Happy Juneteenth, Charles Murray
It is difficult to overstate the significance of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve to the thinking of pre-Alt Right White identitarians, specifically its section on the cognitive and behavioral differences between the races. The dominant mission of the movement then was propagating the forbidden truth of racial differences. When I first became aware of the scene in the mid-aughts, the general sense was that if we could just find a way to get people the truth, it might just blow-the-lid off the entire rotten establishment.
Of course, that day of racial reckoning never came. Perhaps the most obvious flaw in that way of thinking is that everybody already knows about racial differences, and aside from us and the far-Left who are always trying to censor us, nobody much cares. Sure, most people do not want to send their children to “bad schools,” and they know to avoid certain neighborhoods at night, but this kind of behavior has about as much political significance as the instinct to pull your hand away from a hot surface. I don’t want to exaggerate the pollyannaism of us then; pretty much all the ideas we talk about now were present then too (and the doom-posting was there too), but the emphasis was definitely different, and the idea that race realism (as we often called it then) would be our salvation was certainly the era’s most prominent meme.
Anyway, Murray has a new book called Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (there are significant racial differences in (1) intellectual aptitude and (2) rates of violent criminality), and aside from a few people on our side and a couple leftist inquisitors, once again no one is going to care. In fact, this is not a book review, because I myself don’t care to read the damn thing.
I am not saying that Human Biodiversity research (HBD) must serve a political end to be an interesting topic in its own right, but, c’mon, differences in intelligence and crime rates? We’ve all read this stuff a hundred times. Even HBD enthusiasts have moved on to earwax composition; get with the times Charlie. Even the title seems like an out-of-date reference to race realists.
• • • •
Murray is the archetypal conservative of the leftist imagination who yearns for a past that never existed. His stated purpose in writing this book is to save America’s unique liberal individualist heritage from disintegrating into either a racial spoils system, or into racial Balkanization.
I am also aware of a paradox: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there’s no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly.
The logical conclusion of the notion that all races’ abilities are inherently equal is that unequal racial outcomes must be the result of unequal treatment. More and more, this is the conclusion the Left is settling on, and that’s no good because that leads to thinking in terms of groups rather than individuals. Even more worrisome to Murray, it could provoke the last remaining suckers who still buy into the individualist myth, namely Whites, to start thinking of themselves as a group with interests.
Murray is quite right that leftist analysis of racial inequality in America gets the arrow of causation wrong, but the irony is that his own conception of the American creed has things equally backward. In Murray’s imagination, back in the good old days of his youth America was a liberal individualist nation that just happened to have a dominant White majority. In reality, it was a White nation that just happened to have liberal individualist beliefs. What made it a nation was the White part, not the liberal individualist part. Unlike many on our side, I am not anti-liberal individualism. Generally speaking, it is a decent way to run things. But that’s all it is, a way to run things. It is not a reason for being.
If you try to make it into a national reason-for-being, as America has, something else will swoop-in to fill-the-void. For most of American history, implicit White identity filled that void. When Murray was a youth, the implicitly White arrangement was beginning to come undone, and apparently he, as so many others of his vintage, interpreted this as us shedding our racist baggage to more perfectly embrace our liberal individualist identity. We were finally going to ‘live up to our founding ideals,’ and ‘judge a man not the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.’
And it’s not like that was all fake. Embarrassingly, people were genuinely motivated by these ideas. But at the end of the day, liberal individualism can never be an identity. It creates a void, and now that void is filled by anti-White identity. You could say that liberal individualism, as an end in itself, morphed into anti-White identity, but in practice, it’s the same difference. Behind the equity rhetoric, and the diversity-is-our-greatest-strength slogans, opposition to Whiteness is the legitimizing myth of the American state and its intelligentsia. And while a large share of the general public objects to the anti-White language of some of the more strident “antiracists,” anti-Whiteness has long established itself as the implicit normie consensus. This is why mainstream conservatives accept that it is perfectly fair for other races to defend themselves as races, but even when countering anti-White racism, they never dare defend themselves as Whites.
Conservatives might say I am missing the larger picture, that what we are really facing is an assault on the entire American and Western heritage, or it’s all about socialist big business taking away our freedoms. But no, anti-Whiteness is the larger picture. That is the regime’s reason-for-being. After all, conservatives are very willing to defend America and the West, they are quite comfortable defending Christianity, and they are equally at ease attacking socialism or woke business or woke socialist business. But they are absolutely terrified to defend Whites by name. Indeed, one of their primary modes of defending America or Western culture’s honor is to insist that those things nothing to do with Whites!
For sure, it is true that leftist pathologies extend beyond anti-White resentment. And obviously our politics is broader than demonization of Whitey. But that is sort of the point, the idea of defending, let alone celebrating, Whites as Whites is understood to be off-the-table. And that reflects the fact that the implicit consensus is anti-Whiteness. If the national story we tell ourselves is of the gradual extension of tolerance and equal opportunity to all, the bold-print subtext of that story is the overcoming of Whiteness. And in practical effect, White identity is made the negative moral center of that American story.
I am not arguing that the vast majority of Americans are actively anti-White. To use the Kendian language, most are non-White identitarians, not anti-White identitarians. Anti-Whiteness has not bewitched 95% of Americans, body and soul, by any means. Of course not. In fact, I have no doubt that a large share of conservative Whites, maybe a majority, would prefer America to be a predominantly White country, or a Christian country, or a White Christian country. But they have been trained that it is wrong to speak, or even consciously think, in those terms. Which says it all. Anti-Whiteness may not be an especially stable national identity—it is an inherently divisive project—but for the time being, that is its role.
It’s possible I am overstating the anti-Whiteness thing, maybe it is only the most prominent component of a more expansive left-wing project of resentment. But that is ultimately beside the point. The larger picture, remember, is that Murray’s beloved liberal individualism is not suited to be an end in itself. Something will fill the vacuum, whether it’s anti-Whiteness or whatever else, but liberal individualism does not make a nation. And whatever it is you think is filling that vacuum at the moment, at the very least we can agree that it is hostile to White identity.
The Bell Curve era of White nationalism was a failure because its strategy was only to hitch White nationalism to liberal individualism.Their argument was that White nationalism was a necessary evil because diversity gets in the way of a peaceful Last Man existence. Like Murray, they had things backwards; liberal individualism is the means, not the end. And by the mid-aughts, the end was opposition to White identity, and thus White-nationalism-as-a-means-to-liberal-individualism was doomed from the start.
I do not expect that Murray or the rest of mainstream conservatism to learn anything from their decades of abysmal failure. They will continue to shout of the virtues of colorblindness and the dangers of identity politics for as long as anyone will listen. But that also means that there will remain a vacuum on the Right, and it is our job to fill it.
Ryan Andrews is a regular contributor to Affirmative Right. This article is reposted with permission. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Elective Nation
Excellent article.
The United States began as a White (100% of citizens), nationalist (demanding its own independence, sovereignty and self-determination), Christian (various Protestant denominations) confederation of quasi-independent states. Not just White nationalist, but favoring specific Whites: “…Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.” — John Jay, Federalist No. 2, Oct. 31, 1787.
Of course, there were among this “one united people” a handful of Jews and others who did not quite fit in, but they were the exception that proved the rule. The first immigration act passed by Congress reinforced what Jay wrote: Citizenship was limited to “free Whites”. Indians and blacks were not citizens. But the general category of “free Whites” allowed Whites who did not share the majority Christian religion (Protestant) or speak the language spoken by the majority (English) to become American citizens. And Jews were apparently considered “White”. So they could be citizens as well.
Abraham Lincoln is the one most responsible for destroying this most desirable state of affairs for White Americans. Not only did he trample on the Constitution and eliminate the last vestiges of states’ rights and independence, he emancipated the group least likely to be able to live in peace with the majority of Americans.
From Lincoln onward, the United States became a “proposition nation” with no meaning or content whatsoever other than a set of propositions, all of them false: that America is a nation of immigrants (settlers and conquerors are completely forgotten), that Americans are free (really?), and that Americans have unalienable individual rights (maybe for about five minutes, and then that changed).
Under the current dispensation, you could completely eliminate all Americans living today and replace them with Martians, and it would make no difference at all as far as American national identity is concerned.
Americans look to the founding documents to settle political disputes. The Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Supreme Court interpretations are idolized because there is no other reference point for American identity. The general attitude is that these documents are perfect. But if they were, would we be in the situation we’re in today? Obviously they are not perfect. They should have specified race. They should have been specific about the racial requirements for citizenship. It should have been made clear that “religious freedom” applied only to Christian denominations, leaving no room for Judaism and Islam. Unfortunately, it is all but impossible to amend the Constitution. This inadequate document was little more than a suicide pact. But the suicide took about 250 years to accomplish. In other words, the United States is not worth preserving or being a part of because what was good about it died a long time ago.
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races….There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality” – Abraham Lincoln, Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858. At various times he advocated the reversal of slave importation be sending blacks to Africa and elsewhere.
Despite ” Twit – and – Whisperer – in – Chief Biden’s ” proclamation, that it would take F – 35s and nuclear weapons to challenge the federal government, nothing is yet irretrievably lost.
Had the Germans, their youngsters and their Wehrmacht surrendered prematurely, all of Europe, including the UK, would still be run by Stalin’s butchers. This Fortress Europa would still be unassailable by Norfolk.
The Founding Fathers did an excellent job in foreseeing possible governmental irregularities and imbalances, but could not possibly have foreseen the development of wokeism and the purchase of demographically-determined votes. Their additional exclusions for citizenship and the vote, would not have survived the 60s.
Let’s actively wait for the lyrics of the last aria when the fat Lady stops singing !
You are wrongly giving credence to the faux history embodied in the baseless “proposition nation” thesis of the founding generation of (((neocons))); notably, Papa Podhoretz, Papa Kristol, and Ben Wattenberg. Essential to that thesis, which was new in box as recently as the 1970s, was a complete retconning of the postbellum United States. Abe Lincoln was a loathsome and degenerate man, but it does truth a disservice to blame him, his actions, and their consequences for everything that has gone amiss in this country since his day.
Neither in law nor practice was there viable support for the proposition thesis, even among the Republican politicians of the victorious North, including the radicals. Indeed, the Radical Republican faction that came to within a vote of defenestrating Andrew Johnson had melted away to nothing by the end of the Grant administration, thanks in some measure to Grant himself. Furthermore, few Americans who had had actual contact with black people suffered from the illusion that more than a relative handful were civilizable. Fewer still acted in a way calculated to increase either their numbers or their influence.
While there was also nothing “propositional” to be found in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, the initial microbes that led to the full-blown rot of the 1940s and thereafter also appeared in the 1890s, with the (unfortunately) welcomed arrival of the first wave of Jewish layabouts, saboteurs, and general malcontents from central Europe and the Russian Empire. Their heavy hand grasping at the rudder of government can already be seen in Teddy Roosevelt’s administration.
I do not see in what sense the United States that Lincoln left us could be anything other than a proposition nation. It was no longer exclusively a nation for White people. Now it was multiracial and multicultural. It was a nation without a distinct people.
Once the door was opened by Lincoln, anyone could be an American, and any American could be replaced by somebody else and it would still be America.
That, of course, made possible the flood of Jews into the U.S. in the late 1800s and U.S. willingness — after some small resistance — to submit to Jewish efforts to “reform” immigration law in the 1920s, 1950s and 1960s.
Lincoln was not a doorman, whatever else he might have been. The grandiloquent assertion of a retconned past will get you only so far.
Your last paragraph shows that your understanding of the ins and outs of the immigration-restriction debate from the late nineteenth century on is pretty sketchy.
I agree! So if fortune ever blesses us with our own Ethno-State there will have to be racially explicit language in our founding documents and in the name of our new country.
It is not enough to be Awakened (Awakened, not “Woke”) but knowledge without power profits us nothing. It just makes us more miserable. Truth in itself will not set you free if not allied to struggle. Otherwise, the great experiment in multiracial diversity not only ends in White extinction but almost guarantees you Chinese domination of the entire planet (and certainly North America) in the decades to come and certainly by the 22sd century. Has nobody read the speech by Chinese General Chi Haoitan?
Chinese domination of the whole planet, not Jewish….?
Just arksin’ as the blacks say.
Read the speech by Chinese General Chi Haiotan addressing just that issue. Google it! It is easy to find.
This article is extremely good. Things do boil down to White Identity being the bogeyman issue that no man dare speak of positively upon penalty of being unpersoned. White Identity has been slated for destruction for generations by those who despise us. White Wellbeing most definitely needs to be placed back as the highest value of our people. When White Wellbeing is again each individual’s ultimate measurement of action, there will be no stopping us.
To the author: please stop using the term “Whiteness”, which pertains to a diseased state in the AntiWhite Narrative. Use Anti-Whiteism instead of “anti-Whiteness” and “anti-White racism”. Anti-Whiteism is our word. The words you are using are those used in the AntiWhite “Whiteness Studies” classes, a tool of our oppression.
100 years ago during the UK general strike the communists held a meeting about whether or not to attack Buckingham Palace.They voted not to because either Stalin, Zinoviev or Wedgwood Benn had betrayed them.
If they had succeeded they planned to attack Poland with the German Communists, restore Germany and settle the Poles in Africa. The Irish Catholics would have been sent to Africa as well. The western commmunists would have stopped the mass murder of Christians in Russia which was being carried out by the jews descended from East European converts and had nothing to do with communism. Many of the murderers came from and were controlled from the USA.
The prisons in Europe would have been emptied into Africa where they
and their families would have been used as slave labour and settled in Africa when their sentences had been served,
London would have been emptied of its worst half into ships on the Thames, the other famillies for Africa would have been kept in concentration camps on the Yorkshire Moors until they were sent to Africa.
The communists would have populated Africa with intelligent Europeans.The Americans have populated Europe with unintelligent Africans.
The Americans have always been the enemy of the White Man because they are controlled by the Glaubenjuden, Rockefellers, Kennedys and other crooks.
@ Edward Harris
What is the proof of this fantastic “alternative history” account of western communist party policies and ideology? All the communist movements were opposed to “westernn imperialism”, especially Britain’s, and were usually favourable to non-white immigration from the “colonies” as an aid to metropolitan revolution; all this can be documented.
What we do know is that the settlement of British and other white people in temperate areas of Africa was the policy not of the British communists but of the British fascists, and after WW2 of the two Oswalds – Mosley (England) and Pirow (South Africa).
Edward Harris is a Jew. A sephardic one specifically. His pretention that the ashkenazim are not real Jews is part of this. The communists he is talking about are the semi-assimilated/ crypto Jewish population. His hated for lower class Whites (Poles and Irish/English poor) is proof of this. The ‘communists’ he is referring to are Jews. By the way much the same thing happened in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries with regards to poor people being sent to America and Australia. Anyway it is just further proof that the only people who are to be deported from White societies are Edward Harris and all others like him.
Our other problems would solve themselves.
Dear Crackalack,
My maternal grandfather had a mother who was an Eastern Jewess and therefore was not Jewish according to some of my ancestors who were Rabbis. With her that side of my family ceased to be Jewish. I am a Mischling.
My mother put me through the Mumbo Jumbo, with an Eastern Rabbi, which means I am still not a Jew according to my ancestors.
I was baptised as a Christian in the Church of England. I call myself a Christian Jew to annoy the Glaubenjuden who are descended from converts and not the Biblical Jews who murdered Jesus.
Two of the seven who created the Labour Party were my ancestors.
I detest Zionism. l detest East European occupied Palestine.
I detest East Europeans who call themselves Jews.
The lunatics trying to build a new Temple in Jerusalem need medical help, like the Americans who support “Israel”. The Jew side of my family would never tell me the abusive things they heard rich Jews call the Americans. Some of my relations are bankers who are in the Club. They were considering giving me an allowance but a Goy, who they used to contact me, advised them not to.
Why don’t the goyim help each other like the Jews help each other? This did not help me or the Goy!
Thank you for your reply.
” Why don’t the goyim help each other like the Jews help each other? ”
1 ) The “goyim” are predominantly Westernworld White Christians whom never had a strong sense of racial identity as do “the jews”
2 ) Christianity has no especial interest in preserving a White race and does not even recognize the existence of such a race
3 ) Whites are predominantly individualists and recent descendants of rural cultures that are traditionally only concerned with charitable assistance for local churchgoers whereas “the jews” are much more politicly sophisticated with regard to infrastructure supports for their people .
One of my great uncles was 2nd In Command of the Communist Internatonal in the British Isles.
These were some of the ideas the communists wanted to happen.
I visited the USA twice and found the people of the western states very likeable.
I was told that the ranchers who lived on the border would patrol the border and shoot dead any mexican trying to enter the USA at night. The wild animals would destroy the evidence.
The ranchers and communists were good people. The ranchers did the right thing and the British Communists, including my family, would have done the right thing to save our civilisation.
Careful analysis of the Russo-German Pact and its temporary injury to British and western defense preparations, including the secret role of the Comintern, shows this analysis is skewed. One aspect worth mentioning is Browder’s pamphlet listing the Jewish organizations pressing for American entry into the war, which led to a temporary drain of Jewish CPUSA supporters, more detailed than parallel assertions from Lindberg and Mosley. This is a complex issue of history on which Soviet archives have thrown some new light, but the controversies continue; e.g. Sean McMeekin, “Stalin’s War” (Allen Lane, 2021).
Lindbergh.
As a fellow Iowan, strongly identified with what Huntington calls “The Nation of Settlers”, reading Murray’s most recent 2 books is an emotional ordeal for me — despite having been, for decades and prior to “The Bell Curve” inured to The Race Realist Civic Nationalist Narrative he defends. It is an emotional ordeal for me because I moved back to Iowa, after 4 decades of living on the coasts, only to find that the vast majority of those Murray targets — the FDR liberals — here in Iowa are utterly impervious to Murray’s prominence and carefully phrased attempts to overcome their CrimeStop mentalities. Indeed, the more intelligent they are (and indeed, Iowa ranks just behind North Dakota on SAT scores adjusted for participation rates), the more effective is their CrimeStop. This is because they not only absorb and regurgitate a vast array of sophistries offered up as “The Science”, by a theologically corrupted academy, but because they, with their superior cognition, are able to see several steps of inference down the road toward a violation of Ingsoc, thereby invoking “protective stupidity” well in advance of any Thought Crime. These are people I grew up with, and a culture I still identify with — a highly individualistic culture as is required of those who settle a new land due to the demands placed on the nuclear family aka “simple household” by Nature and Nature’s God — as was the origin of European individualism in the Paleolithic. An individualistic human confronted with what I call Blob’s manifest insanity, is in mortal danger as a bloodline and must, therefore, do what it takes merely to survive until the plague passes. This, unfortunately, means, sacrificing their individuality and, indeed, individual integrity. They become less than human or what I call Bloblings.
Indeed, even if one is able to corner one of these hapless creatures into a real “conversation about race” to the point that one convinces them of the veracity of the “two realities” Murray admonishes them to accept, it may be mere minutes before they are once again spewing the catechism of Ingsoc.
This is beyond “protective stupidity. It is effective brain damage. One can joke about these people being “zombies” but it is one thing to make jokes about such people — it is quite another to actually experience one’s friends and family members suffering from what amounts to transmissible brain damage — especially when it is attacking the values one holds most dear if not sacred.
If only the “arguing with a jellyfish” analogy were adequate!
No, what is necessary is not a “conversation” but, rather, a change in the environment sufficiently radical that they are prevented from transmitting their disease and that includes taking out the primary source of this public health crisis:
Centralization.
I worked on such a change in the environment in founding work on what became the Internet’s subversion of mass media and did warn people about both the political crisis that would result as The Nation of Settlers awoke to its mental enslavement AND about the danger of recentralization with network effect monopolies.
That was 1982 folks.
I wish I could get people to listen to me now, but even the white nationalists are in hysterics — understandably so given the desperate situation in which they find themselves: If you don’t have a following or don’t have the skill set to generate a following by manipulating people via mass psychologically, people ignore you because they, rightly, feel the need to form groups to defend themselves from an imminent threat by other groups. So they look for the largest group that even approximates what little reality their emotionally beleaguered cognition can afford them. This generally means identifying with someone that is better at manipulating people than the underlying environment that must be altered in order to break the hold of the zeitgeist on the masses.
So, that’s one reason I don’t bother much with responses like this and am working at the level of technical fixes — despite the lack of capital due to Jewish control of it.
“I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals”
“His stated purpose in writing this book is to save America’s unique liberal individualist heritage from disintegrating into either a racial spoils system, or into racial Balkanization.”
Well, my understanding , that so called “liberal individualism” or libertarians movement are Jewish dreams which come true. Or there was a lot of work, that they are come true.
The idea that society consist of “rugged independent individuals” who make “their own decisions” and “take responsibility of their actions” is helping perfectly take attention from Jewish group efforts actions
Lets say we have 2 tribes:
One tribe has 100 able bodied men.
Second tribe has 5.
There is no way tribe 2 cant take over tribe 1, if members of tribe1 are aware, that they are belong to tribe 1. However if members of tribe 1 have been educated , that “there are no tribes”, only atomized, “ rugged individuals responsible for their own actions” , situation becoming very different.
5 members of tribe 2 to could easy take out even most capable single member of tribe 1 . And other members of tribe 1 will not help him because “there are no tribes” – “well, he made wrong personal decision..”
Murray minces his words because he is deathly afraid of organized Jewry.
We are already living in a racial spoils system managed by a hostile Jewish elite
that has weaponized ALL groups against the innocent white majority.
It’s quite insane when you think about it.
Murray is basically right on race but then he cucks when it comes to white identity and white rights….
so, in the end….he’s an anti-climax.
When Murray says that white power would be a disaster, I hear the voice of organized Jewry.
White power might well be a disaster for Jewry, but it’s the only thing that will save the white race.
“….happily irrefutable. The Jews are God’s chosen people” – Charles Murray, “Commentary,” April 2007. Probably admiration rather than servility or fear. His “Human Diversity (2020) has an interesting section on Ashkenazi genetic disorders (p.198). Jewish prominence in the US is a combination of IQ AND ethnic collaboration. The coercive element is related chiefly to the Israel issue.
Still, don’t throw the baby out with the mikveh! Herrnstein’s old friend is doing something needed, and with less circumspection than hitherto as he approaches his eighties.
Dear Mister Andrews & All,
Thank you. First, as you begin your third ultimate paragraph you are not overstating the anti- Whiteness thing.The greatest contribution I can give to this discussion, and also to compliment your essay is the following two PASTES. The first is by the definitive analysis as to what Critical Race Theory really is: not marxism, or as I call it, Engelsisim-Marxism. This goes back to one of the finest minds I know of, Misses Ilana Mercer. She stated this before anyone, and now others, only a few are claiming credit for it.Let me state herein that it is not the Left, who have never given her any attention whatsoever that have shunned her. It is the Right as in Conservatives and Libertarians. She was black balled in 2002 for being against the 2002 Iraq War, and then blsck listed until to-day by 99.9% because of her defence of White people in her book of 2011 which she refers to below.
I request all who intelligently truly are concerned to view this film video from June 2nd, 2021 ” distinguish Critical Race Theory: Your Life Depends On It!” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSCMuqvQ7Mc
Now proceed to her latest column of the 17th of June, 2021, followed by my COMMENT-ESSAY contribution below it,
Charles Murray’s Empirical Wisdom Confirms Into The Cannibal’s Pot’s Analytical Truths
Ilana Mercer, American Renaissance, June 17, 2021
”
My 2011 book, Into the cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, rests on two axiomatic truths, and I excerpt (pp 40-41 & 126-128, 2011):
“In all, no color should be given to the claim that race is not a factor in the incidence of crime in the US and in South Africa. The vulgar individualist will contend that such broad statements about aggregate group characteristics are collectivist, ergo false. He would be wrong.”
“Generalizations,” I continued, “provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources — one’s life and property — are best invested.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot, pp 40-41)
In short, generalizations about certain group characteristics are, in aggregate, valid. These, however, do not contradict the imperative to treat each and every individual as an individual.
In his infinite wisdom, but with a different — strictly empirical approach — social scientist Charles Murray has ushered into mainstream this very same truth. In a luminous little book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America, Murray counsels precisely that:
“. . . when mean differences between groups are real, it is absolutely essential to resist generalization; it is essential to accept the reality of documented group differences but to insist on thinking of and treating every person as an individual.”
Next, in Into the Cannibal’s Pot (ITCP), I explained that we conservatives and libertarians who oppose affirmative action, set asides and quotas, because of our unfettered fealty for a merit-based, free-market based society are, sadly, promoting “half-truths,” as I put it. Here’s why:
“Free market economists have long since insisted that the rational, self-interest of individuals in private enterprise is always not to discriminate. ‘The market is color-blind,’ said Milton Friedman. ‘No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or atheist; by whites or blacks.’ As Thomas Sowell put it, ‘prejudice is free, but discrimination has costs.’” (ITCP pp. 126-128)
Inherent in these arguments, I had argued, in 2011, is that, while not untrue, they are incomplete, mere half-truths:
“Arguably, however, [our] good economists . . . are still offering up a half-truth. Rational self-interest does indeed propel people, however prejudiced, to set aside bias and put their scarce resources to the best use. But to state simply that ‘discrimination is bad for business’ [and that a pure, free-market meritocracy would solve the problem of racial underrepresentation] is to present an incomplete picture.”
“This solecism stems from the taint the word ‘discriminate’ has acquired,” I posited. “The market . . . is discriminating as in discerning — it is biased toward productivity. Hiring people on the basis of criteria other than productivity hurts the proprietor’s pocket. Thus, we can be fairly certain that, absent affirmative-action laws, the market would reflect a bias toward productivity.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot, p. 127.)
And the clincher:
“In other words, what the good economists [and good conservatives] are loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler,” I wrote. (ITCP pp. 126-128.)
Murray’s work agrees — and amplifies this point, writing on June 16, 2021, that, “refusing to confront race differences in means . . . leads in a straight line to thinking that the only legitimate evidence of a non-racist society is equal outcomes. . . . the logical conclusion is that the state must force equal outcomes by whatever means necessary Prior to the publication of my essay, “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?,” on August 6, 2020, my astute editor, a young lady, inquired about empirical studies for the immutable truths therein.
“The thesis of systemic racism,” I countered in the piece, “is derived from the logical error of reasoning backward. ‘Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes . . . applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the . . . evidence exists.’
But, I reasoned, “Systemic racism is most certainly not ‘the only plausible explanation’ for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: In aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements.”
“Equalizing individual and intergroup outcomes . . . is an impossibility,” I added, “considering that it is axiomatically and self-evidently true to say that such differences have existed since the dawn of time.”
It is what it is. Aggregate group differences in intellectual achievement, athleticism, and inhibition-control are here to stay.
Wise young lady that she is, my editor on “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” found the analytical, logical method (which is in the Aristotelian and Misesian traditions) persuasive.
Murray says the same thing, with reference to mounds of empirical data:
“We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must.”
Disarmed of the firearm of truth, analytical and empirical — without standing our ground on the immutable truths of aggregate groups differences, while we take care to treat each individual on his or her merit — we conservatives are rendered intellectually defenseless”
Dear Ilana,
Cause for a celebration is that you have found support for your AXIOMATIC TRUTHS you successfully conveyed in your second book, “ Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lesson’s For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”, from the political scientist, Doctor Charles Alan Murray, famous for having co-authored “The Bell Curve: Intelligence And Class Structure In American Life” with psychologist, Doctor Richard Julius Herrnstein. If I seem to come across as euphoric it’s because it is always a healing salve to one’s soul to have a person of great value be recognised, as it must have been for you Ilana, given that the majority of abject self-righteous American patriots of Conservatism and Libertarianism who don’t want to face the racial reality of America, ergo their practically entire black listing of you from all mediums of communication with the publication of this second work of yours in 2011, anticipated by them black balling you since you were correct to oppose the Iraq 2002 War. No doubt if you say that the book “Facing Reality: The Truths About Race In America” by Doctor Murray is luminous I could never apprehend anything else than to accept this as true for I haven’t read it. And although I disagree with the title of Social Scientist, as I do with the mendacity that there are Social Sciences, veracity can never be denied from whatever source it comes from.
I’d like to point out that you actually outstrip these scientists of human life, which collectively forms a society, by way of your unimpeded epistemic faculties with an objective observation and above all your own personal experience of the racial situation from residing in more than one country. Ilana, your logic, reason and final analysis of the object at hand is that of a Traditional Philosopher: pseudo-materialistic scientific theories of life have no place in your thought pattern and what you produce in your discourses and writings. Nevertheless, your self-evident facts, undeniable and irrefutable, about Systemic Racism which responds to the ultimate metaphysical question, What is? have found a perfect companion with the Empirical Wisdom of Doctor Murray. It’s evident that whatever you catalyze us with you unfailingly never turn your eyes away from the empirical, even if it should not be to your liking, by confabulating deliberately as many do, who despite the observable facts and the reality before them, which at times may even be a reflection of their own circumstance, are nothing more and nothing less than an aprioristic theoretical aberration of what they see as a reality of what life should be, and its fulfillment based solely upon economic actions that clear away what’s for them the delusional disorder that “generalizations about certain group characteristics, in aggregate, valid.” You brilliantly stress that this calculated cancellation, which might I add results in Cancel Culture, is falsely presented to us by Doctor Milton Friedman and his God, The Free Market, and its Beatific Vision, Meritocracy, that he declares to be colour blind, is an open gateway which justifies the pseudo phenomenon of Systemic Racism, that in turn facilitates the equally treacherous Critical Race Theory, which is anything but theoretical but a psychological tool to enhance the elimination of Caucasian / European / White Man. And so it follows, being that we’re all equal racially given that the Free Market does not discriminate it stands to reason that the disequilibrium of White success as opposed to the Black can only signify that there’s active and always has been a stultifying modus operandi of deliberate deprivation of the Negro. Attention must be focused on the fact that this racial system is based upon and thrives within a structure which is that of a contorted mind of whom you designate, The Vulgar Individualist.
I personally am of the firm belief that the ism of this sociopath, Individualism, embraced by Libertarians, is as Godless, inhumane and materialistic as the ism of the Communist, Collectivism. They too have an aggregation of a group characteristic: the assemblage is the entire society, every living human soul alive, bearing no distinction whatsoever; hence there is no specific group to be founded upon hard evidence, as you Ilana correctly have identified as being nothing but the truth. In the world of The Vulgar Individualist and his counter-part The Low-Minded Collectivist, self-determination is a heresy. An illusion and a danger to life as it really is. One can’t afford to overlook the seriousness of this, albeit just look around for it has tragically been so. And this is no less than one of the greatest tragedies for it is purely legitimized insanity. All individuals are univocal, personality is just a formality, and if not recognized as such the unfortunate will be diagnosed with an egocentric illness. We’re to be considered in spite of biological, psychological and theological axioms, a physical matter triune of man, animal, machine of only one species: void of cognitive faculties, soulless and utilitarian. Our noteworthy physiological and psychological factors are simply part of a unified spiritless mechanism no different than any man made factory machine. We can never cease to function properly, exceptionally, unless we comprehend the facts of life: there are not any sane or insane, moral or immoral, and heaven forbid, racial differences. And to make this an axiomatic truth, and to successfully achieve at making us no longer turn from the light of this nirvana we’ve been criminally avoiding by our very nature of being White, we must eradicate Systemic Racism from our midst forever, and this can only be accomplished through Critical Race Theory: the extinction of everything through the centuries of all aspects of European Man and of Metaphysical value. If this is not a well-planned legalised philosophy of mental derangement, then what is it? One appropriate justification of my question is your quote Ilana of Doctor Murray”…that the only legitimate evidence of a non-racist society is equal outcomes”, therefore, “the logical conclusion is that the state must force equal outcomes by whatever means necessary.” Is this not what has been occurring these last 50 years or more? This is actually the security required for an elite to eventually dominate our lives which I call a Technology Of Evil. If we do not act or think according to the equality it deems to be without discrimination, a true humanitarian utopia upon this earth, then we’re the abnormal, the historically insane. This justifies what I foresee everywhere as the eventual removal from existence of persons like us. Isn’t it already taking place in South Africa; in fact has been taking place since Apartheid ended. Which makes one question those economically potent that were against the Segregation: had they not an agenda which was not for reasons of compassion except for themselves?
I cannot overemphasize your great value Ilana: you proceed courageously to never desist to answer the What is? You weigh words to extract the gold for their true meaning, such as the misuse of Backward Reasoning. I must admit I find this error of rationality to be frightening given my Metaphysical foundation, purely Satanic. And Backward Reasoning misused, an inversion of reverse analysis, is literally a process of deliberate nullification. Is it even necessary to ponder why we have a Cancel Culture? The perfect weapon of a destructive methodology that intentionally annihilates facts to facilitate the fabrication of a block of flats in which no one shall ever reside. The application of this logical criminological procedure is being used as a process to invert what is and give credence to the lie as truth. Any one for rectifying what gender really is and has never been recognized to be?
You’re very much alone Ilana, in as much as you are unique, belonging to only a small number like yourself, specializing in different disciplines, that eventually are interrelated, and this can’t be avoided for it is anything but toxic. No surprise that you’re circumvented by the biggest culprits we find here in America: The Vulgar Individualists of Conservatism and Libertarianism who are void of any culture as in the arts and are forever lacking an ideological coherent movement with firm principles, which definitely are not wanting with you. This detritus of the so-called alternative to Liberalism wishes to locate you in a wilderness of a Waste Land, shunned by the guilty of the Right, the children of those who did nothing dynamic to stop the decadence and deconstruction of America, preferring to be as you observe impuissant, when they had the opportunity to do so from the late 1940’s to the 1960’s, handed to them on a silver platter gilded in gold carrying platinum: James Burnham, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Henry & Ann Paolucci, and Mario Pei. God Bless, Aristo Boho
Your comment is WAY…too long, bro. And you’re dumb if you think anybody reads such an essay. Brevity has not only been the default of the virtuous thought, it is the very life-blood of the WN as we speak, for our time is very, very short. You’re not the only one here, though, at fault. The comments are generally too long. Too bad, I for one enjoy reading comments, the SUCCINCT ones, that is.
Dear Servenet,
Thank you for your REPLY. My COMMENT is not way too long, and likewise not those of some others who contribute to “Occidental Observer”. For you very well, but not for me, or our host who accepted posting it, Doctor Kevin MacDonald. It’s not a question of length it is a question of conveying the truth, and many of us of Tradition aren’t of what evolved negatively with the epistemic faculties of the American Mind, resulting in developing a sound bite culture. The result: no attention span, a population that has not time to read its great men and women of literature: historians, philosophers, and tragically above all novelists and poets, as Europeans and Latin Americans do, and to just react by stimulus and not to think, and even in peace and tranquility the most desolate and isolated population to live amongst, as with its siblings, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Yet, because I’m not lazy as you are, I find, many to my liking even here.
Second I am not dumb at all: Perhaps you sit around a bar bending the elbow with a beer but there’re many who do read such a long essay, and I must say, there has to be something ever so psychologically unfortunate about the intellectual activity you have. I’ll never be subjected to the brevity and superficiality of our contemporary endarkenment by Consensus Reality and an anti- intellectual uncultured lout who permits his blood to be contaminated by the plastic controlled knowledge of America. And I’m not anti-American but the truth is the truth! Hail to the European Minds I have known and are still alive. And I know very well Europe is not perfect either. Nowhere is.
God Bless, Aristo Boho
Hyper-individuality is the first salvo of the critical theory fired at whites mid last century by the dovetailing of jews and corporations. Whites were sold on the idiotic idea that we all had to live in houses without extended family members, miles away from extended family members, in neighborhoods where it didn’t matter if you knew your neighbors and great fences made great neighbors. We allowed ourselves to be marginalized on our own personal islands, never realizing or caring that a flotilla of islands lacks the strength and coherence of a fortified and united nation.
Now we are a bunch of people who don’t know each other, don’t know how to know each other, and are just about banned from knowing each other. While we mesmerize ourselves with our gadgets and “smart” appliances, groups like Latinos, Asians, and Middle Easterners maintain power in cohesive bloc format, living together, knowing each other, reveling in kinship. Individuality is poison, and it’s no surprise that it’s been so heavily pushed on whites, with all other races being absent from the constant barrage of pro atomization messaging.