Taki's Mag

Queen Rania of Jordan

Philosophy is a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we’re professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality-TV performers, or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Takimag I wrote about Nasser’s Egypt, I forgot to mention that the reason Nasser was so wildly popular with the people was because he was totally incorruptible—as rare as a virgin in a harem where Arab politics is concerned. He lived simply and didn’t even give his family a side-road banana concession—very unlike Mubarak and the rest of the crooks in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

Having established that honesty is a virtue even in Egypt, I will now take you to the wilder reaches of philosophy as applied to real life. I always write about the past because I’m afflicted with “anamnesis,” the opposite of amnesia, the latter a condition suffered by all of the world’s dictators and then some. Queen Rania of Jordan is quite a dish but has obviously not read my Greek colleague Aristotle. (More about old Ari in a jiffy.) European royal friends of mine had commented on how Rania got started on the right foot by asking advice and playing humble, but she quickly reverted to type once inside the castle, a not uncommon state of being known as “Lookatmi” among us philosophers. Living an extravagant lifestyle in a country such as Jordan is the equivalent of sniffing an ounce of pure Bolivian and attending a Tibetan monks’ gathering where silence and meditation is all.

It’s bound to attract attention and disapproval. Rania is a Palestinian lass who funnels business to her family—unheard of in the Arab world—and pulls rank on her subjects, also unheard of. Last summer she threw a party for her fortieth in southern Jordan for 600 of her closest. Most guests were straight out of HELLO!’s pages, which is par for the course. Rania’s amnesia for a party thrown by the Shah at Persepolis nearly 40 years ago should have come to her mind. No one likes parties more than me, but it depends where one gives them. When poor Palestinians comprise close to 70 percent of one’s population and you are surrounded by enemies such as Syria, Iraq, and yes, Israel, flashy parties are not recommended.

But back to Aristotle. He taught that all citizens should strive for civic virtue and excellence. The word “idiot” is derived from the Greek idiotis, meaning a private person. An individual. In other words, not partaking in politics means one’s an idiot. To the ancient Greeks, politics was always an art as well as a science. Aristotle and Immanuel Kant were born more than 2,000 years apart, and come to think of it, Jesus was born in between, but all three men basically said the same thing: One has to be a moral person to be a good citizen, and good citizens work together for a better world (Philosopher Taki’s Categorical Imperative).

Think, dear readers. Aristotle, Jesus, Kant, and many more after them preached virtue and morality, yet in the developed world, the ghastly shrinks have turned selfishness into a virtue, and Lookatmi has become the be-all and end-all of our existence. Recently in Davos such smiling wallet-lifters as Bill Clinton, George Soros, and Larry Summers paraded themselves—at a very high price, mind you—dispensing financial and moral advice to the rest of the peasants, advice that they ensure us will make us all rich and famous and featured in HELLO! Magazine quicker than you can say, “Madoff.”

One of the most prominent Athenian statesmen was Lycurgus—an old pupil of Plato’s and a contemporary of Aristotle’s—who professed to be a democrat despite casting a friendly eye toward Spartan ideals. Lycurgus had a regard to the propertied classes’ interests and was described as a financier with a moral mission. It might sound like an oxymoron today, but a state needs both the propertied classes (the capitalists) as well as the martial classes (the Spartans). What a state does not need are the money-shufflers, those billionaires who create and build nothing while enjoying the profits from others’ work. I mean the Soroses, Kravises, Abramoviches, and other such jackals who know how to shift money around and how to bet which weakling will go down next.

Which brings me to what French philosopher Guillaume Faye calls pathological individualism syndrome. The patriotic and brave American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor recently featured Faye in AR. Because our rulers think only about the individual—and not about nation or race—they promote policies at home and raise armies to fight abroad which one day will see our children attacked by the very policies these con men have foisted upon us. Everyone not busy watching the grotesque Simon Callow knows that Africa has lost her traditional societies and is incapable of replacing them with anything that is not squalid and cruel. The Middle East is almost as bad. Yet this world’s Tony Blairs and Bill Clintons insist that flooding old Europe with Turks, Middle Easterners, Pakistanis, Bengalis, and Africans—people who reproduce at ten times our rate—is a valid expression of human solidarity. Multimillionaire celebrities and other demented do-gooders want our taxes to subsidize reckless breeding in our midst, and we—like the proverbial sheep to the slaughter—go along with it. If Taki the philosopher had his way, most of the baddies I mentioned above would be jailed as enemies of the state of Europe. We’d start with the Brussels thieves playing dictator, then Blair, Bush, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright—Richard Holbrooke did the correct thing and dropped dead—the whole kit and kaboodle. Albright’s favorite, Kosovo head Hashim Thaçi, was and is a drugs dealer but also sells human organs. We took his side against Christian Serbs. Pathological altruism is what the good professor Faye calls the desire to become extinct.