A Virtual City State

Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject! brings us another of his great thought provoking essays in which he looks at the prisoner's dilemma and how it is a lesson for all of us who wish to protect and promote the values and ideas of Western Civilization from the current onslaught that is being waged against them, and us. And while the enemies of civilization are indeed dangerous, we have for the first time in history a communications tool that allows us to organize and share information with all of the other people who are similarly inclined. You are using it at this very moment to read these words. And because of this extraordinary tool of communication, we have the possibility of working together to save Western Civilization even with the corruption and incompetence of our vaunted elites who seem to be oblivious to what is happening all around them.

Economist Freidrich Hayek won a Nobel Prize, in part, for pointing out that a free society is not really organized from the top down. While it is true that we have a framework of laws and customs, these are for the most part the result of time and tradition, which is another way of saying that they are the ways of living which have been found over time to be the ones that work the best and we have adopted them for that reason. But total top down planning is a feature of tyrannies, not of free societies. Even now, we still have a society which is mostly free and thus lacking in that kind of top down total control. The enemies of Western civilization see this and make the mistake of assuming that because we are not a top down society that we therefore have no organization at all. What they fail to see, as Hayek pointed out, is that we are indeed a very organized and planned system; it's just that most of the organizing and planning comes from the bottom up.

This bottom up planning requires a foundation of trust, honesty and other positive virtues in the vast majority of the population because to plan anything that is at all complex or long range also requires the cooperation of many people to accomplish. That we have such a culture makes possible the kind of societal achievements and economic progress that no other societies have been able to match, at least until such time as they have learned to adopt those same values.

Ultimately this bottom up approach is the real strength of Western Civilization, and the Internet allows those of us who wish to protect our way of life to self-organize in ways which were previously impossible and unimaginable. I think that process is now at work and the people who are motivated by their love for our culture will use this technology to fight back the forces of darkness. Bill Whittle thinks we will win, and so do I.

Go and read the whole thing.