Envy Is a Civilization Killer

Sorry, Pocahontas

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[AUDIO] Envy Is a Civilization Killer

Thomas Carlyle notes in his History of the French Revolution that the famous class traitor Philippe Egalité, the Jacobin duc d’Orleans, had every deadly sin written upon his face. That is, as every incident since the Revolution has made clear, a good description of the left itself: a force of envy, cowardice, and treachery, the core ideology of which is the idea that the Seven Deadly Sins ought be exercised in society to the fullest extent possible, envy most of all.

Such became clearer than ever over the weekend, as Elon Musk figured out how to reuse flying skyscrapers that can reliably and relatively inexpensively take 100 people or tons of cargo to outer space, and the public’s interest in that now-publicly traded enterprise means that he is the world’s first trillionaire.

Naturally, Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren—who is about as far a departure from the dignified, pro-English civilization, and faithfully Christian Pocahontas of reality as could be imagined—is shaking her fist at the sky Elon’s rockets rule and demanding that the trillionaire’s wealth be confiscated from him. According to the Senator, “we need a wealth tax” because the “typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years” to make a trillion dollars.¹

Others of her ilk have made like points, shaking their envy-green jowls at Elon for the crime of rising like a tall poppy above the average Section 8 denizen. Left unsaid is whether the average American could achieve what Elon has achieved if given 11 million years to do so; methinks not, given that the combined efforts of nearly half of the present American biomass serve merely to drink deeply from the public teat, which is currently serving up jugs of Kool Aid Pineapple.

In any case, to even wonder if the sorts of people who “wash the Cheeto dust off they hands in the Reflecting Pool”, to use a line from a hilarious recent article by Lee (Greater), could achieve what Elon has achieved is to miss the point: a wealth tax is a direct assault on private property, and as such is an attack on the foundation of America. ² To our Founders, after all, “property was supremely important: property . . . made one free.”³

The idea that it could just be stripped because one had “too much” of it—according to some termagent the descendants of John Brown’s friends (Massachussetts Unitarians and their migrant pets) sent to the Senate—would not only be a wholly foreign concept to America’s Founding Gentlemen, but a damnable one worthy of revolution against those bent on implementing it. To such men, one’s life and liberty were only intact if one was a property owner; to attack property, then, was to attack life and liberty as well, and was thus deserving of an exceedingly violent response reflective of the existential nature of the attack.

Indeed, the idea of property rights as intertwined with civilization itself is core to the thought of Anglo-American civilization. As Russell Kirk put it in The Conservative Mind, “Private property and contract make possible the variety of personality, the wealth, the leisure, and the fertility of invention that sustain civilization.”

That, in turn, leads back to what Liz Warren is proposing, and why she is proposing it. She is envious of Elon, as are her constituents. As motivated by spite and envy as the Bioleninist left has always been, they desire to possess that which they could never build, and more specifically desire to steal from and destroy those who built that which they are incapable of even conceiving.

As could be expected, that idea is a civilization killer, as we have repeated instances of throughout history. Rhodesia and mid-20th-century Britain both present particularly compelling—if also heartwrending—examples of this happening.

The “economic left” and favela world are like sides of the same coin

Rhodesia, Envy, and Death

Take Rhodesia, for example. What happened to it?

To some extent, it became a Cold War battleground, and was ravaged for that reason. Much more importantly, however, it stood against the egalitarian tide. It and its unique system of propertied voting rejected the spirit of the day, standing for excellence rather than equality and achievement rather than mere existence.

To be a Rhodesian was to be a man amongst men, building a flourishing high civilization with a unique culture on the last terrestrial frontier. Such stood in sharp contrast to the sort of attitude then ascendant: the yeast-like spirit of the Global Favela, the desire that all ought be dragged down to the same dismal and fetid level so that the incapable would not be made to feel inferior in sight of the capable.

Their lives and their system reflected the old understanding of things, the one from before the Cultural Revolution: as David Cannadine notes of England before the change wrought by Churcill and Lloyd George in his The Victorious Century, “...in most seats the vote was tied to property, on the grounds that anyone who enjoyed the privilege of helping to select a member of parliament and indirectly chose a government should literally have a stake in the country in terms of some established material interest”.

Such seems reasonable. The Rhodesians certainly found it so. It was also utterly intolerable to every Western regime—other than those of Salazar’s Portugal, apartheid South Africa, and Israel under PM Begin, all of which were comfortable with the idea of human inequality—particularly as the 1960s and 70s wore on.

By the mid-1970s, both “conservatives” like Kissinger and Weather Underground/Black Liberation Army-type leftists, along with everyone in between, were agitating for Rhodesia’s destruction and trying to effect it by any means they could. The only real domestic holdouts were right-wing Americans like the John Birch Society (which recently republished Rhodesia Accuses, which you should read) and the British House of Lords, both of which were also comfortable with the general idea of inequality. Everyone else, including supposed conservatives like William F. Buckley,⁴ went along with it.

What stood in the way of the Rhodesians was the politics of envy, and the way in which those who are uncomfortable with the idea of inequality find themselves supporting it.

According to Mugabe, Nkomo, and like sorts, the Rhodesian government was illegitimate and unacceptable because whites 1) voted in disproportionately higher numbers per capita than blacks, and 2) tended to have more productive farmland than blacks. Thus, they argued, the vote should be freely granted to all, and white property should be expropriated. I discussed this in depth here:

Why Rhodesia Had to Declare Independence

Mugabe, Nkomo, and their ilk made such arguments because they enviously wanted to steal white-owned property and possess it for themselves, much as is currently happening in the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa with BEE and expropriation without compensation. Western liberals and their conservative enablers felt compelled to support such arguments because admitting that equality is a false god was much more uncomfortable; the CIA admitted as much in a since-declassified report.

Of course, the claims at the root of such complaints went unconsidered and unexamined. Ignored for the obvious reasons was the fact that democracy had already failed catastrophically everywhere it had been tried in Africa, particularly the Congo. Also ignored was that the land Rhodesia’s productive white farmers possessed generally wasn’t naturally more productive than that of the blacks; it just wasn’t mismanaged terribly and destroyed like black-owned land, as Rhodesian farmer Ron Morkel notes in Rhodesia: Beginning to End.⁵

No, none of that mattered to those doing the destroying. They were there because they were envious, or wanted to enable the envious in the name of human equality.

And so a flourishing civilization was utterly destroyed, all for nothing. What had been a flourishing and prosperous land of happy people, black and white alike, became a hellish backwater characterized by hyperinflation, famine, and the worst sorts of brutal tyranny. Such were the wages of envy as inflicted upon Rhodesia: death.

Britain’s Death by a Thousand Envious Cuts

The same was true in Britain.

Why did it never really recover from the tailspin it found itself in after World War II, and instead lose its empire, its economy, its culture, and its spirit?

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