Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Throughout most of history, men who believe themselves superior or “elites” have believed that other men were born saddled and ready to be ridden.

The alpha male who rules over the band is, after all, a fixture of ape bands. It’s that “made on an ape frame” again.

I want to make this very clear: throughout most of history, whether king or high priest, whether Emperor or conqueror, whether nobility or oligarchy humans were subjected to someone, and to those that worked for that person/worked under the authority of that person or group of people. It was, you might consider, the “natural order of things.” Truly the natural order, since it comes from nature.

And this is what’s important to know: Socialism (“democratic, purple, or pokadotted”—snort—) and communism are not different. They follow the ultimate rule of humanity of an elite who considers itself superior ruling over everyone else.

It is no coincidence that in Europe the “sons and daughters of good families,” the remnants of nobility, (and in the States themselves, the old families and the blue bloods) are usually socialist, communist, and in support of an oligarchy of rulers over the mass of humanity.

Oh, the old excuses have changed. Humans are good at excuses (the problem, of course, was teaching the ape to talk. Not to vocalize, but to abstract. Abstractions and generalizations are slippery. Lies are not far behind.)

After the American revolution, and more so after the French, and after the toppling of kings and nobles that soaked Europe in blue blood, it was not ah…. advisable to talk of nobility of birth. It was not done.

Instead, the noblemen, the “good people” made themselves into a nobility of “service.” They became “public servants”, following “the will of the people.” (For service in this case, you should understand what a bull does to a cow.)

You see, they weren’t stupid—yes, sure, some royal lines got so inbred they were almost as stupid as your average Woke college student—because stupid people don’t keep their hands on the reins and their spurs in the flank of the mass of their fellow men. And certainly not after the idea of the divine right of kings and nobility of birth tumbled to the dirt (if not before when Louis XVI’s head coughed in the basket. But you could argue it started with the black plague, which laid waste commoner and nobility alike and both destroyed some of the older and more cunning families, and the very idea that as long as you obeyed these people you’d be okay. Ideas take time to percolate through cultures. You can draw a straight line from the Black Plague to the age of revolutions, but it’s a slow one.)

They realized—none better—that common property and common good don’t administer themselves. They also realized—again none better—that he who has the command of the property is the de-facto owner. And so they installed themselves as administrators, as bureaucrats. In Europe, where indicators of class in both clothing and manner remain, and where there is often an innate respect for those of “good birth” who can name their ancestors, and have pictures on their walls going back generations, they compose entire ruling classes, “elected” but both sides of the spectrum (all sides of the spectrum) really a nobility, a group of “elites” who trade power between them and who agree that the dear little people, the commoners, should never be given any real power.

I can see your lips start to curl, as you say it’s not so different here. This is true, to an extent. (Not all extents. There is still a difference between the parties, and one at least might be reclaimable. You never get to choose between cake and death. Sometimes you choose the less lethal poison until you can pour it into the plant and get rid of the poisoners.) We have for our sins, and partly because of the twentieth century idea that society was like a machine, that we could centralize power and control the economy and the people in social and economic engineering, and that would make everyone better off—and partly because of Soviet propaganda, the only thing they were ever good at. A Russian trait from time immemorial—created a vast bureaucratic class, credentialed and indoctrinated, and with both of those things sneeringly sure they’re better than the rest of humanity and the rest of humanity wants—needs—to be ruled.

You hear it in the sneering disdain of their voices when they talk of “populism” and in the whining of unelected bureaucrats affronted that the duly elected president differs from them. You hear it in their disdain for “meritocracy.” (They prefer credentialism, mostly brought in under the pretense of eliminating “racism” but really to eliminate the possibility of the wrong people getting power; of the pushy sons of the bourgeoisie grabbing the reins as they did after the Black Plague and unseating the correctly anointed ones.) You see it in their slandering and destroying of any who oppose them. And most of them (not their willing and pathetic dupes who are merely moronic outcasts or envious “intellectuals”) are people of “pedigree.” You explain to me, after listening for ten seconds to crazy Uncle Joe Bribem how else someone whose contact with reality is thread thin someone like that was elected or got power. You explain to me how someone like (Malig)Nancy Pelosi, who is drunk 99% of the time, and not too bright the rest of it (I swear to you, though I can no longer find the video that the idiot crossed herself in a mosque in Syria when she visited to tell them that Bush was a meanie and the democrats lorrrrved them.) It’s just a class thing. They’ve established a ruling class. And though the present scions are often dumber than rocks, they have the cunning and the desire to rule us.

Here’s the thing: they never gave up on communism. They never admitted the horror it was, and honestly a failure at providing luxuries for the elites. Sure, the elites in the USSR lived worse than the middle class in the free world, but THAT’s not the point. The point is that they lived much better than those around them, and it provided them with a sense of their innate and invincible superiority. That’s meat and drink to them. That’s what they actually live for: their rightful place in the world.

In Europe, they’ve managed to convince the majority of people that they need socialism. That a heavy bureaucratic welfare state is in fact the ONLY way to live. Which is why social-democrat is usually the most to the right that the spectrum goes. (To idiots reading that, no, it’s not democratic socialism. The “right wing” of Europe is a welfare state, with enough taxes taken to hold people captive and enough services given to have a serf class that will protest at the state being unseated or reduced. So, in terms of “socialism” it is a pale pink. Call it bureaucratism and put it in as the percurse to socialism.) Note even at homeopathic doses, socialism kills. The European heavy tax, pervasive regulation and welfare state makes it impossible for people to actually reproduce. It makes it hopeless to try to move out of your socially assigned place. Call it feudalism with contraception and without religion. It means that the populations of Europe are dying. The self-hatred induced by Soviet Propaganda doesn’t help. Europe is a vast old-age home. The imports… well, they reflect the socialist idea that people are interchangeable and cultures don’t matter. That’s for another time.

Here, though they have captured all media, all education, the news and entertainment and every branch of what you could call “the information industries” they haven’t fully managed to capture the people. (In Europe, too, to be fair, there are signs of rebellion. But Europe is different.) Oh, sure, we’ve been regulated and hemmed in, and told to stay in our lane, but we remember we once were free men. And we have a constitution we can consult if needed, which tells us the measure of what we’ve lost, but also lets us dream of what could be regained.

This is quite different from the indoctrinated sleep walkers who have been lead to believe they are “elites” but who in fact are donning the saddles for their masters to ride to power—journalists and writers, grievance mongers and “scholars.” My only consolation is that should you achieve your aims—however briefly—you’ll be up against a wall before I am. Because your masters don’t trust you. Nor should they, you quisling traitors willing to turn in your freedom for lack of responsibility. The only ones of you I pity are those minorities—social, racial, intellectual and others—indoctrinated to think that the powerful socialist state will make people accept you. But even you, I do not forgive. You are—most of you—literate, and should be able to read the history of the regimes you wish for. Yes, I know, some of you believe that the welfare states of Europe are both “socialist” and “more accepting.” I enjoin you, for your own life, to learn the language and go over with no money, and sit in bars and cheap restaurants listening to the people talk. It will be an education about those oh, so accepting Europeans. A cheap one, compared to turning in your birth right for a firing squad.

ANY centralized and powerful state oppresses minorities of all kinds. To say that kings and church oppressed your kind and therefore you need socialism/communism, is like saying that you have a hang nail and to cure it, you’re going to cut off your head. And this information is not on the moon, that you can’t reach it. All it takes is stepping outside your comfort zone and your self-reinforcing bubble. Again, your life might depend on it.

The reason our land, our constitution our form of government is already half-lost (what on Earth do you think the compact against the electoral college is? It allows the vortexes of fraud, controlled by the left machine to control the entire country.) the reason one of the likely candidates for the presidency wants to shred our Constitution—the basis for our existence—and open the borders to the serfs and peasantry of every land in the world is because we are the obstacle in their pursuit of their ultimate dream.

One would laugh, if it weren’t so bitter, but the same “elites” who under another name caused WWI have convinced people that nationalism is a problem, and want to create a super-state encompassing the world.

This has nothing to do with lack of war. Trust me, in the middle ages, Christendom warred enough within itself, though technically under the sway of the same super entity.

No. This is because the larger the centralized entity, and the wealthier, the less accountability it has.

With stars in their eyes our “superiors” see the idea of ruling the world and having no one to control them. Of course half of those ‘betters’ are merely the shock troops of the old families, reaching for control once more. The sleep walkers, moving towards their city of creams, without realizing nightmare waits them.

The new promises involve things like paying off student loans, and having “health-care” for free. And these people must never have read fairy tales, because they never ask what the words mean, and what it costs.

Even some of my fellow libertarians have started mouthing things like “most people don’t want liberty.” Oh, that’s not true. It’s that they’ve been told they can have liberty without responsibility. Ninety percent of the younger people who call themselves socialists don’t realize they’ll pay for it, or that their personal lives and choices will be interfered with.

They imagine that they will have endless leisure, to pursue their “dreams” and lack the self awareness to know that dreams that don’t have the spur of reality are just a way to get lost in meaninglessness. They also don’t seem to understand that if they are a charge, not a credit, to a vast, impersonal state, they will in the end be disposed and disposed of as the elite decides. They don’t realize this is just the long way back to a techno-feudalism worse than anything their ancestors endured because not mitigated by Christianity which assigns each individual value simply for existing. Marxism has no such value.

And so, they will tear down the last best thing on Earth, and hasten to put chains on themselves, convinced this will make them free.

At this point, I must trust in the turning point of technology, which despite the giants does give the individual power it hasn’t had since the age of agriculture, and also the ability to once more own his/her own means of production in at least a great measure. I must trust in the fact that our would be elites are in fact the end of a long non-meritocratic process, meaning that they misspell their own names three times out of four, and are also completely unable to cope with the changes in technology and society.

Arrayed against us are very old human instincts, the machinations of people who might not be good at anything but are very good at achieving power, the fears of indoctrinated fools who’ve been convinced every hand in a free society is against them, the hopes of even more pathetic fools who think that they’ll be the special and cherished pets of an all powerful and centralized state.

All we have is our Constitution, our history, and the certainty that free men, acting in their individual best interests have almost eliminated poverty and created—for all its flaws—the fairest and most accepting society Earth has ever seen.

All we have against the lies of old is our shining city upon a hill, which cannot be torn down, because even if occluded by the chains of totalitarianism (it’s come close before) it lives on in the hearts of free men and women everywhere.

It won’t be simple. It won’t be easy. And you and I who’ve rounded the corner of fifty will almost surely not see even the edge of victory on this, unless a miracle occurs.

But we must do what we can. So the future is not like the past. So our yet-unborn descendants taste freedom. It’s all we can do. And it’s a glorious destiny.

In the end we win, they lose, but the end is a long way off. Be not afraid.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for February 24, 2020