Thread: Worse is Worse, Unless There's Better

Worse is Worse, Unless There's Better

From time to time I encounter the slogan ‘worse is better’ within dissidents on the Right. To me this has always sounded as a rationalisation, a mantra intended by the user to help him cope with loss, defeat, inaction, and helplessness. The reason is that, for worse to really be better, there would need to be a credible alternative to the existing system already in place, needing only the critical mass that would be made available by a collapsing system. And as at present a genuine alternative exists mostly in theory, and only very incipiently in practice, with credibility outside its cultural ghetto yet to be earned, for as long as that is the case, worse for us can only mean worse.

An iteration of the ‘worse is better’ mantra was recently enunciated in connection with the United States presidential elections of 2012, which the incumbent, Barack Obama, intends to fight against an as yet unspecified Republican candidate. It was argued that, in the light of Obama’s record to date and of precedent established by previous presidential second terms, an Obama win would be immensely beneficial. The assumption is that Obama will further discredit himself with a large-enough majority of voters, and that his discredit will infect the mainstream political establishment, causing voters to seek alternatives outside of this establishment. It was further argued that a Republican win would create the illusion of progress among the ill-informed, while only delaying, and ultimately opening the way, for further evil from the hard Left.

While the latter argument is correct, the former one relies on fallacies.

Firstly, it does not necessarily follow that Obama’s discredit will mean also a discredit of the entire mainstream political establishment: when a politician becomes unpopular because he has lost his credibility, he is replaced by one that is more popular. Voters have short memories; they rely on partial, selective, carefully packaged, mediated information; they don’t generally understand information that is nuanced or complex; they are impermeable to inconvenient data, arguments, and conclusions; they have no taste for the disruption and inconvenience implied in fundamental change; and they want so badly to believe that everything will be alright, that they blind themselves to the obvious and continue to support the existing system for as long as they can sustain the illusion of hope—or at least the illusion that things will carry on more or less as they have known them, hopefully getting better in due course. This is normal and natural, particularly since most people alive today in the West have not known a major war, or suffered major disruptions to their lifestyles outside of the relatively mild ones inflicted by the economic cycle.

Worse is Worse, Unless There's Better

I agree, that there's really very little hope in having things get worse, as in the case of Obama having another 4 years in office for instance, if there isn't a viable alternative for our people to chose from. It's for this reason, that I've often told people, that it's important to build a political infrastructure, one that our people can take advantage of in the increasingly fluid events happening around the world, as well as in our own country.

Many of our people seem to want to wait for some sort of catastrophic event to occur, before really committing themselves to a viable Nationalist Movement, which in that case, may be too late, in order to take full advantage of such an event.

"Organization" is everything.