Those Goddamn Germans

On the Sudden Popularity of the Most Anti-American Populism

Republican Democracy isn’t the end-all, be-all form of government.

Used to be that you could get lynched for saying that kind of thing in public, but nowadays it’s almost banal, and it’s not difficult to understand why.

Any form of government, after all, is just a game with particular rules, and every game has its exploits, whether those exploits are hard-coded by the original programmers seeking an advantage over everyone else, or due to the tragic reality that no model will ever be adequate to match all the challenges that the world can possibly throw at it.

Our form of government is showing its cracks because it was designed for aristocrats, not plebs—nonetheless the industrial revolution, and the logic of the machine that comes with it, and the tilt towards Germanic thinking that it facilitated, have conspired to turn the people of the West into a universal plebian class. The incentives of industrial markets have a way of combining with the incentives of democracy to elevate the lowest, most short-term type of thinking and give it the sheen of virtue.

The founders of the United States, despite (or because of?) their own fractious differences and self-serving motivations, designed a system to frustrate the ambitions of those who enjoyed ruling over other people, avowing that their form of government was good and useful exactly insofar as it does one thing, and one thing only:

Protect the liberty of the individual.

The individual.

Not the family. Not the tribe. Not the group.

The individual.

“Individual.”

That’s an interesting philosophical concept—interesting particularly because, outside of a few religious cults scattered across history, it’s only gained currency among self-serving aristocrats, maverick traders, raiders, pirates, and one other group. It centers moral value, personal responsibility, and plenary power all in the same place: the mind and body of the individual person.

That other group that I mentioned?

The yeoman freeholder; the common farmer who owns his own land.

This is a rare critter indeed in recent history, and in Europe it only wound up existing in nation-scale numbers in the Nordic countries, in France, and in England.

You know, the same set of countries that took the Enlightenment and the Reformation and used them as a launchpad to change the entire world.

The Roots of Individualism

So what does it take to have an “individual” in the philosophical sense?

It takes a few generations who are relatively unfettered by the major tyrannies of life:

• Strong Family

• Strong Government

• Organized Religion

• Slavery (this includes most of the things we call “employment”)¹

These tyrannies bring with them myriad benefits, which is why people tend to succumb to them whenever possible.

Government takes the work of setting up an orderly community out of your hands. Organized religion relieves you of the burden of formulating and negotiating ethics, codes of conduct, and the rhythms of life. Slavery takes away the burden of organizing your day, directing your energies towards productive ends, and the risks involved in making your own way in the world.

Freedom is not easy, and most people, most of the time, do everything they can to outsource it in the name of an easier life.

We say we hate tyranny, but usually what we mean is that we hate uncongenial tyranny. Tyranny that gives us nice toys—that kind of tyranny we like just fine.

And it isn’t just us. Aristotle observed the same thing (this comes as part of a broader discourse on the moral nature of hierarchies of various sorts):

“[just as one sort of person must rule over another sort] the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole; therefore all men that differ as widely as the soul does from the body and the human being from the lower animal (and this is the condition of those whose function is the use of the body and from whom this is the best that is forthcoming) these are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of authority is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the subject things already mentioned. For he is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong, and who participates in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it;”

—”Aristotle, Poetics, 1254b

The love of the slave-driver is even more of a human universal than the lust for revenge against him (if it weren’t, there would be far fewer slave drivers in the world than there are, and slave revolts would be far more successful instead of being almost universally prone to failure).

It is against this universal tendency that The Individual (I shall capitalize it from now on) emerges, in places where there was no hope of government, where religion could not be organized, where family bonds were unusually weak because marriage customs did not honor the clan structure and inheritance laws tended towards primogeniture (i.e. leaving all the property to the eldest child—usually the eldest son) instead of demanding equal division between heirs (as is customary in, for example, the Islamic world).

Places like France, The Netherlands (and other Nordic countries), and England had those conditions, and as a result they changed almost everything about the material and cultural conditions that humans view as “normal”—a change with material consequences that humans, on the whole vastly prefer, and that have offered the only possible (if still quite thin) hope thus far in history of our species outlasting our planet.

In other words, The Individual is an historical accident made possible by circumstances which made it difficult for people to control their neighbors.

If you are an American, this is your cultural heritage. This is your inheritance that the creeping machinery of the modern State seeks to rob you of. This is the throat upon which you feel the boot. This is the inheritance you sell for a mess of lentils² every time you join up with “the latest thing.”

You hate the world you see decaying around you?

You want to see it change?

Then you might want to lift your nose and sniff the wind.

The destruction of your future is not due to “individualism run amok,” nor is it due to “people doing their own thing.” It is due, entirely and utterly, to people abandoning their heritage of individualism in favor of something alien.

We’re turning into the Germans, guys (culturally speaking). And, though you can’t really see it unless you give it a good hard look, Germany is, in may ways, the European incarnation of a far older, more stable, and more repressive civilization:

China.

Germany and China

On the surface, it’s hard to think of two places more different than Germany and the North China Plain (where the Han come from). Germany is riven with mountains, the Han ethnicity’s home turf is a plain. German food is rife with bread, root vegetables, and preserved pork, while Chinese peasants historically ate very poorly indeed (mostly rice and some very inventive spices—the great Chinese food we’re all familiar with comes from other regions of the Chinese superstate).

But if you look a little bit deeper, you start to see some similarities.

Both are countries that only ever exist as proper countries when there is a strong centralized authority holding them all together in a pretty rigid fashion. During periods in their history where such is not the case, they break up into smaller participates that often war with one another. They are united by ethnicity and language, but not by locality.³

The reasons why this is the case in each place is different—in China it’s due to the need for water,⁴ in Germany due to the need for security—but there is nonetheless a convergent evolution towards a philosophical tradition (Idealism in Germany, Legalism and Confucianism in China) that lionize the mass union of people into the State and minimize (and occasionally demonize) the individual.

Germany has an extra little trick up its sleeve.

During its fractious periods and during the early years of its unified periods, it is tremendously culturally fertile. A lot of the early work in machine engineering toward industrialization was done in the German high country. A German invented the automobile. Disunited Germany produced Beethoven and lager, bratwurst and Goethe, Luther and lederhosen. And Germany’s tradition of internal critics gave examples of courage that spread the love of individualism across the world, from Bonhoeffer to Nietzsche to Martin Luther.

Unfortunately, during the Napoleonic wars, a lot of people fled Germany, and they landed in the United States and Britain. They brought with them the air of continental sophistication (as well as really good beer), and they were—like their Chinese mirrors—excellent mandarins.⁵ They quickly found places of power and influence in government and corporate America.

And they brought with them German Idealism, from which comes state-controlled schooling, state welfare, the centralized regulatory state, and a number of other things we now take for granted that, nonetheless, have deeply undermined the entire nature of the American experiment.

Idealism is a philosophical tradition that stretches back into the Early Enlightenment and sees the world as the raw material from which to achieve an ideal. An idealist throws (and twists) him or herself into any shape necessary in service of an ideal, and is generally willing to do the same to others—well, wouldn’t you, if the promise was the achievement of a utopian vision?

In its formal philosophical form at the social and political level, Idealism promises secular salvation and redemption of the world through the proper corralling of the people under the dictates of The State (or The Company). The leader that can successfully do this can effect the perfection of his society and secure his culture in the camp of goodness, righteousness, and prosperity for all time.

You’ll be familiar with this line of thinking, of course. It’s exemplified in Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Evola, Moussolini, Gentile, FDR, Abraham Lincoln, and other children of Hegel (one of the great philosophers of the Idealist tradition). I’m not interested in whether any of these figures were good or bad people right now—since the topic of “our culture is being stolen” is suddenly hot again, I’m interested in one thing only:

The fact that these thinkers were all, down in their bones, thoroughly un-American and anti-English.

The English philosophical tradition is entirely different. It’s the tradition of The Individual, the yeoman farmer, the freeholder, and the artisan who band together only when necessary to repel threats and otherwise honor the ancient Roman doctrine that each man’s home is his castle.

It’s pragmatic—the exact opposite of idealistic. The pragmatist starts with what is and figures out what can be done with it and how to make it work for him. The idealist starts with what he believes should be and tries to bend the world (and himself) to fit it. And, as every major idealist philosopher has spotted, since most of the constraints in the sociopolitical world come in the form of “people,” “human nature,” and direct consequences thereof, at some point or another the enactment of the idealist’s program requires the neutralization of the individual.

The individual can be neutralized through co-option, impressment, indoctrination, pacification, dissolution, expropriation, or extermination.⁶

The English cultural tradition (in common with the French and the Dutch) requires the primacy of The Individual to function. The German cultural tradition requires the subordination of The Individual to function.

Individuals Build Communities

Everyone needs a place to belong. Everyone is from somewhere. Everyone builds friendship and professional networks, and everyone builds some kind of family.

And some members of “everyone” are weirdos. They don’t have the same religion as their neighbors. They like bad movies. They have weird bonding strategies (they’re gay, or straight, or monogamous, or poly, or virgins-until-marriage, etc.). They don’t drink. They listen to horrible music. They give their kids wine with dinner from an early age. They don’t have the Internet. They perform in drag shows or strip clubs. They protest abortion clinics. They attend orgies. They drive pickup trucks.

Every single one of those things listed above are things I have personally seen form the grounds for schismatic infighting in communities, and it always happens because some yahoo gets it into his or her head that the community belongs to them, and only people they approve of should be allowed to participate. They set out to capture the group for themselves, and they’re willing to burn it down to do it.

But that’s not how community works. Communities don’t belong to individuals, any more than individuals are the property of the communities in which they participate. Communities emerge from the relationship of individuals to one another in pursuit of common interests, whether that interest is a TV show, or a church, or the health of a small town, or jazz.

Individuals form communities because no individual is sufficient, in and of himself, to create all the necessaries to make life worth living (and no individual can make life continue into the next generation without a bit of help from somebody who likes the way she or he looks naked).

By the luck of history and geography, The Individual emerged from a few rare places on the globe, and it managed to maintain its integrity long enough to rule the world, but The Individual is not an easy creature to maintain.

To be an Individual, one must actually behave as if one is responsible for oneself. This doesn’t mean “don’t do anything rash,” it means “If you do something rash, and that backfires, it’s your responsibility.”

The Idealist—who is always a collectivist—sees things differently: “I get a vote in what you do, because what you do effects me.” You may recognize some of its disguises:

• “When men are allowed to do what they want, we get Toxic Masculinity.”

• “Loose women ruin the dating market for men like me”

• “Race mixing is bad because I don’t stand a chance against those big black guys with their swagger”

• “These people are polluting the cultural pool, and we have to stop them”

• “The White/Black/Latino/Chinese/etc. race is under attack—we have to fight back against the race that’s attacking them”

• “If you read/follow/support person/idea X, we can’t be friends, because my tribe doesn’t approve”

A current of fear, envy, greed, and the desire to profit from them runs through all of those things. They run through most cultures, in most places, on the face of this planet, because those things are effective ways to induce prey animals to huddle together in a pack for protection.

The way of The Individual is the opposite. The Individual, knowing that he alone will ALWAYS bear the consequences of his actions (including the emotional burden of the harm he peripherally visits upon others), builds for himself communities, operates on the basis of respect and individual honor, seeks out people of good character, and makes his way in the world.

It’s the way of the leader, of the Great Man, of the craftsman and the small businessman, of the yeoman farmer and the horselords of the hordelands, and it is as American as the land itself—the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, and the nations of the Iroquois Confederation all also found The Individual, and prized him. Their embrace of The Individual was so effective, and gave them so much cultural strength, that it took more than two centuries after over 80% of their population was killed by disease before they were finally conquered by the invading Europeans (compare that to the abysmal record of the collectivist Aztecs and Incas at resisting the invaders).

And, even as the Europeans conquered them, they did, in a sense, win—they bequeathed to the Americans some of the essential features of their political scheme.⁷

The Wise German Concedes

If you read the above and see me as viewing the German Idealist tradition as a cancer on the ass of humanity, gradually spreading in through the anus to devour the good things about European civilization from the inside, you’d be essentially correct.

But among the Germans who colonized the US were those that became some of The Individual’s strongest champions.

Eric Hoffer, a second-generation German immigrant, did this after World War Two. His book The True Believer is essential reading.

Robert A. Heinlein, whose family came to America during the Napoleonic Wars, dedicated his literary life to exploring the tension between the individual and the community, and he left us with these words:

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
—from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 1966

So as you look at the current cultural wreckage and can’t find a place to belong, consider:

Germany has lost every single large war it’s engaged in as a unified country.

So has China (which is struggling to stay united even as it stretches its hand out once again).

So have most of the Arab nations (who have a similar idealist and collectivist bent—The Great Caliphate was a Turkish innovation, and was moderated considerably by cosmopolitan individualism).

The Idealist conception of reality does not work, and cannot be made to work indefinitely, at scale, because a member of a collective is never as motivated as an Individual who steps up to the task at hand.

The free Greeks repelled the Persians—and not just at Thermopyle.

For a space of time, the collectivists triumph on fields of battle, but the discipline required to hold a collective together is literally impossible to maintain over the long term. Collectivism breeds parasitism, which infests the body politic, and collapses both solidarity and community.

The cultural wasteland around you is the result of a century and a half of those parasites running rampant through what was once a nation of Individuals.

Are you on the left and want the world to pull back from environmental destruction and social regimentation?

Are you on the right and horrified by the lack of opportunity and identity on offer for you?

Do you want a future worth living in?

You can have it.

If you’ll stop being so fucking German.

I’m not saying that “you’re a Nazi” because you want community solidarity. Everyone wants solidarity—and, to some extent, everyone needs it.

I’m not saying “you’re a commie” because you want a society where the needy aren’t thrown on the trash heap.

No, I’m saying something a lot more offensive:

I’m saying that you’re drawn to the Nazis, the Communists, the Christian Nationalists, dreams of a White Ethnostate, or a Socialist Utopia, or whatever, because you’re too weak and cowardly to stand up for yourself like an adult.

Do you have the courage to build a future for your children?

Then shut the fuck up about your poor wounded pride.

Pick up a tool.

And build a character worth having, and a life worth living.

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1. Before you leave in a huff, consider:

Employment—where one is a permanent or semi-permanent member of a company owned by, supervised by, and directed by another person, is practice in the discipline of de-individuation. Your will, your creativity, your dress, your attitudes and speech, and sometimes your politics, religion, family arrangement, are all either directly constrained by the demands of your boss or are indirectly subject to his whims. This situation persists, day after day, year after year, eating up most of your waking hours (especially when you consider your commute time) through all your years of peak physical health.

In most cases, you are not hired for your ability, but for your trainability. Even at higher management levels, the companies that hire you are not looking for your individual spirit, they are looking to fill a hole in their machine, and if you resemble the correct shape, and are willing to take the money they offer you for the privilege of pounding you into that hole, you’ll suit their needs.

Not all forms of “employment” are thus. Startups, small businesses, self-employment, and highly skilled high-creativity jobs (engineering, artisinal work, and [sometimes] work in the arts industry) tend to be of a different character, as they depend for their usefulness on the prizing of the unique qualities of the person doing the job (and thus also tend to be much more tolerant of quirks).

2. Genesis 25:34

3. This, in turn, has some fascinating effects on the culture. For a rather harshly critical (but still very well-argued) analysis of the German mentality, culture, and underlying political climate, see Chapter V of the ethnographic survey The Character of Peoples by André Siegfried, 1952

4. As established persuasively by Kurt Wittfogel in his 1957 opus Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study in Total Power. The most successful critics of Wittfogel’s work have argued that his understanding is accurate, but represents a particular instantiation of a more general type of phenomenon that encourages despotism—which is also what I’m essentially arguing here in my comparison of the Chinese and German civilizations.

5. A Mandarin (named after the Chinese social class) is a bureaucrat, manager, administrator, etc. If you want a professional toady who’s happy to sell his soul in order to gain a petty fiefdom, you need a mandarin. The extent of the penetration of the mandarin class into the English world—and the corruption they introduced—was documented in the early 20th century by James Burnham in the book The Managerial Revolution.

6. Or, to use more vulgar language, conversion, enslavement/coercion, brainwashing, intimidation, encouragement to excess vice, stealing wealth (through taxation or seizure), and killing troublesome people.

7. https://daily.jstor.org/the-native-american-roots-of-the-u-s-constitution/