceful acts of conversion–and indeed Christians have foresworn violence-as-tool-for-conversion for quite some time–, but Christians and Muslims, according to their religion, are supposed to hate the social, spiritual, and cultural obstacle preventing heathens from attaining God’s One Truth.
Indeed, Jesus himself was a man of profound hatred. His hatred wasn’t the simple tribal kind but one of moral righteousness. He thought he understood the True Meaning of God. He was a man of peace who preached understanding and love, but he had deep hatred for powerful people, both Jewish and Roman, who either betrayed or violated the Word of God. Because of his moral seriousness and message of love/salvation(and the myth about him being the Son of God), Christians have been reluctant to admit that Jesus was capable of hatred or contempt; in fact, Jesus was filled with both. Indeed, no moral belief system or order is possible without hatred or contempt because morality cannot exist without emotions. One’s hatred or contempt may be of an higher order or morally justified, but it is a form of hatred or contempt all the same. We need just consider how Jesus acted in the Temple ru amok with money changers. Or, consider Jesus’s Prophecy of Redemption for Mankind. He hoped and prayed that his self-sacrifice would serve as a prelude to His Father opening up the heavens and visiting his wrath upon mankind, wiping out all the sinners and cleansing the world in a baptism of fire. Jesus felt this way not out of any sadistic obsession but because he wanted the world to be morally purified. Being a utopian of sorts, he hated imperfections. Since the world was imperfect, sinful, and animated by devilish spirits, those seeking and attaining great power and wealth in the world could only be wicked. As Jesus believed that man had souls, he didn’t necessarily hate the souls of the rich and powerful. He hated the moral and spiritual disease that took possession of those souls. This separation of man into not only body and soul but into soul-as-soul(good) and soul-as-soiled(evil) allowed Christians to come up with elaborate rationale for their moral righteousness and aggressiveness. No matter how much violence, mayhem, and killings Christians perpetrated throughout history, they rationalized(or spiritualized) their actions by saying ‘we are attacking the diseased body, not the soul’ or ‘we are attacking the demon spirits taken possession of the soul, not the soul itself’. So, if a pagan burned his victim at the stake, it was simply evil and hateful, BUT if a Christian burned his victim, it was an act of love to save the soul from the cancer of wickedness. Pagan violence was torture, Christian violence was chemotherapy. As such, Christian violence couldn’t really be called hatred, or if it was hatred, it was hate for the sinful flesh or the demons taken over the soul than for the soul itself.

A similar kind of self-deceit prevails among the liberals and on the Left. So convinced of their moral superiority, they cannot admit that they feel hate or harbor hatreds too. According to their point of view, the Left stands for Love while the Right stands for Hate. So, even leftist hatred isn’t rea hatred, or at most, it is hatred of injustice or evil. In contrast, the Right is said to be about hatred pure and simple; therefore, even love on the Right is said to be founded on Hate. (A rightist might argue that he hates in order to defend what his loves; therefore, his hatred is founded on love. But, a leftist might argue that a rightist loves in order to justify his hatred, i.e. a rightist hates because he likes to hate, and so, his professed love for his own people or culture is a pretext or shabby justification for his hatred. In other words, rightist love is founded on hatred than vice versa.) Much of secular leftism is Christian moralism Redux.
Marxism, for instance, claims to be for all mankind, justice, equality, and all that. So, Marxist violence is said to be necessary violence, a violence borne of love of humanity. It is the hammer of love battering the forces of hate. Of course, some leftists–like Che Guevara and Mao–will admit that they feel hatred for people and ideas standing in the way of ‘progress’, but other leftists characterize their aggressive passions as righteous anger, not hatred. Just like Christians of old, they presumably don’t hate anyone but only want to change his hearts and mind–through violence and force if necessary. Just as Christians think in terms of body vs soul(or pure soul vs stained soul), the Left thinks in terms of Man vs Consciousness. The Left claims to love all mankind, having problems with an individual’s consciousness ONLY IF it’s not with The Program. So, the Left thinks in terms of ‘cure the sickness, save the patient’. The Left will readily admit that some people have to be killed because they refuse conversion to True Science or pose a counter-revolutionary threat. But, there is still the idea that the Left wants to embrace all of humanity through the infallible scientific truth of Marxist thought, and therefore, its ‘hatred’ or violence is morally justified–necessary evils in order to achieve the higher good. Of course, there is some truth to this. Hitler’s killing of Jews should not be compared with the Allied Bombing of Germany or Japan. Though Allied air campaign may have been excessive and even criminal, the ultimate goal was to defeat belligerent and psychotic regimes and to create a better and more stable world order. Of course, UK and US were not radical leftist nations but liberal-conservative democratic ones, but their conduct in war vs. that of Germany/Japan does illustrate that not all hatreds and violence are of the same order. Our point, at any rate, is to point out that even good hate is hate.

Anyway, in contrast to the Left, the Right is seen as essentially hateful and evil because it tends to be tribalist, nationalist, or racist. But, not all forms of universalism are off the hook as far as the secular leftists are concerned. Though some religions– specially Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam–happen to be universalist like Marxism, Leftists have generally disdained religion as unscientific and superstitious, and as such, a force of Ignorance manipulated by the powers-that-be to control the masses and keep them in their place. Also, the emphasis on the Meek Inheriting the Earth simply didn’t jibe with the revolutionary thrust of Marxism which said mankind must UNITE AND FIGHT in order to create a just new order.
There is some truth to the leftist charge against the Right. The Right doesn’t accept the universalist notion of humanity(or justice), and even when it does, prefers border and barriers among peoples than all of humanity being part of some ONE New World Order.
Also, even the Rightist concept of universalism embraces the necessity of hierarchy. So, the Spanish conquerors of the Americas set up a system where white Christians were to rule over the natives even after the latter converted to the Faith.
In the United States, blacks were converted to Christianity, but white conservative forces still maintained a barrier between the white world and the black world despite their belief in the same God. Some Christian whites wanted to maintain the institution of slavery while others wanted to maintain discriminatory barriers without slavery. At the extreme end, there was Nazism in Germany, an ideology in which race and consciousness were believed to be one and the same. A communist could hate someone’s ‘false’ consciousness, but he was not supposed to hate the man himself. According to communist theory, even a capitalist, Muslim, or Nazi could be converted to communist consciousness. If the ‘sickness’ was cured, the ‘patient’ was cured. He too could be a good communist, a comrade. And, we saw some of this in practice in East Germany. Though Soviet troops behaved horribly in the early yrs of occupation and even though communist rule in East Germany was oppressive and miserable, there was still the idea that at long as East Germans adopted Marxism and maintained the alliance with the USSR, they were all comrades and international brethren. This wasn’t possible according to Nazism which determined a person’s worth by race. Of course, race alone couldn’t save or favor someone in the Nazi order. Nazis were pro-Aryan but didn’t tolerate fellow ‘Aryans’ who didn’t get with the program or resisted the national agenda. So, a communist or Jehovah’s Witness ‘Aryan’ could end up dead like a Jew. So, Nazism too required ‘Aryans’ to be develop the ‘correct’ consciousness. And, it’s also true enough that Nazis regarded many non-Aryan peoples as acceptable in the New Order they hoped to create; a person wasn’t subhuman simply because he wasn’t Aryan, though Aryans were regarded as the racial king-of-the-hill. But, certain peoples and races were truly looked down upon as subhuman or unworthy. Though Nazis had little contact with blacks, contempt was the rule. Nazis had little use for Russian Slavs though they tolerated other nationalities of Slavs better. But, if you were Jewish, your consciousness didn’t matter. Nazis believed that the essential Jewish consciousness was rooted in the Jewish race or biology. Jews were said to think and act the way they did because due to Jewish genetics. As Jewish consciousness could not be separated from the Jewish body, there was no way to cure the ‘Jewish sickness’. The only way to deal with the Jewish disease was to be rid of the Jew altogether, body and soul–because the Jewish soul was the flipside of the Jewish body.

There are two ways to define hatred: psychological and moral. The psychological understanding of hatred is rather simple and uncontroversial. Hatred is simply a passionate dislike, a strong distaste, dread, smoldering rage, or feelings of antipathy, animosity, or contempt. One can hate anything or anyone. Some feelings of hatred are acute, some are chronic. Some are emotional, others are well-reasoned. Certain hatreds are inborn, others are developed in life. Some are temporary, some are long-lasting. A friend may fight a friend and hate him, but they may be on good terms again. A person can hate spinach. A person can hate a certain movie or book or the design of a house or car. A person can hate certain smells.(Hatred of certain noxious smells is an inborn evolutionary trait and advantage in most cases as terrible smelling stuff is often dangerous.)
And, there are certain emotions or reactions connected to hatred. Intense fear or phobia is often related to hatred but isn’t the same. It may be true that a phobic person hates the source of his fear, but not all hatreds are phobic, which is to say one can hate something without fearing it. A person may intensely hate the way someone looks or sounds without fearing that person. And, fear isn’t always the same as hatred. We would be fearful of lions and tigers in nature, but we don’t necessarily hate them for what they are. We would simply hate what they might do to us if they came upon us in nature. In the PSYCHOLOGICAL sense, hatred is easy to define and understand. We all have feelings of hatred for all sorts of things, individuals, ideas, and things that happen in our lives. Indeed, we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t or couldn’t feel this hatred.
Few would deny that it’s wrong to feel hatred, but we believe that our feelings of hatred should be controlled and restrained whenever necessary. For instance, it’s natural to hate ugliness, but we don’t think it’s right to go to an ugly person and say, HEY, I HATE THE WAY YOU LOOK! That would be mean and hurtful. So, even though the person’s ugliness(or smelliness) may offend or hurt us, we want to be diplomatic and kind, as long as know it’s not the person’s fault. A person born ugly is ugly, and he or she can’t do anything about it. And, a sick person lying in bed and rotting to death cannot be faulted for the smells he or she produces. Of course, it’s different with a person who goes out of his or her way to look or smell offensive. In those cases, we may and indeed must express our hatred of their hideous behavior or agenda. (The problem with blacks is that even when they don’t go out of their way to be evil or offensive, their very nature is often offensive and destructive to society. When a whole bunch of them get together to have fun, the good times often spill over into madness and chaos. And, this is why the issue of black social crisis is such a difficult one to solve. Germans and Russians did horrible things in the 20th century, but given the right conditions and circumstances, they are capable of establishing and maintaining stable societies. I’m not sure if this is possible with blacks. Can a
majority-black society maintain High Civilization? Sure, blacks can create and maintain a low-level society or even a modest civilization–like those African kingdoms–, but do they have the inherent qualities to maintain a highly complex and advanced social system? All the evidence so far seem to indicate otherwise. But, what really complicates this issue is that black problems aren’t necessarily about black evil because even decent blacks mess up just as royally as bad blacks. They have a hard time getting their act together. Consider black churches. All those people may indeed be sincere about God and moral values, but just LOOK AT THEM. They are so wild, crazy, and childish. So, this complicates the moral dynamics of the social/racial problem. If black problems are rooted mainly in evil ideas or leadership by evil men–like Nazism was rooted in evil aspects of German society–, then we can fix the problem by eradicating evil individuals and bad ideas plaguing the community–as was done with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in WWII. But, the real problem of blackness may not be rooted in some ideology or a bunch of evil individuals but in the very DNA itself, which means that even good blacks are problematic in the way that certain breeds of dogs tend to be. A pitbull is not ‘morally’ more evil than other dogs, but it is NATURALLY(amorally) more aggressive and dangerous. So, people understandably fear and hate pitbulls more. Similarly, the hatred of blacks is different from hatred of Nazis because we hate not only the stupid ideas in the black community but the black biological potential to cause harm and mess up things.)
We may also hate a certain movie, but we would not burn down the movie theater or kill the movie maker because of the way we feel(though Muslims may be the exception in some cases). Because so much in the world is flawed, ugly, revolting, offensive, savage, cruel, disgusting, or unpleasant, it’s natural for us to hate ‘bad’ things. We all hate HIV germs and cancer cells. We all hate corrupt lawyers, incompetent doctors, and lazy nurses. We hate rotten parents who show no responsibility to their kids. The basic emotions that we feel toward negative things in the world are feelings of hatred. Of course, intense and burning hatred can be (self)destructive, and we might end up like animals acting out raw emotions. We want an orderly society, so we don’t want to be dominated by our emotions. So, we try to turn our hatreds into constructive emotions to improve society. (Here, we must make a distinction between controlling/channeling AND denying hatred. It’s one thing to admit feelings of hatred and recognize them as natural and even essential–just like sexual desire–and use them constructively, morally, and lawfully, but it’s quite another to deny hatred as a necessary emotion and, instead, castigate it as pure evil. Controlling and channeling hatred are necessary for the development and protection of society, but denial of hatred can lead to dissipation, decadence, and self-destruction because people would not be allowed to discuss and solve the causes or reasons of their hatred. Their only options or choices would be to deny/repress their hatred and blame themselves for their emotions/attitudes instead of honestly expressing what they justifiably hate about the things or people causing the problem. So, if blacks move into a neighborhood and mess up things, white people are NOT allowed to talk about it, state the obvious, complain about it. Social scientists say the problem is not with blacks-causing-the-problem but with whites-who-take-notice of-and-are-bothered-by-the-problem. So, whites only have two options: ignore the worsening reality &pretend it’s not happening OR move to an area with fewer or no blacks. Of course, some social scientists do admit there is indeed social problems of increased crime and disruptive social behavior when blacks move into the neighborhood. These social scientists recognize white people’s reasons for being afraid of blacks or even hating them. But, as liberals and leftists, they still insist that the problems of blacks are purely historical or economic; black act in a disturbing way because of the legacy of slavery or conditions of poverty. Therefore, instead of hating blacks, white people should hate the history and institutions that made blacks so hateful to begin with. Since whites dominated most of American history, this means whites must essentially hate themselves for having caused harm to other peoples. If a social scientist of the Right countered, arguing that the problem of blacks are the product of history and more the product of biology–blacks being stronger, less intelligent, naturally more aggressive–, he is shouted down as a ‘racist’ and a blind hater. It’s just a fact that certain peoples in this country cannot be hated no matter what they do, or even if the hatred toward them is recognized as understandable, the liberals tell us that non-white problems are purely the result of white gentile oppression in the past–and even in the present. So, if a black guy rapes your mother, your hatred of him is understandable BUT you should really hate the white slave owners 200 yrs ago who exploited the black dude’s ancestors. What goes around comes around. Eye for an eye.)
Anyway, blacks, illegal aliens, the gay agenda freaks, and liberal/leftist Jews are causing a great deal of harm to white America, but white America is told over and over, in a repressive Victorian way, that ALL feelings of hatred for Jews, blacks, gays, and illegal aliens are ALWAYS wrong and evil–though they can hate you all they want. (But, as a safety valve for repressed white hatred, the liberal Jewish media allow and even approve of hatred, fear, and animosity toward Muslims and Chinese. So, what a person cannot say about Jews can be said about Muslims. What a person cannot say about blacks can be said about the Chinese–or Russians. This way, liberal Jews kill two birds with one stone. The frustrated and repressed hate reflexes of white gentiles are released and relaxed on certain targets that also happen to be regarded as hostile to Jewish interests.) It’s one thing to say it’s morally wrong to hate all Jews, blacks, and gays, but it’s quite another to say all negative feelings toward Jews, blacks, gays, and illegal aliens are evil–therefore, white people must spend 24/7 trying to love, respect, and admire ALL aspects of the ‘special’ peoples. It was precisely this Victorian repression of hatred that led to the spiritual apotheosis of Martin Luther King, super popularity of Oprah, and the presidency of Obama. It was not just white guilt but white fear which elevated them to ‘sort of god’ status. The truth is there are many things in the black community and about blacks that whites really don’t like and even hate. But, whites are NOT ALLOWED to hate anything about blacks. Even criticizing rap music may be condemned as ‘racism’. So, white gentiles, brainwashed and manipulated by the liberal Jewish media, try desperately to find reasons to love blacks since unconditionally loving blacks has become a moral imperative. Since so many blacks–leaders and masses–are crazy, whites go out-of-their-way to be supportive when they come upon some ‘nice’ and ‘clean cut’ black folks. White people cling to and support these blacks to prove their anti-‘racism’ and also to send a not-too-subtle message to not-too-likable blacks they will be similarly rewarded if they just act nice like the ‘good’ blacks. Colin Powell milked this white psychology for decades to move up in his career. Of course, many whites know that the liberal Jews are largely to credit or blame for having used the media, academia, and other sources of information to disseminate this mindset among white goyim, and so, there’s a good deal of natural hatred for Jews among white gentiles, but white gentiles aren’t allowed to admit–to others or even to themselves–that they feel negative feelings toward Jews because being critical of Jews is said to be crypto-Nazi. Since hatred of Jews is said to be never ever justifiable, it is repressed among white conservatives and resurfaces as manic Judeophilia. By professing total love of Jews and Israel, silly white conservatives hope that the rich, powerful, and influential Jews will eventually take their side. Just as whites overcompensate and over-reward ‘good’ blacks to prove their lack of hatred, white gentiles over-compensate and over-support Jews in the hope that ‘noble’ and ‘saintly’ Jews will come over to the conservative camp. Conservatives seem to be blind to the fact that most Jews only want the support and devotion of white conservatives but feel nothing but contempt for the values and ideas of white conservatism.

Hatred must be recognized and accepted as a natural emotion just like sexual feelings. But, like sexuality, hatred must be controlled, shaped, moralized, and have a good reason for its expression. For example, when faced with corrupt politicians deserving of our hatred , we don’t simply bring out the pitchforks and hang them. We’ve also come to realize that no one is perfect, so we should be forgiving of people’s imperfections, transgressions, and idiocies(though we may indeed be too forgiving these days). So, we often say we are offended, disappointed, upset, or at most outraged by someone’s actions or thoughts. We generally don’t say, we HATE you for what you did or are. And, it’s true enough that we should nevert act on pure hatred alone. Indeed, all emotions must be curtailed to some extent. Even love has to be tempered, controlled, and shaped according to social rules and needs. It would be bad for society if people just walked up to anyone they desired and said, HEY BABY, I LOVE YOU AND WANT TO SUCK YOU ALL NIGHT. Surely, that is an expression of affection, desire, and love, but we don’t want wild emotions spilling out into the public sphere. Indeed, we need only consider Woodstock to see what happens when LOVE happens on a large scale. Them 300,000 kids were supposed to be about love, peace, and blah blah, but what they created in three days was a Disaster Area and stinking mess(which none of them stuck around to clean up). Some were naked, some were having orgies, some were napping in the mud, some were taking a crap in the open–feeding mother nature?–, and etc. It was all about letting it all hang loose, about returning to the Garden. Funny that Woodstock had looked like The Garden when the rubes ran it but then looked like hell after 300,000 flower folks loved it to death. Society needs order, and all emotions have to be controlled, shaped, and mindful of others. Just as out-of-control hatred is ruinous, so is out-of-control love. Just consider the movie PLAY MISTY FOR ME. The crazy bitch in the movie loves, loves, and loves the Clint Eastwood character and simply cannot accept the fact that he doesn’t love her back. Out-of-control love is very much like out-of-control hatred. It imposes itself, its will, and its agenda on people who may not want any of it. Ironically, it turns into hatred because the object of love may feel loathing and hatred for the obsessive love-struck stalker and because the stalker may come to feel hatred toward the object of his/her love for not loving him/her back. (Very true of Christians too, who often hated heathens and heretics for not returning or reciprocating the Christian love shown them.) Would a pretty woman like an ugly guy chasing her out of love when she only feels revulsion for his ugly-mugly ass? Would a handsome guy like an ugly dogula chasing him around out of obsessive love when he thinks she looks like an ass of a baboon? Anyway, the psychological definition of hate is easy enough to understand, and we can all agree that the ability to feel hatred is universal in all higher animals and even necessary for our survival.
Hate mechanism is, in some ways, an extension of our pain mechanism. Pain alerts us to potential, real, or imagined danger. A hand that comes into contact with fire feels intense pain. A hellishly unpleasant sensation. We all HATE pain. Pain sends signals to the brain that the hand must be removed from the fire because, otherwise, it will be permanently damaged. Pain is nasty, ugly, and hellish, but our survival depends on it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t move our hands from a fire. It’s because we feel back pain, for example, that we know when to rest our backs from stress. If we didn’t feel the pain, we would exert ourselves even as our backs are wearing out. We hate pain because pain hurts, and what hurts us is hateful. So, we try to avoid things and people that cause us pain, and we come to hate things and people that may cause us pain. Hatred, in this sense, is pre-emptive avoidance of pain. We hate pain, therefore we try to avoid it. To avoid it, we must be fearful and suspicious of AND alert and aggressive against those which will likely cause us pain. For instance, animals from a very young age find out that much of nature is dangerous and threatening(and certain hate mechanisms are inborn; for instance, most cats naturally feel intensely nervous when they see a snaky object or hear a eagle-like sound; they evolved to instinctively associate those sounds and images with Danger!) So, wolves, for instance, develop strong hatreds for bears, cougars, other wolf packs, human hunters, and other creatures. Indeed, if they didn’t have these emotions, they would not survive. All animals have keen alertness, and this alertness is tied to fear, and fear gives rise to hatred. Of course, some animals are capable of feeling greater hatred than others. Generally, predators are more hate-prone than herbivores, perhaps because predators must not only flee or defend itself from other creatures but must attack other creatures for food. This very nature makes predators psychologically more complex than herbivores. The hatred felt by herbivores is simpler and easier to understand. They naturally fear and hate predators, creatures that mean to do them harm. It’s a simple kind of fear and hatred. Predators too feel this kind of hatred because most predators are also the prey of other predators. Also, top predators often fight and kill one another. Lions may be kings of the African wilderness, but a lion pride fears and hates other lion prides. Anyway, predators don’t just feel defensive or fearful hatred–the kind that herbivores feel–but feel what might be called the ‘love-kill hatred’. Predators must hunt for survival. They look forward to the next meal which they LOVE to eat. So, a predator does not kill the prey out of simple hatred. It hunts out of love–not so much for the animal itself but for its taste. No prey is willing to lay down peacefully to a predator and say ‘eat me.’. All try to run or give the predator a hard time, and some species even fight back and kill the predator. For instance, a leopard hunting warthogs may actually end up the prey. Even when a predator chases after an harmless prey, the pursuit is usually very frustrating. A gazelle cannot do much harm to a cheetah, but cheetah must exert a tremendous amount of energy to catch those tricky creatures in a hot dry terrain. So, one could say there’s a strange combination of love and hatred in a predator’s aggression against a prey. One could also argue this is why male psychology–in both animal and human world–may be more complex than female psychology. In nature, males generally chase after females, and this activity is oftentimes a blend of love and hatred. For one thing, males must fight other males in often murderous hate-fests in order to win the right to hump the most females. We see this among deers and elephants. The males fight on and on until the top male finally prevails and gains the opportunity of passing its sperm onto the females. We also see this behavior among wolves and lions. So, the male desire to make love to females must often pass the hurdle of hateful fighting amongst the males. There’s further complexity because not all females give themselves easily to males, even to top males. So, in many cases, the male animal must use aggression and violence to subdue the female. The male seeks to make love but it must act in a brutal and hateful manner. Some males may even show anger and hate against the female for rebuffing their loving/sexual attention. This is surely true of human males. Some ugly guy may fall for a girl and hope to win her heart with the prospect of making love to her all night long, but what if she thinks the guy is pretty ugly and gross? He will feel rejected and humiliated, and his feelings of love will turn into feelings of hatred. Hatred for the object of his desire/love that rejected his advances and even hatred for himself for being ugly, gross, and unappealing(like the crazy murderer in Michael Mann’s movie "Manhunter"). . As people are narcissistic by nature, the realization of one’s own ugliness can have devastating consequences. Indeed, many psycho killers are ugly folks, and most of the evil tyrants in history have been not-too-good looking people who sought power instead.

If the psychological nature, dimensions, and definition of hatred are easy to understand, this is not so with the moral definition or understanding of hatred, especially if the moral order in question tend to believe in higher or transcendental absolutes. Moral systems tend to divide the world into good vs evil, and certain emotions tend to fall in the GOOD category while others fall into the EVIL category, sometimes in a wholesale or totalistic way. So, instead of good hatred vs evil hatred, a moral system will argue that Hatred itself is Evil while Love itself is Good. This kind of moral system becomes blindly ignorant or repressive of its own hatreds and confuse them for love.
This has been true especially of Christianity, Islam, and Communism. Moral systems tend to simplify, but simplifying a complex world leads to complexes, which is why our civilization is confused and contradictory. We can see this problem with sexuality in the history of Christianity. Because of the moral concept of sinful flesh and transcendent spirit, Christianity concluded that sexual emotions were sinful. Therefore, the Ideal for the holiest aspirants in the Church was a celibate life. In contrast, those who couldn’t resist sexual temptation were always reminded of their sinful attachment to sinful flesh–even if they were married. Though Christianity made peace with the institution of marriage, it never fully acknowledged the moral validity of sexual emotions until the 20th century. According to Christian ideology, there could be no truly holy sexuality. All sexuality was suspect and something to fear; it was, at best, a necessary sin–like having to take a crap.
There was the concept of holy matrimony, but its purpose was to garb and conceal the sinful nature of sex. Also, couples were advised not to enjoy the sexual act; rather, they were to have sex only for the purpose of procreation, to produce offsprings to be raised under the radiant light of God, and the highest ideal for the best kids was to enter the church, lead celibate lives, and end up with cancer of the balls.

Of course, this puritanical and totalistic banishment, suppression, and denial of sexuality was not only unhealthy but impossible. And, no matter what the Christians did, sexuality crept into the Christian life, often subliminally, at times even blatantly, through literature, music, fine arts, and so on. Even the religious folks during the Renaissance could not resist sensuous paintings of the Virgin Mary. Many paintings and sculptures of Jesus were actually quite beautiful in a fleshy way. And Michelangelo’s David was a good looking dude. But, many Christians, for as long as possible, refused to frankly discuss sexual matters or admit that sex was natural and had a vital role in society. They looked upon sexual feelings as something dirty and pretended as though marriage wasn’t about sexuality but serving the will of God. So, it was ‘union under God’, ‘blessed by Jesus’, and so on and so forth instead of admitting, ‘okay, you two wanna have sex and enjoy orgasm.’ The Christian Church, as it became surrounded by a secularizing culture, eventually came around to the notion that sexuality is indeed a vital and healthy aspect of human life. Today’s Christians still argue for sexual morality and commitment under God, but few would say, in a totalistic way, that sexuality in and of itself is evil or sinful. The Muslim world is another story altogether, of course.
The Jews, of course, always had a saner(and more tribal) attitude toward sexuality. Jews admitted the centrality of sex in the lives of man, and indeed much of the Old Testament is about a whole bunch of people getting laid. Indeed, the Jews regarded sexuality as a great life-creating gift from God. The problem that Jews had with sexuality was its crazy animal propensities if unchecked by moral rules. People would be f___ing like beasts or American Negroes, and the Garden of Eden would turn into Jungle of Harlem. So, according to the Jewish religion, God said, "okay, you can have and enjoy sex, but get married first and obey the rules I set forth." If those rules were followed, sex wasn’t necessarily dirty according to Judaism.

The concept of the ‘pagan’ met the same fate as sexuality in the Christian world. Because Christianity is monotheistic and believes in One God and One Truth for all men, all things pagan were deemed to be evil, devilicious, sinful, or wacky. But of course, no culture or civilization could ever completely wipe out the past and start from Year Zero. Even the Khmer Rouge failed; indeed, why even cling to the notion of Cambodian nationhood going back many centuries if a people were to start from Year Zero? So, just as tribal-nationalism survived and eventually thrived under communism, paganism survived under Christianity and cane to define much that was said to be Christian. Of course, Christians overlooked this contradiction and pretended that the pagan aspects of their civilization was perfectly in harmony with Christian ideas and teachings. Similarly, hardline communists could never admit that they were nationalists as opposed to internationalists. They tried to explain or rationalize their national communism as only a temporary stage on the road to eventual world communism. Communists made the same point about private property. Though the concept of private property was anathema in communism, communists discovered that no society could exist without some practice of private property. But, as the concept of private property was ‘wicked’ and ‘reactionary’, communists either tried to pretend that private property didn’t exist(though in fact some did exist under communism) or just a ‘evil necessity’ for the time being, eventually to be abolished when society achieves full communism. Certain myths die hard, which is why the Chinese Communist Party still insists that the current capitalist development of China is merely a stage in the eventual communization of China. And, it probably also explains why so many privileged Western leftists still cling to Marxist ideas. They fool themselves that their riches and ‘bourgeois’ compromises are really just stepping stones on the way to the bright future of real ‘progress’. They also delude themselves that their power and riches are justified, at least for the time being, because they are using their influence to spread ‘progressive’ ideals, values, and dogma. So, even as Western leftists own tremendous amount of private property, they would rather not admit it ORt pretend that their wealth is a necessary arsenal in the creation of a truly just future. There was some of this among Christian capitalists too. Consider the Robber Barons or Captains of Industry–take your choice–of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of them amassed great fortunes, but as many were were devout Christians(or vain narcissists who wanted to be loved), they never wanted to admit that money was the main passion of their lives. They sought to moralize their ‘greed’, as if to say they had earned all that money in order to be GENEROUS and do good work for Humanity. We see some of that with the likes of George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates in today’s world. These guys love money and want to own all the world but also fool themselves and try to convince us that they only want to help or save mankind. So, AVARICE, GREED, WANTON-MONEY-LUST, and VANITY had nothing to do with their ambitions. Just as Christianity moralized sexuality & spiritualized paganism and just as Marxism rationalized resurgent nationalism & some degree of market dynamics as evolutionary tools in the eventual triumph of communism, Christo-capitalists sought to justify their ‘greed’ and ‘self-interest’ as necessary tools for social good.

And, so we move to the concept of hatred. From the psychological understanding of hatred, we know hatred is an everyday feeling and occurrence. It is a universal emotion in not just humans but all higher animals. But, according to the moralistic definition of hatred, it can only be bad. But, of course, this isn’t possible since ALL people feel some form of hatred on a daily basis. We all hate something or someone. So, the moralistic, puritanical, and neo-Victorian politically correct powers-that-be have defined hatred in a narrow ideological way. To the Left, hatred is simply dislike or antipathy to other races or ethnic groups(or more specifically, white dislike for non-whites). Recently, it has come to include dislike for homosexuals and non-Christian religious groups as well. Originally, Marxists and other radical leftist also condemned homosexuality–regarded as either deviant perversion or bourgeois decadence–and sought to destroy all religions. But, with the rise of multi-culturalism and the gay agenda, the Left has incorporated ‘protection’ of religious groups–at least non-white Christian groups–and gays as part of their program.

On matters of class, Marxism didn’t exactly claim that the upper classes hated the lower classes on a gut level; rather, the bourgeois oppression of the lower classes was said to be the inevitable outcome of the exploitative nature of capitalism. In other words, capitalism’s evil went beyond the will of individual capitalists. Even if every capitalist meant well and didn’t hate the proletariat, he could only oppress and cause harm to the working class since capitalism was a form of modern wage slavery. Similarly, even if a slave master is well-meaning and decent, there can be no just relationship between him and his slaves. The system itself is inherently evil and must be abolished.
Therefore, Marx thought the evil of capitalism went beyond the individual character of capitalists. Even if every capitalist were a good decent person, the nature of capitalism could only lead to oppression since capitalism can only operate through dog-eat-dog competition among capitalists which eventually drive down profits and wages. So, even though communists hated capitalists as generally evil and greedy men, even the good, decent, and well-meaning capitalists could not be spared in the new communist order since they were part of an inherently unjust system. Communists believed that capitalists could only thrive by ruthless competition seeking total monopoly and highest profits for cheapest wages; but, the system would eventually undermine the very possibility of profits since the wealth would become concentrated in the hands of a few while the masses lived on a pittance. And, capitalists who lost out in the competition would also end up joining the masses of toiling workers. Eventually, it would lead to revolution. Similarly, many conservatives believe that the problem of Big Government is systemic than individualistic. Many conservatives argue that even if every bureaucrat were clean and hardworking, the very nature of a Giant Bureaucracy would lead to abuse of power, inefficiency, and mis-allocated resources. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Anyway, the Left seeks to own all of Love and dump all of Hate on the other side. Love is defined as ‘tolerance’ and acceptance of other races, ethnic groups, and gays. Leftist hatred of people who oppose the leftist agenda is not deemed as a form of hatred since leftists are only opposing those who HATE. Hating the "HATE"–as defined by the Left–is not hate. But, it gets funnier. Leftist LOVE requires white gentile males to hate themselves as the villains of history’s crimes, evils, oppressions, and wickedness. So, white gentile males, in order to gain Love, must hate themselves. But, this self-hatred is not called hatred but merely ‘consciousness raising’. Also, white people in general, both men and women, are expected to hate Western history, Western culture, Western values, and Western concepts. But, this hatred of one’s own heritage is not deemed as self-hate, but ‘progressive awareness’ or some such. Meanwhile, the hatred felt by non-white people and Jews toward white gentile people is not deemed as ‘hateful’ but as ‘revolutionary’, ‘liberating’, ‘progressive’, ‘righteous’. So, the hatred felt by Che Guevara wasn’t really hatred but Angry Love. Sometimes, the word RAGE is used to define the hatred of the Left, the ‘people of color’ and other favored groups. RAGE implies that non-whites are simply enraged/outraged by white evil or hatred. RAGE is understood mainly as a righteous response to white oppression. So, when Che Guevara wanted to nuke American cities, that wasn’t hate but only righteous rage(at worst). So, when Black Panthers called for killing ‘honkey pigs’, that wasn’t hatred but merely ‘black rage’ or ‘revolutionary consciousness’. Now, one can argue that some non-white people, in certain conditions and contexts, had a right to hate white people, or at least white people who oppressed them. Surely, if you were black and were discriminated against or called ‘nigger’ all your life, you certainly would NOT have liked the people who treated you that way. If your oppressors are white, you would naturally feel hatred of whites. That is understandable. What is unjustifiable is the pretension that such hatred is not hatred but only a form of ‘progressive’ consciousness or ‘righteous rage’. It is hatred.

The Left has every right to argue that their hatreds are more justifiable than rightist hatreds. We may agree or disagree on that count, but we should at the very least agree that hatred is hatred, and it’s not always a bad thing. What American didn’t hate the Japanese when Pearl Harbor was attacked? What American didn’t hate radical Muslims–or even much of the Muslim world–when 9/11 happened? What Russian didn’t hate Germans when Hitler waged war on the Motherland? What Palestinian doesn’t hate Jews who took the land of his forefathers? What Jew doesn’t hate Palestinians after wave after wave of terrorist attacks?
The problem is not hate, as we all feel hate. We must not be morally puritanical about the nature and practice of hate. The problem is "HATE", a morally puritanical definition where only certain kinds of hate is recognized as hate while other forms of hate–especially the leftist or the non-white kind–are deemed as forms of LOVE.
This is stupid and false, because all people feel both love and hate. Nazis were not all about hate. They hated Jews but they loved their own people, their own heritage, their own nation. Indeed, Nazi hatred was motivated very much by love. We can denounce Nazis for their murderous hatred, but let us not fool ourselves that they were ONLY about hatred. That would be a cartoonish reading of history, a cops-and-robbers vision of the world. Though one can reasonably argue that Nazi hatred was especially poisonous and psychopathic, it would be wrong to say they were motivated only by hatred or even primarily by hatred. Indeed, one could argue that the real problem of Nazism was it was premised on too much love or too much self-love. If Nazis weren’t so crazily in love with themselves, they would have felt less hatred or contempt for people different from, potentially threatening to, or standing as an obstacle to the "Aryans". Hitler wanted to invade the East not primarily out of hatred of Russians(though he felt a great deal of contempt for Russians). His primary motivation was his maniacal LOVE for the Germanic peoples and a romanticized vision of Germanic destiny. To an extent, his thinking–shaped partly by the Western novels of Karl May– wasn’t all that much than that of American whites who conquered the West and then took SW territories from Mexico. White Americans, in their self-love and idea of Manifest(or White)Destiny, thought they should own the lands inhabited by thinly populated savage Indians or inept Mexicans. Nazis were also like Jews who went to Palestine, drove out the original inhabitants, and set up a Jewish state. From the Palestinian perspective, Jewish actions seem hateful, hostile, and cruel. And indeed, it is true enough that Jews came to hate the Arabs standing in the path of Zionist dreams. Even so, it would be wrong to say that Jews were primarily motivated by their hated of Arabs or Muslims. Jews didn’t go to the trouble of establishing a Jewish state simply to hurt other peoples. Similarly, Hitler didn’t attack Russia just to satisfy a murderous hatred of Russians. He did it because he loved his own people and believed that Germans had been wronged by history. Why should a great people like the Germans be limited to their relatively small country–compared to Russia, America, and the British Empire? Hitler believed that for Germans to be truly great and powerful, they would need vast territories in the East. Of course, not all hatreds borne of great self-love are the same. American whites didn’t see American Indians or Mexicans as subhuman. The Christian culture of the American whites, at the very least, acknowledged that even Indian savages and inept Mexicans had souls. And, it’s true enough that Jews didn’t look upon Arabs or Muslims as less-than-human. But, Nazis really had a contemptuous view of Russians as lesser humans. So, in that regard, Nazi hatred was more extreme, poisonous, ruthless, and murderous. Even so, it is wrong to say that Nazis were all or only about hatred. Indeed, if Nazism teaches us anything, it is the danger of Love. Too much Love of something can lead to pathological hatred of everything that appears as an obstacle to the object of love.


So, the issue isn’t really about HATE vs. LOVE but about kinds of hatreds vs. kinds of hatreds. In other words, hatred can be good, even necessary. The issue should really about controlling, harnessing, and properly using our hatreds instead of denying Hatred or blaming only the other side of harboring hatred. Hatred is like Fire. Fire can be good or bad. Fire can save us, serve us, and protect us. It can also burn us. Fire is necessary but it must be controlled. If out of control, it can burn everything down. Same is true of hatred. Out-of-control hatred can lead to stuff like Holocaust, 9/11, or communist mass killings. But, one way to control hatred is to control love. The more we love something, the more we hate that which threatens or stands as an obstacle to what we love. Currently, liberals and leftists are showing ever greater hatred toward Free Speech because it allows "hate speech" which threatens or challenges what liberals and leftist hold dearly. Of course, the liberals are loathe to admit that they have a problem with Free Speech so they say they’re only opposed to HATE Speech, but this only shows the liberal and leftist hatred of logic, consistency, and the law. To protect and prop up the ‘Truth’ they love so much, they are willing to lie and cheat. In the name of ‘Truth’, they’ve come to hate real truth, which says freedom of speech means freedom of all sides to have their say(even if it offends the sensibility of the ‘progressive’ crowd.) Similarly, the recent behavior of Perez Hilton is an example of politically correct gay hatred of the true meaning of marriage. This guy is so in love with his Gay Agenda that he seethes with hatred at everyone who refuses to recognize homosexuality as the biological and moral equal of normosexuality, aka heterosexuality. He seeks to IMPOSE his view of politically correct morality on beauty contestants, wants to disqualify those who disagree, and would probably like to ban any anti-gay agenda speech as ‘HATE SPEECH’.
Similarly, communists, in their Total Love of their supposedly fool-proof theory and Justice, felt nothing but pure hatred toward those who disagreed or stood in the way. Since communists explained everything in terms of class conflict/progress vs. reaction, they labeled their opponents as class enemies or reactionaries(even when the dissenters were poor people or leftists). Nazis, in their Total Love of the Fatherland and the ‘Aryan’ race, developed a great contempt or hatred for people seen as standing in the way of ‘Aryan’ ambitions and power. Jews and Russians were especially hated since Jews were seen as a racial-ideological threat and since Russians were regarded as the ‘Asiatic’ horde that occupied lands that should have "rightfully" have belonged to the Germanic peoples.

So, we need a more honest definition of hatred, and we must accept hatred as part of what makes us human. People think that love, compassion, and empathy are the foundation of morality and that hatred is the evil nemesis of love, but it’s not that simple. Indeed, hatred is a necessary component of morality, no less than it is an essential component of immorality. (It must be said, however, that the greatest evil has less to do with hatred than sadism or some dark mystery. After all, sociopaths feel no emotions, and that’s what makes them so frightening, so evil. They kill or hurt victims ‘for the hell of it’. They are less motivated by hatred than by some strange and chilling desire to hurt or kill people.) Without hatred–a crucial emotion–, we would all be sociopaths. To be sure, not all sociopaths are violent or aggressive, but even passive sociopaths are not human in the normal sense. A passive sociopath may not attack or harm others but feels little or no emotion in the face of evil. If a killer abducts a child and hurts/kills him, you expect the parents to be sad but also angry and hateful toward the man who committed the crime. A parent who feels little or nothing would be a sociopath. The inability to feel hatred for the abductor/killer would be a sick thing. This is not to be confused with forgiveness and overcoming one’s hatred. A person who forgives does indeed feel hatred but seeks to find inner peace or spiritual grace. He is not a denier of hatred but a controller/surmounter of hatred. He feels human emotions of hatred but rises above them. To rise above hatred, one must be able to feel hatred to begin with. (There was a movie not long ago called ‘Forgiving Klaus Barbie.’ The woman in the documentary felt anger and hatred but wanted to go beyond them. She was a person with normal human emotions seeking higher emotions. But, suppose the woman felt no anger and hatred of Klaus Barbie despite what he did to her family. That would be sociopathic and truly frightening.)
One must also acknowledge that feelings of hatred are natural and even essential to the preservation of the self and of society. Of course, some people want to rise above Worldly matters and attain Other Worldly virtues. They may be wise folks or fools, but they don’t deny reality but seek to rise above it. In contrast, The Politically Correct Gang, filled with self-righteous dogma and rage, denies that they feel any kind of Hatred and ascribe HATE purely to the other side in the political spectrum.

Hatred is a necessary moral emotion because all loves need protection. The simplest and most essential form of morality is self-centered. Every creature has a will-to-live and a case for existing in this world and doing whatever’s necessary–hunting, fighting, stealing, etc–to survive. In this sense, even a hungry thief has a moral case to make. "I stole because I’m hungry, and I must eat to live." The consciousness that chooses to steal is taking care of the hungry body. The next level of morality is familial and then tribal. There is strong bond within the family and within the tribe. This level of morality dictates that the group may enforce whatever is necessary for the collective or communal benefit of the group, and individuals within the family or group must recognize loyalty as the most important virtue. It’s a us vs them morality. To protect and serve the Love within the community, the group be hateful to other(hostile) groups. One group may fight off other groups for food and turf. Or, the group may attack other groups to serve its own tribal needs, interests, and ambitions.

As humanity advanced and communities grew larger, greater prosperity allowed some people to think up ‘higher’ ideals than serving basic roles such as warrior, hunter, or farmer. A warrior thought in terms of fighting the enemy to defend or expand the interests of one’s own side. Hunter warred against animals to feed his people. A farmer was rooted to the land, and as such, developed a strong sense of this is ‘my land’ as opposed to that being ‘your land’.
Tribalism was also necessary for political rulers since all leaders ruled over a specific people and territory. Even so, the progress or process of history through countless wars among tribes expanded the notion of humanity. In conquering other tribes and peoples, the political realm grew larger and incorporated a much wider and more diverse groups of people. Peoples who had been tribal enemies found themselves under an expanded community which required a larger definition of WE for there to be peace and stability. When the Greek world had been defined by city-states, each city-state looked upon others as potential rivals or enemies. It was Alexander who finally united all the Greeks through conquest.
Little tribalisms could be swallowed up by a larger tribalism, just like little drops of water could be brought together to form a larger glob of water. The political classes for most of history were very war-like, and as such, all communities were highly tribalistic. For instance, the Ottoman Turks brought into its empire a great diversity of people, but this didn’t necessarily mean universalism(despite the universalist spirituality at the core of Islam). The Ottomans clearly sought to establish an Ottoman Empire distinct from other empires. Because politics for most of history was very much the tool of the military class, political ideas generally couldn’t exist in some utopian theoretical vacuum to formulate a system that would unite all of mankind. Those ‘higher’ ideas and forces–going beyond tribalism–came from the business, intellectual, and spiritual(prophetic) class. Businessmen, unlike the warrior class, spread their power and influence through peaceful trade, not war. Therefore, business was likely to undermine tribalism far more than political/military power ever could. And, intellectuals with a lot of free time and lifelong devotion to ideas were likely to dream up ideas about a New Order in which humanity would be united by advanced theories. Marxism was such an idea. So is democratic idealism and the globalist dreams of the New World Order. If businessmen and intellectuals were still part of the material world, spiritual thinkers and leaders argued against tribalism from an other-worldly perspective. They contended that all men had equal souls in the eyes of God. Therefore, if you spread the gospel of Truth, the world will become united and holy. Of course, there were plenty of spiritual and intellectual people who argued for tribalism, but the general tide was in the other direction because the thrust of all philosophy and spirituality is to find the Unified Truth. Intellectuals seeks truths that apply equally to all peoples and places. Even thinkers on the Right have had this tendency, as evidenced by Carl Jung’s theory of collective consciousness.

Some may argue that religious and business folks always worked hand in hand with the political and military class to gain dominance over other peoples, and as such, business and religion have been no less tribal. This is true enough in terms of practical history; Christian missionaries followed well-armed European seekers of new land, gold, and riches. And, one could argue that the conviction that Christianity or any other religion is better than other faiths is tribalist and imperialist; and this is true enough in terms of how the Christian faith was actually practiced. Even so, the philosophical and spiritual rationale of Christianity was universalist. It imposed itself on other people in order to unite all mankind than to maintain walls–even if, in actual deed, separation was commonly practiced. At any rate, the core beliefs of Christianity was bound to favor, in the long run, anti-tribal values, though, people being what they are, it will always be impossible to totally separate a faith from some degree of tribalism. Tibetan Buddhism is very Tibetan, and black churches are very black.
Same is true of business. Though business followed and spread throughout the world behind empire building via military conquest, the long-term influence of business was to favor rules and regulations over force and might. Though each kingdom or nation favored its own businessmen over others, the rise of the global system loosened the connection between the business class from their nation/kingdom and between the business class and the political/military class. (This is especially with the Jews, many of whom had no firm roots in any single country. Paradoxically, precisely because Jews were far more tribalist than Christians and maintained their separateness, they failed to develop a strong tribal connection with their gentile host country and became more universalist and rootless in their business practices. Because of the Jewish diaspora–with Jews speaking different languages, eating different foods, and wearing different clothes in different countries–Jews failed to develop a specific geo-cultural identity. A Frenchman was French, a German was German, and an Italian was Italian, but a Jew could be both a Jew and a Frenchman, a Jew and a German, or Jew and an Italian. So, it may well be that the concept of dual citizenship is especially precious to Jews because they’ve always maintained dual loyalties. A German during WWI felt loyalty to Germany, a Frenchman felt loyalty to France, and a Russian felt loyalty to Russia, but a German Jew may have felt loyalty to both Germany and to Jews in enemy nations. Today, we have Jews whose loyalty is divided between US and Israel. This may go a long way to explain why conservatives have been eager for Jews to have their homeland in the hope that Jews may develop more a nationalist mindset and lose some of their rootless, two-faced and ‘venal’ qualities.) Today, we have the global business elites in many countries who are closer to one another than to the people of their own countries. Even as the top players in the world business community compete among one another, the rules they ascribe to often trump nationalism(and this is seen as a good thing by Jewish writers like Thomas Friedman, the author of ‘The World Is Flat’).

Of course, extra-national camaraderie among elites was also a feature of the political/military class prior to the 20th century. Many kings and aristocrats in different nations, kingdoms, and empires married one another, associated with another, and had a mutual understanding based on royal blood that transcended tribalism. An Austrian princess could become the Queen of France or a German prince could marry into the Russian aristocracy. A German prince may have felt closer to an English or Russian prince than with Germans of ordinary stock. Of course, one could explain this as a form of pan-European tribalism or a tribalism of class–with highborn people associating together against or above the mob. Some of this was certainly the case after the predations of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. In order to maintain their power and privilege, the upper classes of Europe banded together to defend not only tribal kingdoms or nations but upper class privilege. But, oddly enough, this class tribalism had the effect of promoting a degree of European universalism even if that wasn’t the intention among the aristocratic elites. With the English, German, and Russian kings and nobilities being part of one big family(and united against the danger of Nationalism which increasing represented People Power), a greater unity–if slower political progress–formed throughout Europe. Of course, nationalism couldn’t be suppressed indefinitely, and later the aristocratic elite in each country sought to control it by representing its populist aspirations, but this proved to be like playing with dynamite. Aristocratic Pride & Honor were of utmost importance to noblemen but had no place in the modern world where entire populations could be mobilized and armed with weapons of unprecedented destructiveness. In a way, World War I was a duel between aristocrats with millions of men with machines guns as their pistols.

Hatred is also related to other human emotions such as resentment, contempt, and jealousy. One could argue there is no real difference between jealous(or resentment or contempt) and hatred–that jealousy is really just a form of hatred(or a reason for hatred). An ugly girl feels jealousy toward a pretty girl, and this feeling is natural enough. The thoughts and actions of ugly people are often motivated by jealousy toward pretty people, which may explain the popularity of women like Oprah. It’s the revenge of the hags. And, the whole Jewish-led radical feminist movement that began with Betty Friedan had much to with ugly Jewish women’s jealousy(thus hatred) of prettier non-Jewish women(though the leftist Jewesses will never admit it). Communism was fueled by the jealousies and resentment of the intellectual class and by the working(or poor)class. The intellectual class was convinced of its moral and philosophical superiority and resented(hated) the fact that ‘greedy and crass’ bourgeoisie capitalists held most of the power and wealth. And, working class and poor folks were envious of rich people who had more. This jealousy turned into hatred though the Left cleverly disguised their hatred as LOVE OF JUSTICE.
In time, even good many rich people turned to the Left because they tended to be more educated(intellectually vain) and desirous of moral respect. So, the leftist movement was essentially led and controlled by the privileged class(and almost never by the working and peasant class). If hardline communist intellectuals called for a radical revolution, rich and privileged socialists called for a managed or limited capitalism where the expanded government would essentially be controlled by the privileged elite. Under a social-democratic system, the rich and privileged class keep much of their wealth and also hog the machinery of government IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE. Rich and privileged people picked up leftist causes because ‘man does not live on bread alone’. As leftism became morally and intellectually fashionable, a rich person, in order to be invited to fancy cocktail parties, had to be both rich and politically correct. Indeed, the same happened to radical feminism. Though initially cooked up and led by ugly Jewish hags, it gained ‘intellectual’ and moral legitimacy, and its terminology came to dominate all discussion of women’s issues. As such, even pretty women entered the movement to show that they are not only shallow pretty faces but ‘liberated’ womyn with ‘brains’. That’s how the feminist movement went from ugly-mugly Betty Friedan to pretty-betty Gloria Steinem.

Of course, not all hatred are the same. Some hatreds are indeed morally more justifiable than others. But, we must still face the fact hatred is hatred, justified or not, moral or not. So, the totalistic notion that HATE belongs only the Right while the Left is all about LOVE is false. It may well be that leftist hatred is morally of an higher order than right-wing hatred. Maybe not. I would say rightist hatred tends to be more realistic while leftist hatred tends to be more idealistic. Even so, hatred is hatred, and we must make peace with hatred as an essential part of what makes us human.

I Like the Word ACTRESS!!!

I'm sure all of you have realized that the term 'actress' has become something of a dirty word. All the actresses in Hollywood now refer to themselves as 'actors'. They think they are standing up for new freedom, justice, equality, and progress but they are only lobotomastically toeing the latest Politically Correct Party Line. So much for originality.

Now, I can understand why some women want to get rid of words like doctoress, professoress, acountantess, bus driveress, and whatever.

Those are sex-neutral roles. A woman doctor does the same work as a man doctor. There are no special rules for a female accountant than those for a male accountant. So, sexual identity doesn't or shouldn't matters in many professions. Specifying that a person is a WOMAN is irrelevant and even dismissive. It's as if to say a male accountant is THE accountant whereas a female accountant isn't quite up to par.

BUT, the issue is different in acting because 99.9% of acting roles are sex-specific. A man or a woman can be a doctor, but in most cases, men play men, and women play women. Audience look for, want, and expect different qualities from male actor and from female actors--aka actresses. Even when women play traditionally male roles--especially in action movies--, we respond to their toughness differently. We see female action heroes as HOT SEXY BABES than merely as tough killers. Because acting roles are sex-specific, it makes sense to distinguish between an actor(male) and actress(female). Of course, 'actor' can have a general meaning denoting anyone in the profession of acting. "Man" and "mankind" can be used the same way. Even so, when we get down to the nitty gritty, males take on actor roles and females take on actress roles. Sure, a man CAN play a female role and a woman can play a male role, but that's usually for comedy--we realize right away how funny it seems. (and, thank god guys no longer play female roles in shakespeare plays. that must have been so gay).

By the way, if radical feminists are so intent on getting rid of -ess to denote woman, why not get rid of wo- as well. Why should we distinguish between MAN and WOMAN. Maybe women should be called 'man' too. If differences between sexes were purely artificial constructed, then even the concept of 'man' and 'woman' are flawed. There are only men and that would include those with penises and those with vaginas.

Finally, conservatives and libertarians complain of political correctness, YET THEY USE THE TERM 'GENDER'. 'Gender' connotes that sexual differences are NOT real but merely the construct of culture. So, if they use the term GENDER, they've already given into PC. So, the term to use is 'sex' and 'sexual', not 'gender'. (Worse, 'gender' sounds so soft goo goo.)

I would agree that culture does play a significant role in defining what is masculine and feminine BUT I disagree with the LEFT in a fundamental way. It's obvious that cultural differences are rooted in genuine and verifiable BIOLOGICAL DIFFERNCES. Culture rises from biology. Culture can be used to restrict OR expand a man or a woman's freedom of choice in relation to nature. For example, men are generally stronger than women, so men have naturally been warriors and women have been homemakers. So, this division of the sexes has been based on biology. But, some women are stronger than men and would probably make better warriors, a biological fact. But, if a culture commands that ALL women must be homemakes, even tough women must make home while even wussy weakling men must go into battle.

So, culture can be a curse or blessing when it comes to freedom. Culture, by establishing a world of ideals and laws, can liberate us from brutal biological constraints. Or, culture can oppress us from realizing our natural aspirations by forcing THIS group to only do THIS while THAT group must only do THAT. The Left follows the Roussean line that Nature is benign and wonderful, and therefore, all the oppression we see in the world are the result of CULTURAL oppression. The Left argues that if we get rid of cultural hangups and return to nature--like in Woodstock--, there will be peace and harmony. The Right is fearful of human nature and therefore looks to cultural restraints to keep the Beast-Within locked inside the cage.

Anyway, isn't it funny how the Left tries to have it both ways. On the issue of men and women, they say the differences are mainly cultural, therefore they insist on the term 'gender'. As with the issue of race, they reject the notion of biological differences or factors.

BUT, when it comes to the issue of HOMOSEXUALS, the Left adamantly claims that HOMOS were born that way, their orientation has NOTHING to do with culture, and that's that. (I agree that's true in 99% of cases.) The LEFT operates in BAD FAITH but is comfortable doing so because it flatters itself on being SUBVERSIVE and JAZZY in toying, fooling, and messing with lame-square society. What's really funny is that many white leftists are really lame square boys and girls who think they are so cool, subversive, and avant-garde because they listened to some jazz, kiss Obama's ass, and read Chomsky. What a bunch of sorryass lame square losers who ONLY think they are so hip, cool, and radical.

The Pre-emptive Destructiveness of Marxism-Communism.

When surveying the history of communism, we focus on what communists did to pre-existing capitalists–the businessmen, entrepreneurs, bankers, landowners, and other members of the propertied class. Some intellectuals will, even today, find justifications for what communists did, but few still believe that communism is a viable economic system. Therefore, majority of thinkers, even on the left, agree that communists did much harm by destroying the capitalist class and the institution of private property. But, this criticism of communism doesn’t go far nor deep enough. Communism didn’t merely rob the then-existing capitalists but pre-emptively prevented the development of future capitalists who could have done so much for the economy. When Stalin and his henchmen wiped out the ‘kulaks’, they not only killed off the hard working farmers but destroyed the long term future of Soviet agriculture. (This is why ‘progressives’ still wax romantic about Cuban communism. They compare Cuba in the 1970s/80s with Cuba in the 1940s and 1050s, and shout ‘look at the progress!’ They never compare communist Cuba in the 1970s/80s with what Cuba would have been in the 1970s/80s had it remained free.) Unless we recognize this, we cannot fully understand why formerly communist nations haven’t done well following the fall of communism. In the Soviet Union, for example, communism had lasted for over 70 yrs. Communist destruction of capitalists wasn’t just a one-time thing–in order to establish a new regime–but a concerted effort to root them out entirely generation after generation. (As an analogy, consider having to destroy entire towns to win a war. It’s terrible but necessary for victory. Once your side wins, you allow the defeated side to rebuild their cities. Now, imagine another scenario where your side not only destroys towns to win the war but believes that destruction of towns in and of itself is good. So, even after winning the war, you destroy more towns and don’t allow them to be rebuilt. That was the communist approach to capitalism. Of course, it wasn’t as if communists wanted to destroy the economy itself, and indeed they had an alternative or counter-theory of economics which was supposed to work better than capitalism. But, as things played out, only capitalism could build and maintain a modern economy that liberated than enslaved man.) Several generations in the Soviet Union grew up knowing nothing of freedom or capitalism. They understood neither big business nor small business.
The only socio-economic model they understood was top-down statist totalitarianism. Despite the inefficiency and wastefulness of the Soviet economy, it was extensive, powerful, and penetrated into the life of every person. This fact needs to understood and reiterated over and over if we are to understand why ‘capitalism’ has been a catastrophic failure in Russia after the fall of communism.

Imagine if all capitalists in America had their property taken away by the totalitarian state. Though robbed of their wealth, they would still be capitalists. They would still know how capitalism works and go into business again–if given the chance. They would be closet-capitalists living in a non-capitalist nation. If the totalitarian system were to fall, they would go right back to the business of creating wealth, and the nation would economically revive again. (Indeed, consider Japanese-Americans who’d been robbed of everything during WWII. Though materially reduced to little or nothing, they still had the value and knowledge that would help them rise in the post-war order. Or, consider the West Germans after WWII. Though their nation was a heap of ruins and most Germans had lost all their possessions, they still knew how capitalism worked and had solid business sense. It’s no wonder that West Germany revived so fast. But, when East Germany was liberated from communism, it was sluggish and slow to catch up to the West because 50 yrs of communism had sapped the work ethic of East Germans and robbed them of their business sense. We can see such on display in the movie "Goodbye Lenin".) But, suppose a totalitarian system takes over in America and not only takes away the wealth of capitalists but kills the capitalists. Suppose this regime remains in power for 50 to 100 yrs and tries to root out all capitalist instincts in the hearts of citizens from cradle to grave. Such system would could be near-fatal for any civilization. Imagine a system that forbids books but allows the literate to remain literate. If the system were to fall, the literate could go back to bringing back book culture. But, suppose a system bans not only books but roots out literacy itself. It would not only be a war on books but a pre-emptive war on future literacy itself. Suppose no one understands the art of reading for 50 or 100 yrs. Even if the system eventually falls and books are allowed again, there would be no book culture and no literacy since no one understands or appreciates the importance or advantage of reading.

So, the failure of capitalism in post-communist Russia was less the fault of capitalism than of what had become of Russian consciousness under 70 yrs of communism. It was as though books were allowed again, but there was no one who could read. Money was allowed once again in Russia, but no one know how to invest, build, and trade. Therefore, what developed from this crisis was not true capitalism but Soviet capitalism or Sovietalism. Again, there was rule by an oligarchy, concentration of power in the hands of a few, majority of people looking to the government for solutions and answers than dealing with problems themselves. Freedom may be an opportunity to a Western or Asian capitalist, but it was a dangerous drug, obstacle or mystery to those brought up with communist mentality. Worse, many Russians came to understand the West through TV imagery. There was this false idea that the West was rich and powerful because young people listened to rock music, had long hair, and acted trashy. It was as if Russia would grow into a rich nation IF Russians imitated the superficial manifestations of Western(especially American) culture. But, in fact, no economy could be founded upon poor Russians imitating heavy metal rock bands, getting tattoos, snorting coke, or acting juvenile. Yes, the West have long enjoyed hedonistic fun, but that was the gravy than the real meat of capitalism. Real capitalism means determination, hard work, commitment, discipline, and lots and lots of energy. The American Dream was built on American Reality. There was no free lunch nor short cut. (Sadly, this is a truth forgotten by many Americans in the post-work-ethic era, one where entitlementality is affecting ever greater numbers of people, especially as they’ve been taught by ‘progressives’ that (1) they must take care of others (2) government must take care of them. Also, the mindless hedonistic consumer culture since the 60s has directed generations of kids toward whatever offers immediate gratification.)
Capitalism is like a car. You have to be willing to learn how to drive, have respect for the law, stay sober while driving, and pay attention to other drivers/road signs/traffic signals, and be equipped with good maps. Giving a car to a lazy, drunken, irresponsible, clueless, and reckless buffoon can end up doing more harm than good. In a way, Boris Yeltsin was a drunken fool who didn’t know how to drive the newly capitalist Russian economy of the 90s. He drove it into the ditch. Putin is like a sober son who has observed what his father had done, and so, he’s been careful to curtail the freedom of who gets to drive and how and why. But, Putin hasn’t solved the main problem of Russian character which is a crazy mix of boorishness and grey authoritarianism. Russians can be very wild or very tyrannical/submissive. They haven’t figured out the balance between order and chaos that is so crucial to democracy and capitalism. Russia doesn’t have ‘creative destruction’ but constrictive destruction.

It’s amusing to see leftists point to Russia in the 90s and blame its failures on capitalism when the real culprit was 70 yrs of communism which destroyed the entrepreneurial spirit in that country. Plants grow on fertile soil, and fertile soil of capitalism is the enterprising spirit of individualism. But, such consciousness never developed in Russia as a result of 70 yrs of communism. The Russian soul by the early 90s was arid and depleted of the qualities and values that nourish the growth of capitalism. The capitalist seeds in the Russian soil/soul couldn’t grow due the poor quality of the latter. (The problem was not with the seeds). So, instead of capitalist growth, we only saw ‘capitalist’ robbery. The so-called oligarches–former communist bosses–used their connections and trickery to appropriate the big national industries of the Soviet Union. There was little else to grab since mid-sized and small businesses had barely existed in the USSR. The big guys grabbed the big state industries. That was the extent of Russian ‘capitalism’ in the 90s. It was more like piracy or confiscation than investment and development. Even so, individual Russians from all walks of life could have built up small businesses and then expanded them up into mid-sized businesses(which then could be made even bigger) IF they had an entrepreneurial consciousness. But, few Russians possessed that kind of business spirit. Also, Russian banks were corrupt and useless. There was little law and order to protect businesses from hoodlums and gangsters.

It would be nice if Putin and Medvedev could reverse the current economic reality in Russia, but that would require fundamentally changing the way most Russians think about society, work, and entrepreneurship. The problem is that it’s much harder to teach people to be free than to teach them to follow orders. Indeed, we are seeing the same problem in America. Why do majority of Americans prefer Obama over Ron Paul. Obama says ‘I’ll take care of you’ whereas Paul says, ‘I want you to take care of yourself’. Being free in a constructive way is different than merely being free. In raising their kids, parents are preparing their kids to be free and independent. But, freedom and independence are NOT built on freedom and independence. They must be rooted and founded upon a solid bedrock of values, respect for laws, sense of priorities, sense of obligations, and morality. A child who’s given full freedom at the age of 10 will surely make a mess of things. Good parents incrementally allow more freedom in proportion to the increase in knowledge and responsibility among the kids. This is why libertarianism is lacking for it ONLY emphasizes individual liberty and freedom while saying little or nothing about values. This is why conservatism must be the foundation of ALL ideologies. This is also why all ideologies, no matter how radical, become conservative once they gain power. People must be governed by shared laws and morals for there to be any social order. For any social order to exist, most of its values must either be conservative or conservatized–made to function as the new ‘nationalism’ or new set of shared moral values by all.

It’s easy for a government to establish authoritarianism or allow freedom. What is difficult is developing social and moral character in people that will thrive in a free society. Freedom is only as good as the character of the people who have it–which is why freedom for Germans and freedom for Jamaicans produce very different results. The values, morals, habits, characters, and priorities of those peoples are shockingly different. Libertarianism has worked more or less in a nation like Holland because the Dutch are a Germanic people with a long history of discipline, sobriety, and respect for order. Would Dutch style libertarianism produce Dutch-like results in South Africa or Zimbabwe? Of course not.

So, what can Russia do to build the kind of character among its people that can lead to a true economic growth and democratic development? Russians must look to something other than the cult of freedom, cult of capital, or cult of the state. It’s really a matter of shaping the hearts and minds of the people.(The Russian Orthodox Church, though important as cultural and historical heritage, can’t provide the answer in the modern era for it has emphasized little other than slavish devotion to the Official Government–before, during, and after communism. Also, the Orthodox Church emphasizes the spiritual and timeless whereas Russians need moral values closely associated with worldly matters. Protestantism has had an economic advantage over other sects by emphasizing individual conscience, hard work in This World, and thrift and long-term investment than ostentatious spending for the vanity of man or glory of God. Of course, vanity of man and glory of God often went hand in hand in both the Catholic and Orthodox world, with rich people erecting beautiful cathedrals reserved for themselves or wearing expensive jewelry of gold and gemstones in the shape of crucifixes. We can still see the pattern today, with rich people supporting Obama and Obama promoting himself through a perverse combination of socialism and elitism.) How can the Russian government play a role in creating the kind of people’s consciousness and heart that uses freedom in a sensible and constructive way?
This is difficult because it’s almost always in the interest of the state to keep the people as dependent and obedient as possible. Why would any state want the people to be free on their own, develop their own economic power base, and even challenge the state? Also, isn’t it a contradiction to expect the state to exert its power to teach people to gain more power for themselves?
But, such contradictions are sometimes necessary and inevitable. For instance, any state that desires lasting peace needs a strong military to win wars and keep enemies at bay(though the politicians and people must always be careful not to fall victim to the very thing they’ve created to serve as their protector.) Paradoxically enough, in a nation like Russia where most people look to government, only the government may have the power to set the people free–or shape them to be free. Indeed, we mustn’t think that setting something free will inevitably lead to its happiness or welfare. An animal that’s been caged all its life cannot survive if set free into the wilderness. It wouldn’t know how to hunt, how to forage for food, how to survive. It may feel a momentary thrill, but it will soon have to get down to the business of finding food and shelter and spotting, fending off, or running from enemies. The story of "Born Free" is heart-wrenching because Elsa had grown up depending on humans. She was happy but not free. The owner decided to set her free than send her to a zoo, but Elsa didn’t know how to be free in the wild. She had to be prepared and trained to be free. She learn to be free, but even so, died at the age of 6. Again, freedom isn’t born of freedom but from preparation and training. Independence grows out of dependence. Masters start out as students.
Russians were set free into a new free order in the 90s, but none of them had been prepared for freedom. Worse, during 70 yrs of communism, most Russians had come to rely on nothing but the state. Prior to communism, many Russians had connections and links outside the state–family, tradition, community, church, etc. During communism, the state was the church, ideology, family, schools, and etc. Russians were all like caged animals in a zoo or prison. It was a harsh and repressive system, but it gave you a sense of place and took care of you if you accepted it as god. You didn’t have much, but you had basic necessities and a spiritual-ideological pride that you were living in a ‘workers’paradise’.

Leftists always say that success is a matter of economic background. In other words, some kids do better in school because their parents are richer while some kids fail because they come from poor families. But, if this is true, how does one explain the fact that millions of Chinese, who’d lived in dirt poor poverty under Mao, became well-to-do, prosperous, and even very rich after China adopted free market reforms? How is it that Russian Jews who come to the US with little wealth end up making more money than average Americans within several years? If we follow the logic of the left, a nation that is poor should always remain poor since most people are poor and poor people are fated to remain poor. If one must have rich parents to succeed in life, people with poor parents have no chance. But, we know this to be untrue. So, the truly interesting comparison is between children of poor parents who succeed and children of poor parents who fail. Leftists would like to point out that some children of poor parents succeeded thanks to government help, but, as important as public education may be, the crucial factor turns out to be cultural values in which the kids were raised. Almost all successful kids grew up with respect for knowledge and authority. Kids don’t know anything, and they need patience, diligence, and respect for authority to learn from teachesr with knowledge and skill. Of course, only patience and diligence won’t lead to originality and independence, the engines of innovation and progress. The problem of Asia has been its lack in the originality-and-individuality(independence) department though it’s amply supplied with diligence, patience, and respect for authority.

Anyway, the only true way to assess the damage of communism requires us to examine not only what communists did to capitalists but how communists pre-emptively rooted out and forbade the growth of the entrepreneurial spirit. When one looks at China and Vietnam, one sees examples of how formerly communist nations made a successful transition to free market economy driven by work ethic and energy. But, it must be remembered that China was under hardline communism for only 30 yrs, and Vietnam(at least the more vibrant South Vietnam) for only 17 years, before embarking on free market reforms. Russia was under communist rule for over 70 years which means that, by the time communism fell, there was barely anyone alive who remembered how things were like without or operated outside communism. Communism was the only thing that Russians knew. Russians in the 90s boldly swept communism aside and embraced freedom but under the harsh and confused conditions. Imagine a lifelong prisoner who finally smashes the walls and stands free. He’s finally free, but he no longer has a roof over his head nor any idea how to build a new shelter with his free hands.
China and Vietnam also were fortunate because several Asian countries remained capitalist and demonstrated the superiority of the capitalist economic system. Also, nations or city-states such as Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan provided China and Vietnam with a blueprint for economic growth and entering world trading system. If all of Asia had fallen under communism and if Asian communism had lasted 70 yrs, perhaps it might have damaged the entrepreneurial spirit as much as it did in the USSR.