The First Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Establishment Right is correct when they speak of the importance of order.
Both forms of the right tend to take a more historical perspective than the left. As such, the right generally understands better than the left that the initial state of the human being is one of chaos. Early man had to contend not with rival kingdoms but with the predations of Nature, in particular the elements and wild animals.
This chaos was deadly. Nature seemed to will the death and dissolution of the bodies of early men. The first order, then, was imposed in a simple effort to survive.
At some point, an intelligent warrior among the early men would have figured out something profound: he was more likely to win battles if he had other men by his side. Through charm and threat, this intelligent early warrior would have marshalled other males in his tribe to form a war band, much like the ones seen today in places like the Amazon Basin or Papua New Guinea. The first war band whose leader commanded two dozen or so males would have quickly dominated the males of other tribes. The organisational structure of this war band would have spread, like a technology. Sooner or later various tribes would have united into a clan.
Thus began a process by which social order continued to increase – with temporary and localised setbacks – until it developed into the political world of today.
Perhaps the greatest imposition of order in human history was the establishment of law. The first full-scale lawgiving enterprise was that of Hammurabi of Babylonia, who gave us the Code of Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi was responsible for the order of Babylonian society – order sufficient to develop into a great empire.
Law and order are in many cases synonymous; one tends to follow the other. The Establishment Right represents the powers that imposed the initial order that created civilisation. In this sense it manifests as the warrior-king or the kshatriya class. In a modern context, the Establishment Right represents The Man, the Big Daddy who imposes order upon society.
A state of Nature is similar to a state of chaos in many respects – the most obvious being the absence of human civilisation. The Establishment Right exhorts us to accept order on the basis that, without it, there is nothing. And they’re right in the sense that, without order, humankind falls prey to the elements and to wild animals again.
Characteristic of the Establishment Right mindset is that order is to be imposed whether people like it or not. It’s too important to worry about whether others agree. The government has the right to run over people who resist the order. The Establishment Right values hierarchy, and therefore does not value consensus. This is why they also value law enforcement. The sort of person who has a “Back the Blue” bumper sticker is very likely a supporter of the Establishment Right.
This is why it’s usually members of the Establishment Right who have the least sympathy for people arrested for victimless crimes. Because order is its own good, people are obliged to obey unjust laws. This corresponds closely to the ‘Law and Order Morality’ that Lawrence Kohlberg considered to be the fourth stage in his six-stage model of moral development. This is also why it’s the Establishment Right who most strongly supports conscription.
This is also why the Establishment Right supports inheritance rights the hardest. The most orderly way to advance through the generations is for each man to inherit his father’s position. Any other sons can go into the military or the clergy. This was basically the feudal model of medieval Europe, a time that many in the Establishment Right look back upon fondly.
Related to all this, the Establishment Right likes to support any aspect of the status quo that maintains order, even if there are obvious flaws with that aspect, and even if that aspect causes immense harm to many. For example, the Establishment Right is the biggest supporter of Christianity in the West. They are also the strongest proponents of the divine right of kings.
The imperative to uphold order is why the armies of the world shoot deserters. If people are allowed to desert, order is lost, and when order is lost so is the battle. Part of the First Acceptance is accepting that the Establishment Right is correct when it says we need to shoot deserters. In fact, many unpleasant things have to be done to maintain social order.
Aristotle wrote in Politics that the purpose of politics was happiness, and that this was mostly achieved by justice. Justice, in turn, is mostly achieved by a well-ordered polis. This (like Aristotle in general) is an argument that the Establishment Right agrees with. Order is understood to be the basis of justice, and therefore of happiness. The alternative centrist is happy to accept that, without order, nothing political is possible.
The basis of the First Acceptance, then, is accepting that the imposition of order makes everything else in society possible. All the wealth and culture that exists is dependent entirely on the initial imposition of order by the first warrior-kings, and the maintenance of that order. Should that order ever be fully lost, so too would society be lost. Order is the great defensive line ensuring human survival against Nature.
To a major extent, order is imposed by fear. There’s a very strong correlation between suffering intense feelings of helplessness and trauma in childhood and growing up to become a control freak. By the same token, its often fear that creates the will to impose order. This is why populations that become afraid often react by putting the Establishment Right back in power.
The dark side of this fear-based will to impose order is, as mentioned above, control freakery. There is an element of the Establishment Right that will go into hysteria if anything changes at all, no matter how minor, believing this to be the first step on the slippery slope to chaos. This element has aspects of childishness and autism to it. The displeasure it causes is the basis of the First Rejection.
There are many historical examples of fear leading to too much order, causing unhappiness: the Inquisition, the War on Drugs, the Satanic Panic and burqas are just some. When this happens, it leads naturally to the First Rejection of Alternative Centrism.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the book that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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