While France Burns: A Study in Uncle Ted's Oversocialization

Black Pigeon Speaks (BPS )'s "You Get What You Voted For" looks at the recent French riots, which have seen widespread destruction carried out by a large contingent of mostly immigrant youths in urban areas.

The content is propaganda that works by pushing one's face in the dirt, hoping to generate a populist reaction. Popular politics is a failure since the French government lacks the will to do the needful and expel the migrants – citizens or not – from the republic. The undertone is that we, the true men of the West, whether English, French, or German, must harden ourselves if we ever want to reclaim the Western birthright.

Ostensibly, the riots are over budget cuts to educational programs in response to France's massive public debt and rising bond yields. The latter increases the debt load much faster: "How did you go bankrupt? Slowly at first, then very quickly at the end!" sums up how it goes for nations as well as individuals. Debt payments reach a breaking point, bringing higher taxes and austerity measures which further weaken an already beleaguered middle class. The spiraling intensifies.

Technology was supposed to bring ever-increasing prosperity and leisure, but at the dawn of the AI age, nations like France are threatening to cut education funding even as the middle class sinks under inflation, anemic wage growth, and declining benefits. Teachers are not being replaced, and school buildings are left to decay. How will the children keep up? How will they secure AI's benefits if schools shortchange them and leave them behind as countries like the U.S. and China accelerate their own chatbot-powered economies? This past weekend, one of Anthropic's co-founders told a conference in Bangkok that U.S. GDP could increase by 50% by 2030 as AI opens new doors in medicine, manufacturing, and so on.

Have Western leaders just quietly thrown in the towel on education because they believe the Singularity will make human cognition entirely non-essential?

St. Thomas More spent his last days writing letters from the Tower of London. Among his selected topics was the value of educating young to think well and deeply about the bigger questions of human life. This cannot be delegated to a chatbot. One has to earn insights into what makes life wholesome through deep immersion in liberal fields like language, philosophy, history, and mathematics. If your parents, your culture, and your society lose sight of this because industrial education inculcates conformity, efficiency, docility, and obedience, then the post-labor world looks frightening. Illiberal minds see the wide open spaces as ominous. The cramped office cubicle is homey, comfy, and safe. Who will take care of me? Who is taking care of you now? How's that working out for you?

In a Tucker Carlson segment I saw today, he went on and on about the loss of meaning and purpose if people were given free time, pulled out of the work/eat/sleep machine, and left to wander free-range post-AGI. An incredibly wealthy man of privilege, born into that good estate, he's become something of a latter-day folk hero to the peasants. Still, he can't help but voice his class's worry about the manufactured humans whose mindspaces were occupied by industrialism and who, unplugged from the matrix, feel helpless and overwhelmed by existential dread over their newfound freedom.

"I was working 60-70 hours a week doing gig work, living with my parents, eating ramen every day, and now, now, now... I'm so lost with this fucking UBI check they keep mailing me! Why, God, WHY???"

France's minority youth are apparently angry they aren't getting extra after-school calculus tutoring, but the real issue is that France is making austerity cuts where they hurt most. At least this is the exoteric doctrine communicated through French and Western media.

From the outside, the riots are not the response I would expect from young, frustrated scholars. The footage shows widespread mayhem and destruction, with some old stately buildings set on fire. Mobs of black youths wave flags of African nations. It looks like a conquest. If they were all waving the tricolor flag and singing republican hymns, it could be mistaken for a generic leftist protest.

Most Western identitarians have imbibed a narrative that says the West has been betrayed internally by the usual groups, that an alien elite is running things for the express purpose of abolishing Western civilization. In the short term, the goal is the demoralization of Western institutions, the traditional French people, and the tearing down of native customs, the eradication of whatever Christian elements remain, etc., so that the West continues its long decline into the final void, a victim of civilizational suicide. One-world visionaries believe you must tear down to rebuild something new, something better.

BPS is a propagandist who would benefit from a closer read of Uncle Ted's Industrial Society and Its Future. The blond-haired, blue-eyed white French shopkeeper who has had her business destroyed by the rioters is a sympathetic figure, and I assume that other rightists have pushed The Beringer Project's story about her being a liberal, tolerant woman who supports the mass migrations into her country and is now left to see firsthand the fruits of her convictions. As BPS observes, others were supposed to bear the burden of her virtue signaling, not her. The Internet makes it possible to make up anything from a video clip and post it as fact. Maybe the shopkeeper gave an interview.* Who knows? Certainly not the dissident rightists who hang out on social media.

In The Beringer Project's tweet shared in BPS's video, it mentions the shopkeeper was probably raped. So the story is: a liberal white French woman who voted for migration is now having to pay the price directly for her voting choices; she lost her business to vandalism and was probably gang-raped by a mob once there were no cameras around. The rhetoric is incendiary and designed to promote a hostility that will express itself in a mass right-wing populist movement.

A Ted-pilled take: France and the West more broadly are the victims of oversocialization. Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, etc. are not the droids you are looking for.

Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

 —§25

White identitarian writer Kevin MacDonald borrowed the concept of pathological altruism as an inherent weakness in modern European psychology, an adaptive evolutionary trait that once helped survival but that, given changes in the environment (the rise of technology), has become maladaptive.

MacDonald doesn't address how technology shapes modern Westerners' passivity to what amounts to an invasion by a hostile, alien force. He instead lays the blame for exploiting this weakness in European society at the feet of Jewry.

By contrast, Kaczynski devotes much of his manifesto to how industrialization pressures the modern psyche. A man or woman needs very little to secure an existence as a wagie, but it comes at a high cost: the loss of autonomy, the grind of self-censorship, and the incessant application of the system's version of the particular examen. This self-diagnostic – the hidden catechism – is taught in a thousand different ways and reinforced through overt and covert propaganda techniques (cf. Jacques Ellul's Propaganda).

I think Uncle Ted is closer to the truth, though, in the quotation.

The West embarked on a radical program of technical and technological development as populations grew and moved closer together. In an earlier post, I highlighted Roger Lane's observation that the industrial age brought greater socialization: people moved from the fields to factory jobs, where they found scheduled work, regular paychecks, and the advantages of community, undergoing a profound socio-psychological change for the better. At least at first.

Uncle Ted included Lane's passage in a footnote to his manifesto to highlight the seed of socialization, its causes and origins. Once ripened, the socialization project could not help but produce people wired from an early age to respect social convention and conformity in pursuit of social status and respectability, starting in kindergarten. The French natives who sympathize with the rioters aren't under the thumb of Jesuits working behind the scenes in hidden places; they're simply products of the West. They follow from a 500-year effort to expand and apply technique to every facet of human life.

The leftist is the final product of the last two hundred years of forced education, regular schedules, the refinement of techniques (mechanical, political, psychological), industrial production and consumption. But as the Unabomber notes, oversocialization affects everyone at least lightly. Crowded industrial cities gave rise to a kind of groupthink, with strict orthodoxies, beliefs, and habits that help maintain and expand the system. Cities are ground zero for mental viruses as well as physical ones.

More recently, Woke brought the words "inclusive" and "equity" into every discussion. There are no better words that typify the system's neatest trick ever played on the masses (cf. Technological Slavery, Vol. 1) than these. The system is universal in its laws, techniques, and assumptions about human nature; it cannot leave anyone on the margins. Hence, everyone must be included and have equity. Equity is another word for stakeholder.

The hope is always that inclusion, the system's overarching design on human life, will eventually win out, no matter how high the level of immigration. This is an autochthonous outlook of the West, not the working of alien ideology and certainly not the product of pathological altruism.

So the rightist who pines for the restoration of the Western order, or for a new revised one based on stuff white people like now, leaves unmentioned the role of technology in producing the theoretical white French liberal shopkeeper who votes for the left and endless mass immigration of less socialized humans. MacDonald would argue that Europeans built high-trust, open societies through a combination of genetics and historical influences.

Not all rightists want to see a rewind to an earlier version of the West; some understand that the Western malaise and passivity in the face of violent civilizational change have roots in the Enlightenment. However, they do not, at least openly, discuss the role technology plays in the West's self-destruction.

In Technological Slavery, Kaczynski discusses the exoteric form of the anti-technological revolution, the one led by public figures who appear respectable and principled. These people speak about ecology, alienation from nature, the suffering industrialism causes, and other themes pertinent to anti-industrialism. The hidden body of revolutionaries works in parallel, using more kinetic methods to destabilize the system while staying out of its direct spotlight. They are anti-industrialism's version of masked Antifa street thugs.

Are some right-wing propagandists part of this hidden revolutionary army? Probably not. They never draw attention to technology's damaging effects, or they may criticize some aspects while refusing to jettison the whole. Kaczynski rejected this kind of compromise, but later in life he admitted (like Ellul) that any revolutionary anti-technological movement would have to use it to advance its goals. Rightists who drift into ethnic or identitarian ideologies will continue growing the techno-state, unaware that industrialism is the very cause of European disintegration. The radicalized incel is not going to give up his gaming rig to save his society.

Ironically, Ellul remarks that the First Republic saw systemization begin in earnest. During this period, weights, measures, and the organization of cities and provinces along more scientific principles began, and the effort to refine them has continued to this day. The monism of technique emerged directly from the rationalist, scientific worldview of French philosophes. Today, their descendants watch helplessly as their cities burn and their monuments are defaced. Several years ago, it was ISIS-driven trucks running over small children in the south of France. Then it was a massacre in a French theater. Or maybe I have those backward; but it's so tiresome that it's hard to care. The French, and the West more broadly, keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

What has industrialism produced in the human mind? Answer: The passive, disengaged, atomized Frenchmen who are shocked that their comfortable, orderly society is helpless to withstand, or better, prevent, regular widespread violence and destruction.

Those from much more primitive conditions lack the same degree of oversocialization and do not follow a mental map defined by generations of conformism – delivered via propaganda. The passive worker and manipulated consumer have no connection to their own national past because these are parochial; they are not the system's universal guiding inspiration. The system will tolerate just about anything as long as it doesn't threaten it. The leftist will argue for increasing debt (which increases austerity) because, eventually, the government programs and industrial educational system will triumph and absorb the more primitive peoples flooding into Paris, Toulouse, and other European cities.

Those French who are shocked by the immigrant rioters are really unable to see that their own oversocialization is not universally shared.

* The media has only reported that the female shopkeeper was a clothing store owner who sympathized with the "peaceful" protestors but was upset that the violent faction had tainted their demands by destroying and looting. For her safety, no outlet has released her name yet. She was not raped, and her political affiliations are unknown.