The Toxicity of Truth: Honesty as a Handicap for White Nationalists
For me, the most important question in the world is this: What is truth? The question underlies every attempt to understand the world and to act therein. In a biological sense, the problem of formulating true representations of the world existed long before humans and language. Animals seek accurate information about the world: what is edible, what is not; what is dangerous, what is not.
This means that deception also existed long before human beings. Animals are in competition and although they want accurate information for themselves, they often want to deny it to their competitors. Think of camouflage. The truth about a stick-insect is that it is good food for birds or lizards. It conceals that truth by its appearance. The truth about a cuckoo-chick in a reed warbler’s nest is that it is a parasitic interloper. It conceals that truth by its behaviour.
Wasps and monarch butterflies do the opposite: they broadcast the truth about themselves as clearly as possible. “We sting!” “We taste bad!” But their clear warnings can then be stolen by deceivers. Some harmless moths mimic wasps; some edible butterflies mimic monarchs. To understand biology, you have to investigate not just flows of energy, but also flows of information. When you do, it’s clear that control over information is an essential part of biological competition. Deception is a very common evolutionary strategy both between and within species.
These biological realities also apply to human beings, but there are extra layers in the human world. We have language, and our psychology is far more complex. However, this does not alter one essential fact: Truth is often toxic. Revealing it can be very harmful. It’s easy to see how this applies in personal life, but I want to examine how it applies in politics too. The naïve assumption might be that it is good for a political movement to have the truth on its side. But is it? For example, are White nationalists, who recognize the truth about racial differences, actually handicapped by being in the right?
I would suggest that they are. And I’m not simply referring to the hostile media, which celebrate charlatans like Stephen Jay Gould and persecute truthful men like James Watson. We have to ask: why has a strategy of lies and deceit been so successful in politics? Read more