Keith Woods > Quotes

“Will someone’s loyalty to his close family be undermined if he is told that such loyalty is unearned? Of course not”
― Keith Woods, Nationalism: The Politics of Identity

“Revolutions require a condition where the masses are in a state of discontent and willing to mobilise, an elite that is opposed to the ruling elite, and a shared narrative to unite the elite and mass grievances which the alienated elites can use to mobilise the masses.”
― Keith Woods

“Most revolutions follow this pattern. Elites bifurcate, usually due to revolutionary economic or geopolitical shifts creating a new elite class, this new elite gather significant wealth and influence, but is frustrated by existing political arrangements. Eventually, it becomes clear the split cannot be resolved, and popular unrest — usually triggered by a financial crisis — finally gives the savvy among them the opportunity to draw on the masses and foment revolution.”
― Keith Woods

“Large-scale political orders also tend toward despotism and technocracy. By contrast, political theorists from Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Leopold Kohr emphasize that small-scale societies promote virtue, freedom, high culture, and diversity, both biological and cultural.”
― Keith Woods, Nationalism: The Politics of Identity

“Nationalism is rooted in sentiment, in feelings of love of one’s own: one’s family, one’s people, one’s homeland, along with its history and myths.”
― Keith Woods, Nationalism: The Politics of Identity

“Even if there were some kind of revolution from below, Western states are incredibly well equipped to deal with them. Conservatives comfort themselves with the knowledge that “we have the guns”, and this is true, but the state could easily deal with even a sizeable number of these people engaging in armed revolt. For years now, Western regimes have been turning their sights to the perceived threat of the right. In the United States, organisations like the FBI, CIA, DHS are heavily militarised and trained extensively in counter-terrorism. This is not to mention the enormous surveillance capabilities of the modern state, or the capacity to cut revolutionary movements off from the financial system. The disparity of powers is so great it seems absurd to even consider a serious domestic threat emerging to the state. We don’t even know all the techniques at its disposal in the event of having to subdue a large segment of its population, but we know it has directed large amounts of resources to dealing with this possibility.”
― Keith Woods

“Modern liberalism is constructed around a series of “luxury beliefs” — viewpoints which come at no personal cost to them and are held primarily to signal virtue and status, but have potentially severe consequences for other members of society.”
― Keith Woods

“They (bureaucrats) are generally quite comfortable economically, meaning they can afford “luxury beliefs.” They don’t have to worry about immigrants taking their jobs, and there are few pressing concerns in their private lives that would make them sympathetic to populist politics. Why should that”
― Keith Woods, Nationalism: The Politics of Identity

“Modern globalist civilization is failing to create more humans because it's fundamentally inhuman, misanthropic, and hostile to human life at any age. The very fact that its administrators only understand the crisis of people not having children through the lens of consumer spending, pension funding, and bond market speculation modeling speaks to its inhumanity”
― Keith Woods