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Category: Christendom

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American civil war Christendom Deranged altruism Judeo-reductionism Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Slavery

“There is NOTHING wrong with us”

Monocausalism is the simplistic notion that all of our issues are to be laid on the feet of Jews, that “there is NOTHING wrong with us” as the commenter Helvena put it this year at Age of Treason.

The problem with those who advocate the single-cause hypothesis of our current predicament is that they have not done their homework. Who in the movement can be more knowledgeable about the Jewish Question than Professor Kevin MacDonald? At The Occidental Quarterly when this printed, scholarly journal was under the watch of Greg Johnson (Vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 2008), MacDonald wrote (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):


Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable insight into a nineteenth-century leftist intellectual elite in the United States. This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America. Rather, it was homegrown, and its story tells us much about the sensibility of an important group of white intellectuals and perhaps gives us hints about why in the twentieth century WASPs so easily capitulated to the Jewish onslaught on the intellectual establishment.

Both New England and East Anglia (the center of Puritanism in England) had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem), but the highest rates of public violence—“the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches.” This record is entirely in keeping with Calvinist tendencies in Geneva.

The legal system was designed to enforce intellectual, political, and religious conformity as well as to control crime. Louis Taylor Merrill describes the “civil and religious strait-jacket that the Massachusetts theocrats applied to dissenters.” The authorities, backed by the clergy, controlled blasphemous statements and confiscated or burned books deemed to be offensive. Spying on one’s neighbors and relatives was encouraged. There were many convictions for criticizing magistrates, the governor, or the clergy. Unexcused absence from church was fined, with people searching the town for absentees. Those who fell asleep in church were also fined. Sabbath violations were punished as well. A man was even penalized for publicly kissing his wife as he greeted her on his doorstep upon his return from a three-year sea voyage.

Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as defined by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter. Altruistic punishment refers to punishing people even at a cost to oneself. Altruistic punishment is found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups, such as Jews, based on extended kinship.

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. Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during the Second World War for “exterminating the German people… the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”

It is interesting that the moral fervor the Puritans directed at ingroup and outgroup members strongly resembles that of the Old Testament prophets who railed against Jews who departed from God’s law, and against the uncleanness or even the inhumanity of non-Jews. Indeed, it has often been noted that the Puritans saw themselves as the true chosen people of the Bible. In the words of Samuel Wakeman, a prominent seventeenth-century Puritan preacher: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem. They had left Europe which was their ‘Egypt,’ their place of enslavement, and had gone out into the wilderness on a messianic journey, to found the New Jerusalem.”

Whereas Puritanism as a group evolutionary strategy crumbled when the Puritans lost control of Massachusetts, Diaspora Jews were able to maintain their group integrity even without control over a specific territory for well over 2,000 years. This attests to the greater ethnocentrism of Jews. But, although relatively less ethnocentric, the Puritans were certainly not lacking in moralistic aggression toward members of their ingroup, even when the boundaries of the ingroup were expanded to include all of America, or indeed all of humanity. And while the Puritans were easily swayed by moral critiques of white America, because of their stronger sense of ingroup identity, Jews have been remarkably resistant to moralistic critiques of Judaism.

With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America.

The lesson here is that in large part the problem confronting whites stems from the psychology of moralistic self-punishment exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants, but also apparent in a great many other whites. As I have noted elsewhere:

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms… are punished by altruistic aggression.

The Puritan legacy in American culture is indeed pernicious, especially since the bar of morally correct behavior has been continually raised to the point that any white group identification has been pathologized. As someone with considerable experience in the academic world, I can attest to feeling like a wayward heretic back in seventeenth-century Massachusetts when confronted, as I often am, by academic thought police. It’s the moral fervor of these people that stands out. The academic world has become a Puritan congregation of stifling thought control, enforced by moralistic condemnations that a seventeenth-century Puritan minister could scarcely surpass. In my experience, this thought control is far worse in the East coast colleges and universities founded by the Puritans than elsewhere in academia—a fitting reminder of the continuing influence of Puritanism in American life.

The main difference between the Puritan New Jerusalem and the present multicultural one is that the latter will lead to the demise of the very white people who are the mainstays of the current multicultural Zeitgeist. Unlike the Puritan New Jerusalem, the multicultural New Jerusalem will not be controlled by people like themselves, who in the long run will be a tiny, relatively powerless minority.

The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans won’t be around to witness it.


Postscript

At Occidental Dissent, today Hunter Wallace also liked MacDonald’s article:

Kevin MacDonald has an excellent essay on Counter-Currents about the Yankee Question. This is too good to pass up.

Note: MacDonald has never been a Single Jewish Causer. He could easily write an entire book on the radical utopian movements of the nineteenth century (abolitionism, civil rights, pacifism, “strongminded womanism,” Unitarianism, Free Loveism, Shakerism, Fourierism, Transcendentalism, etc.) that plunged America into racial and cultural decline and laid the foundation for their destructive successors in the twentieth century.

(Read MacDonald’s entire article here.)

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Hate Homosexuality Psychology

Against the Fourth Commandment

In the “Saturday Afternoon with Carolyn Yeager: Kairos on The German Character,” a man called to rebut the German blogger Kairos arguing that Christianity is good because of the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

What the caller ignored is that the Fourth Commandment is intrinsically intertwined with the Monsters from the Id that are destroying our civilization.

I don’t want to explain the subject at length. Suffice it to say that the late Alice Miller discussed how religion can contribute to the guilt that prevents us from being conscious adults. In The Body Never Lies Miller urges us to realize that the Fourth Commandment offers immunity to abusive parents, and argues it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in ruined adult lives.

Below, a page
about the poet Arthur Rimbaud from The Body Never Lies that I stole from Miller’s webpage:

Self-Hatred and Unfulfilled Love

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and died of cancer in 1891, a few months after his right leg had been amputated. In other words, he only lived to be 37 years old. Yves Bonnefoy tells us that his mother was harsh and brutal, a fact on which all the available sources are unanimous.

Bonnefoy describes her as ambitious, proud, stubbornly self-opinionated, arid, and full of covert hatred. He calls her the classic case of someone fired by the pure energy derived from bigoted religiosity. The astonishing letters she wrote around 1900 reveal that she was enamored of death and destruction. She was fascinated by graveyards, and at the age of 75 she had gravediggers lower her into the grave she was later to share with her dead children Vitali and Arthur, so that she could have a foretaste of the eternal night that was to come.

What must it have been like for an intelligent and sensitive child to grow up in the care of a woman like this? We find the answer in Rimbaud’s poetry. Bonnefoy tells us that his mother did everything in her power to curb and thwart his development as a poet, albeit to no avail. Failing that, she nipped in the bud every desire for independence on his part, every premonition of liberty. The boy took to regarding himself as an orphan, and his relationship to his mother split up into hatred, on the one hand, and obsequious dependency on the other. From the fact that he received no token of affection Rimbaud concluded that he must be in some way guilty: “With all the strength of his innocence, he rebelled fiercely against the judgment passed on him by his mother.”

Rimbaud’s mother maintained total control over her children and called this control motherly love. Her acutely perceptive son saw through this lie. He realized that her constant concern for outward appearances had nothing to do with love. But he was unable to admit to this observation without reserve, because as a child he needed love, or at least the illusion of it. He could not hate his mother, particularly as she was so obviously concerned for him. So he hated himself instead, unconsciously convinced that in some obscure way he must have deserved such mendacity and coldness. Plagued by an ill-defined sense of disgust, he projected it onto the provincial town where he lived, onto the hypocrisy of the system of morality he grew up in (much like Nietzsche in this respect), and onto himself. All his life he strove to escape these feelings, resorting in the process to alcohol, hashish, absinth, opium, and extensive travels to faraway places. In his youth he made two attempts to run away from home but was caught and restored to his mother’s “care” on both occasions.

His poetry reflects not only his self-hatred but also his quest for the love so completely denied him in the early stages of his life. Later, at school, he was fortunate enough to encounter a kindly teacher who gave him the companionship and support he so desperately needed in the decisive years of puberty. His teacher’s affection and confidence enabled him to write and to develop his philosophical ideas. But his childhood retained its stifling grip on him. He attempted to combat his despair at the absence of love in his life by transforming it into philosophical observations on the nature of true love. But these ideas were no more than abstractions because despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detestation for his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal.

Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are probably fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud’s friendship with Paul Verlaine is a well-known fact of literary history. His longing for love and genuine communication initially appeared to find gratification in this friendship. But the mistrust rooted in his childhood gradually poisoned their intimacy, and this, coupled with Verlaine’s own difficult past, prevented the love between them from achieving any permanence. Ultimately, their recourse to drugs made it impossible for them to live the life of total honesty that they were in search of. Their relationship was crippled by the psychological injuries they inflicted on one another. In the last resort, Verlaine acted in just as destructive a way as Rimbaud’s mother, and the final crisis came when Rimbaud was shot twice by the drunken Verlaine, who was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity, in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help him understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice, his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child that was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.


Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second to left)
depicted in an 1872 painting
by Henri Fantin-Latour

Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as an attempt to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition. After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a business man, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother’s expectations of him. Though Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to Roche immediately before, to be looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother’s love ended in the prison of childhood.

♣

For those interested in the subject, I’ve written about why forgiving our parents may invoke those Monsters from the Unconscious that are destroying our civilization. In Fallen Leaves I mention the mental issues of a poor Michael Jackson that forgave his father:

“Solitude among millions of fans”

More to the point, a few years ago I analyzed a woman who hates the West as a result of transferring her repressed, parental rage onto substitutive objects:

“A Woman Chasing after her Revenge”

Categories
Bible Christendom Deranged altruism Liberalism

Why America is the most serious enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race

Below, a section of Andrew Fraser’s “Natural Born Citizen? Obama and the Fourth American Revolution” published today at The Occidental Observer.


Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity

The constitutive principle of the First (Federal) Republic was liberty. But the festering contradiction between the progressive ideal of liberty and the reactionary realities of Negro slavery unleashed another wave of revolutionary dynamism, found in its most extreme form in the rise of the abolitionist movement.

Eventually, the First (Federal) Republic was overthrown. When the War for Southern Independence was lost, the federal principle which licensed the secession of the slave states was subordinated to the colour-blind ideal of personal liberty. It was clear that sovereign authority had passed from the citizens of the several states into a consolidated Union-dominated government under the direction of Northern commercial and industrial interests.

But formal legal recognition of the Second (Bourgeois) Republic required another constitutional coup d’état. The revolutionary Fourteenth Amendment was adopted by Radical Republicans to subordinate the states to the federal government and to create a uniform national citizenship.

According to Article V of the federal Constitution, however, amendments require the formal consent of three quarters of the states. The South was still under military occupation by Union troops. Fraud and coercion were employed freely to compel Southern legislatures to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. In effect, white Southerners were made an offer they could not refuse: ratify the Fourteenth Amendment or be denied re-admission to the Union.

The Second Republic was founded on the principle of equality. But it eventually foundered upon the multiplying contradictions between the formal legal ideal of equality and the substantive social realities of race, class, and gender.

Seventy years after the Civil War, the New Deal ushered in the Third (Managerial/Therapeutic) Republic which radically expanded the powers of the federal government. No effort was made to obtain the formal consent of the states to this constitutional revolution.

Indeed, in 1937, the Supreme Court, too, was compelled to abandon its early resistance to repeated and sweeping federal usurpations of state jurisdiction by making the famous “switch in time that saved nine.”  Faced with Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court, the judiciary simply turned a blind eye to the Article V amendment procedure, choosing instead to place its imprimatur on the Third American Revolution.

The Third Republic based itself upon the revolutionary ideal of fraternity among American citizens of every class, race, and gender. While allowing Congress a free hand to regulate the economy, the Supreme Court brought every so-called “discrete and insular minority” under its own wing. In the Forties and Fifties, the Court waged its own revolutionary war against discrimination in landmark cases such as Shelley v Kraemer and, most famously, Brown v Board of Education.

By the Sixties, it was obvious that the principle of fraternity stood in stark contradiction not just to individuals’ freedom of association but also to the exclusionary character of allegedly “racist” immigration laws. Accordingly, the progressive leaders of the Republic launched a demographic revolution which extended the blessings of American citizenship to millions of non-Whites drawn from every corner of the Third World.

As a consequence, the principle of fraternity quickly morphed into the celebration of diversity as an end in itself. But demographic diversity stands in clear contradiction to the ancient republican ideal of a body politic in which citizens unite in pursuit of the public interest and the common good.

Homo americanus long ago renounced his historic allegiance to throne and altar. Soon afterward, the blood faith that his colonial ancestors had shared with their kith and kin across the Atlantic was replaced by the civil religion of the Republic. Americans had also become hopelessly addicted to endless economic growth and territorial expansion. Within that future-oriented, novus ordo seclorum, it was impossible to define the constitutional abstraction known as the sovereign people-at-large in backward-looking, traditional terms of shared blood, language, and religion.

♣

A commenter said…

You state:

“Inspired by the secular humanist ideology of the European Enlightenment, America’s constitutional faith strove to incarnate the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, one after another, in a series of revolutionary republican moments.”


Wait, no mention of the influence of the Bible and the Ten Commandments? Yet, these leaders were overwhelmingly inspired by the Bible as evidenced by an army of relevant sources. Here’s a cursory list:

•  
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for a government of any other.” —John Adams, 1798 in letters to the Massachusetts Militia.

•  
“It is equally undeniable… that the Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western World.” —U.S. Supreme Court, Stone v. Graham, (1980) (Justice Rehnquist, dissenting)

•  “The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.” —Harry S. Truman, Feb. 15, 1950,
 Attorney General’s Conference.

Suggested Reading: The Ten Commandments & their Influence on American Law

Categories
Alaric Ancient Rome Christendom Claudius Ethnic cleansing Islam Julius Caesar Kali Yuga Madison Grant Psychohistory Romulus Turner Diaries (novel)

Rome: my brutal footnotes

“What a certificate of mental poverty it was for Christianity that it destroyed the libraries of the Ancient World!”

—Hitler

After reading page 44 of the translation of Edward Gibbon’s classic (Turner Publicaciones, 2006), I wrote in longhand (transl. from Spanish):

10 May 2012. It is unclear I will read the whole book (his prose is scholarly and academic), but I want to dwell on this point: The day before yesterday I posted the entry “Just an email,” where I openly advocate the extermination of mestizo-Americans to make room for the Hyperboreans in NorthAm (partly because of my revenge for what Mexico did to me).

Now that I read about this “conquest” by Trajan, it seems to me clear and transparent that my conquest à la NY Untermensch is far superior to these Italian pseudo-conquests, especially now that I cannot suffer these crowds of Untermenschen in Mexico that weren’t wiped out by Cortés and his successors.

If such brutal inferences arise constantly throughout my reading of this book, I’ll have to use a separate notebook for these notes as the white pages in Gibbon’s book will end long before I finish…

Page 47. The Roman policy: “A good soldier should fear his officers more than the enemy” reminds me of The Turner Diaries: how they rounded up and killed those white nationalists who failed to promptly cleanse Toronto from Jews. And now that I lost an online nationalist friend I see that I could order the original Gibbon in English to answer the faggotry of [the former friend’s webzine] with real Roman manhood and bonding among the soldiers.

Page 48. I just read these pages and long for the military life in contempt to the ethnic treason of today (the legions accepted people of my age).

Page 50. It is absolutely clear that a white consciousness hadn’t arisen remotely in the Roman Empire (not even with Hitler since he despised Slavs when he could start his conquests elsewhere).

Page 63. This makes me think several things. As mammals could not evolve when the dinosaurs reigned supreme, Gaul, Hispania, Germania and Britannia failed to develop their character under the yoke of Rome. The same applies to the United States: the Spanish Empire had to fall (cf. the grotesque independence of Mexico) for the US to discover its full powers. And now Europe is stuck with a US that has become Mammon and led by a Negro… It is obvious that the US must die so that the white race may regain once more its lost self-esteem and self-image. A pity that the Reich only lasted a few years. It is the culture that I like most because Hitler was the first white ruler of a State to speak out openly about race.

Page 65. I wonder if I will have to suspend this reading to read another book, The Passing of the Great Race. It seems that Gibbon has not written a racial history of the decline of Rome.

19 May. I was struck by what the Romans did in Gaul. Really: you see nothing of this barbarism in TV series like Rome or the other idealized series on the fall of the empire. Instead, in the program I saw today I finally heard some value judgments (“Caesar killed one of every four Gauls; if this is not genocide I do not know what it could be”) insofar as the figure included white women and children.

I’ll finish this book right away [an illustrated book about Caesar] because I see a discernible cause for the triumph of Christianity: something similar to why Amerindians embraced the Guadalupana after the reign of Huichilobos. For these peoples, god on the cross could mean nothing else than a desire for empathy for all crucified in Roman times (literally crucified).

20 May. I’ve seen several documentaries about Caesar and Rome, and my preliminary conclusion is that the Judeo-Christian reaction (reactive Yin) was due to the wild Roman Yang:

• The myth of Romulus and Remus, when Romulus kills his brother and took power is perfect archetype of fratricidal wars. For example, one commenter said that Caesar and Pompey were like two scorpions trapped in a jar. Another said that in those times if you were a politician you’d be killed in your bedroom or you had to commit suicide in the bathtub (the very destiny of Caesar and Brutus themselves). Another commenter said that the crossing of the Rubicon was an act of treason. I think that’s true: and the bust of Caesar that appears in the Wikipedia article reflects the real Caesar instead of the heads of the more idealized sculptures.

•  It’s mankind’s folly to take the name of Caesar as something good and heroic (Kaiser, Czar, etc.) when the true heroes were Brutus and his followers for wanting to save the Republic. The crazy Romans did not recognize Brutus; they wanted a god and then would literally deify Caesar officially—cf. the deified Claudius image in my entry about Gospel Fictions. Precisely in that entry (St Mark implied that god must be better a crucified than an emperor) it’s easy to guess the reasons why the Jesus-god archetype took hold of the dispossessed under the rule of Rome. Caesar’s genocide of a million Gauls including women and children should not be glossed over. And that’s exactly where you realize that “Jesus” or the “crucified god” symbolized those poor bastards that the official story doesn’t glorify.

• The cash from the Temple’s treasures destroyed by Titus was used to construct the Roman building I hate the most: the Coliseum. This hatred of mine shows how I rather belong to the Christian rather than the pagan “psychoclass.” Rome was the mob, and the bloodthirsty spectacle of the mob in the Coliseum, as depicted in that illustrated book by National Geographic I read in 1977, shocked me into reality.

Without all this background along with my thoughts it was pointless to read Gibbon. I must understand Rome before its decline.

♣

I keep seeing documentaries on the history of Rome and I’m once again with the Wars of Gaul. There’s something that catches my attention: the burning of the Gaul villages by the Gaul Vercingetorix. Not even the Nazis would have done that with their people to stop the enemy advance. Together with Vercingetorix’s expelling Gaul women and children from the fortress during the Roman siege, it shows that the Gauls constituted a lower “psychoclass” than the Romans (cf. my explanation of psychohistory).

May 21. I am completely surprised. Yesterday I finished twelve of the thirteen episodes of Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire (I did not see the episode on Constantine). The picture of the events starts taking shape and I think it makes no sense to approach Gibbon without a mature idea of the historical issues. Keep in mind the last episode when Orestes, the father of Romulus Augustulus, put his pubescent boy as emperor in Ravenna, still believing in the idea of Rome after it had already fallen (in 410 AD when Alaric sacked it). The commentator said that while Rome was already dead for some decades, the idea of Rome persisted in some minds. For the first time in my life at one point I felt I understood the age; that I grasped the pathos visually.

♣

Today I am watching another documentary, The Dark Ages that lasts an hour and a half, with some commentators of the previous series on Rome.

Greatly impacted me the genocide of Italians. As a result of his thirst to conquer the lost (Western) side of Christendom, just before the plague took 100 million lives, Justinian, emperor of Constantinople, perpetrated large massacres at the south of Italy. The commentator said that Justinian’s genocide was such “that Italy took two centuries to recover.”

What data, what story I didn’t know! It’s clear that the Western world was far more barbaric, brutal and psychologically dissociated than I previously thought. So clear. True: now I have psychohistory as my historical tool but these atrocities are still so surprising. Now I’ll finish watching The Dark Ages…

3:04 pm. Just today I posted in WDH “The Competition of Races” from Madison Grant’s book. It is abundantly clear that Islam was an animal that succeeded only because of the cultural suicide of the West during the centuries of darkness. Real darkness I mean. Europe was almost depopulated in the sixth and seventh centuries and the people of higher IQ, our best minds, instead of breeding joined the convents. How clear… A gap is made in nature and is filled with an inferior race through the Maghreb, yes: but unlike us that “inferior” race doesn’t suffer from guilt. Classical books were still burning in those centuries because of the triumph of the Galileans and the invoked “Monsters from the Id.”

27 May. I’m seeing again Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire and it really was a psychoclass that is not ours.

“In the name of discipline, 4,000 men were put to this agonizing death.” That is, in 71 B.C. Crassus decimated his legions after their first defeat with Spartacus. Four thousand died by stoning or clubbing by their comrades, and the others compelled to contemplate. OK: since the decimation against the Volsci in 471 B.C. the Romans had not resorted to this method, but some argue that Caesar himself succumbed to this military self-punishment.

May 30. Now that I see the series again, I notice in the episode of Claudius that the Druids made human sacrifices (the Germans, or rather the Germanics, so did in the previous episode) and even ate the sacrificed. I mention this because the Romans, who belonged to a more advanced psychoclass, felt repelled by these practices. It is important to keep this in mind. Here the key that my psychohistory provides is useful, although the Romans also sacrificed the British captives by taking them to the gladiatorial spectacle (though never dared to join a pagan, cannibal feast).

17 June. I wrote almost a month ago that the sixth century A.D. shows that the West had already crossed through another “darkest hour.” It is evident that whites have not delved into the recondite chambers of their souls in order to detect the Monsters from the Id that have decimated their civilization two times in history, including our times.

Categories
Christendom Deranged altruism

Either you accept a nigger Pope…

or burn in Hell eternally!

At Gates of Vienna, a fanatic commenter said:

“As a Deacon, my number one duty and concern is for the human soul, to which I will post one last question to you: Cardinal Arinze (may God bless him and grant him 100 years) is from Nigeria and was very close to being Pope, were in not for the election of our blessed Pope Benedict. If he were elected would you have let him “govern” you in all spiritual matters?

If you would reject a Cardinal, Pope, Priest or ANY cleric who is orthodox in teaching and in a position of authority simply because you don’t like the color of his skin, then you are an anathema to toe One True and Holy church and may be condemning your immortal soul to the fires of hell.

Once again, I ask if this means anything to you.”

Source: here

Categories
Christendom New Testament Old Testament

Gospel Fictions, 5

Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ fifth chapter, “Miracles (II): The Fourth Gospel” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted):


The Fourth Gospel presents an understanding of miracles quite different from that in the Synoptics, and even uses a word for miracle—sign (semeion)—which the others explicitly reject. The understanding of “signs” in the Fourth Gospel, indeed the word itself, stems from the Septuagint: Moses “wrought the signs [semeia] before the people. And the people believed” (Ex. 4:30-31 LXX).

Mark 6:5 claims (though Matthew and Luke refuse to repeat the verse) that in cases of weak faith, Jesus “could work no miracle.” Nowhere in John is faith the precondition of miracle. In the Synoptics, faith precedes the miracle; in John, the miracle precedes faith. John’s uneasiness about miracle-engendered faith, blending uncomfortably with the conviction that this was the way Jesus chose to reveal himself, may lie behind the strange fact that there are so few miracles in the Fourth Gospel: seven, compared to twenty in Matthew and twenty-one in Luke. John’s way of accounting for the paucity of his miracle stories is to declare that he has written only a selection of a much larger number available to him:

There were indeed many other signs [semeia] that Jesus performed in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. Those here written have been recorded in order that you may hold the faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this faith you may possess life by his name. (John 20:31-31)

 
The water made wine in Cana

An examination of the account of Elisha’s providing flour and oil in III Kings LXX reveals some direct verbal sources for the story of Jesus’ miracle at Cana.

One of the most puzzling aspects of this first miracle in the Fourth Gospel is Jesus’ rudeness to his mother: “Woman, what have I to do with you? [Ti emoi kai soi, gunai].” As has been seen before, the statement is here not a historical report but an antitype of Elijah: for the woman (gune) in need of food says to the prophet, “What have I to do with thee? [ti emoi kai soi]” (III [I] Kings 17:18 LXX).

(Archaeologists at modern-day Cana found pieces of stone jars, including the one shown here, that date to the time of Jesus and appear to be the same type of jar mentioned in the water-to-wine story.)

But as it happens, Elijah’s miracle provides flour, not wine. Why the change?

It appears that this miracle story in the Fourth Gospel was not only mediated through the story of Moses, where it picked up the concept of “sign,” before it reached John; it also went through one other transformation, influenced by the mythology of Dionysius. As Bultmann has pointed out:

On the festival day of Dionysus the temple springs at Andros and Teos were supposed every year to yield wine instead of water. In Elis on the eve of the feast, three empty pitchers were put into the temple and in the morning they were full of wine.

In other words the miracle story had an extensive history before it reached the author of the Fourth Gospel. Neither he nor anyone he knew attended a wedding at Cana-in-Galilee at which Jesus provided a hundred and twenty gallons of wine to those who had already drunk so freely they had exhausted the day’s provisions; the story is fiction and has a clearly traceable literary lineage.

Categories
Axiology Christendom Deranged altruism Final solution Judeo-reductionism Liberalism

A reply to a comment

Stevieb said…

I agree with all that [Stevieb refers to what I wrote here]. But this is the first time I’ve read your blog, and you come across too arrogant.

Fine—you don’t suffer fools—I get that. But I don’t get this enthusiasm for bashing “monocausalists,” for me they’ll do just fine for now.

Getting out from under the boot of Jewish ideological and political domination is the first step. You’re probably confusing some of the lesser intellects involved in this movement—of whom I would reluctantly include myself—and that can be dangerous, or at least counterproductive, in my opinion.

Having said all that, I’ll read on (no need to post this)…


Chechar said…

No need to post your above comment in this particular page? OK, I will delete it and post it again in a proper thread (if you don’t mind).

For most people “arrogance” is something like what popularly passes as a jerk, but according to my Merriam-Webster’s dictionary arrogance is “a genuine feeling of superiority that shows itself in an overbearing manner or attitude…”

For the record, these are my recent posts about “monocausalism,” a view that now I reject because I doubt we can blame a hundred percent the Jews for the mess in today’s world and place zero percent of blame on ourselves.

But the real crux is that if monocausalists are right, then Alex Linder’s brutal “Let’s exterminate ’em all” makes sense. On the other hand, if Christian universalism is to blame too for our problems, exterminationism is highly problematic not only from the moral viewpoint, but from the strategic viewpoint as well since whites seem to have a loose screw doing big time, Gremlinesque mischiefs on their own.

I agree with you that monocausalists are doing a superb job though. Since Jews cannot be criticized in today’s traitorous culture, it’s good to see that there are people that focus on them and on them alone.

Nonetheless, if there’s something wrong going on in the white psyche sans Jews, if we are really trapped in a device of our own making, the Gremlinesque screw has to be tightened up a bit.

This is why we have to focus on the existing paradigm or Weltanschauung that I call “Secular Christianity” or however you may want to call it (political correctness, ethno-masochism, deranged altruism, genetic communism, cultural Marxism): a set of ideas as rigid and unexamined as anything that a Calvinist could produce.

Nowadays this crystallized psychic structure, that many simply call “liberalism,” is preventing whites from taking the kind of inner action that would allow them to first rebel intellectually, and then revolutionarily.

I may be arrogant, yes, but it’s worth remembering that even Hitler himself, in his intimate table talks of 1941, spoke more against Christian axiology than against Jewish influence.

Categories
Christendom Deranged altruism

“Christianity is simply too universalist…”

I think James Whistler makes a good point when he says that “everybody knows” Wall Street is run by Jews, just like “everybody knows” Hollywood is run by Jews.

“Everybody knows” that Bernie Madoff was a Jew. Zero Hedge is a hugely popular forum for the financial industry, and discussions of Jewish fraud is open; attempts to silence discussion of Jews by the usual hand-wringing have not been successful. “Everybody knows” Goldman Sachs is a Jewish company.

The problem seems to be that there is no organized opposition to Jewish power. “White” is far too broad a category, and our traditional religion of Christianity is simply too universalist to serve as a counter “evolutionary strategy” (not to mention how Jewish it is). Of the Forbes 500 richest Americans, at least 60% or more are White, but the only example I can remember of any of them working together, sans Jews, would be Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and that was all personal, and even anti-White in the larger sense.

The implicity-near-explicitly White Republican party eagerly falls to their knees fawning over Jewish power and serves only to tamp down any anti-Jewish sentiment among the conservative rank-and-file, like their predecessors in the John Birch Society.

A while back The Occidental Observer talked a lot about Glenn Beck, who was hugely popular and went right up to the line discussing Jewish power—even going so far as to resurrect the notorious Cleon Skousen—but his fan base just seemed to be too dense to take the hint. The lump-fundies of the Evangelical right basically worship Jews and Israel, and the patriotard right wingers idolize the IDF and want nothing more than to join them in a world-wide counter-jihad against Israel’s enemies.

So it’s not even a lack of awareness, it’s more like Stockholm Syndrome. It’s as if Whites have fallen in love with a Jewess, and want nothing more than to gain her favor, even if it requires giving up their last shred of dignity.

—Richard Pierce

Categories
Christendom New Testament Old Testament Porphyry of Tyre

Gospel Fictions, 4

Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ fourth chapter, “Miracles I (The Synoptic Narratives)” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted):

Käsemann’s judgment is that the “great majority of the Gospel miracle stories must be regarded as legends.” The kind of incidents which in fact commend themselves as being historically credible are “harmless episodes such as the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law from a fever and the healing of so-called possessed persons.”

The next two chapters will examine the thirty-odd narratives in the Gospels which depict the Synoptic and Johannine attitudes toward miracles, demonstrating their literary lineage, and discuss how these fictional or legendary stories came to be composed.

Narratives about Jesus’ performing miracles were virtual requirements, given first-century Christianity’s understanding of the Old Testament. Matthew 11:2-5 makes this quite clear:

John, who was in prison, heard what Christ was doing, and sent his own disciples to him with this message: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect some other?” Jesus answered, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the poor are hearing the good news.”

Matthew has Jesus list what are, in fact, signs of the advent of the New Age, as Isaiah had predicted: “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart” (Isa. 35:5 LXX). Matthew combined Second Isaiah’s declaration using that prophet’s very words from the Septuagint.

The resurrection of a dead son

Both Elijah and Elisha mediate two striking miracles, the creation of abundance from little and the resurrection of a dead son. If these sound familiar to a reader of the Gospels, we should not be surprised.

Since Luke’s account of the raising of the widow of Nain’s son so clearly betrays its literary origins in the Septuagint, I shall begin with it:

And it came to pass [kai egeneto] afterwards that Jesus went to a town called Nain, accompanied by his disciples and a large crowd. As he approached the gate of the town he met a funeral. The dead man was the only son of his widowed mother; and many of the townspeople were there with her. When the Lord saw her his heart went out to her, and he said, “Weep no more.” With that he stepped forward and laid upon the bier; and the bearers halted. Then he spoke: “Young man, rise up!” The dead man sat up and began to speak; and Jesus gave him back to his mother. Deep awe fell upon them all, and they praised God. “A great prophet has arisen among us,” they said. (Luke 7:11-16)

Either Luke or some Greek-speaking Christian behind Luke composed this story on the basis of the account in the Septuagint version of Kings depicting the raising of the dead son of the widow of Sarapeta (III, [I] Kings 17:8-10, 17, 19-23 LXX). Both stories begin with a favorite Septuagintal formula, “And it came to pass.” Both concern the dead son of a widow (chera). In both the prophet “went” (eporeuthe) to the town, where he met a woman at the “gate of the city” (ton pylona tes poleos—LXX; te pyle te poleos—Luke), even though archaeological study has shown that the village of Nain in Galilee never had a wall. Nain’s fictional gate is there for literary reasons: Sarepta’s gate transferred. In both stories the prophets speak and touch the dead son, who then raises and speaks. In both stories it is declared that the miracle certifies the prophet (“Behold, I know that thou art a man of God”—LXX; “A great prophet has arisen”—Luke). And both stories conclude with precisely the same words: “and he gave him to his mother” (kai edoken auton te metri autou).

The raising of Jairus’ daughter

Early Christians knew, on the basis of Isaiah 26:19, that raising of the dead was to be one of the signs of the advent of God’s kingdom. The only Old Testament narratives of resurrection are in the stories of Elijah and Elisha. In Mark 5, Matthew 9, and Luke 8, the president of an unnamed synagogue, one Jairus (whose name, “He will awaken,” betrays the representative and fictional nature of the account), comes to Jesus. Like the Shunnamite woman to Elisha, “falls at his feet and entreats him many times,” saying, in both Mark and Luke, that his only daughter was dying. In Matthew, to align more closely with the story’s Old Testament source—as is typical of the careful and knowledgeable first evangelist—the child is already dead.

The story stays close to the Old Testament original. In both, the prophet, on the way to the child, receives a message that it is dead, but continues resolutely. In both stories the prophet seeks privacy for the miracle: “After turning all the others out, Jesus took the child’s father and mother and his own companions and went in where the child was lying,” just as Elisha shut the door upon himself and the child. And in both, the prophet touches the child and speaks, and the child awakes. In Mark, the parents were “ecstatic with great ecstasy” (exestesan… ekstasei megale—Mark 5:42); in Kings, the mother of the child is “ecstatic with all this ecstasy” (exestesas… pasan ten ekstasin tauten—IV Kings 4:31 LXX). Just as the widow of Nain’s son began as the widow of Sarepta’s son, so the daughter of Jairus began as the dead child of Shunnam.

* * *

The other process, the heightening of the miraculous and the elimination of hints about the limitation of Jesus’ power to work miracles, is evident in later treatments of Mark’s account of Jesus at Nazareth. There in his own town, says Mark, he was not notably successful:

Jesus said to them, “A prophet will always be held in honour except in his home town, and among his kinsmen and family.” He could work no miracle there, except that he put hands on a few sick people and healed them, and he was taken aback by their want of faith. (Mark 6:4-6)

Matthew, with a more “advanced” theology and a more fully deified Jesus, could not accept Mark’s assertion, so he treated it as fiction, untrue; it was not that Jesus could not perform great miracles in the face of lack of faith in him, rather he chose not to do so. Bearing this in mind, we may more readily grasp why Matthew and Luke chose to leave out altogether two of Mark’s miracle stories. Jesus is asked to heal a deaf mute:

He took the man aside, away from the crowd, put his fingers into his [the man’s] ears, spat, and touched his tongue. Then, looking up to heaven, he sighted, and said to him, “Ephphatha,” which means, “Be opened.” With that his ears were opened and at the same time the impediment was removed and he spoke plainly. (Mark 7:33-35)

In the next chapter, Jesus is asked to cure a blind man:

He spat on his eyes, and laid his hands upon him, and asked whether he could see any thing. The blind man’s sight began to come back, and he said, “I see men; they look like trees, but they are walking about.” Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; he looked hard, and now he was cured so that he saw everything clearly. (Mark 8:23-25)

For Matthew and Luke, who eliminated both these stories from their revisions of Mark, the notion that Jesus needed any kind of ritual (magic word) or medicinal (spittle) help, or even that he needed a little time and repetition of the treatment, was unthinkable. (Matthew characteristically depicts Jesus’ miracle-working powers as instantaneous.)

A Romanized Jesus in this painting found in a Christian catacomb in Rome. The beardless Jesus (Romans regarded the beard as a feature of the Barbarians) also has short hair and is wearing a Roman tunic.

Matthew ensures his story replaces the two he removed from Mark by depicting the man as both mute and blind.

Then they brought him a man who was possessed. He was blind and dumb, and Jesus cured him, restoring both speech and sight… But when the pharisees heard it, they said, “It is only by Beelzebub prince of devils that this man drives the devils out.” (Matt. 12:22-24).

A miracle story grows here before our eyes. Luke’s mute becoming mute and blind.

Food miracles

Like so many of the other miracle stories, these too have their origins in the Old Testament.

The disciples, though they have presumably just witnessed Jesus feed five thousand with five loaves, naively ask, “How can anyone provide all these people with bred in this lonely place?” —Mk. 8:14. Mark obviously found two stories in unrelated layers of oral tradition and, failing to grasp that they were different versions of the same story, put them into narrative sequence, making the disciples appear unbelievable stupid.

In any event, both narratives stem from IV [II] Kings 4:42-44 read as a typological foreshadowing of the career of Jesus. Both Testaments specify the number of hungry persons (one hundred in the Old; four and five thousand—much greater miracles!—in the New); both specify the inadequate amount of food available (twenty loaves in the Old Testament; five and four loaves—again greater miracles—in the New). In both the prophets instruct their disciples to feed the people, and in both the disciples protest the inadequacy: Elisha’s disciple complains, “I cannot set this before a hundred men” (IV [II] Kings 4:43); while Jesus’ disciple asks “How can anyone provide all these people with bread?” (Mark 8:5). Finally, in both stories, the meager loaves are miraculously amplified to feed all present and more: “And they ate, and left some over” (IV [II] Kings 4:44); “They all ate to their heart’s content, and seven baskets were filled with the scraps that were left” (Mark 8:9).

Interestingly, the miracle of the loaves and fishes is one of the very few Synoptic miracle stories which have also been used in the Fourth Gospel.

Stilling the storm; walking on the sea

Jesus also showed his power over nature in fictions about water. The ancients knew from Psalm 107 what power Yahweh has over the sea (Ps. 107:25-30). In Jonah, the sailors “called on the Lord and said, ‘O Lord, do not let us perish’” (1:14); in the Psalm, “They cried to the Lord in their trouble.” As a consequence, Jonah says, the “sea stopped raging” (1:15); the psalmist, “the storm sank to a murmur, and the waves of the sea were stilled.”

Matthew knew, unlike Mark, that the stilling of the storm was based in part one on the Book of Jonah, for again he rewrote his version of Mark’s narrative. Taking key words from Jonah—“Lord,” “save us,” “we perish”—Matthew rewrites Mark: a fictional correction of a fictional account, each of which is based in its own way on the Old Testament.

With this in mind, the nature of the rest of the miracle story as Mark first wrote it is more easily grasped. If it seems strange that Jesus could sleep in the stern of a small open fishing-boat in the middle of a storm so violent that waves were breaking over the vessel and filling it with water, Jesus’ sleep should be seen not as a description of an event but as a literary necessity.

Jesus also showed his power over the sea by walking on it (Matt. 14; Mark 6; John 6); a variant of the stilling of the storm.

Both versions reveal their origin in the same part of the Old Testament, Psalm 106 of the Septuagint (107 Heb.), with perhaps additional influence from the Book of Job. Early Christians knew from Job 9:8 that the Lord “walks on the sea [peripaton epi tes thalasses] as on dry ground”; thus they also presented Jesus “walking upon the sea” (peripaton epi tes thalasses—Mark 6: 48). But for the basis of their narrative about this “predicted” event, they went to the Septuagint Psalms, as may best be seen by comparing Mark’s and John’s versions of the pericope. Matthew enriches his account with a fascinating addition about Peter’s effort to copy his Lord.

Categories
American civil war Christendom Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Enlightenment French Revolution Individualism Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Psychology Slavery

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.