A Dutch Uncle's Advice to Race Warriors

 

Wikipedia describes a Dutch Uncle as follows:

 

Dutch uncle is an informal term for a person who issues frank, harsh or severe comments and criticism to educate, encourage or admonish someone. Thus, a "Dutch uncle" is the reverse of what is normally thought of as avuncular or uncle-like.

 

In this essay I will give some Dutch Uncle advice to those who fancy themselves as fighting the good fight in the war over racism. I assume that your intentions are honorable, because if they are not, then my advice will be dismissed out of hand because it is irrelevant to your true intentions of eternal conflict.

 

Your premise is that you or your ancestors were the victims of past discrimination based on race; therefore, you are justified in admonishing your fellow citizens who are not minorities, perhaps even demanding reparations. Furthermore you are entitled to practice discrimination against them as compensation and force them to repent publicly for their own actions and for the actions of their ancestors. You demand these humbling admissions even if there is no evidence of individual discrimination. As a recipe for never-ending racial conflict, you could hardly have adopted better tactics.

 

First of all, there is no objective or valid method for determining the extent of past, nationwide discrimination other than a close examination of discriminatory laws. The so-called Jim Crow laws of the post Reconstruction era South certainly qualify, but it is safe to say that these were removed long ago. Today the only discriminatory laws punish those who are not considered to be minorities. I leave it to you to decide who these victims of "affirmative action" might be. Race warriors are left with nothing more than seeking insult and injury in the completely legal actions of your fellow citizens as they go about their daily lives. This is especially divisive when inculcated into the minds of children; i.e., telling them at an impressionable age that they cannot achieve their full potential in life because others hate them for the color of their skin.

 

Now here's my first Dutch Uncle advice: Forget about it. Yes, forget about it. Ignore it. Put it out of your mind. There is nothing--I repeat, nothing-- that you can do to change people's minds....OTHER THAN PRACTICING EXEMPLORY BEHAVIOR YOURSELF. Do not become bitter. Do not ask government to intervene in some way to placate your real or perceived insults. All that will happen is the opposite of what you truly desire. Telling someone that he is a racist, whether he knows it or not, will get you nowhere. In fact it will get you LESS than nowhere. It will harm your cause.

 

Here are some more Dutch Uncle rules for would-be race warriors:

 

1. Perfect yourself through continuous self-improvement and self-reflection. Every man contains the seeds of good and evil within himself, but he must fight his own devils alone. No one can make you a better person and no one can prevent you from becoming one.

 

2. Forget about "fighting for social justice, etc." as an occupation. Your occupation should be finding a way to integrate yourself into the market economy. You do this by building your personal capital base. Become someone others can rely upon, who has skills and knowledge that others admire. Yes, you get it now. Stay in school. Pay attention in school and do your best. Become self reliant and self dependant. Do not rely upon government handouts. These are traps to a lifetime of dependency and bitterness. This should be a strong principle. Work hard. Work smart. Live within your means and do not begrudge others who are more successful. This is the true path to good self-esteem. The most important component of your personal capital base is good character, honesty, reliability, integrity. These are the traits that are most desired in life and also the traits that are most lacking. One can acquire many skills and honors, but nothing is so valuable as one's own good name.

 

3. Turn the other cheek. Do not respond negatively to perceived slights. Be magnanimous; i.e., assume that others did not intend to slight you. Remember the adage--Those who seek trouble usually find it. Do not be that person. Hall of Fame baseball star Ernie Banks once was asked if he had ever suffered insults and discrimination due to his race. He said of course he had. When asked how he responded to these insults and how he remained so cheerful, Banks said, "I killed them with kindness." This is the path to true self-worth. Do not let others make you bitter. Pity them instead.

 

4. Build a strong, loving relationship with your family. Cultivate lasting friendships. Make friends by being a friend. No one can have too  many friends. Be helpful. But most of all, remember that charity begins at home. In other words, your family is your foundation to happiness. Cultivate a strong family network. Do not keep a mental scorecard of whether you have helped your friends or family members more than they have helped you. Just be the person upon whom others can rely, whom others consult in times of trouble, whom others look upon as a rock of kindness and wisdom.

 

None of this is headline grabbing. None of this will get your name and picture in the paper. Forget about seeking accolades from becoming a race warrior. The real, lasting accolades, and the only ones that are important, will come to you anyway.

Denying Reality Leads to Tyranny and Societal Failure

 

The common thread that connects failed societies, from Weimar Germany to the Soviet Union, is an almost pathological insistence on denying reality. Weimar Germany denied that masses of printed money would destroy civilized society. The Soviet Union insisted that Soviet Man would emerge spontaneously from the ashes of capitalist society. Weimar Germany spawned Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was completely destroyed, both physically and politically, by the World War II Allies. Mercifully, the Soviet Union simply collapsed after seventy years of consuming capital to achieve the  phantom of the classless society. Today both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are synonymous with tyranny and failure. Both nations murdered millions. Both nations no longer exist. True, Germany exists as does Russia, but I contend that both are  new nations. Neither is perfect, but neither claims a political heritage to the nation that preceded it.

 

Pathological policy errors flowed inexorably from a skewed view of reality in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Once this view of reality was deemed to be above criticism, its champions adopted increasingly tyrannical policies. Nazi Germany's Aryan Supremacy racial theories seemingly justified the murder of the handicapped, Gypsies, those of alternative sexual orientation, Jews, and Slavs. In the name of birthing a new Soviet Man, the Soviet Union murdered anyone who stood in the way of its program to confiscate all businesses, including small farms. When businesses and farms failed, there was no soul searching as to root causes that might lie in Marxism itself. No, the problem had to be saboteurs within society. Reality, you see, was what the Soviet Union's Politburo said it was. As the vanguard of the proletariat, the Politburo stood outside society and saw its flaws. Those who disagreed were blind to this insight and had to be eliminated.

 

Chasing the Phantoms of Alternative Reality

 

Today the West especially is adopting policies that flow from alternative realities that, frankly, do not exist. Here I list just a few:

 

1. Catastrophic global warming/climate change is caused by man and must be stopped. I prefer to qualify the term "global warming/climate change" by the adjective "catastrophic". Is the world warming? Who knows? Is the climate changing? Probably. But neither global warming nor climate change is "catastrophic". Yet it has become almost an article of faith that the earth is on the precipice of an environmental catastrophe, requiring ever more radical handicaps on our freedoms and the economy.

 

2. White privilege in the US is responsible for crimes against minorities and disparities in wealth. This critical race theory has spawned witch hunts for secret and shadowy white supremacist groups especially in the military, which has empowered investigators to find evidence of these groups and root them out. It will be imperative that these investigators actually uncover such groups, whether they exist or not. Critical race theory is the old Marxist class struggle theory in new clothes. The Marxist class struggle theory postulated that we all are born into a class and cannot escape its prejudices. But notice that the Marxist and now the Race theorists consider that they themselves are not susceptible to the prejudices in which all the rest of us are trapped. Very convenient, eh?

 

3. Covid-19 is an existential threat to human life on earth. Constitutionally guaranteed human rights may be violated with impunity. Who gets to decide all this? Why, elected officials and government bureaucrats, of course.

 

4. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) explains that government need not moderate its spending. Government can always manufacture more money in  order to fund new programs and pay its debts . More government spending can always prevent a drop in aggregate demand. Government debt is irrelevant, because "we owe it to ourselves". MMT gave government elected officials exactly what they always wanted--carte blanche to spend, spend, and spend some more and not worry about justifying or prioritizing spending. As Keynes actually said, pay people to dig holes in the ground and pay others to fill them back up. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Champions of the above denials of reality refuse to discuss whether their view of reality is accurate. All are articles of faith and cannot be questioned. In fact, to question them is considered to be an admission of ignorance, guilt, or perfidy. One wants to destroy Mother Earth, enslave minorities, kill innocent people, and prevent all in society from enjoying unlimited prosperity. It's the old straw man fallacy on steroids. Furthermore, resources will be expended to pursue these phantoms, and more resources will be expended to protect oneself from being caught in a witch hunt. Society will live in fear--fear of global warming, fear of being branded a racist, fear of contracting a dread disease. Unfortunately, what society does not fear is that our lifetime's savings will be wiped out by the hyperinflation made possible by MMT.

 

The Austrian View of Reality

 

Contrast these phantoms with Austrian economic theory, a central feature of which is that in order to prosper man must face the reality of human existence, primarily scarcity and uncertainty. People's preferences must be accepted at face value. Man acts. This is an irrefutable axiom in that to deny it is to confirm its validity. His action is rational in the sense that he believes that his action will improve his condition. He understands cause and effect. He performs one act at a time. He performs the most important act first; in other words, he ranks his actions in order of importance. Performing an act means that he must sacrifice the execution of others until later; in other words, acting means giving up some other preference, at least until some later time. Man's ordinal ranking of preferences means that the cost of an action is determined by what he eschews until later. No two  men have the identical ordinal ranking of preferences; plus, the preferences cannot be assigned a cardinal value in order to compare one man's preferences with another. Man discovers the concept of comparative advantage and adopts the division of labor in order to accomplish more. Through the market process, man adopts a universal medium of exchange (money) in order to break the tyranny of direct barter. Now man can indirectly exchange his specialized production for a universal  medium of exchange in order to obtain his real wants. Man invents government as a specialized service in order to protect his person and his property at a lower cost. He invents law in order to adjudicate inevitable disputes.

 

 All this is reality. Peaceful exchange requires social cooperation, which brings about peace and prosperity among men everywhere. As advice columnist Ann Landers used to say, Wake up and smell the coffee!