If you haven’t understood leftism as a dirty crackhouse of addicts giving each other dopamine hits for superior holiness yet, read this and you might. Check out the quote at the top of the article:
“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” – Alice Walker
This isn’t just a pithy quote. Progressives and leftists fully believe this with all their hearts. If somebody asked you, “What is the rent you pay for living on this planet?” you may, if not scolding them for wasting your time with philosophical mumbo-jumbo, reply with your actual financial rent, or reply that, if there is a philosophical, abstract rent that human beings pay to live on this planet, that rent consists of blood, sweat, tears, and lots of hard work.
How does this activist describe the life of an activist?
It’s long hours, empty bank accounts, angry girlfriends/boyfriends/spouses who are ready to leave you at any moment, family that doesn’t get it, making calls, receiving calls, logging contacts, selling a vision, rejection, empty promises, fulfilled promises, emails, press releases, signatures, counts, validation, databases, vendors, merchandise, rallies, public speaking, volunteers, supporters, haters, naysayers, politics, more politics, and people wishing you would just stop. Especially your doctor.
That sounds pretty awful. What kind of person would voluntarily choose to lose all their money, lose their spouse, lose their health, aggravate their family, and spend all their time dealing with politics? What is the gain for this massive cost?
According to the mainstream opinion, these people are righteous and holy for giving up everything for what they truly believe. They do it for nobody, least of all themselves—after all, look at everything they’re giving up! That these so-called activists become very well positioned—as a result of their activism—for high social status (and therefore easy money and easy sex), giving speeches, touring colleges, appearing on talk-shows, lecturing on social media, working for non-profits, writing articles, and advising politicians and companies on “diversity” is swept under the rug. That whole matrix of money flowing to leftists is for a just cause; therefore, its selflessness cannot be questioned.
You may think the writer is a little crazy for giving up everything for a left-wing ballot initiative. He’s not. He’s known his whole life, consciously or unconsciously, that the way to gaining power is holiness, specifically progressive, activist holiness. Power is worth infinitely more than mere money, mere family, mere time. The writer isn’t crazy; he is very sane—interpreted in a particular sense. What is crazy are the incentives that have been set up for gaining power. With sane powerless people and insane incentives, the incentives will win, and the sane and intelligent will take the insanity of the incentives to a whole new level for the sake of satisfying them.
More than 1 million illegal Middle Eastern and African migrants entered Germany in 2015, with the invitation of the German government. This year, hundreds of thousands have already arrived and a 1-2 million yearly migration from Asia and Africa into Germany is beginning to sound like the new normal. This migration is in contravention of EU and German law. It is opposed by majorities of people in Germany and in every country that has received any of these migrants. These migrants are unchecked, unvetted, uncontrolled and more than 13% of them completely disappear once in Germany, some 130,000 people.
As if the obvious danger of allowing millions of people, mostly young men, from countries that are smouldering craters or terrorist warzones wasn’t enough, these migrants have already been implicated in mass rapes, thefts, murders and unprecedented (for Europe) terrorism.
Sane observers, much like noticing how insane progressive activists are, will notice how insane the German government seems to be. Why import millions of migrants every single year? Why take on these huge social and financial costs when Europe is already facing so many problems? Before the Migrant Crisis, Europe was facing a veritable Euro Crisis, a Greek Crisis, a youth unemployment crisis, and even an admitted integration crisis with legal non-European immigrants, and many other crises besides. All was not well in the Old World. Why would anybody willingly add this to a cluttered plate?
Sane observers of this crisis have been numerous, owing to its sheer preposterousness. They have made many sane points. If the German government wants to solve its demographic problem, why invite a group of migrants that are 80% male? They won’t be producing children. If the German government wants to solve economic problems, why invite Africans and Middle Easterners instead of Chinese and Vietnamese? Surely the Germans are aware that East Asians have a better reputation for productive work and education, and they are no less willing than West Asians to migrate to Europe, given the opportunity. If the German government simply thinks sheltering “refugees” is a humanitarian necessity, why not accept any refugees from the ongoing war in Ukraine?
If the government needed migrants to solve its problems, why did it wait until the migrants broke the border laws of eleven different countries to announce it? Why wasn’t the Merkel administration organizing mega-consulates in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to snatch up and legally fly all these migrants to Germany in 2012, 2013 or 2014? Lots of inconsistencies here.
Spandrell has had some theories on what’s going on in Germany. Frankly, I think the activist’s article from the top of this page provides a much better and more obvious explanation. Quite simply, arguing about the economic, humanitarian or demographic merits of the migrants is pointless because that assumes there is some reasonable entity in charge of Germany making reasoned decisions on what migrants to allow to enter Germany based on their relative merits weighed against each other in some kind of singular complex calculus. But that is wrong. There is nobody in charge of Germany, and the people making compartmentalized decisions about migration, multiculturalism and integration have absolutely no use for smart, intelligent, well-adjusted, economically productive and peaceful migrants.
The people working in public schools and universities, social agencies, left-wing political parties, federal ministries, humanitarian non-profits and the like actively want horrible migrants to arrive and stay in Germany. That the migrants are mostly male, unlikely to ever work a job, but very likely to commit a violent crime is not a negative for these people—it is an unambiguous positive, and they know it.
What could signal one’s belief in human rights, human equality, the power of government education and the true value of every human being more than importing 1 million of the people least likely to ever be re-educated or made valuable? And how else to gain power these days? With tens of thousands of at-risk jihadists in Germany every public school, university, social agency, left-wing party and non-profit is going to double in size, funding, and power. The more migrants, the more need for these people, and the more dysfunctional, the better—the more resources that will be necessary to sink and the more these people can skim off the top, and the more holiness they can proclaim and keep for themselves.
They might even get their face on the cover of TIME magazine. Sane solutions have been declared anti-democratic, racist, bigoted, xenophobic, hateful, anti-constitutional and evil a priori, so progressive solutions are the only ones allowed, even if they never work. In fact, the less they work the better—if they ever solved a problem, hundreds if not thousands of people would be out of an easy and high-status job.
The same logic is at play with the progressive white aid workers who get raped by violent and poor locals in Haiti and then come home and pen essays on how they still believe in human equality, aid work, education, and democracy. Of course they still do. It’s how they gain power. Getting raped and believing just proves that you are more of a true believer than any of those rubes who would give up the eternal ideals of human equality and democracy if the ideals led to some minor and unimportant cost like being raped. Until this point is widely grasped, there will be no end to the madness. They’re not doing it accidentally, or because they’re crazy, or because they’re uninformed. They are very well informed, and they understand the incentives, and they are applying all their intelligence, fervor and energy to the incentives—insane as they may be.
If it’s already been declared by those in power that social justice (human rights, equality, democracy, etc.) is the only and eternal good (and it has), then the only way to gain power is to demonstrate how much stuff you’re willing to give up in the name of social justice. You might see devout progressives giving up their daughters, or Intel giving up $300 million, or these Germans giving away their entire country, and you might think they’ve gone insane, and you might try to point out to them the utility of their daughters, money and countries. Unfortunately, the abstract utility of daughters, money and countries is only abstract compared to the very real and immediate utility of power-by-status-signalling, and the more stuff you give up the more power you get. Sane people might think there is a limit to the amount of stuff you can give up, but there really isn’t. Anything and everything can and will be sacrificed until somebody stops the signalling spiral.
Social justice, comrade, is without price.