The Perils of Positive Thinking

keepitpositive [1]1,611 words

Translation: French [2], Polish [3], Spanish [4]

“Time to stop talking falsely now.
The hour is getting late.”

— Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”

The best way to get people to take bitter pills is to coat them with something sweet. The principle applies to poisons as well as medicines, and it applies in the intellectual as well as the material realm.

The most insidious and destructive ideas are often served in the syrup of high-minded sentiments. A case in the point is the perennial cliché that white advocates need to “keep it positive”: focus on the things we love rather than the things we hate.

1. This is a false alternative. The best approach is to do both: we must love what is good and hate what is evil—i.e., that which opposes and threatens the good. We must promote the good and combat evil. And you can’t really be serious about promoting the good if you are unwilling to name and fight the evils that oppose you.

2. The root of White Nationalism is, of course, the love of our own people. The aim of White Nationalism is, of course, to perpetuate our race and insure its well-being. These are positive goals. But if that’s all we have to say, then white advocacy remains merely sentimental, abstract, and high-minded, merely a matter of feeling and thinking, as opposed to saying and doing.

As soon as we act upon our love, as soon as we step outside the online echo-chamber and enter the realm of public debate, as soon as we try to promote the well-being of our people in the real world, we will discover that there are people who actually oppose us, people who have conflicting interests, including people who simply hate us, and whom we should heartily hate in return.

3. The peril of positive thinking is that it is ultimately ineffectual. It cannot save our people, because it is abstract rather than concrete, high-minded rather than realistic. I am all for abstractions and ideals, but they are not ends in themselves. They have to illuminate reality and lead to realistic, effective action. High-minded happy-talk divorced from ugly facts will not save our race, whose existence in the real world is being threatened by concrete forces including real, flesh-and-blood enemies.

4. Keeping it positive basically boils down to a resolution to be superficial rather than radical. No matter how positive one’s spin is, one can’t avoid dealing with the surface reality of white dispossession. So to “keep it positive,” one has to refuse to examine the underlying causes of our plight, specifically the people who are to blame, lest we discover reasons to hate.

But the best way to treat an illness is to understand the cause. The best way to kill a weed is to pull up the roots. The best way to stop white dispossession is to discover who is behind it, and why, and stop them.

5. There really are people who become so fixated on harming their enemies that they end up harming their own interests. This is the psychology of spite, and it is self-defeating. For instance, some White Nationalists are so fixated on scoring points against the Jews that they attack Israel for being racist and nationalistic, even though White Nationalists should be defending the principles of racial nationalism, rather than attacking them on liberal, egalitarian, universalist grounds.

But the solution to suicidal spitefulness is not a priggish refusal to confront the reality of enmity. Instead, one must simply keep one’s priorities straight. Our overriding goal is to serve the positive interests of our own people. Becoming too fixated on our enemies can conflict with that goal. Ultimately, however, ignoring or downplaying the reality of enmity is a far bigger threat to our people than self-destructive spitefulness. The cure offered by the “keep it positive” crowd is worse than the disease.

6. The “keep it positive” meme is repeated for many reasons, including sincere, naïve, high-mindedness. But as with the “white suicide” meme—with which it is often conjoined—I suspect that the motives behind its propagation are usually morally squalid: cowardice or outright enemy subversion.

The picture becomes clearer when we ask what, exactly, are the positive thinkers trying to conceal? Are they trying, for instance, to avert our gaze from black depravity? Are they demanding that we not ask them “the Negro question”? Are they telling us that we need to focus simply on spreading the “white genocide” meme rather than dwelling on black crime, corruption, and chaos? Consistency demands that they would, but I am not seeing it.

Instead, the “keep it positive” meme, like the suicide meme, is almost always employed to avert our gaze from the Jewish problem, i.e., the fact that Jews are massively overrepresented among the forces both promoting white dispossession and preventing whites from organizing to stop it.

It is easy to understand why Jewish infiltrators wish to spread this meme. But what motivates whites? Ultimately, I think it is a combination of cowardice and naïveté: cowardice in the face of Jewish oppression and white social disapproval and the naive notion that one might still be able to win a struggle without naming and confronting one’s most committed enemies. Indeed, some are so naive as to think that we can win while allowing one’s organizations to be infiltrated and influenced by Jewish “sympathizers.” (These Jews may even be sincere, but enemy agents always seem sincere too, and the hour is too late for such foolishness.)

7. Advocates of keeping it positive often claim that their opponents talk “only” about the Jewish problem, whereas they prefer to speak entirely about positive actions they can take for our cause.

Now, I will grant there are White Nationalists who are obsessed with Jews almost as much as Jews are. I grant that there are White Nationalists who act as if Jews are the sole cause of our problems. In the past, when I published articles that did not deal with the Jewish problem, certain commentators would show up to accuse me or the author of conspiring to cover up Jewish perfidy. But even these people probably do not believe that Jews are the sole cause of our problems or the sole impediment to solving them, although they often act like it.

The idea that one can talk only about positive things rather than negative things, or only about negative things rather than positive things, is not really true. One can, of course, speak of certain topics by abstracting and isolating them from the bigger picture. But abstraction entails a kind of falsification, because one is dealing with parts, not the whole—and, in the real world, everything is interconnected. Thus if one really thinks through one’s abstractions, if one tries to understand how they are related to the rest of the world, how they are meshed in networks of meaning and causality, then one inevitably deals with other matters. And one has to, if one is going to affect real changes in the real world. Thus, dealing with matters in isolation is not really dealing with them at all.

If, for example, one actually thinks through how one is going to take positive steps toward saving our people, one is going to have to confront certain negatives, including the vast and essential role of the organized Jewish community in promoting white dispossession and preventing whites from resisting it. Or, if one starts with the Jewish problem and deals with it thoroughly, certain positive steps toward rectification will suggest themselves.

In a world in which everything is interconnected, truly radical thinking—thinking that can lead to action that can change the world—is concrete and holistic. But attempting to focus entirely on positives or negatives condemns one to being abstract and superficial—and thus, from a practical standpoint, ineffectual as well.

8. What about people who have a broad and concrete understanding of the white predicament but who choose to abstract out certain elements and focus on them in particular? It is a big world after all. People can’t know everything about everything. Specialization is inevitable and indeed necessary for progress. What about people who wish to focus on race, or immigration, or the Jewish problem in isolation from the rest of the picture?

There’s a right way to specialize and a wrong way. One can specialize but still keep a sense of the larger whole, and when people ask about the bigger picture, one simply needs to refer them to other specialists and then get back on message. One should not, however, engage in evasions and obfuscations of the larger picture.

Of course, these evasions only flow one way. Kevin MacDonald does not, for instance, treat biological race differences or non-white immigration as a hot potato. Not so with the Jewish question, which is consistently dodged by people who wish to position themselves closer to the political mainstream.

Of course, when writers refrain from dealing with the Jewish question, they come under suspicion of working for the other side. But there is an easy way to dispel such doubts (at least the reasonable ones). When the Jewish question is raised, they must simply state that they do not focus on that issue, acknowledge that there is genuine debate on the topic, refer the questioner to Kevin MacDonald, and then get back on topic.

Under no circumstances, however, should they resort to obfuscations and disinformation. The entire media and educational establishment are working 24/7, 365, cradle-to-grave to mislead our people about race and the Jewish question. Thus it is frankly disgusting when White Nationalists join in the lies because they are working some clever and self-regarding angle of their own.