A nation of merchants.

Recently, Vox Day ran a piece on Singapore, which I linked in my previous post.
 This is not about that, but rather, a comment that was posted in reply to that piece:

My former company had a policy of sponsoring people from Singapore to work for us for 18 months at our plant in the Bay Area. Subsidized by their government, because they wanted to attract biotech. They were some of the best workers.

What was mind boggling to me was: the women had Masters degrees in science. Yet they were very, very good administrators and dotters of I's and crossers of T's, but no interest in science itself or discovery of new things, testing new ideas. Here they were working at the pioneer of biotech, access to the cutting edge of science....and.....just wanted to make good money.

The other wacky thing was the married women, coming to America for 18 months. Without their husbands. With zero (and I mean absolutely zero) visits by either spouse during the entire 18 months. All of them. No interest in having children, and all they could talk about was networking and getting their next better (read higher paying) job.

I don't understand the absolutely mercenary mindset displayed by some cultures, to the exclusion of all other joys in life.

And from good old Didact:

Singaporeans will tolerate a great deal from their government- they made a pact with their government that as long as the State provided economic prosperity and a basic level of comfort to everyone, they would trust the People's Action Party with basically absolute power.

Why did the Singaporean people so willingly give up their dialects, trash their traditions, leave their kampongs, and do everything they were told and give up everything they asked, so long as they could have jobs and a subsidised HDB flat?

It's not as if they were happier in the HDB flats, not with my paternal grandmother and the rest of the older generation complaining about how things were and how happy they were growing tapioca and raising chickens.

And then the sullen realisation hits: we are a nation of merchants. Founded by merchants, for merchants, for the purpose of mercantilism. The Chinese? Merchants. Indians? Merchants. Europeans? Merchants? Maybe not literally so, but all the immigrants to Singapore were possessed of the merchant spirit, which the whole "abandon your roots to sink your fortune" shtick. Unlanded people willing to abandon everything in the world for the promise of work and money.

Given that psychological traits are at least partially heritable, why am I not surprised?

I remember my history teacher telling me about the '60s, about the push for independence and how a lot of Malayan-born Chinese and their parents rapidly embraced Malayan nationalism, undergoing drives to learn Malay language and culture...at the same time when the Federated States of Malaya were shifting their feet as to what to do with all these Chinese and whether to just leave them stateless, kick them out or grant them citizenship with conditions.

If that's not a merchant ethos, what is? The eternal chimaera. How could I have expected any more from the Singaporean people at large, the descendants of merchants and money-changers? So this is what you get when you have a nation of merchants?

The questions remain. Am I a freak in a nation of merchants, or am I just another merchant that has identified the non-merchants as the winning side and is merely seeking to mimic them for my own comfort and profit in the long term? How can I test myself?

I'm thinking that there might just have been something to the ancient Chinese ranking the merchants on the bottom of the class system.

Defectives Deserve Death.

That one's quite the heavy-handed statement, isn't it? Heh. Does it mean I'm going to go out and slaughter folks? Nah, all I need to do is sit back, relax, and watch as the defectives willingly rush to hurl themselves off the cliff. Defectives deserve death, and to make things all the easier, they're all too eager to commit suicide.

What sparked this? Well, a piece The Real Singapore happily cribbed from the Huffington Post, claiming that amongst the things that produced happiness:

-Giving parents free shit so they can abandon their children to the state and return to their cubicles sooner.
-Giving people free shit so they can stuff their bodies with whatever they want.
-Giving women free shit so they can do whatever they like without repercussions.

Well, yes, if you simply redefine the word "happiness" to mean the exact same things you're meant to be a proponent for, then of course people are going to be happier, by your self-serving definition. However, when you look at some other metrics of modern societies that aren't a circular argument in that "people are happier when the state raises their children because we define happiness to be how happily they return to slaving away"...

Naturally, this appears to have been enthusiastically embraced by many of the replies. Who doesn't like free shit? Coming from a nation which puts forward that the ultimate pinnacle of human existence is the acquisition of cash, credit cards, cars, career, and condos, the next obvious step is demanding that all these things be given to them simply for existing. Hedonism is the new liberty, and training people to live at crotch level makes them easily herded.

"I've got a right! A right!"

No, no rights. No more rights. Charted freedoms. Noblesse oblige. Allegiances. No. More. Rights. Frame anything as a 'right', and no matter how deleterious, stupid and flat-out evil one can prove it to be, it can never be repealed because it's a 'right'.

The simple answer is that the Lockean concept of “natural rights” is profoundly flawed, and actually restricts human freedoms rather than enabling them. Nothing could be more unnatural. Rather than true freedom, what we have is “many individual, domesticated, and mechanized freedoms, in a state of reciprocal limitation.” The Lockean concept of natural rights is thoroughly and simply deconstructed in chapter three of Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins.

Take a look at this:

Her entire argument boils down to "I don't like it, muh rights and freedumbs, fuck the society that allows my privileges to exist." That's the ultimate in high time-preference. So much for the supposed vaunted ability of North-East Asian peoples to play the long game that spans generations, eh?

To quote Vox, who has more to say on the matter:

What appears to be difficult for solipsistic women and their intellectual white knights to understand is that the equal education and opportunity they so value necessarily means a lower standard of living for them and everyone else. That's not because Mr. Lee is sexiss or because I am misogyniss, the observation is no more credibly debatable than the idea that if you drop a ball, gravity will cause it to hit the floor.

Okay, got it, sister. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, not going to stop an enemy in the middle of making a mistake. You go, girl. Your educated ovaries will be left alone as per your wish, but not for the reasons you think or want. Even if you repent, good luck finding a sperm bank, or some gamma male stupid or desperate enough to impregnate you - all the while raking in money for fertility treatment because some bint actress on the televitz could, so can you. We don't need defectives in the gene pool, and the more of you that take yourselves out, the better.

Singaporean society needs to die, and is already well on the path to doing so; I don't need to do so much as lift a finger while it commits suicide, but if anything, I should actually make it easier for these defectives to die out. I will celebrate the day this modernist, vulgar mockery of a culture is subsumed by the PRCs, Thais, Pinoys, and all the foreigners who don't share our culture. What a shock, isn't it? Singapore's population is already only slightly more than half native-born, it shouldn't take more than a couple of generations for it to go the way of the dodo. Hell, it may come all the sooner - I will laugh at "muh education" and "muh rights" when the US dollar collapses and both finance and trade come to a screeching halt.

But what other end could it have been? For all the supposedly reactionary platitudes, Singaporean history is essentially whig history, the entire social narrative based off eternal glory and progress. The approach to the leftist singularity was set from the very moment the national narrative decided that anything pre-independence was simply Singapore just being "a sleepy fishing village" with nothing to learn from or to be thought about, a past to be fled from as quickly as possible.

It seems odd that a reactionary should be calling for the destruction of a culture, but there are no more traditions to be had here, having being systematically destroyed and discarded in one generation. Antiprometheanism, friend. As it is, Singaporean culture is defective. It needs to die.