The Lifeboat Morality.

The behavior of people in a situation of extreme scarcity, and the moral response to it, is the raw area where philosophy most closely joins with natural science. The story of the shipwreck of the William Brown, of Philadelphia, USA, and sailing from Liverpool, England, in March 1841, is one that nearly all priests and ministers like to tell, even if they don't know the story in detail, and even if the moral lesson they attempt to draw is the wrong one.

The ship hit an iceberg and sank. The ship's jollyboat (commanded by Cpt. George L. Harris) and its longboat (commanded by ship's mate Frances Rhodes) were both crowded, the longboat dangerously so. In addition, the longboat was leaking due to its excessive weight, which portended the death of everyone aboard. The commanders of both boats decided to head for a landing in Newfoundland.

It became clear that the longboat would not go far unless it were made lighter. So the mate and some of his sailors started throwing some of the others overboard, both passengers and crew, but chiefly targeting males for getting the toss. It's not that they were heavier, exactly, since among those ejected were two boys, one of them 12 years old, the other being 18 and skinny. The older boy didn't have to be tossed. When he was "chosen," he cooperated, jumping overboard after being allowed to say his prayers. The younger of the boys saved his life by stealthily hanging on to the rear of the boat, keeping his head above water.

The first man to be thrown over was an obedient sailor named Riley. The mate asked him to stand up, and he did. Then the mate or someone assisting him grabbed Riley and tossed him into the ocean, where he drowned.

One man, a sailor named Charles Conlin, tried to appeal to the mate and his helpers through friendship, saying: "Holmes dear, sure you won't put me out?" (Holmes was Rhodes' main assistant in the toss party). Conlin was tossed out.

One man, Frank Askin, tried to buy his life with gold, offering the mate five large coins as a bribe. But in that situation money was worthless, and Askin was grabbed and tossed overboard.

But another man, a sailor named John Messer, successfully prevented his own tossing by menacing the mate and his party with a knife. He had to be ever-vigilent, of course, and it turned out that Messer was the one who, the following day, first sighted the sails of the Crescent (Cpt. S.J. Ball), whereupon the threat to him ended.

By the time they were finished, the mate had thrown overboard 16 men and boys, and 2 women. The women were the sisters of Frank Askin, and it is said that they jumped voluntarily after the mate tossed their brother into the sea. All together, these sacrifices made it possible for the longboat to remain afloat, which enabled the other 23 passengers to be rescued.

Upon their return to civilization, a maritime court of inquiry examined the behavior of the Frances Rhodes and sailor Holmes, but they were unable to find fault with them, given the circumstances.

You can read the story in even greater detail here and here.

There's more than one lesson to be learned in that story, but I'll examine the big ones first.

1. When it is not possible for everyone to live, the phrase "half a loaf is better than none" is as true for people as it is for bread. Fairness is irrelevant.

It is sometimes necessary that some die to save others, because the only alternative is for everyone to die and there be no survivors at all. However, when this kind of situation arises, each person will regard himself as having exceptional merit which puts him firmly in the class privileged with survival. Everyone else might be expendable, but not himself!

In an emergency, anyone who speaks of "fairness" and believes it is a fool (a bleating sheep). And anyone who speaks of fairness without believing it is a sneaky predator (a jackal). There will usually be bleating sheep, but the jackals will outnumber them.

2. When some must be sacrificed to save others, a dictatorship is necessary.

There are no other conflicts so intractable as those for which life for some means death for the others. Neither argument nor bribery, will persuade someone to sacrifice himself. An appeal to sentiments, such as patriotism or family love, will sometimes be successful in getting someone to volunteer to be a sacrifice, but not always. Perhaps not usually. When a substantial number of sacrifices is required, they must be taken by violence, and nothing else will substitute.

To supply the necessary violence to secure the number of sacrifices required to save the rest of the people, there must be an effective local government of a dictatorial nature. This government may not sacrifice themselves - at least, not until the very last - because then there would be no one with both the will and the ability to complete the required number of sacrifices.

In an emergency, a democratic process would be unable to make the required number of sacrifices in the available time. Although democracies are notorious for their characteristic of "two wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner," the slaughter of the sheep always involves deception. Some of the wolves, for example, are the kind of people who will eat meat, but don't want to watch the butcher. Some of the sheep must be persuaded that the slaughterhouse is really a funhouse. And some of the sheep must be persuaded that they are wolves, at least, until it is time for the wolves to correct the misapprehension.

In an emergency, such as that on the William Brown's longboat, the mate might have called for a vote on who to toss - but there would be the equivalent of "nominations" and "caucuses" and "campaign speeches" and pleas of extenuating circumstances every time the next sacrifice was considered. And they'd have to be carried out one-by-one, or else those who were selected for tossing would revolt en masse.

Nothing must be done to warn the sacrifices in advance that they've been selected. If they were warned, they would join their strength and it might be impossible to sacrifice them. That's why the William Brown's mate didn't offer to cast lots to see decide who aboard the longboat would be tossed. Everyone who drew the short straws would immediately become a self-conscious subclass, and they would at once have engaged in defensive maneuvers. The struggle would have imperiled everyone in the boat.

3. Neither money nor appeals to sentiment can buy your life when the cost of maintaining it threatens the life of the one whom you would bribe.

Frank Askin and Charles Conlin learned these truths too late.

Someone resisting sacrifice doesn't always need to be stronger than the opposing group. Sometimes, he only needs to be strong enough to make fighting him not worthwhile.

Remember the story about two men, running from a bear, and one man stops to change from his dress shoes into his running shoes. The other man, confused, stops running too. The bear is getting closer and closer. "Why are you changing your shoes now?" asks the confused man. "Because," says the other, "I just realized that I don't need to outrun the bear. I only need to outrun you."

That is the logic that saved the life of sailor John Messer.

5. Obedience to authority, in an emergency, often kills the obedient.

John Messer resisted and lived. The sailor Riley obeyed his senior officer and died. Riley knew that somebody had to go, or the longboat would sink. He'd been discussing that very subject with his fellow sailors during the past few hours. Riley might have figured on being named one of the tossers, rather than being chosen as a tossee, or perhaps the theory of tossing had not yet been confirmed in his mind as a gory reality as yet. But his fatal mistake was in not being suspicious of authority's intentions when it came to call upon him.

6. Not all lives are of equal value.

Suppose that the occupants of the longboat had not had the good fortune to be rescued by the Crescent. They would have had to make their way to Newfoundland, which was presumably the easiest landfall available to them. In order to get there, the longboat would need guiding by someone who understood the principles of ocean navigation. The ablest navigator must not be sacrificed, since, if he were, the longboat might wander aimlessly at sea until everyone aboard starved, and, in that case, all of the previous sacrifices required to remain afloat would have been in vain.

I reviewed the story of the William Brown disaster because it is very similar in some ways to the approaching apocalyptic end of the industrial age. The world will be an overcrowded lifeboat, and it won't be possible for everyone to survive. The survivor to sacrifice ratio for the William Brown's longboat was 1.28. Somewhat more people lived than died.

That same ratio for the apocalypse will be much lower: only about 0.05. For each survivor, there will be 20 deaths. That's where capitalism has taken us, Ayn Rand.

For the situation on the William Brown's longboat to be commensurate to that of the world during the apocalypse, mate Frances Rhodes and sailor Holmes would have had to keep tossing people overboard until they, just the two of them, were the only ones left aboard.

Appendix A to "The Lifeboat Morality."

Fact in dispute. According to the court records in United States vs. Holmes, all of the men put out of the William Brown's longboat were passengers, not ship's crew. So if Riley and Conlin were sailors, they may have been "hitching a ride" on a ship on which they were not employed.

Some readers may be angry to learn that the court records state that Holmes threw two young White boys over the side while never attempting to toss the fat, greasy nigger who had been the ship's cook on the William Brown.

Fact in dispute. There is no mention of a John Messer in the court document. Further, it is stated that Holmes was the one who first sighted the sails of the Crescent, which was the ship that rescued the longboat's remaining passengers.

Fact in dispute. According to another source two women were thrown from the longboat: a Miss Anderson and a Miss Bradley. I don't know whether they were Frank Askin's sisters or not.

The court document needn't be taken as the last word on the story. Some of the passengers most likely gave their account of events to reporters soon after returning to land. The official version may be a simplification, or one designed to make Holmes seem to be more of a hero in the conventional sense. It is also possible that some of the accounts published in commercial media were embellished by editors for purposes of sensationalism.

Fact in dispute. It appears that Holmes was convicted of manslaughter for tossing Frank Askin, being sentenced to six months in prison and to pay a fine of $20. The penalty was later "remitted," which in this context probably means that it was commuted to a suspended sentence. Yet another source claims that only the fine was forgiven and that Holmes had to serve the six months jail time.

Interestingly, no charges of murder or manslaughter were brought against Holmes or Rhodes for tossing anyone out of the longboat other than Frank Askin, which makes inquiring minds wonder what was so special about Frank Askin.

Appendix B to "The Lifeboat Morality."

Someone objected to my analysis on this subject by saying that the passengers could all have jumped overside and clung to the side of the longboat, taking turns getting back in for "warm-up breaks."

There's at least one reason why that wouldn't work, and the biggest one is the potential for a conspiracy to take advantage of their position in the longboat to stay there, cheating on their prior arrangement with the others, and possibly beating them off with sticks or irons. In the end, some ruthless gang or other would have held exclusive possession of the lifeboat.

"Okay, my turn in the boat's over, time for me to get freezing cold again. Who's next? I'll help pull you up over the side."

Yeah, right.

It was a liberal who made this suggestion. Liberals frequently remark that some scheme or other will work, "if only people would... (blah blah blah)." But that's just the problem. They wouldn't. Those people on the William Brown's longboat would no more have taken turns than any group of them would have leaped into the ocean to die after drawing the short straws.

An apocalypse denier questioned the basis and the accuracy of my statistic that only five percent of the human population will survive.

The bases of the statistic are the facts that mechanized, chemically boosted agriculture makes possible a food productivity yield about ten times greater than that of manual (hoe-and-spade), organic agriculture. The depletion of fossil fuels will, at some point, put a stop to mechanized, chemically boosted agriculture. The world's food production will fall to a level not greater than 10% of its current level. Furthermore, because the food that is grown won't be easily transportable, about half of that 10% will also perish, leaving only five percent of the peak world population surviving.

In terms of numbers, that's down from a high of about 10 billion people in 2040 to a low of 500 million people by 2100.

Birth Control: it's not for us!

I'm not a biological scientist, but I have a halfway decent understanding for how evolution works to achieve favorable adaptations and how nature's usual methodology can be frustrated.

Births per se aren't the problem. It's the lack of natural rigor to life that leads to an early death for the biologically unfit, the poorly adapted, the defective. Fossil fuels enabled mankind to remove this rigor from his existence for a time, but at the price of accumulating a load of bad genes that increasingly require mechanical aid to compensate.

The depletion of fossil fuels will bring the bill for these accumulated genetic costs due for payment. No longer will mankind be able to evade natural rigor, which is essentially as rigorous as it ever was, but we are much less adapted than we once were for meeting its challenges.

In fact, the demographic groups that maintain a high birthrate, despite the disaster that will sweep the world, will have an advantage over those that attempt to redress the food shortage by reducing their family size. Conflict over resources is inevitable, and in the usual course of things people will tend to sort themselves by biological similiarity first and foremost. Other things being equal, the side with the biggest army wins.

Abortion versus Selection.

I have noticed that some of the scientists discussing how to handle the approaching fossil fuel depletion are suggesting that the "Pro-Choice" paradigm for abortion—i.e., leaving abortion decisions to pregnant women—is a useful tactic toward solving the global energy problem. It isn't. While abortion can be an effective eugenic tool, letting women have control of those decisions will accomplish nothing good. The reverse, in fact.

Humans descend from a line of mammals whose females did not have effective control over their pregnancies once they had begun. There is in our women no evolutionary mechanism to promote wise decisions as to when abortion or keeping the baby is better, in terms of the biological quality of the next generation. Rather, there's a noticeable drift for the opposite outcome, in which abortion generally promotes the survival of inferior offspring.

The women most likely to seek abortions are those who have the talent and the energy to succeed in a career. But, if they are occupied in careers, who will (in the main) produce the next generation of children? Inferior women, that's who. Such things as talent and energy level are at least partly, and probably mostly, inherited. If we leave breeding up to lesser women, who couldn't succeed in careers for want of talent or energy, then we ensure that each generation will be a little stupider and a little lazier, less competent, less likely to survive, than the one which preceded it.

Obviously, this is the path to extinction, not the path to eugenic improvement. Whatever their wishes for a career, superior women must put their energy into reproduction. Abortion should be reserved for the lowest grade of female. In the worst cases, it should even be imposed on them, followed by sterilization to prevent them from becoming pregnant again.

It is a matter of spending versus investing. Giving each woman the career she wants and is qualified to handle is the spending. Our race will have one competent engineer, one talented computer programmer, or one brilliant physicist. One. But turning the energies of superior women toward reproduction (with suitably high-grade mates, of course) is the investing. Our race will reap unending gains from the generations of offspring who descend from her.

The right to abortion should never belong to the woman herself. The question should always be decided by eugenic criteria aiming to secure the improvement of our race. Improvements won't come without a great deal of birth, with the best offspring encouraged, when they reach adulthood, to breed further. The worst cases should be aborted if possible, sterilized if they are born, and killed if they cause trouble.

Death, not birth, is the proper and preferred, the most sensible and efficacious, means by which population size can be controlled. Birth control is like hoeing your garden in the dark: you are as likely to chop up valuable crops as worthless weeds. But once the two sorts are present for inspection, it is possible to sort them into categories corresponding to crops and weeds.

Even when resources are not scarce, the destruction of weeds is highly advisable, as weeds have a nearly universal habit of outbreeding crops to the point of choking them if unchecked. It is not a moral evil to destroy genes that nature itself would have let die in the natural world. Indeed, the deliberate targeting of defective genes for destruction will have the salutary effect that, during the process of getting rid of them, they will not be able to drag down the healthy and well-constituted, as they might if nature were allowed to do the job more messily and over a longer period.

Our View of Other Races.

Pick up most any fantasy novel. Tolkien will do just fine. It has monsters in it. And the monsters are stinking foul and deadly vicious.

Although there is a "humorist" subgenre to fantasy, in which the monsters are genteel philosophers or soft-hearted dimwits who only want to be accepted, this is an exception created for the sake of comedy. In serious fantasy, where you are supposed to take the world of the story as something other than a joke, the monsters are nearly always evil stinkers.

Monsters in fantasy correspond to alien races in the real world. Jews are crafty, unscrupulous goblins. Niggers are disgusting and dangerous orcs. Fantasy owes part of its popularity to the fact that it provides a socially acceptable outlet for the racism that a sensible people never truly give up.

White people generally have been under relentless legal and propaganda pressure to retreat from sensibility on racial matters. They've sought relief in fantasy fiction. But it's time that the common sense was put back into the real world. Blacks aren't people; they are monsters who sometimes eat people. Jews aren't people; they are monsters who can sometimes imitate people convincingly: dopplegangers.

Oh, I know that scientifically Jews are Homo sapiens and that Blacks are almost members of that species, too. But we will be much better off if we forget that, at least for as long as their interests and ours are in conflict. Until Whites have their own livingspace, let all others be MONSTERS!

Social Justice and Birth Control: both bad ideas.

Social justice is not an ideal, it is a distraction. Although it is held up as an absolute good to which everything else must be sacrificed, it is in fact a political weapon aimed at disarming a race of proven superior capacity by instilling guilt into its members.

The actual ideal is racial improvement. And since our race is now beset by hostile other races, intent upon our diminution or destruction, the first matter to be settled is that of racial security. For that reason, the population problem—for Whites—should not be addressed by limiting births.

Death, not birth, is the correct constraint upon White population size; however, not useless death. Our life expenditures should reflect a program of wise investment. For each of us who dies, let there be ten or more deaths among our enemies. In that way, each death on our side will provide room for more of our kind than existed previously.

If a White child must die, let him die a soldier's death, not that of an aborted fetus, not that of a suicide, and not that of an unavenged victim.

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