A White Elephant?

 

It’s time to address an elephant in the room. Something nobody dares to say.

I have pointed out recently in this space (“Narcissism Is Not Depression”) that people with low self-esteem will compensate by “working hard at whatever they are asked to do, to prove themselves. They will be scrupulously moral, and always want the structure of rules. Rules will reassure them they are doing all right.”

This means that someone with low self-esteem is primed for accomplishment in life. Someone with high self-esteem will avoid what is difficult. They may enjoy life more, but will never accomplish much.

It follows that a culture that fosters low self-esteem, especially in its children, will, over time, develop faster and become more advanced than a culture that fosters high self-esteem. It will also be more orderly and have less crime and violence; and this in turn allows for faster development.

And this can easily explain, in turn, why some cultures “dominate” others. Why Jews are always so successful. Why “whites” do better than “blacks.” Why the British managed to manage one quarter of the world. Why indigenous cultures never invented the wheel, while Europe and Asia had printing and firearms and ocean-going vessels.

In fact, there is no other adequate explanation. The common one, that whites or Jews or Asians are simply racist and violent, while Africans and aboriginals were always peaceful and loving, is not just nonsense on the evidence, but nonsense on the internal logic. Simply being mean does not give you power over others.

Different cultures are simply better than others. And the key is in child-rearing. Child-rearing is really what a culture is all about: culture is what we pass on to our children. Some cultures instill low self-esteem. Their children suffer, but succeed, and the culture succeeds. Other cultures instill high self-esteem. Their children have a great childhood, but accomplish little in life, and the culture does not progress. They will also suffer more in later life; because the culture around them will be less orderly, less developed, and more violent.

The British upper class has long understood this. It was all about “breeding.” For countless generations, they sent their young away to spartan, rigorous boarding schools, where they were commonly bullied, and expected to fend for themselves. This was the key to the continued dominance of that class. 

Do the same with Canadian aboriginal children, and they call it “genocide.”

I tutor many Chinese and Korean students. They barely have a childhood. For them, it is a grind from morning to night. What is their favourite free-time activity? The usual response is “sleep.”

And you wonder why they do so well at academics? It is not discrimination in their favour. They are systematically discriminated against.

“Jewish guilt” is similarly notorious. You are never good enough.

African-Americans, by contrast, freely boast about themselves. They spike the ball in the end zone. They trash talk. A current ad for Hamilton Ontario tourism features a local football player paid to talk up the city. But he also inserts that he is the best football player ever seen—just in case you didn’t know. One cannot picture a ‘white” athlete saying such a thing. One cannot imagine a Chinese athlete saying such a thing. It is perhaps the most obvious cultural difference between the two groups.

A further irony is that those with low self-esteem are unlikely to complain. They will feel they do not deserve more than they have; and if they are genuinely discriminated against, they will fear drawing attention to themselves. It is likely to cause them trouble.

Those with high self-esteem, and those accustomed to getting what they want, on the other hand, will complain loudly if they do not get it. 

So if some group is complaining loudly of discrimination and injustice, they are almost certainly already privileged. 

This includes women. Boys are traditionally treated roughly and held to account as children. Little girls are traditionally treated as “princesses.” Young women are fawned over. And so they grow bitter when privilege is not acknowledged.

This includes African-Americans. If not privileged by the wider society until recently, they almost always grow up privileged. African-American mothers are famously indulgent. African-American fathers are often absent. And they currently have systematic privilege, and complain the louder for it.

This includes Canadian “First Nations.” Contrary to the myth, they have always been given every consideration by the government and the wider culture, as advised by the best experts of the day. As a result, they remain mired in poverty and a sense of grievance. Again, fathers are often absent; and mothers are indulgent. 

The current popular push for “self-esteem” is increasingly making a disastrous mistake. Our growing lack of interest in child-rearing is making a disastrous mistake.  A civilization-ending mistake, unless we correct it at this late date.

Report from the Trenches

 

Over just the past two weeks in my small city, someone has thrown a rock through one of the stained glass windows of the Catholic cathedral. Someone showed up at the choir recital, pulled out a knife, and started anointing the floor with alcohol. I wonder if his intent was to start a fire; the police were able to restrain him. A local café, run as a Christian charity, hosted a private meeting of Right to Life. Word got out; there was a protest and a call for boycott. They have now banned Right to Life from the premises. I now learn that all expressions of religion have been banned from the local Culturefest festival.

It has become alarming. Yet on the other hand, many seem to be turning to the Catholic church. There have been many recent high-profile conversions. There are record adult baptisms, I hear, in England and France. Some US dioceses are reporting a 50% growth in converts year over year. Generation Z, particularly young men, are said to be flocking to mass. Our own cathedral congregation seems to be growing each week.

On YouTube, I keep hearing about many conversions in places like Iran, China, Japan, and throughout Africa.

We seem to be at a moment of clarity. People are choosing sides. 

Narcissism Is Not Depression

 

Psychiatry generally—and a friend of mine—tend to classify narcissistic traits as “compensation” for low self-esteem, and so classify them as “depressed.” And the preferred therapy is to flatter them and boost their ego.

Einstein is supposed to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting to get different results. This is the same delusion: expecting the same thing to get opposite results.

Someone with low self-esteem is ashamed of their self. They think they are not up to par. The last thing they will want to do is to draw attention; people will see their inadequacy. These are the wallflowers; the ones who will not readily talk about themselves. They will indeed compensate for their low self-esteem, but they will compensate by working hard at whatever they are asked to do, to prove themselves. They will be scrupulously moral, and always want the structure of rules. Rules will reassure them they are doing all right.

Conversely, someone who wants to draw attention to themself is suffering from too much self-esteem, not too little self-esteem. They are proud of themselves. They are suffering from low “other-esteem,” in two senses. That is, in their perception, others are not giving them the admiration they deserve. And they never thought much of others in comparison to themselves. So they are annoyed with the world around them, which had better learn to shape up. The world is not measuring up to their standards.

They will dislike moral standards and rules. They might, after all, be used against them.

You will hear much complaining from those with high self-esteem. You will hear much less from those with low self-esteem. They will not want to show their head above the parapets, for fear of being shot at.

Someone with low self esteem, feeling disappointed, will blame themselves and want to harm or kill themselves. Someone with high self-esteem, feeling disappointed, will want to harm or kill everyone else.

Most narcissists will not go that far, but watch out. They naturally want to destroy anything around them that is good or true or beautiful, that they cannot claim as their own.

And this is where the school shooters and assassins come from.

Indian Land Claims Are Illegitimate

 

Lord Biggar writes in the National Post, seeking to justify the European conquest of Australia and the Americas, displacing the aboriginal people. He argues that the First Nations did not own the land: “Rules or laws, supported by social authority and the threat of punishment, create rights to own things —rights to property.” So the native people had no rights. Too bad.

This is wrong. Rights are not created by government. They are self-evident and inalienable, given by God. Our essential human dignity gives us rights. We are not animals; we are not things. We are in the image of God. Governments are merely formed to protect these rights.

The three principal human rights, according to Locke, are “life, liberty, and property.” 

“Property” has always been a little controversial; Jefferson regrettably changed it to “pursuit of happiness.” 

After all, how can anyone have an inherent and inalienable right to ownership of property? Property is so obviously separate from the person.

Simple, according to Locke: you own what you make. You own the products of your own labour, intellectual or physical.

However, because they had no functioning government, the aboriginal people in Canada or Australia could not protect their rights, although they had them as a moral imperative. They were regularly killing, enslaving, and stealing from each other. 

This is why they were so culturally backward—let’s be honest—they had not even invented the wheel. They were still in the Stone Age. 

There is no point in putting out any effort to make or invent anything if someone else can just take it. Nor is there time for such things if you must always be watching for  sudden attack.

So the best thing that could have happened to aboriginals was the coming of the Europeans. It is simply racism to say it mattered that Europeans brought law and order to the Americas instead of Indians themselves. 

Now, in doing this, did the Europeans steal the Indians’ land? No.

Firstly, Biggar is wrong to suggest that contact between Canadian First Nations and Europeans was mostly “friction, conflict, defeat and conquest.” You might say that about parts of the USA, but not Canada. In most places, local tribes welcomed the Europeans. Trading made the Indians rich and powerful against their enemies, and the Europeans generally protected them from their enemies as well—defended their rights. 

Before the Europeans came, the stone-age Khoi people of South Africa (the Bushmen) would go to the nearest Bantu tribe to resolve their disputes—because they had no legal system of their own. The alternative was endless vendetta. The Europeans did that for the warring tribes of Canada. When the Canadian government proposed permanent treaties, native groups flocked to petition in hopes of getting one. It was a matter of signing on to the social contract and getting the protection of the law. It was not about land. Treaties were signed with tribes newly arrived from the US, who had no conceivable land claims.

That said, throughout most of Canada, the treaties did have the Indians surrendering any theoretical property rights, including mineral rights. In this sense, too, the land was not stolen or conquered: it was sold, in exchange for something the Indians found more valuable: life, liberty, and the secure possession of property.

And even then, the Indians had not actually given up a square inch of land. They retained the same right as any European settler to take up land under the new system and farm it. As Canadians, they still owned it.

Now recall the basic principle: the right to property is a right to what you have made. The Indians had not made the land; they only hunted over it. They had a right to the game they killed, or the berries they picked, but not to the land itself. God made that. Any more than anyone can own the air or the sea: it is there for all mankind to use. 

One establishes land ownership when one’s labour is somehow invested in it and cannot be easily separated from it: if, for example, you have built a structure on it, or cleared, ploughed, fertilized, and planted a field, or dug a mine. This is the basis for squatters’ rights in common law. If the supposed owner is not using the land, and you start using it, it properly becomes yours.

So as hunter-gatherers, the First Nations by and large owned no land until the Europeans came.

Didn’t the coming of the European settlers at least force the Indians to change their way of life? Isn’t there an injustice in that, at least?

No; not in Canada. Even today, 89% of Canada is Crown Land. The Indians are still free to hunt and scavenge through it as they always have. It’s just that they now have better opportunities.

But I end with the same conclusion as Lord Biggar: to give this or that band eternal payments, and then royalties because resources are being extracted in the general vicinity of their reservation, is unjustifiable. It violates the principle of human equality, of equal rights.

Why I Love War (Sic)

 

Apparently I’m a neo-con. I’m a war pig. I’m a tool of the military-industrial complex. For I fully support Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran’s embedded nuclear facilities. 

This, I am told, threatens the MAGA coalition. Prominent voices on the right like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens are in open revolt.

To me the principle is simple. In the words of Edmund Burke, “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Or, in the worlds of the Bible, we are our brother’s keepers. Consider the Kitty Genovese thought experiment. If I see a woman being raped in an alley, or hear her screaming rape in the stairwell, I have the moral duty to intervene. I can’t just walk by or keep the door shut and say “Not my business.”

So too among nations. Pacifism is grossly immoral, and leads to more war. If aggressors expect to meet  swift and harsh consequences, they will not attempt anything.

This is why we have police departments, and why we call them “peace officers.”

By bombing Iran now, Trump makes a truly apocalyptic future war less likely. He is preventing Iran from making nuclear weapons. And he is making others too think twice about disturbing the peace. With no loss of American lives, at this point, and for all we know, no loss of Iranian lives either. 

I can understand why Americans are weary of what they call “forever wars.” To be fair, I also supported Bush going into Iraq and Afghanistan. Now widely considered mistakes.

I still don’t think they were. In fact, the taking of Baghdad and Kabul were quick and almost bloodless.  The mistake was not going in; it was staying. It was the delusional, neo-colonial thought that America could “nation build,” impose democracy on any random country. This is a contradiction in terms: you cannot force someone to be free, or dictate democracy. 

America should have done as I advised at the time: go in, take out Saddam or the Taliban, hand the palace keys to someone else, and leave. 

They should do the same in Iran. I hope Trump is smart enough not to repeat the mistake. Destabilize the Iranian regime to the point where the Iranian people can, if they have sufficient will, take matters into their own hands. Then leave it to them.

Why Canada Must Break Up

 

Nobody speaks of where this current eruption of Western separatism in Canada is coming from. Yes, Alberta has long been dissatisfied, but not to this degree. And now you are hearing Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the BC interior joining in; Saskatchewan as loudly. What has changed? Nobody seems to get it, or say it.

I say this was entirely predictable—because I predicted it. I warned my local Ontario MP of this in 2022. 

It springs inevitably from the attitude towards the Freedom Convoy by the federal government, the Ontario government, and the Ottawa municipal government in February 2022.

The West was willing to hold their tongues so long as it looked as though the Conservatives were going to come into power. Then their voices might be listened to.

 But the East remained indifferent to their concerns. In fact, they seem to show deliberate contempt. “Who do these peons think they are?”

Nor has the East’s attitude softened in the slightest since, in the face of rising calls in the West for independence

The main parallel I drew for my MP was the hanging of Louis Riel by the Macdonald government in 1885. They could and should have extended clemency, as they had for Mackenzie or Papineau in the East. Before that time, Quebec was the main base of support for the Conservative Party. After that, Quebec flipped, and Laurier soon came to power. Ever since, the Conservatives have struggled to garner support in Quebec, and the Liberals have become the “natural governing party.” Western alienation may have also gotten a boost.

I was hoping to appeal to his sense of political self-preservation, as a Liberal. It was a warning he at first seemed to take seriously, but then backed away from in his public statements. Too risky to go against the party policy.

Another parallel I drew was to the British treatment of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, 1916. During the actual uprising, the Irish people were solidly against it. But when the British shot all the leaders as traitors, Irish independence became inevitable. For they had treated the Irish with contempt.

So too with the government’s treatment of the Freedom Convoy. The convoy began in the West; first reports came from BC. Although other truckers from the East joined later, most of the prominent organizers were Westerners: Chris Barber from Saskatchewan, Tamara Lich and James Bauder from Alberta.

And when they arrived in Ottawa, all the Eastern authorities insisted on the term “occupation.” That alone said everything.  “Occupation”: Merriam-Webster: “the holding and control of an area by a foreign military force.” Oxford Learner’s Dictionary: “the act of moving into a country, town, etc. and taking control of it using military force; the period of time during which a country, town, etc. is controlled in this way.” 

They did not consider Westerners fellow citizens. They were foreigners, under foreign control. They were automatically a hostile force who had no right to be in the capital of Canada.

How would you expect the West to react? In effect, it was the East who declared their independence. By refusing to meet with the protesters, refusing to accept their petition, and responding with extreme force, the Eastern establishment made it clear that they looked on the West as a foreign colony they had reason to fear. And which had no rights.

For the West not to declare independence, under the circumstances, would be shameful.

I say all this as an Easterner. I have lived in the West for perhaps three years, but I was born in Ontario, raised in Ontario and Quebec, and live in New Brunswick. I do not want Canada to break up, but the East must change, and they/we seem too arrogant to do so. I tremble for my country when I consider God is just.

The Intolerance of Relativism

 

Last year, our local multiculturalism festival ran into some trouble: some Arabs were giving some grief to the Jewish booth over the Israel-Gaza strife. 

I do not know the details. All I know is that the organizers this year, to solve the problem, have banned any expressions of religion.

An example of the general prejudice that religion causes discord. As if the Gaza situation was about religion. 

The PLO was formed as a Marxist organization; it had nothing to do with religion. To its left, the PFLP, was run by George Habash, nominally a Christian. Only in more recent years, religion has been tagged on as a further premise for the hostilities; they would have continued regardless. It is about ethnicities, not religions. It is worth noting that the most devout Jews in Israel refuse to fight; and the more Muslim states, the Gulf states, have remained aloof from the Gazans.

Except for Iran. Hamas is funded by Iran. But Iran is Shia Muslim, while Gazan Muslims are Sunni. Not the same guys; like Catholics and Protestants. Iran is not supporting them on religious grounds.

So why did the organizers jump to the weird step of banning crosses and crucifixes; instead of banning Israeli or Palestinian flags?

Because of the wider prejudice, or deliberate lie, that relativism is tolerant, while any claim of absolute truth—any religious claim—is oppressive to others. 

And this used everywhere to justify the suppression of religion.

Yet the opposite is demonstrable from history. The most prominent relativist regimes in Western history were the Nazis and Fascists. They were, definitively, cultural relativists: nothing was above the folk and the state, and conventional morality was expressly rejected. Mussolini declared in so many words, “Fascism is relativism.” 

We see where that led. It was not tolerance.

Marxism is also relativist, and rejects moral codes. In a sense, it is culturally relativist, although it would use the term “ideology” instead of “culture.” What is supposedly truth is entirely conditioned by the current system of material production.

And again, the result was grave intolerance: the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, North Korea’s hermit state, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.

For a fair comparison, What states can we cite as absolutist: as officially claiming to know and commit to some absolute truth? That is, nations which declare a state religion. The most obvious example is the United Kingdom; we could also cite Norway and Denmark. Not famous for their intolerance, surely. Also on the list would be modern Greece, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar. Not bad places to live unmolested for your beliefs. 

Granted, not all absolutist regimes are so nice. Iran is also officially absolutist; Saudi Arabia; Pakistan; Sudan; Myanmar. I can personally vouch that Saudi Arabia is really rather a pleasant place to live; and chaos may be the real problem in Pakistan. But still …

And not all relativist states are guilty of mass murder: we could cite the present Chinese government, or that of Vietnam, as not being all bad. 

But at least, we can say that officially absolutist states are among the most tolerant, while officially relativist states are among the most intolerant.

Let’ consider some history.

Under an absolutist mandate, expressly claiming that their official mandate was to lead the Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire was a relatively pleasant place for its many religious minorities to live. This changed when the Young Turks came to power, making the ruling principle Turkish language, culture, and identity instead—cultural relativism. The Armenian genocide soon followed, then the Greek genocide and mass expulsion. And this changed when, in the rest of the Middle East, Islam as a unifying principle was replaced by Arab nationalism—culture instead of religion. 

Then we started to get wars in the Middle East and terrorist attacks. If the official justification was sometimes religious, those who committed the attacks were curiously not known to their intimates to be religious at all. They were generally Westernized and secularist. They were fighting for their culture, of which religion happened to be one component. They were “cultural Muslims” as we talk about “cultural Christians” or “cultural Jews.”

Calling them “Muslim extremists” has always been an egregious lie.

And so it goes: relativism leads to intolerance, and religious commitment leads to growing tolerance.

The reason is fairly obvious if you think about it. If you believe in unalterable ultimate reality, what could cause conflict? Nobody can harm it simply by not believing it; that is their misfortune. If someone does not believe in gravity, I’m not going to fight him over it. Good luck!

If, on the other hand, you believe there is no fixed reality, you have every incentive to impose on others a “narrative” that is favourable to you. The stakes could not be higher: all or nothing.  The only thing left is, in Hitler’s phrase, the triumph of the will. You will or theirs. Conflict is certain, down to the last man or woman or non-binary whatever standing.

And that is where we have been rushing headlong.