White Antifragility: Wokeism as White Supremacism

A week ago so a minor kerfuffle within the ranks of the “IDW”, with Quillette editor Claire Lehmann attaqing James Lindsay for promoting “White Genocide Theory”.

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1402771614631006208

Is White Genocide happening? Is it likely to happen in a country like the US? Well, as wits such as Roko pointed out, it is surely more likely than aliens visiting our planet within the next couple of decades – a prospect that has recently garnered some mainstream attention (probably helped along by the MIC). On the other hand, it is certainly highly unlikely in absolute terms. The only actual example of a “White Genocide” that could apply in American conditions was Haiti a couple of centuries ago, but whites only constituted 1% of the population there. Similar proportion in Zimbabwe, though it was much less extreme. So it’s replication in the 21C US is quite far-fetched. (Note that refers to “White Genocide” as opposed to “population replacement”, a somewhat separate concept that is arguably applicable right now, though not necessarily indefinitely).

But on a more general level, I have gradually come to realize that debates over “White Genocide” miss the entire point on the most fundamental level.

In reality, any even minimally realistic “White Genocide” scenario in the US will boil down to a White counter-elite challenging or replacing the existing one, probably under the guise of expropriations in service of reparations and general racial leveling. It’s not excluded that it could get very violent, at least in its first one or two decades. But over the long-term, history suggests White Supremacy will unironically win, even under the most extremely scenarios. After all, eras of Bioleninist lunacy are often followed by the restoration of traditional hierarchies, often in forms harsher, more rigid and archaic than what came before.

https://twitter.com/acczibit/status/1275195576557219841

My basic take is that Lehmann and her supporters like A Radical Centrism, as well as James and his followers, are all barking up the wrong tree. It doesn’t even matter if there’s a full-fledged Bolshevik Revolution in the US. Long-term, White Supremacism wins – since Wokeism, SJWism, CRT, etc. are just a costly (at the social level, not the individual one) means of signaling it, while bearing in mind that at its very core, CRT is basically a White Supremacist humblebrag (association of White culture with “rugged individualism”, intact families, future time orientation, etc). Couched in the language of CRT, what is for all intents and purposes a White Nationalist manifesto becomes dogma to the progressive faithful and in so doing immanentizes White Supremacy.

Incidentally, from this perspective, it is all the more amusing to see POC hype it so much and white rightoids get triggered by it. Though I suppose that’s only to be expected, given that what those two groups have in common is that they’re lower IQ than the White and Jewish liberals who tend to be the most energetic CRT promoters. Those who don’t “get” how this social game is played pay for it with diminished status, becoming “unhandshakeworthy” in respectable society, canceled from its events and deplatformed from its social fora. Not that there’s anything new or even objectionable about this, societies have had “taboos” and “outcasts” for millennia.

One commonly heard rejoinder is that the White promoters of CRT don’t benefit from it. Tell that to Robin DiAngelo – seems to have worked out well for her. Even at a more general level, high status Whites who promote CRT benefit, at least so long as they don’t drink the Kool-Aid and do things like move into Black neighborhoods in solidarity. (This is where “Does it have good schools?” comes in). But that is just another one of life’s myriad IQ tests, high status Whites did not generally become high status by failing them.

Even in the very long-term, we know from Gregory Clark that class is amazingly stable historically, being rooted in biology, even maintaining its internal structure from one political regime to another even as its exterior forms change. I suspect the children and grandchildren of these Woke signaling Whites will be just fine, and if anything, even higher status than their ancestors (“white privilege” being more of an actual thing in, say, Latin America, than the US). Their societies may be less capable and more dysfunctional that would have been the case otherwise, but who cares? Everything in life is relative. Well, status is, at any rate.

It’s quite funny in a way, we actually do, unironically, live within a matrix of White Supremacy, in which the socially “correct” move is to unironically believe in it and condemn it. The higher IQ, socially savvy “get it” and accrue benefits while reinforcing the very system of White Supremacy that privilege them above their co-ethnics who are their only real competitors for apex status.

Furthermore, it is notable, if not surprising, that Wokeism/SJWism is spreading outside the West, and it can be expected to hit many of these regions harder, since they haven’t co-evolved with it and developed some degree of immunity to it (much like how European socialist movements ended up manifesting in their most virulent forms in Russia a century ago). In this respect, Wokeism can be considered to be yet another tool of Western Supremacism and colonial subjugation.

The only conceivable way that this scenario is averted is the one in which the rise of China simply sidelines White Supremacy for good. White elites, counter-elites, and their status games will not have much relevance in a hypothetical world in which China has 3x the GDP of the US and PLAN rules the Pacific. The hammer of the Chinese working class under the paramount leader of the PRC will break free the chains keeping the rest of the world in tow to White Supremacy. It is the iron duty of all true progressives to support them in that endeavor.

 

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

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  2. Kent Nationalist says

    When did AK become a retard?

  3. Many good things in this post, down to recognizing that taboos have always had a central place in all cultures.

    White Supremacy and CRT can best be understood in terms of Nietzsche’s”self-overcoming” and “will to power”, as a form of ascesis, and as related to religious asceticism which is a disguised will to power.

    As Nietzsche pointed out, religious asceticism is actually the opposite of what it appears – it’s apparent self denial masks a will to power.

    Hindu yogis were quite honest that they sought “tapas” – power – through their self denial. And Ghandi was fascinatingly quite candid about the self-power he sought to generate through his ascetic rigors.

    Today, we even see people like Jack Dorsey and other tech bigwigs practice asceticism as a way of developing power.

    The problem with right wingers is that while they can be very intelligent, they lack “meta” thinking – their cognitive style does not allow them to understand “paradoxical” phenomena, or non-linear phenomena. They cannot see how what is on the surface can be in an inverse relationship with what what is below.

    Kevin McDonald, for instance, if he tried to analyze medieval Christian asceticism or Hindu asceticism, would come to the conclusion that some outside agent, some enemy, had somehow tricked these people into going against their natural self-interest.

    McDonald is extremely intelligent, but he apparently cannot grasp “non-linear” and “paradoxical” phenomena. For instance, the Christian – and Taoist – idea that “weakness is strength” (in some circumstances) would be something utterly beyond his ken.

    I remember my first trip to Amsterdam 15 years ago. I had been led to believe by American media that Europeans were spineless weaklings with no self respect who let third workers walk all over them. Instead, what I found was a White people who were supremely composed and self-confident, tall and good looking, well dressed and intelligent, in a beautiful city full of amenities. They exuded confidence, even arrogance, and were nothing like what I would have thought.

    I understood then that whatever the apparent European self denial with regard to non-Whites, it is anything but borne out of weakness.

  4. Dreadilk says

    I disagree. All this status game jerk off works in a short window. Minorities while broken up will hunt whites down in their respective spheres. In Latin America white do fine because they reject roll over and die approach. Jews in US are learning the hard way. At the rate they are being kicked out of Democratic party.

  5. ravin' lunatic says

    i have to agree with your hypothesis in general, however i fear that the increasingly dissolute and self-destructive nature of the social dialogue are taking matters into a signaling death-spiral.

    it is socially adaptive to believe in the emperor’s new clothes, but what happens when the emperor decides to equip the whole army with new armor of the same make and model?

  6. I wouldn’t exactly say “humblebrag”, in my view, the Woke are coming back full circle and glorify white supremacy and segregation. They just repackage it and frome it differently.

    A century ago, KKK would burn down businesses in minority districts. Today, BLM, basically white women and some black hoods, burn down businesses in minority districts. Both promote segregation, BLM just brands it as “safe spaces for people of color”. Black teachers for black students etc, they are not far off from separate drinking fountains.

    I noticed similar thing during #MeToo peak. For all their complaining about “white men”, they wrecked a bunch of Jews (Weinstein, Lauer etc) and a black guy (Cosby). Hitler would be proud.

    People haven’t caught up yet, but pretty soon all you will need to do as a white man, is to declare yourself transgender, put some lipstick on, and then you will be able to burn all those “safe spaces” that conveniently collect feminists and minorities to the ground.

    There will not be a white supremacist reaction to the Woke for the very simple reason that the Woke is a white supremacist reaction. And a very effective one at that.

    I mean, how many Jewish careers have alt right destroyed? How many did MeToo? Exactly.

  7. sudden death says

    This type of prop balloon potentially seems to be more directed at various non-white current Third Worlders (S.America, Africa, etc) or immmigrants from those countries already setlled in the West, who may find attractive US type of victorious wokeliberalism instead of CCP’íed China dictatorship.

  8. 40 Lashes Less One says

    Poe’s story, Masque of the Red Death comes to mind. The beautiful people dancing away as the plague gets closer and closer.

  9. Morton's toes says

    P(white genocide) estimate = .00000001
    P(aliens show up) estimate = .000000007

    So Roko is technically correct but it is kind of an idiotic point unless you want to discuss the philosophy of humans spending their valuable limited time on idiotic pointless things which we certainly do.

    By the way I have a solution to Fermi’s paradox which I have decided that I like but nobody else seems to so you might want to skip the rest of my post.

    The reason the little green men don’t just show up at UN plaza and say Hello world! is NOT because there aren’t plenty of little green men out there. The reason they don’t is they have figured out that this puzzle is lots of fun for the people trying to figure it out and for the people watching the people trying to figure it out. They don’t want to spoil the fun.

    Also Fermi never said “I have this paradox that I agonize over”. He just asked his fellow Atom Bomb brothers in New Mexico one day at lunch “Where are they?”

    Later on the culture seemed to have gradually decided this is Fermi’s Paradox. Fermi likely did not give a hoot about this question.

  10. Blinky Bill says
  11. Valtazar says

    I mean, I’d say AK is mostly right. This is a inner White conflict, minorities are just props. The thing is, for this to continue to progress in a way that AK envisioned, everybody important needs to aware that it’s a grift and that there are limits to how far you can go. But who can guarantee that the eventual winners won’t be some “1 billion Americans” true believers who will change things in a fundamental way by allowing uncontrolled migration from Africa<'

  12. ravin' lunatic says

    an addendum: i cant think of any policy that would solve our communist problem faster than ‘defund the police’. if wokeistan actually managed to remove law enforcement from our society, i think they would be rather surprised at the consequences…

  13. Janus Knight says

    two groups have in common is that they’re lower IQ than the White and Jewish liberals who tend to be the most energetic CRT promoters. Those who don’t “get” how this social game is played pay for it with diminished status

    I doubt this. Extreme right and extreme left Whites have similar IQs, certainly they aren’t separated by the 15 point margin between White and black. A more likely explanation: conservative and liberal Whites differ psychologically, with the latter being more willing to hold double standards, punish dissenters, and — in general — having a negative self-identity (meaning they are always on the search for enemies). Normie Whites have no defense against this dynamic. Thus, they cannot oppose it no matter how much (or little) talent resides in that cohort.

    Conservatives don’t “get it” not because they are stupid. Rather, they don’t “get it” because they are good people. If this weren’t the case, then many of the best social scientists you are found of quoting (Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray) are imbeciles. Murray knows the game, for example, but he’s also a decent man who can’t bring himself to lie or to embrace the kind of madness coming from the far-left. So, he never drank the kool-aid. Instead, he has spent much of his career trying to talk the left down from their ledge.

    That mentality, in my opinion, is what has motivated much of the talented portion of the right — Murray, Sailer … maybe Pinker — over the last several decades. They are decent people who aren’t psychopathic liars, so they operate under a false understanding of the left — that they are just like them, simply misguided, and they can be reasoned with as a result. But what happens when you try negotiating in good faith with someone who can’t be reasoned with and who is willing to cheat to win? Well, obviously you lose no matter how smart you are.

    Being a good person means y0u lose. Ironically, this could also be used as a justification for divine intervention, as you sometimes allude to in your writing. Unless God intervenes on the side of light, the side of darkness wins. So, either God (or the great simulator) occasionally helps out, or the universe is left to ruin. That assumes, of course, that Asians have the same left/right social/genetic stratification of Western societies, which remains to be seen. If Asians don’t have an equivalently large fraction of psychopathic-tending leftists (personality is heritable), then they may be the future of humanity.

    Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities

    “we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies”

    http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000329

    *Presumably, the above applies to those who promote false victimhood for personal gain (White supremacist Leftists).

    Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic

    https://nypost.com/2016/06/09/science-says-liberal-beliefs-are-linked-to-pyschotic-traits/

    Probably a more correct analysis of the situation might be found, however unintentionally, in the H.G. Wells novel “The Time Machine.” The future evolution of humanity has led to a sheepish Eloi population preyed upon by smart, but evil, monsters. This is eerily similar to the left/right dynamic in Western Civilization. With hope, differential birth rates will remove enough of the far-left over the coming century to allow for this cycle of leftist-inspired social upheaval to end.

  14. Boomthorkell says

    The Georgian one is my favorite, without doubt, though it would have made more sense for it to be England or the Isle of Mann (elves and all that.)

    Unless I’m missing a deeper joke…

    As for the general idea of White Genocide, I agree. It isn’t going to happen, not in the way that people are thinking.

    More importantly, if the Soviet Union couldn’t pull it off, despite the suffering they wrought upon Russians, it’s unlikely even the most woke, Genuinely-I-Want-to-Get-Whitey Extremist (most of whom are white), aren’t actually going to manage that as well. It’s a power struggling and politics, and no matter how many suffer, eventually it will set itself “right.”

    (For a given cosmic value of “right.”)

  15. The man from Musty Grove says

    It’s either a psychotropic medication (sudden intense fascination with crypto suggests dopamine modulation) or muh cold Russian nationalist that makes him indifferent.

    I can tell you that people have had enough of this business of hostile elites and a whole lot of other things besides. Their hearts and biological age are not faring well.

  16. It’s unlikely that descendants of current USA White elites will play much of a role in the USA of 2060. White births in 2018 were barely half of what they were in 1988, and White fraction of USA’s cognitive elites has plunged.

    To my understanding, Asian representation in Ivy League universities was frozen in the mid-1990s as they approached 20% of accepted applicants. While Ivy League admission fractions are an imperfect proxy for the group fractions of USA’s cognitive elites, it isn’t unreasonable to think that around 80% of USA’s brightest in 1990 were White. Today, judging from SAT scores, only a third of USA’s brightest are White. This fraction will almost certainly keep falling with continued immigration from East Asia and India.

    https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_2.png

  17. Mitleser says

    Note that refers to “White Genocide” as opposed to “population replacement”, a somewhat separate concept that is arguably applicable right now, though not necessarily indefinitely

    That is why wokeism is not white supremacism.
    Brain-draining the world => enough foreign people not only for population replacement, but also noticeable elite replacement. It is something the communists in Russia and China did not have, limiting their ability to replace their pre-revolutionary elites.
    Remember how Biden’s cabinet looks like, especially compared to its predecessors.

    An NBC analysis of all Cabinet-level members from the past four administrations found that Biden’s cabinet has the highest percentage of women heading Cabinet-level departments; as well as secretaries, administrators and directors of color compared to his predecessors overall. Close to half of his current Cabinet are women; half of his current Cabinet self-identify as Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American or multiracial.

    Former President Barack Obama, who made headlines as the first biracial President of the United States, scored second highest across gender (30.2% women) and ethnicity (30.2% people of color) diversity metrics across the past four administrations.

    The Cabinets of former presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, meanwhile, were more skewed towards white and male department heads, with only 16.7% and 17.5% of their Cabinets consisting of women respectively.

    Of all of the confirmed and handpicked Cabinet members who served under Bush, 18.7% were people of color. And only three of Trump’s 25 Cabinet members were people of color (12.5%).

    https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/biden-administration/biden-cabinet-breakdown-by-gender-age-ethnicity/2619324/

  18. Coconuts says

    Furthermore, it is notable, if not surprising, that Wokeism/SJWism is spreading outside the West, and it can be expected to hit many of these regions harder, since they haven’t co-evolved with it and developed some degree of immunity to it (much like how European socialist movements ended up manifesting in their most virulent forms in Russia a century ago). In this respect, Wokeism can be considered to be yet another tool of Western Supremacism and colonial subjugation.

    CRT is related to Black Liberationism/Nationalism, Post-Colonial ideology and more distantly to Maoism and Third World Ethno-Communism. Large parts of the world have more experience with ideologies of this kind than majority white Western countries, reasons for this should be clear. Mostly it was also created by people who were not white for the advancement of their own people’s interests. Looking at places like India and China and plenty of others nowadays it can work quite successfully.

    The hereditary racial element of CRT is foundational, Blackness and whiteness are overwhelmingly held to be dependent on phenotype and genetics and suggesting the possibility of trans-racialism is a grave taboo. This makes it unusual in the context of typical European left ideology, it is also why IMO calling it a negro-worship religion is only partly trolling, partly it is just descriptive.

  19. AltSerrice says

    On top of Mitleser’s good point about elite replacement above which I agree with, I think Karlin’s view here misses something very important by focusing entirely on the elite perspective and how well White elites can do out of our current civilisational predicament.

    Certainly White (or “White”) elites can do very well for themselves by promoting wokeism and gain plenty of wealth and power, but I think it’s ridiculous to call this White supremacism when ordinary White people bear the brunt of the negative effects of this change and will see the greatest reduction in their quality of life. In reality it is just a new manifestation of elite supremacism (the historical standard, of course), but with a worse elite that is even more hostile to its underlings. If ordinary White people are the bait and expendable human meat shield that this new elite uses to achieve its power transfer then it can hardly be called White suprematism, can it?

    Calling it White supremacism seems like a powerful take entirely for the sake of making a controversial powerful take.

  20. Daniel Chieh says

    Parasitism is a pretty successful strategy in animals. Its not that different in current society.

  21. The Woke elimination of university admissions tests will overwhelmingly benefit White (and Jewish) elites and hit Asian grinders. This is congruent with the thesis that American elites are crypto-White Supremacists.

    I am actually not sure that conventional demographic projections will come true (barring of course truly large-scale immigration from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, which admittedly can’t be excluded). American Whites are further along the demographic transition than Blacks and especially more so than Latinos, their breeders will be making themselves increasingly felt as this century wears on.

    Still, everything is relative at the end of the day. Latin America is all mixed up, but White privilege is much more of a thing there than in the US itself. The future elites who will enjoy this privilege will still be overwhelmingly descended from the current elites.


    Another way of thinking about it is imagine if rednecks were a different race, that they are a POC just like Russians. After this cognitive adjustment, it is very easy to conceptualize the American elites as crypto-White Supremacists.

  22. White men haven’t voted a majority for the Democrats since 1964.

    The idea that minorities don’t have agency is ludicrous, bordering on cope. I see echoes of the familiar Dissident refrain that somehow women don’t have moral agency either.

  23. John Gruskos says

    He isn’t a retard, just a bitter Dagestani ethnic outsider and a Satanic anti-Christian transhumanist in a foul mood after losing money in fraud-coins.

  24. The Woke elimination of university admissions tests will overwhelmingly benefit White (and Jewish) elites and hit Asian grinders. This is congruent with the thesis that American elites are crypto-White Supremacists.

    Again, spoken like the liberal you really are.

    Another way of thinking about it is imagine if rednecks were a different race, that they are a POC just like Russians. After this cognitive adjustment, it is *very* easy to conceptualize the American elites as crypto-White Supremacists.

    It is “Redstani” sir or “Heritage American”, only our people are permitted to call ourselves rednecks, the rest of you are not.

    While your diminishment of the POL to POC is regrettable, beggars can’t be choosers.

  25. Bardon Kaldian says

    As I said elsewhere…

    Simply, the world order we live in has been created by white, Europe-derived powers after WW2 after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. They thought, at least in theory, that better world would emerge with universal human rights, however imperfect they may be.

    But, with decolonization of Africa and Asia, we have seen that human beings, re their capabilities and cultures, just won’t behave uniformly. Differences are too big and permanent. If the UN had divided the world in 5-10 cultural/religious/racial zones, then it could exist. Now, as it is- global world just cannot survive, because inequality is absolutely ineradicable.

    Take, for instance, Denmark and Pakistan, their GDP (not per capita).

    Denmark, population 5.8 million
    GDP $ 350 billion

    Pakistan, population 217 million
    GDP $ 278 billion

    And, Africans, wherever they are, cannot even come close.

    So, the only way to a relatively peaceful coexistence is re-segregation & partition of the world into various zones (racial, cultural, religious, economic..).

    Otherwise not only the US, but most of the affluent world will have collapsed, or those whose will to live is stronger, will nuke most 3rd worlders in order to save themselves from black & brown demographic invasion.

  26. Not Raul says

    When did AK become a retard?

    Was Jonathan Swift a retard?

  27. Not Raul says

    It is “Redstani” sir or “Heritage American”, only our people are permitted to call ourselves rednecks, the rest of you are not.

    Not true. There are a lot of rednecks in Latin America.

  28. I did OK, overall. But your concern for my financial wellbeing is appreciated.

  29. Blinky Bill says
  30. Yes, good criticism, one of the tags here is “Trolling” after all.

    That said, I think the conceptual difference really comes into focus if you take Charles Murray’s Belmont and Fishtown; assume that they are different races (race after all being just a social construct, as we are told); and assign the “White” label to Belmont (which, after all, has many more of the aspects of “whiteness” described here) while rebranding the rednecks as POCs.

    Viewed from this perspective, this is absolute White Supremacy and can be attacked and condemned from its own ideological first principles.

  31. Another way of thinking about it is imagine if rednecks were a different race, that they are a POC just like Russians. After this cognitive adjustment, it is *very* easy to conceptualize the American elites as crypto-White Supremacists

    .

    Finally, someone is talking sense! I’ve been making this point for ages now to complete silence.

    In the Road To Wigan Pier, George Orwell describes how genteel English people are raised to regard the lower classes as literally a distinct species, and that he could scarcely suppress shudders of disgust at coming into physical contact with English miners and soldiers – he had been taught to think they have an unbearable foul odor (imaginary bad smell is a major way to stigmatize an outgroup), and that even though he could see that these lower class miners and soldiers were at the peak of their physical development, fit and muscular from hard labor without an ounce of fat, and beautiful compared to the flabby and spoiled English upper classes, he could not help finding them physically repulsive.

    And off the top of my head there is that famous quote from – possibly Voltaire? – at any rate, one of those French enlightenment thinkers, about “animals” working the fields who, when they suddenly stand up, reveal themselves as human. He was being sympathetic, but it’s a record of how peasants appeared to the upper classes.

    And then that famous quote from Disraeli’s novel Sybil, that dastardly Jew of Sephardic descent who assimilated completely to the British aristocracy, and who was scathing about the British nobility rape of the lower classes, spelled it out plainly –

    Which nation . . . for she reigns over two’. . . .‘Yes’, resumed the younger stranger after a moment’s interval. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws’. ‘You speak of –’, said Egremont, hesitatingly. ‘The RICH and the POOR’. [Book II, Chapter 5]

    The idea that there are no races within nations, but only between them, has always been an absurdity.

  32. Yellowface Anon says

    It shows how “race” is the new class, only that much of the “white” values are actually (lower-)middle class and “Black” values welfare-seekers. Perennial class struggle, but now intentionally misdirected by elite-employed ideologues.

  33. Not Raul says

    The Woke elimination of university admissions tests will overwhelmingly benefit White (and Jewish) elites and hit Asian grinders. This is congruent with the thesis that American elites are crypto-White Supremacists.

    It’s telling that, decades ago, the media weren’t shouting about tests being racist.

    The issue isn’t really that the tests are “racist”, it’s that Jews don’t score as well as Asians.

  34. Yellowface Anon says

    You made the point more sublimely than mine.

  35. Passer by says

    the thesis that American elites are crypto-White Supremacists.

    Too bad that no one serious cares about your empty attempts to trigger people ala 4chan.

    https://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

    Ron Unz estimated otherwise – jews gain, no one else does. He is way, way out of your league. This is why you are writing on his site, instead of him writing on your site, if you know what i mean. : )

  36. Jews are referred to as ‘spicy white’ by the BLM types. So it doesn’t look like they are getting off easy.

    Jews play good game, but it has gotten a bit stale. Unless they invent a new fashionable victimhood identity, they will be problematic.

  37. Glad to see you are beginning to twig to some of the things some observers have been pointing out for years.

    America’s mainstream leftism is now the Establishment and has been for several decades. It is essentially an ideology that seeks to preserve the status quo. In fact, the American liberal establishment, which is, in its essence, very upscale white (Jewish and non-Jewish; remember that the blacks and the browns are merely auxiliaries), may pay lip service to much revolutionary rhetoric, multiculturalism and such, but fears any significant change to the system that serves them all too well.

    –UR commenter “Twinkie”, Feb. 2015

    That said, drastic social upheavals can be less than salutary, even for members of the elite; however well descendants of the old upper classes may do in modern Russia or China there were certainly some who did less well out of the transition.

    https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/article-historic-1949-execution-chains-China-CCP-anniversary-70.jpg

  38. Well it certainly seems like I successfully triggered some rightoids here… it’s almost as fun as doing it to SJWs, that stands to reason, the difference between them being quite artificial…

    Anyhow, wrt universities, I was talking specifically of the recent trend to abolish SAT entrance requirements. You’re tilting at some straw man.

  39. I have thought along similar lines for a long time, I gave a speech called “Creating Safe Spaces for the Elites” in 2015. You can find me making such arguments on my blog for years though it’s not something that I often blogged about.

    The “powerful” innovation here is to view Wokeism as a White Supremacy that counter-signals itself to reinforce its own hegemony.

  40. @Anatoly Karlin

    “Even in the very long-term, we know from Gregory Clark that class is amazingly stable historically, being rooted in biology, even maintaining its internal structure from one political regime to another even as its exterior forms change.”

    Is Soviet Russia the exception that proves this rule? What were the effects of the Bolshevik purges on the composition of Russia’s upper classes? I’m under the impression that the Bolshevik elite were still drawn from the ranks of Russia’s smart fraction, especially the Jewish community, but did Stalinist and Leninist purges actually alter the composition of the Russian elite to any degree? Is there any degree of continuity between Czarist Russian and Putinist Russian elites?

  41. Rebel Roy says

    Totally agree with you John Gruskos,his whole article just seems like blather on top of blather.The Jews run the whole thing with the help of White brainwashed flunkies.This Karlin guy is a retard.He claims most Whites don’t understand the clever plan.The only people who understand the plan he outlined are people who’ve taken a large dose of LSD.Won’t be wasting my time reading his ramblings anymore,too many other great writers on UNZ.

  42. reiner Tor says

    The future elites who will enjoy this privilege will still be overwhelmingly descended from the current elites.

    This after complaining how the Russian elites (who foolishly supported the revolution in February 1917) got to a very large extent actually replaced after 1917.

    So why is it impossible for the current white elites? Maybe they will, long term, still be doing fine relative to the white or even POC masses, but it’s far from guaranteed that they are going to do well relative to their current position.

    The Woke elimination of university admissions tests will overwhelmingly benefit White (and Jewish) elites and hit Asian grinders.

    There are two questions here.

    One is, how sustainable this is. After all, they had some kind of a quota system in place against the Jews. For a while.

    The second question is, how much are the Asians just grinders? Initially they were, and this grinding thing certainly overstates their advantage, but they are certainly growing as a percentage of the cognitive elite and are going to grow as a percentage of the CEOs and eventually billionaires. If that is the case, then even with the Harvard quotas staying in place forever, Harvard will just not matter that much and will be sidestepped by these growing new elites.

  43. Slavoj Žižek suggested that woke white anti-racists are actually white supremacists without realizing it. Deep down they think that, whereas other racial-cum-ethnic groups are still hopelessly tribal, we whites are further along the evolutionary path and realize there is only one race – the human race – so we don’t need that old-time ethnocentrism. Sure, the day will come when blacks and Jews and the rest will also rise to our level and share our views, but take a good look at them today! They’ve got a long, long way to go.

  44. Janus Knight says

    The “powerful” innovation here is to view Wokeism as a White Supremacy that counter-signals itself to reinforce its own hegemony.

    This is believable. I believe its adoption came in aftermath of the Second World War (even though its genesis came earlier). The United States found itself transformed into a global empire and needed to adopt an ideology which justified this state of affairs. It’s no coincidence that Civil Rights, separation of church and state, and all the rest came shortly after the end of WWII. They had to rid themselves of anything their diverse foreign vassals might find divisive, anything that would pit them against the United States.

    Thus, they said goodbye to Christianity as the de facto state religion because the US was competing for access in the predominantly Muslim Middle East. Goodbye to conservative prudism because Western Europeans needed to see that the US was freer than the stodgy Soviet Union. Goodbye to racial segregation because many vassals were non-White and might be offended by discrimination against their co-ethnics in the United States.

    This has continued into the modern era, mutating into a more toxic form as the world has globalized. Essentially, the ruling class of the United States is signaling to their vassal populations overseas that they have nothing to worry about and should accept dominance because their interests won’t be threatened: the American ruling class hates their domestic population, so both groups have common enemies.

    “Hey, cognitive elite of the world, we’re all on the same side against the other — conservative rubes in the US, but also your own country if you come along. Don’t you want to signal how superior you are to your domestic hayseeds? We won’t threaten you because we’re all on the same side against those threatening hillbillies who might do fascism or something.”

    This arrangement is beneficial to smart foreigners because it allies the ruling classes of many countries against their domestic “others”, allowing increased benefits and status to the global ruling class while keeping Leftist Whites on top.

  45. They mostly wiped out the upper nobility (or drove them into exile) but look into the background of late Soviet elite and post-Soviet you will usually find not poor peasants, but descendants of merchants, priests, lower gentry, Cossacks, etc. who managed to escape the purges.

    Examples I know personally: financial director of a large company, discovered through research that grandparents lied about peasant origins, they were kids of priests; journalist descended from some baron; worker for Central Committee, descended from Volga merchants who abandoned their businesses, got down the Volga and to Baku, became proles, moved to another region in Russia where no one would know them and rose through CP ranks over 2 generations.

    I suspect that many with supposedly humbler backgrounds have exaggerated stories about their poverty. People who laundered their background in some way could get ahead.

    Playing with wiki:

    Andropov: “It was also reported that his mother belonged to merchantry. In fact Karl Fleckenstein was a rich jewel merchant, owner of a jewellers, and so was his wife who took over her husband’s business after his accidental death in 1915 (he was confused for a German during the infamous anti-German pogrom in Moscow, although Andropov preferred to refer to it as anti-Jewish).[11][12] The whole family could have turned into lishentsy and stripped of basic rights if she hadn’t abandoned the store after another pogrom in 1917, invented a proletarian background, and left Moscow for the Stavropol Governorate along with Andropov’s mother” “During the 1937 check, it was reported that his father served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. Andropov was thoroughly interviewed four times, yet he was so convincing that he managed to have all charges dropped. He joined the Communist Party in 1939.”

    Gorbachev was supposedly from a poor peasant family but they had moved to a wealthier area; both grandfathers were sent to gulags, one was tortured in the 1930’s. This suggests not the humblest of backgrounds.

    Khrushchev and Brezhnev were from humble backgrounds but they were lucky to be in a psotion to rise up the ranks at the specific repressive time from between when the Old Bolsheviks took power and were being purged, and the those of older accomplished backgrounds were still trying to get back on their feet.

    Essentially there was colossal repression and attempted reverse natural selection as the Old Bolsheviks (ugly losers from upper classes plus members of disgruntled minorities) took revenge on their peers.. Families that could have done much to contribute to the country were instead forced to launder their backgrounds, scramble to survive, start from scratch, etc. It was a huge waste of human resources and those families got ahead anyways because eventually that is what nature and family tradition do.

  46. It’s an extreme case, though, and my there really was to underline that even in the most catastrophic, worst possible outcome – a violent Bolshevik-type revolution – the fact of White Supremacy in the US will not be fundamentally challenged.

    Just as it hasn’t been in Cuba. https://www.unz.com/gdurocher/white-power-in-cuba/

    Quite a few critics of SJWism, both Left and Right, have long been pointing out that it is a cover for class war. What Richard Hanania recently pointed out on Twitter is that it is actually much cheaper than actual class war, i.e. it’s bug not feature, so far as the American power system and really even ordinary Americans are concerned. SJWism in lieu of, say, trade union militancy of the kind you have in France and Italy, for instance, save American elites money and probably make its economy more efficient overall.

    One is, how sustainable this is. After all, they had some kind of a quota system in place against the Jews. For a while.

    If it’s done in the name of social justice (SAT discriminates against Blacks), then it might be more stable.

    The second question is, how much are the Asians just grinders? Initially they were, and this grinding thing certainly overstates their advantage, but they are certainly growing as a percentage of the cognitive elite and are going to grow as a percentage of the CEOs and eventually billionaires.

    Well, of course not just grinders, but it’s widely observed in HBDland that they underperform test scores. Since standardized tests are one of their relative advantages, devaluing the role of test scores elevates elite Whites (other peoples it benefits, such as Blacks and Latinos, aren’t true competitors). But those Asians who do “make it” regardless intermarry with White elites and contribute their genetic stock to its perpetuation. (It’s not like the ruling class will become notably Asian short of tens of millions more of them coming over).

  47. Holy shit, you don’t even have proper punctuation, immediately start kvetching about le jews, and then even accuse all dissenters of being junkies! Literally a walking stereotype of the American boomer “conservative.” There’s even the “rebel” in username, alluding to the lolbert side of the spectrum.

    You seriously believe, a people who can’t even form a goddamn government in their own country that lasts more than half a year because they keep arguing about irrelevant personal bullshit, have the competence to pull off an actual conspiracy to genocide a people that outnumber them severely?

    Of course not. Their nepotism and tribalism only goes so far to help their co-ethnics get high positions and big paychecks. After that it’s just mediocre management to keep the cash flowing. Simple parasitism is as far as it goes.

    And there’s only one population to blame: naive retarded goodwhites. All WEIRD populations perhaps, or whatever you want to call them. You can, and should, fleece them for every single thing they have and then some. Either they learn and put a stop to it, or die in irrelevance, to be replaced with someone who won’t run their own culture into the ground over a wad of dollars and internet good boy points.

  48. view Wokeism as a White Supremacy

    Yes, the foundation is implicit.

    Liberalism has been working at uplifting the Negro in America forever. Now that a certain plateau with this uplifting has been reached and it cannot be ignored, somebody has to be blamed for the failure.

    Hint: that’s not going to be the liberal elites and their ideas.

  49. Passer by says

    Well it certainly seems like I successfully triggered some rightoids here

    And who cares about that? Is this how one has fun? With virtual bs on forums somewhere? Sounds like someone spent too much time on Chans.

    You’re tilting at some straw man.

    Well, i wasn’t talking about that, but about the article’s premise in general, and the premise is wrong, looking at the wipe out of white non-jews in the Universities, as shown by Ron Unz.

  50. Passer by says

    The Woke elimination of university admissions tests will overwhelmingly benefit White… elites

    Why? Ron Unz has shown that this is already the case in elite US Universities – merit does not matter there. There are already de facto quotas in place. And as a result of that white non-jews in the universities were wiped out.

  51. But with billionaires, the question is whose money is it and where is the money going.

    If you look at the top 10 rich people/families of London, there are 30% of the billionaires are Indian, 30% are Russian money (Abramovich, Usmanov, Blavatnik), 10% Swedish (Rausing), 10% Dutch/Portuguese, 20% English (Dyson, Weston).
    https://i.imgur.com/VcN0qFY.png

    In 80% of the cases, the money has not come from the United Kingdom. That is, the money is flowing from India, Russia, etc, to the United Kingdom.

    In 1970s, UK was a failing economy, with coal miners protests as the main political topic. Today, it became a playground of the international wealthy people, and the destination country of Indian, Russian, Arab, Nigerian and, above all, Chinese wealth.

    Who are the people which benefit from this financially? Aside from the international wealthy people themselves (that benefit from the English legal system), it is the anglosaxon bourgeoisie.

    For example, the scam seeming English education system, is funded by Russian, Chinese and Nigerian money.

    When schools began to struggle to fill their boarding places, they first turned to China, where local agents actively seek the new wealthy desiring the English public school experience. Then came the Russians who, with Nigerians, are now the fastest-growing population in British private schools.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/five-star-schools/

    Similarly, next to the train in Oxford is the Oxford University business school. Who paid for it?

    It paid for by the Saudi royal family.

    https://i.imgur.com/newc2sK.jpg

    And Russian money paid for a new classrooms for government studies at Oxford University, via Blavatnik.
    In Russian universities, you have regularly decaying classrooms and paint falling off the walls. While some English students have modern classrooms, built with Russian money.

    https://i.imgur.com/VOIfA5O.jpg

    Receiving foreign billionaires is good for financial situation of local English bourgeoisie as an destination country – the problem is that the local middle classes in their source (Russia, India, China, Nigeria) are losing local investment ceteris paribus.

    This money also flows to the local bourgeoisie through their property assets:
    https://i.imgur.com/quDOKTx.png

    I believe some of this outside billionaire’s money also contributing to the hi-tech investment, which benefits the easy employment opportunities of educated local middle class – as the result is a lot of money is flowing to these new growing employers.

    https://i.imgur.com/iI7LE9d.jpg

    https://i.imgur.com/I8bXsVy.jpg

  52. Ana de Armas is full white. The “Latino race” doesn´t exists.

  53. The concept of virtue signaling and leisure class, has been written about a lot already more than a century ago, with books such as 1899 “Theory of the Leisure Class”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class

    But if you know what life is nowadays like in Western Europe, this behaviour has reached historically unprecedented new heights – corresponding with the almost idiotic levels of comfort and safety among the population.

    A century ago, the leisure class was smaller than today, and neither could afford the current levels of tree-hugging and supposedly antiselfinterested virtue displays.

  54. Blinky Bill says
  55. In a way, little has changed.

    Orwell writes in his essays in the 1930s how the English elites all despised Britain and had “leapfrogging” loyalties towards Russia, while imagining they had divested themselves of the “taint” of nationalism (the “taint” of self-love).

    So, this phenomena has been going on in elite European culture for a long, long time.

    Montesquieu in his Lettres Persanes tries to achieve an “objective” perspective on European culture through the lens of a visiting Persian prince who is “surprised” by all the “odd” features of European culture.

    It is a work of “self-criticism” – and thus, “self-overcoming” – that is deeply embedded in the rationalist traditions of Europe, originating in ancient Greek and Roman cosmopolitanism. Roman playwright Terence – ” nothing human is foreign to me”.

    Montaigne, in his essay “On Cannibals”, suggests that the “savages” Europeans encountered are in no way inferior to European civilization – and in many ways superior – and horror at cannibalism is a mere ignorant prejudice, and properly considered with regard to specific conditions, cannibalism is rational and less loathsome than many of the cruel practices of Europe.

    This kind of “shocking reversal of perspective” and attempt to free oneself from merely local biases and achieve a “larger perspective” is an inevitable product of rationalism and according to Nietzsche, the final refinement of the Christian search for “Truth”.

    What is different about the modern version of this ancient European impulse is the introduction of a moral element of self-flagellation and not just a rationalist element – this the Romans would not have understood.

    But to supposedly “hate oneself” is really the last refinement of Christian asceticism, as Nietzsche would say.

  56. English elites all despised

    Although one thing to note about England today, is that it has things like very marginal income tax rates, and also high level of workers’ protection.

    So, the economic difference between the rich and poor in England, is much more minimized, compared to countries like Russia, USA and Latin America.

    But while the economic differences are reduced by such egalitarian policy, England is still a caste based society, with its different castes living in alternative cultural spheres, and only marrying to each other.

    And the English bourgeoisie lives very comfortably, despite its high tax payments. They are not stupid people, they know how to market their industries (including tourism and education), and to make the world provide for them.

    One of the stereotypes about North Western Europe, is that people are supposed to be “hard working” and “industrious”. But actually the lifestyle of the skilled worker is much more lazy and luxurious compared to Russian employment conditions. Actually, a common problem complained by foreign investors in UK, is trying to make the employees work stay in the office beyond their official hours.

    I’ve talked to Japanese managers that complain about the laziness of the Western European engineers that are employed by their companies’ subsidiaries, that go home at 6pm, and refuse to answer emails on Sunday.

  57. Good points.

    19th century style poverty has been eliminated in Britain, and all classes live quite comfortably. But somehow, this has done nothing to eliminate the caste system in Britain.

    This suggests that the sense of different “races” or fundamentally different “types” living in Britain goes well beyond rich and poor, and Diaraeli got it only half right. Britain also always had “genteel poverty”, the “respectable” bilut poor gentry who had higher caste than the vulgarly wealthy parvenue merchant. Orwell I believe cane from genteel poverty.

    One of the stereotypes about North Western Europe, is that people are supposed to be “hard working” and “industrious”. But actually the lifestyle is much more lazy and luxurious compared to Russia. Actually, a common problem complained by foreign investors in UK, is trying to make the employees work stay in the office beyond their official hours.

    Excellent point!

    The supposedly dour and hard working Germans have a much more relaxed lifestyle than Americans, and the precise and meticulous Swiss have a system where you can choose to work 3 days a week, 4 days, or a full week!

    Americans can only dream of such luxury! And of course the generous European holidays.

    To be fair, Japanese hard work and long hours are somewhat illusory according to what I’ve read. You’re expected to stay late and make a “show” of being really committed to work.

    And to be fair, American hard work similarly has a fantasy component, with most middle class jobs requiring only 3-4 hours of actual work out of 8 per day.

    However, there are still examples of Japanese dying from Karoshi, and Americans in tech start ups work like crazy.

    It’s a complex picture.

  58. Tom Marvolo Riddle says

    Individualism is the key driver here. To put it simply, “The future is for others to worry about, going with the flow makes my life easier. Social opprobrium would be detrimental to my personal fortunes.”

    There is also hubris, yes. A mental cope to justify this decision as something other than a betrayal, for some. For other’s this delusion is unnecessary and they simply don’t care about their tribe. It’s a combination of multiple factors. Mostly though I think it stems from a loss of kinship, loyalty, honor and religion. A weakening of the ties that used to bind.

    Of course censorship and propaganda are huge factors as well.

  59. It seems like the very opposite of individualism to me. One starts with the tribe and it’s local prejudices. At first it seems that the morals and manners of ones tribe are the only possible ones, and ones tribe are the only real humans.

    As one grows in intellectual sophistication, one achieves an “expanded consciousness” and a “higher” point of view. One sees that the prejudices of ones tribe are not timeless and inevitable but merely local biases.

    At it’s root, this is at the heart of all spirituality – an expanded consciousness that encompasses the whole world and even all of existence.

    In my view, once one has achieved this “expanded consciousness” one can return to the values and lifestyles of ones tribe, not as representing the only way to be human, but merely one way, that one is comfortable with.

    On this basis, perhaps a new nationalism that respects the Other can be developed.

    Real, hard core individualism is always monistic and always wants to impose it’s ways on everyone else – the tribe is just an extension of itself. An “expanded consciousness” recognizes the validity of multiple ways for humans to flourish, while choosing one particular way – and tribe – for oneself.

    Most humans live best in a tribe, but intense tribalism that takes the tribe too seriously is a recipe for WW1 types of disasters. One must have a “higher” perspective even as one remains in a tribe.

    And then of course there are those rootless wanderers who see past tribes altogether – but they are few.

  60. Indiana Jack says

    Another way of thinking about it is imagine if rednecks were a different race, that they are a POC just like Russians. After this cognitive adjustment, it is *very* easy to conceptualize the American elites as crypto-White Supremacists.

    If rednecks and elite Whites are considered as separate races, then White Genocide and White Supremacy are not mutually exclusive, although they might be more accurately termed redneck genocide and elite supremacy. While I agree that “White Genocide” is an exaggeration, it is reasonable to think that Wokeism is a tool for maintaining the power and prestige of elite Whites, while at the same time serving to exclude and demoralize downscale Whites. And it is arguable that it is downscale Whites and their offspring, more than any POC, who are the primary source of rivals to the position of our current elite.

  61. BlackFlag says

    With hope, differential birth rates will remove enough of the far-left over the coming century to allow for this cycle of leftist-inspired social upheaval to end.

    But why would the psychopaths who are currently doing so well be at such a disadvantage in birthrates in this age? Maybe they are so selfish that they don’t care about children. And when tfr and desire for children become linked as they have now become, as Karlin discussed in his Industrial Malthusian idea, that’s might lead to their tragic downfall.

  62. Dreadilk says

    This is a justification after the fact.

  63. Dreadilk says

    Outcome is still not desireble to the elite. Having a large portion of it purged and descendents of survivors having to hide their origins.

  64. BlackFlag says

    Since when did this game supposedly start, 1960s, 1990s, 2010? Has the position of the white upperclass increased since any of these points? Its continually gotten worse in terms of prospects for the success Upperclass Whites virtue signal for vain class points but they aren’t playing 3D chess. You only need to know a few of these old milquetoast fools to realize it. They are losing everything die to cowardice, lazines, fecklessness.

  65. xxxeliss says

    what happened to Radical Centrism?, he started to tweet progressive nonsense

  66. Coconuts says

    19th century style poverty has been eliminated in Britain, and all classes live quite comfortably. But somehow, this has done nothing to eliminate the caste system in Britain.

    I don’t know, my grandparents came from fairly humble backgrounds, miners, labourers and domestic servants, in two cases the children of recent Irish immigrants to England, whereas I went to a fairly high level British university and had a girlfriend whose grandfather had been a Church of England bishop. This would have been very rare in Orwell’s time. OTOH, class differences were/are still obvious and outside of the university context social expectations and norms were/are different.

    It’s hard to say whether this is a good or bad thing, T.S. Eliot was still writing in the late 1940s that one of Britain’s great strengths was its class system. At least you know more or less know what kind of status you can plausibly aspire to unless you have exceptional talents, and people in the upper classes are often brought up with a lot of expectations and demands on them and can seem quite unusual people as a result.

  67. Well, if I believed in Karlin’s idea that the upper class remains stable over centuries I would say your ancestors were really nobility and you simply didn’t know it 🙂

    However, it’s fairly obvious that illustrious family names remain stable over time because talented members of the lower classes marry into them, while the actual genetic content of the upper class constantly renews itself. Every few generations the upper class is composed of new genetic stock – which is why, for instance, English noblemen of the 18th century do not look even remotely like the physically formidable warrior nobility that conquered England.

    To be fair to Karlin’s theory, a single revolution is obviously not enough to change the talent profile of a population, so the old elite – assuming it was not on the verge of decay through the natural process of entropy – may well reemerge unscathed after the dust settles.

    In the Jewish world, I’m noticing there is a huge surge of conversions filling the ranks, adding fresh blood. In a few generations no one will know, and Jewish vigor and success will be attributed to “ancient bloodlines” etc, etc and not to culture by those attracted to the theory of changeless Platonic Forms.

    It’s hard to say whether this is a good or bad thing, T.S. Eliot was still writing in the late 1940s that one of Britain’s great strengths was its class system. At least you know more or less know what kind of status you can plausibly aspire to unless you have exceptional talents, and people in the upper classes are often brought up with a lot of expectations and demands on them and can seem quite unusual people as a result.

    I’m very sympathetic to this. Contentment with ones situation is one of the greatest blessings a person can have, and the ceaseless quest to “improve” ones life station that is such a feature of the modern world bears s huge part of the responsibility for the wave of anxiety and unhappiness we are suffering through.

    At the same time, genuine ambition and talent is always made way for by the upper classes and moreover, always finds a way to enter it – if you are one of those that truly want it.

  68. SIMP simp says

    Always has been.

  69. Seraphim says

    Hindu yogis sought Moksha/vimoksha, vimukti, mukti/Nirvana: emancipation, enlightenment, liberation, and release, freedom from saṃsāra, the cycle of death and rebirth. The ‘power’ they sought through asceticism was the power to break through the cycle of impermanence into the realm of permanence, the Kingdom of God which ‘is not of this Earth’. True yogis always considered obtention of ‘siddhis’/powers as an obstacle to liberation (if not the greatest obstacle).

  70. Yes, true yogis did indeed despise power, and Hindu and Buddhist literature is full of admonishments to not care about any powers gained.

    But many yogis nevertheless sought “tapas” – power – as a result of the great self-control involved in asceticism.

    Later Buddhism grasped that asceticism and self-denial are inherently ego building and personal power building exercises, and Ch’an for instance no longer advised meditation.

    One of the reasons I lost interest in Ghandi because he describes in his autobiography how he sought power from his ascetic practices – not surprising from a nationalist, but still.

  71. Daniel Chieh says

    Individualism is partly it, but its largely the environment that modern society provides which rewards a kind of a parasitic attitude. Imagine it like a natural niche and its not surprising that personalities come to exist which dominate said niche. “Betrayal” really only as meaning if there’s punishment for betrayal – its not different from extended game theory in general: defection is in fact the optimal solution, unless there’s punishment against defection.

  72. #71

    Tapas does no mean ‘power’. It is the means by which you acquire ‘power’. Tapah is “purification through discipline,” “commitment,” or “internal fire.” It can be translated as ‘austerities’/askesis (training). In Patanjali’s view it is: ‘asceticism, austerity, self-study, study which leads to the knowledge of the Self through Japa (the meditative repetition of a mantra or a divine name, like the ‘Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the heart) and self-surrender, resignation to God (humility or ‘smirenie’), preliminary (practical) Yoga. Fasting is a ‘tapah’. It is exactly the contrary of ‘ego building’. The Yogi renounce even to using the ‘Siddhis/Powers’ that he acquired by Tapah. The ones who sought ‘power’ are the ‘fallen’ ones (there is no doubt in my mind that these are the Biblical ‘Nephilim’, and the ‘Saints of Satan’).

  73. Originally it meant “heat” – not power, per se.

    I know that it’s supposed to be the opposite of ego building – but eventually it was realized that trying to destroy the ego is itself a form of ego building (in China, Chuang Tzu mocked Confucian ritual for precisely this reason).

    Anyways, the point is that on the surface the ascetic yogi or medieval monk my appear to be denying his self interest – but in fact, he is working towards his ultimate self interest very strongly (that is what he believes).

    Likewise, CRT may on the surface appear to be denying White self interest – while on a deeper level working for it.

    The point is only that self denial – even self torture – can paradoxically be a self affirmation on another level.

    But certain people who think in a simple linear fashion cannot understand this. That’s why it’s an amusing thought experiment to imagine KMac trying to “decipher” medieval ascetic practices 🙂

  74. Seraphim says

    The supreme ‘self-interest’ is Salvation, Moksha, Nirvana. It is not a destruction of the ego, but its superseding.
    KMac may try to ‘decipher’ medieval ascetic practices (i.e. to put his ‘white’ spin on things he has no knowledge whatever – I wonder whether he is even marginally aware of the vast mistic-ascetic writings collected in the ‘The Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers’, as well as of Yoga or Taoism, there are things naturally remote from ‘evolutionary psychology’ or ‘Evolution Strategy’).

  75. Sure, but for my money, the best way to supersede the ego is to not supersede it – to simply let it be. The more you do anything about it, the bigger it grows. But this insight cones late to every spiritual tradition, and is the ultimate refinement of asceticism- it’s self-overcoming.

    I would bet good money KMac is not aware of the existence of ascetic practices and yogis, much less the wonderful Philokalia or Heyschast tradition, as he isn’t aware of Romanticism or the rich and deep European tradition of self-criticism and disaffection with modern European culture either.

    He once briefly discussed the New England Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau as some kind of weird, anomalous example of home-grown “culture of critique” – completely unaware of how it connects to and exemplifies larger European culture.

    But yes, if you’re perspective is entirely that of ‘evolutionary psychology’, there is simply too much human behavior that you won’t be able to explain, and will simply have to ignore.

  76. and is the ultimate refinement of asceticism- it’s self-overcoming

    The self-overcoming of asceticism.

  77. Mr. Hack says

    There you go again Altan, labeling somebody a “troll” when they just offer there own seemingly reasonable opinion. I you disagree with somebody’s opinion about something, explain your reticence in accepting their opinion, don’t just blurt out “troll” with no explanation. It can be very irritating as in this situation, bordering on cowardice. 🙁

  78. Dieter Kief says

    Might well be that philosopher Michael J.. Sandel is thinking along these lines when criticizing self-optimation in The Tyranny of Merit – The End of the Common Good.
    Seen from that persective, the negelct of Wall-Street for flyover country is perfectly rational. – The Kantian counter-argument to this cool way to look at the world is: Rational yes, reasonable – no.

  79. Dieter Kief says

    Aaron B you have developed a very interesting way to characterize conservative thinking.
    You might well be aware that your thoughts are very close (if not outright identical) with what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer said about conservatism.
    Adorno even turned his critique of conservative wolrdview into a methodological critique of the – counting! – social sciences in his famous remarks against Positivism in the social sciences (cf Der Positivismussstreit – The Struggle Over Positivism).

    (As an addendum: The arguments against rationality as a type of thinking that is not appropriate to the deeper problems of the human existence was famously acknowledged by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, that the problems that are attached to rationality (counting, logic – all kinds of functional abstract systems) are below thee realm where thee real problems of us humans can be traced/found/met…)

    ((second – sigh – addendum: Philosophically this is all rather clear at least since neo-Kantianism gave this problem a really beautiful and easy to grasp form (Kant did say by and large the same things, it’s just that Kant is too much for most people now). And Jürgen Habermas made a methodological use of thee Neo-Kantian insights and found a way around thee conundrums of the subject-philosophy, that bothered quite a bit of western thinking before him. – His suggestion: Understand (=accept…) that loss of problems which look theoretically unsolvable not leats because they produce all kinds of self-contradictive (=paradoxical) results, in theory, are no theoretical but practical problems.
    And, he continued: If you open up to this insight you’ll soon realize, that intersubjectivity (dialogue, argumentation, deliberation) is the realm where we can try to solve these problems. Last remark from the Habermasian perspective: The realm beyond intersubjectivity is – something else: The best way to put this: Beyond intersubjectivity begins the realm of: The sacred, of religion, asceticism…

  80. Trump in the White House showed how justified the Establishment Elite perception of working whites as a threat to the ruling caste is. There is a class of people who think them making lots of money in an increasingly unequal society (ie globalist ‘trade’ with China) is the national interest and so they think realist nationalism (‘ populist’) politics amounts to treachery, and moral turpitude. Hence the campaign to brand whites, at least the less wealthy and educated/indoctrinated ones, racist. And to de-cohere their community with an alien wedge (immigration)

    It is working well for the business class, and so we are going to get globalism under Biden and very shortly Harris, which will suit China’s rise. An end to that anti white politics will require a revolt of the Deep State, as America become inextricable entangled with China’s mega economy; most of the productive capacity being in China and the US somewhere China acquires technology. America population will be so disparate by that point the US innovative edge will be offset by a lack of trust and decline in teamwork.

    The low diversity level of China’s populace will mean that the gap between the US and China will be much less than American strategists think it is by the time a conventional naval war (well away from the Chinese mainland) breaks out sometime after 2040 and ends in a pyrrhic victory for the US and an armistice. The attitude of Russia will be the deciding factor long term. With Putin, the Deep State is already running things, so as long as Putin’s people are influential Russia could see America as less of a threat than China over the border. However, I don’t think Russian elites are any less greedy than American ones and China is where the money is.

  81. Well, only had time for a quick scan of this good article. I’ve suggested in previous comments it may be profitable to regard the legally mandated diminution of Whites in America, and especially White males, as something that fits on the low end of those “stages of genocide” tables put out by NGOs and think tanks.

    I’m not enthusiastic about my own suggestion for the obvious reason that it could be politically regarded as a cynical mimicry of the victim cards successfully played by some Jewish and some Black organizations to get money from innocents and achieve political leverage over them.

    Nonetheless, the actions of our government (in America) and the rhetorical Zeitgeist encouraged by those actions sure as hell seem to me to fit the idea of low-end genocide in the making.

    If I’m reading Anatoly correctly, he’s spot on that signaling against White Supremacy is White Supremacy. For global capitalists, it means cheap Black, Brown, and Yellow labor with less pushback from uppity Whites. For academics, think tankers, journalists, and others among the chattering classes–jobs, tenure, grant moneys, advancement, and the warm envelope of self-righteousness with a pay check.

  82. AltanBakshi says

    Mr. Hack it’s about something that I have already explained countless times to our New Yorker. I don’t have time nor patience to repeat stuff to people who have no genuine interest to learn, but I understand if you are somewhat irritated, for I have multiple times called you a troll, just because I had a childish impulse to piss you off, my bad.

    Don’t worry, though Aaron is… well better not to insult, he’s not stupid, he very well knows why I called him a troll.

    But to satisfy your curiosity, I will explain to you my reasons.

    Later Buddhism grasped that asceticism and self-denial are inherently ego building and personal power building exercises, and Ch’an for instance no longer advised meditation.

    Mr. hack this kind of statement is patently false, no Buddhist master has ever thought that asceticism is “inherently ego building and personal power building exercise.” Asceticism as a one part of one’s practice is seen beneficial, all masters of Chan or Tantra have practiced in their lives asceticism, but being attached to asceticism and self mortification is indeed a fetter, and such extreme forms of ascetic practices are still more or less prevalent among some holy men of India. But Aaron always looks how things are explained in the books, but he never thinks of real life or how Chak masters and Siddhas truly lived. If compared with our modern life standards they lived and still live very modestly and ascetically.

    Self-denial on the other hand is a meaningless Western concept from a Buddhist point of view. No matter if being is a selfish or non selfish, he still has a selfless nature, he just lacks of awareness of his empty nature. Selfish or not, being and his states always arise dependently.

    Chan practitioners by the way meditate very much, but getting attached of pleasant meditative states is indeed an old problem among us, so our texts often warn about it.

  83. they simply don’t care about their tribe.

    People create/chose their tribe, always have, always will.

  84. AK’s almost always worth reading – until he starts contrarian counter-signaling American White Nationalists/ the Alt-Right. On Russia, he’s well-informed, insightful and reliable, on American politics, particularly dissident politics, not so much.

    Too much try-hard novelty and contrarianism in this piece.

    White genocide is a very useful propaganda term that describes the ongoing and thus far successful attempt to displace the White-dominated power structure, particularly in muh West, with a Jewish-dominated coalition of non-Whites.

    Sailer has written for years about how so much angst and hate is tied up in WASPs denying Shlomo’s granddad that country club membership in the 50’s. And it’s the same hate that motivated the Jewish Bolsheviks to burn down Russia in revenge for exaggerated phantasmagoric pogroms and oppression under the Czars.

    AK can affect a big-brained centrist sophisticate pose and distance himself from those crass low-IQ anti-Semites and racists with pieces like this but it doesn’t change the reality of what’s going on in America.

  85. Mr. Hack says

    How can anybody take you too seriously as a devout Buddhist when you take enjoyment at “pissing’ folks off? Anyway, I do appreciate your honesty, and must confess to you that as a practicing Christian, I too get some sort of insane pleasure from teasing people with sarcasm. I guess that both of us have room in which to improve and need to grow up.

    Anyway, getting back to the issue at hand, couldn’t Aaron’s perspective that the practice of asceticism taken to a great extreme could possibly lead to a sense of self exaltation “ego building” and be very similar to what you describe as “getting attached to pleasant meditative states”? Is there really such a great difference in what you two are trying to describe? I think that Aaron would consider you to be way too dogmatic in your stances in an area that obviously has some room for various interpretations?

  86. AltanBakshi says

    Well one word can change the whole meaning, like claiming that such practices are “inherently” something. Inherently is by thr way quite a problematic word in the Buddhist philosophy, if thing’s nature is defined by it’s relation to something else, then how it can be inherently something?

    I have never claimed to be a good Buddhist here, I’m very sinful man, but at least I am part of the Buddhist church or community, unlike others here who claim to be inspired by Buddhism, but never go to temple, never interact with the monks, or have never declared their faith as Buddhists, or in precise Buddhist sense, have not taken Refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddhist religion.

  87. White genocide is a very useful propaganda term . . . .

    Exile, I’m sort of imagining a 4-panel editorial cartoon, “‘Social Justice’ in the Last 100 Years”:

    Panel #1: Bolshevik Social Justice: Tuxedo-wearing folks entering a prison camp.

    Panel #2: Aryan Social Justice: Yellow-starred folks entering a prison camp.

    Panel #3: Hutu Social Justice: Machete.

    Panel #4, a diptych: American Social Justice: first scene has meek White job applicant interviewing with Black HR lady with bust of George Floyd on her desk. She recites his credentials: “advanced degree, knowledge of several languages, etc.” Second scene has Black HR lady smiling broadly with sinister expression: “We have great career opportunities for you here pushing broom, bagging trash, and delivering office parcels. Welcome to the Wakanda States of America!”

    Well, that’s a top of the head thought, and I’m definitely not a cartoonist.

    But, there ought to be a good way of getting our very real concerns out for public debate.

  88. Thanks – I haven’t read those writers but you’ve got me interested now.

    But as you say, it all stems from Kant, and in fact many European thinkers developed this line of thinking, and it was very much in the air in European culture for quite some time.

    Of course, critique of rationality is the inevitable result of the search for truth and objectivity, so it was merely the natural development of European philosophy.

    What fascinates me, is that the modern world has completely lost it’s nerve in regard to the boldest insights of European philosophy.

    That at this late stage in the game we can have positivists like Daniel Chieh essentially give the classically conservative Samuel Johnsonsian response to Berkeleyan Idealism – is a very sad thing.

    Of course, the only possible response to Kant is pragmatism – and thinkers as early as the Greek Pyrhonnians grasped that reality is unknowable and pragmatism is the only possible approach to life.

    But a pragmatism that pretends it is “pragmatic” to pretend we have gotten hold of the truth? Not just dishonest – but a complete failure to realize the beautiful possibilities of pragmatism!

    It just shows how much humans fear the wide open fields. A full, complete, and honest pragmatism expands our power and opportunities for flourishing – we can honestly utilize whatever “works” towards human flourishing rather than “martyr” ourselves to a figment of our imagination. In fact it was this attitude that gave us modern science over scholastic “knowledge”.

    But I think what this shows is that people value security over thriving according to our full potential.

    In the end we are a petty species.

  89. Mr. hack this kind of statement is patently false, no Buddhist master has ever thought that asceticism is “inherently ego building and personal power building exercise.” Asceticism as a one part of one’s practice is seen beneficial, all masters of Chan or Tantra have practiced in their lives asceticism, but being attached to asceticism and self mortification is indeed a fetter, and such extreme forms of ascetic practices are still more or less prevalent among some holy men of India. But Aaron always looks how things are explained in the books, but he never thinks of real life or how Chak masters and Siddhas truly lived. If compared with our modern life standards they lived and still live very modestly and ascetically.

    Well, it all started with the Buddha and his Middle Way. After trying asceticism, the Buddha turned away from it, realizing it merely increased our sense of self and egotism. It’s right there in the foundational legend of Buddhism – doesn’t get clearer. He tried asceticism, and decided that can’t be the Way with a philosophy of no-self.

    A philosophy of no-self cannot encourage asceticism, which is an effort of self-will.

    You make a good point when you say that Buddhism encourages living simply and especially compared to our times. The other side of the coin is that cultivating luxury, extravagance, or simply excess from what we truly need, is equally ego building and equally condemned.

    Extremes are ego building. Rigorous self-denial is ego building, and so is self-indulgence. That is why the Middle Way is preferred.

    In today’s atmosphere of luxury, certainly simplicity should be stressed.

    But to an SJW who thinks he’s “denying himself”, the pompous ego aspect of his “altruism” should be stressed.

  90. reiner Tor says

    Just a minor point:

    Russian money (Abramovich, Usmanov, Blavatnik)

    Abramovich and Blavatnik are Jewish, with probably little attachment to Russia or Russian culture, while Usmanov is an Uzbek.

  91. Dieter Kief says

    But I think what this shows is that people value security over thriving according to our full potential.

    Ok, I can see how you come to this conclusion.

    Mine is even simpler than that: Don’t underestimate philosophy – and the tradition (that’s Gadamer, essentially Truth and Method) and/or the necessary cultivation of reasoning/thinking.

    It’s interesting, that it is easy to not take philosophy (and poetry, and the novel…) seriously.
    And it is deceptively easy to overlook the at times rather harsh consequences. – But this at the same time is, what makes all that interesting.
    If it would be really obvious, how important all these precious things of our tradition are, they would not be interesting, but rather boring.

    You have to climb a mountain to understand how interesting that can be. – I end in a paradox of sorts – and necessarily so!

    PS
    Btw. – that’s the UNZ review for me – such conversations like ours very rarely happen elsewhere.

  92. AltanBakshi says

    It’s wrong to say this, but you really are hopeless, asceticism can also be an attachment, when taken too far. When Buddha practiced asceticism before his enlightenment, he tried many extreme practices, and he almost died, like fasting almost to death, or meditating in the scorching Indian sun for hours or days, it was such asceticism that was in his opinion pure idiocy, not all asceticism, but often everything depends on where we look and how we look things, from the perspective of our luxurious modern day life in the west he was very ascetical even after his enlightenment, he slept very little, he dressed only in discarded rags, begged for his food, lived in the forest, and so on, and so on.

    Aaron Buddha’s teaching is nothing else than pure altruism, more altruistic, closer to Buddha one is, that’s all.

    https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BBXGBH/pakistan-punjab-region-lahore-national-museum-fasting-buddha-BBXGBH.jpg


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seongcheol

    Seongcheol was a great master, probably greatest Korean Chan master in past few hundred years, he made every day 3000 prostrations. Millions of Koreans thought that he is a real Buddha.

    Here’s one interesting excerpt from the wiki about Seongcheol and his fight against Japanese heresy:
    “After the war, the reformation gained momentum and significant changes were set in motion, although it would be years until they were solidified. Central to the reformation was the issue of celibacy. While all the Buddhist canons emphasized the celibacy of monks, Japanese Buddhism had undergone significant changes during the Meiji Restoration, most notably the end of monastic celibacy. During the Japanese occupation, Korean Buddhism was severely oppressed and the Japanese style was advocated, thereby converting most Korean monks into little more than monastic residents officiating over ceremonies, married, with a business and income. Seongcheol and the new leaders were very critical of the Japanese style of Buddhism, maintaining that the tradition of celibacy, hermitage, poverty, and intense meditation were not only central to Korean Buddhism but to the true spirit of Buddhism as a whole.”

    You just read some of our advanced books, but you are out of touch with our daily practice and instruction, don’t you notice the vast cognitive dissonance that you have with the Buddhist philosophy and practice?

    I am so tired of this, why I even try, must be that I am too somehow mentally challenged? Wiser men would have walked away…

  93. AltanBakshi says

    Buddhism is a religion of problem solving, nothing else. The whole premise of Buddhism is that we got a problem, if we got a problem, then there’s a reason for it, if there’s a reason, then it can be solved ( or causes for it removed), if it can be solved then life without the problem is possible, and life without the problem is Nirvana. The Four Noble Truths, that’s it, the basis of our Dharma.

  94. Thanks

  95. Yes, if you neglect the philosophical discoveries of those who went before you, you condemn yourself to spinning your wheels and not advancing.

    The “hard headed” man who despises philosophy (and poetry etc) ends up only being unaware of the philosophy that guides his life. He is captive to something he is unaware of and cannot analyze – or free himself of.

    If it would be really obvious, how important all these precious things of our tradition are, they would not be interesting, but rather boring

    .

    In a way, yes. If it was obvious it would not be thrilling or precious. On another level, the most difficult thing is to notice what is right in front of your nose 🙂

  96. I’m not sure we’re disagreeing so much.

    The question is simply what is a “sufficiency” for human animals – to go well below this, is asceticism. To go well above this, is luxury.

    I agree with you that to a spoiled modern person, a simple life would indeed appear ascetic! But I don’t think it can objectively be defined so, if human nature is satisfying it’s basic needs.

    The Buddha’s life after enlightenment was to avoid extreme self denial or luxury – to satisfy his basic wants without luxury.

    Living in the forests, dressing in old patched up clothing, depending on alms for food, in that period, was a way of living that supplied a person’s basic wants without deprivation.

    It was a way to demonstrate that the complexity of civilization was based on superficial excess that does not contribute to happiness or spirituality – a timeless message.

    Aaron Buddha’s teaching is nothing else than pure altruism, more altruistic, closer to Buddha one is, that’s all.

    I think this captures a high level of truth, but ultimately Buddhism does not recognize the existence of the individual human being, so there must be a level beyond altruism.

    When one recognizes that we are not seperate but all interconnected, altruism is the natural result. If you are me, and I am you, then selfishness makes no sense.

    Schopenhauer said that the difference between a good man and an evil man is simply that a good man, when he looks at another, sees himself, while a bad man, sees something utterly other than himself.

    Spiritually is an expansion of consciousness so that all of existence is eventually “oneself”.

    So certainly, merely working for ones own salvation does not manifest interdependence nearly as well as working for the altruistic salvation of all beings.

    But ultimately, in a world without “beings”, no one needs to be saved, and working for anyone’s salvation – oneself or others – is to not manifest the insight of interdependence.

    But everything is a medicine – if one is naturally a very aggressive and fierce person, one might do well to cultivate altruism as a corrective.

  97. Nationality is not the difference, as the multinational origin postsoviet elite are behaving the same way in terms of storing money outside Russia while outwardly posing as a patriots, – the incentives for this behaviour are structural and creating the same behaviour in billionaires of all national origins.

    Abramovich and Usmanov have an additional role, as important pillars of the Russian state capacity, in a semi-formal sense. They act as informal government agents, and there is a sense that they are custodians of their vast wealth (which is based on former public property).

    While I don’t know what is the role of Blavatnik, but his money is also probably former peoples’ property of the USSR, that has been extracted from Russia, and now pays for building luxurious classroom for bourgeois English students in Oxford University.

    Abramovich and Blavatnik are Jewish, with probably little attachment to Russia or Russian culture, while Usmanov is an Uzbek

    This is what Navalny said, and it is of course cheap political rhetoric. In response, if I recall, Uzbeks have started recording videos of themselves reading Pushkin to dispute Navalny’s claim – there can be Uzbek fans of Pushkin.

    Ostentatiously Usmanov spends money re-buying James Watson’s Nobel prize. Abramovich spends money on British football (and turning his children into pseudo-English aristocrats – which showed some of the “patriotic values”, turning children into fake English nobility https://www.instagram.com/sofiaabramovich97 ).

    “Patriotic” marketed oligarchs like Altushkin is focusing on promoting “Russian classical education” (while he and his family are British citizens, and the children sometimes visit the homecity their father’s industries pollute, to buy drugs); Vekselberg is re-patrioting 19th century bells and Fabergé eggs. Elena Baturina promotes Russian concerts across Europe, but she spends her political money on the British conservative party and donations to Boris Johnson’s election campaign.

    All such are loyal to the ruling system of the country where they live, but they also move their money outside Russia, because of inferior property law, legal system, suddenly devaluations, local rivals, and changing political stability – at the same time their industries are poisoning Russian cities with pollution.

    There is often a surface theatre about patriotism, but the money goes around the world.

    The sense of insecurity is also contributed to by the situation of most middle income countries – where there is greater socioeconomic chasm between winners and the losers, than in high income countries.

    To solve the problem, would include improving property law (including for rich thieves like Sergei Pugachev – when they can lose all their assets if the politics alliance change, this encourages capital flight), increasing financial stability (i.e. not devaluations like 2015 which the elite was all insulated from by storing money outside Russia), and increasing of the economic equality within Russia. And not believing every theatrical display of the elite’s “patriotism” would help.

    The most wealthy self-made billionairess in Russia is a Korean nationality woman – founder of Wildberries online shopping. Her wealth is not related to stealing of former public property, and she has not been squeezed out yet.

  98. There is far less of an absolute economic chasm between rich and poor within the UK, compared to Orwell’s time.

    When Orwell was writing “Road to Wigan Pier”, there was real poverty in the United Kingdom, and poor people he visited were living like in a Brazilian favela of today. Those people in the 1930s UK, were living in dirty, primitive conditions.

    By comparison, proletariat in UK today, are economically enjoying middle class conditions, except in terms of their social prestige. They have clean houses, running water, good infrastructure, advanced healthcare, and overall high standard of living.

    Hourly minimum wage of adults in UK, is $12.50 per hour, with the first $18,000 per year untaxed. (A fulltime McDonald’s minimum wage worker in UK, has between 3-4 times higher salary than an average fulltime medical doctor in Sverdlovsk region).

    say whether this is a good or bad thing, T.S. Eliot was still writing in the late 1940s that one of Britain’s great strengths was its class system.

    It’s of course, a good thing, if the social caste system was reduced.

    The problem is that there is not necessarily increase in meritocratic mobility. That is, the McDonald’s workers now have a good salary. But there needs to be mobility so that intelligent working class children, can become Prime Minister, rather the current upper class idiot.

    There is also the problem that high culture can also be fading, as it loses some of its prestige that had been connected to class system. This was because the high culture was given an association to upper classes, and therefore to power.

    Intrinsic value of the high culture, was not related to wealth, power and prestige, but its association with the aristocracy had helped to make it more aspired to.

    So Karl Marx was living in poverty in London, but has been spending his last money to purchase piano lessons for his daughters – as this was a middle class indicator of the 19th century.

    When the class indicator aspect of piano lessons has faded, then can be a collateral damage that less children will receive piano lessons. And then possibly there will be less musical youth, other things equal.

  99. Japanese hard work and long hours …You’re expected to stay late

    I don’t think so. I know Japanese engineers, which are sent by company to resolve problems in European subsidiaries, and they have to work as many hours as they need to resolve this problem.

    So they can be working all morning and night, all Saturday and Sunday, if that was required.

    Whereas equivalent roles among Western European employees, often turn off their phone and do not answer your email, on Sunday.

    That said, there is also a subjective aspect, of peoples’ working culture and style, that varies by individual idiosyncrasy.

    For example, I am a fan of the concept of working “long hours with low intensity”. I often can stay in the office until 5am. I’ve stayed at work sometimes until 7am, and surprise the cleaners in the start of the morning.

    But I like to work most of the days with “low intensity”, and which probably derives from having always a somewhat scattered attention span since I was young.

    There are many other people who like to be stressed all day and “high intensity”, but they have to stop working at 6pm and “turn off”

    Strangely, I find it more exhausting overall, to follow a strict working schedule. And I worked better when I didn’t think about the time.

    supposedly dour and hard working Germans have a much more relaxed lifestyle than Americans, and the precise

    Some of the national stereotypes like this don’t seem to match reality.

    For example, if you look at practical topics like electrics. British work, is often seeming to me to be extremely competent, from the academical point of view, and matches what you should do from the textbook. As long as the calculations in the textbook are accurately followed, then the work is usually good.

    By comparison, East Asian engineers can seem to be much more “creative” (not always in the good sense).

    Still, the promoted national stereotype on forums like this one, is that British engineers are very creative, and East Asians are unoriginal and formal. Whereas in real, too much you saw the opposite. (With the academic textbook following, British mentality, being a more reliable choice though).

  100. Yellowface Anon says

    Looking at biological males posing as trans females to play women’s sports team, I can conclude LGBTQ+ is subliminal heteronormative or patriarchial too – transgenderism affirms “gender roles” and the minority status of people with sexual dissociation even if it means loosening the tie between sex and gender. Queer is basically another name for androgyny, which presupposes a masculine standard of beauty, the male “gaze”.

    Bisexualism adds “homosexuality” to “normal” sexual orientation for their sex and homosexuality itself is often conceived from its distinction from heterosexuality, i.e. it reinforces heterosexuality as normative even if it explicitly disavows heteronormativity. Sexual orientation is dialectical and the thesis is heteronormative.

    This is why LGBTQ+ activists often come into conflicts with feminists and matriarchs and I’m waiting for the Floppa gender synthesis!

  101. AltanBakshi says

    “I’m not sure we’re disagreeing so much.”

    “Well, it all started with the Buddha and his Middle Way. After trying asceticism, the Buddha turned away from it, realizing it merely increased our sense of self and egotism.”

    “Later Buddhism grasped that asceticism and self-denial are inherently ego building and personal power building exercises, and Ch’an for instance no longer advised meditation.”

    To give you a few examples….

  102. AltanBakshi says

    I think this captures a high level of truth, but ultimately Buddhism does not recognize the existence of the individual human being, so there must be a level beyond altruism.

    Wrong, ultimately, according to the doctrine of Emptiness, human beings neither exist or non-exist. This is very important detail, ultimate truth is neither negative or non-negative. If we would truly and ultimately exist as humans, we would have an essence of humanness, if we would have such an essence, evolution and change would be an impossibility, but still we do exist as humans! Are you now getting our logic Aaron?

    We do exist, we do exist as beings who suffer and who feel being separate individuals, but even so we exist dependently as a sum of various factors, when we develop altruistic thoughts and commit good deeds, then it will reflect back into us, like a boomerang, after all we don’t exist in a vacuum, though often we have some bad karma as a hindrance and obstacle, so we don’t always notice the good effects of our good acts, some times change takes some time… Beings exist, and beings suffer, such is the nature of Samsara.

    Anatman, non-self doctrine denies only that we have a permanent substance/soul or that we exist independently from the rest of reality, it does not deny all modes of existence. Some of our masters say that for balance, we should not only read teachings about Sunyata, how things lack of their own nature, lest we fall into nihilism, but we also should study Tathagatagarbha or Buddhanature teachings. One teaches what we are not, and other teaches what we truly are, they are not in contradiction, but two different ways to explain one truth. Remember, nihilism, to claim that things do not exist, and absolutism, to claim that things truly exist, are two extremes, fabrications of the mind.

    “The Tathāgata teaches the Dhamma by the middle without veering to either of these extremes – eternalism or annihilationism – having abandoned them without reservation. He teaches while being established in the middle way. What is that Dhamma? By the formula of dependent origination(Pratityasamutpada), the effect is shown to occur through the cause and to cease with the cessation of the cause”

    Samyutta Nikaya 12.17

    It was a way to demonstrate that the complexity of civilization was based on superficial excess that does not contribute to happiness or spirituality – a timeless message.

    This is very Rousseaun attitude, Buddha told that one of the bad human births is to be born among savages, without laws and civilization. I really don’t think that you would be as happy living in the highlands of Papua-New Guinea as you would be in the USA, nor are circumstances in Pakistan as good for practice of Dharma as in Europe.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/The_Buddhist_Goddess_Shyama_Tara_%28Green_Tara%29_Attended_by_Sita_Tara_%28White_Tara%29_and_Bhrikuti_LACMA_M.84.32.1a-d.jpg

  103. Wrong, ultimately, according to the doctrine of Emptiness, human beings neither exist or non-exist. This is very important detail, ultimate truth is neither negative or non-negative. If we would truly and ultimately exist as humans, we would have an essence of humanness, if we would have such an essence, evolution and change would be an impossibility, but still we do exist as humans! Are you now getting our logic Aaron?

    Yes, and another beautiful example of the Middle Way.

    Obviously we exist on some level, but we don’t exist the way we casually assume, as substantial, distinct entities.

    The analogy Buddhism uses most is the dream – on one level, a dream does indeed exist, but it does not have existence the way things in our waking life do.

    Interestingly, solid physical objects, science shows, don’t really exist the way we think. They are just energy fields, and the deeper you look into particles, you find – emptines 🙂 It’s been said when you look deep enough “something unknown is doing we don’t know what”.

    I like this kind of logic very much!

    And yes, things that have “essences” don’t change – that is why I dislike the idea of HBD (hard). It is the search for unchanging essences, but nothing is more obvious in the history of nations than constant change.

    We do exist, we do exist as beings who suffer and who feel being separate individuals, but even so we exist dependently as a sum of various factors, when we develop altruistic thoughts and commit good deeds, then it will reflect back into us, like a boomerang, after all we don’t exist in a vacuum, though often we have some bad karma as a hindrance and obstacle, so we don’t always notice the good effects of our good acts, some times change takes some time… Beings exist, and beings suffer, such is the nature of Samsara.

    In my humble opinion, you have missed the logic here and taken a false step.

    Indeed there are no beings who suffer – the Vajrechedikka Sutra says this explicitly and repeatedly.

    And therefore, no beings need to be saved, and no suffering needs to cease.

    And yet, to see that is precisely the end of suffering!

    Our problems as humans is – that we think we have a problem when we do not.

    That to me is the highest, most hopeful, and beautiful message of Buddhism – everything is perfect already, we all have Buddha nature already, the jewel you are searching for has always been embedded in your forehead (like the Buddhist fable).

    Anatman, non-self doctrine denies only that we have a permanent substance/soul or that we exist independently from the rest of reality, it does not deny all modes of existence.

    Sure, things have a mode of existence. It would be quite impossible to deny any mode of existence whatsoever, because we are here talking!

    Just – is it real in the ordinary sense? Do things have the A) the solidity and substance we attribute to them, or are they in a sense dreamlike figments of our mind, like when you look deep down into a particle, science finds that matter vanishes? B) Do things exist as seperate entities, or are divisions we use to conceptually seperate one thing from another arbitrary conventions, and there really only one “thing” – the universe?

    Some of our masters say that for balance, we should not only read teachings about Sunyata, how things lack of their own nature, lest we fall into nihilism, but we also should study Tathagatagarbha or Buddhanature teachings. One teaches what we are not, and other teaches what we truly are, they are not in contradiction, but two different ways to explain one truth. Remember, nihilism, to claim that things do not exist, and absolutism, to claim that things truly exist, are two extremes, fabrications of the mind.

    Sounds like great advice. I am opposed to absolutes and extremes!

    And yes, if things have no individual existence, and only the entire universe can get considered one “thing”, then individual imperfections don’t exist – everything finds it’s place in the greater whole, and everything has Buddha nature.

    Perceiving this is the Great Liberation.

    This is very Rousseaun attitude, Buddha told that one of the bad human births is to be born among savages, without laws and civilization. I really don’t think that you would be as happy living in the highlands of Papua-New Guinea as you would be in the USA, nor are circumstances in Pakistan as good for practice of Dharma as in Europe.

    In my view, the logic of Buddhism suggests the kind of life that isn’t really compatible with the concerns and obsessions of civilization.

    The things civilization cares most for, have no value to Buddhism.

    To Buddhism, complex civilization is just a wasted effort based on delusion.

    Civilization is often contrasted with savagery, but it’s a false contrast. Civilized life is quite savage.

  104. AltanBakshi says

    And yes, things that have “essences” don’t change – that is why I dislike the idea of HBD (hard). It is the search for unchanging essences, but nothing is more obvious in the history of nations than constant change.

    Still our possibilities are limited by our past, by our past deeds, as a dog you can never get enlightened. Only through our deeds we can change our fate! Buddhism is a philosophy of action, our nature is not defined by any essence, but by our action!

    And yes, if things have no individual existence, and only the entire universe can get considered one “thing”, then individual imperfections don’t exist – everything finds it’s place in the greater whole, and everything has Buddha nature.

    Perceiving this is the Great Liberation.

    Grasping and nihilism, nothing else. The concept of One is also dependently born, there could be no One without the others. Dependently designated is the “One.”

    You have made a mish mash of everything Aaron. In Buddhism there are stages and phases, paths and practices, which are given to individuals according to their capabilities and knowledge. And do not start talking shit about how we are already enlightened. Those who practice advanced practices like Chan, Mahamudra etc, have a good grasp of Buddhist basics, therefore they interpret basic sensory data or impulses differently than you do Aaron. Or do you claim that you could make same assumptions about reality even if you would not know how to read or count? Reading and counting are now Aaron fully part of you, there would be no Aaron without those skills, you cant unlearn them. Because of how you know how to read, you intepret automatically and subconsciously visual data on a different manner than you would if you could not read. Same is true with Buddhist practitioners who have attained some level of realisation on the true nature of reality.

    In my view, the logic of Buddhism suggests the kind of life that isn’t really compatible with the concerns and obsessions of civilization.

    The things civilization cares most for, have no value to Buddhism.

    To Buddhism, complex civilization is just a wasted effort based on delusion.

    Civilization is often contrasted with savagery, but it’s a false contrast. Civilized life is quite savage.

    Buddhism is and has always been dependent on the existence of civilization, what you are writing here is same what that idiotic western pseudo-Buddhist arch-heretic Stephen Batchelor is saying. Buddhism, unlike you, cares about laws and societal harmony.

    Indeed there are no beings who suffer – the Vajrechedikka Sutra says this explicitly and repeatedly.

    Few years back I was studying for a few days Vajracchedika under a very great master and lama, a close friend of His Holiness, but my mind was tired after being in a long retreat and just eating of vegetarian food, so I dont much remember what he explained of it. Sad, because if I would studied well, I could now metaphorically smash your teeth in…. Anyway, there are no static or fixed beings, elementary Buddhist knowledge, and nothing exists independently. Well I am not doing you, I will not make narcissistic Ad Hoc explanation in a situation where I know that my knowledge is limited, and holy texts should be explained only with utmost care. Therefore I admit that I am not qualified enough to expound this most holy scripture.

    You underestimate how scholastic we are, how we have always been, from times of Great Nalanda and Taxila. Our monks study for many years Vajracchedika, it’s indeed a great text, a holy text, and what you are doing will ensure your rebirth in lower states of existence, any master of Chan would likewise warn you of this, and I do not say this out of spite, but sincerely warning you of dangers of studying Dharma alone. Please contact Dharma friends of Israel, there you will find what you are looking for, and you can go further on your path. If you have any sincerity on your quest, any reason, any curiosity, then please contact them.

    https://www.dharma-friends.org.il/

    Be well.

  105. Mitleser says

    Wokeism makes (more) sense as White Elitism, not White Supremacism.

    Related: Ever since the establishment of the second US constitution aka civil rights laws, whites have declined as a percentage of the total US population in all states, but not in Washington DC, the seat of the political elite of the US.

    If the curiously explicit inclusion of DC didn’t give it away, well, the one exception is the nation’s capital, where whites have increased from 27.8% of the population in 1990 to 35.3% in 2012. In the US as a whole, white dropped from constituting 75.6% of the population in 1990 to 62.8% of the population in 2012.

    Only the Imperial Capital saw more white babies in 2016 than in 2015.

    https://www.unz.com/anepigone/where-white-fern-grows/
    https://www.unz.com/anepigone/the-unbirth-of-nation/

    The DC-based whites have also a noticeably higher average IQ (111,8) than the whites from the US states, being an important part of the cognitive elite of the US.
    https://www.unz.com/anepigone/average-white-iq-by-state-2019/