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The ongoing riots in the UK and the senseless destruction they have caused remind me of Bertold Brecht's famous poem he wrote in response to the 1953 East Germany strikes. While Brecht, himself a communist sympathizer, initially intended his poem to be a satirical polemic about heavy handed work quotas it recently struck me that he might have been more correct than even he had anticipated.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "to dissolve" as "to become dissipated or decomposed". After seeing the behaviour of the rioters right now as well as the rhetoric that has been coming from that class of people over the last few decades one must wonder if the right solution isn't really to dissolve the people. By this I don't mean immersing them in sulphuric acid until dissolution but rather dissipating their population density as a fraction of the whole country until there is no longer enough of a critical proportion of people which can light the fuse so to speak. There's a reason why even though there are far more "natives" in London than Sunderland the violence in the former has been more chickenhearted and more easily put down.
These rioters are generally low human capital people who take out a lot more over the course of their life than they put in. It's not scientists and lawyers you see giving the middle finger to police officers and pushing garbage bins in their general direction. I think it is perfectly fair to say that as a group they are best characterized as failures who have disappointed their betters and what's more don't even think there is anything wrong with their current state and behaviour. They are even confused and disoriented about the flashpoint of the current disorder: unlike what their prejudices told them the person who killed the three girls in Southport was not a fresh off the boat Muslim migrant but rather a black Welsh 17 year old child who had been born in the UK having a schizo moment. The true facts about the stabbing coming out did not placate their desire for an orgy of violence in the least.
Furthermore they live off the tax contributions of people like me and instead of being thankful for what they are given they blame us for making the country worse and want to bleed us even more. I like to quip that if the majority of people want to see a human parasite they would be better served by looking in the mirror instead of the Times Rich List and I think that applies perfectly here.
Another good example of a city that had some riots is Manchester; when the thugs tried their trade there they were met with swift counter protests bigger than what they could muster and were forced to disperse, leading to no public damage. It appears that the violence only really gets out of hand in the minor cities where the concentration of "natives" is too high. To prevent future riots the obvious solution is to reduce this concentration or namely, to dissolve the people.
Whenever there is dissolution there must be a solvent. And what would make the best solvent here? The usual answer provided by the left is something like "integration" where rich and well off people are asked to live amongst the lower classes in the hope that they will have a civilizing effect on the poors. Normally this is done by mandating the building of housing intended for poor people very close to housing occupied by the well off. While this may work at preventing tantrums from being thrown in the first place it won't do very much to quell them if they happen: a bunch of effete button pushers (Note: I count myself as among this group) doesn't put the fear of God into anyone. They would never have the guts to go up to the rioters and do this (choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has).
Instead the best solvent you can get is someone who will also stand up to debauchery when it rears its ugly head: migrants who are unafraid of giving it just as good as they get (see above video). And what's more, unlike the low tier "natives" who Great Britain is saddled with because they were born here the non-natives are all people who were either themselves selected by the UK as being positive for the country or descendants of such people which means they still have a portion of the net positive genetics (I'm ignoring refugees here because they make up a very small proportion of total migrants and something tells me the rioters of today wouldn't be happy if illegal migration stopped but legal migration continued at the same levels as today).
In fact a more reasonable word for these migrants would be "elects", since they are the chosen. Each and every single legal migrant in the UK has been collectively chosen as being worthy of being allowed into the country. They should be accorded the respect such an honour deserves instead of being told that they don't belong here. In fact the reason so many of them were chosen in the first place is because the "natives" have continued to disappoint the real decision makers day in day out for the last however many decades where importing so many migrants was the only choice left to keep a stable state going: firstly refusing to take care of older family members and foisting them onto the state and then refusing to have enough children if they're net contributors/having too many children if they aren't net contributors. Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
And we shouldn't forget that many of the migrants had far worse starting conditions than the gentlemen throwing bricks but through industry and positive sum contributions to human flourishing have managed to make something of themselves, only to be looked at enviously by the people who previously have been appropriating the wealth of the successful and now want to get even more at the elects' expense.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another. I for one am looking forward to the consummation of this process; we'll probably end up with fewer riots at least.
I'm trying to figure out on what proportions this actually describes your beliefs, amounts to an instance of trying a different belief on for size, and is an exercise in tricking the resident contrarians into vigorously defending the polar opposite viewpoint. Either way, the statement about fewer riots at least seems baseless - I actually happened to be in London in 2010?11? when the minorities were rioting, and it still looked more serious than the pictures we are seeing now.
Let me try to guess what's going on here? There's a really obnoxious bait-and-switch that white supremacists tend to do (it's really important here to emphasize "supremacist"). Everything is at first justified through the lens of something like meritocracy or "master morality ---look at how inferior these examples of other races are, or look how "multiculturalism" is just "slave morality" where the strong are forced to support weak parasites (since Nietzsche is on everyone's mind again from the recent ACX post) .
However, when push comes to shove, it becomes very clear that their true motivation is not any kind of meritocracy or "master morality" at all---it's just wanting the members of the group they're part of to have increased status for the sole reason of having been born into that group. This is of course decidedly anti-meritocratic.
Posts like the OP's are a great way to highlight this contradiction (I tried something similar with this question posted on the old site). If you're actually going to judge some people as superior to others because of their achievement and greatness, no reasonable judgement is going to come out the way white supremacists (and racialists more generally) say it will. It really emphasizes that they have no basis for their positions besides naked, defecting-in-the-prisoner's-dilemma selfishness.
Of course, all the liberals hate the argument because you're judging some people as inherently worth more than others and all the racial conservatives hate it because the judgement is actually by merit instead of what they want: arbitrarily putting the group they were born into on top. See also the Nietzsche article's description (section X) of why everyone gets mad a Richard Hanania despite him being the only actual "honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist".
In summary, think of this as "Ok, Mr. white supremacist, I'll grant you your stated motivation that we should follow some kind of 'master morality' and judge some people as superior and therefore of greater worth than others, let's see where that actually takes us. Oh, it should actually make you sound like Richard Hanania, supporting skilled immigration and all, instead of whatever you are. You really don't have any grounding in your policy preferences besides naked selfishness in favor of your birth group do you?". Whether the OP actually believes that you should rank people this way is less interesting.
Neither master morality nor slave morality nor selfishness have anything to do with it. I expect to be treated differently in my own house compared to the plumber who comes over to fix the taps. If my mother suddenly started calling the plumber her son, then gave me a fiver and threw me out onto the street, I'd be horrified. Who wouldn't?
If I went to Italy, or Bangladesh, I wouldn't expect to be treated like a native because I'm not one. If I stay in the (foreign) country I'm in now, I will never become a CEO because they want local companies to be owned by local businessmen, and that's fine, that's the deal. Likewise if I move to a village in Derbyshire or something.
This is sort of my point: if someone is able to positively contribute to the country they immigrate to, integrate well into the social fabric, be involved with the local community, etc, then it's their country too (I'm not going to use your "house" framing since that manipulatively plays on intuitions about small family groups that do not at all apply to countries of millions). You judge people by their actions instead of where they arbitrarily happened to be born.
Of course someone with OP's absurd level of contempt for such a large fraction of his country's population is at the very least not integrating well into the social fabric. However there are many other people that satisfy all the above requirements that you would arbitrarily exclude to their and your own country's loss.
You are explicitly rejecting any sort of meritocracy here---is that actually what you mean to do? It is complete nonsense to have a privileged class of "natives" who through no hard work of their own are forever in a separate superior class that is locked out to everyone else.
(@jeroboam, look how quickly we get someone saying that all immigrants, even the positively contributing ones, should be forever treated as inferior)
This is a straightforward clash of worldviews. I have a positive sense of my people as a people with a thousand years of shared history and shared culture. Clearly you don’t feel the same and neither of us are going to argue the other into their favoured moral intuitions. I am not manipulatively trying to sneak in inappropriate intuitions to win an internet argument, I am describing my sincere opinions.
We literally have the words ‘homeland’ and ‘motherland’, so I’m hardly the first to feel this way.
Again, you are unintentionally trying to force my reply into your preferred moral framework. Superiority and inferiority are entirely irrelevant. Many migrants are clearly superior to at least some native British on all counts, but that doesn’t make them native. In many cultures, guests are treated with a solicitude greater than family, but they’re still guests and expected to behave appropriately. Real relationships with real people cannot be ranked on a strict 1D scale.
If we’re talking bad analogies, the idea that if you don’t import literally every person in the world who is better than your stupidest native person, you are basically like a nepotist hiring his brother seems very tortured to me. This is the reason I stopped being a liberal - it is absolutely incapable of considering the actions of people at any scale other than the individual.
No, I’m not. Saying that because I don’t want mass immigration (>50k people a year) I would be happy with selecting people for jobs at random is a big leap of logic.
Look, clearly we aren’t going to agree, because our axioms are too different, but we can at least try to understand each other. If you genuinely believe that any group feeling on a larger scale than family can only be based on selfishness at best and bigotry at worst, then obviously you’re going to end up against nativism. However, try suspending that assumption for a moment and see what you get.
Ok, let's try this if you're interested in discussing at an annoyingly meta level: I don't see this belief
as an axiom, but rather a necessary conclusion from deeper principles justifying morality. Specifically, I 100% agree with the very end of this article
Scott Alexander of course always says things way more eloquently than I can. The (admittedly extreme) individualism you're calling out isn't an axiom, rather, at our current level of technological development, it's the best way to achieve all the good things---to exalt and glorify civilization, etc. See here and ymeskhout's broader point in the original post.
Actually that helps me understand you a lot better, thank you.
I agree with all of this. The thing is, my shining example of all that we could be is Victorian Britain circa 1850, which clearly involved individualism but also religion and a profound sense of who we were as a people. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was pretty damn good, and could have been a lot better if we'd had modern technology and levels of economic development.
Now, in your linked comment you basically say that times change and the latter things resulted from the 20th century pivot towards extreme individualism. I used to think so too, but it no longer seems self-evident to me. The rise of countries like China (which did badly under full communism but OTOH pretty clearly hasn't embraced liberal individualism now) on the one hand and the decay of Britain / Europe / US despite those countries not becoming measurably less individualistic has muddied the individualism <-> prosperity relationship considerably in my eyes.
You might also say that you're primarily in favour of full individualistic meritocracy rather than individualism per-se. Tautologically, getting the most effective possible person for the job is most effective, at least on an individual-level, short-term scale. Whether that's true on a longer time scale, I don't know. My sensibilities are affronted by blatant nepotism and discrimination(*) but at the same time I think a big part of the dysfunction that Western societies have gone through in the last few decades has been essentially a sublimated cry of despair on behalf of middle-class people who are exhausted by the perpetual struggle not to fall from their current position and resentful of the constant pressure to strive for positions they can't realistically achieve. I suspect the majority of people were mostly happier with more structured expectations and a somewhat more rigid social structure. (I would be interested to know how you think things will end up: do you envision a natural slackening of the rat race one day, or a continued and perpetual struggle? If the latter, the resultant technological progress and prosperity may not be worth the candle.)
So I think I see where you're coming from, but I broadly disagree on how we get there and how adaptive modern liberal globalism is. I think we need a mostly-homogenous, high human capital society with a relatively but not completely inflexible social structure, where it's possible for the most intelligent people to rise in rank and to move around but doing so is neither common nor expected.
To return to our original point of contention, I also have a strong sense of my people as a people, and I care about maintaining my homeland's culture. 20 years ago, when I thought that liberal globalism really was hugely beneficial, I pushed those feelings down and supported mass immigration because I thought it would be worth it. Now, it seems very obvious that mass immigration wasn't and isn't worth it, and so I strongly oppose mass immigration. Discussing this with people, I was horrified to find that many people who I thought were likewise patriotic pragmatists aren't - some actually do regard people as completely fungible, and others support mass immigration in order to destroy a traditional English culture that they despise.
(*) For me, this depends on scale. Only considering your friends and family for a job is very bad, only considering those in your local church is pretty bad, only considering those within 100 miles is understandable most of the time, only considering those in your country is basically fine. 60 million is a big pool.
In your linked comment, you talk about Von Neumann, Einstein, and Edison; I'm happy to let the few thousand literal geniuses in the world go wherever they like. Say, those with IQ > 140 if you want something quantitative.
I'm going to first go even more annoyingly meta: I'm not so happy with this sentence because it seems to be framed as just a personal preference that can't really be justified by more than "I personally like it". Everyone sort of has "inner values" based on such idiosyncratic preferences, but it always feels to me very morally wrong to try to argue with others by nakedly stating them (in harsher words, this is what I called "naked selfishness" before). Rather, you ought to find universal reasons that work for everyone---either extremely compelling "poetry" to convince others to have your same idiosyncratic preferences, or better, links to universal values like reducing suffering. Obviously you have a lot of these universal reasons which are explained more later in the post, so this is a nitpick. Also obviously, I have nakedly selfish reasons for preferring individualistic meritocracy since it gets close to my shining example of something like early 2010's San Francisco Bay Area (before housing availability/infrastructure issues really started kicking in). However, if I can't find universal reasons to support it, I should seriously question whether this preference is reasonable. At the very least, I should never expect them to be compelling to anyone else and keep them to myself.
So now lets get into the universal reasons.
I don't have much personal experience with Britain/Europe, but I don't really see much decay in the US, not coincidentally, the country where individualistic meritocracy is the strongest. Particularly in technology, the US continues to produce world-changing breakthrough after breakthrough---AI systems, fracking, mRNA vaccines, etc. Though it's hard to feel this because of relative status effects and short memories, people in the US have more than they ever used to---bigger houses, better cars, more variety at the grocery store, better entertainment, etc. It's also not a coincidence that the technological breakthroughs in the US come from its most individualistic, diverse, and open areas like San Francisco or Cambridge, MA.
I would even say that the most compelling explanation for decay in Europe is actually this attitude, which is far more prevalent there:
This promotes a sort of closed-mindedness and resistance to change. If you want scientific and technological progress, you need novel ideas. If you want novel ideas, you need to be tolerant of weirdos, immigrants, and outsiders. Conversely, if you close yourself off to the unusual socially, you're also going to lose the drive to create the new technologically---"why do we need more, our village is good as it is!".
Finally, 60 million is not a big pool at all. I'm in math, and the median best mathematician from a region of 60 million doesn't hold a candle to the world's best. Furthermore, agglomeration effects are really important for new ideas so it makes a big difference if one country can concentrate high-performers in one place. I guess if you're making this exception:
then it's not so bad (though 145 IQ is 3 standard deviations which is on the order of magnitude of 1/1000 people so there are around 10 million of them in the world. This is smartest kid in your year in your school district level, not world-changing genius).
I think this is the most compelling argument against my point. As far as naked selfishness goes, I much prefer the rat race since it pushes me to achieve much greater things than I would otherwise. At some level, you can justify it in this way: sacrifices we put up with currently to make the future better. However, I think a much better justification is that the people happy with the rigid social structure were those on top. For everyone else, being at the bottom is even worse if you're forever stuck there and there's nothing you can do about it. Having hope and agency over your life is really important for happiness, and if sacrificing the top 10% to stress is worth it to give this to the bottom 90%, then that's a worthwhile trade. I realize though I might just be typical-minding here---maybe as you say the chance to rise makes most people more stressed and unhappy than being stable in even a pretty low place.
Either way, once society is wealthy enough that everyone's non-status needs are met, I expect the rat race to eventually resolve itself by splitting into a million parallel races so that everyone can feel high-status by being in the top 1% of something---some niche video game, sport, academic field, etc.
As the final point:
Do you have universal reasons why maintaining your homeland's culture (in more of a sense than various minority groups are able to maintain their cultures within US-style multiculturalism) is important? I think there's something around monocultures being bad---like you can argue that my vision of progress coming from all the new ideas from mixing cultures is sort of a dead end since it won't work anymore once everything is mixed and homogenized. Again, however, I think US-style multiculturalism resolves this issue pretty well.
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