Tom’s Big Picture

A long overdue follow-up to The Death of the Middle Class, Part One.

If present trends continue, what will America look like in the future?  The answer is staring us in the face on our southern border: Anglo-America will become Latin America.  All of the same demographic groups are on the chessboard, and we will likely see similar results.

The Bush family is planning ahead. They have extensive business dealings with and Jeb has actually married into the corrupt white elite of Mexico. For it seems that the Latin American model is inevitable for America. And in that model, who you know and are related to is most important.

Observant students of history will consider Barack Obama not only the first African-American president, but also the first Latin-American president.  His election on meaningless slogans directly taken from Latin American political campaigns (”Yes we can”) is an indicator of the civic health of our Republic.

I recently read an essay by a French intellectual of the “New Right” in Europe. In this essay, he argues that nationalism is ironically, at its core, individualistic. By drawing a “big fence” around a sufficiently large group (”the nation”), loyalties shift from specific people (family, close kin, co-religionists, etc) to the abstraction of the nation. Abstractions are less demanding and messy than people. Give the government 50% of your earnings and let them take care of your parents, educate your children, etc. Socialism, when it has functioned at all, has always been a national sort of socialism. Ironically, the New Right is defending nationalism as a necessary precondition for socialism, a political given in the European system. I thank God my ancestors moved to America!

It seems to be a media fantasy that the new internationalism will lead to a multicultural utopia of atomized individuals with identities as multifaceted as their iPod playlists. This is really just tripe of course, to finish the decapitalization of Western Civilization.

Throughout all of history, proximity of diverse groups of people increases intolerance. This is why silly white liberals from lily-white rural Vermont have such silly socialist ideas about how people ought to get along. When many rural Vermonters don’t even have locks on their doors, they assume that everyone else must be just as honest and well-intended as they are, and any deviation from that system (such as the need for locks and firearms for self-defense) must be pathological.

If a multicultural future is inevitable, we must plan for this reality with facts, not fantasy.

First, the future will likely not have a middle class. Achieving a “comfortable” income level will no longer be formulaic and predictable. Most will be in a sort of tolerable poverty provided by plentiful material goods and cheap, crude mass entertainment (e.g. Wal-Mart and American Idol respectively are precursors to the future). If you wish to be middle class, you had best set your sights on filthy rich. The iron law of wealth distribution is returning, and the top 20% will own 80% of the wealth, likely more. It will be a mad scramble against global competition and regression to the mean (i.e. if you’re above-average at something, odds are your children will be closer to the average) to stay in that 20%.

So the struggle will be one of continuous improvement of one’s progeny. I want my children and grandchildren to be more moral, more intelligent and more beautiful/healthy than myself.

The masses will be degenerate, stupid and fat. Our new elite will be a new caste of the moral, literate and fit, based on the new capital of good genetics, good education and a more rugged morality better able to delay gratification.  Delayed gratification, or low time preference, correlates with intelligence but may actually be the driving factor of many success stories: people who save money instead of spending it do better financially; people who control their eating habits are more attractive and live longer than those who do not.

Acquiring and keeping capital will mean high resistance to marketing messages.  If your kids eat advertised junk food and become obese, they will not be able to attract a high-quality mate, decreasing your family’s genetic capital.  If your little girls become materialist “shop-a-holics”, as explicitly encouraged by advertisements to “splurge” on this or that plastic crap from China, they will drain your family’s monetary capital to nothing within one generation.

A friend of mine has described a microevolutionary trend called “Survival of the Prettiest”.  He said he noticed that pictures of people considered beautiful just 100 years ago look rather plain compared to the beauty we see all of the time now.  If you go into any ultra-high-end suburb (above the striving middle class range of homes), he observed, you will see fit, pretty mothers pushing around strollers; my friend comments that the men are as uniform in their earning power as the women are in their beauty.

While there has always been a correlation between beauty, health and IQ (beauty is basically symmetry of proportions, which indicates good genetics), this is now in overdrive as the cutthroat nature of modern capitalism increasingly gives males with the practical intelligence to earn money all of the cards in picking mates.  Long gone are the days when the pretty cheerleader could marry the cute but average jock and live comfortably ever after as long as her husband joined the union and worked hard for a high-paying manufacturer.  Now most women like that would be foolish not to go to the best college they could get into and pick from a pool of mates more able to provide a middle class standard of living.  Of course, in the second generation, these smart-male, pretty-female pairings tend to produce children who are both smart and pretty, which further enhances the correlation.

But this is not a Catch-22.  If your family is not wealthy, it means you lack monetary capital.  But monetary capital is itself just the end result of moral and genetic capital.  Thanks to the Internet, people merely poor in monetary capital can still build up moral capital.  Your children can receive an education second-to-none, for free.  Or you can waste your time.  Ironically, it is the very cheap abundance of Wal-mart and the Internet that will first increase then permanently decrease class mobility.

At the top will be people with all three forms of capital, some of whom will fritter it away.  At the bottom will be the deliberately ignorant, people who could read, for free, all of the great works of our civilization but choose to spend hours on Youtube.  And occasionally there will be that poor family out there, doing their best to improve themselves with the vast free resources available, akin to the children of the pioneers who became literate by reading their King James Bible by candlelight when the days’ chores were finished.

Second, there are mass opportunities as the capital stock of Western Civilization is redistributed. If we hope to rebuild it one day, we need to recapture as much of it as we can.

Some may have been shocked by my description of the future elite as moral, for our current elite is anything but moral. How will immoral elites be replaced with moral elites (and I would add- possibly a Christian elite)?

The strategy pursued by the current elite is fundamentally suicidal. Believing in nothing, they seek stimulation above all else and ultimately death. This elite is sterile, barely having children. And they will pass away.  Notice how easily non-Western elites who still cling to traditional notions of morality and thrift (e.g. the top 1% of Pakistanis, Indians, etc who move here as highly skilled immigrants) are able to displace our elites in professions such as medicine and academia.  Imagine how much more effectively the vanguard of homeschooled children, detached from the toxic popular culture but, unlike Third World immigrants, still possessing the inner spark of Western Civilization, will take assets and power from the childless, amoral elite that currently runs the country.

I believe that a systemic inculcation of the children of the saving remnant of this nation with Biblical values of thrift, hard work and honesty will result in the inevitable distribution of capital from unworthy hands (our current elite) to our hands. I have experienced this myself. The second-largest asset I own came to me at a bargain price because of someone’s divorce. One person’s inability to delay gratification led to a distribution of capital from his hands to mine.

Look around this society, or take a walk in a mall, and just look at what you see. There are so many people who are fundamentally unemployable in any job that it must become obvious that the moral capital account of our Christian past, on which we’ve been coasting for two to three generations at least, is rapidly being depleted and will soon report “Insufficient Funds.”

As massive amounts of capital are distributed from Baby Boomers to their children, the latter’s inability to delay gratification will result in massive bargain sales of important assets to those with the simple patience to avoid debt, save cash, work hard and stick together. In the long run, Dave Ramsey, in teaching Christians these skills, may have more impact on the future than Billy Graham (I just wish Dave would stop advising people to buy stocks when dividend yields are below historical averages).

If the destruction of our country continues (which really means the dissociation of the nation from its government), we must see ourselves less as generic Americans and more as a self-conscious elite minority in a multicultural society. All over our country, little groups prosper because they have a common faith and stick together. The two wealthiest ethnic groups, according to The Millionaire Next Door, are the Chinese and Russians. Other rich minorities you’ve probably never heard described as such include Armenians, Syrian Jews, Lebanese and Greeks. They succeed through niche businesses, cooperation and explicit preference for doing business with each other.

If the American nation is no longer to be, then we must decide the boundaries of a new group. Homeschooling and/or Christian-schooling Protestant Christians will be their own minority elite in the new polyglot America. And given the high achievements of our ancestors and the high calling of our faith, we should not be content with running convenience stores (the niche of Pakistanis) or hotels (the niche of high-caste Indians). We ultimately must seek to control the means of influence itself: a large capital base at least sufficient to control major media and thus politics. In the moments when I am most postmillenial, I would argue the ideal of the unity of all capital in Christian hands.

Before we can get there, though, many Christians will have to let go of their pietist contempt for wealth and empire-building. Wealth is nothing more than control of God’s Creation, which was declared good by God Himself. Man makes it an idol, but there is nothing fundamentally evil about lumber, land or oil. Someone will own our country after the capital of the current decadent elite is redistributed through the iron laws of economics. If not us, who?

There is a certain sanity in this acknowledgment, of coming to grips with reality. While we must not yet give up on our country, it is nice to know there is still a strategy if our depreciating returns in convincing our fellow Americans to “wake up” are unsuccessful. They may not wake up because they are already dead, anesthetized by Grand Theft Auto and Guitar Hero.

The challenges will be immense, ironically in proportion to success. The lure of frivolity and materialism is very hard to resist, especially if our group can attain control of significant amounts of capital, but the lessons of the past should make us realize that there is nothing inherently in us that makes us worthy of our civilization (as Sam Francis said, European peoples are a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for Western Civilization). The virtues of the past must be diligently rebuilt with each generation, lest the base of the capital be itself eroded. The more material wealth and influence we attain, the harder we must be in teaching the next generation the values that enable the wealth.  In the long-term, if proper Christian doctrine is not instilled in your grandchildren, they may feel guilty about inherited wealth and seeking to please their peers, give much of it away to causes totally at odds with the family interest (I am thinking specifically here of the great man Henry Ford, whose wealth now funds a foundation run by alien Marxists).

I would argue that common religion and values are not enough, that most successful groups contain a commonality of both physical descent and religion. But on a practical level, there is no need to argue about this, for if I am right about this it will be true “on the ground” anyway.

I hope my readers do not find this post too depressing, as it is an acknowledgment that reaping follows sowing. It is the West that voluntarily gave up its faith, surrendered its authority and leadership and is now allowing itself to be invaded and destroyed. Even at this late hour, it is only for lack of will that we are where we are. But as Christians, we ought to realize that it is the inside that counts, and while still strong on the outside, the corpse of the West is in a whitewashed tomb.

Absent a miracle that looks less and less likely, rebuilding our civilization may take as long or longer than the time it took to destroy it. I would date that rot back to the Enlightenment, the anti-Biblical notions of equality and “rights” that lead to the horrors of the French Revolution and later the greatest crimes in the history of humanity under Stalin and Mao. So that’s about 300 years or so by my count*. But it is a good time to be alive, as the opportunities for greatness, for acquiring wealth and doing good may be greater than at any time in history. The essence of life while we are still on this Earth is to struggle for what you love and love the struggle.

*Immigration itself is a highly assymterical act.  When someone immigrates to the US, that is not considered an immoral or aggressive act.  However, to un-immigrate someone, i.e. make them go home or to their parents’ or grandparents’ home, is considered to be a very aggressive act.  The flabby mindset of most Americans would be horrified at such a proposal, but this is exactly what has to happen eventually to claim any part of our nation back for our children**; most nations of Europe have done this with alien groups historically, so it’s not unprecedented.  But it will take a long time for that kind of mental toughness to redevelop.  I would argue that when someone takes an action that requires an aggressive or immoral act to reverse and that act encroaches on the rights of others, then that action is itself aggressive and immoral.

** It is possible we have irreversibly entered an era of multiculturalism, where traditional nation-states are obsolete.  I can accept this, and this highlights the need even more to be a self-conscious minority.  However, I do note a great inconsistency in the application of this principle.  It’s always a country like the USA, or the Netherlands, or Sweden that is “obsolete”.  There’s never any talk that China maybe is obsolete, that Chinese people need to stop being medieval and let all of Africa immigrate into their country.  There’s never any criticism of Saudi Arabia for being explicitly Muslim and Arabic.  It’s always the Christian, European nations that are the target of this, and so I reject this logic until it is at least equally applied to all groups.