Classic EssaysWilliam Pierce

Self-Discipline and Moral Health

Discipline, Germany, c. 1945

by Dr. William L. Pierce

WELL, the murder of White farmers and the gang-rape of White women by AIDS-infected Blacks continues apace in South Africa, as does the seizure and trashing of White farms in Rhodesia. Rhodesia’s Black dictator, Robert Mugabe, is boasting openly now of his intent to run all Whites out of Rhodesia. He understands now that no other country will come to the aid of the White Rhodesians, and he can do anything he wants to them. The British government of Tony Blair talks about not letting Britain’s cricket team play in Rhodesia, and the U.S. government of George Bush talks about imposing visa restrictions on Mugabe and members of his government if he doesn’t behave himself, and so Mugabe is laughing at them and proceeding with his plan to ethnically cleanse Rhodesia. (ILLUSTRATION: Discipline, Germany, c. 1945)

I could talk more about these things happening to our kinsmen in southern Africa and about the failure of our corrupt and treasonous governments to do anything to stop what is happening. I could talk more about the way in which the Jew-controlled news media in America consistently ignore these things: the same media that spearheaded the effort to persuade Americans only a decade ago to apply economic and diplomatic pressure to White South Africans until they turned their country over to Blacks.

I also could talk about more horrible Black-on-White crimes that have been committed in America recently and about the refusal of the controlled media to report these crimes. There’s certainly plenty of that happening, and it’s important to publicize it, as I often have done in earlier broadcasts.

Today, however, perhaps you will bear with me while I talk about a much more prosaic matter: less blood-stirring than the murder and rape of our kinsmen in southern Africa and less provocative than crimes against our people in America. What I want to talk about today is what’s happening to the character and the spirit of our people. That’s important, and in a sense it’s as much at the root of our other problems as is the control of our news and entertainment media by the Jews or the corruption of our political process and of our governmental and social institutions resulting from that control.

Actually, I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll try to deal with different aspects of it today. In discussing the changing character and moral quality of our people, it’s important for us to have some fixed standards to which we can refer. I don’t want to sound like some old geezer complaining about how much tougher he had it as a kid than today’s kids do. So I’ve collected input from a number of other observers: teachers, parents, employers. I’ve tried to get balanced and reasonably accurate views of the state of morals in America today and that of 50 years ago, and to examine the differences and to try to understand what caused the differences.

I’ve also examined statistics where they were available. It’s difficult to quantify some moral elements numerically, but others can be quantified or at least, correlated in a reasonable way with things that can be quantified. For example, I believe that it is reasonable to correlate the level of personal debt with the ability to postpone gratification: the greater the level of personal debt — typically mortgage debt and credit card debt — the less the ability to postpone gratification. In the last 30 years, the average personal debt in America, measured as a percentage of income, has increased 70 per cent. People are much more likely today to spend money they don’t have than they were 30 years ago. And there is, of course, a penalty for that. People end up spending a great deal more for the things they want if they borrow money to buy them, and so they end up being able to buy less than the person who earns his money before he buys and therefore pays no interest.

Without beating around the bush, I’ll tell you now what I have concluded about the change in the moral quality of our people during the past half century. American men and women today are softer, weaker, less reliable, less willing to accept responsibility, less patriotic, less able to endure discomfort or hardship, less willing to postpone gratification, and more willing to tolerate weakness and corruption in others than they were 50 years ago. And White American men are less masculine than they were 50 years ago.

I haven’t studied the matter enough to decide whether women are less feminine than they were. Certainly, there still are many very feminine women in America, but there also are more than enough unfeminine women running around today, and these un-feminine women, these feminists, certainly have more influence and are doing much more damage than they were permitted to do in the past. Whether American women as a whole are less feminine than in the past, however, I can’t say. But it definitely is the case that American men are less manly on the average than they used to be. And by “less manly” I don’t mean less sexually active; I mean less dignified, less self-reliant, less dependable, less self-confident, less courageous. Today they talk more and whine more, are less inclined to keep their commitments, and are more inclined to wait for someone to tell them what to do. They aren’t as tough as they used to be.

Discipline, Germany, c. 1945

Our people are less disciplined than they used to be. More specifically, they have less self-discipline, less ability to use will power, to make themselves do what they believe they ought to do. There is in each of us a combination of infantile urges and more mature desires and needs. The infant seeks only to gratify himself and to avoid pain. The well-developed man or woman has a more inclusive concept of “self” than the infant. He is concerned not only about his own needs but also about the needs of his family, his community, his clan, his nation, and his race.

And the well-developed man or woman has longer-range needs than the infant. The infant wants instant gratification, instant relief from discomfort. That’s all that is of concern to the infant; nothing else matters. The well-developed adult, on the other hand, thinks about future needs and future dangers and is able to balance these against present feelings: against present desires and fears and pain. He subordinates the present to the future. If he decides that a future need is important, he will suppress present desires, endure present discomfort, and face present dangers, in order to achieve his future goal. The ability to do this is a function of a person’s degree of self-discipline. The person without self-discipline remains infantile in his behavior, and often in his attitudes as well. The person with a high degree of self-discipline is able to keep his infantile urges under firm control and to marshal all of his resources, all of his strength and intelligence, to accomplish what he believes is most important.

This undoubtedly is an over-simplification, but I believe that it is nevertheless useful to look at all of the aspects of moral decline that I mentioned earlier: the greater softness, the lesser dependability, the lesser self-reliance, the lesser ability to postpone gratification, and the lesser degree of patriotism, as consequences of lesser self-discipline. By lumping all of these aspects of moral decline together as a decline in self-discipline, we only need to ask ourselves: what has caused our decline in self-discipline, by and large? Why does the average American man or woman today have less self-discipline than the average American of 1940 or 1950?

I believe that there’s more than one answer, more than one reason for the lesser degree of self-discipline today. In the first place, self-discipline develops as a result of the application of external discipline, especially when we are young. There is, of course, a genetically determined component of self-discipline, the innate self-discipline of the race as a whole, which evolved with us over millions of years and enabled us to survive. Because our temperate-zone environment was less forgiving and imposed a harsher external discipline on us, and on other races that also evolved in the North, than the tropical-zone environment imposed on the races that evolved in the Tropics, we and the North Asian peoples, the Japanese and the Chinese, for example, have greater innate self-discipline than Blacks do. But self-discipline also is the consequence of training, of the deliberate application of external discipline, when we are young. And it is clear that there is much less of that today than 50 years ago.

The raising of children in America has been feminized, softened. Spankings and other forms of corporal punishment are out. In fact, the prevailing attitude among White parents today is that any sort of punishment or denial is a bad thing. Disobedience no longer merits a whipping or the withdrawal of an allowance. Disrespect to a parent no longer earns a hard slap across the face and being confined to one’s room for a few days. Self-indulgence in children actually is encouraged today.

Discipline, modern America

Daily chores, which used to be the norm for children, no longer are required. The number of children who are trained on a musical instrument or who are trained in any way at all has declined drastically. In America’s feminized child-raising environment, to require a ten-year-old child to practice for two hours every day on the piano or the violin is considered cruel and unusual. To require a 12-year-old to spend four hours a day studying Latin or mathematics after school is equally abhorrent to television-bred parents.

So the lack of external discipline for children today definitely is a big part of the problem. And why is external discipline no longer imposed? Well, for one thing, we live in a less demanding world or so it seems to most Americans at the moment. We are fat and soft and spoiled. Technological advances have given the average family so many labor-saving appliances in the laundry room, in the kitchen, and in the yard that less labor is needed. The tendency today is not to repair things or to clean things and reuse them, but to throw them out and buy new ones. So chores for the kids aren’t really the economic necessity they used to be. And with both parents working outside the home, with the day-care center replacing the parents, the enforcement of proper standards of behavior becomes more difficult. Most parents don’t even try. They just let their kids absorb their morals from television and then run with the pack.

But there are other reasons for why external discipline no longer is imposed on children: propaganda against it. We experience propaganda that makes discipline a bad word, propaganda that makes the whole concept of discipline suspect and Politically Incorrect. Discipline is “fascist.” Disciplined is what the German Nazis were, with their heel clicking and saluting and their“Jawohl, mein Führer!” The disciplined Germans were evil and racist. We’ve seen that in a thousand Hollywood films and a thousand TV serials. Much better to be relaxed and informal and insubordinate. That’s the American way. Take the Black man as a model in this regard. Discipline leads to the gas chambers and to guilt, guilt, guilt! To discipline a child is to warp him and make a little Nazi out of him. That’s the party line that has been pumped into us by television and by Hollywood for the past 50 years.

Discipline, modern America

For the most part, the party line that the Jews have fed us from Hollywood has been implicit rather than explicit. Implicit propaganda is generally more effective, because it’s less obvious and more difficult to counter. When they launched the “counterculture revolution” on America’s college and university campuses 40 years ago, however, they came out of the closet. They denounced any sort of discipline or self-restraint in quite explicit terms. The assault on discipline was just one front in a Jewish war against everything traditional. The aim was not only to turn Gentile students against authority and to get them to abandon their own standard of conduct: it was to turn the whole Gentile world upside down.

At the same time that discipline was denounced explicitly as “Nazi,” there were assaults on so-called “racism” and “sexism” and traditional morality and traditional standards of civility and decorum and grooming. There were demands for more Black students to be recruited and more Black professors to be hired, regardless of qualifications; for women to be treated like men; for coed dormitories; for an end to the emphasis on Western, that is, on White civilization, which was denounced as racist and sexist. It was the beginning of Political Correctness: Whites are bad, Blacks are good; heterosexual men are suspect, women and gay men are okay; discipline and self-restraint are stuffy and old-fashioned whereas licentiousness, incontinence, and wantonness are “cool.” Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X became campus heroes and role models.

The amazing thing is that the Jews were able to persuade not only homosexuals and feminists and non-Whites to go along with their crusade against traditional Gentile society; they also were able to persuade heterosexual White men and women. Clearly, there already was a good deal of softness in our society, especially at our universities.

Many groups were behind the crusade against discipline, but no one expressed its spirit better than the two Jewish youth activists, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, leaders of the Youth International Party, or “yippies” for short. These two Jews probably got as much media publicity as all the other counterculture revolutionaries together. Rubin’s book, Do It!, was published in 1970 by the Jewish publisher Simon and Schuster, which is owned by multibillionaire Jewish media boss Sumner Redstone, who also owns MTV and CBS, among other media. You can find Rubin’s book in nearly every public and university library, and it would do you good to read it, but I’ll read you just a few excerpts now, in which Rubin explains what the Jewish counterculture revolution is all about. And I apologize ahead of time for the obscene language. Part of the Jewish strategy was to break down all the traditional standards of behavior and discourse and to make civility and polite language seem old-fashioned.

Puritanism leads us to Vietnam. Sexual insecurity results in a supermasculinity trip called imperialism. Amerikan foreign policy, especially in Vietnam, makes no sense except sexually. Amerika has a frustrated penis, trying to drive itself into Vietnam’s tiny slit to prove it is The Man. The revolution declares war on Original Sin, the dictatorship of parents over their kids, Christian morality, capitalism, and supermasculinity trips.…Our tactic is to send niggers and longhair scum invading white middle-class homes, fucking on the living room floor, crashing on the chandeliers, spewing sperm on the Jesus pictures, breaking the furniture, and smashing Sunday school napalm-blood Amerika forever.

We will do whatever is forbidden. We will outrage Amerika until the bourgeoisie dies of apoplexy. We will turn Amerika’s colleges into nudist camps.

Rubin says much more for example, he tells his young readers that they should kill their parents because parents are repressive and keep the kids from doing what they want to do, and he always spells “America” and “American” with a “k” instead of a “c” in order to suggest a German and therefore a Nazi flavor. He ends his book with the counterculture manifesto:

At community meetings all over the land, Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem. There will be no more jails, courts, or police. The White House will become a crash pad for anybody without a place to stay in Washington. The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared. All watches and clocks will be destroyed. Barbers will go to rehabilitation camps, where they will grow their hair long. There will be no such crime as “stealing” because everything will be free. The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm. There will be no more schools or churches because the entire world will become one church and school. People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon, and fuck whenever they want to.

Again, I apologize for the language, but I really wanted you to get the flavor of what the Jews were pushing on our university campuses. I was there at the time, as a professor. The kids were absorbing the Jews’ propaganda, and most of the parents were too busy with their own affairs to pay attention. Books such as Do It! were very widely read, and despite the childish phrasing and shock-effect style were taken seriously by millions of young, White Americans, just as was the Jewish singer Bob Zimmerman, who used the name Bob Dylan.

Discipline, modern America

Although Rubin and Hoffman and the other Jews on our campuses went further and expressed things more brazenly and more crudely than the mainstream media, the mainstream media supported them, as witnessed, for example, by Simon and Schuster’s publication and distribution of Rubin’s book. All of the Jews in the media were peddling the same poison, just packaged differently for different segments of our population. And very few people who knew better were willing to speak out against what was happening, from fear of being denounced as “anti-Semitic” or “racist.” The people who knew better also had become too soft and too lacking in self-discipline.

Certainly, we ourselves are to be blamed for failing to structure our society in a way to keep ourselves disciplined as our technological advances freed us from natural disciplinary pressures. The attitude in America during the past few generations has been, “I want my children to have an easier life than I had, a softer life.” The attitude instead should have been, “It is my responsibility to ensure that my children grow up to be strong, self-disciplined men and women.” And we should have structured our schools and other institutions, and our child-raising practices, accordingly. But we didn’t. And because we didn’t, we have a generation of White Americans who are softer and flabbier mentally, morally, and physically than we had two generations ago.

In addition to this huge mistake on our part, however, we made the even bigger mistake of permitting Jews to infiltrate our society and to take over virtually all of our mass media of news and entertainment, which in the television age are able to determine what most of our people think. And the Jews have used their control of the media to exacerbate the indiscipline resulting from our own laxity. They have done everything they could to make us even softer and flabbier and therefore less willing and less able to resist their further encroachments.

Nature does not for long tolerate softness and indiscipline in man or in beast. Either we will free ourselves from Jewish influence and then restructure our society so as to make our race fit once again, or we will cease to exist as a race. This is a fact of life, and it is a fact that justifies whatever means are necessary, even the bloodiest and most radical means, to bring our people once again to moral health.

* * *

Source: Free Speech magazine, September 2001, Volume VII, Number 9

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