Our loose screw

That Whites have got a loose screw is patent even in the writing of the foremost expert on how the Jews are capitalizing on it. In an article at his webzine, The Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald put it in simple terms:

My view is that moral universalism and guilt are aspects of individualism as an ethnic trait of Europeans (see here, p. 23ff). These traits are profoundly maladaptive in the modern world where they have been used as swords by the historic enemies of Europeans and their civilization. European individualist culture creates morally defined ingroups rather than ingroups based on kinship, with high levels of altruistic punishment against violators. The Puritan-Yankee culture that was so influential in shaping America is a prominent example, as in the movement to abolish slavery in the 19th century and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. These morally defined ingroups function to prevent defection in societies not based on biological relatedness. Guilt then functions as a negative emotion motivating people to adhere to group norms. The success of the culture of the Holocaust in manufacturing guilt is testimony to the continuing success of this strategy.

The strategy of Jewish intellectual movements for destroying Europeans and their culture has been to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. Jewish intellectual movements have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment.

More technically, at The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ), the academic journal for white studies, Prof. MacDonald approaches the same subject in more abstract terms (e.g., “the free-rider problem,” “altruistic punishment,” etc.) that require previous knowledge from the reader about esoteric fields of inquiry such as evolutionary psychology among humans.

In an article published last year at TOQ MacDonald wrote:

It is noteworthy that the French Revolution had pronounced egalitarian, anti-aristocratic trends, often couched in the language of moral ingroups and outgroups in opposition to the aristocracy. For example, the moral condemnation of social hierarchy by the Jacobin radicals during the French Revolution is a major theme of Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo. Thus Stoddard notes the hatred toward the White slave-owning colonists. During the height of the Reign of Terror, colonists sent home to France were greeted, in the words of one such unfortunate, with “a furious hatred… A hatred so intense that our most terrible misfortunes did not excite the slightest commiseration.” At the same time, mulatto and Black delegates from San Domingo were greeted with delirious applause.

Such sentiments recall the moral fervor of the Puritan-descended Yankee abolitionists in the period prior to the American Civil War. For example, for Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), a prominent publicist and activist, the Civil War was a moral crusade waged not only to preserve the union, but to emancipate the slaves. He argued “for the unity of races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base” by adding to the number of slave states. Writing in 1840, Brownson claimed that we should “realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which had been destroyed by capitalism. According to Brownson, Christians had to

bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.

It’s interesting that whereas the aristocratic-egalitarian military groups emphasized by Duchesne produced cohesion and loyalty as a result of fealty to a successful leader (rather than on the basis of kinship), the East Anglian model for cohesion was the creation of moral and ideological bases of group cohesion (rather than on the basis of kinship). These two models are thus variants on the individualist theme. The Puritans famously imposed penalties on people who departed from the moral/ideological strictures of the society. They were also willing to incur great costs to impose their moral/ideological version of truth. Puritan “ordered liberty” was the freedom to act within the confines of the moral order. This might be called the paradox of individualism: In order to form cohesive groups, individualists have at times erected strong social controls on individual behavior that result in group cohesion.

The logic connecting these tendencies to the individualist hunter-gather model is obvious: Like all humans in a dangerous and difficult world, hunter-gatherers need to develop cohesive, cooperative in-groups. But rather than base them on known kinship relations, the prototypical egalitarian-individualist groups of the West are based on reputation and trust. Egalitarian-individualists create moral-ideological communities in which those who violate public trust and other manifestations of the moral order are shunned, ostracized, and exposed to public humiliation—a fate that would have resulted in evolutionary death during the harsh ecological period of the Ice Age—, the same fate as the derelict father who refused to provision his children.

A possible evolutionary legacy of this phenomenon is a greater tendency to engage in what social scientists term “altruistic punishment,” defined as punishment of people who depart from the moral-ideological consensus that costs the punisher. A cooperative culture derived from European hunter-gathers would be expected to be characterized by high levels of altruistic punishment directed at free-riders. This is studied in a game among strangers who donate to a common pot that is increased by a set multiplier by the experimenter and then divided equally. Free riders contribute little but get all the benefits. Altruistic punishers incur costs to punish the cheaters. This punishment is motivated by moral outrage. Because it is played among strangers, the game mimics individualistic societies.  Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.

The Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues, not hesitating to endure high costs in order to punish those who violated the moral norms of the ingroup. They were prone to utopian appeals to a “higher law” and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” It goes without saying that all of the great European wars of the 20th century have been rationalized in moral terms—to secure the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy, and individual rights against the state.

To conclude, my proposal is that the culture of the West as it developed in the modern era owes much more to egalitarian individualism than to aristocratic individualism. It’s interesting that all of the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique involved moral indictments of the West and its history of slavery, segregation, colonialism, anti-Semitism, exclusion of Jews from the Protestant elite. Clearly the most egregious of these moral failings stem from the cultural strand of aristocratic egalitarianism, not the egalitarian individualism that eventually won out.

Nevertheless, these movements have managed to create a moral community that taps into the hunter-gatherer ethic of egalitarian individualism. As noted above, Duchesne attributes the decline of aristocratic individualism partly to “the ethical demands of modern democratic liberalism.” However, the psychological power of the ethical demands of modern liberalism themselves require explanation. The argument here is that the roots of the creation of a moral-ideological ingroup stem from the unique egalitarian-individualist strand of the culture of the West.

The general dismantling of the culture of the West, and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity, is occurring as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment and based ultimately on these evolved tendencies.

MacDonald’s long piece can be read here.