Iron Law of Culture
There will always be a ruling culture, no matter what, and once that ruling culture dissipates, or the people that it rules are no longer apart of that culture, then that government can no longer rule
The Iron Law of Oligarchy dictates that there will, no matter what, always be a small elite group who end up dictating the lives of the rest of their nation. Even in what one might call anarchism, there will ultimately be some level of hierarchical organization that trades protection for compliance and taxation. The interesting thing about anytime in history is that this basic idea was well-understood from the lowliest of lowly peasants to the Sovereigns themselves. However, in the era in which we live, this idea has so many caveats for most people as they are so in denial about having control over every little thing in their lives. They believe that they are almost entirely autonomous.
People, who view themselves as individual sovereigns and essentially walking nation-states, cannot comprehend that what they see are just shadowy figments dancing on the wall. Subconsciously, they are extremely selfish. Consciously, they will pass their selfishness off as some enlightened individualism that is some great virtue to behold of modern day.
To them, government is just some indifferent, perfectly figured out organization that is there to protect them and give them free money when they are old. What couldn’t be more evident of a completely delegitimized government or ruler, though? When they’re seen as basically just cynical bureaucrats who are there to do a couple simple things so that Joe Blow and Jane Doe can continue leveraged lives of casual sex and driving cars they can’t afford, there doesn’t seem to be any recognition of power. Ultimately, these individuals who most certainly do not see themselves as anything more than their persona, rather than a soul or a member of a community, are fickle, and completely disinterested in a government controlling their lives. As long as the high-end standard of living they have can be maintained, then they aren’t too disgruntled about their dignity being taken from them. Besides, did they even have it in the first place?
For the average American, patriotism is something to get choked up about when having some brews with the boys. It takes a lot, as we have seen, for Americans to really recognize what the hell being an American even means, and that sometimes we have to sober up and speak out even if it makes some people uncomfortable. That’s the essential difference between the consumerist culture of now, and the true, honest-to-God organic patriotism of the heroes of yore.
These heroes were outcomes of successful institutions and a strong, traditional culture of standing up for what is right. When the crisis generations came, Americans stood up for what they believed in, even when it meant battling with themselves. William Strauss and Neil Howe cogently thought up this sort of generational cycle in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning. They reckoned that American/Anglo-Saxon culture specifically has strong sensitivity to these cycles, called saeculums made up of four generations:
The first generation, the High, being of euphoria, economic highs, strong collectivism. (Boomers)
The second generation, the Awakening, being of detachment and experiencing less of the fruits of the institutions beget by their grandparents and parents. (X-Gen/Thirteeners)
The third generation, the Unraveling, opposite of the High, where institutions are being challenged and individualism grows. Failures of the established institutions become more blatant, and bring about more and more criticism. (Millenials)
The fourth generation, the Crisis, where institutions are destroyed, replaced, and the people born of this time either grow up during the crisis or experience the aftermath where the new institutions now stand. (Zoomers)
Apart from the fantastic theory this book gets at, and how extremely prophetic it has become, I think the authors didn’t take into account two very important things that, I believe, make their theory now null.
Firstly, this cyclical nature, of a natural compulsion towards challenging old institutions and building up new is very specific to certain cultures. Specifically, Anglo-Saxon is extremely sensitive to these cycles, as the natural scientific inclinations, idealistically fair legal systems, and persnickety challenges to old institutions permeates that of English culture going back to the 1300s. This is even more evident in American history, where there always seems to be a battle between the old and new, rather than compared to maybe a nation like Russia, where culture, short of the spiritually destitute Soviet Union and its aftermath, maintained the same power functions and hierarchy as a nation-state for hundreds of years with little changes to government or culture. Even moreso, for tribal nations of the Americas or Africa, the inherent chaos of might means right diplomacy leads to a state of constant war, and a maintaining of whatever the ruling Shaman says. In short, with the importation of extremely traditionalist cultures that do not facilitate political and cultural battles and disagreements in the same way American/Anglo-Saxon culture has, then such battles are bound to be fought either on a lower form of understanding to help match these foreign tribal mentalities, or these battles will all but be irrelevant except to the tuned-in American or consumerist lib loyalist.
Since the culture is no longer Anglo-Saxon, and hardly even a derivative of it, the United States cannot function as a legalistically fair, free-market, semi-aristocratic republic. All it functions as now, in terms of culture, is highly decentralized cultural enclaves who do not speak English, worship the same God, hold the same priorities, hygienic standards, and proclivities towards scientific innovation as the predecessor Anglo-American culture. In terms of the inevitable oligarchy, the ruling powers are unequivocally-detached midwits who have to make a sales pitch that will ensure their electors pick them. This leads to, like just recently, Republicans voting heavily in favor of a Red Flag law that pertains to military workers. The oligarchy is no longer focused on law and order, glory through God, love of their countrymen, but on how to keep its “constituents” compliant in an ever-chaotic, dying republic; constituents who work on short-term time preference modus operandi, and have absolutely no interest in keeping the nation stable, productive, and spiritually healthy.
Secondly, American culture has gone through a distinct shift in priorities and complete disconnect from its spiritual stasis that it and its predecessor cultures had maintained for thousands of years. The once-inherent spirituality that gave countrymen some level of agreeance and understanding with their paisanos has now evaporated. Americans who still understand the foundational moral roots this country has, either through genetic osmosis, or because they just simply get it are the only ones carrying the torch at this point. The ruling culture is no longer Christian, nor American. It is a hypersecularist (nihilist) consumer culture largely made up of the strongest beneficiaries of the Millenial Saeculum. If you are an atheist, or mildly religious, have a strong belief that the government is full of people who care about you and want to do what is right, and that all woes could be solved if it weren’t for just those gosh-darned prejudiced morons who won’t get out of the way of progress, you are a member of this consumerist culture, and congratulations, you are easy to rule.
The faculties that make up the healthy motions that a growing culture go through must be maintained in order for that culture to still be the same, and still have that evolution that brings about sweeter fruits. We can debate all day long about the Stuart King who should’ve been, or how magnificent a leader General Lee was, but at the end of the day, regardless of the sides, we can recognize that these mythic archetypal heroes were products of a glorious culture that no longer rules. Maybe in some small towns in the Deep South or Midwest, we still see harbingers of the old world’s traditions and an appreciation of playing by the rules of the game, who enjoy the competition within the bounds of a just law. However, the lawfulness that made a nation like England so rhetorically, and legitimately, powerful, no longer rules her or her colonies’ subsequent independent nations. The minute we started to embrace the failures of democracy, rejecting the basis of rule of law, and reverted to a chaotic state of perpetual divisionism and hatred between the many new cultures and subcultures permeating this once great land, we were no longer a nation.
That’s the thing that even the reactionaries and paleoconservatives do not seem to get: the ruling culture is no longer American, it is a consumerist culture that wears the skin of Anglo-American culture; much akin to a cicada’s molt harboring the same special distinctions of the cicada that used to wear this skin but has now moved on. To believe that we can somehow “convince” some starry-eyed “leaders” like Desantis or Crenshaw or Abbott to carry the old world’s traditions is a laughable idea. Their jobs are to maintain stasis, and they will play every lib language game, kowtow to any new civil rights act equivalent, and die on the hill of radical centrist Third Way Blairism before even paying any mind to American virtue and family values.
Do not feel sorrow yet, though, my clearpilled reader. You see, there’s a beautiful ending to all of this. The ruling consumerist, Third Way Leviathan who shouts “Build back better!” in resplendent vigor at the top of his lungs! The elitist superintendents of our educations system, degenerate comptrollers of the media your grandparents garble up like the shadows on the cave wall; their power solely hinges on one thing and one thing only: being able to make sure the enclave cultures who view western government as an intelligent, well-organized James Bond-like federation of elaborate agencies that somehow keep everything together, aren’t rowdy and on their side.
The POC’s, imported cultures that set up enclaves in the inner-city, their culture is not Anglo-Saxon in the slightest, or even resembling of a European culture where governments have long histories of intelligent debates, philosophers, rulers, etc. No, these are people who come from nations where the ruling government is generally half a century old at best who mimic western democratic republicanism insofar as they have a guy they call the President and sometimes he gives people welfare and he has a bunch of guys with guns who will ensure that he stays President. If you come from Mexico or El Salvador or India, you probably aren’t too knowledgable about how government functions, or the innerworkings of economics, or what a central bank is, or how money is created, or why the West has such characteristically clean cities (well, used to), generally lower petty crimes, and people are generally richer. This is of no concern to the foreigners. All they know is they want to go to the place where they don’t get their head chopped off, they can get a low-end or decent job making more money than they did in their home country, and can saddle up with their homies in a cultural enclave and pretend they are in their motherland but with less crime, more infrastructure, and more money.
The minute the recession shows its fangs, once the downfall of the cities becomes so too noticeable, and specifically, once the detached, lib overlords come into the Mexican slums and tell these people, “Sorry but you can’t have this taqueria here, please, eat the bugs, and uh, you can’t be worshipping ole’ Jesus Christo, yeah get rid of that iglesia there, thanks!” is when these people, who culturally rule their enclaves, and therefore, control a decentralized null hypothesis over their own specific ethnic communities will have utter disinterest in voting at all, and will backlash in the only way they know how: rioting and establishing more localized power wherein there will likely be mafia-rule.
And now, with BLM even sticking it to vaccine mandates (for ulterior motives, no doubt), the signs are showing that this is quite evident, that the consumerist lib elites do not control anything except the pipeline of welfare and the basics of running a government (muh roads, which even then, they suck at). Before, when Anglo-American culture ruled, there was a perpetual sense of understanding that if a bridge needed to be built, it would be built, and we’d get the engineers and funding to do so. Now, the government has decided to start building a bridge without anyone’s consent. The only way that the elites rule is through promises. They cannot threaten anyone effectively, as it continues to blowback in their face when they realize that there are still Texan Patriots, Southerners who will not relinquish the culture that the ruling Yank-successor culture has tried to destroy for over a century, Midwestern Mormons and Americans who harbor that old world frontiersman spirit of freedom and life on the open range, Appalachians who know what it is like to struggle and live off the land without any help from government state and especially federal. They seem to think that, probably due to them being incompetent, egomaniacal, Godless midwits, everyone will just go along with obeying their rule simply because there are still boomers who worship every word that they say.
And that really brings us back full circle. In the generational theory, those who were born during the High generation (boomers), literally cannot conceive of a world without the system that was put in place in their youth. They are so utterly convinced in almost this “iron law of governmental competence” that the system will just wash out the bad and things will return to normal. This is what happens when a culture fails to live up to the institutions it built, this is what happens when those institutions were simply bad trees bearing bad fruit, and this is what happens when the overlords of that culture are so in denial of their own gigantic cultural, spiritual, governmental, epistemological failures that the younger generations want to completely overhaul the entire system that they created. They are such a failure that the enclavian cultures they let in simply treat their nation as a place to set up shop and do whatever they want without any hint of assimilation and respect for the ruling culture.
This is what happens when a ruling culture doesn’t know how to rule. It allows for splinter cultures from before its rule, and during its rule, to usurp its power through its own inability to control the narrative without any competence or consistency. The minute the people that they have tried to rule over realized that they are Hansel and Grettle and are about to be cooked up for the scary witch who offered them all of this candy, the entire fable implodes in on itself. There is no way that they can keep the charade going when there is nothing within the cicada molt except air. They either collapse in on themselves through sheer incompetence and the fact that there is just no more feedback in the system, or the nation finally splits into the borders that already de facto exist within it through sociocultural societies.
I think it pertinent we develop a new understanding of how governments rule, the Iron Law of Culture, defined simply as this: There will always be a ruling culture, no matter what, and once that ruling culture dissipates, or the people that it rules are no longer apart of that culture, then that government can no longer competently rule and therefore leads to a constant state of war and chaos. Don’t take it from me either, Thomas Hobbes spoke of this plainly in Leviathan, where he talks about how the sovereignty of a common-wealth (country/nation-state), among many other requirements, can only properly be called sovereign if it rules its people equally, assimilating those into its ruling culture, and casting out those who cannot do so. If a Sovereign fails to rule its people as one, then the nation will be divided, and therefore no longer a nation. Therefore, the King, no longer Sovereign. That is the basis of rulership, and the current US Gov’t cannot accept that it is ruling nobody through culture, but through psychologically conscripting its loyalists and unknowing POC’s into constant warfare against those that do not recognize its rule, and therefore, it is only a matter of time before the legitimacy of this government becomes null. I would say it is already null, and that is why they have to keep pushing the lever to maintain compliance.
“For the sovereign is the public soul, giving life and motion to the Commonwealth, which expiring, the members are governed by it no more than the carcass of a man by his departed, though immortal, soul.”
Thomas Hobbes