We Know Our NO, But What Is Our YES?
Ideas wanted! (DN: 5.X.3)
On the classical-liberal right, much of our political and ideological motivations are oppositional in nature. To a significant degree, we are what we are because of what we’re against.
This is justified. The things we’re against are very bad things.
Our Ethos
If you look down the long, muddy track of human history, you see millions of bloody footprints—all of whom are victims of the signature human evil:
The act of people being forced, against their will, to become the means to another’s ends.
That really is it, in a nutshell. When you see a horrid thing done by one to another, it can all be boiled down to a simple equation:
A perpetrator had a goal in mind. To acquire something. To dominate. To slake a thirst for vengeance, power, or lust.
The victim was made a means to that end. By force. By fraud. By encroachment upon person, property, or liberty. WITHOUT CONSENT.
The classical-liberal ethos is to oppose this. That is the driving force of our belief system. We oppose it when done by individuals, and we oppose it when done by groups—even when those groups call themselves a “government.”
We are defined, at our core, by what we’re against, not what we’re for.
Not exclusively, of course. We are for human flourishing. We are for peace and joy. But let’s face it—we are driven by resistance. Our first instinct is to talk about what stands in the way of flourishing, peace, and joy.
Once again, this is justified. A stand against oppression and violations of individual consent is one of the best stands anyone can take. Solving this problem is sine qua non.
But…
Is It Enough?
Can any group, any community, any nation, survive and cohere solely around an ethos of opposition?
We have our Prime Directive: Do not trespass the person, property, or liberty of another.
(Or, in greater detail: Do not, without valid consent, damage, take, encroach, subjugate, initiate force upon, or through deception usurp the person, property, or liberty of another.)
Any community or nation with that as its prime directive, made up of people who believe in and follow that prime directive, will have flourishing and peace. But is that enough for such a community or nation to cohere in the first place?
After a time of a community observing this prime directive, the resultant flourishing, peace, and joy really might be enough for people to make the connection:
We didn’t trespass each other’s person, property, or liberty. We didn’t establish a government that does that. And look at the wonderful results. What are we FOR, you ask? We are for those results!
That could indeed be enough…if we could get things to that point. But can we?
Hey, let’s all cohere around NOT doing bad things. I promise good things will happen as a result.
Eventually.
The left doesn’t ask this of their people. Yes, they oppose a lot of stuff. But the core of the classical leftist message isn’t just “some people have more than you, and that is unfair.” The core of of that message is,
Some people have more than you,
That is unfair,
The collective has a claim upon the property of the individual, and
We are going to use force to take things from them and give them to you.
It is a repugnant message rooted in envy, greed, violence, and morally impermissible theft. But it has the advantage of promising something: We are going to get you stuff.
(Sometimes, that stuff is just the opportunity to feel moral superiority by being generous with other people’s money.)
Classical liberalism doesn’t have this. Our ethos is correct: Leave us alone, and good things will happen. But is that enough to attract people in the first place?
Thinking it through
I have asked this question several times before. We began a preliminary discussion last year in What Unites Us: SHOULDS. We won’t reach any final conclusions today, but it is important to revisit the topic as we move (admittedly slowly) towards actually establishing a new kind of nation.
ArcadianWeald spoke to this question in a recent thread. The Black Knight and I were being a bit cynical when it comes to the more blindly and blandly compliant members of our populations. It’s easy enough to get that way, especially given what we’ve seen in recent years. But ArcadianWeald, staving off such cynicism, suggested that “We need to offer them a better narrative.”
My mind frequently returns to this question. What can we offer besides “Stop doing bad things, and good things will happen”?
I asked Arcadian for more.
“To strive for the good, the true, the beautiful, the transcendent. Something to lift them up so that they can be the best that they can be,” he wrote.
I continued prompting him for greater detail until he ultimately provided a ten-point guide to living a better life:
I. Success is gaining mastery over your chosen traditional craft.
II. The flight to transcendence begins with contemplating upwards, outwards from ourselves to the great celestial spheres above.
III. Develop your mind, body and soul towards a life of arete and goodness. Make a habit of it and you shall keep returning to it.
IV. Inspiration can spark in the most unlikeliest of places.
V. You don’t stride without first learning how to observe and think, how to move your body, how to stand and how to take those first tentative steps forwards. It takes time, practice, failure and discipline before it becomes like second nature to you.
VI. To stride greater distances, first learn your purpose with clarity and how to comport yourself properly to align with your purpose in life.
VII. Great men take time out to keep a journal to detail what is of great importance to them. Make it a habit to write down what is important to you, to reflect and contemplate upon this every chance you get as this will be your guide and your teacher to what is important to you.
VIII. For culture and virtue to flourish, it takes each of us to be open and courageous enough to preserve it through creation of new culture, copying the great works before us so these can be passed down as our great inheritance, through patronage and continuing the legacy of great works through discussions and expanding upon them so that these great works remain relevant and in our present cultural memory.
IX. For beauty to flourish, observe the beauty around you in your home, your village, in nature, inside yourself and strive to convey that beauty in all that you do. Add that flourish to your words, use natural materials to build like stone or wood, decorate your spaces with detailing, with statues, with murals, with paintings, with nature, with water features, garb yourself with beautiful clothing and with virtue and decorum.
X. Every slight, every critique, every misunderstanding, every doubt, every second-guessing, every failure, every time we seek approval from outside sources is an opportunity to come back to ourselves and learn to know thyself better. It is an opportunity to gain better clarity of reality, of truth, of goodness, of beauty, of the transcendence, of knowledge, of wisdom, of who we are so that we can grow towards more fully-rounded individuals with better focus on what is within our control and proper to our nature.
We can talk about its specifics in the comments, but for now, I just want to make two points.
First, it is amazing what we can produce when we really focus on being specific in our thoughts. I had asked Arcadian,
Imagine that you are charged with creating a book of wisdom, with teachings to help people…. Each teaching is just one or two lines—a short, powerful life-instruction. If you had to come up with 3 or 5 or 10 of these, what would they be?
What he came up with in response is pretty cool—so hats off to him for putting in the effort, and for the excellent result.
Second, we really do need to think about this. What “better narrative” can we offer? What positive vision—beyond merely stopping the bad stuff—can we espouse?
Your thoughts are needed and welcome!
Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |
(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22
(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.10 | 4.11 | 4.12 | 4.XZ | 4.13 | 4.YX | 4.14 | 4.15 | 4.16 | 4.17 | 4.18 | 4.19 | 4.YY | 4.YZ | 4.ZX | 4.20 | 4.21 | 4.22 || How: 5.0 | 5.1 | 5.2 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.6 | 5.X.1 | 5.7 I 5.X.2 | 5.8 | 5.X.3
Christopher, Christopher. You ask of me a weeks-long project, just to know my own thoughts on the subject.
There must be, at bedrock, an understanding of society that both frees and obligates each member. This tension must express itself in ways that reinforce our commitments to each other while coercing no one. If wealth means power over others, we are without hope. Men, male and female, seek security. Some, notably parents and the agéd, will sell their liberty for it. To avoid incentivizing this, a just society sets a minimum barrier against want, while penalizing wrongful coercion. None will freely give service to a community without expectation of reciprocity. If I am killed while quarrying stone for the group, will my wife starve, my children beg in rags? That is the current situation, nearly, for certain poorly regarded rural groups.
But how do we craft such guarantees without creating coercion? Not with words, is my immediate felt response.
Not long ago, the banker and the drunk tipped hats when they met, and stood together in litany and song on certain mornings of the week. It will be many years before we can afford the luxury of a drunk, but there will, in every comity of ten, be one whose habits tend less to industry than want. What keeps us whole?
I offer more questions than answers because such is the state of my mind. I am very interested in your thoughts, though I appreciate your call for input and your unreadiness to dominate the conversation.
The driving force, the ring-zero rule in all of Consciousness, from the smallest particle to the largest complex organization, is to seek what is best for itself, and AT THE SAME TIME, is best for all others.
This is the guiding principle - simple to understand, difficult to accomplish.
But a worthy endeavor.
If you look at Nature, our bodies, the Cosmos, it is done effortlessly on our behalf.
To me, THIS is evidence of the God, or Supreme Being.
Everything ALWAYS leans in our favor.
Were we just to not get in the way.