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Sometimes a very ordinary thing can remind you of an extraordinary thing. Recently, I was dealing with a salesperson who was bidding a job I needed done. He underbid (by his own reasoning), and he approached me halfway through the job to ask for more money. Mind you, this wasn't a contract job. For all intents and purposes, call it a thousand-dollar job: some shit I needed done but simply ran out of time to do as we are heading into this current season.

I thought about the concept of fairness, as in, what's reasonable to ask. When he approached me asking for twice the amount of money he originally bid, I thought it was dishonorable. There are just certain things that one person can do to another, or ask from them, which seem 'low'. You know what these things are when you think to yourself, "I'd never do X."

If X is something like going back on your initial offer and asking for an unreasonable amount extra, and if X is dishonorable, then X would be the kind of thing that you'd not want other people to know that you did. If I had been this laborer, I'd be embarrassed (and possibly financially harmed) if my customer (me, in this case) was to go around town telling other people about it.

But this entire phenomenon, in itself, is a very good thing. A society should have this kind of 'immune reaction' to what is dishonorable. A person who is transacting with someone else in a generally honorable community will think about his actions. He will think about whether what he is doing is honorable or not.

If you take this ingredient out of a society, things are bound to get worse.

I recall, at various times in the past, listening to people defend Jews by making sociocultural cases about their proclivity for 'haggling'. They just have balls, right. They are just cunning negotiators. They aren't afraid to push people's envelopes. The concept is generally called chutzpah, which just refers to the boldness to push people's boundaries. I thought, there's something insidious about this notion. What figment of a groups social fabric says what the floor is? What's the lowest someone can go? Does chutzpah mean you can go as low as you want, if it works? It seems like there needs to be some faculty working in a social group that acts like a self-regulator, which sets a level below which no 'honorable' person will go (else risk the consequences of being known as dishonorable).

Conflict is a fact of life. I don't mean what we typically mean by conflict (fights, politics, wars, arguments, etc.). By conflict, I mean simple differences in interest that anyone transacting in a society is forced to navigate. There are infinite interests and desires, and limited resources to satisfy them. Foundational economics. The seller wants something from me. I want something from him. If he's my neighbor, what's the right way to manage these ordinary conflicts so that, generally, we don't feel always under attack within our own society, constantly walking around with suspicious eyes and defenses activated? What preserves a sense of regularity, safety and stability as an individual, even when our society constantly involves these kinds of conflicts at every turn?

I think the answer has to be: honor.

Honor is what makes us confident that, even though there are people who properly need to take some things from me in this society, and there are things I need to get from them, that I don't have to be threatened (in the sense where I'm constantly uneasy) all of the time. Honor makes me confident that people are going to be highly conscientious about how they do things, including how we handle transactions, how and how much you ask from me, and what's respectable to reciprocate with. It does this, majorly, by determining what's off limits, i.e. what's dishonorable to do or ask for.

If you need something done and you offer to pay $500 for it, and this is a reasonable amount, it's dishonorable for someone to ask for twice that amount of money. It's dishonorable not to complete what you said you would complete. It's dishonorable to change your terms after they've been agreed upon, generally.

But we see, quite clearly, that what amounts to honor at this ordinary level (we might say at the level of the 'small') emerges as something more important, by orders of magnitude, as it scales up within a society. That is, as you begin to sum all of the small things into something much larger.

It seems to me that one aspect of culture which the Jews lack is honor. It might be the most basic (most primitive and foundational) aspect of social relations, which is utterly absent in the Jewish way of doing things.

With their principled chutzpah, it's a race to the bottom. Who can set the bar the lowest? Furthermore, this lack of basic honor at the individual level transmits to race-wide anxiety at the level of their group. It's often remarked that the Jew is very ethnocentric. Nepotism is rampant in their practices. I think this is, at best, an appearance. No Jew trusts another Jew, because they know all of their peers are mutually in a race toward the bottom. Survival of the thriftiest. There can be no mutual value for self-sacrifice in company which, recognizing the self-sacrifice of others, takes it as the stink of weakness and exploits it to crush that person. The necessary value of self-sacrifice is absent in such a crowd, because there is no honor.

Imagine that the Jews are a people huddled in a lifeboat. It might look as if the rest of us are currently fragmented as a group, each of us floating on our separate raft or plank of wood. But the mass of Jews huddled in their nepotistic lifeboat is in a precarious position because of their lack of honor. Their eyes are constantly scanning, from side to side, assessing each of his other Jews, predicting which one of them will be the first to sell the others out. Who is going to fuck me first? Their lifeboat is unfathomably tense, and their anxiety unrelenting. Such is the social effect of a society with no room for honor.

But honor is a tricky thing. It's hard to define. I'd be very interested if any of you reading this (all two of you) could try to define what honor is, leaving a comment or whatever.

Honor seems precariously difficult to preserve in a society. At least one reason for this is because honor is a two-way street. Not only do you have to shame or cast out the dishonorable, but so too you must preserve your own honor. Inevitably this requires self-sacrifice, for if an honorable person sees a dishonorable person benefitting in one instance, then to maintain his own honor, he must not associate with the dishonorable person - even if it might mean a direct benefit to him, should he associate with that person.

This seems to be the bottom which has fallen out of our society. A good deal of people might, on reflection, say some practices are dishonorable, but it's not affecting their choices. It's every man for himself. If you aren't getting punished for dishonor, because your society doesn't implicitly enforce it, then go ahead, go profit by associating with the dishonorable. Oh, that producer of porn is making a mint? Hell, who cares where you get your money. . .as long as you have it, that's all that counts. Go and see what you can make of your time with that porn-producer. Get it while the gettin' is good!

And slowly, without honor, we see that all-important Trust begin to wane in our society. Our anxiety grows, until we are anxious as a Jew. We no longer trust the landscape for conflict is governed by honor. We instead perceive that, even in our own nation, we are in a sea of sharks, all in a race to push us to the bottom dollar. We can't be confident that people are going to do reasonable things, and make reasonable requests from it, but rather our confidence grows that people will take as much meat off the bone as we'll permit, before we slap their hands. But it is precisely this. . .this feeling that we must always be slapping our neighbors hands, which erodes our sense that we even live among neighbors any longer.

I think that a society must have honor, and honor must be healthy and active. And a society that is to be honorable, cannot allow a group within its ranks whose narrow set of strategies all have dishonor as their hallmark. A healthy society cannot permit itself to live alongside a group for whom dishonorable practices is their stock and trade. It might feel capitalistic, and for the libertarian-minded folk, it will ring of 'free markets' and 'invisible hands'. But the real invisible hand's wrist is honor. And keeping a strong wrist is the job of each person in a society.

The invisible hand of the liberally free market wants to break its own wrist. Honor is like the other hand that holds it steady.

The Jew, by its nature as a people, thrives exclusively by a strategy of loosening the grip of the hand of honor, hoping that the wrist of your economy's invisible hand will go limp.