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The Role of Empathy in Moral Communities: Altruism—and Pathological Altruism

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Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a book to be titled Western Individualism and the Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. It is completed apart from proof-reading and deciding how to publish it now that Amazon has become part of the thought police. 

In a later section of this chapter on race differences in personality, I describe the personality system of Nurturance/Love personality system and note that this system is stronger in European culture than other human cultures (see also Chapter 3). Briefly, Nurturance/Love is an evolved system linked to specific brain regions coding for positive feelings in response to being loved and nurturing others; empathy—which results in personal distress at seeing the suffering of others, especially loved ones—is a central emotion of the Nurturance/Love system. The extreme ends of individual differences in the Nurturance/Love system are linked to sociopathy at the low end (callous unconcern regarding the feelings of others, lack of remorse, cruelty) to dependency disorder (overly prone to needing social approval and love) and pathological altruism (overly prone to empathy to the point of self-sacrificing, self-harming behavior) at the high end.[1] Because of its role in cementing family relationships and nurturing children, women are higher on the Nurturance/Love system than men.

For individualists (i.e., people who are less prone to negative attitudes toward outgroups and strangers), being on the high end of empathy can easily lead to a pathological form of altruism where high costs can be incurred with no corresponding benefit. Pathological altruism is generally defined as focusing on others’ needs to the detriment of one’s own needs.[2] Such altruism, motivated by what one might label “hyperempathy,” is more common among females­—which fits with females’ generally being higher on the Nurturance/Love system.[3] It can lead to pathological consequences for both the altruist and the intended beneficiary, as in the phenomenon of co-dependence where one person’s altruism facilitates maladaptive behaviors in another person, such as drug addiction by being overly solicitous and tolerant of other’s self-destructive behavior. Pathological altruism often involves a sense of self-righteousness, which can be translated as a sense of moral superiority that advertises one’s good reputation within a community defined, as prototypical European groups are, not by kinship but by conforming or exceeding the moral standards of the community. As noted above, such expressions of moralistic self-righteousness have a long history in Western societies and are very salient in contemporary political rhetoric.

An example of how self-righteous virtue signaling works at the highest levels of government (also illustrating the gap between elites and the rest of society on critical issues like migration), can be seen in the comments of David Goodhart, a liberal journalist based in the UK, on the migration into the UK:

There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham. … [The political class] failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens.[4]

An evolutionist can only marvel at the completely unhinged—pathological—altruism on display here, given that the speakers are themselves native White British. Countries whose policies ignore the good of their own people are surely headed for disaster. Such altruism is nothing but a recipe for evolutionary extinction. Read more

Warring on Whiteness: Stale Pale Males vs Vibrant Varicolored Vixens

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Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning brazen effrontery or impudence. You could say that someone who displays chutzpah is spitting in the face of morality and logic. Appropriately enough, the very word sounds like an expectoration: the ch is pronounced as in German “Bach,” or Scottish “loch,” and the u as in English “sugar.”

“Pity the Poor Jews”

Chutzpah comes in many forms and has many practitioners. In “Power to the Perverts,” I described Jonathan Yaniv, a “trans-identified” Canadian who sued sixteen women for refusing “to wax his balls.” Now that’s chutzpah. The journalist Mark Steyn is another Canadian and another practitioner of chutzpah. He has just got his violin out for a heart-rending rendition of his old favourite song “Pity the Poor Jews.” According to him, there are “Two-Mile Tailbacks at Jew-Hate Junction”:

As Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say, everyone meets at Jew-Hate Junction: excitable young Mohammedans, secular polytechnic Euro-lefties, anti-globalist conspiracy theorists. … Young Muslims do not like Jews: that is a simple fact, and it’s a waste of everybody’s time denying it. Where Muslims predominate, Jews vanish — as in Molenbeek, across the canal from downtown Brussels. …

Ethnic Continentals, on the other hand, do not like Muslims, and they see where this is headed, and it’s easy to blame Jews. The logic is not difficult: ’Tween-wars Europeans would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques in every corner of their countries. But then the Holocaust happened, and “nationalism” got blamed, and mass immigration was instituted as a form of penance, and in one of history’s blacker jests the principal beneficiary of Holocaust guilt was Islam. So, in the newest variant of the oldest hatred, Jews get hated for the Islamization of Europe. (Two-Mile Tailbacks at Jew-Hate Junction, SteynOnline, 6th March 2019)

Steyn goes on to discuss the “Jew hate” of Ilhan Omar, the “savvy Somali” Congresswoman who is a rising star of the Democratic party in America. He condemns the Democratic “House Leadership” for failing to put Omar in her place and defend America’s beleaguered Jews: “Like Corbyn in London, it [the House Leadership] can no longer even insist on its anti-Semitic bona fides without weaseling and equivocating.”

Innocent victims of Islamization

When Mark Steyn condemns someone for “weaseling and equivocating,” you should pay attention. He knows what he’s talking about, because he himself is an expert practitioner of those essential political arts. His article about “Jew hate” is replete with them. Take his assertion that “mass immigration was instituted [in Europe] as a form of penance [for the Holocaust]” — exactly the sort of off-the-cuff explanation that has a certain surface plausibility that will pass scrutiny in the mainstream media but completely fail any serious attempt at getting to the roots of what actually happened. Why did Steyn say “was instituted,” using the passive voice? Well, Steyn himself is “weaseling,” because he wants to avoid the questions of precisely who “instituted” mass immigration as penance for the Holocaust and precisely how Jews reacted to this penance.

The answers to those questions are not at all helpful for Steyn’s portrayal of Jews as innocent victims of the “Islamization of Europe.” For example, why does Britain have so many of Ilhan Omar’s fellow Somalis? It’s thanks to the Jewish Islamophile Barbara Roche, the Labour immigration minister who “entered politics … to combat anti-semitism and xenophobia in general.” (See also Andrew Joyce’s “The SS Empire Windrush: The Jewish Origins of Multicultural Britain.) As part of Roche’s combat, she granted “more than 200,000” Somalis “exceptional leave to remain” in Britain despite the fact that “most were untrained and would be dependent on welfare.”

“Jews and Muslims are natural allies”

Roche wasn’t doing “penance” for the Holocaust but working to atomize Britain for the benefit of Jews. After all, Dr Richard Stone, Jewish high priest in the martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence, says that “British Jews and Muslims are natural allies.” This is not a “fringe” or minority view among European and American Jews, but absolutely mainstream. In the New York Times, the Jewish journalist Bari Weiss has shaken her head in disappointment over Ilhan Omar’s missteps:

The particular challenge in the case of Ms. Omar is that she is exactly the kind of politician a vast majority of American Jews, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic and who have long aligned themselves with liberal causes, want to celebrate: Here is a refugee, a mother, a Muslim and a woman of color — the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress. It’s no wonder she has already landed on the cover of Time magazine and in front of Annie Leibovitz’s camera. Who wouldn’t want to cheer her on? … It may be more difficult to call out those who ought to be our friends and political allies, but alas for the Jews, not all anti-Semites carry tiki torches. (Ilhan Omar and the Myth of Jewish Hypnosis, The New York Times, 21st January 2019)

As you can see, Jews in America don’t see mass immigration by Muslims as “penance” for the Holocaust, but as a way of recruiting “friends and political allies.” Jews “want to celebrate” Ilhan Omar because she is the antithesis of the stale pale males who founded and shaped America. She is Black, not White; Muslim, not Christian; female, not male.

In short, mass immigration isn’t “penance” by European Whites, but revenge on European Whites. Barbara Roche and Bari Weiss are goyophobes, or haters of White gentiles, in the same way as Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Jewish journalist who created the hate-hoax about “gang-rape on broken glass” among “the toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students” of the University of Virginia.

Snarling in triumph

That gang-rape hate-hoax ran in Rolling Stone, the hipster magazine published and co-founded by the Jewish homosexual Jann Wenner (born 1946). The magazine paid millions in damages to some of those it defamed in the hoax, but its goyophobia is as strong as ever. Rolling Stone didn’t simply “want to celebrate” Ilhan Omar, but actually and unequivocally did so by placing her on its cover for March 2019:

Vibrant varicolored vixens: Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rolling Stone #1323

Omar appeared on the cover with the senior Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Jahana Hayes, and with another new and vibrant Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has claimed “Jewish roots that span back 500 years to the Spanish Inquisition.” It’s interesting to compare the facial expressions of the older and newer generations of female Democrat. Pelosi and Hayes are smiling moderately, but Omar and Ocasio-Cortez are almost snarling in triumph. Their canine teeth are fully exposed and their nostrils are raised. Their message for their older colleagues seems to be: “We’re the future, you’re the past!” Read more

The Glories of Gandhara: Lessons for Identitarians

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The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhāra: An Introduction with Selected Translations
Richard Salomon
Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom, 2018

This is a fine book of translations of mysterious Gandharan Buddhist manuscripts. The context provided by Richard Salomon is excellent, providing a comprehensive overview of the little we know of ancient Buddhism and of the various sources: (enormous or fragmentary) Buddhist canons (Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit), archaeological sources (artifacts, inscriptions), and later legends and tales. Salomon emphasizes how little we know about ancient Buddhism from Gautama to Ashoka and indeed about ancient India in general.

Salomon’s long introductory chapters alone are worth the price of the book. I love it when a historian is able to draw a coherent picture from a great mass of wildly heterogeneous material (e.g. W. M. Sale on the Iliad, Brigitte Hamann on young Hitler, Fustel de Coulanges on the Indo-Europeans, David Engels on Roman decline).

Between the second century B.C. and the fourth century A.D., Gandhara, in what is today the rather hellish countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan, was a thriving Indic kingdom ruled by successive waves of Indo-European conquerors (Greeks, Scythians, Kushans . . .). As so often in multicultural empires, a period of syncretic flourishing was followed by total dissolution, with the disintegration of the state and of the ethnic elite with a stake in the commonwealth — quite comparable to what occurred in ancient Rome.

The typical appalling state of surviving Gandharan manuscripts

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Amazon Bans Culture of Critique and Separation and Its Discontents

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Twenty-one years after a respected academic publisher, Praeger, published Culture of Critique and Separation and Its Discontents, they have been banned on Amazon. A People that Shall Dwell Alone is still available. This comes only around two weeks after they banned books by Jared Taylor and Greg Johnson. This is an extension of the de-platforming from financial sites and PayPal, Patreon, Coinbase, and credit card companies that has hit pretty much all sites on the dissident right, including TOO and TOQ. Clearly the establishment is terrified that these ideas are gaining traction, and it illustrates once again, that the culturally dominant left cares nothing for free speech as a pillar of American civilization. I am now deeply worried that if the left obtains power in the next election, what has happened thus far will pale in comparison to what lies ahead. Private companies like Amazon cannot impose criminal penalties, but if the left manages to redefine the First Amendment, as they would certainly love to do, there will be a very real prospect of imprisonment and heavy fines — even for well-argued, well-supported statements and writings.  This has already happened in several parts of the EU, and the left has already developed sophisticated legal theories aimed at getting around the First Amendment. Supreme Court liberals, like Elena Kagan (who has already shown her proclivities in this area), are sure to be thinking along these lines.

Like pretty much everyone associated with the dissident right, I celebrated the election of Donald Trump. However, it’s clear that the populist, anti-immigration themes of Trump’s rhetoric have energized the left to a fever pitch. Trump has been unsuccessful or unwilling to carry through his promises on immigration, and there has been a barrage of investigations and impeachment talk beginning as soon as he took office. The liberal/left cultural establishment might have let things continue as they had been going for several decades if Jeb or Hillary had been elected. From the perspective on the left, everything was on course. There would be polite disagreements between Democrats and Republicans while the latter gradually ceded ever more ground in the culture wars; in the not too distant future, the Republican viability in national elections would be destroyed by the new Democrat voters they collaborated in importing. But it would all be very gradual.

However, Trump won, and to make things worse, there were populist stirrings in Europe, with the success of Brexit and with several European governments openly defying their EU masters on immigration and the ideal of multiculturalism. The response of the left, which should have been completely predictable, has been to do everything they can to ramp up immigration and even lower the voting age so that they are assured of winning future elections. And they have targeted the ideas of the dissident/populist right for suppression. Again, we are just seeing the beginning of what promises to be a very ugly war.

Like others on the dissident/populist right, we will not stop doing what we are doing, even if it means less visibility for our ideas and less financial support. It’s inevitable that Whites wake up to their dispossession and to the increasing hate directed against them from our cultural elites. Barring a USSR-type government, I’m not at all sure that our ideas can be prevented from triumphing. And that has our hostile elites very worried.

These books are still available:
Culture of Critique
Separation and Its Discontents

From Barnes & Nobel (when I click on the link, I get a pop-up with a 15% discount)”
Culture of Critique
Separation and Its Discontents

In Canada, at
Culture of Critique
Separation and Its Discontents

This is what I got from Amazon. In subsequent emails, they just keep repeating that these books were found to violate “content guidelines,” even though I pointed out that they were published 21 years ago by a respected academic publisher. No specifics. No appeal process.

From: Kindle Direct Publishing kindlecontent-review@amazon.com
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 4:37 PM
To: Kevin MacDonald
Subject: Alert from Amazon KDP for 2 Title(s)

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following book:

Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism by MacDonald, Kevin (AUTHOR) (ID: 4392904)
The Culture of Critique: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements by MacDonald, Kevin (AUTHOR) (ID: 3285482)

During our review process, we found that this content is in violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we cannot offer this book for sale. If we identify additional submissions with similar content that violates our guidelines you may lose access to optional KDP services and/or face account level actions up to and including termination.

You can find our content guidelines on the KDP website:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2TOZW0SV7IR1U<https://www.amazon.com/gp/f.html?C=2NXN4UFTTG5Z6&K=95RQOE6HNW93&M=urn:rtn:msg:20190311233725fdf99199909246f994ec0eb6a720p0na&R=35Y0X1UGCIMUT&T=C&U=https%3A%2F%2Fkdp.amazon.com%2Fhelp%3FtopicId%3DA2TOZW0SV7IR1U%26ref_%3Dpe_3052080_269936200&H=CS0VQ5SUHSPKZJQSXWE9BORDSOIA&ref_=pe_3052080_269936200>

Best regards,

Amazon KDP

Failed Crypsis and Its Discontents: Past and Present

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“Some accuse me of being a Jew; some excuse me for being one; some even praise me for being a Jew. But all think about it.” Thus wrote the nineteenth-century writer and journalist Judah Loew Baruch (1786—1837) who, after ostensibly converting to Christianity, assimilating, and renaming himself Ludwig Börne, struggled to understand why Germans insisted on seeing him as a Jew.

Börne’s lament is a classic of failed Jewish crypsis, and one of my personal favorites. Looking back, one wonders how Börne could ever be surprised. The reasons of the Germans were surely not that difficult to surmise. Börne was an acerbic ethnic activist who used his journalism to pour sarcastic scorn on German Romanticism and folk nationality that he clearly feared and despised. He was a key figure in the Junges Deustchland (Young Germany) movement, a social reform and literary movement in nineteenth-century Germany (c.1830—50), influenced by French revolutionary ideas, which acted as a vehicle for culturally hostile Jewish ideas and opposed the German Romanticism and nationalism then current. Members of Young Germany considered themselves to possess formidable intellectual and literary gifts, and they engaged in a scathing culture of critique. But they failed to inspire much enthusiasm, instead exciting widespread animosity. This is because “Young Germany” was more like “Young Israel,” being intellectually inspired by the Jewish converts Börne and Heinrich Heine, and given a European face by a ‘social justice’ gang of philo-Semites and Leftists who had married Jewish women (e.g., Georg Herwegh). In the words of one Young Germany leader, Karl Gutzkow, “It needed two Jews— Heine and Börne — to overthrow the old ideology and shake all illusions.”[1] Many Germans agreed, which resulted in the movement being discussed colloquially as “Young Palestine,” and the banning of many of its publications. When it came to Jewishness, much to Börne’s despair, all thought about it.

Ludwig Börne

This early alliance of Leftists and Jews, each aware of the destructive power and potential of the other, would result in the promotion of Young Germany novels like Wally, die Zweiflerin, (Wally, the Doubter) that attacked marriage and preached “sexual emancipation.” Such activities, now all too familiar to us, marked an initial confluence of interests between Jews and non-Jewish radicals, since both were keen, as Gutzkow put it, to “overthrow the old ideology and shake all illusions.”

We are now almost two centuries removed from the Young Germany-Young Palestine controversy of 1835, and this confluence of perceived interests seems to have sustained the Left-Jewish alliance for almost the entirety of the intervening years. And yet, if recent events are anything to go by, this alliance appears to be fraying at the edges. The main reason for this fraying, I suggest, is that the initial goal of overthrowing the old cultural and political status quo has now been largely achieved. As we progress into a Cultural Marxist endgame, the alliance is being revised by some, and the most radical on the Left are reassessing their erstwhile partners. What are they getting out of this? Who exactly are these people and what are their interests? How valid are their victimhood credentials? Most important has been the apparently novel discovery that far from being among “the oppressed,” Jews are incredibly influential and bear all the hallmarks of an elite. The mask slips and crypsis fails. The resurgence of Börne’s crisis — the lament of failed crypsis — and with it a revision of perceptions of interests, is thus an old/new characteristic of present-day politics.  Read more

Jewish Efforts to Restrict Free Speech in the UK, 1945 to the Present

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Jez Turner addressing a rally

Jez Turner addressing a rally

First posted on March 12, 2017.

“The judiciary itself, which has for so long been the last safeguard of our liberty and honor, seems to have forgotten the difference between ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ in the general collapse of public morality and equity.”
Alphonse Toussenel, The Jews: Kings of the Epoch, 1847.

When I was younger, and first learning to play chess, the part of the game I found most difficult was learning to interpret the intentions of my opponent and anticipate his course of action. Like most novices, my focus was on moving pawns out of the way in order to bring more powerful pieces into play. It was only as time progressed that I realized the importance and inherent power of the pawns themselves, and with that realization came an appreciation for my opponent’s opening strategy.

I was very recently reminded of this learning curve by the slowly unveiling strategy of one of Britain’s Jewish ‘charities,’ the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA), which has placed free speech in check and threatens mate at any moment. In a case that will have devastating repercussions for free speech in Britain, CAA has proven itself even more influential than the government’s Crown Prosecution Service, which has now capitulated to the Jewish group and granted a judicial review into its earlier decision not to prosecute Jeremy Bedford-Turner, known among colleagues as Jez Turner, for a 2015 speech.

The Historical and Political Context

Context is crucial, and it is important to note that the Turner case is the culmination of a strategy that long precedes even the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. This strategy, which in Britain can be traced back to the 1910s, concerns repeated and consistent attempts to bring about the criminalization of ‘anti-Semitism,’ or in other words, to make criticism of Jews illegal. Although the precise nature of these attempts have fluctuated slightly over time, Jews have been remarkably prominent in the introduction of laws, or influencing the interpretation of laws, that negatively impact on free speech. Following the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, Jewish delegates attempted to pass a resolution “outlawing anti-Semitism” at that year’s annual Labour Party Conference. [1] However, the bombing immediately cost the Zionists a great many non-Jewish friends within the Labour movement, and the proposal was emphatically crushed. Following the notorious Sergeant’s Affair, in which Jewish terrorists murdered British soldiers in barbaric fashion, another explicit proposal to outlaw anti-Semitism was introduced in the House of Commons, but was rejected at its first reading in 1948. Direct and explicit efforts such as these continued to fail. In Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policy Making Since the 1960s, Erik Bleich notes that “during the late 1950s and early 1960s Jewish groups sought laws against anti-Semitic public speeches made during this era, but there is little evidence that this pressure achieved substantial results.”[2] Read more

Update on Atty. Glen Allen’s Lawsuit against the SPLC

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Editor’s note: Atty. Glen Allen sent the below email to update what is happening in his lawsuit against the SPLC. As I noted in a previous article, this is a very worthy cause. A victory against the SPLC would be a huge win for our cause. 

*   *   *

March 7, 2019

Friends, Supporters, and Interested Persons:

This is my second email update on my litigation against the SPLC, Heidi Beirich, and Mark Potok.  Since I have new friends and supporters (and thank you!), I have copied below my first email update, dated January 31, 2019, along with its attachments.

The SPLC defendants, as expected, filed two motions to dismiss on Monday evening.  The first seeks dismissal of all nine of my claims;  the second seeks dismissal of Potok on grounds that the Maryland court lacks personal jurisdiction over him because — so he asserts — he has no contacts with Maryland.  I anticipated all of the defendants’ arguments and am hard at work, together with my co-counsel, in preparing an opposition, which is due March 18.  If you would like to see pdfs of these motions to dismiss, please send an email to editors@theoccidentalobserver.net  If any of you have comments regarding them, please get in touch with me.  I would be particularly interested to know if anyone has any information about Potok’s activities — what exactly he did at the SPLC, what he does now, and whether he ever visited or had other contacts with Maryland or any surrounding states.

As far as I know, no plaintiff has ever survived a motion to dismiss in litigation against the SPLC.   Trust me, I’m putting my heart into becoming the first.  If I do, the next phase will be discovery — document requests, depositions, etc.  I believe the SPLC has never been subjected to discovery in any prior litigation.

I am deeply grateful for your past support, and will respectfully ask that this support, moral and financial, continue into this new phase, if you are in a position help.  Donations can be made directly to me at P.O. Box 10441, Baltimore, MD 21209, or through my Breathing Space for Dissent website.

Best to you all,

Glen Allen

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