Ahead of the Curve

1,169 words

Spanish translation here

Editor’s Note:

The following talk was given on Saturday, April 2, 2016 at a networking dinner in Budapest sponsored by Arktos Media. I want to thank Daniel Friberg and the Arktos team and everyone who attended. 

“I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.” — The Joker in The Dark Knight 

“People who aspire to supermanhood are bound to look monstrous to men of a decaying civilisation” — Savitri Devi, Defiance

The Tuesday after Easter, I stepped outside and discovered that spring had come to Budapest. The sun was shining. The air was warm. There were still scarves and coats, but there were also people in short sleeves. Everyone seemed more cheerful. Sidewalk cafes were starting up. And, for a moment, I shared their positive feelings.

But then a grim thought crept in: as the weather warms, the sap will start flowing, but so will the migrants, and those who are already here will be no longer huddling indoors for warmth but out on the streets causing trouble. 2016 will be a terrible year for Europe, a year of invasion, terrorism, rape, murder, political instability, and perhaps civil war. In a flash, the beginning of spring in Budapest had turned into the beginning of winter for Europe, a time of death and desolation, perhaps to be followed by rebirth.

“These people won’t be smiling for long,” I thought.

It’s a really lonely feeling. Sometimes, you question your sanity. Sometimes, you wish for the blue pill. But as much as we like to joke about the eccentrics, cranks, paranoids, and autistes in our circles, the truth is that we are not monsters. We are not wired differently from the rest of humanity. We are just a little more sensitive, a little more far-sighted. We’re just ahead of the curve. But the rest of our people will see the same things we see, and feel the same way we feel, when the disaster we foresee is upon them. We just pray that by then it will not be too late.

The more naive conspiracy theorists explain patterned behavior through top down control. On their account, there are very few agents in history, just a tiny group of string-pullers and lots of puppets. History is not the result of many different agents striving at cross-purposes such that the result is contrary to practically everyone’s intentions or predictions. Historical events are planned by tiny cabals and made to order by their agents. Public opinion, even our moral intuitions, are manufactured by hostile elites and propagated to the stultified masses.

This worldview paints us in a pretty tight corner. For it paints our enemies as more powerful — and our people more passive, deluded, enthralled, and hostile — than is in fact the case.

There is, however, a more hopeful way of looking at our situation.

It is wondrous to see a vast school of fish or flock of birds suddenly turn in formation. Does this happen because they are following a king fish or king bird? Yes and no. Surely the fish at the back of the shoal are following the fish in front of them, and there are some fish that are more often at the front and others that are more often at the back. But they are all agents, and their orderly behavior can arise without top-down control because they share the same basic nature and are dealing with the same environmental stimuli. There is a saying in the book of Proverbs, “The locusts have no king, but they march in formation” (30:27). This is possible because locusts share the same nature and respond to the same environmental stimuli in the same way. This is true of humans as well.

One of the most encouraging lectures I ever attended was given by Kevin MacDonald. It was published as “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism.” MacDonald examines the scientific literature on “implicit racism.” Now, when I first heard of this idea, I rolled my eyes. Because implicit racism sounds to me like an essentially occult explanation for why blacks and browns do not perform as well as whites even when explicit racism has been dismantled. Since the Left simply denies that races are biologically unequal in their capacities, poor performance must have social causes, and if obvious social causes have been eliminated, then more obscure ones like “stereotype threat” or “implicit racism” must be at work.

But it turns out that implicit racism is real. The human brain is hard-wired to feel more comfortable around people who are genetically similar to us and to feel unease around people who are genetically different. Moreover, we are capable of making astonishingly accurate assessments of genetic similarity starting in infancy. So we’re not monsters. We’re neurologically quite normal, and the fact that the majority of our people do not share our views (yet) is just a sign that we are ahead of the curve.

If human beings were entirely controlled by our instincts, multiculturalism would not be a problem. Peoples would separate naturally and stay that way. But the higher, distinctly human parts of our brains can be programmed to think that ethnocentrism is immoral. This programming does not alter our instinctive ethnocentrism. It merely institutes an inner conflict between our moral convictions and our healthy instincts. These instincts still, however, express themselves unconsciously or hypocritically in “implictly white” affinity groupings.

This analysis is grounds for hope in two ways.

First, it implies that, other things being equal, we are not just ahead of the curve but stronger and healthier than our politically correct brethren. We don’t fight against or feel guilty about our ethnocentric feelings, but they do. Anti-racism, in short, is a state of constant psychological conflict, i.e., a form of mental illness, and relentless diversity propaganda is a form of gaslighting.

Second, it implies that our task is much easier. For although the enemy still largely controls the programming of our people’s conscious minds through education and popular culture, deep down our people are already on our side. They feel what we feel. Our task, therefore, is merely to make them conscious of their ethnocentric feelings and morally comfortable with them. That’s no small task, as it goes against the reigning moral traditions of the last two thousand years. But it is encouraging to know that nature is on our side.

There is an abyss between where we are now and the world we want to create. And when you need to leap over an abyss, first you take a step back. Metapolitics is taking a step back from politics and assessing one’s situation and strategy for getting to the other side. And when a group of Swedes, Englishmen, and Americans meet in Hungary to talk about how to save our homelands, that is taking a step back too. I want to thank all of you for making this gathering possible, and I hope we will all have renewed energies as we leap back into the fray.