Agree with the libertarian philosophy upholding this speech, but how does imposing apartheid -a government enforced institution if there ever was one -square with the hope and progress possible when we take responsibility for our lives? How do property rights fit in with ons sal self?
Great advice! It seemed to me S Africa was the first globalist project. It appears more violent and racist (anti-white now so nobody cares). Ive heard you have to have fences and guards. Still, this information is true inside knowledge and applicable as the US may even need to copy these extremes - the "police" won't save you (they're already near that point here now as they obediently stood down during Antifa riots even for mothers trapped in cars with babies). Don't trust the state. It can't even offer retirement income without forbidden procreation and demanding immigrant replacements for the kids you were supposed to have had
Inspiring but do they really have a chance. Not only a hostile government but extreme demographic disparity. Plus S. Africa has a lot of aspects of a failed state. I have to wonder whether they would be advised to establish their community in a friendly environment. They have done that before as refugees from Holland and France and again with the Trek. They would be welcome in my neighborhood.
I am a product & a supporter of Catholic education for many reasons. But the one part that rung a bell with me in his speech was this:
"We built multiple universities that were soon recognised as on a par with the best in the world, not through grants or government funding, but through women and children baking and selling pastries, and people going door to door to collect pennies to fund these massive projects. As a nation, we took ownership of what was rightfully ours, and it worked …"
This philosophy is one the ways that the Catholic Church/School built & achieved as much as it has. Everybody pitches in. Bake sales, raffles, festivals, 'penny wars' (between the grades) and so on were de rigueur for every project to be tackled. Of course there were always generous benefactors that did a good deal of the heavy lifting. And, in my day - when nuns and priests were plentiful - their presence along with their time & talent defrayed a great deal of the cost of educating the students.
But that sense of everyone pitching in was part of the deal - you knew it, you participated in it & many thought it was a pretty good system to obtain what we wanted as well as preserve our religion, our Catholic culture and our way of life.
Surprisingly, I never heard a word of complaint from my parents, teachers, friends, workers, donors that "We shouldn't HAVE to do this" or "We pay taxes to support the public schools yet we STILL have to fund our schools with no help from the government" (I don't believe there was any govt. subsidy at that time).
So I applaud Ernst Roets. His appeal to relying on ourselves to make things happen in our communities is so simple and yet so powerful.
This echoes the "hard times create strong people that create good times that create weak people that create hard times" principle.
While I absolutely do agree with "the breakdown of our communities, and the solution lies in reinvigorating them, we ought to realise that using the state as primary vehicle to achieve these things is misguided"
Just look at the US. The statist-loving Democrats have been in political power 12 out of the last 16 years and yet socioeconomic outcomes in low income minority communities, the same that Democrats exploit with their claimed advocacy and massive government spending (really luxury virtue signaling beliefs) have crashed. Ironically and infuriatingly the worse it gets the more Democrats seem to be able to exploit the problems for more statist political power (queue the music representing the shift to weak people).
I think I don't believe in the binary centralized-statism-vs-independent-community-statism view. The opposite of statism is anarchism... and there are many signs of too much anarchy in South Africa. Multiculturalism , aka ethnic tribalism, really constrains the ability to best provide for the overall human condition using old tribal community cooperation.
The key, as with everything in life, is balance. And not statist balance, balance encircled by a process of constant improvement. In fact, that has been the founder's design of the American Great Experiment... a severely flawed and imperfect republic that is the best ever designed.
It seems to me that the modern Northern European countries have the best balance. The mostly disingenuous claim by the left is that they are evidence that socialism works. However, only Finland has a few government-owned industries. They are all die hard capitalists. They also limit immigration and are generally more ethnically and racially homogenous. They balance heavy centralized control with independent community control. And frankly, they accept a more severe rules and tax environment because life is relatively good only spending less than 1% GDP on their own defense while the US spends 4%-6% (depending on the current international wars involved in) to run the Global Order international safety and security program.
It is the turn toward centralized statism when things are NOT going well that bodes the spiral down into worse outcomes. It is the matriarchal society vs the patriarchal one (the more libertarian view)... the weak people craving to be taking care of rather than living a life of freedom where they can effectively take care of themselves and their families and their communities.
With the US, the glue that held the melting pot together was to expect assimilation into adopting American values and love of country. It was also a country with multiple paths toward economic opportunity with a reasonable shot and achieving a level of prosperity unheard of in the rest of the world (the American Dream).
The Democrats and part of the Republican party (the Uniparty) have screwed it all up.
They exported American working class economic opportunity to other countries for the corporate profits. They imported other country's poverty by the millions every year for the cheap labor to fatten corporate profits. Having exploded racial and ethnic differences, they cut off most of the path to working class economic opportunity (here China and Mexico, you take all of our jobs and real industry... just make sure you put a lot of cash in our investment accounts to pay us back!). They horded the income and wealth sandbox for themselves and then injected a fake morality that their income and wealth accumulation was good and moral and supported by the principles of capitalism (which, by the way, was never conceived as a system that justified corporate profit at the expense of domestic society). They destroyed the global economy and then bailed themselves out. They likely unleashed a global pandemic and then rigged the system to jack up their pharmaceutical stock values.
And today, with the mess they have caused, they put up a cardboard cutout corporatist puppet presidential candidate after propping up a previous vegetable... and they lie about centrist policies indenting full well to keep layering on more central statist rules and laws... while increasing taxes on the shrinking number of producers so that they can feed the weak people in return for more votes.
The US is completely out of balance and it is just tilting toward destruction. I don't see any return to community control happening anytime soon. It will take a complete and devastating crash of the economy and society before that happens. We are in the period of weak people... not yet hard times. It is coming.
This strategy can work if the existing state takes a position of benign disdain. But what if the State actively repressed and criminalized this movement? And surely a failing state like South Africa could find it a useful distracting tactic to cover up its own failures by targeting the African's alleged "white supremacy?"
Good questions. My first thought would be that we're better off regardless for having built greater community strengths and shared identity, if or when we become targets. My second is that this essay mainly focuses on step 1, 'ons sal self' - necessary but not sufficient. "State-proofing" group/cultural institutions can start simultaneously but achieving it will be even harder, and take longer periods of concerted effort. I take the point that, wherever we are trying to do that, we need to stay grounded & not be distracted from that task or - worse - seduced into thinking that capturing or re-capturing reins of state power would be an easy (easier) fix. Another point might be to stay under the radar as long as possible. The state exists through extracting resources, whether co-opted or barrel of a gun.
Sinn Fein means something like Ourselves Alone which sounds similar and they did establish parallel institutions in the early days. Somehow they transmorgified into Marxists.
"returning to our communities, of building our institutions and working in the real world for real solutions, of achieving solutions not by voting for them, demanding them or trying to legislate them into existence, but by building them"
is exactly right.
But, to summarize several specific points already made, structures must be in place to make such building possible. This is, roughly, the venerable idea of subsidiarity: higher spheres of authority are needed to ensure the freedom, the conditions, and the resources for lower spheres of authority to build as they see fit. (To put it somewhat paradoxically, higher spheres of authority are needed in order to make it possible for those higher spheres to seem unneeded.)
The importance of voting Republican this election cannot be over stressed. It is exactly to avoid the development of a fully antagonistic state by ensuring that the party that overtly desires an antagonistic or managerial state not continue to be in power.
The idea of community self-sufficiency versus seeing central government as the only actor capable of providing social goods is worth recognizing. Certainly, it's an been an American idea from the beginning as Tocqueville famously chronicled two hundred years ago.
But I'll be honest that I find it deep troubling to celebrate this speech, which glosses over the Apartheid period in this way:
"In the second half of the 20th century, we went from being community builders to state builders. We gradually abdicated our responsibilities toward each other to the government and the state, which we kept strengthening as fast and as much as we could. We then tried to use the state to solve complicated societal problems, such as education of native tribes, race relations and what we called separate development. We even abdicated our responsibilities to our children by assuming that the government would teach them about culture and history and all the things important to us.
It worked for a short while, and then it failed. And if failed spectacularly. After the Nazis, we became the great moral target of the 20th century. We were villainised and rejected by our ancestor nations in the West. We became pariahs, and we were on our own."
To not only not mention the word "apartheid", but to describe that era as "using the state to solve complicated societal problems, such as education of native tribes, race relations and what we called separate development." is frankly appalling. And then for Roets to whine about how about how they "were villainised" as if they became pariahs for reasons that had nothing to do with their own actions doubles down.
I'm sorry, but I have lost a lot of respect for N.S. Lyons for celebrating this speech in this way.
The destruction of American (US) society began with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Up until then, "apartheid" (aka "segregation") had permitted/produced two parallel and prosperous societies: white and black. Both had school systems; both produced professionals in all realms: medical, legal, educational, technological, agricultural, and so-on and so-forth. But that single, well-intentioned, piece of legislation destroyed both -- to borrow from Ernest Hemingway, "How did they get destroyed? Two ways. [the black] Gradually, then [the white] suddenly." All of which is to say that the future -- the saving -- of South Africa *as a whole* depends on a planned and purposeful policy of racial apartheid... for the benefit of both.
I agree that the 1964 Act began the unraveling of society, but that true observation does not alone validate state mandated segregation. I think if you want to justify state mandated segregation you need a more convincing argument. No?
No. The past sixty years of American black-white history could not speak any more eloquently, nor be any more convincing... nor does anything or anyone else need to.
Agree with the libertarian philosophy upholding this speech, but how does imposing apartheid -a government enforced institution if there ever was one -square with the hope and progress possible when we take responsibility for our lives? How do property rights fit in with ons sal self?
Great advice! It seemed to me S Africa was the first globalist project. It appears more violent and racist (anti-white now so nobody cares). Ive heard you have to have fences and guards. Still, this information is true inside knowledge and applicable as the US may even need to copy these extremes - the "police" won't save you (they're already near that point here now as they obediently stood down during Antifa riots even for mothers trapped in cars with babies). Don't trust the state. It can't even offer retirement income without forbidden procreation and demanding immigrant replacements for the kids you were supposed to have had
Inspiring but do they really have a chance. Not only a hostile government but extreme demographic disparity. Plus S. Africa has a lot of aspects of a failed state. I have to wonder whether they would be advised to establish their community in a friendly environment. They have done that before as refugees from Holland and France and again with the Trek. They would be welcome in my neighborhood.
I am a product & a supporter of Catholic education for many reasons. But the one part that rung a bell with me in his speech was this:
"We built multiple universities that were soon recognised as on a par with the best in the world, not through grants or government funding, but through women and children baking and selling pastries, and people going door to door to collect pennies to fund these massive projects. As a nation, we took ownership of what was rightfully ours, and it worked …"
This philosophy is one the ways that the Catholic Church/School built & achieved as much as it has. Everybody pitches in. Bake sales, raffles, festivals, 'penny wars' (between the grades) and so on were de rigueur for every project to be tackled. Of course there were always generous benefactors that did a good deal of the heavy lifting. And, in my day - when nuns and priests were plentiful - their presence along with their time & talent defrayed a great deal of the cost of educating the students.
But that sense of everyone pitching in was part of the deal - you knew it, you participated in it & many thought it was a pretty good system to obtain what we wanted as well as preserve our religion, our Catholic culture and our way of life.
Surprisingly, I never heard a word of complaint from my parents, teachers, friends, workers, donors that "We shouldn't HAVE to do this" or "We pay taxes to support the public schools yet we STILL have to fund our schools with no help from the government" (I don't believe there was any govt. subsidy at that time).
So I applaud Ernst Roets. His appeal to relying on ourselves to make things happen in our communities is so simple and yet so powerful.
This echoes the "hard times create strong people that create good times that create weak people that create hard times" principle.
While I absolutely do agree with "the breakdown of our communities, and the solution lies in reinvigorating them, we ought to realise that using the state as primary vehicle to achieve these things is misguided"
Just look at the US. The statist-loving Democrats have been in political power 12 out of the last 16 years and yet socioeconomic outcomes in low income minority communities, the same that Democrats exploit with their claimed advocacy and massive government spending (really luxury virtue signaling beliefs) have crashed. Ironically and infuriatingly the worse it gets the more Democrats seem to be able to exploit the problems for more statist political power (queue the music representing the shift to weak people).
I think I don't believe in the binary centralized-statism-vs-independent-community-statism view. The opposite of statism is anarchism... and there are many signs of too much anarchy in South Africa. Multiculturalism , aka ethnic tribalism, really constrains the ability to best provide for the overall human condition using old tribal community cooperation.
The key, as with everything in life, is balance. And not statist balance, balance encircled by a process of constant improvement. In fact, that has been the founder's design of the American Great Experiment... a severely flawed and imperfect republic that is the best ever designed.
It seems to me that the modern Northern European countries have the best balance. The mostly disingenuous claim by the left is that they are evidence that socialism works. However, only Finland has a few government-owned industries. They are all die hard capitalists. They also limit immigration and are generally more ethnically and racially homogenous. They balance heavy centralized control with independent community control. And frankly, they accept a more severe rules and tax environment because life is relatively good only spending less than 1% GDP on their own defense while the US spends 4%-6% (depending on the current international wars involved in) to run the Global Order international safety and security program.
It is the turn toward centralized statism when things are NOT going well that bodes the spiral down into worse outcomes. It is the matriarchal society vs the patriarchal one (the more libertarian view)... the weak people craving to be taking care of rather than living a life of freedom where they can effectively take care of themselves and their families and their communities.
With the US, the glue that held the melting pot together was to expect assimilation into adopting American values and love of country. It was also a country with multiple paths toward economic opportunity with a reasonable shot and achieving a level of prosperity unheard of in the rest of the world (the American Dream).
The Democrats and part of the Republican party (the Uniparty) have screwed it all up.
They exported American working class economic opportunity to other countries for the corporate profits. They imported other country's poverty by the millions every year for the cheap labor to fatten corporate profits. Having exploded racial and ethnic differences, they cut off most of the path to working class economic opportunity (here China and Mexico, you take all of our jobs and real industry... just make sure you put a lot of cash in our investment accounts to pay us back!). They horded the income and wealth sandbox for themselves and then injected a fake morality that their income and wealth accumulation was good and moral and supported by the principles of capitalism (which, by the way, was never conceived as a system that justified corporate profit at the expense of domestic society). They destroyed the global economy and then bailed themselves out. They likely unleashed a global pandemic and then rigged the system to jack up their pharmaceutical stock values.
And today, with the mess they have caused, they put up a cardboard cutout corporatist puppet presidential candidate after propping up a previous vegetable... and they lie about centrist policies indenting full well to keep layering on more central statist rules and laws... while increasing taxes on the shrinking number of producers so that they can feed the weak people in return for more votes.
The US is completely out of balance and it is just tilting toward destruction. I don't see any return to community control happening anytime soon. It will take a complete and devastating crash of the economy and society before that happens. We are in the period of weak people... not yet hard times. It is coming.
I like the idea of the virus. It makes me think. Keep up the good work!
All this sounds great, but you should probably still all move to New Zealand while you still can.
This strategy can work if the existing state takes a position of benign disdain. But what if the State actively repressed and criminalized this movement? And surely a failing state like South Africa could find it a useful distracting tactic to cover up its own failures by targeting the African's alleged "white supremacy?"
Good questions. My first thought would be that we're better off regardless for having built greater community strengths and shared identity, if or when we become targets. My second is that this essay mainly focuses on step 1, 'ons sal self' - necessary but not sufficient. "State-proofing" group/cultural institutions can start simultaneously but achieving it will be even harder, and take longer periods of concerted effort. I take the point that, wherever we are trying to do that, we need to stay grounded & not be distracted from that task or - worse - seduced into thinking that capturing or re-capturing reins of state power would be an easy (easier) fix. Another point might be to stay under the radar as long as possible. The state exists through extracting resources, whether co-opted or barrel of a gun.
How do you propose to bring them about without entering the realm of the state? This is not a rhetorical question.
Sinn Fein means something like Ourselves Alone which sounds similar and they did establish parallel institutions in the early days. Somehow they transmorgified into Marxists.
I think the idea of
"returning to our communities, of building our institutions and working in the real world for real solutions, of achieving solutions not by voting for them, demanding them or trying to legislate them into existence, but by building them"
is exactly right.
But, to summarize several specific points already made, structures must be in place to make such building possible. This is, roughly, the venerable idea of subsidiarity: higher spheres of authority are needed to ensure the freedom, the conditions, and the resources for lower spheres of authority to build as they see fit. (To put it somewhat paradoxically, higher spheres of authority are needed in order to make it possible for those higher spheres to seem unneeded.)
A terrific way to approach our lives, our states, our countries. Thank you.
Fantastic speech Ernst!
The “vote mind virus” 🎯💯🎯
The importance of voting Republican this election cannot be over stressed. It is exactly to avoid the development of a fully antagonistic state by ensuring that the party that overtly desires an antagonistic or managerial state not continue to be in power.
The idea of community self-sufficiency versus seeing central government as the only actor capable of providing social goods is worth recognizing. Certainly, it's an been an American idea from the beginning as Tocqueville famously chronicled two hundred years ago.
But I'll be honest that I find it deep troubling to celebrate this speech, which glosses over the Apartheid period in this way:
"In the second half of the 20th century, we went from being community builders to state builders. We gradually abdicated our responsibilities toward each other to the government and the state, which we kept strengthening as fast and as much as we could. We then tried to use the state to solve complicated societal problems, such as education of native tribes, race relations and what we called separate development. We even abdicated our responsibilities to our children by assuming that the government would teach them about culture and history and all the things important to us.
It worked for a short while, and then it failed. And if failed spectacularly. After the Nazis, we became the great moral target of the 20th century. We were villainised and rejected by our ancestor nations in the West. We became pariahs, and we were on our own."
To not only not mention the word "apartheid", but to describe that era as "using the state to solve complicated societal problems, such as education of native tribes, race relations and what we called separate development." is frankly appalling. And then for Roets to whine about how about how they "were villainised" as if they became pariahs for reasons that had nothing to do with their own actions doubles down.
I'm sorry, but I have lost a lot of respect for N.S. Lyons for celebrating this speech in this way.
The destruction of American (US) society began with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Up until then, "apartheid" (aka "segregation") had permitted/produced two parallel and prosperous societies: white and black. Both had school systems; both produced professionals in all realms: medical, legal, educational, technological, agricultural, and so-on and so-forth. But that single, well-intentioned, piece of legislation destroyed both -- to borrow from Ernest Hemingway, "How did they get destroyed? Two ways. [the black] Gradually, then [the white] suddenly." All of which is to say that the future -- the saving -- of South Africa *as a whole* depends on a planned and purposeful policy of racial apartheid... for the benefit of both.
I agree that the 1964 Act began the unraveling of society, but that true observation does not alone validate state mandated segregation. I think if you want to justify state mandated segregation you need a more convincing argument. No?
No. The past sixty years of American black-white history could not speak any more eloquently, nor be any more convincing... nor does anything or anyone else need to.