COUNTY SOVEREIGNTY
1996 July 1


Just this one essay this time.

OBJECTIVISM: THE NEXT WORLD RELIGION
by Frank Forman

1. Religions with Jewish Founders

Has anyone noticed that all European religions since
heathen times were founded by Jews? Christianity, of
course, but also Marxism and Freudianism. I take as my
definition of religion the one that Mencken gave in
_Treatise on the Gods_:

"Religion is quite simple at bottom. There is nothing
really secret or complex about it, no matter what its
professors may allege to the contrary. Whether it
happens to show itself in the artless rumble-bumble of a
Winnebago Indian or in the elaborately refined and
metaphysical rites of a Christian archbishop, its single
function is to give man access to the powers which seem
to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce
those powers to be friendly to him."

Marxism has its History and Freudianism its
Unconscious as surely as Christianity its triune God. But
while Jews were the founders, it was not until the
religion was suitably paganized that it took root among
Europeans.

What does the Easter bunny have to do with the
Resurrection?

I rest my case for Christianity. As for Marxism, it took
Lenin to paganize it. But Freudianism never took root,
for its chief practitioners remained Jewish. Had Carl
Jung not repudiated Freud and instead paganized it,
Freudianism might have become a full-fledged religion in
Europe and its settlements in the United States and
elsewhere.

Why is it that Jews have founded all European religions
since heathen times? I can only speculate, and I extend
some ideas from Kevin MacDonald's brilliant book, _A
People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group
Evolutionary Strategy_ (Westport, CT: Praeger
Publishers, 1994). He argues that early on, the ancient
Jews locked into a strategy that exaggerated normal "Us"
vs. "Them" sentiments that emphasize marrying within
the group. He seems to hold that this strategy fed upon
itself, much like antlers in moose have gotten bigger and
bigger, but he does not follow up on it. He attributes the
high intelligence of Jews to their social structure, which
awarded the highest prestige to religious scholars and
allowed them to father the greatest numbers of children,
thus engaging in what amounted to a practice of
eugenics. Contrast this with Christianity from early on in
the Middle Ages until the Reformation, where priests had
to *abstain* from having children.

MacDonald does not pin down when this process got
started--the historical record is unclear, esp. since we
don't really know when the various books of the Bible
were written and how they were later edited--but I
suggest that it began as soon as the Hebrews became the
"People of the Book," as they are often referred to, and
invented what Max Dimont, in _The Indestructible Jews_
calls a "portable god." Now the Old Testament is
basically a history of the hapless people who got caught
in the fighting between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian
civilizations (which fighting did not get underway for
well over a thousand years into their existence!) and who
are barely attested to in the records. It must have made
very good sense for these hapless people to have secured
their identity around their religious writings rather than
real estate. They differ from another mobile group that
has retained its identity, the Gypsies, but the latter did
not hit upon a survival strategy that led to a eugenic
increase in intelligence and so remain insignificant
players on the world scene.

But still, why would it be that even the most intelligent
of Jews be the founders of all religions in Europe since
heathen times? Mencken again: "Yet these same rude,
unpopular and often unintelligent [sic] folk, from almost
time immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the
Western world, and beyond all comparison its greatest
poets. It was Jews who wrote the magnificent poems
called the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Books
of Job and Ruth; it was Jews who set platitudes to
deathless music in Proverbs; and it was Jews who gave
us the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the
incomparable ballad of the Christ Child, and the twelfth
chapter of Romans. I incline to believe that the scene
recounted in John VIII, 3-11, is the most poignant drama
ever written in the world, as the Song of Solomon is
unquestionably the most moving love song, and the
Twenty-third Psalm the greatest of hymns. All these
transcendent riches Christianity inherits from a little tribe
of sedentary Bedouins, so obscure and unimportant that
secular history scarcely knows them. No heritage of man
is richer and none has made a more brilliant mark upon
human thought, not even the legacy of the Greeks."

The writings of Marx and Freud do not soar quite so
magnificently, but too they abound with high poetic
moments. But what the People of the Book also put in
their books besides poetry, from the Bible to the writings
of Marx and Freud, was just that: a Book, that is, one
that contains within it an encompassing world view. Yet
there is something peculiar about these Books and readily
apparent to objective observers: the world views in
Books are not actually self-consistent. A theology of the
sort that tries to assure self-consistency by an intricate
and tortured process of rationalization (systematic
theology, that is) is an invention of Europeans.

MacDonald has an explanation: the *function* of the
social selection mechanism by which rabbis won the
highest prestige in their communities is fundamentally
*irrational* from an objective standpoint. He might have
said "non-rational instead of "irrational" were he a
sociologist instead of a psychologist. "Irrational" action
denotes means not suited to the end in question, while
the sociologist's "non-rational" action is outside this
means-end relationship. Rabbinical scholarship is indeed
irrational from the standpoint of learning about the world
visible to the senses, but that is irrelevant when such
learning is not the end in question. This scholarship is a
selection mechanism only, much like the rigorous civil
service examinations in ancient China, which dealt with
very little in the way of knowledge useful to actual
practice of a civil servant. In evolution, we must always
keep in mind, there is no overarching direction: *good
enough* is the rule, which means that rabbis need not
work up systematic theology nor Chinese bureaucrats
learn anything useful during their education. It is enough
that these screening mechanisms select very broadly for
intelligence.

[This is an important point, for sociologists have come to
see human institutions as mostly evolving, not toward
any specific goal of harmonious adaptation, but as a
result of the immediate forces at hand. In biology, such
"functionalism" was abandoned early on under the impact
of Darwin: giraffes do not have long necks *in order to*
eat leaves high off the ground; rather, those giraffes that
had longer necks had greater chances of passing on their
genes, whence giraffe necks got longer and longer. Of
course, those in charge of human institutions sometimes
do aim for specific goals, but by and large this is not the
case. I see no reason to think that any group of Jews or
Chinese deliberately contrived their selection systems,
entry into the rabbinate or the civil service, as the case
may be. Rather, these systems just grew up bit by bit
without much overall purposeful direction. It is quite odd
that MacDonald would call himself a functionalist as far
as human societies goes, esp. in view of his deep
understanding of the principles of biological evolution.
Psychologists may be biased toward looking for at
functions, since humans, one by one, do indeed act
purposefully. It is on the sociological level that this is
much less the case. I bring all this up for another reason:
looking for purposes seems to be the *default* sociology
that became part of our mental equipment during our
hunting days. It was *good enough* then and has by no
means been extinguished by education. I need mention
only the abundance of conspiracy theories!]

The Books written by Jews, then, are poetry that wafts
into the Empyrean. "That there are gross absurdities in it
is apparent to everyone, but absurdities do no damage to
poetry"--Mencken, once more. *And* they are elaborate,
though on the surface simple. When such a Book gets
suitably mixed up with pagan elements, Europeans (and
their offshoots in America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, and so on, too of course) fret over the
inconsistencies and absurdities and struggle to reconcile
them. The Jews themselves elaborate and give the world
the Talmud, while Europeans write the _Summa
Theologica_. Each are equally removed from the world
visible to the senses.

One might think that sober Europeans would prefer
instead to stick to reality and exercise their mental habits
of systematizing in a scientific fashion. This they do, but
there is the poetry only Jews can provide and also a
Book that is not at all easy to systematize and which
therefore becomes as mighty a challenge as discovering
the laws of physics and chemistry. When the first
challenge contains the greatest of all poetry and the
second only the awe of mere nature, the first one attracts
by far the greater effort. I merely note, in this regard,
that there are more astrologers in this country than
astronomers. It is a state of affairs about which
complaint is useless.

2. The Merits of Objectivism

My prediction is that the Objectivism of Ayn Rand is
going to become the next world religion. Ayn Rand was
Jewish, having been born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum
in St. Petersburg on 1905 February 2, and so fits in with
my thesis. Of course her works are wonderful as poetry.
Of course they are packed with absurdities and
obscurities, though this may take a long time to figure
out. And of course her works promise to "give man
access to the powers that seem to control his destiny," as
Mencken put it. She has "reason" and an ideal "man
*qua* man" that is only distantly related to empirical
men, and she offers a practice, "reason" again, whose
"single purpose is to induce those powers ['objective
reality'] to be friendly to him [to provide 'happiness']."

Ayn Rand was a refugee from Soviet communism and
emigrated to the United States when she was twenty-five.
She had several jobs as a screenwriter in the movies and
wrote a novel, _We the Living_ (1936), about Soviet
communism as well as a novelette, _Anthem_ (1938),
and several short stories, plays, and movie scripts. It was
not until her next novel, _The Fountainhead_ (1943)
became a best seller through word-of-mouth advertizing
that she became fully self-supporting as an author.

When she came to the United States, she was shocked
that the intellectuals here were enamored of communism
and refused to believe reports about the actual horror
involved. She held to a political philosophy of
unrestrained capitalism and developed friendships with
Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson (whose best-
known books came out the same year as _The
Fountainhead_) and worked tirelessly on the cause of
freedom and capitalism. But she also discovered that
most "conservatives" were great compromisers and
accepted the basic premise of the communists that man
exists to serve others.

She was lead to offer egoism instead as the proper
morality and the only one consistent with full capitalism.
But egoism was not a doctrine to exploit others but to
cultivate the best within yourself. _The Fountainhead_
offers psychologically penetrating portrayals, as
magnificent as those of her earlier Russian compatriot
Dostoyevsky, of those that aspire to be the best they can
and those "second-handers" who live off the opinions of
others.

Ayn Rand also discovered that most "conservatives"
were religious, while the liberals and Soviet sympathizers
maintained that their political ideals were the epitome of
reason. She came to realize that religion would be as
fruitless in the cause of liberty in this country as Russian
mysticism was in stopping communism. And it was
capitalism, which allowed every man the opportunity to
use his own powers of reason to his own advantage, that
embodied reason, not liberalism, socialism, or
communism. The fact that Soviet sympathizers in this
country refused to acknowledge the horrors that
communism made in practice was further proof that these
sympathizers were fundamentally hostile to reason.

She thought deeply about these matters and concluded
that reason, egoism, and capitalism were on one side,
while mysticism, altruism, and socialism were on the
other. And the mystics could be either those that
worshipped the state or god. She expounded this
philosophy in her last novel, _Atlas Shrugged_ (1957),
and made further elaborations for the rest of her life.

She remained, however, fundamentally a novelist (as she
herself recognized) and not a philosopher. Her
philosophy, called Objectivism, is basically a theory of
virtue, one of self-cultivation, and that is how those
inspired by her novels but not engaged with her
philosophical system take it. For those who become only
casually engaged, Objectivism is probably as adequate a
philosophy as desired. But those who become more than
casually engaged with her system, however, very often
treat Objectivism as a religion that Jews are exceptionally
capable of creating, that is, a complete world view
written in magnificent poetry.

Objectivism does *look* like philosophy (and for her
more light-hearted followers it functions as one that is
generally good enough), but like all religions, her works
require endless interpretation. The secondary literature is
minute compared with that of Jesus, Marx, or Freud, but
this is only a matter of time. Ayn Rand refused to
endorse evolution and, like Creationists, held that man
was utterly different in kind from the rest of existence.
Her philosophy is basically pre-Darwinian and appeals to
essences that biologists have long since abandoned. She
held that men were born _tabula rasa_, an eighteenth
century psychological doctrine. She insisted that all
events are caused (except those caused by man), in spite
of the revolution of quantum mechanics, which she never
tried to understand. And for all her pretense at being
scientific, she never discusses the experimental method.
All of this enables her followers to engage in elaborate
contortions and redefinitions of terms to keep her
statements true, in exactly the same way Biblical
inerrantists do, and ditto for Marx and Freud.^
  ^[Ayn Rand's use of terms like "reason," "man,"
"egoism," "selfish," "objective reality," "happiness" are
indeed often highly idiosyncratic, though by no means
always utterly without justification. These idiosyncracies
keep her more devoted followers endless busy insisting
that her critics do not understand her, as browsing
alt.philosophy.objectivism will readily confirm. At the
same time, these followers insist that her writing is a
marvel of clarity! I have been told exactly the same thing
by Christian Evangelical inerrantists. While only an
argumentative atheist would insist on taking the Psalmist
literally when he said, "The Lord is thy shade upon thy
right hand" (121:5), no one really understands a great
many words of the Bible. It is not the *function* of these
obscurities to keep interpreters busy, but it sure works
out that way!]

So all the elements of an Objectivist religion are there:
the founder is Jewish, the poetry is stupendous, the
writings are obscure while they seem otherwise, there are
endless opportunities for contorted rationalizations of
assertions at odds with modern science. But not every
religion founded by Jews gets adopted by Europeans. It
also takes paganization. While Ayn Rand's heir and
holder of the copyrights to her books, Dr. Leonard
Peikoff, is Jewish, his brand of Objectivism is practically
Hasidic and will not spread. Fortunately for the religion,
a heretical follower named David Kelley (whose
disagreement with Dr. Peikoff is as slight as any of the
theological differences that have caused religious wars in
Christendom) is paganizing Objectivism essentially by
connecting it to everyday life and turning it into a guide
for living with his Institute for Objectivist Studies. I
cannot describe the paganization any better than this, for
it has not been long underway. So far, I have no
Kelleyite equivalent to the Easter Bunny! I should
mention that, besides Kelley's, there is a preposterous
version of Objectivism founded by Frank Wallace called
Neo-Tech. Browse alt.philosophy.neo-tech if you have a
great deal of time on your hands.

Even with all this going for it, a religion must satisfy
other criteria that sociologists have identified besides
Mencken's inducing higher powers to be favorable to the
believers, criteria that are needed if the religion is going
to survive:

1. It explains the world to believers.
2. It gets the believers to behave themselves.
3. It divides the world into us and them.
4. It makes income for priests.
5. It rationalizes concrete interests.

Objectivism does the first two very well, the third also
well--to Objectivists, even libertarians are anathema--and
the fourth not so well yet. (Neo-Tech need only import
techniques from Scientology to develop great potential as
a money-maker, a potential that could dwarf the Hasidic
orthodoxy of Dr. Peikoff or the "mainstream" pagan
version of Kelley.) But it is the fifth element,
rationalizing concrete interests, that Objectivism can do
fabulously, and this is to justify full-speed ahead
capitalism and the right of producers to keep all of what
they earn and not even be taxed. In a world of ever
increasing inequalities of wealth and income, Objectivism
will be the religion of choice for the well-to-do, indeed
for the global elite. I predict that large corporations will
continue, although with far less bureaucracy, and will
become increasingly multi-national. National
governments are rapidly reaching their limits in their
ability to tax, since capital can fly across borders ever
more easily. (States reached their limits some time ago,
which is why governors love revenue-sharing.) Sooner or
later, corporations, instead of feeding at the Federal
trough and getting regulations that limit their
competitors, will come to realize that the downside of
big government, the corporate profits tax if nothing else,
adds up to more than the benefits of whatever
protectionism and contracts they can extract from the
government. Objectivism is the perfect religion for those
connected to the global economy to adopt.

My own politics, Country Sovereignty, would limit the
extractive powers of the state (county) even more than
that of the several states that make up the U.S.A. But it
will not prevent any individual county from becoming a
welfare state (welfare county). However, businesses
benefit by having laws uniform across jurisdictions, and
this goes with Objectivism being a universal and total
philosophy. But since Objectivists cannot agree among
themselves any more than Christians, Marxists, or
Freudians, we can expect a healthy pluralism among the
world's nations to continue.

In any case, Objectivism will be only one of a great
number of belief systems, though it will be the next
*world* religion. Here come some more predictions.

3. The Future of Other Religions

During the first anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma
City on Patriot's Day, I turned on the teevee to watch
the commemorations. Among them was a gathering in a
beautiful Catholic church--with rock "music" being
played. This version of rock, so I am told, is much less
annoying that Hard Rock, though the beat is much
heavier than the early rock 'n' roll of such worthies as
Little Richard and Elvis Presley that burst on the scene
when I was growing up (I was born in 1944.).

The chief religion of the majority in this country is going
to be just this Rock Christianity. Largely gone will be
the somber, ritualistic affairs still given at "mainline"
Protestant denominations and at traditional Catholic
services. (I don't think the synagogues have been very
far infected by rock--yet.) It is the Evangelical Christians
that play rock "music" the most, and they are the
denominations that are growing leaps and bounds. Mark
Twain in _Letters from the Earth_ had the Devil remark
that Earthlings could bear only an hour and a quarter a
week in church. There being no dominant cultural elite
in the country any more, the Rock Christians, who
obviously enjoy this sort of noise, will get their way and
adopt a religion that is considerably easier for them to
tolerate than one giving stuffy services.

There will still be mainline Protestants and traditional
Catholics among the better off, but mostly out of habit.
They will recede in numbers as the older members die.
The better off of rising generations will start switching to
Objectivism, for they do tend to be more rational--it
takes a good dose of rationality to earn a good living--
and Objectivism, not taken too seriously, appeals to
rationality.

Full secular rationalism, just a sober, scientific outlook
on the world (and not the sometime seemingly similar
Objectivism), will *not* become appreciably more
dominant. Surveys have found that states in which
Christianity is weak are not those in which secular
rationalism is strong; rather, those are the states where
New Age religions are strong.

I expect Christian Identity to grow rapidly among
unemployed and marginally employed whites. This is a
version of Christianity that grew out of the British
Israelites. These were people who got fascinated with the
more obscure parts of the Bible and concluded that the
British people were one of the Ten Lost Tribes of
Israel.^ They were not at all hostile to Jews, but when
these doctrines came over to America, hostility sprung
up and the Jews were declared to be not descendants of
the ancient Jews but rather descendants of a people
known as the Khazars, who were located in the Caucasus
Mountains along one of the trade routes from West to
East. This group of converted Jews does indeed have an
historical existence, but that they are the ancestors of
most living Ashkenazi Jews is quite dubious and not held
by any scholars of the subject.
  ^[I just came across a reference to a nineteenth century
view, written by a Britisher of course, that St. Paul
brought his preaching to the British Isles. Victorian
society both moved away from religion under the impact
of Darwinism and toward it by some of quite lively
imaginations.]

This is not the place, however, to expound on the history
of Christian Identity. What matters is that the adherents
have a general conspiratorial outlook as responsible for
the country's problems. They regularly attribute their
own personal problems to Affirmative Action (to what
extent correctly is not germane to the analysis of
religions). They identify with the White race, and
psychologically this is good strategy. The reason for this
is that in a time of great change, it makes sense to
channel one's sense of identity into something that cannot
be changed, to have a grip on one's sense of personhood,
most especially as it becomes harder and harder to
identify with one's occupation. (This is especially so
among the unemployed and the marginally employed.)
Biological descent and sex are the two ways that this can
be done, although nationalism comes close, in that
leaving one's country is costly.

Now in Europe and Yugoslavia in particular, where
people are far more likely to live where their distant
ancestors did, ethnicity fits the bill for getting a sense of
identity. In the United States, on the other hand, such
rootedness can be found only in biological descent from
a much larger group than the ethnic one, namely race.
(Even Old Americans, those with predominately British
ancestors from Colonial times, almost always have
Germans in their family tree; I am an example.)

Now the Anti-Defamation League is horrified at this
development of racial identification among whites. They
are clearly not representative of all Jews in this country,
though, because their politics is generally liberal,
Democratic, and favorable to Affirmative Action, while
many Jews have come to conclude that Affirmative
Action is misguided and furthermore against their
interests. Michael Levin and the late Richard Herrnstein
are among two prominent Jews who have come to the
conclusion that the factual basis for innate racial equality
is at best ill-founded if not actually false. Still, even they
must look askance at a Christian Identity which is
unavoidably antisemitic and cannot transmute from a
preposterous (even by the standards of religions!) belief
system back into a benign one.

I predict that a number of more far-sighted Jews will
return to their pre-Israelite roots and go back to
worshipping Baal. For one, Judaism can be among the
most demanding of religions to practice. For another,
paganism is fun. But a larger reason is that in a world of
plural paganisms, Jews cannot be singled out for
animosity. It is what sociologists call "civil religion,"
that is, religion that does not get so out of hand that the
believers become impolite or worse toward believers of
other religions. By employing this strategy, Jewish
pagans will be able to get along with those belonging to
another pagan religion called Asatru, a recently invented
pagan religion that can has a large potential to become
overtly hostile to those not of European descent. This is
a minority sentiment at present, but as certain marginal
elements in society adopt a strong identification with
their biological descent, the hostility can grow. Christian
Identity is unavoidably antisemitic, but Asatru need be at
most only mildly so, and once Baal worshippers start
appearing, Asatru followers will get along with them as
well as they do Druids, New Agers, and the like, in a
civil religion of paganism. Asatru worshippers may still
get upset about the New World Order and Affirmative
Action; it's just that the antisemitic elements will be
submerged.

These pagan religions are really just ways of keeping
busy, as very few of their practitioners actually believe
in them as a complex body of truths. (Consequently they
do not require Jewish founders and will never become
world religions.) Keeping busy is going to be the job of
ever increasing parts of the population as more and more
jobs are automated.^ Kurt Vonnegut already foresaw a
world without jobs, except for an elite that tended the
machines, in his first novel, _Player Piano_ (1951), and
books have been proliferating on the subject in the past
few years. The marginalized will not lose the vote,
however, so Objectivism is not going to grow large
enough to eliminate the welfare state, though the ever-
increasing size of the welfare and unemployment roles
will mean a welfare budget stretching over more and
more people. Those on the dole will see a substantial
drop in the standard of living, though not one so serious
as to reduce life expectancy.
  ^[Humans, and very lowly animals, can do things that
involve parallel processing, including anything that
requires manual dexterity, that no computer can do (yet),
while machines can take over a great deal of work that
involves the higher centers of the brain.]

4. Race Wars Instead of Religious Wars

The real problem, as I said, is keeping busy. Pagan
religious practices can only fill up so much time, and
since they are not serious religions, they will not mount
the sort of hostility that drenched Europe in blood for
centuries. I predict, nevertheless, a surge in violent
behavior. You just wait until the illegitimacy rate of
whites starts approaching that of blacks in this country.
Where it already has, among whites in decayed industrial
towns, such as Manchester and Liverpool in England,
soccer hooligans are the result among the unemployed
and marginally employed, and most especially among
those who had no moral upbringing. It is in precisely
those places where *concentrations* of amoral youths
occur that violence starts feeding upon itself and
explodes. Today among the whites in this country, a
youth without a moral upbringing will still be more or
less kept in line by the community. This is a situation
that, by every demographic estimate, is going to change. 

What is more, whites are more mobile than blacks.
English soccer hooligans often succeed in eluding border
controls and start up riots at soccer games in countries
where they are most unwelcome, whereas blacks confine
their rioting to Korean grocery stores nearby and the
like. Whites who see Affirmative Action as the cause of
their problems will take their rioting into black areas and
start a race war. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray,
in the most thought-provoking chapter of _The Bell
Curve_ (1994), grimly warned of the coming of what
they called the "custodial state," which they characterized
as "a high-tech version of the Indian reservation." This
custodial state has arrived, de facto, in decayed industrial
areas in England and the black ghettos in the United
States: much hand-ringing and guilt-mongering is done
(and many middle-class paying jobs handed out to
government bureaucrats), but nobody actually expects the
problems to go away in any foreseeable future, anymore
than anyone seriously expects civil war in Yugoslavia to
die down any time soon. Peace is coming in the Middle
East, as Israeli capitalists invest in businesses in the
Moslem countries (and the reverse) and these
businessmen then successfully pressure the hot heads to
cool it so as keep the profits coming. But there are no
profits to be had in the ghettos (and not enough to be had
in Yugoslavia for peace to break out there anytime soon).
While the members of what Herrnstein and Murray call
the cognitive elite wall themselves up in fortresses, a
low-level race war will be allowed to drag on in areas
where morality has broken down. Racial warfare will be
endemic and de facto, like the wars in Northern Ireland.
There are fewer deaths there due to the fighting than due
to traffic accidents; I cannot make the same prediction
here.

Objectivism fits in here, because the well-off will start
adopting it as a religion, while abandoning the current
religion of egalitarianism that many of the well-to-do
now have. The number of actual Leftists will shrink to
the point where they will control only about ten major
universities, where they will reign over a regime of
Political Correctness far fiercer than anything known
now. These universities will be financed with Federal
money under what will be known as the Conservative
Columnists' Full Employment Act.

Objectivism will become the next world religion, with
some taking it superseriously and working out
interpretations, redactions and further system building,
but it will not dominate: Objectivism appeals mostly to
those who pretty much already hold an objective view of
the world.^ This is not a very large percentage of the
population, but it is much larger among the well-to-do,
since making money requires paying strict attention to
reality. As a political force, Objectivists will succeed in
limiting the growth of the welfare state and on the
grounds that taxation constitutes an immoral initiation of
force. But they will not get their way entirely and will
have to compromise. I predict that another warning of
_The Bell Curve_, birth control, will figure in this
compromise. There will be Henry Clays and Bob Doles
among the Objectivists who will offer the compromise of
continuing welfare payments at the cost of undergoing
birth control.
  ^[I did an informal survey of participants of
alt.philosophy.objectivism and discovered that nearly all
of them had a personality type called INTJ [Introverted-
iNtuitive-Thinking-Judging] in the Myer-Briggs
Personality Inventory. They constitute about one percent
of the U.S. population, according to David Keirsey and
Marilyn Bates, _Please Understand Me_ (1984). The
authors say this is the most self-confident of the sixteen
types and their best one-word description of it is
"scientist" and offer Ayn Rand as an exemplar, though I
distinguish the two. Those that answered a quiz at a
Myer-Briggs Web site turned out to be INTJs seven
percent of the time. Biased samples and all, Netizens are
almost certainly more likely to be INTJs and potential
recruits for Objectivism than the average voter. Your
humble servant [[YOU MEAN YOU ARE *NOT*
SELF-CONFIDENT??--The Internet MONSTER]] is an
INTJ and by a large margin.]

5. County Sovereignty

How do my predictions fit into my general theme of
county sovereignty? Recall that this ideal would grant the
ability to tax only at the county level, with counties
contributing their revenues to the states, and the states to
the national government. Counties would act upon a
simple majority rule and could establish a religion,
outlaw abortion, or run a welfare state, if a majority of
its inhabitants so desired. (I add a restriction on their
activities that unconscionably escaped me: counties may
NOT run a *warfare* state.) The states would operate by
the rule of a two-thirds majority and the national
government by five-sixths.

World religions are universalist and Objectivism will be
no different. (I guess Judaism does not qualify as a world
religion, since Jews have never been proselytizers; I'll
have to think about this some more.) Ayn Rand still saw
the world in terms of nations and did not advocate world
government. In fact, she maintained that a cultural
revolution needs to take place before a political one is
possible. (One of her very best essays was entitled "It's
Earlier than You Think.") This cultural change will
occur in some places before others, and those who live in
places that are moving toward Objectivism the most
rapidly will desire to follow their own ideas and not be
constrained by authorities higher up and hence will not
be unfriendly to county sovereignty. I expect to see some
practical and tactical support from Objectivists for
decentralized government here. Since, as I said, Rock
Christians (who considerably overlap the Christian Right)
are also demanding that the Federal government get out,
we can see a growing agreement on decentralization
(with Rock Christians and Objectivists trying to convert
each other).

The Christian Identity people are also extremely vocal
about their desires for White Separatism and will further
add support for devolution. Their numbers, given the
way work is changing and the way white ghettos will be
forming, will only increase. Indeed, it would be a good
thing from the standpoint of defusing a race war if White
Separatists were tacitly encouraged to move far away
from the black ghettos. And to make a prediction about
black religion that I did not before, Islam of a separatist
variety will grow among blacks, not to the point of
becoming a majority by any means, but enough to serve
as a safety valve. It may well come to the point where
the White Separatists control Montana and get all two
thousand blacks there to leave. Montana has about 800
thousand people, 740 thousand of whom are non-
Hispanic whites. This leaves a around 58 thousand other
people for the White Separatists to chase out, but a good
many of them regard Asians as "white." This prediction
is wild enough for me to not go into any more precise
detail.

6. Summary

My prophecies in summary: Objectivism, which is being
paganized from its Jewish roots, will be the next world
religion and will serve the economic interests of the well-
to-do in a time when incomes are becoming more
concentrated. Rock Christianity will become, more and
more, the religion of the majority, but religions based
upon identity will grow even faster, in particular that
called Christian Identity, which is a religion of White
Separatism and is irremediably hostile to Jews. (How
many Identity Christians will swing over to the more
peaceful version of white identity called is Asatru, which
can coexist with other paganisms, I don't predict.) But
the biggest change on the horizon is an increase of
unemployment and marginal employment. As it works
among high demographic concentrations of amoral whites
(for the first time in this country), we can expect rioting
and even de facto race wars. The separatists, on
principle, and Objectivists and those in the Christian
Right out of expediency, will all push for a general
devolution of government. The Left, in the meantime,
will all but have disappeared.