Establishing Our Movement

1,200 words

In “Against the ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” I argued that White Nationalists cannot model our work on a business that caters to the given ideas and preferences of the public, because currently, the public mind is very much in the hands of our enemies. Thus instead of following the public, we must lead them; instead of pandering to them, we must better them.

But there are strong economic and social incentives to abandon hard White Nationalist truths for flattering mainstream illusions: you’ll make more money; you’ll be more popular; you’ll be more socially acceptable. How do we combat this?

First, we simply need to make people aware that there is a conflict at all. Freedom isn’t just having options; it is being aware of one’s options. We can’t really be responsible until we know that we are making choices and what we are choosing. If one does not grasp the distinction between pandering to the public and leading it, but one regards popularity and profit as measures of success, it is easy to become a panderer without even knowing it.

Second, we need to recruit people of good character who, when shown that they have the choice to lead or pander, will make the right choice—who will prefer truth, justice, and the common good over more personal and proximate rewards like money and popularity.

Third, the distinction between a business and a profession is useful here. Businesses measure success by profits. Professions measure success by promoting the public good. Our goal is the latter. We aim at nothing less than the survival and flourishing of our race.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Philosopher Is In here.

Fourth, if our movement is more akin to a profession than a business, what sort of institutions should we build? Lawyers and doctors are professionals, but their firms are businesses—often very big ones. Still, we recognize that the profit motive corrupts the pursuit of the common good, thus we have restraints on corruption, namely professional codes of ethics as well as economic regulations. As bad as law and medicine are today, they would be far worse if they dispensed with the trappings of a profession and focused entirely on making money.

The best way to protect a profession from the corruption of market incentives is simply to make it a non-profit institution. But even non-profits need to bring in more money than they spend. Thus non-profits also face the temptation to corrupt rather than better the public, simply to pay their bills. This is especially the case with non-profits that need to fund themselves from day-to-day donations, which creates the very same incentives as in businesses existing on day-to-day sales. But this is not true of non-profits that are funded from the interest generated by large financial endowments.

Thus I think that the best models for our metapolitical institutions are churches or universities that have large financial endowments. Such institutions are about upholding and propagating a body of knowledge. And because they have large endowments, they don’t have to chase money, which removes the corrupting incentive to change their messages to match the public mood.

The purpose of a church is to preserve and uphold revealed truths and share them with the world, regardless of their popularity at any given time. Obviously, this would be difficult if, to survive, churches had to win weekly popularity contests with competing churches and religions, as well as secular belief systems and weekend sports.

Americans don’t like the idea of an “established” church, meaning a church that enjoys official status and government subsidies. But such a church does not need to compete with other churches to fill its coffers. Thus it would be less likely to set foot on the slippery slope that leads to modern American “megachurches” sponsoring rock concerts and preaching the gospel of prosperity.

Religion is essentially different from market transactions. A business does not tell potential customers: “You are ignorant; your desires are corrupt; you are guilty. You need to become better.” Instead, a business seeks to satisfy the given preferences of potential customers. The best salesman flatters his customers. He doesn’t threaten them with damnation.

You can order Greg Johnson’s The Battle of the Books here.

If you have money in your pocket, a shirt on your back, and shoes on your feet, you are good enough for most businesses. You don’t need to improve your knowledge, character, and tastes to become a good customer. In fact, those would just get in the way.

But what if people really do need moral and spiritual improvement? The first step is always to tell them, even if it hurts their self-esteem. Imagine, though, if a church’s survival depended on competing with churches that preach that human beings are naturally good, thus you are fine just the way you are. Obviously, more people will buy the latter message in the “marketplace of ideas,” even if it reinforces their vices—including the vice of complacency—leaving them worse off.

Like churches, educational institutions are primarily about preserving and passing on a body of knowledge as well as improving the character and tastes of students. Like religion, education is premised on the assumption that the student is not good enough the way he is. He is ignorant. He is vulgar. He has bad habits. Otherwise, he wouldn’t need to learn anything.

Thus, like religion, education is fundamentally different from the market. Education is about improving a student’s knowledge, character, and preferences, not catering to his existing level of ignorance, vice, and vulgarity. Thus to do their edifying work, educators need to be insulated from market incentives.

Perhaps the single most subversive institution in modern higher education is allowing students to evaluate teachers. If a teacher’s pay and promotion are affected by student evaluations, this creates an incentive to flatter students, lower standards, and inflate grades, because one gets better evaluations with easy courses rather than hard ones. In effect, student evaluations empower students to resist the essential educational relationship by replacing edification with catering, pandering, and flattery, thus corrupting both higher education and themselves.

How can our movement maintain the purity of our message and goals in the face of the constant pressure to compromise in the pursuit of economic and political popularity? We need to create non-profit educational organizations with large financial endowments that insulate our thought-leaders and opinion-makers from economic incentives to compromise on essential matters of principle. Of course, even though we cannot compromise on the content of our message, we should also encourage innovation and pragmatism in the means by which we persuade more and more of our people to our side.

From a White Nationalist point of view, the main problem of modern churches and higher education is not that they preach unpopular ideas but that they preach the wrong unpopular ideas because these institutions have been captured by the Left. Thus once White Nationalists finally have our equivalents of the Ford Foundation, we must take special care not to succumb to institutional subversion and capture. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to have institutions worth stealing?