A Negative Review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition
A rather negative review of my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future appeared by someone who calls himself thezman. I am not familiar with his blog, but he seems to be basically on the right side of things as indicated by its blogroll, which includes Vdare.com, AmRen, Steve Sailer, etc. Since most people are not going to wade through a 500+-page book, this is my version of the main ideas.
Thezman’s review will not be helpful to someone who isn’t familiar with the book because it leaves out critical information and basic ideas. The review begins by complaining that I don’t get around to defining individualism until Chapter 8. But a major point, ignored by the reviewer, is that there are two clearly spelled out definitions of individualism in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively, the aristocratic individualism of the Indo-Europeans, and the egalitarian individualism of the northern hunter-gatherers. Unless one discusses these concepts, the entire point of the book is missed because it’s essentially about how these two types of individualism played out in history, with the power of aristocratic individualism gradually decreasing after the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. One would do better by reading some of the reviews on Amazon, such as this one; or even better, read Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s 9-part review for the Council of European Canadians.
Re aristocratic individualism, from Chapter 2:
The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was not based on a single king or a typical clan-type organization based on extended kinship groups but on an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group. Critically, this elite was not tied together by kinship bonds as would occur in a clan-based society, but by individual pursuit of fame and fortune, particularly the former. The men who became leaders were not despots, but peers with other warriors—an egalitarianism among aristocrats. Successful warriors individuated themselves in dress, sporting beads, belts, etc., with a flair for ostentation. This resulted in a “vital, action-oriented, and linear picture of the world” [citing Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization]i.e., as moving forward in pursuit of the goal of increasing prestige. Leaders commanded by voluntary consent, not servitude, and being a successful leader meant having many clients who pledged their loyalty; often the clients were young unmarried men looking to make their way in the world. The leader was therefore a “first among equals.” …
Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships [not biological relatedness] were characteristic of [Proto-Indo-Europeans] and this practice continued with the various [Indo-European] groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of closeness of kinship) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree).
Thus aristocratic individualism is fundamentally about individual accomplishment rather than kinship ties as being at the heart of social organization while retaining a strongly hierarchical social structure. Chapter 3 describes Egalitarian Individualism:
As noted in Chapter 2, there were already strong strands of individualism in Indo-European-derived cultures. Thus the argument here is not that northern [hunter-gatherers; h-gs] are the only basis of Western individualism, but that Indo-European individualism dovetailed significantly with that of h-gs they encountered in northwest Europe. The major difference between these two strands is that I-E-derived cultures are strongly hierarchical and relatively egalitarian only within aristocratic peer groups (aristocratic individualism), while the h-g’s were strongly egalitarian without qualification. The burden of this chapter is to make the case for this. The contrast and conflict between aristocratic (hierarchical) individualism and egalitarian individualism is of fundamental importance for my later argument.
I really don’t understand how a competent reviewer could miss this, or the material in the following paragraph on the evolutionary basis of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer groups and the central importance of moral communities as the social glue binding hunter-gatherer communities rather than extensive kinship. This concept is critical for understanding Chapters 6–8. From Chapter 3:
Egalitarianism is a notable trait of hunter-gatherer groups around the world. Such groups have mechanisms that prevent despotism and ensure reciprocity, with punishment ranging from physical harm to shunning and ostracism.[1] Christopher Boehm describes hunter-gatherer societies as moral communities in which women have a major role,[2] and the idea that Western cultures, particularly since the seventeenth century, are moral communities based on a hunter-gatherer egalitarian ethic will play a major role here, particularly in Chapters 6-8. In such societies people are closely scrutinized to note deviations from social norms; violators are shunned, ridiculed, and ostracized. Decisions, including decisions to sanction a person, are by consensus. Adult males treat each other as equals.
Re climate, I certainly agree that climate is important, as emphasized in Chapter 3 on the northern hunter-gatherers, where the harsh climate of Scandinavia resulted in a general deemphasis on extended kinship in favor of nuclear families. The Indo-Europeans originated in what is now Ukraine but developed a very different culture than the hunter-gatherers. Their culture was completely militarized—likely needed to survive and prosper in the steppes where marauding groups were the norm (not the case in Scandinavia). Their individualism, whereby individual merit mattered more than kinship, was highly adaptive in getting the best leaders. I suppose this could have been simply a cultural invention enabled by domain-general processing (see below; the cultural invention approach is emphasized by Joseph Henrich in his The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous re the role of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages). Or it could have been due to a similar scenario as that sketched in Chapter 3 for the northern hunter-gatherers: Both of these groups lived in areas where one kinship group couldn’t control the basis of economic production. In the case of the northern hunter-gatherers, their source of food on the Scandinavian littoral was not available year-around, forcing them to retreat into small family-based bands where only very close kinship relationships mattered for part of the year (Chapter 3). On the other hand, the proto-Indo-Europeans periodically traveled for extended periods in their wagons in small family-based groups to grazing areas for their cattle and returned to the larger encampment. Again, no kinship group could control the vast steppe region, and relatively intensive kinship typical of hunter-gatherers rather than extensive kinship relations (e.g., in a Middle Eastern clan) would continue as the fundamental basis of social organization. I favor the ecological scenario, but the cultural innovation perspective is also possible. However, a purely cultural shift would have to entail strong social controls to prevent evolved predilections for kinship ties from dominating. Seems difficult and there is no evidence for it.
[thezman:] The first three chapters of the book cover the migration of people into Europe and what we know about the organizational structures. Europe was initially settled by hunter-gatherers with an egalitarian culture. Then nomadic people with an aristocratic warrior class came in from the east. MacDonald argues that the genetic basis for egalitarianism and meritocracy is in these original people. This is not an argument from science, but rather an argument from inference.
Thezman thus ignores the ecological argument of Chapter 3, the clear evidence for individualism in both of these groups, and the genetic cline from northern to southern Europe revealed by population genetic research discussed in Chapter 1.
[thezman:] It cannot be emphasized enough how marriage patterns and family formation helped define what we think of as the West. The rapid decline in cousin marriage, for example, is arguably the great leap forward for Western people. It naturally lead [sic] to the evolution of alternatives to narrow kinship in human cooperation. MacDonald does a good job summarizing how these mating patterns were brought to the West with the aristocratic people who migrated from the East.
But it’s not just the aristocratic peoples from the East that created the familial basis of individualism (i.e., a tendency toward nuclear families rather than, say, compound families common in Southern and Eastern Europe based on brothers living together with their wives). I argue in Chapter 4 that the nuclear family pattern is strongest in Scandinavia, a result I attribute to climate (monogamy is favored in harsh environments because of the difficulty of men provisioning the children of more than one woman) in conjunction with the ecological argument noted above.
[thezman:] In the next chapters the focus shifts to culture and history. Chapter four is about European family formation. The focus is entirely on Europe, so the reader is left to guess why this differs from the rest of the world.
But the arguments from Chapters 2 and 3 make it clear that the roots of individualism in both the Indo-Europeans and the northern hunter-gatherers are essentially primordial, as noted above.
[thezman:] Chapter eight is an interesting chapter in that he finally gets around to providing a definition of individualism. He states at the opening that individualist societies are based on the reputation of the individual. Group cohesion depends on the members judging other members on an individual basis. Each member also accepts that he will be judged by society as an individual. This contrasts with other societies where membership in a tribe or clan is the basis for judging people.
But the theme of the importance of reputation appears long before Chapter 8. Indeed the word ‘reputation’ appears around 80 times in the entire book, beginning with Chapter 1 and throughout the book. The stage is set for developing the importance of reputation in the emphasis on individual military reputation in Chapter 2 on the Indo-Europeans and the concept of moral communities in Chapter 3—individuals were trusted to the extent that they had a good reputation, and trust was not based on kinship distance. This chart contrasting northwestern European hunter-gathers with the Middle Old World culture is from Chapter 3:
Northwestern
European H-G Cultural Origins |
Middle Old-World
Cultural Origins |
|
Evolutionary
History |
Hunting, gathering | Pastoralism, agriculture |
Kinship
System |
Bilateral; weakly patricentric |
Unilineal; strongly patricentric |
Family System | Nuclear family;
simple household |
Extended family; joint household |
Marriage | Exogamous;
monogamous |
Endogamous, consanguineous; polygynous |
Marriage
Psychology |
Individual choice based on personal characteristics of spouse | Utilitarian; based on family strategizing within kinship group |
Position of
Women |
Relatively high | Relatively low |
Ethnocentrism | Relatively low | Relatively high |
Social Status | Mainly influenced by reputation | Mainly influenced by status in kinship group |
Trust | Trust based on individual’s reputation | Trust based mainly on kinship distance |
Contrasts between European and Middle Old-World Cultural Forms
[thezman:] This gets to the major flaw in the book. It needs an editor. The parts are here for a straight line argument that individualism has genetic roots and that it was selected for in European people. As humans adapted to the harsh northern climates, they adopted social structures that rewarded the behaviors necessary to survive as a group in the areas we now call Europe. While we cannot locate an “individualism gene” we can infer it through things like marriage patterns and family formation.
I realize that at 511 pages, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is something of a tome but I think there is in fact a straight-line—albeit complex—argument. The difficulty is that one is dealing with two different forms of individualism and how they play out in history. The primordial tendencies of all three groups (the Indo-Europeans, the northern hunter-gatherers and Early Farmers) and how they influence family structure (Ch. 4) must be integrated. But one must also include the argument on the role of the Church in accommodating to aristocratic individualism in the early Middle Ages (the Germanization of Christianity) and ultimately facilitating egalitarian individualism (e.g., the canon law of moral universalism, monogamy, exogamy. Canon law swept away the morality of the ancient world based on natural inequality characteristic of the aristocratic moral framework and substituted a morality based on moral egalitarianism and individual conscience, paving the way for outbreaks of Protestant-type individualist thinking about religion during the later Middle Ages) (Ch. 5). This culminated in the Protestant Reformation and the rise to dominance of egalitarian individualism, leading to the English Civil War and the gradual decline of aristocratic individualism (Ch. 6). And then Chapter 7 (which is completely unmentioned in the review) focuses on egalitarian individualism and how it figured in the movement to eradicate slavery by creating a moral community that abhorred slavery. In any case, its tomeishness is no reason to fail to comment on the central differences and the historical dynamic between aristocratic individualism and egalitarian individualism. There is an argument there, but I rather doubt that thezman read it carefully enough to get it.
[thezman:] This [a shorter book] would make for a nice, crisp two-hundred-page book. Instead, these bits are spread over five hundred pages, mixed with material that is highly debatable. People familiar with the history of the early church, for example, will scratch their head at the assertions made in chapter five. The section on Puritanism often seems to contradict what he said in early chapters about individualism. A professional editor could have pointed this out and forced a rethinking of these chapters.
It’s not professional to complain about the statements in Chapter 5 without saying what was puzzling. And the chapter on Puritanism shows that essentially it started out as what one might call a group of individualists (because of their evolutionary background as northern Europeans). This concatenation of individuals formed a cohesive group via powerful social controls embedded in Calvinism. In America, the Puritans originated with the intention of keeping non-Puritans out of Massachusetts (building “the proverbial city on a hill”), but this gradually gave way, mainly because of the colonial policies of the British government preventing the colony from restricting immigration and settlement. During the nineteenth century, several intellectual offshoots of Puritanism, having escaped the powerful social controls of Calvinism, revealed themselves to be radical individualists (e.g., the libertarian anarchists).
[thezman:] Another problem with the book is that it is not really about individualism so much as a way to support his theory of group evolutionary strategy. As a result, he reduces group behavior to individual motivations. This sort of reductionism is common among older right-wing writers for some reason. That generation has always had a fetish for assigning base human desires to the behavior of groups. For some reason, emergent behavior lies beyond their intellectual event horizon.
Sorry, but I don’t get this; I would like to see examples where I reduce group behavior to individual motivations or assign “base human desires to the behavior of groups.” The whole point of cultural group selection theory (which has gradually become eminently respectable) is that groups are a fundamental category of natural selection, that groups are far more than a concatenation of individuals—an idea I first developed regarding the ancient Spartans (Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (Plenum, 1988) and later applied to traditional Jewish groups (A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Praeger, 1994). Take a look at Chapter 1 of the latter; it’s a cultural group selection argument. Think of a military unit. Group behavior is not a simple function of individual motivations but of a hierarchical command structure enforced by rigid discipline; cheaters in the ranks are often forced to suffer severe penalties, thereby solving the fundamental problem of group selection: human groups, unlike the vast majority of animals, are able to develop social controls and ideologies that prevent individual cheating detrimental to group interests. This is a major theme of A People That Shall Dwell Alone where I show that heretical Jews were dealt with harshly.
Moreover, my argument is definitely not biologically reductionist, since there is a major role for cultural innovation via human general intelligence and its control over the modular mechanisms of the lower brain (see here and here on the links between general intelligence and innovation, solving novel problems, and solving old problems in new ways). My view is that ideologies are not reducible to the deterministic output of evolved modules, and this should have been apparent from reading the book, especially Chapters 5 and 8. From Chapter 5:
Religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., the traditional Catholic teaching of eternal punishment in Hell as a result of mortal sin) to control sub-cortical modular mechanisms (e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action tendencies mediated by implicit [modular] processing are controllable by higher brain centers located in the cortex.[3] For example, people are able to effortfully suppress sexual thoughts, even though there is a strong evolutionary basis for males in particular becoming aroused by sexual imagery. Thus, under experimental conditions, male subjects who were instructed to distance themselves from sexually arousing imagery were able to suppress their sexual arousal. Imagine that instead of a psychologist giving instructions, people were subjected to religious ideas that such thoughts were sinful and would be punished by God.
Ideologies such as the Christian ideology of the sinfulness of sexual thoughts are a particularly important form of explicit processing [i.e., non-modular processing linked to general intelligence] that may result in top-down control over behavior. That is, explicit construals of the world may motivate behavior. For example, explicit construals of costs and benefits of religiously relevant actions mediated by human language and the ability of humans to create [emphasis added here] explicit representations of events may influence individuals to avoid religiously proscribed food or refrain from fornication or adultery in the belief that such actions would lead to punishments in the afterlife.
Ideologies, including religious ideologies, characterize a significant number of people and motivate their behavior in a top-down manner—i.e., the higher cognitive functions involving explicit processing located primarily in the prefrontal cortex are able to control the more primitive (modular, reflexive) parts of the brain such as structures underlying sexual desire. Ideologies are coherent sets of beliefs. These explicitly held beliefs are able to exert a control function over behavior and evolved predispositions.
There is no reason to suppose that ideologies are necessarily adaptive. Ideologies often characterize the vast majority of people who belong to voluntary subgroups within a society (e.g., a particular religious sect). Moreover, ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social controls—rationalizing the controls but also benefitting from the power of social controls to enforce ideological conformity in schools or in religious institutions [e.g., Marxist control of the educational system in the USSR]. The next section illustrates these themes as applied to regulating monogamy in Western Europe.
Ideologies are cultural creations enabled by human general intelligence and language; they are not a deterministic outcome of evolved psychological mechanisms. In Chapter 8 I discuss the ability of ideologies such as racial egalitarianism created by elites throughout the West that dominate the media and academia to control evolved tendencies toward ethnocentrism—a major problem for White people now. Hence, I absolutely reject biological reductionionism. Thus the title of my book, The Culture of Critique. Culture is critical and underdetermined by our evolutionary history.
[thezman:] The final criticism of the book is that it fails to explain why individualism has led the West to the verge of self-extinction. It has become an article of faith in certain circles that Western individualism is the cause of decline. Some argue that it makes it possible for tribal minority groups to exert undue influence on society to the detriment of the majority population. If so, then why now and not a century ago or five centuries ago when the West was far more fragmented?
Again, I think the argument is quite clear: the rise of a substantially Jewish elite (i.e., thezman’s “tribal minority”) hostile to the traditional people and culture of the West discussed extensively in Chapters 6 and 8, and continued in Chapter 9. From Chapter 9:
So, what went wrong? Why, little more than a half century after the countercultural revolution, is the West on the verge of suicide, everywhere inundated by other peoples—peoples that are typically far more clannish, far more prone to corruption (an endemic problem in much of the Third World where relationships are based primarily on kinship rather than individual merit and trust of non-kin), and often of demonstrably lower intelligence. This has continued to the point that Western peoples are on the verge of becoming minorities in areas they have dominated for hundreds or, in Europe, thousands of years. Ultimately, if present trends continue, their unique genetic heritage will be lost entirely. One need only look at the demographic trend lines in all Western countries, steady declines in the White percentage of the world population, and generally below-replacement White fertility in the context of massive immigration of non-Whites. Extinction, after all, is just as much a part of the story of life as the evolution of new life forms.
This ongoing disaster for the traditional people of America is the direct result of the rise of a new elite as a result of the 1960s countercultural revolution. This new elite despises the traditional people and culture of America.
The above is essentially a reference to the argument from Chapter 6 on the decline of the WASP elite and the rise of a substantially Jewish elite, culminating in the 1960s countercultural revolution and recounted in my book The Culture of Critique (especially Chapter 3). The above passage continues:
The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and academe were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism discussed throughout this volume. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of these activist intellectuals, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.
The triumph of these intellectual movements to the point of consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil.
…
It was noted in Chapter 6 that during the period of ethnic defense in the 1920s, Darwinist thinking on race was common throughout Western culture and assumed prominence among many U.S. immigration restrictionists, energized by the changing ethnic balance of the United States. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that the intellectuals who became influential beginning in the 1930s (particularly the Boasian school of anthropology) targeted Darwinian theories of race as well as individual identities based on White racial group identity. For example, attacking racial identities in favor of atomized individualism for European-Americans was a central strategy of the Frankfurt School. Group identities based on race and even the family, were portrayed as an indication of psychopathology. Radical individualism was thus promoted by intellectuals who retained a strong allegiance to their own group and self-consciously promoted group interests.
These ideologies fell on particularly fertile soil because they dovetailed with Western European tendencies toward individualism. And whereas individualism has been the key characteristic of Western peoples in their rise to world dominance, these ideologies and their internalization by so many Europeans now play a major role in facilitating Western dispossession.
In particular, the ideology that White identity and having a sense of White interests are signs of psychopathology has made it impossible in mainstream media and academia to argue for the legitimate interests of White people in having homelands and in avoiding becoming minorities in societies they have dominated for hundreds, and in the case of Europe, thousands of years. Such ideologies are disseminated by the mainstream media—including conservative and libertarian media—and throughout the educational system, from elementary school through university.
They have in effect created a moral community that is radically opposed to the interests of Whites. And as with the Puritans, the new elite has been able to create a culture of altruistic punishment in which White people punish fellow Whites who deviate from the dogmas of the moral community created by the new elite, even at the cost of compromising the long-term interests of themselves and their descendants.
These ideologies have been increasingly buttressed by powerful social controls. As discussed in Chapter 8, in much of the West these controls include formal legislation punishing critics of immigration and Western dispossession. Because of the First Amendment, such statutory controls are in their infancy in the United States but are likely to gain traction in the coming years if the left gains power.
However, informal controls are also very effective in the United States and throughout the West. For example, many people have been fired from their jobs as a result of the actions of activist organizations simply phoning their employers. These organizations take advantage of the moral community created by media and academic elites over the last 50 years by limiting the influence of dissident individuals and exposing them to public scrutiny, thereby subjecting them to ostracism and job loss. The effectiveness of these tactics relies on elite consensus and conformist popular attitudes for their effectiveness. Scientifically based ideas that were entirely respectable less than a century ago now result in ostracism and job loss.
You can disagree with that (please do!), but it’s unprofessional to review this book without mentioning the book’s discussion of the role of the rise of the Jews in creating the culture of Western suicide. But once again, a critical piece of the argument is missing from the review. One wonders if thezman did anything more than thumb through the book.
[1] Christopher H. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[2] Ibid., 8.
[3] Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy,” Politics and Culture (Issue, #1, April, 2010), unpaginated; see also K. MacDonald, K. (2009). Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture. Evolutionary Psychology, 7(2), 208–233.
OT
I wonder how it is that the Dutch want to give back the identity of an anonymous “Nazi aggressor”? Have they, surrounded by their “multiracial fellow citizens”, meanwhile changed their minds and freed themselves from their illusional fiction of “tolerance”? That would be an amazing step in the direction of Aryan fraternization! https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/german-fighter-pilot-identified-after-79-years-from-dna-on-envelope/
Thank you for that upbeat story.
“The researchers managed to track down a sister of Benzien’s in the United States but found she had died. However, her grandchildren, whose DNA would not have helped identify the pilot, turned out to have held on to a number of letters sent during their grandmother’s lifetime. ‘A forensic investigation found her DNA in the glue under the stamps and the sealing glue and it matched the DNA taken from her brother’s bones,’ Tuinhuis said.”
What a moving story and what a remarkable piece of forensics.
So moving. Clown.
A company called Othram engages in this sort of forensic genetics — one of its founders is Steve Hsu, a prof of physics at Mich State — in 2020 Dr Hsu was hounded out of his position as VP of Research at MSU after race realist remarks — research into (the genetic nature of) intelligence and behavioral genetics are also among his interests.
Michigan State Research VP Stephen Hsu Resigns After Pressure over Research on Intelligence
His blog is called Information Processing.
“Liberator” was the name of one of the American carpet bombers designed to murder Germany’s civilian population. The question is who was to be “liberated” here? (Presumably Germany from its population. And the omnipotent freedom of action of the Jews.) Only one is certain: the white race with certainty not! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_B-24_Liberator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS1FesL37ck
Ted Sallis over at his “eginotes” blog has also had some criticisms of your work. Unfortunately, he’s about 1,000 times smarter than Zman.
I’ll have a look. What aspect of my work?
Mostly just your new book and its related thesis. I’m pretty sure he still values your Jewish trilogy, and of course, he opposes your recent censorship. But if you search for “jante” or “western liberal tradition” or click on the MacDonald tag on the right hand side, it should give you some idea. Be warned though, it is his own personal blog so his criticisms can be quite harsh.
Do you have a link?
https://thezman.com/wordpress/
Here are a some examples.
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/2020/07/fisking-duchesne.html
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/2021/03/sallis-xenophilia-theory-again.html
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/2020/12/call-to-ethnics.html
Surprisingly hostile. He used to write for TOO. Now I guess I’ll have to write something on him.
I clicked on commenter Dorfmann’s second link. Here follows what I found.
In other words, Ted Sallis says that the peoples of northwestern Europe—presumably including Scandinavians and Balts—learned effectively nothing that was usefully adaptive about the nature of the rest of the world and of the widely differing characteristics of the various peoples inhabiting that world after the period when their languages consisted of a thousand words and various grunts.* Why, I wonder, is this notion of all-determinative “race memory” presumed to hit a brick wall at precisely the point where what might rightly be called primitiveness begins to fall victim to social, cultural, ethical, religious, and technological reflection and observation—not to mention travel, something the northern peoples, the Vikings notably, are famous for?
It is not unfair to say that in the quoted passage above, the conclusion Sallis draws from the evidence he presents is comparable to saying “I feel chilly; so this must be Tuesday.” How can a man who reasons as maturely as a teenager who has been distracted by the sight of a pretty girl have attained a position where he is regarded by some people as an authority?
_______
*Of course, he makes the same dismissive assumption about the peoples of southern Europe, too. So, Ted, how many centuries before the birth of Thales had Greek attitudes and the Greek nature, in the broadest sense, been set in stone?
@Pierre de Craon
Here is the original post detailing the theory.
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/2020/06/racial-proximity-theory.html
Sallis has written numerous articles for TOO, Amren, and Counter-Currents in the past, but if you need some more evidence of this guy’s bona fides, this is probably the best refutation of Lewontin ever written.
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/2018/10/tales-of-fst-sallis-vs-lewontin.html
And he has defended Frank Salter’s “On Genetic Interests” maybe better than Salter himself.
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/2021/07/defending-salterism-and-against.html
I am a big fan of Salter’s EGI and Sallis has been great in promoting it. I am going through his comments that tag me and will respond.
Sincere thanks for the links, Dorfmann. When time permits …
As I have, for better or worse, been loitering in this neighborhood since at least 2009 (likely a bit earlier), I remember most of Sallis’s TOO articles very well, although none of them gave me an itch to follow his work elsewhere.
The z man is kind of a weirdo, TBH.
He refuses to deal with the JQ no matter what evidence you provide.
I read his blog for a while and his work is always surface….he won’t NTJ……
he’ll take you right up to it and then back off. He mocks people who mention jewish influence.
I think IRL he’s an insurance salesman or something like that, and he might even be jewish.
He’s not in your league KMAC.
Pierre De Cryon- I cannot but observe that your – whatever its – thesis or generalization has too many exceptions and open ended concepts to be viable or taken into serious consideration.
As I have said so menny tawz b’fo’, one exception or deviation of an inductive instance renders the deductive hypothesis suspended or nullified. It is immediately obvious that American Indian tribes, individually, were not hostile within their group to EACH OTHER. Rather, they were extremely hostile to the “Other”.
This segues into a general shortcoming I perceive in Dr. MacDonalds broad opinions about various groups differentiated by their prime means of existence. That is to say, all agrarians or “hunter gathers” or hybrids have group cohesion that is extreme. And there is one compelling, ineluctable, immutable reason: that is the requisite to merely survive. In a milieu of scarcity, strangers are always suspect because they are constantly expected to pilfer, rob, or expropriate resources from one group to another.
Retrospectively to what I said in the other comment here, Western Euro peons did not start giving away everything tangible and intangible until the Roman Times. The Roman Empire had structural cultural, religious, ethnic insufficiencies the made it possible for the Chews to expropriate and exploit. All this, of course, is caused and effects the confidence and assurance of a culture. Theirs was in decline because the roots were shallow and mostly derived from other cultures. It was a MATERIALISTIC culture and statist worship based on power and conquest. It was NOT a culture developed for Inner Consciousness or higher, wider and deeper considerations.
“Whites” (the colloquial term for convenience and shallow depth) for Indo-European, did not start giving away the store, their identity, confidence until the Middle East inappropriate and alien religion was forces upon its peoples. The permanent catheter in the vein from which all subsequent toxins and pathogens could be slipped into he blood stream of Jew Rope. From stupid idolatry and anthropomorphic comic book deities to Semitic cyanide.
The Enlightenment caused a crash of the Western Man because the geometric, Aristotelian categorical thinking, time and space, 5 senses, children’s book of Christian understanding could not wrap around these new physical and finite discoveries. What a pathetic cosmology!!
It was Christianity that put the White Race on the skids into the acid bath!!! It’s universality, leveling, equivocation, ambiguity on all major issues make and made it less than useless, but toxic and poisonous.
Maybe I will list the endless examples of its inadequaces to neither steer or explain properly and further survivability.
Your sense of your intellectual superiority to everyone hereabouts seems to have no functioning self-critical component. Amazon sells replacement components in packages of eight for under thirty bucks. If you are a Prime member, the price is actually a bit lower. Do you want a link?
I hope you were not offended, Pierre. That was not my intention.
“That was not my intention.”
As Pierre said, ‘your sense of intellectual superiority seems to have no self-critical component’ … and I would add no basis in reality either. In fact, you seem to be blind and deaf to such a possibility. Thus, you’re extremely tiresome. Take note.
My plate is full and I don’t have much time to engage in polemics. However, I would like to say KMac is a very unusual guy. He not only has big balls, he’s unique. People like him are rare birds -giants amongst men- and they only come along every so often. Masses are programmed. Just look at the environment of the jab. People riding in their cars by themselves wear masks. Some folks have triple masks. Thus, it is easy to comprehend why he can rise the emotion of certain elements. In most cases he forgot more than they’ll ever know. But that’s another issue. My take is that he should ignore those like the individual under discussion. Not doing such simply lowers his level.
Carolyn Yeager, Meine Schatz, here is some information that you might find useful. Saves on Kleenex tissues.
https://www.drugs.com/condition/excessive-salivation.html
Individualism is the natural enemy of group solidarity. When the self-liberation movements took off they specifically targeted people by promoting individualism over group allegiance which is naturally more appealing to humans hence why White America rapidly collapsed after the 1960s resulting in the highly individualistic and multiracial population today.
But this move toward individualism has been a rather stupid one because the truth about human racial differences that have been suppressed so the truth about human racial differences is finally explained here.
https://truthgiverofhumanity.blogspot.com/2022/05/What%20is%20the%20Human%20Race.html
and here is why individualism has destroyed the group.
https://truthgiverofhumanity.blogspot.com/2022/04/What%20is%20the%20Basis%20of%20Morality.html
z man is a pseudo- intellectual. He’s very wordy and full of bravado, but his work never really takes you anywhere.
He’s not searching for the truth; he’s trying to cover it up.
He’s actually quite full of shit. He’ll say there are no “cabals,” and mock people who believe in them,
then he’ll offer you another term that means the same thing and pretend that he’s bestowed you with a brilliant insight
by saying it’s the “managerial elite.” I guess maybe he’s ripping off Paul Gottfried.
He’ll never tell you who is in the managerial elite because then he’d have to name the jew, and he won’t do that.
In fact, if you name all the jews in the Biden team (Blinken and Nuland and Mayorkas and Garland, etc.etc.etc.)
he’ll pretend he didn’t see any jews and say they’re “managers.”
And his comment section is sheer pain, filled with the same kind of nonsense and stupidity that he spews.
Ramzpaul used to plug the zman, doesn’t seem to do it anymore.
Maybe when people initially check out his work, they might be impressed with his verbosity, and sometimes he can turn a
good phrase, but in the end he isn’t taking you anywhere because he is quite confused himself.
The problem with an average GenZ attempting to be an intellectual is their lack of understanding of basic research, analysis and sound logic since it’s not in the zeitgeist nor do professors excel in teaching critical thinking. Essentially these Zers are often not taught basic critical thinking.
In this instance, thezman may have compounded the problem by not fully reading your work! (Having a name in all lowercase is the first tiny tell tale sign of “zhe man’s” sloppinesses!)
Obviously you’ve offered an articulate and sound analysis of your research, along with fitting rebuttals, demonstrating your superb theory of Individualism among Europeans.
Zman is a far right commentator who has garnered a huge following in the past five years. He generates an amazing amount of high quality content(blog posts, articles, podcasts weekly) and really has a great skill of speech and writing. When Jim goad went to counter currents, taki hired Zman as a replacement. He has become very popular partly due to his quality and because he ostensibly opposes the “antisemites”, predominantly Kevin macdonald, and will debunk and criticize them. Hence he has won a lot of Jewish and Jewish aligned followers, many professionals and people who don’t feel comfortable in chat rooms where the jq is broached. But he will call out the neocons and call attention to their ethnic interests, so he does go quite far, except that he almost ritualistically opposes “the antisemites.” He has alluded, I think, over the years, either that he is part Jewish or has a Jewish wife, but don’t quote me on that. Much of the steam that was in venues like too and cc before 2016 has gone over to websites like his that don’t cross a certain line.
I used to be a devoted reader, but over time it seemed to me that less and less background work went into his articles and blogs, so I have gradually stopped reading him, but similar things can be said about most other journals. Z seems to form a group with people like Derbyshire and Johnson of counter currents politically and they frequently give shouts out and links to one another.
In short, I wouldn’t take it too seriously, as opposing Kevin macdonald is part of Zman’s “shtick” so to speak.
zman has no intellectual integrity. He’s a gatekeeper. But he’s much worse than Jared Taylor. Taylor avoids the JQ but provides great info on race. zman doesn’t provide great info on anything.
zman ties himself up in pretzels to avoid the jewish question and his work suffers for it. I think he KNOWS but he’s being paid to divert, or as others speculate he’s probably Jewish.
I take issue on your comment that zman has debunked antisemites because he can’t debunk people who are speaking the truth that he is unwilling to deal with.
I quit reading his crap because in the middle of every article I would scream in my head, “You’re dancing all around the real issue, which is Jewish influence!”
There’s also a certain arrogance from zman that is off-putting. I can’t imagine that his following is “huge,” but if organized Jewry is behind him that would explain his rise.
Oh, Jim Goad is a far better writer than zman. Goad is hilarious. I was saddened when they replaced Goad with zman.
“The Redneck Manifesto” is a fun read and has some great information. zman will never do anything as significant as Goad’s book.
I didn’t mean that he debunked successfully, only that he postures to have debunked. In fairness, I think one time Z wrote a list of essential reading for the dissident right, and I think Macdonald’s trilogy was on it. He’s a good gatekeeper, or is he a gateway?
I follow my own dictum: DISREGARD NARRATIVE – ANALYZE FUNCTION. How does any action or development cause change; without some sweet NY toppings attracting egg laying insects.
Z could stand, quite privately, for Zionist, or signify the last letter: after which, ” non plus ultra ” beyond his penultimate wisdom.
The small fry go after Kevin because he’s the big gun and they think they can gain fame
if they target him.
Speaking for myself, I have found (although have not read any of them, read much about them), the entire series main merit is the contribution and dereliction of the Jews. The other parts and components of propositions of group strategy, “individualism” (poor choice of word-concept), hunter gatherer versus farmer, and so on, seem to be a rearward justification that is overwrought, overstressed, and invented with the use of novel terms and concepts an abstractions laid on top of each other as co-existent or cause and effect.
I base almost always my final opinion and defining determination on my lifelong pursuit of cultural anthropological field work, which was incorporated into my profession requiring constant travel. My ability to discern pattern formation, additionally and subtractually, exceeds the norm by several standard deviations. Like animals that “feel” or perceive earthquakes before humans, I perceive what others have not yet. Any slight ripple of an abnormality or anomaly I cannot not perceive. This annoys acquaintances and relatives alike. It also makes it easy for me to spot phony, contrived, sloppy, dishonest studies and experimental data, hypotheses, and conclusions at an early juncture, before further analysis of methodology standard to statistics and the rigors of the Scientific Method.
For every generalization that Dr. MacDonald makes about group, climate induced, cultural heritage and imputes or projects forward, I can think of exceptions. As some may know, even one (1) exception to a hypothesis renders the thesis or assertion of a scientific paper or position into a nullified condition. That is, unless an outside cause or determinant is found and explains the exception.
I can simply the academese of the usual social science research. Tribal societies are designed for continuity, not innovation. Age, achievement are determinants of who rules. Rather than taking a mutual exclusive approach (either/or), there is usually a blend of both. Nepotism is an inherent tendency, until there is significant disfunction. Nepotism in a broader conceptual form, in modern times, takes the form of those who attend elite schools or favored institutions like certain NGOs, etc.
The migration of masses off the land, transitioning from the Jeffersonian ideal of rural, agrarian VALUES, sets the stage for new information, concepts, mores, etc., that do not necessarily have the advantage of being reality tested and validated. Those who produce intangible “labor” and rely on others to procure subsistence, have a tendency to embrace the abstract, unproven ideas and ideals that serve to promote their interests solely. Therefore, there is no such thing as a “Natural Aristocracy” of correlation to IQ. In fact, the most destructive personality type or persona is precisely the creative and most intelligent. This is indisputable. And the phantasmagorical destructive individuals that rise from power, almost always come from upper income, economic and socially prominent families, or “knowledge workers” for whom abstract intelligence, symbol manipulation, and virtual reality is their metier.
This is but a comment, not a protracted critique. I believe that most of the changes and results in the Western Euro peon population were caused by volitional manmade forces, e.g., the rise of the Christian Catholic and Protest Ant religions, migrations to urban centers/creation of surplus sustenances, and the formation of industrial tier and status stacked concerns and industry.
This is a partial perspective and critique. [Unedited]
” As some may know, even one (1) exception to a hypothesis renders the thesis or assertion of a scientific paper or position into a nullified condition.”
Does UT at Austin teach that nonsense ?
The so-called “soft sciences” such as the behavioral sciences of psychology and sociology are recent , in historical terms , additions to the domain of science . They are called “soft sciences” because of the high probability content of their [ laws ] which explicitly or implicitly express a computational measure of the existence of exceptions to the [ law ] ;
in the form of , for example ,
{ There is a 10% chance that an exception will occur during an experiment/(trial run) that has a 90% chance to successfully demonstrate the [ law ] } .
In other words , have no doubt that probabilistic
laws of science
are NOT usually nullified by less than fifty percent exceptions recorded in sufficiently numerous and adequately conditioned demonstration trial runs .
Found the Jew!.
Nonsense and blather. This is the same kind of pompous bullshit that zman spews.
An exception does NOT nullify a hypothesis.
And you admit you haven’t read KMAC’s trilogy?
Next time, put down your thesaurus and your need to use big words and actually
do the WORK before you grace us with your insignificant opinion.
LOL.
What is scientific induction answer?
Scientific induction is the establishment of a general real proposition based on the observation of particular instances in reliance on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature and the Laws of Causation
What is inductive and deductive in scientific method?
What’s the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning? Inductive reasoning is a bottom-up approach, while deductive reasoning is top-down. Inductive reasoning takes you from the specific to the general, while in deductive reasoning, you make inferences by going from general premises to specific conclusions
Example:
Cheap medications A and B both cause major side effects >>>>
All observed cheap medications cause major side effects >>>>>
All cheap medications cause major side effects
Note the plural observations are consistent. Then they are compiled. Thence, a general statement is made that is without exception.
However, if ONE cheap medication is found then that inductive data point renders the hypothesis void. Understand? If gravity failed to return the baseball to the ground, the we could not generalize and say gravity does this, implying ALL THE TIME WITHOUT EXCEPTION.
And finally, your statement is incorrect, which implies that you ejaculated an opinion that was not supported or logical. The rest of your statement was not worth mentioning, because CARELESS STATEMENTS USUALLY COME FROM CARELESS PEOPLE.
OT
What an exhausting screwed up sophism of an
“Assyrian” named Isaac. The problem is rather
that Syberberg believes in all this Holo bullshit.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/favorite-antisemite-syberberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-J%C3%BCrgen_Syberberg#Controversy
I tried to read the Ted Sallis articles, all three “eginotes” and could not get through them.
Maybe someone else could interpret that gobbledegook for me.
@BH
“I tried to read the Ted Sallis articles, all three “eginotes” and could not get through them.
Maybe someone else could interpret that gobbledegook for me.”
Intentionally muddied waters are always like that.
I second the motion.
Read https://textuploader.com/tts19
Looks like a typical Parisian romance. Already the great
philosopher Andrew Anglin wisely said: “Only firm faith
in Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven makes you strong!”
https://twitter.com/em_down_under/status/1548307221070884864
Arf, Arf!!
That is Baby-Marx’s (“poupon” = baby in French) “barking contribution to world wisdom”.
Who would have expected anything substantial? Not us!
Better be a Jewshredder the a “Jewrope” for Europe!
“Germoney in the Auschwitzkasten of ze Jews!”
https://www.dict.cc/?s=Schwitzkasten
Just followed the latest excretions of the millionaire Canadian
pinstripe “philosopher” with the castrato voice. He complains
of being defamed as a “Nazi,” but places immense value on
demonizing all “racism.” How is it possible that people let
themselves be fooled and misled by this heini in such a way!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56jb4YME3n4
Either this idiot has completely “zero checking”, or he runs
his infamous game with intention, I claim the second. How
can someone as a “philosopher” not realize the simple fact
that the deprivation of sexual identity means only the “logi-
cal” consequence of the deprivation of national identity!
He says, the bad “leftists” are to blame for everything, but the
“leftists” are now times eternal component of the so-called
“democratic” society after Jewish-American model, which he
wants allegedly, they will therefore never disappear! The man
is a liar through and through! He enriches himself monetarily
with the most radical “intellectual” fooling of his useful idiots!
https://www.dict.cc/?s=Heini
I’m sorry, but anyone who links to Vdare or Sailer isn’t necessarily ‘on the right side of things’, assuming you’re talking about explicit white identity.
Instead of using it as an opportunity to explain why there is nothing wrong, politically or morally, with wanting the US to remain majority white, when Brimelow was called a White Nationalist by the NYT he sued them (and asked for donations to pay for it); that was a real WTF moment for me about Brimelow and Vdare.
Despite all of his writing about real and irremediable racial differences (HBD), Sailer is clearly a civic nationalist; his term for that is ‘anti-racist citizenist conservative’, but good luck getting him to explain exactly what that means — if you read him regularly, you have to admit he posts a lot of garbage; with him it seems mostly about page views between asking for donations — one comment I saw described the tone of much of his writing as ‘wry detachment’; snark would be another word for it — and bizarrely, Sailer really went all-in on the mainstream COVID narrative — this comment shows I’m far from the only one who has noticed what a fraud Sailer is.
I know The Zman has trashed Sailer several times on Gab, e.g. here.
I have no use anymore for either Sailer or Brimelow (albeit Vdare still occasionally has some interesting content).
Yes, Sailer is a cuck and he won’t post your comment if it’s regarding the JQ.
Also agree that KMAC could easily disregard zman who is a nobody just looking for attention.
Why is someone with a name replying to trash that calls itself zman
Ayn Rand would be more famous if she stuck with short novels instead of epic stories. She should have said that some countries are better than others to be an individual, objectively.