Propertarianism, Part 3

2,374 words ^[1]

Part 3 of 3 (Part 2 here ^[2])

Social control

The core problem of Propertarianism is its phobia of naked power, a phobia shared by all variants of liberalism and something that I think makes human beings uncomfortable regardless of their ideology, unless they’re actually part of the ruling caste. And even then, only at a practical level, never at the conceptual – to think of power at the conceptual level is to stare down the gullet of Gnon – Nature or Nature’s God – and Gnon is ten times more ancient and more terrible than Cthulhu.

Strangely enough, Propertarianism started out as an attempt to explain the unique success of Western civilization, but unlike more successful attempts ^[3], it came through libertarianism and still carries a good deal of libertarian baggage, to the point that Propertarianism cannot conceive of non-material means of effecting social control. Social control is effectuated through three means: bullying, bribing, and bamboozling. Alliterative appeal aside, you can impress or intimidate a man into obeying, buy his loyalty, or convince him that doing your bidding is right. A healthy regime has a mixture of all three methods in place to convince the men living in its shadow not to revolt with pitchforks and torches in hand. Men are given the opportunity to earn through labor and wit, and even more importantly, the opportunity to marry and have children (bribery). They’re convinced that obeying the King is the right and good thing to do, even ordained by their god (bamboozling), and ultimately, in the event that they don’t obey their King, that King and his many knights, barons, and guards will be more than happy to split their heads open (bullying).

All three elements of social control are necessary, and various types of men respond to various types of social control better or worse than others. For example, a sociopathic brigand fears the noose, while paying little heed to faith or economic opportunity. A religious fanatic doesn’t fear punishment in this world, or poverty, but fears God. An erstwhile, salt-of-the-earth worker takes threats of violence as a sign of disrespect and has no time for superstitions, but will fall in line if given a chance to earn his daily bread. All of us fall on three continuums, between minimum and maximum responsively to violence, conviction, and bribery. However, Propertarianism completely disregards conviction as a mode of social control, or rather, doesn’t accept that convincing necessarily involves bamboozling and deception, even if it is in the public’s interest; i.e., that lies are tools of statecraft and social control. The church of Propertarianism will tell the truth to the best of its knowledge (testimonialism). This will usually not involve claiming that it is good and proper that our people survive, even at the expense of the survival of other people (as is often the case in the real world) because it cannot risk making that false positive, that Type 1 error.

Propertarianism’s liberal/libertarian heritage also makes it cagey about naked power, so it puts its faith in the rule of law and Curt Doolittle’s belief that he can devise a system of law which is free of error and potential for abuse, not understanding that it is not possible for the state to abdicate any portion of its powers without falling into private hands, where the lack of formal recognition of state function allows abuses unparalleled by any absolute or feudal ruler. Failure to recognize the inevitability of cartelization and the quasi-statal nature of some industries is what has led to today’s distorted marketplace – what the mid-century fascists and third-positionists were trying to rectify. It was also abundantly clear to medieval man, who devised the system of guilds and charters to formalize these inevitable relations between the government and economy, lest the government and large corporations be bound in an informal and destructive manner. Propertarianism, however, seems to rely entirely on the promise of material stability and “pursuing parasites for fun and profit” that we’ve already established will generate a culture of nosy busybodies. How will you control men when you recoil from faith and fear power?

American Nightmares

A final issue with Propertarianism is that it is what we call a “coup-complete” solution, which is to say that in order to implement Propertarianism, a group would have to fully seize power in the West. For this reason alone, because it presupposes power, it is appealing. A secure, powerful government is always better than an insecure, impotent government – such as we have right now. Thus, the Propertarian armies would have to defeat the Left in armed conflict first. I passed over some of the issues with that in the beginning, but let us look deeper into the question of armed conflict.

Firstly, the victory of the Right is not a foregone conclusion in a hypothetical war between the Left and the Right in the US. People who say that the Right has all the guns are forgetting that the Left has many state allies abroad who can furnish it with weaponry. As in the first American Civil War, foreign powers will fund, arm, and train the various factions. The Distributist, in the video linked to previously, points out that nothing stops China from sailing a ship full of AK-47s into San Francisco harbor and arming the antifa to counter the redneck militias.There is also the fact that the US harbors millions of ethnic Mexicans who would themselves represent a faction in such a war and would probably be supported by the Mexican government (and Mexico will likely retain sovereign integrity for longer than the US). Indeed, a coalition of Chinese-backed Leftists and Mexico-backed guerrillas is likely to defeat any Rightist coalition that arises, a coalition which isn’t very likely to attract support from abroad.

Of note is also the fact that white and Right-leaning Americans generally lack a friend-enemy distinction such as Leftists and Mexicans possess. As such, they cannot effectively organize beyond the local level. This may be enough in the “pocket Bosnia” scenario likely to characterize the early days of such a civil war, but it will prove impotent against concentrated action backed by state actors, especially if those state actors pool their efforts in order to defeat the Rightist coalition. Here’s a nightmare scenario: social control breaks down in the US and Canada, leading to a “pocket Bosnia” scenario – every unsettled account is settled violently, every seed of resentment blooms into murder, the cities are jungles of war of all against all, and warfare is waged primarily on the personal and familial level. Rural America survives, as do enclaves in the cities where there’s enough cohesion that fear of the police isn’t the only thing holding back the beast of primal man. These places become havens of peace and prosperity, which then become easy pickings for quasi-state actors backed by three foreign powers, namely China (in the Pacific coast, and further inland), Mexico (California, the Southwest, and Texas), and the European Union/NATO states, aided by Israel (East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and further inland). The three foreign powers and their quislings declare occupation zones and start administering the North American continent in accordance with the Leftist ideology of their choice. Those hoping for Russian assistance are hoping in vain. The Russians know their limitations and are aware that at this point in time, the best they can do is survive and keep their powder dry, and that they won’t be an imperial power capable of projecting power over vast distances for at least another fifty years. They won’t get involved in the American civil war.

Sounds scary? It’s far likelier than heroic Minutemen restoring the Republic. And even that is downright realistic compared to Propertarian Minutemen. If the Right – essentially Right-leaning white people – have a future on the North American continent, it is by acting in decentralized groups animated by a common purpose and high asabiyyah – a togetherness which gives the men cause to sacrifice for the common good. This common purpose, asabiyyah, and culture of decentralization is what allows the Taliban to run circles around the bureaucratic blundering beast which is the US military in Afghanistan. It’s true that guerrillas can disrupt weak empires, but only if they have the aforementioned unity of purpose and an ally in power (either within the empire or a foreign state), or barring such an ally, are facing a regime so weak that it cannot control its territory. Propertarianism tellingly doesn’t provide such a unity of purpose, due to the social control issues discussed above, but also due to its lack of historical context. The American empire found its common purpose in the liberal ideology, but this was only possible because liberal ideology was itself piggybacking on the Anglo genotype and Anglophone nations of the world. To be an Anglo usually meant being liberal in one way or another during the period which saw the rise of the British and American empires. Even though the British and American empires were liberal empires, however, it is important to keep in mind that liberalism had a symbiosis with Englishness which only ended in the wake of the Second World War, when it defeated fascism. It was taken from the Anglos and spread across the West, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was further diluted and found itself to be property of the world (how’s that for intangible commons?), with a few recalcitrant holdouts such as North Korea, Iran, and Cuba.

Propertarianism lacks liberalism’s historical lineage, even though it claims descent from liberalism. It will for that reason not glom onto any particular nation or any genetic line, and not serve as the official religion or ideology of any tribe. Contrast that with the Preußentum-style corporate state which resonates with Germans, or even Moldbuggian neoreaction – a Carlylean restorationist screed updated for the modern world – which is the alternative ideology of the Anglo world kept alive in bits and pieces throughout the Puritan-liberal night. Propertarianism has most in common with a truncated form of old-style Puritan-liberalism, but the genetic line likely to carry this ideology – the Danish-descended Anglos of Essex and Lincoln, via New England – are firstly engrossed with classical liberalism, and secondly are dying due to classical liberalism.

Maybe I’ve stumbled upon a possible niche for the Propertarian idea, though. It has its flaws, but maybe it can serve to organize Yankees into something that passes for Right-wing thought. It’s certainly a better option than liberalism for a people that has proven itself consistently unable to bear Right-wing regimes. The people highly unlikely to adopt Propertarianism, however, are the fighting-age, fit-for-battle males of America who are overwhelmingly Christian and lack faith in written constitutions, rule of law, and completions of the scientific method. Rather, what these men crave is a leader who will take their energy and channel it into greatness, a leader who will give them a chance to live like lions, conquer, and make survival possible for themselves and their families. They crave such a leader because their bodies are very much aware that history is driven by great men, not by great ideologies, and that ideologies and religions are tools in the hands of great men who seize power by means of their indomitable will. In my nightmare scenario above, such a great man, at the head of a tribe (whether synthetic or real), makes the territories of North America ungovernable to the three occupying powers through guerrilla actions, forcing them to retreat in whatever schedule and proportion, or merely lasting long enough until the fall of the American empire leads to a global reckoning as all the untenable relations held in place by the fear of American military might are dissolved and renegotiated (often in bloody conflicts). This forces the three occupying powers to retreat to their homelands. Either scenario returns the situation to a “Bosnia classic” (ethnic enclaves embroiled in low-intensity, community-level conflict), which will allow this charismatic leader’s group to conquer much of the continent due to superior asabiyyah. After all that is complete, that group will have very little use for Propertarianism, though some of its useful ideas might be utilized in its new paradigm.

Conclusions

There’s a lot to process about Propertarianism, and precious little to go on. The lack of a single text where the Propertarian idea is defined so that it may be critiqued is a big issue. In this article, I’ve taken pronouncements by Curt Doolittle to be representative of Propertarian ideology where I found such to be lacking on the Propertarian Institute’s Website. Perhaps these concerns will be addressed in the future. However, from what information we have, I conclude that Propertarianism very naïvely believes that it can sidestep human nature, eliminate Leftism (which is to say, eliminate sin), solve the problems of liberalism using h liberal methods, and come to power with relative ease. It is blind to the problems of liberalism as indicated by the NRx/Dark Enlightenment, or the Traditionalist philosophers before that. It dismisses attacks on the Enlightenment for being German or Semitic, though it is the Enlightenment and its philosophies that caused many of modernity’s problems. It dismisses moral objections as “moralizing” – for example, I’m likely to get attacked for moralizing for pointing out the severe risk busybodies would pose under Propertarian law.

Ultimately, Propertarianism isn’t even all that concerned with the problems of white survival. Sure, parasitism and deception are problems, but we can tolerate some deception and some parasitism insofar as we can survive; survival is the chief issue facing us here. This is a problem of birthrates, of territorial defense, of replacing the ruling regime with one amenable to our survival, with an awakening of the European warrior, and many other things which have little to do with the letter of the law. It’s important not to lose sight of that. Propertarianism offers no solutions for white survival outside of civil war, and even that is orthogonal to the philosophy itself. To be fair, I don’t have any non-military solutions to offer, either, but at least I’m not asking you to learn a complicated new way of thinking. Just lift weights, learn martial arts, obtain weapons training, and become embedded in your community – skills which will be useful in any case.