Devon Eriksen@Devon_Eriksen_
This photo was taken after a discussion of how to improve American education.
But the number of Americans in this picture is zero.
This confuses the liberal (a creature who is easily confused).
The liberal will say "This man is a US citizen" or "that man has made a great educational tool which is useful to many people".
The liberal does not understand that neither of these are synonymous with "is an American".
The reason the liberal does not understand this is that the liberal does not understand the distinction between the government and the nation.
For many liberals, this failure to understand is unique to America. They do not, for example, fail to understand that the Chinese nation, and the Chinese people, have an identity that prexists the legal structure of the Chinese Communist Party.
For some of them, this is because they hate White people and want to take our stuff.
For others, it is merely because the United States of America has had a single, legally continuous federal government for most of its history, so it's easier to confuse the two.
But the America predates the constitution by 14 years.
(And if you try to "correct" me to 13, you don't understand when and where America actually came to be. It wasn't on July 4th of any year.)
And during those 14 years, there was indisputably an America, but the current federal legal structure did not exist at all.
This is easier to understand for China. There is no legal continuity between Chin Shi Huang Di and Deng Xiaoping. Yet China is still China, and the Chinese are still Chinese.
It is easier to understand for France. There is no legal continuity between Charles Martell and Emmanuel Macron. Yet the French are still French, and France is still France... at least for the moment.
The liberal does not understand the importance of the tribe.
So he confuses the state with the nation.
Interestingly enough, this means that he has fallen into the same error as his hated enemy, the fascist.
The fascist is not a liberal, he is the opposite of a liberal, but he also confuses the state with the nation.
The fascist understands the importance of the tribe... in fact, he believes the tribe is everything and all important. But he fails by believing that the state is the perfect expression of the will of the nation, and therefore the two can be treated as identical.
When Mussolini said "'All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state," this perfectly encapsulated what the fascist thinks, and why fascism ultimately failed due to its own inherent flaws.
Governments are not perfect expressions of the will and interests of the tribes they represent. To treat them as if they were is national suicide.
The liberal, of course, doesn't care about the interests of the tribe.
Liberalism, at its core, is a denial of the legitimacy of tribes as a thing that can, or should, exist.
To the liberal, a tribe, or even the wider tribe, which we call the nation, is a relic of the past, a primitivism to be overcome.
To the liberal, utopia is when the tribe ceases to exist, and there are only a set of atomized, disconnected individuals, with relationships only to the state and perhaps for a brief period to their college friends.
The liberal imagines that the elimination of tribes will be the elimination of warfare, which, to the liberal, is the ultimate evil.
The brutal irony is that it might actually work. When Oceania finally merges with Eurasia and Eastasia, there will be no wars. There will only be the unified totalitarian rule of the Party.
Thus, the fascist, and his sworn foe, the liberal, both end up in the same place: All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
If you want to imagine liberal utopia, picture a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
But the problem, of course, is not just totalitarianism. It's human nature.
Humans are a pack animal.
A pack is not a herd. It is not a group of undifferentiated grass eaters standing in the same spot, keeping their widely-spaced prey eyes peeled for lions.
A pack must work together to hunt. So the pack has roles, and mutual loyalty, and a structure and character of its own.
The herd is merely a collection, but the pack is a mechanism.
The pack animal cannot survive without the pack.
A cat, abandoned in the forest, will eat small woodland creatures, and survive, but an abandoned dog will die.
Why? It is not because the dog is dumber, or less suited to survival. It is because all the dog's survival strategies require multiple dogs.
Among humans, packs are called tribes. When tribes are extended past kin groups by a shared ethos and heritage, they are called nations.
And this is the crisis of liberalism. The liberal regards the individual as the ultimate good, and desires to free the individual from obligation to the tribe, and the constraints of tribal expectations.
Problem is, like the dog without a pack, the human without a tribe is free, but he cannot thrive. Disconnected, he will become anxious and depressed. He will be mentally ill, even physically ill. He will act in self-destructive ways, and ultimately, he will fail to breed and produce the next generation.
Look around you.
This is not theoretical. It's not some idea that I dreamed up about what might lead to what. It's what is observably happening right now, to heritage Americans.
This is what happens when the identity of the tribe is removed, when all roles and bonds of culture and kinship have been removed, leaving only an atomized soup of autonomous individuals, arranged for maximized GDP.
The measure of whether someone is, or can be, a member of the tribe is not the same as the question of who is smart, or productive, or built something cool, or can throw around a couple billion dollars in investment money.
It's whether someone shares the ethos and heritage of the tribe, whether that someone will integrate with the tribe, adopt its values as their own, and support it.
Vivek Ramaswamy's political career should have been over forever the moment he attacked American kids for being American kids, and having sleepovers, and doing football and cheerleading instead of memorizing SAT questions.
It's not a question of what is most "efficient", especially not in terms of stupid credentialist grinding that substitutes recognition within society for advancement of society.
Americans have never gotten ahead by scholastic grinding. That is not the American way. Americans advance America, and the world, innovation, creativity, and play, not being pushed around by tiger moms.
The Wright brothers did not resume build their way into a top engineering school. They didn't even graduate from high school.
Instead, they played with flying toys, started a bicycle shop because bicycles were a nationwide fad, and they played around with stuff they thought was cool until they came up with something that, surprise, actually flew.
They did it because they liked it. They were having fun.
This is why America innovates when everyone else just imitates or, at best, improves.
I'm not going to explain to you why this works, because if I have to explain it to you, then you don't get it, and you are not an American.
As for Sal Khan, well, let me use his own words, and you can look up the context for yourself:
“High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity, or kindness. The Schoolhouse[dot]world site offers a scorecard: The more sessions you attend, and the more that your fellow participants recognize your virtues, the better you do.”
I'm not going to explain to you why this is disgusting to Americans, because if you don't already understand, you are not an American.
Are Ramaswamy and Khan bad people for promoting these ideas?
I don't care. That's not the point.
The point is that these are Indian values, not American values. These men claim to be American, perhaps even believe they are American. But they want to change America, not change themselves to be American.
So they actively promote Indian values over American value, for America, because that is what seems best to them.
Because they don't get American values.
Because they are not Americans.
No administration of the United States federal government can issue a document that makes them American, because to be American, they would have to first understand what it means to be American, and they do not, and having a social security number will not magically teach it to them.
America is for Americans, not people who want to avail themselves of America's success.
Being rich is not enough. Being talented is not enough. Building cool stuff is not enough.
To be an American, one must understand what that is to be an American, and want to be that thing as it is, rather than to attempt to change it to something more to one's own liking.
If America were a poor, impoverished, struggling frontier, I would still want to be an American, because an American is who I am.
I am an American for better or worse, for richer or for poorer, in triumph or in defeat. If America ceases to be America, I will die on that hill trying to stop it, because there's nowhere else I have to go, and nothing else that I can be.
I doubt that any of these opportunists have that depth of commitment.
Don't bother calling me a racist. I will agree, that, yes, I am. Because it's what all the commies don't want me to be, are desperate for me not to be, which means it's probably in my best interest to be one, at least somewhat. Seems to be working out okay for the Chinese and Indians.
But being a racist isn't enough. We must also be tribalist. Racism alone will do nothing to protect us from infiltration by people like Arnold "fuck your freedom" Swartzenegger, who is another non-American given citizenship papers by an incompetent federal government who no longer serve our civilization.
So perhaps it's time to change that government, just as France and China did, if that's what is required to remain American, rather than die out and be replaced by an atomized soup of the third world's "best and brightest" trying to grift and credential their way to a prosperous society, with no cultural ties, sense of community, or shared identity and vision.
I do not want to live in Oceania. I do not want to practice EngSoc. I do not want my tribe to be governed by laws made for the entire world and for every culture, one size fits nobody.
I'm sorry for you if you are afraid that people having a cultural identity will give them something to fight over. But World War 2 PTSD cannot be the entire personality of the human race forever.
This is not sustainable.
The tribe is not a disposable superstition of the past. It is a load-bearing structure of human social instinct.
And we all owe Rudyard Kipling a massive apology.
