James Kalb og husmannstroen

Som husmannstroende i himmelengene i grenda til Totenåsens apostel, kjenner jeg meg akkurat som denne påskelilja i gråsteinsmuren på Grythengen. Her er kaldt, grått og hustrig, all kultur og identitet har forsvunnet, kun et bleikt gjenskjær av hva her var, kan skimtes.

Grythengen har blitt selve inkarnasjonen av et liberalteknologisk samfunn, eller Servoglobus overherredømme, som Sætreng kaller henne.

Dette synes husmannstroens barn er helt topp...

-Wikimedia.

Skremmende er det hvordan Kalb setter ord på mine tanker og erfaringer. Dette er akkurat slik jeg har reflektert og erfart. Samt ikke minst det han nevner om alle dem som er opptatt med å jage fram og slå ned dissidenter til liberalismens tyranni.

Nå har det imidlertid blitt stilt fra dem, så jeg får samle kreftene og slå tilbake med full kraft. Ingen skal oppleve det jeg har opplevd, fordi jeg har forsvart vårt fedrealter og vår husmannstro!

Denne enga får jeg bare få med, slik at jeg kan vie meg til fotografiet, skribleriet og grendepoesien. Når jeg ikke lenger klarer å holde på herr Fossemøllens øyensten, får jeg bare slippe taket og la henne synke til bunns i det mørke havet.

Det blir Kalb nå framover, samt Capture One og fotografiet. Alt for å dokumentere hva jeg kan av de siste rester av tradisjonene og vår fedrearv.

Kalb har rett, absolutt rett, uten tradisjoner og tro går alt til grunne. Liberalismen har lagt seg lik et klamt teppe over alles hjerter.

I et nytt samfunn må tradisjonalisme være en del av fundamentet!

Det synes nå som om James Kalb skriver mest frekvent hos Crisis Magazine, vil anbefale alle opponenter til liberalismens tyranny, til å begynne her. Selv om man ikke er troende eller husmannstroende, er her mye å finne for alle tradisjonalister. Kalb arbeider da også for at tradisjonalister på tvers av religionene og kulturene må stå sammen, for å samlet slå tilbake mot det liberalistiske tyranniet, som i disse dager tar strupetak på vårt fedreland.

- James Kalb hos Crisis Magazine

Selvsagt, bestill også Kalbs bøker. Leste hans "Tyranny of Liberalism" tilbake i 2012, og dette er jeg sjeleglad for i disse dager, hvis ikke vet jeg ikke om jeg ville overlevd.

"Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It"

"The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command"

Such aspects of the current regime are exaggerated. A diverse technological society of 325 million that is increasingly integrated into a global political and economic order is not going to be run democratically or through broad-based public discussion. It’s going to be run by networks of full-time professionals and the institutions that employ them. These inevitably become conscious of their common interests and act together to promote policies and ideological perspectives that advance those interests and defuse or fend off conflicting popular concerns. - James Kalb

To add to the problem, modern life dissolves history, heritage, and inherited ways. People get processed through an increasingly centralized and bureaucratized school system. They work for large bureaucratic organizations, or for smaller concerns that are increasingly integrated with global markets. They amuse themselves with commercial pop culture and connect through electronic communications networks that ignore geography. And they’ve been subjected for years to propaganda and social policies that weaken informal connections like family, religion, and common culture. - James Kalb

Beyond such economic corruptions, there are ideological temptations. Those with power habitually exaggerate their wisdom and virtue and the importance of what they do, so that the greater their power the more likely they are to feel themselves called upon to remake the world in the image of their own perhaps radically defective ideal. Our present global elites, for example, lead extraordinarily privileged lives, and they base the legitimacy of their position on claims of economic efficiency and neutral expertise. So why wouldn’t they try to put their legitimacy beyond question by claiming that such qualifications are the key to all good things, and attempt to establish a global technocracy that overrides all other sources of authority, including local community, cultural tradition, natural law, and the Church? - James Kalb

It seems then that the Church views ties and some degree of loyalty based on common descent, history, culture, and language as a good and necessary thing. But what do we do with that today? Inherited loyalties don’t help us when we work for an insurance company, get our food from McDonald’s or Whole Foods, surf the web, or send our kids to a school with children and staff from everywhere. More and more people think they just gum things up.

So they see more reason to reject than value them. Many British people were horrified when their compatriots voted for Brexit. Who wants to be shut up on an island with a bunch of racist xenophobes? Even the Jews, the gold standard for endurance as a people, now seem largely to be abandoning their traditions and intermarrying themselves out of existence.

But that’s a problem. An inherited culture is a system of cooperation developed through long experience living together. There’s no way to replace that as a way of building up a shared system of life that works tolerably well in all settings throughout the whole of life. But without such a system life gets worse: weak human connections, stunted human development, and wrecked lives. Indeed, that’s what we see around us. - James Kalb

Som husmannstroende tradisjonalist har jeg blitt angrepet for trangsyn av husmannstroens barn, og var det ikke for Israel ville jeg vel vært død nå. Som alltid, ingen, med unntak av J.M. Greer, ser klarere gjennom hykleriet!

And finally, bigotry has been promoted from a vice among other vices to the ultimate unforgivable sin. In the considered view of the centrist Democrat who was the consensus choice of all respectable opinion to become president of the United States, bigots are not only extremely numerous and thoroughly deplorable but “unredeemable.” They have no place in our society, or so it is thought, and respectable publications present them as legitimate targets of extra-legal violence. A woman who murders her child and never comes clean about it can find absolution among respectable people more easily than a woman provoked into saying the wrong word. And in Britain a three-year-old who uses the wrong expression (like “broccoli head”) can get reported to the police as a racist and the incident entered in his permanent record.

What is going on? When did opposition to bigotry become so bigoted, and “hate” lose its connection to hate? How did it happen that pretty much everyone who ever lived now counts as a bigot to be ashamed of? For that matter, when did ordinary Church teachingregarding sex and the sexes, or the value of recognizing and protecting national distinctiveness, become equivalent to crimes against humanity?

At first such views seemed extreme, but more and more they are becoming the conventional wisdom, taught in the schools, proclaimed by moral leaders, assumed as a matter of course in law and public policy, and re-enforced by high and low culture and even by penal sanctions. The transformation is barely noticed, and generally taken for granted as an obvious good thing.

Such a change must have something immensely powerful behind it. But what? It’s a complicated story, but at bottom it has to do with the emerging globalized, technological, and integrated social order in which we live, and the ideals that support that order and the position of those who run it. These ideals present an image of a world reconstituted in accordance with technocratic norms and understandings, a single economic and social network ordered by global markets, certified experts, transnational bureaucracies, electronic entertainment, and electronic communications that make everyone in the world equally present to everyone else.

In that world, the world of Facebook, Amazon, and global mobility of labor, specific inherited culture loses coherence and function. Men and women become interchangeable economic units. Family is replaced by day care, fast food, and welfare rights. Religion merges into politically correct progressivism. And common sense and the wisdom of the people—the secular equivalent of the Catholic sensus fidei fidelium—are replaced by spin, memes, propaganda, alleged expertise, and commercial pop culture. - James Kalb

Hvordan skal jeg forholde meg til disse husmannstroens barn, som ringeaktet sitt fedrealter, sviktet sin husmannstro og jaget sin kulturbærer?

The resulting outlook and way of life isn’t satisfying for many people. How can it be, when it provides no place for arrangements as basic to the normal life of ordinary people as inherited community and marriage understood as a natural, functional, and reliable union of man and woman? It bears especially hard on the less successful, who don’t have careers and therapists to keep them going. So people know there’s something wrong with it, and polls repeatedly show they believe the world is going the wrong way in the face of constant spin and propaganda to the contrary. - James Kalb

Og teknokratene og karrieristene, de mener naturligvis at vi deplorable nymoderne husmenn skal falle på kne og takke dem! Slektas representanter for de globale eliter har vært ute etter meg også, for å forsøke å tvinge meg i kne, fordi jeg ikke faller på kne for deres allmektige Servoglobus! Fordi jeg ikke digger pumpehuset! Fordi jeg heller vil ha et brønnhus enn et pumpehus! Selvsagt er jeg en bigot, hvordan kan noen drømme om husmannstroens brønnhus til fordel for Servoglobus sitt pumpehus?!?

Our rulers and betters don’t want any backtalk. They know everything, they’re doing a great job, and everybody ought to be grateful and get with the program. So we’re told that what we have now is utopia emerging from an intolerably bigoted past. Apparent problems are only growing pains, or signs the project hasn’t been pushed far enough. Social disconnection must be seen as liberating, since cultural coherence is exclusionary, xenophobic, and racist. And family disintegration can’t be recognized as an issue, because any suggestion of traditional sexual distinctions, connections, and standards is understood as evil.

Hence the universal support from respectable people and institutions for current attitudes regarding hatred and bigotry. Distinctions that relate to areas of life like family or religion that elude the grasp of bureaucrats and billionaires must be seen as “hatred”—otherwise the legitimacy of their positions and actions becomes questionable. Those tempted to make such distinctions must therefore have something wrong with them. They need to be shut up and re-educated.

Nor do our rulers lack arguments for their view. It’s backed by accepted ways of thinking, which are basically technological, and don’t know how to deal with evolved organic arrangements like inherited culture and the family, and by the fears of an increasingly fragmented population, who lack reliable human connections and look to the state to protect them from people they mistrust (or are induced to mistrust, and from a world that seems increasingly chaotic and threatening. - James Kalb

Husmannstroens barn har i sannhet sviktet sitt oppdrag, de er ikke lenger jordens salt, men teknokratiets syre. I sannhet, situasjonen i Øverskreien er langt alvorligere nå, enn hva den var før M.J. Dahl kom vandrende over Totenåsen på slutten av 1800-tallet. Johan Solhaug skrev i sine memoarer at det var ei mørk tid i Øverskreien før Dahls komme, men nå, nå er det mørkt nå. Og dette ville Kalb kunne skrevet under på!

Distinctions that relate to areas of life like family or religion that elude the grasp of bureaucrats and billionaires must be seen as “hatred”—otherwise the legitimacy of their positions and actions becomes questionable.

Amen!

Such tendencies are also supported by institutional and class self-interest. The EU, for example, is best understood as a union among ruling elites that helps them run things without serious regard for their constituents’ views. The same could be said about globalization in general. The powerful become more powerful, and the people are expected to do as they’re told and like it.

The upshot is that all established voices today favor cosmopolitanism and consider it a basic part of political sanity and moral decency. If you favor borders or “populism” you’re considered an idiot, an ignoramus, and probably a Nazi. Absorption of local societies into a global order, and their consequent radical transformation or even dissolution, have thus come to count as unquestionable goods. For proof, consider the horrified response to Brexit among respectable people in the UK.

All these tendencies nonetheless seem odd. However strong they are, there must be some limit on how far they will go, because cosmopolitanism has weaknesses as well as strengths. One is an inability to attract loyalty. That is why empires fall apart, although collapse may be deferred if they are thought to stand for noble principles—religious, as in the case of Byzantium, cultural, as in the case of China, or civic, as in the case of Rome. - James Kalb

Whether it’s the older or newer version, it’s easy to find serious problems with socialism. It’s inefficient and doesn’t deliver on its promises. When it fixes one thing it deranges others. Since government can’t know much about what’s going on at the individual level, it offers not “justice” but “equality” and thereby deprives people of responsibility for their situation. It also concentrates power, supplants autonomous institutions, like family and religion, and makes it impossible for important centers of thought and action independent of the state bureaucracy to exist.

The end result is a non-functional society with an arbitrary, corrupt, and ineffective government. When government controls everything, nothing controls government, and those who run it have free reign. And since socialism destroys personal feelings of responsibility—for how can they develop when people don’t depend on each other in daily life?—those in power lose any motive to sacrifice their personal advantage to the public good.

Even if those in charge manage for a time to run a principled and efficient government, socialism causes problems. The reason being that it gives all power to a false vision of the human good. - James Kalb

We have set ourselves adrift from God, history, and human nature. The world is awash in mindless distraction, the Internet is turning us into scatterbrains, and authoritative voices deny the objectivity of truth. Our highest ideal is nondiscrimination with respect to human connections other than money, certified expertise, and bureaucratic position. The effects of this ideal, which is commonly identified with the Gospel itself, are to entrench power and dissolve the patterns, standards, and communities that make the lives of ordinary people functional and give them meaning.

The result is a culture that doesn’t work. Family and local community fall apart. Religion disintegrates, so much so that even cults lose adherents. We no longer pick up a worthwhile way of life just by growing up and coming to admire what’s admired and hate what’s hated in the world around us. Why should anyone form himself on the model of commercial pop culture, social media fads, and what young people are told in today’s schools? - James Kalb

En korrekt beskrivelse av enga og grenda mi, her er intet tilbake som gir mening, annet enn fotografiet. Selvsagt må jeg berge jentene mine vekk herfra, men til hva?

So what to do? I’ve noted that the signs of the times call for a renewed emphasis on the transcendent—that is, on divine realities. Without their presence to keep everything in order, the practical alternatives are distraction and dissipation on the one hand and this-worldly fanaticism on the other.

We have plenty of both today. To provide distraction we have career for the few and drink, drugs, social media, and degraded pop culture for the many. As for fanaticism, we have PC among our rulers and their hangers-on, and a variety of movements among rebellious young men which ignore the transcendent and therefore go nowhere.

We need something better. That thing is obviously Catholicism, but how do we give Catholicism a concrete presence in today’s world? Calling for better observance of Catholic moral teachings isn’t enough, because those teachings grow out of an understanding of God, man, and the world that must somehow be made more vividly present for the Catholic way of life to make sense. - James Kalb

Its beginnings are closely connected to the rise of modern natural science, which rejects the contemplative ideal of knowledge in favor of prediction and control. This approach, which stresses observation, measurement, and mathematical modeling, has led to modern technology and industry. So it’s been enormously successful.

Progressivism likewise rejects contemplation in favor of control, and its most effective forms have favored hard-edged analysis aimed at radical social transformation. Marx expressed the approach forcefully: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

The triumph of the will through objective investigation and rational organization thus becomes an accepted guide to life. That approach has been nearly as effective in the social as the physical world. It’s given us modern economics, modern bureaucratic management, modern representative democracy, modern concepts of freedom and equality, and modern methods of thought control. These ways of doing things are intended to get the people who use them whatever they want, and they’ve swept all before them. - James Kalb

Nei, dette er helt utrolig! Les selv, kan ikke gjengi alt. Og det hele er også gjengitt som en podcast!

- The Conundrum of Progressivism

Heidundrende du, Kalb står intet tilbake for Greer!

In broad terms, a nation state is a state that represents a people that exist prepolitically. This means it represents a people that understand themselves as such because of historical and cultural ties that don’t depend on the state, so that they would continue to be a people even if the state were divided or absorbed by another state. Thus, Poland is a nation state, Austria-Hungary was not a nation state, the Kurds are a nation without a state, and the extent to which the United States has been a nation state is debatable and has varied over the years. - James Kalb

Modern ways of thinking lead people to moral views that are different from traditional ones, so it’s not surprising they consider themselves morally superior to people in the past. Whether current moral understandings are actually better is nonetheless dubious and deserves investigation. - James Kalb

But leaving out essentials leads to bad substitutes. When society is seen as a sort of machine, for example, people become careerists instead of social beings. Ties to particular people and communities aren’t taken seriously; only the economy and bureaucracy are taken seriously. So this is where people now put their efforts and the way they understand who they are. This is hardly a moral advance. - James Kalb

However, we can’t do without a larger scheme of meaning and reality. Since we no longer understand ourselves as part of a tradition, or the world as having a natural moral order, we create a moral and social order and force everything into it. This becomes the function of politics, which substitutes for religion and social tradition. The result is that the government’s involvement in human life becomes more pervasive while its understanding of human life becomes thinner. - James Kalb

I sannhet, Kalb er gull! Veldig trist var det dog at husmannstroens barn sviktet sin apostel. Vi står ribbet tilbake. Men jeg skal forsøke å fange de siste fragmenter av vår arv på kamerasensoren og i grendepoesien. Kanskje kommer en tid hvor menneskene vil være takknemlige for min innsats?