Brilliant and sophisticated young people come up with brilliant and sophisticated schemes for reforming the human race; unforeseen disasters ensue … That’s pretty much the story of Marxism, progressivism, etc.
In response to disasters caused by leftist social engineering, the brilliant and sophisticated young people on the (so-called) dissident Right — folks like Walt Bismarck and Richard Hanania — have their own brilliant and sophisticated ideas for social engineering. Such schemes cannot possibly backfire, because these progressives on the dissident Right have better motives and smarter ideas, than those misguided progressives on the Left did, right? Wrong.
The solution to leftist top-down progressivism is not right-wing top-down progressivism. It’s Distributism. It’s breaking up concentrations of power and promoting, as much as is practicable, ownership and decision-making at the lowest possible level of the social and economic hierarchy. A nation of owners and decision-makers is free; a nation of renters and employees and voters in huge elections (where all the candidates have bent the knee to AIPAC and to the central banksters) is bound to be enslaved. That’s the real lesson from “the American experiment.” If the Right intends to seize and to use the Left’s tools — i.e., the machinery of the Total State — it should do so only to destroy those tools as much as possible, so that no one can use those tools to abuse America’s citizens ever again.
“Oh, but when we get control of the one ring to rule them all, we’ll use it benevolently,” the Richard Hanania’s and Walt Bismarck’s of the online Right assure us. I’m sure Hanania and Bismarck are smart — they’re certainly much smarter than me. And I’m sure they mean well — just like all the high-minded reformers who promoted things like federally-backed student loans and “restorative justice” and “no child left behind” and all kinds of other noble-sounding schemes. And I’m sure that Hanania and Bismarck have just as much skin in the game as those past reformers did, which is to say they have absolutely no skin in the game — meaning that they won’t be accountable for any of the unforeseen costs of their reforms. Nobody, not even Richard Hanania and Walt Bismarck, is smart or competent enough to successfully manage the human race from on high. There are too many variables, too much complexity, too much dynamism, for any one person or group to wargame everything out. The only way to responsibly use the one ring to rule them all is to destroy it at the earliest opportunity.
The dissident Right cannot out-social engineer the social engineers on the Left. That’s a losing strategy. The answer is Distributism.1
Use centralized power to break up concentrations of power and distribute it as widely as possible. Break the central banks (and the cartels that run them) into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind. Defund and abolish the three-letter agencies, especially the regime’s spooks and secret police.
Let ICE be the last federal agency left standing, use its manpower and resources to deport everyone who’s immigrated here in the past 10 years (at least), and then shut ICE down too. Any future invasions shall be treated as an act of war, and the invaders repelled at the border — by any means necessary.
End dual citizenship (looking at you, Israelis). To paraphrase Jesus of Nazareth,
No one can serve two countries. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both America and Israel.
RETVRN, not to the original Constitution, but to the Articles of Confederation.
Let cultural reforms arise organically, in a bottom-up fashion. Lead the way in your own local area by promoting bottom-up reforms using local resources and local organizations. What works in one locale can be copied elsewhere. What doesn’t work can be better addressed locally, because everyone involved will be closer to the problem and will be far likelier to have skin in the game than social engineers operating at the national level.
National and global reformers, with access to national or international resources and organizations, can afford “luxury beliefs” in a way that local reformers, relying only on local resources and local organizations, cannot. We cannot afford luxury beliefs anymore; we cannot afford any more social engineering from on high.
If Distributism is impractical, then so are all the sophisticated top-down social engineering schemes, whether proposed by the progressives on the Left or the progressives on the so-called Right. If the Right can gain control of the one ring to rule them all, then the best thing to do is destroy it, grind the fragments into the tiniest pieces possible, and then distribute those pieces to the most local, most fundamental levels of society that we can.
If you’re on a podcast app or streaming platform, visit the Substack post for this episode at https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/trying-to-out-social-engineer-the-left to see embedded articles and other media.
Here is
’s post, How to Castrate the Left:
Here is
’s reply to Bismarck’s post:Here is Bismarck’s reply to Greene’s reply:
And here is Greene’s reply to Bismarck’s reply to Greene’s reply:
And finally, here is
’s reply to them all:
Thanks for listening and reading. (And if you prefer written posts to audio podcasts, don’t worry, regular posts will resume shortly — got a few different pieces in the pipeline now …) Be a pal and like and subscribe and re-stack and all that. Thanks!
Distributism was most famously espoused by early 20th-Century Catholic apologists G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, though neither of them gave a comprehensive, systematized exposition of it. See, G.K. Chesterton's Distributism (The Distributist Review): https://distributistreview.com/archive/g-k-chestertons-distributism
Trying to Out-Social Engineer the Left's Social Engineers Is a Losing Strategy