The conservative movement has been under attack for a long time not only by liberals but also by neoconservatives. This has led to the situation where the true conservatives, paleoconservatives have been branded racists and expelled from conservative publications and circles.
Luckily most of the prominent paleoconservatives and their new intellectual alt-right allies have been offered a new home and intellectual headquarter Unz Review by a honest Jew, Ron Unz. He is not a paleoconservative himself but believes in the freedom of speech.
The three most famous and active names in Unz.com are John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer and Ron Unz himself. All three have done a tremendous job of writing and publishing very interesting “hate facts” and other politically incorrect ideas. However, all three are also philosophical empiricists who refuse to draw the big picture even if that would greatly help save the beleaguered Western civilization.
The best example of philosophical empiricism is John Derbyshire. For decades he has been one of the most famous writers in the conservative movement. His writings and radio program have long been hugely popular. Because of his race realism he has been pushed out of the mainstream conservative publications into fringy alt-right circles where he now practically reigns intellectually supreme with an encyclopedic knowledge. His writings and especially his hundreds of book reviews have shaped the intellectual direction of the conservative and especially alt-right movement.
There is just one problem: Derbyshire is an arch-empiricist. Luckily he is quite honest about it. This can be seen in his review of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book The Great Fiction:
The only one of the essays in The Great Fiction that defeated me in this way was the book’s longest (42 pages), “In defense of Extreme Rationalism.” It is a 1989 review of a book titled The Rhetoric of Economics, by Donald McCloskey. I have not read McCloskey’s book, but apparently it is an attempt to apply faddish late-20th-century epistemological relativism to the discipline of economics.
Hoppe has some fun of the fishing-with-dynamite variety with relativists in general and their claim to know as an objective fact that knowledge of objective facts is not attainable. He then expands this into a long argument for an economics based on pure rationalism—that is, as a set of propositions deduced by logic from self-evident axioms.
Woven into that argument is an attack on empiricism as being hardly any better a road to true knowledge than is relativism.
Empiricism-positivism, too, is a self-defeating doctrine, and not only because of its observational monism, which cannot be stated without implicitly admitting its falsehood and accepting a dualism of observable and meaningful phenomena to be understood on account of our knowledge of action and cooperation.
It was round about there that the author lost me, so far as that one essay was concerned. Along the way the phrase math envy had crossed my mind a couple of times.
So what if Derbyshire, Sailer, Unz and virtually all famous Unz.com personalities are more or less empiricists? Why is that a threat to the conservative movement?
Because conservatism is based on the Western Christian tradition of rationalism and natural law. Empiricism and its cousin historicism (historical relativism and nowadays even post-modernism) are not only absurdly self-contradictory philosophies but have always tried to undermine rationalism and the natural law tradition. They are the ultimate poison which led to socialism, democracy and cultural Marxism. This is what Hoppe explained in his book and why Derbyshire was appalled by his radical pure rationalism and radical decentralism.
Rationalism
There are only three possible ways to see the world in a logical and systematic way: Rationalism, empiricism and historicism. They all have different starting points which then determine through what sort of perspective or “sunglasses” you see the world.
Usually people do not try to create a coherent world view and so do not care about philosophy and methodology. However, Derbyshire is very aware of all the philosophical and methodological questions but in a systematically anti-rationalist fashion. He deliberately tries to destroy rationalism with his empiricist relativism. He tries to derail the conservative train off the rationalist tracks into a heap of mumbo-jumbo where there are no social laws, regularities, natural law or even rights. Social science and history are just a matter of statistics and subjective interpretations.
This can be clearly seen in Derbyshire’s theory of history. History is not a battle between true and false, right and wrong, freedom and oppression. There is no invisible hand of social laws but just singular events which have no overall connection to anything except in the subjective imaginations of the spectators. If there are trends then they involve the march of history toward ever better empiricist science, reason and enlightenment.
Derbyshire goes so far in his historical relativism that he even denies the almost inexorable drive toward globalism and World Government of the New World Order.
I doubt that we are any closer to World Government than we were in H.G. Wells’s time, and I hope that we are not.
U$Srael
Derbyshire not only denies the trend but also that globalism and NWO is directed by a ruling elite. Of course, Derbyshire is not alone in his denialism. Steve Sailer, Ron Unz and virtually all other alt-right intellectuals are also not interested in ruling elite studies. None of them have ever written a word of U$Srael. This is quite logical because empiricist methodology makes the burden of proof very high in social sciences. From the empiricist perspective there is no statistical or other hard proof for the conspiracies of the ruling elite. In fact, there is no hard proof of the existence of any kind of ruling elite. Sure there used to be powerful kings and even now there are dictatorships but there is no hard empiricist proof that democracies have ruling elites!
So it is not surprising that Derbyshire also outright denies the Jewish role in the ruling elite. By definition there can be no such problem in democracies since neither ruling elites nor large scale conspiracies exist in them! U$Srael led by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers is just a figment of anti-Semitic imagination.
Derbyshire goes so far in his relativism that he even refuses to see Jews. Or rather he refuses to acknowledge that many elite Jews and Jewish networks have purposefully tried to steer both science and politics of Western countries into Jew-friendly waters. Derbyshire made his denial clear in his review of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique.
Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard of conservative journalism in the United States, an exceptionally lethal one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed, not to get the Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing, I have not yet got the Jew thing—that I am in fact a philoSemite and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places, none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find. …
The main thrust of this book’s argument is that Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements engaged in a deliberate campaign to delegitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations —most particularly the USA—through the twentieth century and that this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy for the Jews as an ethnicity. In MacDonald’s own words, “[T]he rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.” He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian movement in the social sciences (most particularly the no-such-thing-as-race school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews in left-wing politics, the psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of individual psychopathology), the “New York intellectuals” centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy. …
Sowers of discord there have certainly been, but on balance I cannot see how anyone could deny that this country is enormously better off for the contributions of Jews.
Also Steve Sailer and Ron Unz used to be totally oblivious to the Jewish Question. However, gradually the weight of evidence became so enormous that they now acknowledge especially the role of Israel and Zionist Jews. But there is still no attempt to build a bigger picture and see the ruling elite or even U$Srael.
Their refusal to see the ruling elite might also have something to do with the fact that the global New Man does not alarm them. This might sound surprising because all three are race realists but again empiricism explains the apparent paradox. Empiricist methodology can be very useful when it is properly utilized in natural sciences. Facts do not speak but some are so obvious as to be loud. This is also why the empiricists usually are relatively race realist. They see that race and ethnic differences are obvious. However, this is all that empiricism helps them to see. It does not help to draw any conclusions. From the fact that there are ethnic differences does not follow nationalism. In fact, since empiricism denies all social laws it is very easy for an empiricist to be ambivalent or even dream of a brown future. This is exactly what Derbyshire does.
Population mixing on this scale is not altogether new, as witness the black African component of countries like Brazil and the U.S. as far back as the 18th century; but it has never before occurred when the dominant ethic everywhere is one of human equality and civil rights. It is possible that we shall manage this well, and end up with a world of coffee-colored meritocracies. I should be very glad to see that happen.
Police state
Empiricism gives you a blank check. You are logically free to not only choose your ideology and opinions but also change them at any time when things get too tough. Therefore it is not surprising that empiricists are easily bullied into line. Naturally empiricists do not see this as cowardly but instead fancy themselves as “reasonable and “middle-of-the-road” types. This is also why they always consider their critics as “extremists”. We see this also in Steve Sailer and Ron Unz. Sailer opposes both nationalism and secessionism and has developed “citizenism” though has never explicitly explained what he means by it. All we know is that it is a flexible and “democratic”. Derbyshire seems to be some sort of vague classical liberal. Unz has even less of a coherent world view but famously seems to believe both in democracy and open borders.
Empiricism also explains why they all are surprisingly quiet about the enormous vote fraud in US election while at the same time demanding lockdowns. After all, there is not yet enough proof of large scale vote fraud but there is enough proof of a deadly pandemic to demand lockdowns! Why? Well, there is. Statistics show it! No need to explicate why vote rights were not violated but other civil rights need to be violated.
Perhaps not coincidentally empiricism is usually associated with mathematically gifted semi-autistic nerdy types. They are not easily aroused to fight against the establishment. They usually start as the establishment types but because of their nerdiness are not good at following the heard and gradually are pushed to the fringes. Usually it takes them very long time to even realize that the establishment was long conspiring against them. They are so much against conspiracy analysis that usually they are last to notice that they personally have been conspired against. This is also why they still adhere to most official truths of the establishment. And what is more official than national elections, courts, WHO and mainstream medical science!
Unlike the supremely arrogant Jew, Ron Unz or the occasionally hasty and bad tempered American, Steve Sailer, Derbyshire is the proverbial deliberative British gentleman. Unlike Sailer and Unz he did not immediately jump on the Covid mania bandwagon. He did join the Covid Cult but was resistant to mania. Unlike Unz and Sailer, Derbyshire did not start to make feverish projections of millions of deaths nor is he enthusiastically calling for lockdowns. On the other hand, he also did nothing to stop the mania and the destruction of our rights. After all, rights are relative anyway.
Just imagine a world where the fate of civilisation depends on empiricist technocrats and mathematically gifted nerds who have no absolute ideas, values, principles or even a religion. Instead of religious or ideological fervor they only complain how the wokes are so unreasonable and unfair. While being outran by the fervor of SJWs they retreat with their snarky comments. The do have access to all the facts but refuse to put them together into a big picture. Instead of a holy war or even a mission they babble about abstract “whiggism”, “citizenism” and “trust in democracy”. When the Jews help demoncrats to organize a coup d’etat with the biggest vote fraud in American history they ignore it all and even vouch for the honesty of the demoncrats. The only time the empiricist technocrats have a mission and fire in their hearts is when they demand lockdowns and the destruction of our rights by a police state.
It is not a coincidence.
There is a method in the betrayal: Empiricism.
For thousands of years human have thought logically and rationally. They have tried to observe, make best possible theories and explanations and have drawed conclusions.
Only a totally insane person would use Brazil or especially the USA as examples that race-mixing is “nothing new” and it can work. The USA for example is on a brink of a race war and civil war just because of that.
Its amazing and frightening how being an autistic nerd or an empirist can make you an complete idiot in some cases. Sometimes autistic people loose all logic and rationality. Even an average IQ person can sometimes think and draw conclusions more rationally.