Europe is in Trouble

So is the United States if it doesn’t get its border in order.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

In the utilitarian brutalism of the London Underground’s subterranean interchanges, I suddenly realized I was surrounded by women in headscarves—scores of them. I thought it was a coincidence. When I ascended the escalator and tapped my card to exit, I was still surrounded by women in headscarves—most with prams or carrying babies.

Symbolically, perhaps, the first indigenous Brit to speak to me on this trip was an addict asking for a lighter for his heroine pipe.

In the twenty-six years since I’d studied there, London had changed. I encountered the occasional indigenous Briton, but not so frequently as the others. I’d heard of such changes, but being there drove the point home. This visit was only a couple of weeks beyond ethnic clashes, which the British government had hoped to censor and suppress.

Happily, life in London seemed normal—for now.

It is one of the bitterest ironies that George Soros and his fabulously wealthy scion have adopted the term “open society” to adorn their organizations. The problem with chaos agents like Soros is that the programs and policies they support run counter to the very conditions that make a society possible.

Take, for example, the subject of mass migration. Can it be an accident that Western countries such as the US, Canada, France, and the UK simultaneously have relatively open borders? (Note: Updated from an earlier version.) Whether there is some collective post-colonial guilt or a coordinated effort to permit mass migration, it is happening. And it won’t soon stop.

And it could destroy Europe.

I’m speaking as an observer/citizen journalist who was a graduate student at University College London in 1998. I write from London decades later, and I can tell you that the city has been completely transformed.

I can hear the well-flogged accusations of “Racism!” as I type. But get race out of your mind for a moment.

Socio-Cultural Operating System

Consider your socio-cultural operating system (SCOS). Each person runs one. Some people are more principled and consistent than others in how they run their SCOS, but most people run one SCOS or the other. Sometimes SCOSes overlap when in transition. But it’s not always easy to straddle two SCOSes, and they almost always have to be adjacent. In other words, the further away two SCOSes are, the more likely it is there will be intolerance or conflict.

So as to avoid charges of racism, or some other -ism that references religion, let’s use the familiar color scheme to approximate the major SCOSes:

• Purple — Tribal-animist culture values security among members of sub-Dunbar units. (Clannish Nomads)

• Red — Domination-glory culture values conquest, vengeance, and self-indulgence. (Gang Raiders)

• Blue — Godliness-hierarchy culture values tradition, order, and knowing one’s place in society. (Righteous Controllers)

• Orange — Commercial-scientific culture values success through discovery, entrepreneurship, and strategy. (Liberal Strivers)

• Green — Eco-egalitarian culture values relativism, tight consensus, and equal material outcomes. (Social-justice Activists)

Pay close attention to these basic SCOSes, as we consider the situation on the ground in much of Europe.

Think of SCOSes as the way people operate and organize themselves. As with computer operating systems, it isn’t easy to develop *interoperability*—in this case, cultural commensurability—particularly when the value of cultural or religious toleration develops primarily in the Orange SCOS.

Remember, toleration must be reciprocal, meaning it must be a value more fundamental than any desire to disseminate one’s SCOS. And that raises questions around Popper’s paradox of toleration.

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SCOS Replacement Rates

Indigenous Britons (made up of people primarily of Orange-Green SCOSes—with a small remaining Blue minority—aren’t having babies. Migrants to Britain—primarily of people running Red and Blue SCOSes—are both arriving and having babies over the replacement rate. Britain’s demographic future is thus easy to predict: In 20 years, indigenous Britons will be a minority.

This has already happened in Britain’s largest city.

When it comes to past immigration trends, groups permitted to enter in the 1950s to the 1980s were able to assimilate in the UK. So, for example, the Indian diaspora of Britain has risen to the highest echelons of commercial and political society and have adopted primarily Orange and Green values. Not only did these immigrants come at a rate that allowed them to assimilate and not overwhelm the host’s collective SCOSes, such immigration was controlled and assimilation was a policy priority.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

The populations coming in from the Middle East and Pakistan carry strong Red, Blue and Red-Blue transitional SCOSes, which are stubbornly persistent in the face of Orange-Green assimilation pressures, which no longer seem to be a matter of UK policy.

Instead the UK government just surveilles and censors everyone.

The trouble is, advanced societies become advanced through the predomination of Orange SCOSes, muted somewhat today by the eco-egalitarian moralism of Green. Green is also primarily responsible for assymmetric toleration of people coming in with strong Red-Blue SCOSes. In other words, Greens’ pity those they view as intergenerational victims of colonialism, but fail to recognize that those with Red-Blue values only tolerate them right now because they’re still outnumbered.

In a decade or two, Red-Blues will have the numbers simply to infiltrate Britain’s tolerant and fragile democracy—far more easily than Mehmet II’s men breached the walls of Constantinople. Once Red-Blues have power, it’s not clear they will care much for Orange-Green institutions and will want to see to it that Red-Blue institutions get built. Islamoforming will happen locally at first, but scale nationally after a time.

Britian is in trouble, as are many other countries in Europe.

Asymmetrical Tolerance

Those who operate according to Green’s SCOS believe that their permissive and tolerant olive branch—backed by a collective pity party for third-worlders—will enchant all the Red-Blue newcomers who will form an intersectional alliance with them so they can bring about a more muscular socialism.

A fool’s outlook.

Red brings the values of corruption and conquest. Blue brings religious and moral certitude. Neither will make nice with Green. Indeed, the Red-Blue populations that have come to Britain already operate a parallel society, not as a peaceable community, but as as an invasive SCOS.

Yet Greens refer to any skepticism as “Far right.”

Notice here I don’t mention race at all. Culture is the issue. There is only passing reference to religion in my characterizations of Blue, but religious zeal is, of course, a vital element. When Red transitions to Blue, Red values can and will serve Blue values—a Bronze Age outlook. Mosques and madrasas already proliferate in tolerant Britain, forming Red-Blue networks. When infidel British children grow up to become the waning minority, does anyone honestly think that Red-Blue will magically transition to Orange-Green?

The question is whether and to what extent Britons, nay any Europeans—including the peaceable Sikhs, Hindus, Atheists, and Anglicans should tolerate the intolerant. Whatever you think about the YOBs or old folks currently being dismissed as “far right,” they sense something important about the power of culture and they are understandably afraid.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Popper’s Paradox and Membranics

As one who believes generally in the free movement of people, I do no longer take the autistic economist’s view of immigration policy. In other words, I no longer believe in open borders. I believe in porous borders. Porous borders allow for a functional membranics that takes into account Popper’s warnings and, in particular, the kinds of SCOSes that can enter a jurisdiction and take root. A jurisdiction is, after all, an unavoidable reflection of a people’s collective SCOS.

All this might sound harsh coming from someone who stands proudly at the pulpit of pluralism ready to lead us all in song. But Karl Popper was right in that toleration and pluralism are reciprocal arrangements. And the brute fact is, societies are too frequently a SCOS numbers game.

Returning to the invasive species metaphor, such is not to characterize other human beings in a disparaging manner. It is simply to acknowledge that there are strong, sometimes incommensurate forces at work when it comes to how people people live together and to what extent the prevailing socio-political institions reflect their SCOSes. The core proposition of pluralism is that any give member of that society share the fundamental value of toleration.

So, at the very least, the stewards of liberal society must guard their institutions or lose them. That means some measure of exclusion. Orange-Greens must restrict the number of people who do not share their SCOS.

But the Greens think the antidote to history’s colonialism is reverse colonialism. And like the socialist intellectuals and activists that came before them, they labor under the mistaken notion that socialism—real socialism—will soothe and shape the souls of all colors.

Surah 2:191: "And kill them (non-Muslims) wherever you find them … kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers (non-Muslims)."

Purple Prose

As I write this, concerns about Haitian immigrants in the US eating pond poultry and housepets has reached epidemic proportions.

But we should not be surprised.

Biden’s immigration Czar, Kamala Harris, permitted 100,000 Haitian migrants (Purple) to settle in various clusters around the US. It’s one thing if it’s a trickle. It’s quite another when its a flood. Springfield, a small Ohio town, is struggling with both the economic and cultural distance between the Haitians and the townspeople who are struggling with the vast gulf between their Orange-Blue SCOSes and the Haitians deep Purple SCOS. They are poor, uneducated, eat exotic animals, and practice voodoo—all of which is perfectly understandable in the environment from which they came. But they are being transplanted into a very different environment through bureaucratic social engineering. And whether you think the Haitians are “eating the dogs… eating the cats,” SCOSes are clashing.

It will take a generation or two to integrate this population. And the denizens of small-town Ohio will have to learn how to be round holes for Harris’s population of square pegs. (See also “Luxury Beliefs.”) Of course, the foolish Green elites are screaming “racist!” while ordinary people attempt to keep their community intact.

And so it goes.

No one knows who and how many of what SCOS have entered the United States since the border czar opened the flood gates so that the DNC could keep Congressional seats. Illegal migrants are just warm bodies for the census takers. They’re here at the behest of the DNC so that Left-dominated states can keep power despite mass outmigrations by native-born Americans who have had enough of shitty leftwing policies.

From those left behind in states like Illinois, California, and New York, you’ll notice outcries. And they are losing native-born wealthy and middle-class citizens to other states as third-worlders come in droves to occupy their hotels, community centers, and welfare queues. For the most cynical of reasons, the Biden-Harris administration has simply replaced those who have fled. With whom? God only knows.

But as the Leftwing states hollow out due to defections, the great replacement ain’t so great for those left behind.

Cloward-Piven Strategy

In conjunction with the let-‘em-come-come-what-may strategy of census padding, the American Left is also perfectly willing to use the Cloward-Piven strategy (named after the socialist professors who devised it). The basic idea had been that if you can overwhelm the welfare system and bankrupt the government, the only reasonable alternative left, according to Cloward and Piven, would be to institute communism.

It’s no accident, then, that the federal government is not only giving illegal migrants free money and free flights to leftwing states, they are doing so at a time when federal debt is at 130+ percent of GDP, where GDP growth is almost entirely due to debt spending, and the destruction of the dollar is almost certain.

So, you see, it ain’t just Europe that’s in trouble. It’s America too.

The West is at a crossroads.

A Note on Peace and Pluralism

Some will argue, quite credibly, that some immigrants to Europe from Red-Blue parts of the world are quite moderate and will indeed adopt the liberal toleration of their hosts—notwithstanding a colonial past and numbers that make the continuing flood of new migrants comfortable in a failure to adapt and assimilate. We should all pay for peace and pluralism. The truth is, no one knows just how deep the Red-Blue SCOS runs. But unless stewards of socio-cultural membranes become more selective and conscientious. Europe and America will find out whether our prayers for peace and pluralism will be answered, or if some angry Abrahamic God will have his way with what is left of the West.