Jews and the shaping of our thought

Nobody reading this needs to be told that Jews have had a great influence on the West in the last few decades. What might not be widely understood is the effect they have had specifically on the way we think.

Through the ages the Western mind has shown itself to be straightforward, positivist and empirical rather than mystical, intuitive or magical. If Western man sees something, he believes that it is there and thinks that the way to understand it is by looking at it more closely. He does not assume that his eyes deceive him or that reality is as described by an authority that must not be questioned. The fact that something looks different from different points of view does not make him think that it is created by his perceptions, nor does he imagine that it is a product of his preferences or statements. He distinguishes what is out there, the object, from himself, the subject, and tries to make his statements match reality. In this way he seeks to apprehend the world around him.

At least, this always used to be the case, but after the Second World War it began to change, mainly on account of three intellectual fashions, namely relativism, social constructionism and postmodernism, which are the cause of a great deal of the damage the West has done to itself in that period. We owe them largely to Jews.

Relativism comes in three varieties: moral, cultural and epistemic. Moral relativism denies that there are absolute moral values. Cultural relativism asserts that no culture is of greater value than another, nor must we judge another culture by the standards of our own. According to epistemic relativism, a person’s knowledge is relative to their assumptions or point of view. Someone who claims to know something doesn’t really know it; it’s just the way it seems to them from their “perspective”.

The main effect of relativism is to undermine one’s confidence. “I thought this was right and that was wrong”, one thinks, “but perhaps I was mistaken”. “I thought it was fairly reasonable to expect my neighbour to stop playing loud music at eleven o’clock, but perhaps that’s just my culture.” “I thought ice floated on water, but perhaps I didn’t really know it. Perhaps no one really knows anything.”

Moral relativism can make morality relative to many things. In a documentary, Louis Theroux made it relative to the individual. He described a sex worker as having had a difficult upbringing.[1] She explained that when you’re fourteen and don’t go to school, you don’t realise that it’s just sexual if somebody shows an interest in you. Now, she’s had so many experiences that she can have sex with anyone. Addressing the viewer, Theroux didn’t ask whether selling sex was wrong but whether it was wrong for her. Maybe it wasn’t, he suggested, although it might be wrong for someone else.

Cultural relativism was intensively promoted in the 1990s. “All cultures are of equal value” was a constant mantra of the media. A case in point arose when a Haitian living on Long Island hired a voodooist to cast out the spirits she thought her father had let loose in her house, causing troubling sounds to come from the basement.[2] He threw a sheet over her, doused it with cologne and set fire to it, not taking her to hospital with her third-degree burns until the following afternoon. When he was charged with attempted murder, his defence was that he was only practising his religion. A Haitian spokesman explained that Haitians, like other ethnic minorities, had brought their culture to America with them. Who were Americans to judge?

Nor does epistemic relativism have much going for it. It may be true that scientific knowledge is only ever provisional as it inches its way towards the truth or makes occasional wrong turns, but this does not mean that it is relative to a point of view. One might even say that a considerable amount of knowledge has been established beyond question over the centuries. How many of the thousands of statements in a random medical textbook might be wrong, for example? But epistemic relativism has seeped so far into our culture as to affect the way we think, yet it has done so with a twist. Instead of causing people to doubt their knowledge, it makes them feel entitled to describe any statement they may care to make as true for them, while they presumably believe that other people might “know” the opposite. In effect such people do without the concept of knowledge altogether.

Epistemic relativism was popularised by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which held that scientific knowledge was relative to a “paradigm”. Thomas Kuhn was Jewish. Decades earlier, cultural and by implication moral relativism were introduced by Franz Boas, who was also Jewish.

Social constructionism is the fashion followed by anyone who says that something is just a social construct, which is an extremely popular thing to say. What it means is unclear. Perhaps by “construct” those who say it mean concept. A social construct is in the mind, and if it is just a social construct there is nothing that corresponds to it in reality. But to show this, social constructionists would need to produce an argument to say that what the concept appears to refer to isn’t there. Instead they seem to think that they have proved as much simply by calling it just a social construct.

Sometimes when people call things just social constructs they mean, stressing the social aspect, that the only reason we think that they exist is that we have agreed that they do. But to establish this, they would again need to show that our belief that they exist is mistaken.[3]

In a third scenario, social constructionists accept that social constructs exist but emphasise that we have constructed them, and what we have constructed we can deconstruct or cease constructing. A feminist might apply this to differences between the sexes. Yes, she might say, the sexes differ, but we construct the differences by bringing boys and girls up differently, therefore to get rid of the differences we only need to change our child-rearing practices. But this has been tried, and it has not worked. In any case, every parent knows that boys and girls differ by nature. Adults are not needed to socially construct the differences.

The one sort of thing that social constructionists do not describe as social constructs are those that really are social constructs, like money.[4] All that makes a piece of paper a ten-dollar bill and means that we can use it to buy things with is the fact that we have agreed that it is a ten-dollar bill, which we have agreed means that we can use it to buy things with. Social constructionists aren’t interested in this kind of example because they’re not really interested in social constructs. What they’re interested in is a sophisticated-sounding term that they can use to persuade themselves that things they don’t like, such as sex differences, either don’t exist or can be got rid of.

What could be more damaging than an intellectual fashion that induces a society to indulge in such self-persuasion? It is going to proceed on the basis of a false understanding of reality and waste its energy trying to get rid of things, quite possibly having forgotten why it thinks they need to be got rid of, that will never go away.

The main source of social constructionism was a book called The Social Construction of Reality (1966) by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, both of whom were Jews.

Postmodernism is a nonsensical collection of ideas designed to appeal to the will to power and aid the revolutionary transformation of society. It is mainly attributed to Michel Foucault, author of The Order of Things (1966), but is as much due to Jacques Derrida, who wrote Writing and Difference and On Grammatology (both 1967). Foucault was not Jewish; Derrida was.

Derrida’s main idea is that we are in a prison of language from which we cannot escape. Far from letting us grasp reality, language stops us making contact with it, therefore a statement does not represent the world but can only be called a “narrative”, which cannot be appraised as true or false. If we think that a narrative is true, we are deceived by a group such as White people or men, who have the power to impose their narratives on others. This is what a feminist meant when she described objectivity as nothing but male subjectivity.[5] A statement a man describes as objective, meaning that it is true for all, only expresses his prejudices and seeks to advance his sectional interests, presumably at the expense of women.

To counter such unpleasant groups, postmodernists decided that it was necessary to “privilege” the narratives of women and non-Whites. It is thus postmodernism that we have to thank for the idea adopted by the British police as long ago as in 1983 that if a Black person “perceives” themselves to have been racially attacked by a White person, then this is what has happened.[6] Any definition of a “hate crime” in use today is of this type. The #MeToo movement was similarly postmodern. For a case of a man mistreating a woman to be discovered, all that was needed was for a woman to say that she had been mistreated. Thus non-Whites and women were “empowered”.

When it feels the need, postmodernism forgets that language forms an impenetrable barrier between us and reality and says that it can “construct” it. We become magicians, making things true by mere assertion. This side of the philosophy was illustrated by a social psychologist who wrote a paper called “Self-fulfilling stereotypes”, which explained how stereotypes such as of Italians as passionate persist.[7] He did not deny that the stereotypes were true. Italians really are passionate, he maintained, but only because that is how they are described. Presumably they started out being no more passionate than others, then for some reason people took to calling them passionate, which made them passionate. The narrative constructed the reality; the stereotype fulfilled itself. Incidentally, this writer was Jewish, and his article appeared in a collection edited by a Jewish woman.

From academics like this, via the intellectuals who spread their ideas, postmodernism came through to the general public, again in the 1990s, the first decade of political correctness.[8] It is now so familiar that one hardly raises an eyebrow when a man writes: “I am a woman because I say I am. Nothing else is needed”. But postmodernists are quietly selective about the bits of reality they think their words can govern. When this man finds that he has run out of milk, he won’t say: “I have milk because I say I have. Nothing else is needed”. He will go out and buy some, like anybody else.

Postmodernism gives its followers a gratifying sense of power. Confronting a history book that says things they don’t like, they can dismiss it as only purveying the writer’s prejudices. They can laugh at its claims to objectivity, saying that objectivity is unattainable. Then when they put pen to paper themselves, they can purvey their own prejudices to their hearts’ content, for what can a narrative do but purvey the writer’s prejudices? They do not need to try to be objective, for who can be objective?

A book does not need quality to be influential; what it needs is to be promoted. The publisher promotes it to journalists, who promote it to the public in admiring reviews or commission admiring reviews from academics. The book fills every bookshop window and starts appearing on college reading lists. Anyone who wants to be up-to-date makes sure that they have read it. To bring all this about, the book only needs to be selected as a world-changer by someone in a key position in a network of the right people, such as, in the case of a book written by a Jew, a Jew whom other Jews will obey. But is there such a network? Are there Jews in publishing, advertising, the media and academia? Do bears shimmy in the woods?

Another influential Jewish book was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a piece of pseudoscience which purported to show that the typical White American male was an incipient Fascist. It drew on interviews which it is tempting to think were interpreted in view of a pre-ordained conclusion, marking subjects on the “F scale”, where a traditional husband and father would score high. Jewish men were not included in the sample. The book was taken by a generation of social scientists to reveal a deep malaise in American society, which liberalism and permissiveness might cure. Published by the American Jewish Committee with Theodor Adorno as lead author, it was the first major product of the Frankfurt School.

The Institute had been founded in the 1920s by Felix Weil, who was Jewish, as were Theodor Adorno and the school’s other main members, namely Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Its associates, such as Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Reich were also Jews. Fromm and Marcuse wrote books that influenced the youth of the 1960s.[9] Marcuse became the “godfather” of the campus radicals of that decade, the main ones being Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, Abbie Hoffman, Michael Rossman, Jerry Rubin, Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Steve Weissman and, in France, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, all of whom were Jews apart from Mario Savio. These activists implemented the implicit agenda of The Authoritarian Personality by opposing authority, succeeding so far as to spell the end of it, often known as the end of deference, especially deference to White men. Their followers went on to be well represented among those who have been running our institutions for the last 25 years.

If there is one idea that started to bear in on White people after the Second World War, it was that of essential racial equality, the idea that the races, no matter how different they might appear, are basically the same. This meant that any differences in their circumstances must be due to environmental factors such as the mistreatment of Blacks by Whites, therefore as the idea was spread, so was the notion of White guilt. For decades now the idea of essential racial equality, though hard to reconcile with evident facts, has been closed to questioning.[10] Having started with Franz Boas, it was popularised after the War by his pupil Ashley Montagu, who was Jewish, and then notably by Stephen Jay Gould, Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose, all of whom were Jews.[11]

Today we commonly hear calls for White people to be exterminated or to commit suicide. Headlines from the American press between 2015 and 2017 include: “Professor tweets that white people should commit mass suicide”, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” and “USC professor calls for holocaust against all white people”.[12] These calls can be traced back to two sources. In 1967 Susan Sontag famously described the White race as the cancer of human history.[13] White people threatened “the very existence of life itself”, she wrote. What does one do with a life-threatening cancer? Then in 1992 Noel Ignatiev of Harvard University founded the magazine Race Traitor with the motto “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”. The way to save humanity was to “abolish whiteness”. As we know, this is the great abolitionist movement of today. Susan Sontag and Noel Ignatiev were both Jews.

What calls itself “critical race theory”, from which demands for the wiping of White people off the face of the earth now emanate, is descended from “critical theory”, the basic method of cultural Marxism, later called political correctness, now called wokeness, which began with the Frankfurt School.

Burdened by unnecessary guilt feelings, with demands for their extinction ringing in their ears and after decades of exposure to relativism, social constructionism and postmodernism, it is little wonder that many White people now have trouble thinking straight. Without the influence of Jews, this would presumably not be so. We would still be as mentally capable as we once were.

[1] BBC, Jan. 12th 2020, “Selling sex”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbcf/louis-theroux-selling-sex?page=1.

[2] American Renaissance, June 1998, “O Tempora, O Mores!”,  https://www.amren.com/news/1998/06/o-tempora-o-mores-june-1998/.

[3] In Culture of Critique, Kevin Macdonald explains that Jewish intellectuals have never seen a difference  between truth and consensus, meaning their consensus. “Jewish religious ideology was an infinitely plastic set of propositions that could rationalize and interpret any event in a manner compatible with serving the interests of the community. … It never occurred to the members of this discourse community to seek confirmation of their views from outside … by trying to understand the nature of reality itself.” See Kevin Macdonald, 2002 (1998), Culture of Critique, www.1stbooks. com, Chapter 6, “The Jewish Criticism of Gentile Culture: A Reprise”, available at http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/CofCchap6.pdf.

[4] This example is due to John Searle. See e.g. Searle, 1995, The Construction of Social Reality, London: Penguin.

[5] Adrienne Rich (1979) was quoted by Dale Spender, who was quoted by Roger Scruton in “Ideologically Speaking” in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (eds.), 1990, The State of the Language, Berkeley: University of California Press.

[6] In 1983 the Metropolitan Police adopted a definition of a racial incident as “any incident which includes an allegation of racial motivation made by any person” (from “Race Equality in the UK Today: Developing Good Practice and Looking for Reform: The Police”, a handout distributed by John Newing, President of the Association of Chief Police Officers, on December 8th 1998 at QMW Public Policy Seminars: Developing New Legislation and Strategies on Race Equality, Royal Over-Seas League, London SW1). Thus the racial nature of the incident lay in the allegation, not in any evidence.

[7] Mark Snyder, 1988, “Self-fulfilling stereotypes”, in Paula Rothenberg (ed.), Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

[8] I use the word “intellectuals” in the sense of Friedrich Hayek, 1998 (1949), The Intellectuals and Socialism, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, pp. 9-18, who meant by it the media, academics and any others who make a living out of conveying ideas to the public, such as teachers, priests, novelists and cartoonists.

[9] For example, Erich Fromm wrote The Fear of Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947) and The Art of Loving (1956). Herbert Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Repressive Tolerance (1965).

[10] A fact that is hard to reconcile with the doctrine of essential racial equality is that Asian women have wider hips than White women, who have wider hips than black women. This is because women of the three races need to be able to give birth to babies with heads of different average sizes. Thus the doctrine of essential racial equality is refuted by an observation anyone can make. This is before one goes on to note that Asians with their bigger brains have higher IQs than Whites, who have higher IQs than blacks, or the dozens of other ways in which the races line up in the same order.

[11] In 1942 Ashley Montagu (real name Israel Ehrenberg) wrote Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. In 1947, with Theodosius Dobzhansky (also Jewish), he wrote a paper stating that man had “escaped from the bondage of the physical and biological” and was “almost wholly emancipated from dependence upon inherited biological dispositions” (“Natural Selection and the Mental Capacities of Mankind”, reprinted from Science, vol. 105, 1947, in Ashley Montagu [ed.] 1975, Race and IQ, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 104-13). In 1950 Montagu edited UNESCO’s first Statement on Race (UNESCO, 1969, Four Statements On The Race Question, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000122962), which stated: “For all practical purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth”. In 1967 another UNESCO statement averred that current biological knowledge did not allow us to impute cultural achievements to differences in genetic potential. Other vehicles for this idea were The Mismeasure of Man (1981) by Stephen Jay Gould and Not in Our Genes (1984) by Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose. For a review of the no-race idea, see Steve Sailer, May 31st 2000, “Cavalli-Sforza II: Seven Dumb Ideas about Race”, V-Dare, https://vdare.com/articles/cavalli-sforza-ii-seven-dumb-ideas-about-race.

[12] Mark Collett clips, Oct. 7th 2020, “Racism’s New Anti-White Definition — Mark Collett”, https://odysee.com/@markcollettclips:3/racism-s-new-anti-White-definition-mark:f. Other headlines were: “Trinity College professor calls White people ‘inhuman’: ‘Let them f-ing die’”, “Professor: ‘Some White People May Have to Die’ to Solve Racism”, and “White Professor calls all White people to mass suicide over slavery”. Slides put up during lectures included: “How White people plagued society” and “White people are a plague to the planet”.

[13] Susan Sontag, 1967, “What’s Happening to America? (A Symposium)”, Partisan Review, 34 (1): pp. 57-58.