Individualism/Collectivism

Seeing Some Old Friends and Acquaintances

Going to a gathering of old friends and acquaintances is always sort of bittersweet. The sweet part is seeing the friends and getting some positive attention rather than a lot of negative attention as I have become accustomed to when not around people who are already on board. The sad part is contemplating the political implications. I can only conclude that the vast majority of my generation are completely clueless about our issues—White identity and interests, Jewish power and its consequences, and multiculturalism combined with mass non-White immigration and its consequences—consequences that are apparent to anyone paying attention and looking at the available information. Instead, they are far more interested in their families (especially women)—how many children and grandchildren do you have?—and in sports (mostly men)—I got a quick refresher course in all the local teams. Their media were things like MSNBC, Meet the Press, and the local newspaper—all Left-liberal. To the extent that they care at all, their opinions reflect these media sources. A couple people dropped hints to being conservative, but I didn’t hear anything that seemed to offer a glimmer of hope that they had been red-pilled.

To the extent that they care at all. The reality is that huge numbers of people are not really all that interested in politics. They care far more about their careers, their leisure activities, their families, and dealing with everyday life.  Voter turnout for the 2020 election was around 67% if you believe the narrative in an election that was engineered to be insecure under the cover of the Covid scare.  This means millions of people didn’t bother to vote. And many people who did vote know next to nothing about the issues or how the government works. And far too many can be easily swayed by sophisticated political advertising funded by activist billionaires, many of whom are Jews who have contributed the bulk of the money for the Democrats and far too much to ignore for the Republicans.

And they are economically comfortable, so you hear a lot about second homes and leisure travel to far-off places. Many of them are religious and at least some of their politics is religiously motivated. And the great majority are overweight and out of shape—sort of easing into old age and the supposed inevitability of decline.

I can’t even imagine trying to proselytize to them. It’s like they are on the other side of the moon. Where would you start? I suppose you could suggest some reading, some podcasts, or internet sites, but their first reaction is likely bewilderment and even moral outrage, and it would be hard to get past that. It’s hard to get past that because the default way that White people evaluate political issues—especially if they are on the Left and especially among women—is very often moral. Moral judgments are deeply intertwined with emotion and with personal identity. Facts become irrelevant. The whole point of the vast literature depicting victimization of non-Whites and gender minorities is based on inculcating moral revulsion by depicting particularly egregious examples of White misbehavior—like the way the media framed the George Floyd incident. So you are in a deep hole to start with. Exposing them to the realities, say, of Black IQ and short time perspective would be met with blank stares followed by moral revulsion. Forget about citing data.

And of course they are insulated from the effects of the ongoing disaster. They live in suburbs, small cities, or rural areas. I saw maybe one or two non-Whites the entire visit until I got to the big-city airports. Their media doesn’t cover issues like the surge in illegal immigration, crime in the cities, and much else. Re immigration, the arrival of 2–3 million illegals in the past year is an issue that would never even be mentioned in the mainstream liberal-Left media. Gov. DeSantis’s strategy of shipping needy illegals off to sanctuary cities like New York, DC, and Chicago is great and is certainly resulting in the entire gamut of mainstream media covering the issue (with—surprise!—moral revulsion on the Left [human trafficking!!] and gleeful coverage on Fox News).  Better is sending illegals to smaller places like Martha’s Vineyard that wear their sanctuary status as a moral badge and are suddenly confronted with an influx of people in need of social services—certainly not something that well-heeled liberals should ever have to endure, even if jobs are available. The migrants DeSantis sent to the Vineyard were of course dispatched elsewhere by the national guard within a couple days during which the Vineyardians claim to have been greatly enriched.

This may wake up some Whites to what is going on at the border and may well help the GOP in November, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the ongoing, decades-long replacement of the White population via legal and illegal immigration. The electoral replacement of Whites is essentially irreversible at this point barring a political cataclysm—and to be sure, there is no shortage of talk about a civil war.  (The Left, which always plays for keeps, is well advanced in purging the military and security agencies in anticipation of such an eventuality.) But even assuming the GOP benefits enough to do well in November, it doesn’t change the reality that the GOP is worse than useless as far as seriously trying to change the present trajectory. (It’s the same in Sweden where a conservative coalition will form a government but exclude the further-right Sweden Democrats, whose main issue is immigration and its disastrous effects, from ministerial positions. The cordon sanitaire in Europe is alive and well.)

So I have to say it’s not looking good right now. Most White people need to get hit over the head to get them to change at all—which is why the strategy of some GOP governors to ship illegals to sanctuary jurisdictions makes political sense. But again, the GOP has a long record of being worse than useless.

Some Psychology  

Speaking of hitting people over the head with issues that affect them, there is evidence, summarized in Ch. 8 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, that White people informed that they will soon be a minority (another issue that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media except for a few examples of Leftist triumphalism) tend to adopt more conservative attitudes. I suppose this is positive because in the long run, the disastrous consequences of the current direction of the West will be apparent to ever-increasing numbers of White people.

But of course, there are a lot of countervailing psychological forces in play, also discussed in the above-mentioned book and all related to the unique Western tradition of individualism. Chief among these is that the social glue of Western societies is based on establishing moral communities rather than communities based on kinship (e.g., clan-type cultures or groups, such as Jewish groups, with high levels of ethnocentrism resulting in strong ingroup identifications and negative attitudes toward outgroups). (The uniqueness of Western individualism, our relative lack of ethnocentrism, and our lack of social organization based on extensive kinship are also a theme of Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.) The moral communities of the West are a powerful force for social cohesion. Westerners are peculiarly prone to feeling guilt for contravening the moral attitudes of their cultures. In the environments we evolved in, violating the moral sensibilities of the group was an evolutionary dead end. So my old friends and acquaintances going along with the current anti-White zeitgeist are simply conforming to the morally tinged messages of suffering minorities and evil Whites they see every day in their media.

In the contemporary West, these moral communities are created by the messages disseminated by the media and the academic world—top-down control of culture processed by our higher brain centers able to inhibit evolved tendencies, e.g., toward ingroup racial identity. And at this time people are inundated with messages that race doesn’t exist, that all groups have the same genetic potential and are only held back by White racism, etc. And of course, there are huge incentives for going along with these ideas and increasingly dire penalties to those who voice opposition.

Women are particularly prone to the primacy of moral attitudes in politics. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this—personality differences related to being higher on nurturance and love important for rearing children and cementing long-term relationships, but for women in individualist cultures it means also being empathic to the suffering non-Whites they see in the media which can easily lead to pathological altruism, such as after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. And of course there is no shortage of men who have the same reaction.

It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue. [Should Haiti Be Rebuilt]

There are also sex differences in proneness to fear and desire for safety, with women higher. As they say, there is safety in numbers, so going along with the views of the majority of your moral community offers protection, whereas going against such views may have a variety of negative consequences—form getting fired from your job or getting ostracized from friends and family. And these days, a reincarnation of the gulag for political dissenters in the West is a real possibility and is already a reality in much of the West where there are no Constitutional guarantees of free speech.  The Left, which once championed free speech, is now adamantly opposed to free speech on sensitive topics like race and multiculturalism. And throughout the West, the views championed by elites in control of the mainstream media and the judicial system conform entirely to the anti-White zeitgeist. There’s a natural tendency to look up to elites—and to fear their power. We live in an oligarchy presiding over a faux democracy.

These lock-step moral communities produce a hive-mind, cult-like mentality. Tobias Langdon provides a particularly graphic example of the hive mind based on moral certitude and illustrated by constant virtue-signaling. Quoting a Guardian columnist attending a book fair:

You will never meet a group of people more consistent in their views, and not because most of them also go to the same pilates class. Every man jack of them voted remain [on Brexit], and they are considerably more leftwing than those at any meeting of any political party. … The audience absolutely hate being politically misidentified, and they spend those first 10 minutes desperately signalling, with spontaneous clapping and foot-stamping, to indicate that nobody hates the [the “conservative” Conservative] government more than they. … The atmosphere, it probably goes without saying, is electrifying.

So we are up against it. But never say die. The future cannot be predicted.

Pakistani Collectivist Political Culture at the Root of the Rotherham Pathology

An article from the Daily Telegraph points up ethnic differences in political culture that enabled the horror that unfolded in Rotherham (Rotherham: politics ‘imported from Pakistan’ fuelled sex abuse cover-up – MP). Although we at TOO have stressed the pathology of the White community for not prosecuting industrial-scale rape of White British children by Pakistani males for fear of being labeled a “racist,” it goes without saying that the Pakistani community must bear ultimate responsibility.

Part of the Pakistani pathology was that such large numbers of men would engage in such behavior. But in addition, the industrial-scale rape of children had to have been common knowledge within the Pakistani community because of the large numbers of men involved.

Nevertheless, nothing was done to stop it. As Tobias Langdon notes, White sex criminals do their deeds secretly and in private because they are well aware that such behavior is looked on with horror by the vast majority of other Whites. This is what one would expect in an individualist culture.

However, Pakistan is a typical Middle Eastern collectivist culture, so the emphasis is on supporting one’s own kinship group, no matter what. This is also the case in the Orthodox Jewish community, another typical Middle Eastern collectivist culture (see here on the SY’s, a group of Syrian Jews living in New York). The Mesirah phenomenon in these  Orthodox Jewish communities has led to covering up a wide range of crimes, especially sex crimes against children and financial crimes.  Read more