Recently I wrote about a quick and dirty but very effective way of analyzing moral claims: Know them by the company they keep. It applies the birds of a feather theory: like attracts like. Bad guys and good guys associate with similar types. You’ve seen that in your daily life for sure.

But geo-politically there’s another metric, another useful tool.

That heuristic, that method focuses on backward versus forward thinking. We can judge the morality and indeed the prospects of individuals and groups by their time orientation.

I’ll discuss this on an international scale shortly, but first, let’s look locally. In American politics, both extreme conservative factions and far-left elements glorify their respective versions of an idealized past.

Both groups often appeal to less informed voters, who might not have access to the full range of information needed to critically evaluate these nostalgic narratives.

How? Republicans long for the 1950s, an unrepeatable era of social hierarchy and consumer plenty: they erroneously find “the answer” to be the social hierarchies of the times. But nobody is going back to their “good ol’ days”.

Lefties, differing in which golden era they fetishize go back in time even further and hold up “indigenous ways of knowing/being”: the noble savage. For both brands of midwit the grass was always greener yesterday – just pick which yesterday best fits your aesthetic preferences.

For example, consider the assertion from some leftist quarters: ‘Indigenous knowledge is science.’ While it differs significantly from Western scientific methods, it encompasses a broad range of ecological and practical knowledge that has sustained cultures for centuries. Their indigenous creationism, spiritualism and “vitalism” is entertainingly eviscerated by a real scientist, Professor Richard Dawkins who counters with: “Indigenous bollocks is still bollocks”. 

The faith community, that bubbling fountain of bad ideas are Olympians of yearning for yesterday. Catholics harken to some past “pure” era. Ever more deranged as always in the derangement stakes, fundamentalist Islamists are proud – no, really proud – that an earnest desire to reproduce in every respect the era of the Prophet Muhammed of the Seventh Century is the ultimate route to paradise. They wish to govern today along the lines of those days down to not just the ancient texts but they even evince a will to dictate the length of pant legs for men, veils for women, FGM, and remarkably strict toilet practices. Because “the Time of the Prophet… was better,” apparently.

On a smaller scale, still in the “faith community” – when the devout don’t have the numbers to impose their views on society the Amish valorize 1830-1840, and not a moment before or after and Hassidic Jews adore 19th century Hungary for some reason.

Where can we even start chipping away at this international, inter-generational stupidity, this historical fraudulence and ignorance?

What goes for backwards religion also goes for backwards international politics and the secular stories nations tell themselves.

We see this metric of forwards verses backward thinking again and again and it is helpful in our analysis and hopefully our rejection of various ideologies.

In our current age we can ask who is backwards looking? We have Islamists (see above) in the Islamic Republic of Iran representing the apotheosis of this. We also see Russia’s harkening back to deep history as explained by amateur professor of history Vladimir Putin who, with incredible ignorance of what foreigners are actually interested in, held forth for the first half hour of his recent global airtime (with Tucker Carlson) with complicated (and wrong) historical arguments. All backwards looking, note.

Who cares if he’s right even on the merits? Who cares if 700 years ago Volodomir of the Kievan Rus’ did whatever to the Golden Horde, or that the Lithuanian or Swedish empires double-buggered their neighbors?

Forward looking people, people with a future don’t care: because they know that emotionally satisfying nostalgia is a retarded worldview.

There is a positive dynamic that winners adopt and it is the forward looking view: it is the ideas of the Enlightenment as put into practice by the greater American project and, not coincidentally, the original Zionist ideals. Of Thomas Payne, Hume, Hertzl. A future orientation is deeply burnt into modern secular American capitalism, our foreign policy, and secular Jewish philosophy.

The main orientation is forward for all“Next Year in Jerusalem” Israelis and “Morning in America” Americans. It is this future orientation that makes Israel the most successful country in the Middle East by every metric you care to measure, for Jews and Arabs. And it has made America the main superpower.

In Israel (and the US, Australia, Netherlands, etc.) future orientation involves embracing the rationally mediated future: betting on low taxes, an entrepreneur class encouraged, enlightenment values, open societies, freedom for people to build their own lives and families: even if those structures aren’t necessarily “traditional”.

Plainly we see which orientation works: backwards looking or forwards looking. The USA and Israel are forward looking: ISIS, Iran and Russia’s orientations always harken back to the “good ol’ days.”

The dream of the 1965, USSR-produced “Palestine” as a state and people is entirely backward looking, built on a non-existent, fictional history. Like Putin’s aggrieved Russia and ISIS’s embattled caliphate, “Palestine” is based on a phony, manufactured past.

The losers of this and last century are obvious: the Russias, the Irans, the Communist type of Chinese, the G.o.P. and the cray-cray wing of the Democrats and socialists: they’re ALL about yesterday’s battles. They’re obsessed with yesterday’s injuries and hurts via the supposed but imaginary purity of the good ol’ days and the wisdom of the ancients.

Wisdom of the ancients is hilarious because “the ancients” – your ancestors and mine, were toothless, illiterate, dung encrusted scoundrels who didn’t know where the sun went at night or to not poo in their own drinking water. There’s your “ancient wisdom”.

Coherence isn’t necessary for yesterday’s heroes: just a deep well of victimhood, aggrievement, revenge, revanchism and jihad.

These, and the murder of millions of Israeli Jews and their Arab “collaborators” (Arab Israeli citizens) are the “Palestinian Dream”. A more negative, anti-human, factually flawed meta-story would require powerful computers to make up.

Contrast this with individual Palestinian immigrants to the West who have better motivations, who routinely flourish in their various countries of emigration because like immigrants everywhere they’re… you guessed it…. future oriented.

Here’s the difference in temporal orientation writ big:

Those who worship and reconstruct the fictional past as grievance say:“Look what they did to us! See this injustice we’ve exhumed, examine this ancient injury, pick this long healed scab, sniff this stinky wound! Where is our revenge for these past wrongs?”

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…the future oriented who say: Whatever is in the past, good and bad, these are the cards we are dealt for whatever reason: how can we build a future with these cards we hold?

Race baiting entrepreneurs, frauds all, the Kendis, Di Algelos and their entire DEI complex even try to invent and import new grievances of the distant past, slavery say, or Hindu “caste prejudice” via biologically impossible and preposterous concepts like “intergenerational trauma” to today’s world.

When the hurt doesn’t exist, like the fact-free notion of the Palestinian“Nakhba” which was invented after Oslo in 1993!, just make up your grievances to fit. Make them up from whole cloth or just backdate ‘em.

The winners of tomorrow, of peace, prosperity and freedom are those who understand the past and teach it as history. And learn its lessons as history.

Winners …. are future facing.