I would not put it past jews to insincerely use federalist arguments as they would any other argument they find convenient. Hitler wasn't necessarily wrong to call that argument, as put forth by jewish political elements, a mask.
>"The enemies National Socialism proclaimed to be German enemies were hometown enemies"
This is correct. There is a continuity of spirit between Hometowns and the Reich that was specifically not to be preserved under bolshevik transformation or other loss of sovereignty.
>"Its political success came from the conversion of hometown bigotries into national virtues"
I would not use the word "bigotries" but this again points at a shared trait amounting to the capacity to exclude those forces which are truly a threat to distinctly German continuity and potentialities.
This has been a great series and I don't mean to take away from it in any way, but missing here is the idea that the National Socialists didn't do what they did in a vacuum. Bolshevism and other forces of world empire did in fact threaten and ultimately did take away the sovereignty of Europe, leading to the criminal degradation of its potentialities which has taken place since.
On that note, this idea of temporal vs spatial is valid and interesting, however I believe a healthy civilization is capable of wisely wielding both for its own sake, able to not let either element be weaponized by external or subversive forces to jeopardize its overall structure. If there is space (literal, metaphorical, or metaphysical) into which your civilization can expand, it would do well to consider both risks to its internal structure and threats from external forces which may well be eyeing the same expansionary plane. In this light, and given the historic context which is affirmed by hindsight, Germany can be seen to have been quite healthy indeed.
After it had secured its sovereignty, were it able to do so without total transformation, it was hoped by many that their old ways could reassert themselves in whatever capacities then possible. After all, it tends to be the case that all types, when not under duress, regress towards the mean.
Might I just call you River. Thank you for your comment, River. I always appreciate when people take the time to comment on my posts. I expect you’ll disapprove of my responses, but even when people disagree, I find value in fleshing out the details of those disagreements. While I’m not a great fan of John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech, I do think he was right that you can only improve your own thinking in response to its critics. So, let’s get to it.
The reason I prefer to taxonomize phenotype by personality structure is that the definition maps directly onto the object. Of course there will be gray area and outliers, but the two are conceptually co-terminus and of course my claim – based on the empirical data – is that personality structure largely predicts politics and morality. Taxonomizing phenotype by race or ethnicity, while methodologically valid, lacks this benefit. While there of course must be an average within any such category, outliers are usually too numerous to draw statistically powerful conclusions. Ashkenazi Jews are a complicated case as their historical experience has required spatialist public policy preferences, while they have offset this with strong private temporalist dispositions. From a personality structure perspective therefore, there are a mix of outcomes. And of course Ashkenazi Jews are going to be over-represented in any domain where high verbal intelligence provides a competitive advantage.
So it’s hardly surprising that while it is easy to point to ardent spatialists (from either end of the left’s closed circuit, or Janus-faced symbiosis) whether thinking of Marx or Mises, it is also true that there have been plenty of ardently temporalist Jewish thinkers, from Martin Buber to Hannah Arendt to Paul Gottfried. I’m not saying they’d all agree on everything, of course not. But they do tend to emphasize the particularistic and the communal over the universalist and the (monadic) individualistic.
All to say that that kind of analysis is vastly more complicated than is acknowledged by most who provide comment on it. I don’t say that studying a racial or ethnic (or religious) group lacks scholarly value or interest, but it is much more dubious to draw sweeping social analyses from it than using my personality structure phenotypes, since, again, the definition maps onto the object. As I always remind my commentators (who are so appreciated), I’m not trying to tell you what to think, just what I think and why.
And, hey, if 1920-30s German Jews were pro-federalism, good for them.
And, if we’re looking at these things through a political rather than scientific lens, the ideological frame of managerial liberalism is precisely calibrated to directing us all to focus on racial and ethnic conflict. That’s precisely how the ruling technocratic managerial class legitimizes its bureaucratic paternalism and social engineering agenda.
As for the question of balance, your take is precisely that of Harold Innis, from whom I drew the space-time tropes: the idea that societies (he’d say civilizations) can and should achieve a balance between the two phenotypes. So I concede the appeal of your claim. It would be nice if such a thing were possible. However, as I spent nearly 500 pages in my most recent book explaining, my reading of history suggests that that conviction is wrong. The phenotype wars (and the dialect of bureaucratic rationality) locks us into historical cycles in which the hegemony of each phenotype in turn eventually leads to the hegemony of the other. Any society might have a golden age in which the two are in relative balance, but that’s just a fugitive moment, a passing arc in the larger spiral of the society. But, again, I argued all this at great length in the book, so will leave my remarks on this at that, here.
Finally, I certainly agree that all types regress towards the mean when not under duress. However, for one or the other of the polarizing phenotypes, depending upon the point in the society’s spiral, most of history is duress.
Thank you again, River, for your contribution to the comments section. I always appreciate when readers push me to clarify my thinking on any relevant topic.
I would not put it past jews to insincerely use federalist arguments as they would any other argument they find convenient. Hitler wasn't necessarily wrong to call that argument, as put forth by jewish political elements, a mask.
>"The enemies National Socialism proclaimed to be German enemies were hometown enemies"
This is correct. There is a continuity of spirit between Hometowns and the Reich that was specifically not to be preserved under bolshevik transformation or other loss of sovereignty.
>"Its political success came from the conversion of hometown bigotries into national virtues"
I would not use the word "bigotries" but this again points at a shared trait amounting to the capacity to exclude those forces which are truly a threat to distinctly German continuity and potentialities.
This has been a great series and I don't mean to take away from it in any way, but missing here is the idea that the National Socialists didn't do what they did in a vacuum. Bolshevism and other forces of world empire did in fact threaten and ultimately did take away the sovereignty of Europe, leading to the criminal degradation of its potentialities which has taken place since.
On that note, this idea of temporal vs spatial is valid and interesting, however I believe a healthy civilization is capable of wisely wielding both for its own sake, able to not let either element be weaponized by external or subversive forces to jeopardize its overall structure. If there is space (literal, metaphorical, or metaphysical) into which your civilization can expand, it would do well to consider both risks to its internal structure and threats from external forces which may well be eyeing the same expansionary plane. In this light, and given the historic context which is affirmed by hindsight, Germany can be seen to have been quite healthy indeed.
After it had secured its sovereignty, were it able to do so without total transformation, it was hoped by many that their old ways could reassert themselves in whatever capacities then possible. After all, it tends to be the case that all types, when not under duress, regress towards the mean.
Greetings RiverHollow.
Might I just call you River. Thank you for your comment, River. I always appreciate when people take the time to comment on my posts. I expect you’ll disapprove of my responses, but even when people disagree, I find value in fleshing out the details of those disagreements. While I’m not a great fan of John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech, I do think he was right that you can only improve your own thinking in response to its critics. So, let’s get to it.
The reason I prefer to taxonomize phenotype by personality structure is that the definition maps directly onto the object. Of course there will be gray area and outliers, but the two are conceptually co-terminus and of course my claim – based on the empirical data – is that personality structure largely predicts politics and morality. Taxonomizing phenotype by race or ethnicity, while methodologically valid, lacks this benefit. While there of course must be an average within any such category, outliers are usually too numerous to draw statistically powerful conclusions. Ashkenazi Jews are a complicated case as their historical experience has required spatialist public policy preferences, while they have offset this with strong private temporalist dispositions. From a personality structure perspective therefore, there are a mix of outcomes. And of course Ashkenazi Jews are going to be over-represented in any domain where high verbal intelligence provides a competitive advantage.
So it’s hardly surprising that while it is easy to point to ardent spatialists (from either end of the left’s closed circuit, or Janus-faced symbiosis) whether thinking of Marx or Mises, it is also true that there have been plenty of ardently temporalist Jewish thinkers, from Martin Buber to Hannah Arendt to Paul Gottfried. I’m not saying they’d all agree on everything, of course not. But they do tend to emphasize the particularistic and the communal over the universalist and the (monadic) individualistic.
All to say that that kind of analysis is vastly more complicated than is acknowledged by most who provide comment on it. I don’t say that studying a racial or ethnic (or religious) group lacks scholarly value or interest, but it is much more dubious to draw sweeping social analyses from it than using my personality structure phenotypes, since, again, the definition maps onto the object. As I always remind my commentators (who are so appreciated), I’m not trying to tell you what to think, just what I think and why.
And, hey, if 1920-30s German Jews were pro-federalism, good for them.
And, if we’re looking at these things through a political rather than scientific lens, the ideological frame of managerial liberalism is precisely calibrated to directing us all to focus on racial and ethnic conflict. That’s precisely how the ruling technocratic managerial class legitimizes its bureaucratic paternalism and social engineering agenda.
As for the question of balance, your take is precisely that of Harold Innis, from whom I drew the space-time tropes: the idea that societies (he’d say civilizations) can and should achieve a balance between the two phenotypes. So I concede the appeal of your claim. It would be nice if such a thing were possible. However, as I spent nearly 500 pages in my most recent book explaining, my reading of history suggests that that conviction is wrong. The phenotype wars (and the dialect of bureaucratic rationality) locks us into historical cycles in which the hegemony of each phenotype in turn eventually leads to the hegemony of the other. Any society might have a golden age in which the two are in relative balance, but that’s just a fugitive moment, a passing arc in the larger spiral of the society. But, again, I argued all this at great length in the book, so will leave my remarks on this at that, here.
Finally, I certainly agree that all types regress towards the mean when not under duress. However, for one or the other of the polarizing phenotypes, depending upon the point in the society’s spiral, most of history is duress.
Thank you again, River, for your contribution to the comments section. I always appreciate when readers push me to clarify my thinking on any relevant topic.