I have one point to bring up – if the emigrating ancestors of the ALT-Right people had met with a similar welcome to that which their kin are prepared to offer new arrivals, then Canada would be coast-to-coast Aboriginal, as would the U.S.A. and Mexico; as well as Central and South America, right on down to the tip of Patagonia. The Jews would have been barred from entering Canaan by the Canaanites (and several other *.ites). Sapiens, with all of its colours, cultures and convictions, might have remained crammed into the fertile deltas of the Tigris-Euphrates and the Indus.

But it did not turn out that way. Instead, adventurous humans, Abram-and-the-Gang, out of Ur, struck off in search of a better life for themselves, to wit: to live without fear and without want of the basic necessities of Life. Of course, none of them saw what they were doing as ‘evil.’ Most of them hadn’t a thought or care as to how their setting up shop in a new place was going to affect the species for whom that place was already home; how their search for a better life placed them in direct competition with the indigenous peoples/species who were naturally just as motivated to live as the newcomers….and so things often came down to ‘the survival of the fittest.’

The processes of expansion and home-building have been ongoing since the very beginnings of Life. All living things are driven BY THEIR NATURE to satisfy Life’s basic requirements for food, shelter, and security – these provisions being the definitive attributes of a home, regardless of the species that builds it.

Now, invariably, the eternal search sets one species in direct conflict with at least one other, or, in the case of us humans, with all other species, and even with one another.

When there are no new frontiers left to inhabit, as is the case today, societal expansion ends, or war begins, and the trend is for societies to turn inward upon themselves. The human body lacking nutrition will begin to consume itself; so too the social unit, once all external sources (such as those gained from expansion into new territories) are used up. With respect to humans, the progress of ‘turning inward’ reveals itself by the degree of their society’s fractionation into ‘us’ and ‘them’ – ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ This applies to community, national, and global society.

Societies tend to fractionate along the dimension of homebuilding – food, shelter, and security – since we are programmed, first and foremost, to be about building homes for ourselves. All species in Nature are programmed to behave the same way. Even the fetus in the womb follows this principle; attempting to exit via the birth canal when it runs out of room, to continue building itself (growing) elsewhere – if given the opportunity.

Once an economy fails to provide returns on a level to which the strong in a particular society are accustomed, this demographic will look to the weak within their societies for ‘growth’ opportunities. Given that what a region provides is in its measure finite, the expansion of the slice available to one group implies a commensurate reduction in what remains to be shared among all of the other groups.
Bad enough, but it gets worse: what accompanies and compounds the effect of a skewed wealth distribution is the skewing of opportunity in the same direction. Worse still:
It is natural process.

The skewing of opportunity to generate wealth will eventually concretize Canada into a splintered society of haves and have-nots -with very nearly all of the wealth concentrated among the haves. This will happen each and every time because it is natural process.

Given that wealth is society’s lifeblood, it must flow without impediment or disruption. We know what happens to our bodies if the flow of blood becomes disrupted, sporadic; or if blood is allowed to pool in spots, leaving other spots bloodless. Neither the pooling of blood or of wealth can be called immoral; but it is sure to result in society’s collapse, as surely as the individual whose blood inventory is largely in their legs is bound to collapse.

Canadians might by now be wondering if Canada’s best days are already in the past, if that is true, it is patently not because of immigration. It would be due to the pervasiveness of self-interest in today’s society. That is how we are able to turn a blind-eye to wealth inequality and poverty even when it has exceeded the most conservative notion of what is socially deleterious. This is what permits us to take a do-nothing stance even when it may have reached levels not seen since WWI.

Because the impetus to search for food, shelter, and safety is a feature of all species, these things must be satisfied before human individual and social fulfillment can be substantively realized. No society with a skewed wealth distribution can provide any of these at the necessary level. The greater the skew, the more society will turn upon itself, the more it fractionates, and the nearer the society is to collapse. The greater the tragedy -Canada is to me the front runner for becoming the world’s first truly multicultural society. And that is setting the world’s folks up for a wonderful future.

The rise of the Alt-Right is a warning to all of us that societies in which these movements exist could have progressed well into decline. Immigration is fingered by populists as the source of a national society’s malaise. It is not the immigrants. It is how the wealthier folks have exploited immigration, and because the returns on investment combined with extended low GDP growth and have already so skewed the distribution of national wealth that there are few opportunities left for citizens of the labour-class to replace or expand their income. See Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century for a thorough elucidation of this process. The loss of even one of those opportunities to a new-comer, because there are so few opportunities, becomes amplified exponentially.

In their search for cheaper labour, employers discredit the real advantages of immigration by using it to lower every labour-class Canadian’s expectations with respect to pay and working conditions. Nowadays, the ideal employee is too often someone who is prepared to work more hours for less money, for little to no benefits, tolerate horrendous working conditions and toxic exposure, and already trained to boot! This is done in the name of global competitiveness…but when every employer/investor in the world is doing it, it becomes a case of more money for investors, less money for everyone else.

Immigrants, for their part, are being true to human nature (given to them by god, not other people, don’t forget) in emigrating from a place where there is no opportunity for their families, to a place where there is. It is what brought every single human soul to this land. Immigration/migration is, after all, a Canadian tradition.

The world’s immigrants are being bamboozled just like Alt-Right subscribers are, by their own ruling classes. The ruling class of one nation obliges their citizens to emigrate by creating untenable conditions for them; the ruling class of the receiving nation obliges their own citizens to be happy with less, by hiring workers from outside and putting domestic and foreign workers in direct competition for too few job opportunities. If you are a global investor/employer, can you imagine a more perfect setup?

It is natural for anyone looking for a job to be resentful of the situation, but we must be careful where we lay the blame -if we do not properly identify the root causes, we cannot fix the problem. The problem is not immigration, it’s how wealth is distributed and how those among the wealthier group are exploiting immigration in order to become even wealthier.

Postscript – the end of the story

The root cause of social revolution: the labour-class’s inevitable response to being mined by their own kind.
The forces of scarcity become so strong that the weak become motivated out of their ‘comfort zones’ to action upon the ruling group. We’ve seen this over and over again. The trouble is, the group that takes over, to wit: the new ruling class, ends up behaving as antisocially as the group that was just ousted -only the names and faces have changed. The ruling group still exists. The ‘changing of the guard,’ normally accomplished at the price of unimaginable misery – ‘unimaginable’ unless you live in such times and aren’t born a generation later- simply and inevitably results in the same old – same old.
The ruled, or, as I prefer to call us, the labour class, having so little of the nation’s resources available for nurture, eventually collapses into anarchy and infighting…

…and as Canadian society tries to preserve whatever semblance of cohesion remains to it, it morphs into an oligarchic police state right under our noses.
All of this due to natural process – the existence and effects of which have been thoroughly explained to us, over and over, by the likes of Charles Darwin, Robert Ardrey,[i] and many other brilliant minds, throughout humanity’s sojourn. Trouble is, none of these truly brilliant minds ever seem to get into politics.
We have seen this over and over again, but we have not done what it would take for humankind to move beyond its ego and embrace a future of sustainable human social progress. Such a world, if humans are to be a part of it at all, would be one where humankind accepts the mandate which god has handed to us; a world in which we – Alt-Right people, immigrants and migrants included- accept the responsibility and joy of being the stewards of god’s Garden. As Edmund Burke observed, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Will we? Learn?

∞

[i] Check out Robert Ardrey’s Social Contract – a must read – also available on Kindle.