Hard work doesn’t entitle you to anything.

One of the dogmas of modern society is that hard work is the most important, most valuable, most meritable quality there is. There is an unspoken assumption underlying the majority of social, economic and political ideas of the age, that if you work hard, that entitles you to something, and that if you are entitled to something, well it’s either because you worked hard, or it’s “unfair”.

That my friends, is a lie.

You are not entitled to anything by working hard. You can slave all your life and get nothing for it, and suffer and sweat and die alone with not a penny to your name – and this is not unfair, because, you are not owed anything.

You are not owed anything for working. You are not owed anything for being born. You are not owed anything for being smart. You are not owed anything for being stupid. You are not owed anything unless you enter into some kind of contract to that effect, and even then my friends, even then, you are relying on the good graces of your debtor and their ability to pay, and if they fail, you are at as much fault as they for choosing to engage in a risky endeavour.

My father used to say “nothing’s fair in this goddamn crazy world” (in recent years he has shortened it to “this GCW”. But it’s not really about fairness. Fairness is a social construct which has a specific sphere of meaning. A contract can be fair, if both parties get their due, a contract is a social relationship between to people. But even then… its hard to explain…

When I was born, I was born to middle class parents, with a comfortable lifestyle. Some people are born to parents who are slaves. Some people are born princes and princesses.

It’s easy for me to look up at princes and not consider it unfair. I am not owed to be a prince, it’s not something I deserve. It’s not something princes deserve either. It is, we could say, a grace bestowed upon them (by birth, by life, by God, by society) – a gift they are given without deserving it, but a gift is not “unfair” its something given freely by someone(s), someone(s) who have the right to grant such a gift. As such it cannot be unfair. My parentage is as much a gift, but it is easy for me to look down upon those born to slaves and think that their situation is “unfair” – because middle class guilt was drilled into me from a young age. I was taught to feel that way. Truly, it is no more unfair than the prince scenario. The child of slaves does not deserve to be born into slavery, it is also a gift, although this is a horrible use of the word. It is something that history has brought to bear upon them. The results of ancient wars and conflicts, trickled down to the present, and the princes of the world, and the guilt obsessed middle class families, and the salt of the earth working class protestants, and the slaves – we all are given these situations by these forces which, though we battle with all our might against it, against the thought of it, in our every action, of charity, of selfishness, of self will, of planning, of effort of control – though we fight it, these forces, this world, is bigger than us, and out of our control. Whether we are born a prince or a slave, we are equally powerless. Equally weak. Equally deserving of nothing.

By which I mean… there is nothing we deserve. Not that we deserve nothing. Because the two statements are very different, and the latter is not at all what I mean.

When good comes to us, we like to think we earned it. We like to think our hard work, or our skill, or our good nature can be credited with the good we receive. In truth, the good we receive is beyond our control. In an artificial environment this is not always true, but in the real world it is, and we find it so easy to forget because of how long we have lived in an artificial environment. Where we think we are getting what is fair, but we are really getting the spoils of wars too far away for us to understand. The product of other peoples slaveries. Born princes but educated to believe that we earned it, and thus more dangerous than any young aristocracy who knew that their position was a mere accident of history.

And this …this factors into the whole complaints I have been hearing a lot about the education system. Because it’s an artificial environment. The goal of education was once LEARNING, and by learning, I mean specifically a very high level abstract kind of learning, learning to understand, to think, to process the world at an analytical level above what is required for the everyday.

But the idea that “effort” is entitled to reward. That work in itself is deserving of success, an idea only able to thrive because we live in an artifice propped up by blood money and other peoples slavery, this idea, which seems so noble, so enlightened, so “fair” – has corrupted education beyond recognition. And learning no longer has a place, because there is something that unfortunately comes with education, that corrupts it everywhere, and that is status, and status is a grander reward, even more coveted than money (which is greatly coveted). And so the children taught from the earliest age that effort, hard work – these good valuable things – are in themselves deserving of reward, pound their little fists on the table, because they tried dammit, they tried so hard, and they deserve what they are owed.

And there wasn’t any other point to it anyway… was there?

A more innocent time…

It strikes me as quite tragic when I learn about these old times, well at the moment I have in mind the Anglo-Saxons, but probably many other examples would work as well. It strikes me that we are so… perverse in comparison, and they were so innocent. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to romanticise the past. I do not mean they were better than us, clearly your average anglo-saxon lived a probably more brutal life, dealt with more explicit violence with those around him – but even there, even in the brutality of times like that, there is a glimpse of the innocence of times like that.

Take for instance this story the source of which I have long forgotten, a group of men are discussing how all their slave-cook ever does is boil meat for them, and they can bloody well boil meat for themselves, but their slave afraid of being cast out into the cold goes to them and tells them, now now, don’t be so hasty, if you didn’t own a slave, you wouldn’t be lords. The men satisfied with this answer keep on the slave-cook, even though all he does is boil meat and they could do that for themselves.

There is something, childlike about it. An innocence I can’t quite pinpoint, not only present in the characters, but present in a world where this story is plausible at all. I don’t know how to explain it, but it does seem tragic to me that we have lost whatever it was. That these men could slaughter and enslave their fellows, yet have an innocence we who decry violence and force do not.

It’s not just them though, lots of people, some of the tribal island peoples seem to have it. I know the “myth of the noble savage” is just that. But its not that… its… something more like simplicity, or… just a lack of contact with corrupting factors. Any people who is more sheltered has more chance of not having the ideas that have done whatever did to us what was done.

Machievelli to a great extent must share some of the blame. It may be that princes discussed these things among themselves before him, but it really was him that popularised… real politik. And then when it became known this is what it is, the people did not trust their leaders and the leaders did not trust the people – but …that is not exactly the whole story – just one little corner of a far bigger beast. Did the Anglo-saxons trust their leaders? Did their leaders trust the people? No… this isn’t exactly about that… its not about trust or mistrust… its about slyness, its about the cleverness of it all. The subtlties, the intricacies, the bluff and counterbluff – it is the sophistication of civilised discourse, civilised intercourse, civilised sexuality, civilised politics, civilised art, civilised literature.

I don’t want to be anti-intellectual, there is nothing wrong with subtlety if you need it to fine tune a point, there is nothing wrong with sophistication in itself, it’s when it becomes a veil, part of some complex machine designed to hide the knife that guts, the hand that holds the whip, when everything is calculated, when people can discuss the dysgenic effects of giving food to the poor, and worse, when people consider the dysgenic effects of giving food to the poor but discuss something altogether different all the while holding it firmly in mind. It’s not dishonesty, a bald-faced lie can be an innocent thing – but the malific influence of enchantment to mould the world, with an utter disregard for truth one way or the other…

…or maybe that’s not it. I don’t know. Something is missing… something we once had, that is the tragedy of it.

——-

You know… there is something of it… in the idea… that we revel in our badness. Where a violent bastard from a more innocent time might simply be a violent bastard, we hide our violence, but not just behind sanitisation – which we do, and is part of it – but also behind glorification, and not glorification of the glory of battle, which is natural, but glorification of evil, fetishisation of the very corruptness that induces the fetishisation.

Crash. The film Crash by David Cronenburg, but really, any of his films, lay bare this thing, this …perversity, this glorification, not of what is glorious in a generally evil act, because generally something genuinely is, but for the darkness itself, for corruptness itself, the attraction of suicide, infects everything we do, we are not satisfied with mere sex, we must have death with our sex, and we are not satisfied with mere death, we must have degridation with it, and even then, even then we cannot face up to what we are doing, so we craft grand edifaces of sophistry to normalise the abnormal, to make our sickness seem natural and worse – to make them seem like haute couture.

“I’ve faked my life like I’ve lived, too much. I take whatever you’re giving, not enough.”

Ted Kaczynski

Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all essential respects leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible.” They want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.

I’m losing my sense of self

I used to place myself in history.

But I no longer see myself in history. I no longer see clearly who’s side I would take, I no longer recognise myself in histories battles. I cry over the history I have lost. All of a sudden I feel alone.

I’ve accepted a history far away from myself. A history that is not “mine” that I cannot relate to. I don’t know who I am becoming…

On a totally unrelated note, j’adore this song:

My wholehearted agreement

I love when people say what I think so I don’t need to find the words for myself.

yay

No more exams