Our understanding of the universe, our most fundamental perception of it is based on axioms, postulates that while by their very nature cannot be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, are nevertheless believed to be true because no counterexample has ever been found and because our everyday experience overwhelmingly supports their truthfulness. A common axiom, one that undergirds all of mathematics and hence all of science is that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Now, if you draw a straight line on a latex glove and then stretch the glove over a ball, the straight line will appear curved. This is what we call a great circle, and it is still a straight line in a spherical coordinate system. Long haul commercial flights all follow great circle routs because they are indeed the shortest distance between the point of origin and the destination. This is a good example of an axiom, because it is at once “obvious” and fundamental to everything we have ever accomplished with modern math-based technology. Had this axiom somehow failed to be true, our planes would start dropping out of the sky, our information technology would crash, and our lives would never be the same in every possible way.
Like most things mathematical or logical, in order for a statement to merit axiom status, it must comply with BOTH the necessary and the sufficient conditions. The necessary condition in this case is rather self-evident; there can be no counterexample to the statement aspiring to become an axiom. Even a single case, no matter how irrelevant, or rare, or statistically unlikely that counters a proposed axiomatic statement will lead to its immediate disqualification. If we ever determine, for example, that in the weird universe of subatomic particles there is a distance between two points that is shorter than a straight line in their native coordinate system, the shortest distance axiom will automatically lose its status as an axiom. It may still be accepted as a reasonable approximation of the truth given certain assumptions, but it will never again be an axiom. Newton’s laws of motion lost their status as immutable truth (though they were never axioms) when Einstein proved that in systems that move with a higher than negligible fraction of the speed of light, these laws fail and fail spectacularly. Since nothing within the realm of human engineering exceeds the smallest fractions of the speed of light, Newton’s “laws” are fine for our everyday applications. But laws they are not. The sufficient condition for becoming an axiom is a corollary to the necessary one; not only can there never be even a single counterexample, there must be multiple positive examples, pieces of evidence that anecdotally show the axiom to hold true. Such was is the case for the shortest distance axiom; on its foundation we have built our entire superstructure of math and science, and it hasn’t failed us yet.
Is the existence of God an axiom? Well, there is nothing so far that would unequivocally fail the first test, the necessary condition, nothing that would positively negate God’s existence, but is there multitude of evidence that supports it? Many people, myself included, would say yes. But even I do not consider this to be enough to meet the burden of the sufficient condition. Our everyday lives do not, in a physical sense, depend of the existence of God in any way that can be scientifically determined. Thus it is a matter of belief, not of logic. Had I tried offering this opinion in medieval Europe, however, I would be burned at the stake as a heretic. Why? What made it so important for the organs of government in European countries for many centuries to elevate the existence of God to axiom status? After all, systematic persecution of non-believers, or believers in the wrong god, like all government endevors was expensive, replete with inefficiencies, and took scarce resources away from other, more immediately important tasks like common defense and food production. The answer is not hard to find; heresy was a crime not because it had anything to do with belief or non-belief in one deity or another. It was a crime, the worst possible crime punishable by the worst possible torture and death, because it undermined the legitimacy of the State.
The lay and church nobility that ran things back then was, just as in our own times, split between people who inherited wealth and power from enterprising and often criminal ancestors (Joseph Kennedy comes to mind as the progenitor of the Kennedy dynasty) and people who were sufficiently ruthless, enterprising, and ambitious to gain it for themselves. The difference between now and then lay only in the machinery of state comprising of elections, constitutions, party plenums and conventions, millions of pages of rules and regulations, all designed to confer legitimacy on our leaders today be they in China or in the US. Lacking such sophisticated apparatus, the powers that be in the premodern world simply claimed that they had the divine sanction to rule. They were anointed by God and hence their claim to power was unassailable. But what happens if I don’t believe in God, you may ask, or at least not the God that you claim to have been anointed by? Well in that case, my friend, you will be tortured until you sign a written confession to being a heretic, which as you know is a crime punishable by being burnt alive.
Image by Montanasuffragettes
2018 Women’s March in Missoula, Montana
The existence of God had become, in the middle ages, a kind of axiom by decree. Since torturing and burning vast numbers of people was not feasible, major resources were diverted towards conning the regular folks into believing via physical manifestations of the divine. If you spent your entire life in an earth hovel four feet high without a single window, imagine your first moment entering the Notre Dame cathedral: colored light streaming through the stained glass windows, ceilings soaring to two hundred feet or more, the angelic voices of the choir, the sound of the massive pipe organ; it must have seemed like pure magic. How could you doubt that God was real? The building of such cathedrals, just like the Greek, Roman, or Jewish temples, just like the pyramids, was by far the largest enterprise undertaken by the State, because the State needed these god-like technological and artistic wonders to maintain the myth of its divine sanction and its legitimacy. In other words, it needed all of that simply to stay in power.
In the West, aggressive industrialization combined with the post WWII Pax Americana brought about a level of prosperity to regular folks that was utterly unparalleled in human history. Having massive amounts of discretionary incomes, people became willing to pay more taxes in exchange for better infrastructure, safer food and water, improved medicine, and other services that are provided by all levels of government. This, in turn, created vast government bureaucracies, whose inefficiencies began to slow down the Western economic miracle. Combined with the fraying of global security as a result of overdependence on Middle Eastern oil in the 1970’s, this led to increased global instability and economic stress. Suddenly, folks in the West were not very happy anymore with the direction their elected governments were taking them. The elites’ grasp on power was, all of a sudden, threatened.
Image by Takver
Never ones to quietly relinquish power, the 20th century elites went back to the tried and true medieval playbook of forced axioms. Of course, the old divinely anointed shtick was not going to play anymore, since these same elites have been busy destroying organized religion in their own countries, so they needed something else. Who was it exactly that was threatening the elites’ grasp on power? Was it the marginalized racial minorities? The new immigrants? No. It was the white majority, people who had agency of their own, won by the hard work of their ancestors across many generations. The answer, then, was obvious. The elites needed fewer empowered white citizens and more, much more, minorities and other people, like new immigrants, whose only agency derived only from the elites themselves.
Since the West was over 90% white, reducing the number of white citizens and increasing the number of minorities required a two-prong approach. First, the whites needed to be dissuaded from reproducing. Second, they needed to be persuaded to allow massive immigration from non-white countries. In accomplishing both of these objectives the Western elites were spectacularly successful. Divorcing sex from reproduction via the removal of stigma from promiscuous behavior, encouraging homosexuality and “transgenderism”, and allowing unfettered access to virtually free birth control and abortion, they drove the white birth rate to half of what is needed for population maintenance, let alone growth.
But the piece de resistance was the “diversity is strength” axiom in support of mass immigration from impoverished countries. This proposition certainly cannot clear neither the necessary nor the sufficient conditions for becoming an axiom. There is not just one counterexample to it, but a true cornucopia of them, every single day. Diversity breeds crime, reduces social trust, drives down wages, weakens social cohesion and thus military preparedness, and much more. It is, demonstrably, the source of great weakness rather than strength. The anecdotal positive effects, better art and culinary scenes for example, are much too few to warrant meeting the sufficient condition, even if the necessary condition had been met.
Image by Grinnell College
The diversity “axiom” is an infinitely weaker one than the god “axiom”, and that is why it must be enforced much more stringently and by ever escalating levels of coercion. Indoctrination in school from kindergarten to PhD, group think at the workplace, unprecedented propaganda by all mass media outlets; all of that is just the beginning. Now come the book bans, the virtual burnings at the stake in the mold of James Damore and Alex Jones. In Western Europe, actual prison terms for wrongthink are now a fact of life. British police is encouraging people to report “hate noncrimes”, i.e. Bolshevik-style spying on and ratting out their neighbors not for what they did, but for what they said.
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And it’s going to get much, much worse. The diversity is our strength proposition is so clearly the opposite of the truth, so more clearly with every passing day, that the efforts that are put in place by our elites to maintain it must become exponentially more egregious. Just like in the worst totalitarian regimes known to mankind, like in Mussolini’s Italy and Ceausescu’s Romania, the rabid excesses of the Western governments and unelected bureaucracies are rapidly becoming such that the retribution by the oppressed masses must be equally awesome. As we have seen in numerous cases from Mussolini to Ceausescu, the more egregious the oppression, the more grotesque the oppressor, the more vehement the retribution that is meted to them by the oppressed when they finally fall (and they all do). This is something that Gorge Soros and his cabal of tech giants know full well. They know that they are long since past the point of no return and doubling down on oppression is the only path open to them. That’s why we haven’t seen the worst out of them yet. Not by a long shot.
