[expat1000]

Sultan Knish/Daniel Greenfield Ping List (notification of new articles). FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off.

[Texas Fossil]

A country and a people can be measured in its breath breadth and its depth.

[Texas Fossil]

Only by escaping the tombs of government, can a nation and a people come alive again.

Bing! We have a Winner. It is TIME to DownSize DC!

[ClearCase_guy]

Very good essay!

Depth of control governments actively or passively disrupt the codes of the old society, Modern systems in the West even deliberately export large numbers of exotic and foreign cultures and religions to make any of the old social or ethnic codes outdated and unworkable. These actions are meant to unglue the old horizontal peer-to-peer bonds of a society and recreate them in a vertical puppet-master-to-puppet system that controls behavior from the top down.

This is a wonderful explanation for the emphasis on Diversity and Multiculturalism. From my perspective, those tendencies are inherently weakening and I've never really understood why so many people think that are beneficial. Well, if the goal is to gain more Depth of Control, then cultural influences which unglue old bonds would be be doubleplus good.

[ClearCase_guy]

The Austro-Hungarian Empire is a good model of this trend, I think. They had a large territory, with many languages, relgions and ethnic identities. It held together reasonably well while control was broad but not deep. In the 1800's, in the post-Napoleonic era, control tightened which set off revolutions (notably 1848) which caused the empire to exert even more control and institute widespread use of secret police. It was nothing but a steady decline from that point, until the Balkan Crisis in 1914 exploded and the resulting war swept the empire away.

Broad control worked for them. Depth of control was too much for them to handle with such a large and diverse territory.

[PeterPrinciple]

I have encountered many here on FR who think the answer to every problem is govt. They are no different that liberals but will say “OUR LAWS ARE BETTER.”

[arthurus]

Modern systems in the West even deliberately export large numbers of exotic and foreign cultures and religions to make any of the old social or ethnic codes outdated and unworkable

Import, not export.

[arthurus]

The problem of Depth of power as he puts it is epitomized in the Moslem world except that there the society is forcibly homogenized- arabized- but the tribalism is endemic. When a society is altered to that extent (the Moslem world of North Africa was once made up of prosperous agricultural and urban ppopulations) it cannot change back. It is stuck.

A new freer system can emerge only by certain ill fitting individuals physically leaving that society to go to another place that is not already stifling with organization, to start a new system. The depopulated Americas served that function a few centuries ago. With the continuing and advance of bureaucratic totalitarianism North America will eventually no longer be able to feed itself and there will be famine and population reduction thereby. With the total socialization of industry and medicine there will no longer be much industry at all and no development of new drugs including antibiotics that will result in fierce epidemics that will depopulate the cities into which nearly all of the population will be jammed. America may well again serve to be the destination of those souls yearning to breathe free that it was in the 1500s to 180s.