Why Rejecting the Egalitarian Delusion Matters
It's about Hierarchy, Not Cruelty
Welcome back, and thank you for reading! I had the pleasure of receiving attention from Elon Musk regarding posts about Rhodesia and South Africa both my personal X account and The American Tribune X account over the weekend, and as such we have many new subscribers here today. Thank you all! As such, I thought it would be worth delving back into a theme I discuss periodically on here—egalitarianism, and why we should reject it. I think that will be useful for all our new readers, and is something that longtime subscribers have said they’d like me to explain a bit further. So, I’ll do so today! Enjoy, and as always, if you find this article valuable, it would be hugely helpful if you could like it by tapping the heart at the top of the page to like the article; that’s how the Substack algorithm knows to promote it. Thanks again!
Egalitarianism is the idea that everyone is not only equally valuable in the eyes of God, but also equally important and capable, and thus ought to be treated as such by society as a whole. Yet further, it is the belief that public policy ought reflect the understanding that all are equally capable, and where differences in human capability are reflected by policy or outcome, they should be wiped away.
This has played out across domains and nations, ravaging what used to be the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia while also destroying America’s cities and the British landed elite.
It is the belief that the Congolese can rule themselves as well as any European could, and so both the Belgians and the white mercenaries requested by the Congolese government must be chased out of the country in the name of anti-racism.
It is the belief that the Rhodesian system of propertied voting—one that only allowed those who had shown, through their ownership of property, that they could be stewards of their own lives and thus also could be trusted to steward the future of the country—was unfair because more whites qualified per capita than blacks. And so the system had to be done away with and replaced with mass democracy…even if that led to a repeat of the Congo, the explicit fear of the Rhodesians, and why they declared independence.
It is the belief that all are equal, and so it is unfair and illegal for a white neighborhood in Detroit to use restrictive covenants to keep itself white, whatever the massive cost in urban devastation that results from wiping it away.
It is the belief that none should rise above his fellows, and so the Anglo-Norman landed elite of Britain had to be wiped away by ruinous death and income taxes, nationalization, and hostile regulations so that all might be equal in ownership as they are equal in their lack of privileges.
Of course, such an idea is utter nonsense when viewed through the lens of its results. Whether Rhodesia’s system was “fair” or not, it delivered freedom and prosperity; the race communist system of theft and forced equality with which it was replaced delivered famine, tyranny, and hyperinflation. Detroit has turned into a bombed-out wreck thanks to forced equality, England is an anarchotyrannic backwater of its former self thanks to the disastrous 20th century, and the absence of the Belgians means the Congo is back to being the misery-filled hell that Dr. Livingstone discovered.1
In each case, the belief that all are equally capable is to blame, for it is manifestly untrue.
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
![[AUDIO] Why Battling the Egalitarian Delusion Matters](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ixi9!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F184445475%2F9454e1cc-fa3b-4fac-bc51-4680d8e55c3c%2Ftranscoded-1768318947.png)
The Congolese Example Explored
Take, for example, the Belgian Congo. Hochschild’s lies about King Leopold II’s rule notwithstanding, it went from being a hell ruled by cannibals when the Belgians arrived in the late 19th century to a relative paradise by the early 20th century.
The Belgians had brought to it modern mine, road, and rail infrastructure that made it prosperous and possible to safely traverse for the first time in its history. They provided not just maintenance of that complex machinery and infrastructure of modern civilization, but also schools, hospitals, and a functioning justice system. The country became so safe and pleasant that Europeans even visited it on vacation…quite a contrast from the murderous rule of cannibal chieftains and slavers from Zanzibar in an entirely undeveloped hell that had existed just a few decades prior!
Yet still the Belgians were chased out in the post-World War II era, with the madness of decolonization in the air, and the Congolese natives got their chance for self-rule. It was a disaster, and soon the tyranny emanating from Kinshasa and the refusal of the natives to even maintain the machinery left for them by the Belgians2 sent the formerly prosperous Congo crashing back to the harsh reality of the Stone Age. The lie that the natives could rule themselves proved the Congo’s downfall, as Professor Bruce Gilley notes in his The Case for Colonialism:
The Belgian Congo came after Léopold’s rule and the fifty-two years of this colony from 1908 to 1960 were the only period of good governance that this benighted region has ever known. This is not a technicality. Quite the opposite. The proposition that there was some feasible good governance model available to this region from indigenous sources is unsupported.
Indeed, this lesson is generally true from the post-colonial era. Despite being damned today as ruthless exploiters who took all they could and gave nothing back, the colonial powers actually invested a great deal in turning the Dark Continent into a functional continent, pouring blood, sweat, and vast amounts of capital into doing so.
That worked, but the handoff of power over the course of the second half of the 20th century meant it was all for naught, and the only legacies of success in Africa are those that, like South Africa, have enough former colonizers left to keep things somewhat functional. Even those too are falling to pieces as they continue to punish the last few elements of success who are left. As Professor Gilley notes:
If colonial subjection caused poor performance, then today’s Ethiopia would be the economic miracle of Africa. Instead, the only semi-successful African economy ever was South Africa, until its system of white minority rule was hastily “decolonized” in the early 1990s and the country went into a tailspin.
In fact, all over the post-colonial world, the time a nation spent under the supposed yoke of the European powers is strongly correlated with its present degree of wealth and development.3 The paternalistic hand of Europe is what guided those blighted lands—whether the Congo or Sarawak, Rhodesia or Burma—to the only real justice, good government, and prosperity they have ever known, and its withdrawal in the name of freedom and equality has been a disaster.
The old masters, at least, were highly competent and cared somewhat about those over whom they ruled,4 unlike the Idi Amin-style cannibal kleptocrats of today5, and tried to provide good governance in exchange for resources. But such a system of order and hierarchy was deemed unacceptable by liberal thought—particularly that in America6—and so it was all wiped away.
The Uncomfortable Need for Hierarchy
The simple fact that paternalism was beneficial across the colonial world is an uncomfortable one for many people, in part because of the racial angle. Even if we’d all prefer to live under even hardliners like PW Botha7 to cannibals like Idi Amin…or even mere incompetents like Brandon Johnson, it’s considered untoward to bring it up.
The thing is, it’s true of domestic policy in Western nations too.
Take, for example, the state of the white underclass in the Anglosphere. As Charles Murray chronicles in his painful-to-read Coming Apart, and British physician and cultural critic Dr. Theodore Dalrymple notes in both his The Mandarins and the Masses and Life at the Bottom, the state of that white underclass across our lands is not a good one.
Drug abuse has increased tremendously over the years, and fentanyl use alone results in annual carnage greater than that seen in the entirety of the Vietnam War. Bastardy rates are up and continuing to climb across all the races, with the problem being particularly severe amongst the underclass. The annual fiscal toll, particularly on the underclass, of just sports betting8 and credit card interest9, is in the staggering hundreds of billions of dollars.
Such are not the statistics of a healthy civilization, or a healthy citizenry. Something is amiss.
Noblesse Oblige and Our Ailing World
What is wrong is that there is no one to stand against the flood of licentiousness and predation and say “no”. Generally committed to noblesse oblige, the lords of the Old World often saw it as their duty to keep usury and liquor away from the common people on their estates.
If someone needed to go into debt to improve the farms, it’d be them, not the tenants. If alcohol was to be sold within the estate, it’d be an alehouse, not a shop handing out the gut-rotting, mind-killing gin of those days. Churches were maintained, and the men of note made a show of going to encourage others to do the same. The manor home, the church, the village shops, and, where possible, the farmers’ cottages would all be built to exacting standards of taste and beauty so as to uplift those who spent time around them. Those who ruled saw it as their duty to protect their people in what ways they could.
That’s not to say the old order was perfect. It often failed to reach the lofty ideal of true noblesse oblige. But many of them at least tried, whether great lords10 or financially strained gentry11, to do their duty and protect their tenants in what ways they could. That was particularly true of efforts to prevent both financial exploitation and moral degeneracy. While that standard of noblesse oblige might often have been breached, it was at least the standard, which is more than can be said of the present elite.
Of course, that too is uncomfortable. Few want to be the sort of person who has to say “no” to some form of vice, and those who do want to be in a blocking position are often of the annoying hall monitor type. But it needed to be done. Gin was a blight that nearly wrecked London, and it needed to be kept out of the countryside; Rhodesia limited native access to hard liquor for the same reason.12 Church attendance is good for society, as is moral behavior generally. Usury is a scourge, and must be treated as such.
Someone had to say “no,” and be in a position to do so out of love and concern for his people rather than as a petty tyrant of a bureaucrat. That was largely the domestic role of the Christian gentlemen who ruled before bureaucracy, and duty they upheld not just as politicians, but also as justices of the peace and as lords of the manor.
Reversing the Egalitarian Plague
That is the purpose a justly ordered hierarchy fills. Much of what remains of a real elite, one rooted in excellence and tradition, has retreated from its position out of the deluded and depressing belief “at least in theory, that they should not exist,” a decision that has left it “without the power needed to benefit society as they ought.”13
This mix of abdication of duty and social regulation that largely prevents the duty from ever being fulfilled, particularly when paired with the church’s unfortunate drift toward egalitarianism, has created a gaping chasm in the social fabric, as noted in Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites: A Theme Illuminating American Social History by Plinio Correa de Oliveira:
A serious problem arises if 1) the "best" are not found among the aristocracy,
2) no one among the common people is willing to assume the mission of propelling society toward perfection, and 3) the clergy itself relinquishes this mission. Which form of government can save this society or nation from ruin?There will never be a lack of people proposing political solutions. They will try to devise a government, supposedly composed of good men, to mechanically solve the problem from outside the ailing social body. When the whole social body is decadent, however, the problem is unsolvable and the situation desperate. The more one tries to remedy it, the more it gets entangled and precipitates its own ruin.
There is no “political solution” to problems that stem from a rotten civilizational soul—the fentanyl crisis, the shocking increase in out-of-wedlock birth rates, the damnable return of the Dark Continent to the Stone Age with all its horrors, the social degeneration we see all around us. Political fixes made through policy changes can help; Erik Prince bringing order to the Congo14 and Trump cracking down on fentanyl smuggling are both good steps.
But the root of the problem is a civilizational crisis that cannot be fixed through mere policy changes. To extirpate the social woes that currently ail us, from the Heart of Darkness to the American Heartland, we need to reject egalitarianism. We must return to the values and systems championed by men like Burke: chivalry,15 and an understanding that what we have must be stewarded, for it is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.16
What must exist, in short, is a state of noblesse oblige. What ails the struggling small towns that dot America, or the wretched and impoverished towns of England? Nearly no one exists who is willing to embrace being the sovereign, the one who decides the exception, and says “no” to the ills that ail us. All manner of society-wrecking vice and licentiousness are allowed in the name of “freedom” (which conflicts quite strongly with the old idea of ordered liberty), city-destroying and government-abetted anarchotyranny is accepted with a shrug, and the white man’s burden is left dying on the ground rather than being picked up and treated as the expansionist form of noblesse oblige it is.
Cecil Rhodes would not have acted in this way, nor George Washington, Coke of Norfolk17, Ian Smith, or the other titans of the world that used to exist. They would have, instead, done what they did: exercised what authority they could in what ways they could to improve life for those under their control, such as by ending sati in India. To fight tyranny and to lift up the lot of those who rely on them is the duty that comes with being at the top of the hierarchical pyramid; it is what naturally attends privilege. The great sin of our rotten elite is that it refuses to recognize that duty, and the egalitarian temperament foisted upon our souls by decades of propaganda make many among us retreat in horror from “duty”, noblesse oblige, and paternalism, whether at home or abroad.
Africa need not be a hellhole; it could and should be wisely and justly administered again, and doing so would be for the benefit of all involved…except the kleptocrats currently in charge. In fact, were the West to act as the West again, we’d probably get a repeat of what happened the first time:18
European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes-all relatively voluntary acts. Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and geographies concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives.
The same is true of our towns, our cities, our people. All need not be decaying before our eyes. We were great once, and can be again. Good governance is possible.
But to achieve it, we must reject the egalitarian rot. Results must be put before the ideology of liberalism, accomplishments and outcomes treated as more important than feelings and chafing at the bit of paternalism. As Thomas Carlyle notes in his History of Frederick the Great, Vol. I, it took the Normans drilling the English for them to become a great and world-spanning people19; it is the spirit of every-reaching excellence generated by that drilling that generated much that is good about our world, for the world-spanning colonial impulse came from it.
Doing that again is what rejecting egalitarianism will mean, and the tremendous results we saw in the glorious 18th and 19th centuries, the high tide of Occidental ambition and greatness that placed our civilization atop Olympus, are what will follow from doing so.
We need not roll like pigs in the muck and mire of the fetid Global Favela. We can be great, we can strive for greater things. But doing so means rejecting the doctrine of equality that leads to the Global Favela.
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How I Found Livingstone by Henry Morton Stanley is a must-read book
As Curtis Yarvin notes in An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives:
In the second half of the 20th century, the Third World passed from its old colonial masters, the British, French and Portuguese, who were certainly no angels but who were perhaps at least a little less brazen, to a new set of ruthless and cynical overlords, the Cold War powers, whose propaganda skills were matched only by the devastation that their trained thugs unleashed. Under the mendacious pretext of “liberation” and “independence,” most remnants of non-European governing traditions were destroyed. Major continents such as Africa were reduced to desolate slums ruled by corrupt, well-connected fat cats, much of whose loot went straight from Western taxpayers to Swiss banks.
Noted here, amongst many other places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Africa#20th_century_to_present_4
As Yarvin also notes in his An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives:
If you read travel narratives of what is now the Third World from before World War II (I’ve just been enjoying Erna Fergusson’s Guatemala, for example), you simply don’t see anything like the misery, squalor and barbarism that is everywhere today. (Fergusson describes Guatemala City as “clean.” I kid you not.) What you do see is social and political structures, whether native or colonial, that are clearly not American in origin, and that are unacceptable not only by modern American standards but even by 1930s American standards.
In 2025: https://www.legalsportsreport.com/sports-betting-states/revenue/
The Earls Fitzwilliam were great about this, as covered in one of my favorite books: Aristocratic Enterprise: The Fitzwilliam Industrial Undertakings, 1795-1857
I also wrote about this here:
Skidelsky, in his biography of the infamous Oswald Mosley, notes this about Mosley’s grandfather, a baronet of middling means:
Mosley’s adored and adoring grandfather was clearly a paternalist of the old school, who took his obligations and his rights very seriously. He was not without enterprise: the diversification from arable to livestock farming to counter the North American grain invasions of the 1880s saved the Rolleston economy for another generation, As a young man, he worked with his labourers in the field from dawn to dusk. He raised a prize-winning shorthorn herd, placed his pedigree bulls at the disposal of his tenants for a nominal fee, and remitted a portion of their rents in hard times.
He built cottages and a recreation hall for his workpeople, maintained a school for their children, an almshouse for the aged, a church for their spiritual health, and threw open his grounds to fêtes and fairs for their entertainment. His solicitude on one occasion took a positively Tolstoyan turn when he started baking a special wholemeal bread at the stone mill of Rolleston: ‘Standard Bread’ provided Northcliffe’s Daily Mail with one of its carliest journalistic stunts, and Rolleston was deluged for samples of the health-giving loaves.
That is covered in this book:
This is covered very well in Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites: A Theme Illuminating American Social History by Plinio Correa de Oliveira
As Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France:
“The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone!”
This connection between Burke and a proper view of ownership comes from one of my favorite books, The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914 by JV Beckett. He notes:
[T]he [land] market was subject to artificial constraints.
Landowning families had every incentive to preserve what they already possessed, and to try to purchase additional acres as a means of climbing the social ladder. Here the emphasis was on the family, since the benefits of ownership belonged to the individual only as a trust: in Edmund Burke's words, landownership was 'a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born'. J. A. Froude made the same point when he argued that land was sought after 'from an ambition to leave our names behind us, rooted into the soil to which the national life is attached'. To facilitate preservation the landowners sought legal safeguards: primogeniture, which ensured that in the event of an owner dying intestate the property would pass intact through a single male heir; and the strict family settlement, a legal means of holding the estate together while providing for younger children.
I need to write a full article on him, but he is one of the more fascinating of the Regency aristocrats, as he was a man as committed to noblesse oblige in country life as could be possible, and is famous to this day for it. Coke of Norfolk (1754-1842): A Biography is a reasonably good biography of him
From Bruce Gilley’s The Case for Colonialism
"Without the Normans, Thomas Carlyle demanded, what would it (England) have been? 'A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles capable of no grand combinations, lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity; not dreaming of heroic toil and silence and endurance such as leads to the high places of the Universe'."
I wrote about this here:
Discussed some in this paper: https://www.brepolsonline.net/content/books/10.1484/M.MMAGES-EB.4.000062#:~:text=superstructures%20of%20political%20belief%20that,still%20further%20fractures%20and%20contradictions.
Fantastic article.
You can just enforce hierarchies. You don't need consent.