What to read? (Part 5) A White Character Survey: Envy in Politics and Literature (Part 1)

Théodore Géricault, “Envious woman,” oil 1822

Among Europeans, since antiquity, envy and jealousy have been main driving forces in the political process, resulting in a treasure trove of different literary genres. All European languages make a fine distinction between envy and jealousy, although both notions often overlap. The Germans have an additional nuanced word for this character aberration, i.e. “Schadenfreude,” a compound noun literally meaning when someone rejoices over someone else’s bad luck.

Today, the notion of schadenfreude may apply to Whites who savor the professional failure of their racial next-of-kin. Schadenfreude has been for centuries a dominant feature among White intellectuals, rulers and politicians, although for obvious reasons, none of them has ever been eager to publicly admit this character defect. Outbursts of poorly concealed envy can be observed today among a number of White nationalists, White self-appointed leaders, and White spokesmen, faking sympathy and compassion for their better-skilled rivals on the one hand, yet gleefully gloating in private over their next-of-kin’s minor faux pas on the other. Over the last half a century envy and jealousy have been the prime reason for the lack of unity among so-called White movements and parties in Europe and the USA.

The most glaring case study of the destructive envy can be observed today among individuals critical of celebrity billionaire Donald Trump and his beautiful wife and intelligent, attractive children, who in turn are now being assaulted by a lethal barrage of pathological envy and jealousy, not only by predictable envy-ridden non-White detractors, but also by more intelligent, jealous White rivals. The late French-Romanian philosopher of gloom and doom, Emile Cioran, a household name among Alt-Right and New-Right intellectuals and sympathizers, describes political rivalry as just another shorthand for the envy contest.

More or less all humans are envious; politicians are absolutely envious. One becomes envious insofar as one can’t stand anybody next to himself or above himself.  Engaging oneself in a project, a project of any kind, even the most trivial one, means sacrificing oneself to envy — the supreme prerogative of all humans (French original, p. 1009).

Beware of White Friends

Undoubtedly the self-perception of Whites differs substantially from the perception of Whites by non-Whites. There is ample empirical evidence showing the lines of cognitive demarcation and IQ difference between different races, thus slowly but surely refuting the modern dogma of racial equality. But what about ingroup rivalry resulting in envy and hostility between two White equals? To make matters worse even the most intelligent, the most cultivated, the least biased White man of strong character and of impeccable civic virtues, may become at times a victim of trendy power delusions, which in turn makes him a nuisance to his kind and ruins the community he lives in. Witness the timeless Shakespeare’s character Macbeth, becoming belatedly aware of the nullity of royal life without progeny, and who had turned from being a virtuous man into a mass killer.

Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my grip,
Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand[1]

Due to the impossibility of quantifying someone’s character, the subject of character flaw still remains an uncharted field for racial theorists, aka “political anthropologists.”  The late German anthropologist Ludwig Clauss, whose works were quite influential in Weimar and later on in National Socialist Germany, dismisses the idea that Whites are endowed with better character than non-Whites. Advocating racial difference should by no means amount to setting up a scale of White character compared to non-Whites, nor attributing White European notions of good vs. evil to non-Europeans. It is precisely the modern millenarians, egalitarians and multiculturalists who use this implicit discriminatory procedure against non-Whites: dismissing the race factor and advocating miscegenation on the one hand, while simultaneously resorting in all fields of life to White man’s standards on the other. Non-Europeans flooding Europe, or for that matter “Black lives matter” movements in America, are only able to gain self-legitimacy because they have been previously turned into subjects of victimization and self-pity by their self-hating White patrons.

To be Nordic, for example, does not mean to be a good man or a noble man. Not every Nordic man embodies Nordic values.  A man of the Nordic style can also be a crook or a criminal. A Nordic miscreant differs from a Mediterranean, Alpine, or a Middle Eastern miscreant as clearly as a righteous Nordic man differs in this sense from righteous people of those races.

To single out White miscreants is not difficult. One can always rely on the safe passages of comparative literature with its overcrowded gallery of White saints and White con men. Again and again we see the role of political and religious sentiments, the obsession with one’s self-appointed grandeur, let alone a genetic proclivity to lying or intellectual pilfering, or congenital melancholy, or inborn bent to suicidal cultural nihilism or philosophical pessimism. Or better yet, someone’s inherited tendency for hallucinatory spells about an abstract communistic Brave New World.

These are only a few among numerous character flaws that need closer reconsideration by evolutionary psychologists. Character flaws or strengths, unlike cognitive skills, or IQ, cannot by measured in numbers, nor can they be quantified by equations. In order to partially grasp the deep-hidden character defects among Whites one is obliged to resort to metaphor and literature more than to mathematics. The bloody in-group wars between Whites, starting from the mythical Trojan war, all the way to incessant inter-White bloodletting in Europe, and then to the relatively more recent carnage linked to the inter-White War of Secession in America, followed by the recent gory Spanish civil war, and the latest conflict among ex-Yugoslavia’s peoples — these internecine wars have all proved to be far more savage than all the past wars fought by Whites against non-Whites combined.  Genetic proximity and racial kinship amongst Whites are in no way a guarantee for the absence of jealousy, bickering and wars, which, to be sure, in the eyes of non-Whites, are often seen as the main trademark of the Western civilization. Age-long infighting between Whites, be it on a family, local or a global level, must be surely looked at with a great deal of bemusement by incoming masses of non-White migrants.

In the Gallery of Saints and Con Men

The Judaic god Yahweh is a jealous god (Exodus 20:5), which he himself openly admits and brags about on several occasions.  He is by definition a totalitarian god who tolerates no other gods and by extension must reject any alternative version of truth, as well as all other systems of belief. His chosen people, just like himself, are therefore required to be jealous and vindictive, dismissing any form of critical introspection when residing amidst a host nation — as decreed by Moses in Deuteronomy. Yahweh is a far cry from the down-to-earth gods and goddesses in Homer’s Iliad, who take frequent turns at jealousy, fooling each other, cheating with each other’s spouses or siding up with opposing warring parties — yet never, ever holding lengthy grudges against each other. Achilles spiritual protector was the war goddess Athena; his military rival Hector had the god Apollo as his guardian and guiding spirit.

In ancient Rome and Greece, vanquished tribes were often subjected to terrible physical ordeals, albeit with one notable exception: neither the Greek nor the Roman armies ever thought about imposing their own systems of belief on the vanquished. The gods, myths, lies, verities, or narratives of the vanquished were left intact. With the rise of Christianity, envy, jealousy and self-righteousness, handed down by the Jewish religious ukases in the form of the 10th Commandment, although brandishing envy as a major sin, had brought instead the White character flaws to their deadly paroxysm.

It would be silly to argue that sentiments of envy and jealousy were nonexistent in ancient pagan Rome. Those inborn, creeping, lowlife features of human behavior have always been common to our White ancestors, as seen in countless examples of bloody strife and civil war, stretching from ancient Greece and Rome all the way to the present times. The school of Stoicism, however, with its most illustrious thinker Seneca, tried to set up some character strengthening devices in order to tame the feelings of envy. Blind discriminatory nature, however crucial it is in man’s phylogenesis, can hardly dispense with harsh and disciplined nurture.

Each man, according to his lot in life, is stultified by flattery.  We should say to him who flatters us: “You call me a man of sense, but I understand how many of the things which I crave are useless, and how many of the things which I desire will do me harm.  

Seneca’s answer to aping sycophants in his entourage is simple: the less we crave for fame the less we shall be envious of our look-alikes. Another heavyweight philosopher of doom and gloom, highly popular among scores of White nationalists and conservative thinkers, Arthur Schopenhauer, writes in his famed Chapter “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life”:

An indirect but certain proof of the fact that men feel themselves unhappy, and consequently are so, is also abundantly afforded by the fearful envy which dwells in us all, and which in all relations of life, on the occasion of any superiority, of whatever kind it may be, is excited, and cannot contain its poison. Because they feel themselves unhappy, men cannot endure the sight of one whom they imagine happy.

Probably Schopenhauer should have titled this chapter of his “the ode to death,” given that throughout the chapter he raves about the “blind will” causing ceaseless envy, only  to end up in dismal despair. Neither could he hide his own immense envy against his contemporary rival, the philosopher Friedrich Hegel whose entire philosophy he derisively calls “Hegelei,” and who stole from him much of his craved academic glitz and glory during and after his lifetime.  Why him, why not me? — these are timeless haunting questions hovering over all of us.

In the gallery of the envious one stumbles upon the inevitable late medieval poet Dante voyaging in his purgatory kingdom of the blind where shadows of the deceased are obliged to cleanse off their character flaws by having their eyes sewn shut with lead. Dante’s infernal allegories in his epics were a carbon copy of the hellhole of thirteenth-century northern Italy where religious and ideological fervor and serial slaughters between the imperial-minded Ghibellines and the papists Guelfs reigned supreme. A wretched character whom Dante meets during his passage through Purgatory tells him:

My blood was so with envy set on fire,
That if I had beheld a man make merry,
Thou wouldst have seen me sprinkled o’er with pallor.

Similar feelings of envy resulting in mass killings, once akin to warring Ghibellines and Guelfs in medieval Europe, have gradually morphed into the proverbial hatred between European Left and Right, taking on today their finite form in the clash between the modern pontiffs of Antifascism and Multiculturalism and modern racial nationalists. Dante’s dismal premonitions were to be echoed seven hundred years later by his best disciple, the poet Ezra Pound, whose own apocalyptic Cantos where framed on the model of those of his medieval teacher, presaging his own intellectual and political proscription in the newly established post-World War II world. Pound’s gallery of the envious is manifest in the verses he wrote right on the eve of Europe’s breakdown:

… And then I slept
And, waking in the wasted air,
Saw and heard thus –
He whom I saw seemed like a cavalier,
And I heard this:
“Watching my people die
Does not satisfy
even if they broke their word,
Even if they deserve
to be governed by King Turd.
|Roosevelt, Churchill and Eden
bastards to a man,
Liar, Jew and glutton..
have squeezed the people dry
like sheep!

To be continued.
Dr.Tom Sunic has authored several books.

[1] Modern translation: They gave me a crown and a scepter that I can’t pass on. Someone outside my family will take these things away from me, since no son of mine will take my place as king.