The History of Christmas

(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)

The Right Kind of Left

This is part of a series of posts I’ll be doing on the possibility of a Leftism that is free of ressentiment, envy, wrath, spite, hatred (yes, even of the oppressor), animistic collectivism and nihilism.

Good:

1. Creating jobs for people for their sake, perhaps in part through the Government.

2. Investing in infrastructure, definitely through the Government.

3. Being willing to help someone who has gone astray, or to redirect them to someone else who can help them where possible. This with the patient, persistent and gentle care seen in A Walk to Beautiful.

4. Inclusiveness, as the actual solution to elitism.

Bad:

1. Handing people cash indefinitely or unconditionally, thus encouraging laziness and dependence.

2. Expecting that infrastructure will just build/maintain/clean itself through private investment, which it will not. In fact you’d have to pretty deluded to think it will. Third world countries rely on private infrastructure development, and this means that there are great roads and bridges in front of giant mansions, but no roads and bridges where the poor people are (only garbage and toilet water, since there are no sewage or trash collection services either. Such services are normally provided by the state, but with a minimalist state you have to take care of such matters yourself, which of course you can’t. Yes, not even you, invincible White male who descended from the heavens).

Even the U.S., an extremely wealthy society in terms of GDP, has extremely poor places where there is terrible infrastructure, comparable to third world countries (certain parts of Brooklyn and the deep South, for example). Canada, by comparison, does not have so many extremely poor places, even in far out rural and forested areas, and this despite being a poorer country overall. This is in part because of equilization payments.

3. Patronizing people and forcing them to take treatments that are degrading or against their will. Institutionalizing them against their will, or treating them like a problem that needs to be fixed. The mental hospital and its treatment of the mentally ill is the most barbaric and disgusting stain on Western civilization.

There is a certain vicious intolerance that runs through the West, that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s this tendency to see certain people as not being human, a cutting off of one’s empathy with them. To deal with this mass psychopathy, I think an extremely reactionary ‘anarchist’ Left has come into being, one that is itself pathological and walks around carrying the burden of its spite, guilt and ressentiment. I can’t decide who is worse, the reactionary who reverts to paganism (I consider this ‘anarchist’ Left to be essentially pagan) and starts idolatizing The Community™ out of desperate self-medication and as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, or the psychopathic White male doctor who straps you to a bed because you’re too crazy and worthless to be considered human anymore. I honestly can’t decide .

This same vicious strain is visible in the way families interact over here. White families tend to be alienated, i.e. the members alienated from each other. I see young people moving out at aged 20 (too young an age to move out, IMO), and parents not being willing to take care of their own children beyond the minimum necessary. I suspect this is not the case with Jewish and Black families, and I know it isn’t with South Asian families. This isn’t merely a lack of family values, however, as it appears to be something deeper and more essential to the West, with the family indifference being perhaps a symptom of some other underlying problem.

Maybe this comes with class privilege. Something similar exists in Pakistan as well, among the upper and middle classes (even in me when I was not ‘democratized’), a similar tendency to dehumanization. The West has overall class privilege because it is the upper class of the Earth, and then the upper class of the West has even more privilege added to that original baseline. Add being White and male to that and you can imagine how twisted your psyche must become.

4. Nihilism, as the perceived solution to elitism. It’s one thing to believe in social equality, but another thing to believe in value equality. Value equality is a contradiction in terms, as when you have values you automatically see some things as better than others. Some things are better than others. Kindness is better than indifference, humility better than pride. Happiness is better than suffering, and making yourself happy is good even when others are suffering (if you call that selfish, then it is the grandest and most virtuous selfishness I can think of). Celibacy is better than sexual activity, monogamy better than promiscuity, drug-abstinence better than intoxication, vegetarianism better than omnivority, and faith better than atheism. Etc.

These values should be upheld without the exclusionariness of Country Clubs and other elitist hellholes. This is not cultural elitism, nor is it Pharisee-ism. It is Christianity at its truest: simultaneous inclusiveness of people and intolerance of bad things. I guess you have to see it in action to really appreciate it.

(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)

The Religions of Pakistan

Pakistan’s non-Muslim minority subpopulations go completely under the radar because of Pakistan’s puritan pretensions and its pan-Islamist ambitions, but they are not as trivial as one might think. The following graphic was taken from the article ‘Reviving Pakistan’s Pluralist Traditions to Fight Extremism’ by Lisa Curtis, published at the website of The Heritage Foundation (which is an American right-wing outfit, but this particular article is quite good).
 

The Religions of Pakistan (Source: The Heritage Foundation)

 

Punjab and Sindh are clearly the most diverse provinces (and also have the most religiously syncretistic cultures).

Read the full article here. I am also reminded of Ali Eteraz’s article from last year, ‘Protecting Pakistan’s Hindus’.

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Here are the some extracts from the article ‘Born believers: How your brain creates God‘ by Michael Brooks which appeared in New Scientist:

‘The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness….

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.