Open Letter to Prince Charles

In response to his call for a Sustainability Revolution.

Dear Prince Charles

In your book, Harmony, you say the following:

“The Earth is under threat”. It cannot cope with all that we demand of it . . . If we want to hand on to our children and grandchildren a much more durable way of operating in the world, then we have to embark on what I can only describe as a ‘Sustainability Revolution’ - and with some urgency”.

I agree entirely.

Influenced - like you, I suspect - by books such as E F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Meadow’s The Limits to Growth, and Herbert Gruhl’s Ein Planet wird Gepündert (We are Plundering our Planet), the whole essence of which is contained in its title, I came to this same conclusion in the early 1970s - more than 40 years ago!

Clearly, you were also an early convert to the realisation that we couldn’t carry on as we were, but needed a radical change of values and behaviour, in respect to the economy and the grossly materialistic lifestyles and lifestyle aspirations it engendered and depended on. We were placing an increasingly unsustainable drain and strain on the finite natural resources and carrying capacity of our vulnerable and already (even back then) overpopulated planet, which the very survival of our civilisation clearly depended on us putting an end to. There HAD to be a Sustainability Revolution.

I was young and naively expected those in positions of power and influence to recognise this too and take appropriate action. I was greatly encouraged by many eminent individuals, including yourself, who clearly shared my perspective and concerns.

When I eventually realised that, despite all the fine words and good intentions, the radical change of course towards a sustainable economy and ways of life wasn’t happening, and wasn’t going to happen  (on the contrary, the socio-economic order of consumer capitalism responsible in the West for our suicidal direction of travel, was emphatically endorsed by our leaders and put into “turbo mode”), I set my mind to trying to understand the cause of such madness. How could such an intelligent race as our own, capable of putting men on the Moon, be so blind and stupid when it came to the existential need to develop a sustainable global economy and ways of life?

It took a long time, but eventually I discovered what I believe to be the answer. Again, despite being older and wiser, I naively expected those in positions of authority in academia, to recognise the importance of my discovery; but again - thus far, at least - this hasn’t happened. When I’ve tried to communicate my insights and ideas to academics and others, they have not listened, or, if they have, have dismissed them, usually with distain as a form of “social Darwinism” - which I’ll come back to.

The obvious explanation for my ideas being ignored or dismissed is, of course, that they are rubbish, that I am deluding myself about their importance. After all, who am I to judge? 

Then again, who is anyone to judge?  We look to academics as authorities in understanding the human condition and situation, but as my discovery (which is indeed based on a human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, perspective) reveals, it is a mistake to expect academics to have a realistic understanding of the society, state and economy they themselves, like everyone else, are utterly dependent on, and thus quite incapable of viewing objectively.

Undeterred by the lack of academic interest in my ideas, I’ve continued to develop them and explore their implications for understanding human nature and behaviour (individual, social, political and economic) which evolved, in the natural and very tribal environment as it existed for human beings long before the first states and civilisations emerged from it.

From what I know of your views, you look to “old wisdom” as your main source of inspiration in facing up to the existential challenge of achieving a Sustainability Revolution, while my inspiration is based on the relatively “new wisdom” generally associated with the name of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. I don’t reject the “old wisdom”, where it makes good sense, but see it as part of our historical heritage, which is a mixed bag of ideas and values, which need to be assessed very critically.

The Abrahamic idea of man being a sinner, i.e. a fallen angel, for having disobeyed divine (i.e. priestly/state) authority is a very bad idea, or at least, one well past its sell-by date. I see man very differently, as an aspiring ape. We have to rise above our primitive Darwinian nature, but first we must acknowledge and develop an understanding of it, rather than making it a taboo, which a previous generation of academics did in overreaction to the Nazis having hijacked and abused, for their own evil purposes, the half-baked ideas of social Darwinism

So, what does an evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, perspective tell us about ourselves and our situation, which academics, because of their self-interested blindness to the true nature of the state and the taboo they themselves put in place, are missing?

First of all, it tells us that the human brain must have evolved to want (subconsciously more than consciously) to maintain the environment on which it depends and has been “successful” in. Clearly, we ALL depend on the socio-economic status quo and don’t want it changing to our own personal disadvantage.

This means that everyone who is anyone in society, whose “success” within it has given them any degree of power or influence, is the least inclined to want radical change. Or if, like you, they recognise the vital need for radical change, they will, nevertheless, still be subconsciously very much inclined to envisage only the kind of changes which preserve their own privileged position within the changed socioeconomic order/environment.

This is a difficult obstacle to get around, rather like trying to jump over one’s own shadow. We have to trick our brain into recognising what it (subconsciously) doesn’t want to recognise, either ignoring or rationalising it. It is a difficult trick to pull off, not least, because we can never be sure that we have succeeded, are not just rationalising and deceiving ourselves at a deeper level. We have to remain sceptical and self-critical.

If I feel with some confidence that I have got closer than most to the truth, it is because mainstream (academic) understanding of the human condition and situation is so badly misconceived, the academic brain being no different from other human brains in respect to its inclination to rationalise the state and status quo to suit its own, personal, self-interests. 

Like their medieval predecessors and counterparts, academics are privileged clients and employees of their respective "patron state", with a massive personal self-interest (subconscious more than conscious) in rationalising and defending its role, self-image (as a "nation") and ideologies (social, political, economic and racial/formerly religious), on which the state bases its claims to moral and knowledgeable authority.

Secondly, a human-evolutionary perspective reveals how the state and the society associated with it conflate and confound very different aspects of the original tribal environment in which human nature evolved, with the so-called “nation state” now deceitfully posing as our tribe or nation (intra- and inter-tribal environment) itself, while at the same time facilitating society’s SELF-exploitation (as an extra-tribal environment, on a par with the natural environment) to the personal advantage of its ruling elites and favoured (especially wealthy and academic/formerly priestly) clients, at the expense of society at large and its long-term survival.

This is why all past civilisations were bound to a cycle of boom and bust which eventually led to their demise, as happened to ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. 

Our own civilisation is bound to the same cycle. The present, unprecedented, boom phase, will soon be followed by an equally unprecedented and likely terminal bust phase. 

Our failure to face up to the challenge of a sustainability revolution will, of course, play a major role in our civilisation’s demise. But so long as we fail to recognise the true nature of the state and its primary role of facilitating society’s self-exploitation, there is no way we can rise to this challenge.

I’m not a doom-monger, any more than you are when you warn of the dire consequences of us failing to achieve sustainability, but a realist - and an optimist. 

If we continue on our present course, we are doomed. That’s just a fact that you and I have been aware of for a long time. It is probably too late now to avoid a degree of civilisational collapse in the decades ahead, which will be terrible enough, but we could still reduce its scale, overall damage to the biosphere and bio-diversity, and greatly increase our children’s and grandchildren’s chances of survival and recovery.

However, before we can embark on the Sustainability Revolution in earnest, we have to develop a much better understanding of society and the state, along the lines I have indicated above.

As heir to the British throne, you are in a uniquely influential position to promote such an understanding and to play a leading role in the revolution that would follow from it.

The question is, are you up to it?

I’m optimistic, but at the same time realistic in respect to just how big a challenge this would be for you.

All I can do is present my ideas and hope that they resonate with you.

Best regards

Roger Hicks

P.S. I know, you receive piles of letters every week and are very unlikely to actually read this one. For this reaon, I will publish it as an open letter on my blog, where others might also read it, and who knows, perhaps someone who knows you personally will recognise its relevance and bring it to your attention.

My BLOG.

P.P.S. A few years ago I watched live coverage of the Queen's Speech to both houses of Parliament, in which your mother read out the government’s plans for the coming legislative period.  

My overwhelming impression was of it being a ritual humiliation of the monarch, who is required to present the government’s plans as if they were her own, when everyone knows they are not.  

You will be expected to do the same in due course and, given public knowledge of your views on many issues, I shudder at the thought of you allowing yourself to be similarly humiliated, especially in view of you usually having more enlightened ideas than any British government is likely to have.

#Contrapot

Having recently created the hashtag #contrapot, I thought I’d better explain what I mean by it.

In overreaction to the evils of Nazism and the Holocaust (as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Jim Crow and Apartheid) the West’s ruling elites embraced an ideology of white racial self-denial and self-contempt, which is the exact but equally extreme and insane opposite of Nazi racial ideology (see links below).

The Nazis made a big, nasty and totally misconceived issue of race, seeing profound racial differences where they did not exist, between the closely related peoples of Europe, including  European Jews.

In the aftermath of these horrors there was an understandable overreaction, especially by academics (and, for obvious reasons, even more especially by Jewish academics), who went to the opposite extreme of denying the importance, even the very existence, of race altogether.

Despite being inherent to human nature, prejudice and xenophobia were blamed for the Holocaust and demonised, which is like blaming and demonising male sexuality for rape.

This extreme overreaction should have been recognised for the madness it was and corrected long ago, but wasn’t, because quickly incorporated into the state's age-old state strategy of “divide and rule”, whereby society is divided into a “morally superior”, now supposedly unprejudiced, ”colour-blind” and xenophilic, elite, on the one hand, and the morally inferior, naturally (evolved human nature being what it is) prejudiced, not colour-blind, but xenophobically-inclined masses, on the other, who must submit to the authority of and domination by their supposed "moral superiors”.

This new, secular, ideology of divide and rule was of little use as a replacement for church ideology in the essentially mono-racially white societies which comprised the West prior to WW2, where there was little opportunity to accuse transgressors of prejudice, xenophobia or racism (Jim Crow America and Apartheid South Africa being notable exceptions, of course), so multi-racial and multi-cultural societies were created in their place, via mass immigration from relatively poor, non-European countries, which comprised people of different race (conveniently advertised by their darker skin colour) and culture, which also served state and capital as a welcome source of cheap and complaint foreign labour.

Anyone objecting to immigration or the changing ethnic composition of their neighbourhood or society was dismissed as a bigot, nativist, xenophobe or racist. Only relatively recently, with mass migration to the UK of white Europeans has it become possible to criticise immigration at all, without it automatically resulting in accusations of racism.

Post-racial multiculturalism now serves the state as an instrument of socio-political intimidation, rewards, punishments, manipulation and control, just as medieval church ideology once did.

It doesn’t seem credible that classically democratic states like Britain, France and the USA would inflict such madness on their own people, but they have, and are, with other western states following suit.

Because it is so incredible, it is very difficult to recognise. Added to which, it is also a very painful and frightening thing to recognise: that the state we trust and identify with as our nation should betray us in such a fashion. How can it be possible? The whole purpose of the “nation state” is to serve its people’s collective self-interests - surely?

I’m afraid not. The primary purpose of the state is very different from what we have been led to believe by academics (formerly churchmen), who are looked upon as authorities, but are privileged clients and employees of the state themselves, with a massive personal self-interest (sub-conscious more than conscious) in rationalising and defending its role, self-image (as a “nation”), and ideologies (social, political, economic and racial, formerly religious) on which the state bases its claim to moral and knowledgeable authority.

The state conflates and confounds very different aspects of the original tribal environment in which human nature evolved, long before the first states and civilisations emerged from it, with the modern "nation state" now deceitfully posing as our tribe or nation (intra- and inter-tribal environment) itself, while at the same time facilitating society’s SELF-exploitation (as an extra-tribal environment, on a par with the natural environment) to the personal advantage of its ruling elites and favoured (especially wealthy and academic/formerly priestly) clients, at the expense of society at large and its long-term survival. This binds all civilisations to a cycle of boom and bust, eventually resulting in their complete demise, as in the case ancient Greece and Rome. Western civilisation, thanks to its development of science and technology, has  boomed like none other before it, but its bust phase is fast approaching, if not already upon us. The way things look at the moment, it is very unlikely that it will survive this present century, especially since the situation is compounded by our finite, vulnerable and overpopulated planet's compromised ability to support us.

It is a prospect that very few - especially those with children and grandchildren - are prepared to countenance, preferring instead to allow themselves to be deceived by professional optimists (mainly academics and politicians) who deceive themselves first hand.

The state does serve us, of course, and we are all completely dependent on it, but as a shepherd serves his flock; which is not for the flock's sake (notwithstanding any genuine concern he may feel for a lost of injured lamb), but for his own and/or his employer's sake, for the meat and wool the flock provides and can be exchanged at market for money.

The state is like an abusive step-parent which did away with our natural, loving parents (our original tribes and nations) before we were born, and brought us up to believe that it was our natural, caring parent, i.e. nation, with all its children’s, i.e. citizens’, best interests at heart, when in fact, its real purpose is to facilitate our self-abuse and exploitation, which is now rapidly leading to our civilisation’s self-destruction.

This explains the otherwise inexplicable self-betrayal we are currently experiencing, but which very few are aware of. Most of what is happening is being driven by subconscious forces, in fact, by our own Darwinian nature, which has been perverted by the artificial environment to civilisation itself.

It is, admittedly, difficult to get one’s head around, but once you do, everything starts to make a lot more sense. And once we understand the madness, we can start to think rationally about how to put and end to it, hopefully before it puts an end to us.

It is important to recognise it as “self-betrayal”, because blaming “others” only makes our situation worse, preventing us from uniting and putting an end to the madness. Instead, we just fight amongst ourselves as we head towards the abyss. It is what happened to ancient Greece and Rome, and is currently also happening to us.

Post-racial multicultural ideology and the government policies it has inspired have led to many western cities, such as London, becoming a melting pot for all humanity. People of different race and culture are officially encouraged to mix, integrate and assimilate, which is pretty Orwellian, when you think about it, because it destroys the very diversity its adherents claim to love and want us all to celebrate.

Human racial and cultural diversity is a consequence of populations having been more or less isolated from each other in the past. Bring them together in a city like London and what you create is a melting pot in which this diversity will gradually dissolve and disappear. In overreaction to the Nazi’s insane notion of a "pure" Germanic master race, we have gone to the opposite extreme of trying to create a “mixed-race master race”. Those seeking to maintain their racial identity by opposing the melting pot (especially if they belong to the non-Jewish white majority) are demonised as racists or white supremacists (a blind eye is turned to ethnic minorities, which, naturally enough, are often just as keen to retain their racial/ethnic identity as white people).

Post-racial multiculturalism might also be called “one-human-racism”, or the “ideology of the Pot”, and those who support it, “people of the Pot” (“miscegenate man”, as opposed to “ethnic man”). Britain has a “Pot Parliament”, committed to white racial self-denial and self-contempt, which promotes racial mixing in the melting pot of the post-racial multicultural society it has engineered and imposed on British society by demonising anyone who opposes it as “racist”.

It is not just the British state, of course. The French and American states have done the same, as, to varying degrees, have all western “democracies”. The power-political method to this madness I have already explained.

My opposition to state ideology of the Pot I call “Contrapot”. Thus the hashtag.

Evolution wired our very tribal brains to see things in terms of “them and us”, and it is better to go with the grain of human nature rather than against it.

We each need to decide which side we are on: Pot or Contrapot? It has to be one or the other.

Which ever side you choose, or while you remain undecided, it is important not to demonise the other side. The revolution I am hoping for cannot be achieved by force, violence or intimidation, but only peacefully and with respect, for others and for the rule of law. The truism, "united we stand, divided we fall", is indeed true. The very survival of our civilisation depends on us uniting, which we cannot do if we are hating and fighting each other, or trying to impose our own views on others, even when encouraged to do so by the state.

Multi-ethnic society has been imposed on us by the state using lies, deceit, force, intimidation and rewards (as you would expect from an abusive step-parent), but we cannot free ourselves from it using the same methods by which it was imposed. In fact, we can’t free ourselves from it, unless we use force and inflict grave injustice on others, which I certainly do not want to do. We must learn to live with it now, but in such a way that it is genuinely enriching for all concerned. At the moment it is Orwellian in nature, imposed as it is by the state, deceitfully posing as our nation, via a system of rewards & intimidation.

Contrapot is defined by its non-violent and respectful opposition to the Pot, i.e. the oxymoronic absurdity of multi-ethnic nationhood, which is what the British and other western governments seek to impose on their countries. But opposition is not enough. It must offer an alternative, or at least point in a direction that will lead to an alternative. So much has to change in the radical reformation of society and the state that it will take some time, years, if not decades.

Challenging the authority of the state is a tricky thing to do, given its immense power and our dependency on it (both material and emotional, so long as we identify with it as our nation), but it has to be done, so that we can carry out the radical reforms to it that are necessary, if it is to serve our long-term survival and well-being, rather our self-exploitation and self-destruction, as it has done up until now.

There is a lot more to be said, some of which I say in the blogs I link to below, but this will have to do for now.

Civilisation, an evolutionary cul-de-sac?

The West’s Overreaction to Nazism and the Holocaust

The Method to the Madness of Post-Racial Multicultural Society and Ideology

The Paradox of Race Does and Doesn’t Matter

Political Implications of Evolutionary Psychology

This is the first draft of the first part of the party manifesto of #Contrapot-UK (please, scroll down to 2nd draft):

https://twitter.com/rogerahicks/status/1074238587896508416

The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’

This is the title of an editorial (LINK) in today's NYTimes, which I submitted a comment on. It wasn't approved, so here it is on my own blog:   

We all understand and accept that our own lives and the lives of family and friends mean more to us than the lives of strangers.  

However, all strangers are not equal. There are strangers whom we relate to and identify with far more readily than with others, and one of the main factors influencing this is RACE.  

Race is not the "social construct" that the state and state ideology would have us believe it is (except when you try dividing closely related peoples from the same subcontinent into different races, as the Nazis insanely did), but real and important. Not in the way that racial supremacists believe it is, but because central to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group identity.  

It is the STATE which is the real "social, i.e. economic and power-political, construct", which deceitfully poses as our NATION, in order to legitimise itself, its ruling elites and the immense power they wield and abuse, to their own personal advantage and that of favoured (especially wealthy) clients.  

This is what not just America needs to recognise and develop an understanding of, so that instead of trying to bend human nature to suit the state and its purposes, we can learn to adapt the state, its institutions and moral code to better suit human nature and needs.  

This is how to go about resolving America's racial problems, rather than with accusations of "racism".  

I elaborate in this BLOG.

Method to Madness of Post-Racial Multiculturalism

Post-racial multicultural society and ideology serve the state’s age-old strategy of “divide and rule”, dividing society into a morally superior, now supposedly "colour-blind", elite and the morally inferior, naturally (human nature being what it is) less colour-blind, masses, who must submit to the authority of and domination by their "moral superiors".

No one is really "colour-blind", of course, but can only feign it, humans being the inherently and intensely tribal animal that we are.

Why has it taken me so long to recognise this simple truth? Why have academics still not recognised it?

Because POWER (of the state) forbids it, and because academics invented post-racial multiculturalism, persuading their “patron states” to embrace it, as an instrument of socio-political intimidation, rewards, punishments, manipulation and control, effectively, a modern, secular replacement for the power-political role of medieval church ideology.

See previous BLOG in which I elaborate further.

Why I'm so Critical of Post-Racial Multiculturalism

Post-racial multiculturalism is the exact but equally extreme and insane opposite of Nazi racial ideology, which it began as an understandable overreaction to (as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Jim Crow and Apartheid), before being consolidated by academics into an instrument of socio-political intimidation, rewards, punishments, manipulation and control, a modern, secular replacement for the power-political role of medieval church ideology.

Original sin" (disobedience of divine, i.e. priestly/state authority) has been replaced by "racial prejudice" (the natural human inclination - like original sin - to identity with members of one's own tribe, race or ethnic group, which was mistakingly made responsible for the Holocaust and equated with the evils of Nazi racism), which only submission to priestly/academic/political/state ideology and authority can save us from eternal damnation for, not as heathens and heretics, as in the past, but as "bigots" and "racists".

In the land of ideological colour-blindness the colour-blind (i.e. those who feign it, since no one really is) are Kings, i.e. have access to positions in politics, the civil service, the judiciary, the media, academia, etc., while those who fail to comply with state ideology do not.

What is "Celebrating DIVERSITY" other than Orwellian newspeak for white people everywhere to celebrate our own ethnic displacement (white flight), replacement (we have already been reduced to an ethnic minority in large swathes of our major cities) and ultimate demise . . ??

This explains why the entire western world - led, as usual, by America - has succumbed to the madness of mass poor-world immigration and an ideology of white racial self-denial and self-contempt, which facilitates it, denying, demonising and suppressing as "racist" the natural ethnic foundations of national identity and genuine (as opposed to pseudo/state) nationhood. There is no need for conspiracy theories involving particular groups of people.

It also explains why our democratically elected politicians have imposed this madness on us: because they have no choice; if they want to pursue a career in politics, they have to comply with state ideology, which academics (who teach them at university and advise them in office) are largely responsible for; although it is no good “blaming” them either, because as individuals they are also beholden to this same ideology. Attacking them for it will just get their backs up, causing them to cling all the more tenaciously to their current ideologies and misconceptions, just as early 17th century academics, i.e. clergy, did when their understanding - and with it, their authority - was challenged by the likes of Galileo.

Like their medieval predecessors and counterparts, modern academics are themselves privileged clients and employees of our "patron state", with a massive personal self-interest (subconscious more than conscious) in rationalising and defending its role, self-image (as our "nation") and ideologies (social, political, economic and racial, formerly religious), on which the state bases its claim to moral and knowledgeable authority.

Political Implications of Evolutionary Psychology

The West's Overreaction to Nazism

The Paradox of Race Does and Doesn't Matter.

Civilisation: An Evolutionary Cul-De-Sac?

An Exchange of Views with Sunder Katwala

This is an exchange if views between Sunder Katwala (Director of British Future) and myself on the Telegraph website below the line of an article he authored (LINK to article).

I think it was a very valuable exchange, in which we both expressed our very different views on the issue of multi-racial and multicultural Britain. I'm republishing our exchange here in the hope that we can continue our discussion and eventually come to a mutual understand.

• 

  rogerhicks

  1 day ago

  Sunder, Your name alone tells me that we belong to different nations, as does just  a glimpse of your face.

  That does't mean to say we can't be friends or at least get along. Certainly we should respect each other as individuals. But please, don't try embracing me as belonging to the same nation, because we don't. That is just the power-politicing of the British state - the same one that took us into the First World War - and its political elite, who want to impose the oxymoronic absurdity of "multi-ethnic nationhood" on us.

  I don't blame third world immigrants, or their descendants, for wanting to enjoy the benefits of British, or any other western state's citizenship, but I feel a far stronger bond with other native Europeans (and European Americans and Australians) than I do with non-European immigrants like yourself - unless I get to know them personally, of course, which is a very different matter, as I elaborate on in the blog I have linked to below.

  On The Paradox of Race Does and Doesn't Matter.
  • 
    
• 

  Sunder Katwala

  1 day ago

  So, which nation do my children belong to? They have been born here, since 2006, to parents born here in the 1970s, with grandparents born in the 1940s and 1950s in England (1), India (1) and Ireland (2). 

  Do you make a distinction between them and Sebastian Coe, who also has an Indian grandparent? If so, why?
  • 
    
• 

  rogerhicks

  1 day ago

  Sunder, When your numbers were small, to embrace you as one of us was a reasonable and civilised thing to do, because it didn't undermine our identity as essentially a nation of closely related European peoples (you add a few drops of colour to a big pot of white paint, and for all intends and purposes it remains a pot of white paint), but there are now too many of you. We can't embrace you all without losing our own ethnic identity, which forms the natural basis of national identity and genuine nationhood.

  The state has long posed as our nation in order to legitimise itself and its ruling/political elite, but as recent developments conclusively prove, it is not a nation at all. Not a "nation state", as it claims, but a "patron state", which plays us, its clients, off one against the other.

  Like you, I have a lot of sympathy for the fundamental ideas of socialism, which, like nationalism, is deeply rooted in man's inherently social and tribal nature. Only the state is no substitute for our tribe, or nation, as it deceitfully claims to be.

  I would be interested in hearing your response to the blog I linked to on The Paradox of Race Does and Doesn't Matter, and also to this blog on The Perverted Darwinian Nature of of the State and civilisation itself.
  
  
• 

  Sunder Katwala

  1 day ago

  Sorry, you failed to answer the question. Are you including or excluding my children? Are you excluding Sebastian Coe too. Is it names that matter? Or glimpses of faces? (They aren't that visibly ethnically different, but maybe its the surname that counts).

  More seriously, your argument fails to provide any future for this country. It is a multi-ethnic country now, which remains majority white and white British, and that can not be reversed, certainly not in any peaceful or democratic way.

  My Dad was born a British subject in India. Like those who came over on the Windrush from the West Indies, a lot of effort went into telling them they were British. They believed what they were told, and were then told it hadn't been intended or (as you say), that the offer was made but it was rescinded. I am confident of my place in this country, and want everybody else to be too.

  But I don't see the case for such a level of pessimism that the British or the English have lost their national identity. I see the Jubilee street parties. I see the plans to commemorate our history in 2014. I see the power of the English language and its literature - from Chaucer and Shakespeare, yet it power also to absorb immigrant influences from Beowulf to Eliot, Shaw to Stoppard and Rushdie, without ceasing to be a single tradition. 

  Michael Gove put this case very well a few years ago

  "I happen to think that request or demand gets its wrong, and that there is a better metaphor. A metaphor that somebody who was themselves a migrant to this country came up with. That was the metaphor that TS Eliot used when he was describing the great tradition of English literature. Eliot described the presence of each new author in the tradition as subtly altering how we saw that tradition.

  What Dickens, or Hardy, or Yeats or indeed Eliot himself contributed to English literature changed how we see all of English literature. And so when we think of Britishness, it is impossible to think of it now without the contributions of each successive wave of new citizens.

  Not just in the sense as Robin Cook famously pointed out that chicken tikka massala is now Britain's favourite dish. Some of those who best summed up how Britons think were not John Bull figures themselves. There is no better author who better understands the English tradition of liberty than Isiah Berlin. There is no better student of British history than Lewis Napier. There is no better exponent of the British tradition of pragmatism and empiricism than Karl Popper

  All of these figures sum up what it is to be British, what it is to have a British sensibility. They are all people who took their place in an existing tradition and subtly altered it by their presence. And that particular British tradition, as Liam argued, has been uniquely open to the world".
  
  
• 

  rogerhicks

  23 hours ago

  Sunder, I can't really answer your question because I don't see Britain as a nation anymore. To me it's just a nasty, mercenary state (the same one that used to allow its children to be exploited in its mines and factories) posing as a nation, in order to facilitate society's self-exploitation to the advantage of its ruling elite and their favoured clients (to which you, of course, and indeed, myself, belong).

  I don't relate to your sense of Britishness anymore than I image a Native American relates to Barak Obama's or George Bush's sense of American identity, or an Aboriginal Australian to Kevin Rudd's sense of Australian identity.

  I'm a Native Briton and European whose sense of national identity is inseparable from his ethnic identity and origins, which stretch back through more than 2500 years of recorded history and on into prehistory. You are welcome to your own, globalised British identity if that is what you want, but please, don't include me. It is not where I "be-long".

  [Britain]  is a multi-ethnic country now, which remains majority white

  But for how long? We have already been reduced to an ethnic minority in our capital city, and are on course to soon become so in the country at large.
  

  Although, I don't believe that Native Britons, and Europeans in general, are going to allow themselves to become an ethnic minority on their own continent without a fight, which means that we are heading towards civil war. It is a war that I hope we can avoid, but at the moment the prospects don't look good. It feels to me very much like 1913 all over again . . . 
  
  
• 

  Sunder Katwala

  22 hours ago

  Your problem isn't with my claim to my English and British identity. It is two-fold, and primarily with the broad, mainstream white English acceptance of my claim to British identity.

  Firstly, you have no proposal to make which would be accepted, either by Britons today generally, or by more than a slim minority of the white English/white Britons, whose identity you claim to speak for. I am confident the vast majority of white Britons accept that I am British too. This is also the case for English identity.
  Secondly, beyond your fear of civil war (though I am glad you hope it doesn't happen), you have no proposal to make about what happens to the citizenship and identity of the current British. Are you applying a grandparent test? Does one need four grandparents? What different civil and political rights do your insiders and outsiders have. 

  So please tell us what your future programme is, and how it will come about. If you are saying the nation is already dead, so it is all futile, I think the felt persistence of national identity for most people counts against you.
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  rogerhicks

  19 hours ago

  Sunder, This is in response to your last post, which is lacking a reply button.

  First let us agree that WE have a problem (which I fear is leading towards civil war), rather than just you or I. Certainly neither of us, nor anyone else with an grain of reason and humanity, wants civil war. I assume that we respect each other and want to get on. 

  The problem is that you want to belong to my nation, while I don't FEEL that you do, because for me the natural basis of national identity is shared race and ethnicity. I'm not bothered about "racial purity", but about racial and ethnic "identity". As I've already said, if it were just you and few others, there would be no problem. But it isn't just you, but millions of others who have come here from a distant continents, because of the massive differences in wealth and opportunity - wealth and opportunities which my ancestors - not yours - created. The Japanese and some other Asian peoples have created their own prosperous societies, and don't come to Europe in their millions to take advantage of ours. And they very sensibly don't allow others to come and take advantage of theirs.

  Not that European civilisation and prosperity is sustainable as it is currently maintained, with or without the aggravating madness of mass third world immigration. We are light-years away from achieving a sustainable global economy, which is also leading to global conflict and catastrophe.

  The source of all our problems, I see in the perverted Darwinian nature of the state and civilisation itself. Until we recognise and develop an understanding of this, there is nothing we can do to avoid conflict and catastrophe, which is why I'm always going on about it.

  We need to recognise the essentially (perverted) Darwinian nature of our situation. Denying this, as we do, does't change the fact; it just makes it impossible to deal with consciously in as rational and humane a fashion as possible.
  
  
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  Sunder Katwala

  16 hours ago

  Dear Roger,

  I would like to take the challenge seriously. I believe it is more important to engage with those who are anxious, not confident, about our future. For me, an important way to engage is to ask "what shall *we* do now?" ... I am not sure 'it is simply too late to do anything' is a useful response.

  So here's what I would propose
  - We need clear  foundations of our common citizenship: I think we need everybody to speak English; obey the law; respect the freedom of speech of others. We need to encourage people to be committed to our society, and to making a positive contribution to it.
  -  For those who have that commitment to us, I want us all to be fully part of us. We don't have two-tiers of being British. I do think we want and need a Britishness which can include people across every colour and creed), with the space to respect the range of different English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and other routes to that shared Britishness. So we need a political community with shared rules, and I think common traditions and shared understandings of history matter too, though they are doubtless sometimes contested and contentious issue. But, in place of civil war, we could also favour finding room in a liberal society to have some plural disagreements about the attachments which matter. There might be many more traditional and modern associations (rural and urban, high church and secular. classical and popular culture, the monarchy and our modern sporting teams. Some contributions - the export of cricket and football, and the import from newcomers of fish and chips, tea and curry) that this encompasses.

   I think we can and should have a nation, and one that most people will respond to and value. Nor need it be dismissive of your more traditional understanding of who we are, except that it can't encompass your desire to exclude millions of British-born British citizens with a felt allegiance to Britain. But I don't want our inclusion to entail your dispossession, since I can't see how you insist that it must. Our presence is a result of your (and our) shared history. The English went out to the world; they did not stay at home in a fortified island. Everything that has followed is in part a consequence of that.

  This is a possible future. I am not sure you are offering us a future at all.
  

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  • 

    rogerhicks

    50 minutes ago
    
    

  
  
  

  I apologise about the delay in responding to your last post, Kunder, which again doesn't have a reply button.

  I think that this is a very valuable exchange of views we are having, which I hope will help us avoid the conflict between third world immigrants and native Europeans that is brewing, not just in Britain, but right across Europe, and in America too, where, although its founding race and still its ethnic majority, whites are not the native, i.e. indigenous, population, which creates a different situation than we have in Europe, where whites ARE the indigenous population.

  Clearly, you identify with the British state and accept its claim to representing a nation, which I don't. This is the fundamental issue which separates us. I hope to bring you - eventually -  around to my way of thinking and viewing our situation, which is very much outside of the political box, or boxes - in fact, outside the room in which the boxes are kept - in which we are used to thinking, being based on my own, human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, perspective.
  
  Initial attempts at applying Darwin's ideas to human society went horribly wrong (especially when the Nazis got hold of them) and were thus discredited and dismissed as "social Darwinism", which it is now considered a moral imperative to condemn. The mistake of social Darwinists was to use the theory to rationalise and justify prevailing values and the status quo with its social and racial inequalities. However, as I elaborate on the blog I linked to, a Darwinian approach is absolutely essential to developing anything like a realistic understanding our situation, which is the only way that we can take any kind of rational control of it.

  We delude ourselves into believing that we are in control of our situation at the moment - because that is what our brain evolved to make us believe - but nothing could be further from the truth.

  This is all I have time for at the moment, although there are a number of things you say in your post that I would like to respond to.

Civilisation: An evolutionary cul-de-sac?

On the perverted Darwinian nature of the state

I put this as a rhetorical question in order to offer an affirmative answer. If I'm right, and I'm pretty sure that I am, the implications could hardly be more profound or our recognition of them more urgent.

(This is the text of my 4th video blog, Part 1  and Part 2 on YouTube).

It is not an easy thing to recognise, given that it involves the environment in which we have been totally immersed since birth, are completely familiar with and dependent on, and the fact that our brains evolved to try and maintain the environment it depends on, especially when it has been particularly “successful” in it, as everyone who is anyone in society invariably has been. Understandably, the more successful someone is, the less inclined they are to question the political and socio-economic environment that facilitated it. Thus the difficulty in recognising the inherent flaws and non-sustainability of the artificial environment we call civilisation and the evolutionary cul-de-sac it represents.

Britain's Multi-Ethnic Olympic Team

Jim White praises the multi-ethnic composition of Britain’s Olympic team in today’s Telegraph (LINK), and this is my response:

What this article reflects is state ideology (not coincidentally, the exact but equally extreme opposite of Nazi racial ideology) which denies, demonises and suppresses as “racist ” the natural ethnic basis of national identity, which the liberal (and not so liberal) Left has succeeded in in imposing on all western democracies since the end of WW2., The NATION has been removed from what was supposed to be our “nation state “, leaving us with just a mercenary STATE, for which it is the “colour of money, rather than the “colour of someone’s skin ” (i.e. ethnicity) that counts. Just look at the role that money plays in sports (including the olympics) nowadays . . !

I no longer see Britain as my NATION, because it isn’t one, and thus won’t be cheering on its athletes. If I cheer at all, it will be for competitors of my own race and ethnic origins.

And NO, that doesn’t make me a “racist “, as state ideology would have us believe, but someone with a healthy sense of his own ethnic and national identity, who refuses to be intimidated by the all-powerful, but mercenary (to the point of treacherous) STATE.

Why do members, even of the conservative press, like Jim White here, go along with this madness and self-betrayal of one’s own nation? Because they’d lose their jobs (or not get them in the first place) if they didn’t, just as EnochPowell did.

Many are scared of facing up to the truth of what has happened, not because of personal cowardice, but for fear of the social and political consequences. I am more fearful of the consequences of us not facing up to it – or leaving it too late. Sooner or later it is going to be forced on us anyway. The truth is like that.
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Renegotiating the Social Contract

The following quote is taken from the blog of Norman Tebbit:

“What we are seeing is a significant failure of the state to observe its side of the social contract between the governors and the governed.”

Funny that you should mention the “social contract ”, Norman, since I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

When was this “social contract ” negotiated? And between whom? Personally, I don’t remember ever being consulted. Does anyone else on this blog?

In so far as there was an unwritten “social contract ”, it was based on the assumption that the STATE represented a NATION comprising the native peoples of these British isles. It certainly didn’t mention anything about it also including as many 3rd world immigrants as the STATE, under one pretext or another, chose to let in, with the consequence that within the next 50 short years Britain’s native peoples (referred to as “white British ” in the census) will have become an ethnic minority in their ancestral homeland.

I believe it high time that WE negotiated a NEW “social contract “, one which, among other things, I want to guarantee that Britain’s indigenous peoples remain the ethnic majority on these islands for the foreseeable future.

This new contract is going to take a while to draw up and agree upon, so I suggest the we start discussions and consultations about it immediately.

National Loyalty is Here to Stay

Says Ed West in “The Euro Delusion“.

True! Because Homo sapiens evolved as a deeply tribal animal, with the nation having superseded our original tribes.

Only, multi-ethnic Britain is NOT a nation, but just a mercenary STATE posing as a nation. “Multi-ethnic nationhood ” is an oxymoronic absurdity which the all-powerful “liberal-fascist” state, with the complicity of capital (as in Nazi fascism), is imposing on us.

Notwithstanding all attempts to deny, trivialise, ridicule, demonise and suppress it, we are very much dominated by our tribal nature, which state and capital manipulate and exploit, the former going so far as to actually pose as our tribe or nation, because, as Ed rightly says, “sovereignty relies on the legitimacy that only nations can provide.”

Like an abusive step-parent which did away with our natural, loving parents long before we had any memory or experience of them, the STATE usurped the NATION we never had the opportunity to become, and brought us up, over the centuries, to believe that it is our loving parent, i.e. nation, in order to facilitate society’s self-exploitation, to the advantage of power and wealth (original restricted to the nobility and clergy, who founded the state back in the Middle Ages), but now including “talent”, of course, and, paradoxically, because of their new role as clients (voters) and objects of largesse by politicians posing as “national leaders” and buying the “moral high ground” for themselves with taxpayers money, the “disadvantaged”,

In overreaction to the horrors of Nazism, as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Jim Crow and Apartheid, western states, understandably initially, but then opportunistically for power-political and economic advantage, embraced the exact but equally extreme opposite racial ideology of “One-Human-Racism”, or “colour-blindness”, which declared race to be a “social construct”, of no social or political relevance, especially in respect to national identity, except to evil “racists” like the Nazis.

It’s an ideology which gives spurious moral authority and immense political power to the “colour-blind”, or those who feign it, as anyone who wants a job in politics, the media or academia is obliged (indeed, forced) to do.

In reality, however, it’s not RACE which is a social construct (except when applied to closely related peoples such as Germans and Poles) but the STATE.

On the contrary, race and ethnic origins are of central importance to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group, i.e. genuine national, identity. Only, the STATE doesn’t want us to develop a genuine sense of national identity, but to continue identifying with its own, nasty, mercenary and deceiving self.