Evolutionary Psychology

Environmental Activists and Machiavellianism

It is intuitively obvious that people who have the need to emphasise how “moral” and “kind” they are tend to not be very nice people.

Have you ever been at a party where you have started chatting to someone who is “Woke.” Perhaps she is vegetarian, makes a point of purchasing organic food, signs petitions and goes on occasional environmental protests. She will be very pleasant and outgoing until you say something that indicates that you are on what she perceives as the “enemy” side, such as that genetics might play a role in crime. At this point, she will turn: she will become cold, she will shun you. This is because the Woke are not genuinely kind people at all. Many of them behave as they do because they have a personality disorder and a growing number of studies are showing this to be true.

A personality disorder is defined as an enduring pattern of disruptive thoughts, behaviours and moods. There are various personality disorders, but it appears that those most strongly associated with the “Woke” stereotype are “Narcissism” and “Machiavellianism.”   Machiavellianism is characterised by manipulative behaviour, deception, a desire for power and trying to force others to comply with your wishes. Signalling Wokeness in a leftist society is a play for power. Narcissism is characterised by entitlement, arrogance, exploitation, grandiosity and a desire for praise. Wokeness, in a liberal society, involves believing you are morally superior to others and may elicit praise. These are two of the “Dark Triad” personality traits, the third being Psychopathology.

Unsurprisingly, then, a new study by Hannes Zacher of Leipzig University in Germany — “The dark side of environmental activism” — has found a clear connection between the Dark Triad traits and leftism. In the study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Zacher administered a leftism scale to 839 full-time employed Germans which measured such facets as anti-hierarchical aggression, anti-conventionalism and top-down censorship. He also administered to them accepted scales of Narcissism and Machiavellianism, further asking them about their environmental activism.

What did he find? Machiavellianism was positively associated both with left-wing authoritarianism and with environmental activism. Fascinatingly, he then controlled for personality type — in psychology this is measured using the “Big 5” personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness (rule-following), Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (mental instability) — and found that the association still held: Machiavellianism predicts leftism and environmental activism.

This is one of a growing number of studies to have made this connection. In “Why dark personalities participate in politics?,” also published in Personality and Individual Differences, Polish researchers found that Narcissism was consistently related to left-wing political participation, such as joining boycotts and blocking streets. Such people receive Narcissistic affirmation via such actions — they reassure them of their moral righteousness — and their grandiosity means that they are certain that whatever they do is right.

A study in 2020, “The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes,” on a sample of Americans, found that the key predictors of Authoritarian left-wing attitudes were scoring high on the scales of Machiavellianism and Narcissism. Interestingly, it also found that “Alt-Right” activists, though not leftists, scored high on Psychopathology. It is unclear why, but one possibility is that psychopaths tend to be attracted to danger and if you are serious political dissident — “Alt Right” in a Woke society — then you are potentially placing yourself in a dangerous situation.

Even quite everyday left-wing activities seem to ultimately have some association with Dark Triad traits. The recent study “The dark side of going green: Dark triad traits predict organic consumption through virtue signaling, status signaling, and praise from others” in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services found precisely this. Drawing on a survey of 337 people, the researchers found that the intention of buying organic food and the willingness to pay extra for organic food was mediated by status consumption and by the belief that one would receive praise from others. In addition, it was found that those who were inclined to “virtue-signal” about these purchases had high levels of Narcissism and of Machiavellianism. In other words, to some extent, people who purchase organic food are motivated by their Dark Triad personality traits and this is especially true of those who want you to know that they have made these purchases.

All of this, indeed, is consistent with evidence from broader studies of personality differences. These tend to show that “conservatives” are high in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and that they are low in Neuroticism. Liberals, on average, are the reverse of this: they are selfish and have low mental stability. This was set out in a study where, conveniently, quite the opposite findings were reported, and widely publicised, due to a “coding error.” If you experience the world as frightening and dangerous, which those who are high in Neuroticism do, then it makes sense that you would wish to take control of that world. Hence Neuroticism is associated with Machiavellianism according to the study “The dark triad and normal personality traits.

Returning to that party where you meet the Woke activist, note that she shuns you rather than the other way round. This is consistent with the evidence that liberals are more likely to break friendships with conservatives than the other way round. They are also more likely to avoid talking to friends and family who have different political views than are conservatives. This may be because, being higher in Neuroticism and Narcissism, they are more likely to be overwhelmed by negative feelings when the views they hold — which are important to making them feel superior and important to papering over their inner turmoil — are challenged.

This research seems to indicate that society has turned Woke because leftists are more power-hungry, but also partly because they are more mentally ill: Conservatives are simply too mentally stable, too content with life and, well, too nice.potent

Ed Dutton Goes Back to School (With Evolutionary Psychology in his Satchel)

The Naked Classroom: The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School
Edward Dutton
Jolly Heretic Publications, 2023

As a schoolboy, Ed Dutton decided he was a “humanities person.” He felt an immediate interest in the lives of his ancestors and the people around him, and so enjoyed learning about history and literature, which spoke to him of such things. Memories of eighth-grade lessons on stamens and pistils, on the other hand, still summon up feelings of “ennui and despair.” He couldn’t wait to turn sixteen so he would never have to take another science lesson again. How did such a child morph into a dissident evolutionary psychologist?

By discovering the relevance of science to all the things he was already interested in. History, for example, can be understood as Darwinian evolution in action:

Individuals and groups compete for power and resources under harsh Darwinian conditions and those who are best adapted to their environment survive. Computer models have shown that groups highest in “positive ethnocentrism” (in-group cooperation) and “negative ethnocentrism” (out-group hostility) dominate all other groups, all else being equal. Not only that, but people can pass on their genes indirectly and tend to favour people the more genetically similar they are to themselves. [This] makes sense of soldiers dying for their country or one ethnic group persecuting another. Why didn‘t we learn about this when we learnt about World War II?

Come to think of it, I have a pretty good notion why White British schoolchildren are not taught how outgroup hostility can help them prevail in the struggle for survival. But Dutton is certainly correct that teaching such things would make science lessons a whole lot more interesting—for all concerned.

Religion was another matter that excited the young Dutton’s curiosity. Churches were all over the place, and students prayed and sang hymns at school assemblies.

“Why are people religious?” I recall wondering, aged about 11. “Why do they tell us that Father Christmas isn‘t real, yet believe in a kind of invisible Father Christmas, who created the world?” Yes, I was that kind of child. Science classes could have explained to me that, in Darwinian terms, something is an adaptation if it is partly genetic, found in all cultures, [and] associated with mental and physical health and fertility. Religion is, therefore, an adaptation, and that is why otherwise perfectly rational people will believe it and engage in it. It is, in effect, an instinct, whereby a number of other instincts — following the leader, over-detecting agency [and] causation, the feeling of being watched (which makes you more pro-social), the feeling of being looked after (which guards against anxiety and despair) — are all selected for and, so, become bundled together.

Even math has aspects that make it relevant to the practicalities of our lives today; it teaches the student

to think logically, and this is vital to understanding the world and as a force against those who value power over reason. If somebody is forced to assert as true something which they know to be wrong — if they must assert that 2 + 2 = 5, for example — then they are humiliated; they have submitted to someone else‘s power. If Algebra and Trigonometry had been taught with these factors in mind, I would have had far more time for them.

In short, “Science is badly taught because it is not taught in a ‘based’ way, [i.e.,] with reference to fascinating, controversial yet accurate knowledge of the world, the kind of knowledge certain influential figures try to suppress.”

Dutton sees these powerful antiscientific authorities as driven by four psycho-social forces which amount to a version of Francis Bacon’s Four Idols of the Mind updated for the age of social media:

  • Low Decoupling Ability, or the inability to distinguish questions of fact from questions about what ought to be. A recent illustration is the furor which ensued when Richard Dawkins made the elementary point that practical objections to eugenic breeding do not mean such breeding would be ineffective.
  • Motivated Social Cognition, or the adoption of beliefs because they satisfy a psychological need.
  • Concept Creep, such as the expansion of the idea of what is harmful or violent (“silence is violence”). Also applies to the expansion of a concept such as “racism” to encompass the entire universe.
  • Catastrophization, or the extrapolation of disastrous conclusions from limited observations: e.g., the Third Reich will be reborn if “antiracist” activists suffer the slightest setback. (For some amusing recent examples of catastrophization in American politics, see here: link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjYOddl-CCA)

It does not matter how “progressive” the political preferences of a scientist may be: he will be viciously attacked by the anti-science brigade if he reports a finding contrary to their cherished world view. A recent illustration is the attack on

left-wing behavioural geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden who, in 2021, published The Genetic Lottery (Harden, 2021), a book that denounced all the “right” people, such as Charles Murray, and insisted that there was “zero evidence” for hereditarianism. Yet merely for talking about mainstream behavioural genetics, Harden was described in the Daily Beast as legitimizing “crypto-race science.” Behavioural genetics was described as “ethically abhorrent,” with the author suggesting that publishers “should refuse to participate” and need to recognize that the field is “actively harming people.”

But back to the classroom: every schoolboy notices that most of his teachers, especially in primary school, are women (in Dutton’s native Britain the figure is 85%). Evolutionary psychology could explain to them that

boys are attracted to jobs that involve systems and the manipulation of objects, and also status, because — being higher in testosterone — they are highly competitive: car mechanic, pilot, computer programmer and scientist. Girls massively migrate towards caring professions: general practitioners, social workers, nurses and, of course, primary school teachers. Even with academic subjects, you find this divide. Male doctors will be attracted by surgery; female doctors by psychiatry and paediatrics, in other words, caring about children or helping people talk through their psychological problems. When a profession becomes dominated by females, as has occurred with teaching [like academic psychology these days], it starts to be regarded as “women’s work” and, thus, of low status. This further repels men and the profession’s wages start to fall, making it even less prestigious.

In secondary school, the imbalance in favor of women teachers diminishes somewhat (27% of secondary teachers in Britain are men), but male teachers are heavily concentrated in certain subject areas such as math and science. Here, an evolutionary psychologist could explain to curious pupils that “the essence of science is systematizing and this is more attractive to the male mind,” and that “males are higher in spatial and mathematical intelligence,” which is necessary to the successful pursuit of science. Females, presumably because they are the ones who teach their children to speak, are higher in verbal intelligence.

And, of course, science had plenty to say (where permitted) about why East Asian students do so well in math, while Black students rarely excel outside of Phys Ed.

Even social class dynamics visible in the schoolroom can be illuminated, since there is an extent to which social classes are genetic clusters: “Experiments have found that people can correctly assess other people’s social class from facial clues to a greater degree than would be possible by chance.” The tendency for friendships to form within social classes rather than across them is an expression of inclusive fitness.

Playground bullying is a type of behavior that “can be found among non-human animals and in all human societies, and it is highly resistant to attempts to stamp it out. Accordingly, [it] may be an adaptation.” If so, “bullying must be partly heritable, it must elevate fertility and it must be associated with health.”

If bullying aided survival (and thus fertility) it would be elevated at times of want and this has been found in anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies. Bullies are less likely to be picked on, less likely to be stressed and more likely to be healthy, and studies note direct evidence that bullies are healthier than those who are bullied, both physically and mentally.

Moreover, chicks dig bullies: male bullying implies status and dominance, physical prowess, social skill (not being the outcast oneself) and even intelligence (in the context of verbal bullying). For such reasons, Dutton is contemptuous of today’s anti-bullying campaigns, which are most likely to elevate the campaigners themselves into bullies over the rest of us.

Decades of pro-homosexualist propaganda seems to have had no effect on male adolescents, among whom “gay” remains the worst of insults: even math can be “gay” if a boy dislikes it enough. Might it not interest such youngsters to know why they have such strong negative feelings about homosexuality? Once again, evolutionary psychology has explanations. Here are just a few: homosexuality is maladaptive because no amount of homosexual behavior can ever have a reproductive payoff; it is an expression of developmental instability, indicating high mutational load and increased risk of mental instability; effeminate males may well be unreliable as defenders of the tribe; and homosexuals may be vectors of disease due to risky sexual practices.

Evolutionary psychology can also explain differences in male and female social behavior that are obvious even to children:

Males develop friendships in the context of a male band which fights other bands, and as a means of alliances to ascend the hierarchy of their own band. Female friendships are based around finding potential “alloparents” for their children or potential children. Such relationships must be close, as you are trusting these women with your babies; so females will cultivate a small number of intense, one-to-one friendships. The result of this system is that “new women on the scene” are not novel and interesting alliances in a large band that fights another band. They are dangerous rivals that may poach one’s carefully cultivated alloparent. As such, there is a degree to which all females that are not one of your potential alloparents are rivals and enemies, which can explain why bullying can be so nasty and spiteful among females.

While nasty, female bullying is less overt and physical than male bullying since females are both weaker and higher in anxiety. This is also why girls “play for status via covert methods. They virtue-signal, or attack the virtue of others, stressing their interest in ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance.’”

These are, of course, precisely the tactics of today’s “woke” left. If it has ever occurred to you that its methods are unmanly, you are onto something: the female (or effeminate male) bully avoids direct confrontation, engaging instead in “the adult equivalent of ‘telling the teacher’: complaining about a video online, calling the police, or some other act of brazen cowardice.” Dutton shares an illustrative personal anecdote:

In November 2021, I was in a bar in northern Finland [with some] members of Finland’s “Young Green League.” One was manifestly a man dressed as a woman. He hadn’t even made that much effort: he had stubble and extremely hairy arms. Nevertheless, he confidently used the women’s loo. Eventually, as he seemed quite friendly, I explained that my experience of people like them — the Greens, the Woke — was that they were unreasonable, aggressive, dogmatic, and could never brook any kind of disagreement.

“No, we’re not like that,” he chirpily replied.

“You mean you can have a calm, reasonable conversation about anything?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, let’s talk about your autogynophilous transsexuality . . .”

At this, he recoiled, like a vampire presented with a crucifix, and hissed with a barely-suppressed glint of animal rage. I was then physically mobbed. They brought over their fat, tall, bearded friend to intimidate me into leaving the dance floor I was on.

“You have to go!” he declared.

No, I don’t,” I said. “This is a public bar.”

So he “told the teacher” – the landlord. I knew the landlord personally and he calmly appealed to me to please just stop talking to these people.

Of course, these are (disproportionately) the sort of people in charge of educating the rising generation in the West today, and making science class more interesting to the young Ed Duttons of the world is far down their list of priorities. If they do not adopt the program he suggests in The Naked Classroom, it is not for pedagogical reasons, but because they know they would soon have a revolution on their hands.

John Tooby on Coalitional Politics in Science

John Tooby (1952–2023) died on November 10. Hearing about this brought back a whole lot of memories, many none too pleasant. As will be obvious, we disagreed about pretty much everything. But I have to say that in my experience he was an affable enough guy even after he attacked me publicly, and even after I was being shunned by the good people at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. I wrote this originally in 2017.

John Tooby was a professor of anthropology at UC-Santa Barbara and, along with his wife Leda Cosmides, prominent in the field of evolutionary psychology. For a whole lot of reasons, we do not see eye-to-eye on pretty much anything related to evolutionary psychology, but Tooby has also criticized me for my work on Judaism and for around ten years they had a note on their website that they were going to refute me—since removed. But I am happy to say that I finally agree with him about something. But first a little background.

Our differences long predate my study of Judaism and go to the heart of how to conceptualize evolutionary psychology. At a time when E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology was still under fire from the left, Tooby and Cosmides designed an evolutionary psychology that would fly under the radar of political correctness. The vicious assault on sociobiology by the left was a sight to behold—culminating in a woman pouring a pitcher of ice water over Wilson’s head at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But the left succeeded. Evolutionary psychology became ensconced as the heir of sociobiology. The word ‘sociobiology’ was virtually expunged from the lexicon, and the most important academic journal in the field changed its name from Ethology and Sociobiology to Evolution and Human Behavior. I heard it on good authority that Wilson described those who carried out this coup as acting like “beaten dogs.”

Without the baggage of the term ‘sociobiology’, the field was free to reinvent itself.  The trick was to loudly proclaim the idea that evolution did indeed sculpt the mind, but that all humans were essentially alike because we all evolved in the same Pleistocene environment. This takes issues like race differences completely off the table, and individual differences, as in personality and intelligence, become mere “noise.”

And since we were all the same, the only interesting source of differences between humans was that people were exposed to different environmental contexts in their lifetime. Why is one person more aggressive than another? The evolutionary psych answer is that some people are exposed to contexts that bring out aggression, such as poverty and low social status, or their muscular build makes aggression have greater payoffs — explanations that fit well with a leftist zeitgeist. The  fact that some people have genes that predispose them to be more aggressive than others was out of bounds, along with the entire field of behavior genetics.

Evolutionary psychology also posited the “massively modular” mind — the idea that the mind was nothing more than a set of mechanisms each designed to solve a specific problem in our evolutionary past: a mechanism for falling in love, a mechanism for finding someone sexually attractive, one for fearing snakes, etc.

This neatly avoids talking about IQ — the one measure that is most feared by the left. That’s because differences in IQ are powerfully associated with success in modern societies, because IQ is strongly genetically influenced,  and, most importantly, because we don’t have any environmental interventions capable of getting rid of race differences in IQ in developed societies. IQ doesn’t fit well with evolutionary psychology because intelligence was not designed to solve any particular problem from our evolutionary past. Rather, as discussed in my 2013 paper (my last statement on the topic), it was designed to integrate information from a wide range of areas and use this information to solve novel problems and create imaginary worlds. Humans can solve a whole lot of problems that were not around in the environments we evolved in. That’s why it’s important  for success in school — and modern life.

There are other differences as well, on the theory of learning (here, p. 29ff), as well as prefrontal control of evolved modules sensitive to cultural input, and the theory of culture generally. My theory of culture emphasizes that intellectual endeavor and quite a bit of what passes as science is actually the result of coalition of interest. My book, The Culture of Critique, essentially argues that strongly identified Jews formed the backbone of intellectual coalitions that were intended to advance Jewish ethnic interests. Seems like a natural thing for an evolutionist to think about. So I was pleased to read the following from Tooby’s Edge article on “coalitional instincts.

Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when—as is generally the case—new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member—at risk of losing job offers, her friends, and her cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.

Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally.  No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best-case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.

All of the intellectual movements reviewed in The Culture of Critique involved shared adherence to doctrines that had a flimsy grounding (if any) in scientific research, and questioning the doctrines brought shame and ostracism. The fact that a century passed without any evidence for the Oedipal Complex had no effect on Freud’s followers, any more than research on ethnocentrism or race differences would influence the Frankfurt School or the Boasians.

In the intellectual world, group cohesiveness has facilitated the advocacy of particular viewpoints within academic professional associations (e.g., the Boasian program within the American Anthropological Association; psychoanalysis within the American Psychiatric Association). Rothman and Lichter (1982, 104–105) note that Jews formed and dominated cohesive subgroups with a radical political agenda in several academic societies in the 1960s, including professional associations in economics, political science, sociology, history, and the Modern Language Association. They also suggest a broad political agenda of Jewish social scientists during this period: “We have already pointed out the weaknesses of some of these studies [on Jewish involvement in radical political movements]. We suspect that many of the ‘truths’ established in other areas of the social sciences during this period suffer from similar weaknesses. Their widespread acceptance . . . may have had as much to do with the changing ethnic and ideological characteristics of those who dominated the social science community as they did with any real advance in knowledge” (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 104). Sachar (1992, 804) notes that the Caucus for a New Politics of the American Political Science Association was “overwhelmingly Jewish” and that the Union of Radical Political Economists was initially disproportionately Jewish. Moreover, as Higham (1984, 154) notes, the incredible success of the Authoritarian Personality studies was facilitated by the “extraordinary ascent” of Jews concerned with anti-Semitism in academic social science departments in the post– World War II era.

Once an organization becomes dominated by a particular intellectual perspective, there is enormous intellectual inertia created by the fact that the informal networks dominating elite universities serve as gatekeepers for the next generation of scholars. Aspiring intellectuals, whether Jewish or gentile, are subjected to a high level of indoctrination at the undergraduate and graduate levels; there is tremendous psychological pressure to adopt the fundamental intellectual assumptions that lie at the center of the power hierarchy of the discipline. As discussed in Chapter 1, once a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement attains intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that gentiles would be attracted to Jewish intellectuals as members of a socially dominant and prestigious group and as dispensers of valued resources. Group cohesiveness can also be seen in the development of worshipful cults that have lionized the achievements of group leaders (Boasian anthropology and psychoanalysis) (Chapter 6, 224-225)

Real science is individualist, not a product of coalitions:

I propose that a minimal requirement of a scientific social system is that science not be conducted from an ingroup-outgroup perspective. Scientific progress (Campbell’s “competence-of reference”) depends on an individualistic, atomistic universe of discourse in which each individual sees himself or herself not as a member of a wider political or cultural entity advancing a particular point of view but as an independent agent endeavoring to evaluate evidence and discover the structure of reality. As Campbell (1986, 121–122) notes, a critical feature of science as it evolved in the seventeenth century was that individuals were independent agents who could each replicate scientific findings for themselves.  Scientific opinion certainly coalesces around certain propositions in real science (e.g., the structure of DNA, the mechanisms of reinforcement), but this scientific consensus is highly prone to defection in the event that new data cast doubt on presently held theories. (Chapter 6, p. 235)

And as Tooby notes as a general rule, there were indeed strong moral overtones to being a coalition member in the movements reviewed in CofC. As I noted in Chapter 6 (p. 213)

Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. A critical feature of these movements is that they have been, at least in the United States, top-down movements in the sense that they were originated and dominated by members of a highly intelligent and highly educated group. These movements have been advocated with great intellectual passion and moral fervor and with a very high level of theoretical sophistication.

Dissenters were expelled and vilified as moral cretins (and intellectual morons). To dissent was to place oneself outside of polite society. These coalitions had access to the moral and intellectual high ground of the society — prestigious university presses, academic departments able to turn out compliant graduate students, and the elite media. Under these conditions, the coalitions become immune to criticism.

Finally, Tooby might want to think about the extent to which evolutionary psychology itself became a coalition of like-minded people able to marginalize dissenters and ignore unpleasant findings — findings that conflict with the leftist zeitgeist that dominates universities today. Coalitions are indeed the death of science, and prima facie,  designing an evolutionary science able to fly under the radar of political correctness is not a great strategy for discovering scientific truth.

EO Wilson: RIP

Some tweets on E.O. Wilson, who died two days ago at the age of 92.

EOW’s Wiki article emphasizes the role of Gould and Lewontin in the hostility toward Sociobiology—a major inspiration for Chapter 2 in The Culture of Critique:

Sociobiology was initially met with substantial criticism. Several of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard, such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, were strongly opposed to his ideas regarding sociobiology. Gould, Lewontin, and others from the Sociobiology Study Group from the Boston area wrote “Against ‘Sociobiology'” in an open letter criticizing Wilson’s “deterministic view of human society and human action.” Although attributed to members of the Sociobiology Study Group, it seems that Lewontin was the main author. In a 2011 interview, Wilson said, “I believe Gould was a charlatan. I believe that he was … seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.”

Gould and Lewontin correctly realized that Wilson’s work was really an attempt to pull off a counter-revolution—to undo the work of Boas and the other Jewish anti-evolutionists from earlier in the century. They smeared it relentlessly.

After EO Wilson’s work, all aspects of human behavior were up for a fresh evolutionary understanding, including politics, the arts, ethnicity, morality, and yes, altruism, although EOW totally emphasized natural selection at the individual level. (Much later he accepted the importance of group selection.) Nevertheless, he put altruism at the absolute center of evolutionary thinking—the controversy continues to this day between people who emphasize groups as a unit of selection like me (cultural group selection) and people who view groups as just concatenations of individuals.

Finally, it’s noteworthy that Wilson wrote a positive blurb for Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests, a book that validates the reality that individuals have a genetic interest in the fate of their ethnic groups in the same way that parents have a genetic interest in nurturing their children. Wilson: “[This] is a fresh and deep contribution to the sociobiology of humans, combining genetics and social science in original ways.”

Jones vs. KMac: Spirit or Material? Toward a Synthesis

By now, healthy numbers of informed people are generally aware of the work of our editor Kevin MacDonald and traditional Catholic thinker E. Michael Jones. Much of their influence comes from the fact that both have devoted major portions of their careers to writing about what is absolutely the most pressing issue of our age: The Jewish Question.

What has long fascinated me is the fact that both writers have considered Jews and their collective behavior in quite contrasting ways — yet in my estimation, they are both right. How can that be? Thus, for a decade or so, I’ve attempted in my own mind to reconcile KM and EMJ. Better yet, I’d love to attempt a synthesis of the two approaches to understanding Jews. Given that the present essay marks my 100th contribution to The Occidental Observer, I’d say that a conversation about the attempt to reconcile KM and EMJ is worthy of the occasion.

In my estimation, the contrasting foundations of these two men’s analyses mirror the larger Western conflict we’ve all seen for five hundred-plus years with the struggle between our inherited Christian past, with belief in faith, souls, spirits, and—most of all—God, vs. rationalism, humanism, and materialism—in other words, a strongly scientific worldview. Obviously, Catholic traditionalist E. Michael Jones falls into the former group, while Kevin MacDonald, an academic evolutionary psychologist, falls into the latter. When views from these two competing and conflicting worldviews consider a wide range of topics, they barely ever share common ground, but with KM’s and EMJ’s approaches, they share so much that they are almost complementary in some respects. How can this be? What, then, is the nature of Jews? Why are they so unique among humans? What can they teach us about humanity in general — if not the greater meaning of existence itself?

My consideration of these questions is biographical in that I’ve grappled with these competing worldviews for most of my life and have actually wavered between them over the decades. To my own surprise, I’d now say that Jones’ Christian approach is the more conclusive narrative in that Christianity — as with religion in general — posits a beginning, a middle and an end, which even to many of us post-Christians is a familiar story encompassing “In the beginning,” Adam and Eve, the life of Christ, the struggles between Good and Evil, everlasting souls, heaven and hell, angels, and always an omnipotent, all-loving God.

In an exchange among KM, EMJ and their hostess, Jones explained some aspects of this religious view:

Man is a composite being made up of body and soul (if that word sounds tendentious to the sociobiologists, they can substitute “mind” in its place). He has both a brain and a mind. These two entities are related but distinct. Human beings, unlike angels, can’t have minds unless they have brains, which function according to the laws of chemistry, biology, electricity, etc. and are a direct product of our DNA. Our thoughts, however, are a function of our minds, and, although we can affect our minds by manipulating the chemistry of our brains through alcohol and drugs, the logic of our thoughts is independent of the functioning of our brains.

In contrast, MacDonald grounds his trilogy on Jews in a post-Christian world, one is which God is dead and therefore plays no role in the universe, where scientific laws impartially govern eternity, among which are those laws in evidence with respect to Darwinian evolution. Sadly (for me personally) this modern view of scientific materialism allows for no obvious purpose in existence beyond mere survival. And while survival is nice, it’s still does not provide a convincing reason to struggle and survive. In this sense, The West in general has been demoralized for the past few hundred years, depending on the pace and degree of an acceptance of the atheism — implicitly or explicitly — that has appeared alongside the rise of science.

In short, should you warm to either KM or EMJ, it will likely come down to the worldview you tend to accept already — the general Christian one of historical Europe or the modern scientific view. Personally, I can’t imagine many people changing their worldviews from one to the other simply based on a careful reading of Jones vs. KMac, but that has in fact been happening to me. I’m not back to a belief in God yet, but due to the facts surrounding the Jewish Question, I’m inching my way away from the Existential belief that our presence here on this Earth is meaningless, for it appears indisputable that Jewish existence has some sort of meaning, and, if their existence has meaning, so should ours.

Having just argued tentatively in favor of the religious or supernatural, I will allow that KM likely has the advantage in this debate in that the modern West and its institutions have largely abandoned a spiritual, Christian approach and accepted “science,” which can be as seemingly solid as physics and math or as malleable as the social sciences have been across time. As a rule of thumb, “educated” Westerners have shed Christianity and a belief in God, while “the unintelligent, hicks and charlatans” still embrace them. Witness today’s knee-jerk reaction to the Catholic Church’s repression of Galileo or the respective fates of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” such that Darrow is still respected to this day while Bryan is knowingly mocked.

Without question, the largest institutions of The West such as academia and the media, but also the government that rules over us, are functionally anti-Christian and pro-science. Few would argue otherwise. (Let’s leave out the Covid debate for now.) So it is within these structures of support that MacDonald has advanced his career. His project on Jews in the 1990s admits as much in the opening words of the 1994 book that began the trilogy: “The project attempts to develop an understanding of Judaism based on modern social and biological sciences. … The fundamental paradigm derives from evolutionary biology, but there will also be a major role for the theory and data derived from several areas of psychology, including especially the social psychology of group behavior.” (vii)

Though it’s been many years since I read the trilogy, I still have a strong impression that A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994) and Separation and Its Discontents (1998) hew more closely to what appears to be MacDonald’s mid-to-late career dedication to impartial scientific inquiry. In contrast, by the time of the more famous Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (also 1998; hereafter usually CofC) there is the impression that this scientist-author, as a member of the group being “critiqued” and therefore harmed, has experienced a number of “Aha!” moments and realized that his earlier efforts at impartial research were insufficient when encountering a hostile group that undermines the very power of impartial science in the service of, well, a “group evolutionary strategy.” This does not imply that MacDonald did not think that the theory and data in CofC would not hold up to the same standards of scientific rigor as the other books in the trilogy. However, from 1998 onward, I would say, MacDonald has become a partisan—and for many good reasons. (In fact, here he writes as much: “As a result of reading about various Jewish intellectual and political movements, I came to see Jews as advocating policies that are opposed to the interests of European peoples. It was this cognitive awareness based on a great deal of reading and thinking that led me to my current beliefs.”)

Careful readers of the trilogy will spot this shift, I believe, with the first two books relying more heavily on evolutionary theory straining to be as evidence-based as possible, whereas CofC moves on to “the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York intellectuals.” What is critical, KM points out, is that these venues and ideologies were promoted for their “scientific rigor” for decades, when in fact, as MacDonald discovered, they were perversions of real science employed in the course of anti-White ethnic warfare, with Freudian psychoanalysis being a prime case in point.

Perhaps more than any other thinker in the English-speaking world, MacDonald has exposed this form of ethnic warfare and really captured the critical conversations about race, Jews and Whites in the first two decades of the 21st century, despite robust efforts by Jewish-led interests to stifle this knowledge.

To be sure, KMac’s account could be right — and probably is. Over the millennia, Jews have evolved adaptive behavior that ensures their survival and puts them on top. But honestly, it’s really just too … “uncanny,” which is why EMJ’s Christian approach has, against my desire, it seems, pulled me toward belief in a spiritual battle rather than a merely biological and social one. Let’s consider Jones’ account.

I first ran across the writings of Dr. Jones through his journal Culture Wars, and I actually stopped buying it after a number of issues because the editing and format were often so atrocious that I could not take it seriously. I returned to it, however, because Jones’ writing on Jews was so blasphemous — meaning so good, touching always on our current culture in ways that were highly instructive. Only Kevin MacDonald, many of us TOQ/TOO writers and a tiny handful of others were doing something similar. And Lord knows the mainstream press and academia wouldn’t touch an approach like Jones’ (though any number of Jewish academics were in fact writing similar things in books that were rather obscure, in part because far fewer people read books this century).

I’m pretty good about keeping up with these topics and am happy to say that both MacDonald and Jones, despite opposition, have been getting great exposure for some twenty years. No doubt this is due in part to their successful use of non-written forms of discourse, such as YouTube, other podcasts, speeches, interviews, etc. And for some years, all their works were available on Amazon but of course those days are long gone as the regime methodically cracks down on White activists (and Jones).

Punishing Heretics

Not surprisingly, both of these modern heretics have paid a steep price for fearlessly addressing the JQ. For instance, beginning in 2006, this attack began against MacDonald:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has initiated a campaign against me. The controversy started in September, 2006 when someone not connected with CSULB emailed all the full-time people in the Psychology Department — except me — alerting them to a comment about me at the SPLC website.  Heidi Beirich of the SPLC came to Long Beach from November 12–15, 2006 to interview faculty and administrators about me. During the 2006–2007 and 2007–2008 academic years there was also a great deal of discussion and debate about my work and associations on faculty email lists. Eventually several departments issued statements dissociating themselves from my work and, in some cases, condemning my work.

The result was a hostile working environment for the next eight years (until he retired) where “[c]old shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.” Fortunately, MacDonald mounted a robust defense, arguing that “The SPLC is paying me attention because it wants to suppress my academic work.” Further, he argued that the two authors of the SPLC created a report that was “a compendium of ethical lapses.” Unlike others, he survived this attack on his career.

It’s been far from smooth sailing since, however. The ADL currently has 88 entries on MacDonald, and one way or another, MacDonald’s family and neighbors have heard nefarious stories about the retired professor, leading to discomfort and ostracism that most people never experience. And, of course, The Occidental Quarterly (an academic journal) and the online Occidental Observer, both of which MacDonald edits, have been de-platformed by PayPal and credit card processors.

E. Michael Jones has also endured his fair share of opprobrium as well, beginning with the almost surreal story of his first teaching appointment:

In the fall of 1980, E. Michael Jones was an assistant professor of American Literature at St. Mary’s College. After receiving his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1979, Jones had moved his wife and two children to South Bend, Indiana to begin what he thought was going to be a career in academic life. But God had other plans. One year into the six years of his tenure track position, Jones got fired because of his position on abortion. Getting fired for being against abortion at what called itself a Catholic college was something his professors at Temple found difficult to understand. Taking his cue from their incomprehension, Jones decided to abandon academe and start a magazine instead. Initially known as Fidelity and now as Culture Wars, that magazine set out to explore the disarray in the Catholic Church that led to his firing.

What Jones eventually found was that America’s kulturkampf, which long had a Protestant-Catholic dimension as well as a glaring racial one, found itself with a rapidly growing Catholic-Jewish battle as well. Increasingly after the year 2000, Jones wrote about this conflict in Culture Wars, culminating in collecting these essays into a truly magisterial book in 2008 titled The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (JRS). No reader of Jones’ writing in that tome can be surprised that Jones has been met with Jewish opposition. Jones, of course, seems entirely right about his arguments and observations, but many Jews don’t necessarily want the world to read such truths about them.

In particular, the SPLC has been aggressive in chasing Dr. Jones. And in 2008 they realized what initially appeared to be one of their greatest successes. As Jones relates:

I was in the middle of a tune when I got the call. On Monday nights I play Irish music at a pub in South Bend. On Monday, February 11, I was planning an early departure on Tuesday morning to speak at the Catholic University School of Architecture, as part of a lecture series on Building Catholic Communities….

Tim Ehlen was now on the phone explaining that the entire lecture series was cancelled by the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.   The Architecture department was the host for this lecture series.  I was scheduled to speak in less than 48 hours. … Just as Dr. Carlson was beginning his presentation, an email was sent from the Southern Poverty Law Center to Ehlen …

“These are not the Latin Mass traditionalists,” Mr. Potok continued, referring to me and John Sharpe of IHS press. “These are the people who reject Vatican II reforms. They are out of [actor Mel Gibson’s father] Hutton Gibson’s world, in saying that the Jews are destroying the world.”

When confronted with the usual SPLC shtick, Dean Ott panicked and canceled the entire lecture series.  Six months of effort on the part of Ehlen to put this series together were all over.  I would be less than candid if I were to say that cancellations come as a surprise to me. The SPLC, the group which pressured CUA to cancel, employs people whose job it is to find out when I speak and get me canceled.

Another cancellation came some years later when Jones had bags packed for an appearance at a Traditionalist Catholic conference in Gardone, in northern Italy. As before, a telephone call relayed the information that yet another Jones speech would be canceled, “thus aborting an opportunity to discuss the thesis of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit in the Traditionalist circles who had gone out of their way to avoid the issue.”

Of course, Jones understood all along what was happening because of his writing and speaking on Jews: “There were certain opinions which were left better unsaid.” Sage advice, no doubt, but based on literally thousands of instances, when that choice arises, Jones is sure to utter them anyway, which is why I titled a 2018 TOO essay on Jones: “Too Reflexively Ornery”:  E. Michael Jones and Culture Wars. In fact, a decade ago I labeled Jones as a “Catholic iconoclast” and noted how Culture Wars had run cover stories such as “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame,” and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” This Philadelphia boy knows how to shock.

Reviews

Next, we come to the issue of how the works of MacDonald and Jones have been accepted, beginning appropriately in academia, since both men earned Ph.D.s and taught at universities. While there have been extensive scholarly reviews of MacDonald’s books, neither MacDonald nor I are aware of any instance of these highly relevant books being used in any classroom in American universities, which speaks volumes about the intellectual poverty of today’s humanities and social sciences, as well as the censorship applied to much dissident thought. (MacDonald keeps a superb website cataloging these reviews and so much more; one can follow the links for weeks on end.)

The same can be said for Jones’ books on Jews, particularly The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. In my own field of American cultural history, Jones’ work far exceeds in explanatory power what has been happening in America for a century and a half over the depressing pablum that now dominates the humanities everywhere. Yet we know of no instance of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit being used in the classroom.

Fear not, however, for both MacDonald and Jones are quite adept at using the Internet to propagate their knowledge and arguments, which is likely why MacDonald emerged as the de facto intellectual leader of the Dissident or Alt-Right and Jones has become increasingly popular among younger White males. I invite readers to consider writing (or creating videos) about the Internet presence of both men.

Fate of Their Books

Some of Jones’ books are still available on Amazon, such as Degenerate Moderns, Libido Dominandi and The Slaughter of the Cities, though not JRS (old or new edition) or Logos Rising. (Oddly, Barren Metal, which appeared between JRS and Logos Rising, is available.)

In MacDonald’s case, the first book in the Jewish trilogy, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, is available at Amazon, as well as an earlier book, but not the second book in the trilogy, Separation and Its Discontents. Of course, CofC and Cultural Insurrections, the two most important books in his oeuvre, are unavailable. In contrast, Barnes and Noble sells both A People That Shall Dwell Alone and Separation and Its Discontents, and most importantly CofC (but not Cultural Insurrections). We find another split in sales where Amazon does sell Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future (2019) (which, as you might expect, takes a social science perspective on the history of the Catholic Church and its influence), but Barnes and Noble does not. Go figure. In any case, searching for each book on both sites can take some extra steps, so, again, just buy them via links on KMAC’s site.

God and Spirit

As indicated above, I’ve found myself involuntarily drifting toward a suspicion that it’s actually Jones and his belief in traditional Catholicism who is setting us further along the track than Kevin MacDonald. I say this with full knowledge of the fact that Jones resolutely disavows a belief in race, the importance of DNA and related matters. Of course, Jones is dead wrong about this, but weighed against the mass of superb scholarship Jones has done over thirty years, I intellectually ding him only about 3% for his odd claims dismissing race. Perhaps this intellectual chasm between the two men is all the more reason to achieve a synthesis of MacDonald and Jones.

Another relevant point is that over the last two decades I’ve found myself accepting a belief in the existence of Satan and Evil, and undeniably, from the perspectives of Whites and other non-Jews, Jews are inextricably associated with Satan, though I’ll leave it to others to argue whether they are, in some sense, actually Satan or more along the lines of being under the spell of that malicious being.

MacDonald can never go that route because science rejects believe in God, spiritualism, the supernatural realm, etc. For his part, Jones accepts the linkage of Jews and Satan but does this properly through the most basic of Christian doctrines—one of the Gospels. St. John writes in the Book of the Revelation (2.9, 3.9) that “those who call themselves Jews” are really liars and members of the “synagogue of Satan” (JRS, 15).

On page 32 Jones again quotes St. John by writing “The Devil is your father, and you prefer to do what your father wants. He was a murderer from the start and was never grounded in the truth; there is no truth in him at all.” I will not begin to try to unpack all of that here, but in the Introduction to JRS and here in Chapter One, titled “The Synagogue of Satan,” Jones makes a case that St. John was revealing that at the foot of the cross, when many Jews rejected Christ as the Messiah, a transformation in the term “Jew” was introduced, and no longer has “a clear racial meaning.” Further, “When the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos, and when they rejected Logos … they became revolutionaries” (p. 15). The following thousand-plus pages is a story of their revolutionary actions, which can be seen as “the history of the Jews and the attacks on the Universal Christian Church by heretics linked to Jews or heavily influenced by Jews” (p. 20). On that count, Jones succeeds hands down in making his case.

(It is interesting to note that on the following page Jones approvingly cites Kevin MacDonald’s observation that movements are led by the few — which Jones indeed shows in his discussion of The Enlightenment, the birth of modern England, the Russian Revolution, the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the American Empire. That neither Jones’s insights nor those of MacDonald are recognized at all in education in the entire Anglo-sphere is, then, an unspeakable crime and we can thank both scholars for doing their best to right this wrong.)

I know I have given far more attention to the writing of Jones than to MacDonald, but that is because I am de facto in MacDonald’s camp, writing as I do for The Occidental Quarterly and The Occidental Observer, where I explicitly support MacDonald’s work and implicitly follow it at all times as well. With Jones, however, it takes a bit more effort. MacDonald writes with unbroken clarity in a social science style, so his own prose speaks for itself. In contrast, Jones is more of a storyteller whose constant goal is to reveal “the unwritten grammar” of events both old and new. The only other scholar I’ve seen succeed in this so successfully in the cultural sphere is the late Jewish professor Stephen Whitfield (American Space, Jewish Time, 1988), though Whitfield covers only a fraction of the story Jones does. The style is fun but can take a little getting used to.

Jones uses other metaphors for exposing “the unwritten grammar” of reality. For instance, in Chapter 71 of Barren Metal, “Andrew Jackson and the Monster Bank,” Jones argues that “Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’ is the key which unlocks the door to understanding.” This passage highlights both the beauty and the utility of Jones’ writing, in this instance in a critique of usury:

What [author] Meyer failed to mention is that usury is, as Ezra Pound would have put it, contra naturam, and, by its very nature monstrous. Far from being a mysterious lapse into incoherence, Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’ is the key which unlocks the door to understanding his stake in this fight. A monster is something unnatural. Usury is monstrous because it is contra naturam. The bank war of the 1830s arose because neither Andrew Jackson nor his opponent Nicholas Biddle could articulate the real issue which had plagued the American System from its inception in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, namely, usury.

I suspect our editor Kevin MacDonald will not be overly persuaded by my foray into religion, but these unhappy, desperate times push me to desperate thoughts. By all rational, material measurements, the White race has been defeated by Jewry. Point to even one area in which Whites hold a credible counter to Jewish power. There are none. Except — and this is where desperation comes in — a turn to the possible existence of God, and the Christian God at that. Remember, if I can be convinced that Satan is alive and well, I can well consider that Satan’s opponent, God, also exists. It’s a start.

And I’m not the only one thinking this way. Much to my utter surprise, none other than enfant terrible Andrew Anglin has headed in much the same direction, to the extent that he, too, is turning to E. Michael Jones. In a blog on September 24, 2021, he posted this lecture by Jones:

Commenting on this video, Anglin wrote:

When I read about the way homosexuals have infiltrated the Catholic Church, my resolve in the belief that there is only one true faith is strengthened, as it makes perfect sense to me that in this time of ultimate, total, global satanic Jewish evil, that the Catholic Church would be under such aggressive assault by the Devil….

I will admit, however, that a big part of this is the fact that I really believe that E. Michael Jones is the only relevant living Christian intellectual. However, if that is the case, then why? Surely, God will offer us a guide in this time of darkness? I’m only seeing one guide, who actually seems like an adult.

I am personally cursed to see clearly what is happening in the material world. But I am not any clearer than you on what is happening in the spiritual world. So I am left in as much of a conundrum in trying to figure out what the true nature of religion is as anyone else.

Like Jones, Anglin believes that the Catholic Church “is a top target of Satan.” And any regular reader of The Daily Stormer knows that Anglin sees Jews at the center of all of this. Anglin and Jones are strange bedfellows indeed, but if Jesus could forgive a former prostitute and welcome her among his most intimate followers, Jones and the rest of us might also accept Anglin in a similar way.

Isn’t there an inescapable feeling that we are at a crossroads of history? MacDonald emphasizes that if Whites cannot adopt a counter strategy to the current Jewish group evolutionary one, our prospects are doubtful. Anglin, too, has admitted that The West has lost to the Jews and now is the time merely to survive. Jones, however, offers hope. In the closing of JRS, he writes:

The final collapse of Jewish resistance to Logos will take place when they have reached the pinnacle of worldly power. At no time in the past 2000 years have Jews had more power than now. …

The conversion of the Jews did not seem imminent. The Jews had never been more powerful; the Church, the antagonist of the synagogue of Satan for 2000 years, had never been weaker. But appearances can deceive. Benedict XVI, the author of Dominus Iesus, had said, even before becoming pope, that he looked forward to the conversion of the Jews. Reversal was in the air. (1073–77)

Perhaps we can only pray that this is so.

Conclusion

As stated above, both MacDonald and Jones, based  particularly on their books CofC and JRS, appear to be right with respect to the JQ. One cannot, for instance, read the writings of MacDonald and conclude, “No, he is wrong.” On scientific terms, he has nailed it. With Jones’ writing on Jews, it is not as easy to declare outright that “This is true” because it revolves around religion, and belief is a chief characteristic of religion. It is simply not susceptible to scientific proof. Still, when a reader gets to the end of JRS, the overwhelming response has to be, “Dr. Jones has made his case about the revolutionary (and destructive) nature of Jews.”

This is such an important point to grasp. Take, for instance, last year’s George Floyd incident, BLM violence, and what has since flowed from them. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s it was pretty much common knowledge that Jews were using Blacks as a battering ram against White society, yet by my estimation, about 90% of the writing on Blacks and American society since last year either states or implies that it is Black agency and power themselves that are responsible for this. Of course, that is preposterous. Blacks don’t have any power. Jews are responsible, and KM and EMJ have written brilliantly on this in an historical context. KM did so in his essay “Jews, Blacks, and Race,” which appeared in Cultural Insurrections, while Jones did so extensively in JRS (specifically chapters 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 26 and 29). This should be common knowledge still but is not.

Again, I must stress how critical it is to openly talk about Jews and the JQ, precisely as KM and EMJ have done. As Jones wrote in Culture Wars in the December 2020 issue, Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu told us, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” That is why Jones ceaselessly names the enemy: “If you want to succeed in the culture wars, you must identify the enemy.”

Elsewhere (Part 1 & Part 2; also here) I’ve cited TOO writer Andrew Joyce on both naming the Jew and describing their destructive (and often revolutionary) behavior. Just recently he contributed a new TOO essay in which he reviewed a new Arktos book by New Zealander Kerry Bolton, a book which gets to the heart of both MacDonald’s and Jones’s cases. Not mincing words, Joyce writes that “a very Jewish cast of characters were responsible for developing, spreading, and implementing many of the most destructive ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the heart of these ideas is the desire to fracture the host society/mass culture.” Joyce quotes Bolton for a specific argument:

The focus of this Neo-Freudianism is on the individual detached from society. It is therefore a means of deconstructing and fracturing the social organism, which is why the Marxian theorists who created the Frankfurt Institute in 1923 found Freudianism to be such a useful ingredient in creating a new revolutionary synthesis. The organic bonds of family, state, faith, and ethos, disparaged as ‘primary ties’ in need of cutting, were portrayed as injurious to the individual well-being and as repressing the individual’s path to self-actualisation.

Bolton, Joyce notes, shows that “The primary weapon employed by all factions is the Freudo-Marxism Synthesis, which touted social engineering as a ‘therapy’ but possessed social control as its aim. This synthesis and its early promotion were of course Jewish in origin, and Bolton makes sure to hammer this point home.” Fortunately for us, Bolton is as tenacious as Joyce and “repeatedly stresses that many of these figures are Jews, and that the Frankfurt School, its funders, and many other peripheral associations involved in early Cultural Marxism were ‘largely Jewish.’” This corresponds completely with the scope of the writing of MacDonald and Jones, both of whom are referenced in Joyce’s essay. I’m completely astonished at this late date that so many otherwise intelligent people either fail to see this or opt not to mention it.

In any case, for years, a tiny minority of us Whites have labored mightily to inform fellow Whites (and fellow Christians) of the threats posed by our enemy. We have done what we can but it appears not to suffice. Perhaps, then, E. Michael Jones has it right in the video above when he says to change the question from “What can we do?” to “What can God do?” Maybe so. In our desperate hour, maybe that’s all we can do. I’m running out of other ideas.

Inducing White Guilt

“Group-based guilt is debilitating because it may undermine internal attributions for in-group success and may threaten the in-group’s identity as moral and good.”
    Iyer et al. “White Guilt and Racial Compensation,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2003.[1]

“We’re not sorry! And we’ve stepped over the prospect of being sorry.”
   Jonathan Bowden

I am frequently bemused by the mystery of the failure of our ideas to win over those White masses sleepwalking into permanent displacement from their own lands. That which seems self-evident — the demographic projections, the crime figures, the well-documented plans and trends, the bold intentionality of it all — is yet insufficient to break through into the deeper instinctual consciousness. Why? In a recent conversion I had with Kevin MacDonald, it was mentioned that when White people are told they are being slowly replaced, they get angry. And yet it appears a gentle and transient anger, incapable of translation into clear political trajectories and easily muzzled by the poisonous triad of media, entrenched government, and the academy. My recent reading of Ed Dutton’s Race Differences in Ethnocentrism answered some questions, but provoked more. The text is primarily concerned with what might be termed “hard biological” explanations for low ethnocentrism among Europeans, possibly at the cost of placing too little emphasis on cultural and socio-ecological factors. In particular, I felt the text understated the case that present-day low ethnocentrism is something that has been deliberately cultivated over time, and that part of that cultivation has been the widespread dissemination of shaming propaganda carefully designed to threaten and undermine White in-group identity. I am thinking, of course, about the concept of White Guilt.

Discussions about White Guilt are becoming increasingly common on both the Left and Right, and basic distinctions can be made between explanatory theories. One set of theories ascribes to White Guilt a “dishonest and evasive” character, in which White Guilt is on some level a self-serving and self-satisfying charade that enables Whites to continue to patronise and dominate minorities. These theories emanate from the harder, old-school Marxist Left. Another set of theories ascribes to White Guilt an “honest and spontaneous,” character, in which it arises as genuine feelings of regret at alleged historical wrongs or at the holding of a privileged position in society. These theories emanate most commonly from the center-Left of the ideological spectrum. Another set of theories, ascribes to White Guilt an “honest but cultivated” character, in which White Guilt arises as genuine feelings of regret and discomfort at alleged past and present wrongs, and is the product of a debilitating and ceaseless social critique designed to undermine the ability of Whites to see their interests as legitimate and thus the ability to defend and protect those interests. These theories emanate almost exclusively from the dissident Right. The centre-Right appears to stand alone as advancing no position on the matter, much as it has forfeited taking any positions on mass migration or issues of ethnic identity. Read more

Review of Ed Dutton’s Race Differences in Ethnocentrism

Race Differences in Ethnocentrism
Edward Dutton
Arktos, 2019.

“Those who advocate Multiculturalism seem to have lost an important instinct towards group — and thus genetic — preservation. Once a society, as a whole, espouses Multiculturalism as a dominant ideology then the society is acting against its own genetic interests and will ultimately destroy itself.”
Ed Dutton

Watching his incredibly entertaining Jolly Heretic You Tube channel, it’s easy to forget that Ed Dutton is also an extremely serious, and increasingly prolific, researcher, author, and scientist. The recent publication by Arktos of Dutton’s Race Differences in Ethnocentrism follows closely in the wake of Dutton’s At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future (2018), How to Judge People by What They Look Like (2018),  J. Phillipe Rushton: A Life History Perspective (2018),  and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How The Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers (2019). In Race Differences in Ethnocentrism, Dutton, who has collaborated with Richard Lynn on a number of occasions, builds impressively on the work of the latter and has offered, in this text, one of the most informative, formidable, pressing, intriguing, and poignant monographs I’ve read in years.

Dutton’s book is a work of science underscored by an inescapable sense of social and political urgency, and has been explicitly prompted into being by the need to address two questions “particularly salient during a period of mass migration”: ‘Why are some races more ethnocentric than others?’ and, most urgently of all, ‘Why are Europeans currently so low in ethnocentrism?’ In attempting to answer these questions, Dutton has designed a book that is accessible to readers possessing even the most modest scientific knowledge, without compromising on academic rigor or the use of necessary scientific language. The text is helpfully replete with explanatory commentary and useful rhetorical illustrations, and its opening four chapters are dedicated exclusively to placing the study in context and exploring the nature of the research itself. This is a book that can, and should, be read by everyone.

In the brief first chapter, Dutton explains ethnocentrism or group pride as taking two main forms. The first, positive ethnocentrism, involves “taking pride in your ethnic group or nation and being prepared to make sacrifices for the good of it.” Negative ethnocentrism, on the other hand, “refers to being prejudiced against and hostile to members of other ethnic groups.” Typically, a highly ethnocentric person or group will demonstrate both positive and negative ethnocentrism, although it is very common for people and groups to be high in one aspect of ethnocentrism but not in the other. It is also apparent that some countries and ethnic groups are very high in both forms of ethnocentrism while others are extremely low in the same. The author sets out to explore how and why such variations and differences have occurred, and are still fluctuating. This is clearly a piece of very novel research. Dutton remarks that “there exists no systematic attempt to understand why different ethnic groups may vary in the extent to which they are ethnocentric.” Dutton’s foundation is built on a deep reading of existing literature on the origins and nature of ethnocentrism, pioneered to some extent by R. A. LeVine and D. T. Campbell in the 1970s, and built upon most recently by Australia’s Boris Bizumic. These scholars advanced the argument that ethnocentrism was primarily the result of conflict. Another highly relevant theory in the study of ethnocentrism has been the concept of ‘inclusive fitness,’ which argues that ethnocentrism provides a method for indirectly passing on one’s genes.

Dutton closes his introductory chapter by providing an interesting overview of historical observations of differences in ethnocentrism. During the so-called ‘Age of Discovery,’ Europeans encountered large numbers of different and distant tribes, and many remarked on the reception they received from these groups. Some, such as the natives of Hawaii and the Inuit were noted as being extremely friendly, while the negrito tribes of the Andaman Islands, near India, remain notoriously hostile to outsiders, shoot arrows at passing aircraft, and kill intruding foreigners, including an American missionary in November 2018. The Japanese appear throughout history to have combined a moderate level of negative ethnocentrism with very high levels of positive ethnocentrism, resulting in a society typified by high levels of social harmony and in-group co-operation, and willing sacrifice for the nation in times of war. By contrast, the Yąnomamö tribe of Venezuela are very high in negative ethnocentrism but very low in positive ethnocentrism, resulting in a society riddled with lawlessness, extreme violence, poor social harmony, and an inability to form stable social structures of any kind. Differences in general levels of ethnocentrism are important because, as Dutton points out, those societies most welcoming of outsiders were subsequently colonized and fundamentally and permanently changed by migration. Meanwhile, those societies that displayed extreme hostility to outsiders have remained almost intact, and remain unchanged even centuries after the European ‘Age of Discovery.’ Read more