Pull the roots, salt the earth

I was in rural Dumfriesshire, up in Scotland, in the summer and I was surprised when, in the middle of nowhere, a man who was definitely from Mali—to judge by the hair and facial features—got on the bus with a vaguely criminal-looking local youth in a bucket hat. The fruits from the immigrant dispersal policy—of course, we say “migrant” now because nobody belongs anywhere, so there is no “im-” or no “in” to anything; and if we are professionals we are “digital nomads”—as with the delightful girl on an advert for the Kenya tourist board who has gone to “magical Kenya” to look at wildlife and touch-up pictures for the London office (perhaps).

I think Greer has gone for the “money-saving” line because to associate another person’s actions with sheer monetary greed is the go-to option for humans. “He’s just in it for the money.” Everyone says that—the left talks about “corporate greed, not human need” and the right talks about “grifters”. However, the odd point is that humans are not actually very motivated by money—despite what they say. Indeed, it’s even a disguise to say “I only care about making money”—a pre-emptive counter-signal to knock down the most common criticism made towards anyone. So naturally Greer goes for it here—although it doesn’t make much sense; when have government bureaucracies been motivated by the desire to save money? In fact, the right’s whole argument is that they never are.

So there is another motive behind the immigrant dispersement to the rural areas, but before we deal with that let us consider what really motivates man. It’s thymos; not pride exactly, more a kind of self-respect and a desire to be respected and recognised by others. I mean, think about it, would you rather be rich but disdained as a miser—the proverbial Scrooge McDuck—or would you rather be a war hero with a modest income, a limp, and a campaign medal who everyone universally admires and stops to pass the time of day with? There’s no contest—and it’s why men die for medals, a fact recognised in the modern era by Napoleon, even though medals have little monetary value (yes, you can sell them to collectors but nobody ever carried out an act of courage in war with the vague thought they would get a medal to sell to the collectors to top up their pension years later).

So it’s all about recognition—almost like those cloying corporate presentations that say “we want to recognise the valuable contribution you’ve made this year” and so on. That’s not to say people are not unmotivated by money; it’s just not what really actuates them—a bit like gangsters, “It’s about respecc, innit?”. Hegel identified this tendency with his master-slave dialectic: the slave struggles for recognition from the master, and the master only realises he is a master because he has the slave to struggle against; so the two depend on each other.

Similarly, Marxism is not really about the proletariat’s financial status—that’s a secondary consideration—it’s about their recognition as an autonomous agent; eventually, their destiny to become *the* autonomous master—the apprentice has become the master. This is why Marxism, in feminist and racial forms, continues to compel even though we live in an age of economic plenty—it’s a theory about how the “unrecognised” get recognition; it’s about their thymos.

So we all want a gold star sticker from teacher? Yes—and, eventually, we want to graduate school and meet the teacher outside and hear him say, “You don’t have to call me ‘Mr’ now you’re not at school, you can call me ‘Paul’.” This is what politics is about really; and the accusation that people are “in it for the money” is another way to say they don’t care about the *real game*—about medals, honour, and self-respect.

Hence purely economic arguments from conservatives—“Blacks in America have never had it so good, why must we continue the racial discussion?”—will never work because the real issue is about “when will you meet me outside school and let me use your first name?”—except on a societal scale. In a way, a lot of progressive politics is an attempt to compel the *master* to use the first name without graduation having taken place—i.e. when you’re still in the classroom—so as to derive counterfeit recognition.

So what’s the real deal with immigrant dispersal to rural areas? The rural hinterland, as Spengler observed, constitutes the roots for the country—it is where the myths originate, where the fresh blood for the cities originates; it is the country’s essence. In countries like Britain, long industrialised, the rural areas were sucked dry by the cities over a century ago—they have no fresh blood to give; hence fresh blood from abroad now flows back into them from the cosmopolitan cities where all the races and religions mix (the process has happened many times through history, as Spengler would say—it happens at the high civilisation stage, deep into decadence; it’s life with “the world-city”).

However, this process is not just an inevitable historical cycle; it’s also planned and orchestrated from the centre. The cosmopolitan bureaucracy hates and disdains the nation—“straight white Christian men”—and they are aware that the nation’s essence is contained in the rural areas. Hence the immigrant dispersal to rural areas is a deliberate policy to “pull the roots and salt the earth”—to totally destroy any connection between land, blood, spirit, and people.

It makes no economic sense—nothing government-initiated does; it’s just straightforward spiritual-racial war against the European peoples. There will even be—very soon, if not already—subsidies for ethnic minority farmers (agriculture, though a tiny economic activity, encapsulates the connection between blood and soil). Indeed, I have already seen the ads that promote “black farmers” and special segments on the BBC’s Countryfile about “Muslim children on the farm”. Kill the roots.