We all need to belong to something. That’s why even the most individualistic of libertarians will nevertheless join various groups and institutions. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the success of the American Republic as compared with the French was the churches which, although numerous in their denominations, bound the spirit of the Americans together across the country.
There’s a reason that cultural and ethnic homogeneity are so crucial in the creation of high-trust societies. So, as a father, you have a duty to make sure your child grows up somewhere they belong in this most primal of ways. If having children doesn’t give you the incentive to take an interest in politics and the society your child must inherit, I don’t know what will.
As far as love in the home goes, you don’t have to be gushing with emotion to let them know you love them. Routine, structure and stability are the greatest tokens of love for a child. Superficially, we can say that accepting them for who they are and kissing them goodnight are very healthy, but shaming them for being different to their brothers and sisters is bad, of course. Taking time for your children is at the heart of the matter.
Set times every week for family meetings, eat meals at least once a day together as a family with no distractions and have a board game evening, for instance. Make the home something that you are all collectively invested in and your child will know deep down that you want to be invested in them. Creating that platform gives them the space in which they can speak honestly with you about your parenting and genuinely listen to your parental wisdom in return.
4. Esteem
I’m at risk of repeating myself here. That’s because children need to be out of the home and in an environment where they are not unconditionally loved in order to find out how they can earn the esteem of their peers and elders, as well as those whose opinions don’t matter to them at all. But learn from the mistakes of the pushy parents who raise those over-competitive, ticking time-bombs we’ve all encountered. Studies show that children like this are more likely to reject you later in life and less likely to achieve a sense of fulfilment. Which leads us to self-actualisation.
5. Self-Actualisation
We all want our children to reach their fullest potential but, the trouble is, most of us are not really engaged in that task ourselves. Generally speaking, however, we want our children to succeed at something they love. The best way to do this is to understand what they’re good at and play to their strengths, whilst supporting them in their weak areas.
For example, if yours are still young, study them to see what schemas they have. Schemas are the following psychological urges developed from their first year:
Rotation — the love of things that spin or of simply being swung round;
Trajectory — not just the joy of throwing things, but of making lines in space, even by dropping items from a height;
Enveloping — housing my toys off in bricks always gave me a sense of security;
Orientation — an interest in positioning oneself or objects in different ways, e.g. that satisfaction in turning the hourglass upside down;
Positioning — for my son, the shapes must not only go in the correct hole but must be lined up perfectly for selection from the start;
Connection — the love of building and dismantling bricks, train tracks etc.;
Enclosure/Container — that fond memory of building a fort of sofa cushions can extend as far as insisting all your doodles have a border;
Transporting — parents whose important items have been carried away by a dumper truck or train; and
Transformation — the wonder of changing states and shapes, like melting ice.
Once you’ve got them sussed, thinking of toy ideas and study supports is much easier.
But, let’s be honest, if your child isn’t good at science, they probably won’t be an astrophysicist and probably won’t want to be; but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t know how gravity works. If your child has a talent and they love a certain hobby, focus their energies on it and help them to excel; chances are, none of you will regret it or resent the other.
Transcendence
Interestingly, Maslow later revised self-actualisation. He thought it was aimless and without any end in sight, without some higher, transcendent goal. In the West, we have lost the concept of the paterfamilias, the father as both priest and king of the household, with the hearth keeping both the fire and name of the family alive, surrounded by statues and images of ancestors. The fireplace has been replaced by the television in most of our homes and the father has been replaced by the state in many more still.
As the priest of your family unit, your natural role is to act as a spiritual guide for your children, to the best of your knowledge and belief. Teach them the ways of your ancestors, about their culture and their role in the bigger picture. Teach them how to search within and without for answers, and how to respectfully disagree, so they do not end up mindlessly following authority.
In short, being a father is never going to be easy. Then again, nothing worth doing ever is. Become what you were born to be. But, if you’re going to do it, do it right. You don’t have to be the perfect father, you just have to keep at it. All cheesy clichés, yes? That’s because these principles are time-honoured, tested and true. Let’s keep it that way.
Chapter 4
Why Fighting Is Good for Men and Boys
What would you do if you saw two boys of six years wrestling? Their shirts off, red and sweaty, they have a large group of peers around them, cheering, eyes wide and knuckles white. Would you stop them, or give the young scraps some advice? Would you see a violent squabble, or boys acting on natural impulses which will better equip them to defend their family and neighbours later in life? The answer you give is, in large part, dependent on your gender; so, the fact that this scenario would make an increasingly large number of men upset is a sign of a collapsing civilisation. But, nil desperandum, Western civilisation has the solution!
As an early years professional, I saw education academics acknowledging the data — boys need ‘rough and tumble’ play for their mental and physical well-being. But they have no way of encouraging this in institutions where boys are immediately reprimanded for making finger-pistols at each other. Without saying it directly, they thought the majority female teaching staff for younger age ranges was pushing our boys’ natural urge to fight like lion-cubs underground. What’s more, the boys were made to feel bad about themselves and their very nature.
Their solution? They suggested that more men be encouraged to teach younger children and engage in rough play with them. Until the late 1800s, education was male dominated and boys spent a lot of time with male mentors. But, of course, there has been no effort to bring back that environment. Instead, a compromise between boys being boys and boys being fairy princesses was achieved — playing superheroes.
As though female teachers are going to tone down their disapproval as boys shoot lasers, magic and (Gaia forbid) bullets at each other. The treacherous political class present only feeble attempts to manage the symptoms of our societal masculinity problem — like sticking some tape over the burst pipe of our haemorrhaging testosterone as cultural Marxism continues to swing the pick-axe of nth-wave feminism at it. So, it’s high time we took a few swings back.
But, first, we need to teach our lads how to fight.
At the age of six or seven, Viking children were taught the martial art of Glima. This was not just father and son play-fighting; boys and occasionally girls already wrestled with friends and family up to that age. This was more systematic, a group activity.
The Greeks also taught their boys how to wrestle, because our other ancestors could see the big picture. The Hoplites, for example, were individualistic free men of all ages who voluntarily came together to practice combat; this not only strengthened their communities but also allowed these farmers to fend off the Persian Empire. Yet today even isolated expressions of violence in co
mputer games are questioned by SJWs. Nevertheless, all the signs are there — our boys are yearning for the same activities that were practised by their forefathers.
At college, I started an unofficial fight club — men only — based in large part on the book and movie of the same name, in which the narrator’s Nietzschean alter ego, Tyler Durden, describes the bubbling frustration inside the ever-increasing number of 30-somethings coming together for underground fights: ‘We’re a generation of men raised by women.’ Naturally, half the guys in my year were participating within a week. But, our young boys should be taught how to fight openly and without shame to avoid hidden expressions of violence and maybe even some mass-shootings by angry, young loners on medication. When they are young, it is the perfect time to teach them.
Young lads have no intention of seriously injuring their friends; it’s just good fun and produces healthier attitudes towards violence, confidence in self-defence and the defence of one’s community. Furthermore, the data show that fighting helps to strengthen peer relationships, meaning less bullying and segregation. It is interesting to compare the codes of honour of ancient Greek wrestling etc. with those we intuit as wrestling children.
No intentional hitting or kicking;
No gouging the eyes or biting; and
No going for the balls!
That’s precisely how I used to wrestle with my brothers and friends as a pup; it was just obvious. If someone took things ‘too far’, they were ostracised from the fun, at least until they calmed down and apologised. If someone got hurt, we stopped, checked whether they were just being a pussy or needed mending. We kept calm and carried on.
The data are screaming that men haven’t changed, especially in our need to practise fighting.
We still have the same natural impulses, but their suppression, no, their demonisation has made our men weak and submissive. So much so that many have become self-deprecating betas, full of white guilt and ashamed of Western civilisation, who believe that masculinity is toxic. We have everything to be proud of and need to encourage our boys’ fighting spirit so they grow some balls, some confidence in themselves and their kin. That’s the spirit which has kept our enemies, foreign and domestic at bay for thousands of years and will do the same to tyranny within and invading barbarians from without. If we want to turn scrapping boys into men first and gentlemen second, we need to organise some fights, not break them up.
Addendum
Fifteen Steps to Restore the West
In the introduction of this book, I referred to Prof. Hoppe’s speech, titled ‘Libertarianism and the Alt-Right. In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change’, delivered at the 12th annual meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey, on 17 September 2017. The body of his speech provides ten brilliant, albeit predominantly negative, steps to restore Western Civilisation. Below, are a summarised version of these ten ‘specifics of a populist strategy for libertarian change’ with the addition of my own five personal, positive ssteps:
Populist tactics
One: Stop mass immigration.
Two: Stop attacking, killing and bombing people in foreign countries.
Three: Defund the ruling elites and their intellectual bodyguards.
Four: End the FED and all central banks.
Five: Abolish all ‘affirmative action’ and ‘non-discrimination’ laws and regulations.
Six: Crush the ‘Anti-Fascist’ mob.
Seven: Crush the street criminals and gangs.
Eight: Get rid of all welfare parasites and bums.
Nine: Get the State out of education.
Personal tactics
Ten: Don’t put your trust in politics or political parties.
Eleven: Affirm human free will and the consequent natural order of the human world, particularly one’s natural rights.
Twelve: Promote individual responsibility in the local community from the family-outward.
Thirteen: Europeans, be proud of your identity, your traditions, heritage and culture, and defend these, especially by producing large well-developed families.
Fourteen: Repent and be baptised into the Church, defending and promoting your people’s religion as opportunities arise.
Fifteen: Develop a skill set and otherwise prepare to establish possible segregated communities with like-minded folk, with the aim of preserving Western civilization.
Afterword by Ricardo Duchesne
In this afterword I would like to reinforce Richard Storey’s excellent effort to show that libertarian freedoms are not incompatible with a strong commitment to in-group white identity politics. Whether you prefer to call it ‘libertarianism’ or not, I fully agree with Storey that Europeans can preserve their freedoms only by living inside nations with a strong sense of ethnic, religious and historical identity.
The unique individualism of Europeans, including the liberal philosophy that came to justify it in the modern era, is now faulted for much that is wrong in the West today. It is said that liberalism prioritizes the abstract individual, regardless of race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation. Many on the Alt Right, followers of Alexander Dugin, to be sure, are calling for a Western world that is more in line with the way non-European societies are organized, with their authoritarian governments and strong collectivist values. But this is impossible. Europeans are innately individualist. This does not mean, however, that their liberalism inherently precludes them from recognizing the importance of collective identities, shared values and ancestries. Let us not forget that a few decades ago all the settler states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America were full blown liberal states with strong collective identities that openly excluded non-European outsiders. These settler states, as well as the nations of Europe, were all conceived as nations with a strong ethnic identity, an identifiable territory, a language, myths and symbols, and common ethnic lineage.
At the same time, Carl Schmitt’s assessment in the 1930s that liberal states have an inherently weak understanding of their collective political identity cannot be denied. European liberals wrongly imagine that their nation states were created through contractual arrangements by abstract individuals without deadly contests against outsiders and without a strong ethnic identity. Liberal theory has a progressivist inclination, or utopian hope, for a world in which all peoples will peacefully come together in pursuit of their natural right to life, liberty, and comfort. It imagines a world in which there will be no in-groups and no out-groups, in which the friend-enemy distinction, which Schmitt viewed as inherent to political relations between nations, will somehow vanish.
Having said this, it is important to make a distinction between the Anglo-American version of Western liberalism, which emphasizes ‘negative liberty,’ and the Germanic model of liberalism, which emphasizes ‘positive liberty.’ The Anglo version is more libertarian in focusing on individual agents and a ‘minimalist’ state that concentrates primarily on the security of individuals and their freedom to engage in contractual arrangements without obstacles or constraints imposed from above by state bureaucrats who think they know what is best for citizens. The Germanic version admires the heroic ethos of aristocratic freedom as well as the role of the state in encouraging the realization of one’s highest potentialities. It accepts the value of negative freedoms — freedom of thought and assembly, equal treatment under the law — but without neglecting the fact that in the modern era individuals from different ethnic groups were coalesced into distinctive nations with shared collectivist values. The Germanic version recognizes that humans have a need to belong to a group or a Volk, and that the state is the one agent capable of ensuring this need. What Storey has endeavoured to show is that these two views of freedom are not necessarily opposed and that non-coercive systems of rulership have and could yet arise among European peoples.
Nevertheless, the German conception was once very influential in Europe and the United States, but after WWI and WWII this model was
thoroughly discredited. Meanwhile, around the same time, the Anglo model came to embrace the notion of positive liberty (that the state should play a role in nurturing and sustaining the cohesiveness of the citizens making up the nation) from a leftist, Keynesian perspective, while still adhering to the principles of negative liberty. Among those associated with this Germanic conception, I would identify G. F. H. as the one thinker who offered the best argument reconciling the tendency among Europeans for individual liberty with the need humans have for communitarian values. Hegel, it seems to me, was the one thinker who recognized both the value of negative liberties and the need for shared values or for ‘positive’ freedoms.
Paleoconservatives, Traditionalists, Alain de Benoist and the European New Right, are wrong in condemning Western individualism and in calling for some return to ancient Greek ideals of ‘social’ freedom, or feudal ‘organic’ values, or for a ‘traditionalism’ that is inherently illiberal in the manner of non-Europeans. There is much to be learned from these schools in their emphasis on the natural inequalities of nature, their valuing of the Aristotelian virtues and the wisdom attained by past ages, and their respect for order and traditions. But there is no turning back from modern liberalism with its emphasis on separation of church and state, equality under the law, respect for private property and the privacy of individuals.
While I credit the prehistoric Indo-European aristocracies with originating individualism, and welcome the limitations imposed by feudal aristocracies against despotic powers throughout ancient and medieval times, White Identitarians should be wary of calling for a return of aristocratic rule in our modern age. We should welcome the political freedom and the equal rights of the citoyens sanctioned by the French Revolution. By modern times, the aristocracies of Europe had become parasitic courtiers, and were understandably replaced by bourgeois elites calling for representative institutions. After all, Storey’s argument is that contemporary European nations should not accord superior rights and privileges to any European social class.
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