Counter-Currents
Gabriël Metsu, Man Writing a Letter, circa 1664-1666
2,716 words
I grew up in an incredibly small, overwhelmingly Southern Baptist town. The kind of place where almost everyone had some idea of when any given person in town had or hadn’t walked up in the main church (stationed straight across from the main grocery store) during the altar call to ask the Holy Spirit to come into their hearts, and “conservatism” meant being among the people keeping track more than anything else.
It was more important that your attitude towards the War on Terror was hope that Jesus and the Holy Spirit would guide George W. Bush to lead our country in “the right direction” (whatever that was) rather than having any sort of meaningful opinions about any of the policies themselves. These people weren’t “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” types; they genuinely hoped that, before it was all over and we did whatever had to be done, as many Muslims as possible would be saved.
Obviously, I had no idea yet what I was, but I sure as hell knew I wasn’t that — so it was only natural that my search for alternatives caused me to end up drifting towards the Left. Sure, like many others, I went through a libertarian phase as well. But the influences on libertarianism were heavily Leftist in spirit during this time anyway. Gary Johnson was already stating on record that libertarians are more naturally allied with progressives than with the Right, and this was the predominant mindset of most of the libertarians I personally knew. Regular contributors to the libertarian groups I was in eventually went on to design Left-wing anarchist websites with names like Abolish Work.
Save the odd comment from a Walter Block or a Hans-Hermann Hoppe (those crazy old curmudgeonly uncles of the group whose comments people were often fondly amused of, but rarely persuaded by), libertarianism was full of what were essentially just young, naive progressives who disagreed about what economic policies would best achieve progressive goals — people who really meant it when they said they wanted to eliminate the minimum wage so that more black teenagers could get jobs.
In other words, the only alternatives within reach were essentially one or another flavor of leftism. It was either “I want to save Muslims from eternal damnation in Hell for holding the wrong abstract, theological beliefs,” or “I want to save Muslims from eternal damnation to a world dominated by U.S. imperialism.” I don’t think anyone here can blame me for having felt at the age of 20 that the latter option was a hell of a lot less insane than the former (in fact, I still think it is). I didn’t end up where I am now because I discovered some new proposition that was being positively declared by some new group, and deciding that I agreed with it. I ended up where I am now because I discovered through experience who my real enemies are.
Had you asked me even a year ago, I never would have imagined that race would become such a prevalent topic in my writing. As I will discuss at length elsewhere, the Trayvon Martin case played an important role in my red-pilling. But the first thing I actually invested energy in writing was a ~100,000 word introduction and tour through philosophy of mind that eventually branched into a detailed analysis of the data from near-death experiences, where I defended the “reality” of these experiences against the claim that it’s obvious they’re simply the “phantasmagoria of a dying brain.”
I did write a couple of articles dealing with race early on. One demonstrated that a given white person is actually more likely to be shot per encounter with police than a given black person is. (The statistic ends up out of proportion to the white and black percentages of the population because there are more “given black persons” ending up in encounters with police than “given white persons” — and as I also show, this is not out of proportion to the black and white crime rates. While this is obvious to most sane people, it isn’t inherently obvious that this factor would be completely sufficient to account for the entirety of the black/white police shooting gap, or that the available evidence basically leaves no room for racism as even a supplementary factor alongside it.) The other demonstrated that the war on drugs actually came about because of the agitation of black victims of drug violence, and not because white lawmakers decided to use it as a pretext for jailing non-whites (against the claims of most liberals and libertarians).
But that was it, and as far as I was concerned, that could just as well have been the end of the focus on race in my writings. I moved on to an article discussing a feminist publication’s claim that women are “disproportionately victimized” because crime rates are falling faster for men than they are for women, even though there are still more men dying from acts of violence than women, as there have been for decades. (Karen Straughan ended up adding a comment to that one, which I’ll admit I was quite proud of.)
Another article discussed the fact that the gender sentencing gap that favors women for lighter sentences than men is much larger than the racial sentencing gap that favors whites for lighter sentences than blacks, in which I made the argument that these statistics prove that “black men in the criminal justice system share more in ‘oppression’ with white men on account of being male than they share in oppression with black women thanks to their race — and white men share more in oppression with black men on account of being male than they share in privilege with white women thanks to their race.” The idea was to work towards building a critique of the “social justice” narrative as a whole; but race, as I still saw it even then, was only a small part of that picture.
Now, I’m not sure if I am technically “a” White Nationalist or not. That probably depends on your definition.
I wrote an essay I titled “Ethnonationalism for Normies” to explain that I do think there are virtues to the position — I don’t think ethnonationalists are, by any means, bad people who are doing something inherently dirty by wanting to move towards an ethnonationalist state. At worst, if I were to decide that I didn’t want to live in an ethnonationalist state, they would be people who share a preference I happen not to fully share — like people who enjoy loud psychedelic trance music and want nothing more than to go to a place like Burning Man where they can be surrounded by others who share that preference too. Even if that wasn’t my own personal taste, why the hell would I want to go out of my way to shut down Burning Man? Someone who would try to do that would be my enemy, whether I had personally planned to attend the event or not.
Even as a libertarian, I always was at least sympathetic when people would express watered down perspectives like “why couldn’t we just put a whites-only area over here, and a blacks-only area over there, and an Asian-only area over there, and a mixed area in the middle, and then let people go to whichever one they want? Obviously all of us will end up in the mixed region, but still; why the hell not? If nothing else, then everyone in the mixed area could live in peace and not have to worry about the racists who’d run off to the other regions.”
Obviously, it’s clear from the content of my articles that I share many concerns held by White Nationalists. The mainstream media and academia do in fact quite often express bias against the white majority and in favor of narratives that imply a worldview in which, simultaneously, all races are exactly the same and only environmental circumstances ever cause us to appear to act differently; and yet whites are uniquely prone to commit evil against everyone else. The races are exactly equal in goodness, strength, truthfulness, and morality! — and yet until the evil white man who unlike everyone else is too stupid and vain to recognize it stepped onto the scene, we all understood this a long time ago.
These narratives would be disastrous if taken seriously, precisely because they are false. We have articles in the mainstream press touting a study that claimed that white conservatives are “more likely to kill you” than Islamic terrorists (which, as I show, is sheer nonsense) and studies claiming that blacks are discriminated against per se in job hiring which are surprisingly easy to refute. This bias is even, in large part, responsible for the very economic crash of 2007–2008 that the U.S. is still recovering from, so it’s hardly some small, trifling matter. And yes, there are also undeniably very clear double standards in what we’re allowed and supposed to say about the socioeconomic successes of whites versus Jews, and that has to mean something.
Now, it’s not that I hold some strong sentimental attachment to civic nationalism deep down inside my heart — I’m just not quite convinced yet that we can’t comfortably secure our interests through what Greg Johnson calls “metapolitics” alone — in the cultural realm in which we expose truths like these with intelligence and explain and defend them with integrity — without actually needing to adopt any explicitly “White Nationalist” policies. If, even according to White Nationalists themselves, Jews can do such a great job of securing their own interests in even the most diverse societies as a minority, well . . . why can’t we?
I think I actually represent a rather normal, boring everyday “white perspective” in that I don’t want to live in places exposed to high levels of crime (well, duh), and I don’t want “activists” allowed to block the highways I need to drive on to get to work (well, duh) — but unless and until political violence of that sort enters the picture, I really am approximately as “colorblind” as it’s possible for a human to be in my everyday personal relationships.
But now, consider this: I’ve had extended conversations with Greg about my points of agreement and disagreement with full-blown White Nationalism. These conversations were polite, civil, interesting, and never once devolved into accusations that anyone was a piece of shit because of their perspective. You could argue that compared to mainstream arrangement, I have similar degrees of agreement and disagreement with vegans — I would love to see the kinds of industrial slaughterhouses we have in the United States today wiped off the face of the Earth, and while I ultimately prefer them being replaced with things like holistic grazing rather than exclusively vegan agriculture, that still places me far closer to vegans than mainstream society in terms of what we ultimately want, at least compared to where we are now.
So why is that White Nationalists have welcomed me whereas vegans usually treat me like scum of the earth despite how deeply I share one of the largest planks of their ultimate goals which mainstream society stands against them on? Why don’t we find ourselves in even strategic alliances? How many vegan communities do you think would welcome me as a speaker on the horrors of modern concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) if I was open about the fact that I’m actually undecided about adopting a vegan diet?
I think the answer really is as simple as that White Nationalists are ironically far more “tolerant” people as people than the stereotypes would have you believe.
Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been working through an intensely difficult personal situation. Just recently, my wife has been dealing with resurfacing memories of the childhood rape that left her with lifelong PTSD. And I’ve been talking openly about my own experiences with mental illness as I battle alternating waves of Tony Soprano-level panic attacks, temporary but repeated and serious episodes of chronic fatigue and depression, attacks of something I can’t find any explanation for besides auras from temporal lobe seizures that have literally given me half-hour episodes of physical inability to speak, and more.
Based on all of this, one would imagine I would have found a better home somewhere on Tumblr than anywhere within the political “Right.” But — I’m sure partly because anyone close to me can see that I am fighting these things, and not just trying to wrap them around me like a blanket as the entire definition of my identity henceforth — I’ve found a tremendous amount of personal support from people I’ve met through these political networks (including Greg himself). I’ve only had a couple of people imply judgmentally that I deserve what I get if I don’t just pick myself up by my bootstraps, and because I treated them like human beings and simply explained what I’m actually going through in response to their comments without resorting to self-righteous moral objection because they dared say such an offensive thing, even they ended up joining the ranks of those on my side and sincerely trying to figure out how to help.
And at the same time that I’ve found those experiences so remarkable for changing my expectations, I’ve run into two liberals who were sharing those old “Right-wing extremists are more likely to kill you than Muslim extremists” article. In response to their posts of those articles, I linked to my rebuttal (for which I literally read through the entire database and looked at each case that was classified as “Islamic” or “Right-wing” terrorism to see what grounds the authors had for doing so) — and I was immediately faced with spit-spraying screams accusing me of having committed the unforgivable moral sin of racism, and treated like I was either a dangerous monster or a prejudiced idiot with zero possibility of redemption from there on. All this for correcting the statistics on per capita rates of ideologically motivated violence between these two groups that they were interested in first, because of another article that did it badly — an article they liked when they thought its conclusion reflected badly on whites. And as soon as I show that the very numbers they wanted to wave so haughtily around against whites actually do in fact reflect more poorly on Muslims than they do on white conservatives, they immediately act like I’m scum beneath even continuing to converse with.
“Democrats are the real racists”-type arguments might suck as a rhetorical strategy, but to be perfectly frank, I still think there’s a large grain of truth to them. They’re the ones who are motivated into their conclusions by race itself. They’re the reason I can’t just write a simple article or two addressing racial topics and move on, because after I write that first couple of articles, from then on what I think about those topics is basically the entirety of who I am to them, whether I want it to be or not.
While we have plenty of room in our regular understanding of the world for the person who holds all the “correct” progressive beliefs about race but is a hypocrite because he still choosee to live in a nice, liberal, secluded white area and effectively acts like a white separatist in his actual private life (like the notorious anti-racist “white” guy Tim Wise), there is no room for the person who doesn’t hold all those “correct” progressive beliefs about race and instead holds a whole host of “offensive” ones, and yet nonetheless doesn’t “practice racism” in his personal life at all, still treating anyone he’s admitted into his personal circle the same regardless of race.
If I were black, would I prefer a Tim Wise who gives a speech with themes I like and then packs up to go sleep at a home placed as far away from me and my town as possible, or a Chuck Norris who would meet me at a Texas Roadhouse to talk honestly about his “offensive” beliefs? The “politically correct” Left is full of Tim Wises, but the “politically incorrect” Right is full of Chuck Norrises, as well. And Leftists really can’t seem to wrap their heads around either archetype.
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11 comments
I’m glad you write for CC. I look forward to more of articles.
Mr. Cassiel,
in regards to your health problems I would like to share some information with you, that might be helpful.
This won’t make your panic attacks disappear, but you will be more aware about what causes them, i.e. what your body is reacting to, which in turn will help you to be more calm, etc.: Topic: Barometric pressure and anxiety; I’m a human barometer! http://www.anxietyzone.com/index.php?topic=89964.0
”I have had many similar experiences, and i tend to have my worst anxiety during the times of year when we have severe wind and pressure changes. ”
” I have the same issue. I get extreme vertigo and migraines from rapid barometric pressure changes. Really, the best advice I have you already have done: Recognize that its from the barometric pressure change. Then next time you start to feel that way, go to this site: http://www.weather.gov/ type in your zip code in the top left corner. then look at the 3 day history and see that indeed, the barometric pressure has been changing rapidly.
Its what I do. I actually have it bookmarked. But really, you can start to notice these symptoms in advance… sometimes even a day in advance, usually in a more minor form…
What I’m trying to say is, it may get worse in the next few hours. if it does, try not to get too concerned.”
Also, start taking iodine drops:
When depression starts in the neck http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/when-depression-starts-in-the-neck
”When thyroid hormone levels are low, many organs and internal systems slow down, creating a wide range of symptoms — including depression.”
Also check out ”Inclined Bed Therapy”:
All Testimonials fibromyalgia http://inclinedbedtherapy.com/testimonials/52?view=category
That’s really interesting. I found some scientific support for the idea here, as well.
I’ve noticed that my symptoms tend to get much worse in hotter and more humid weather, and that I’ve felt the best I’ve felt since these symptoms started living near beaches (on both the East and West coast)—in other words, at sea level—where it’s possible to get sunlight (and avoid falling off the other side of the rope into SAD symptoms) with relatively low heat. I tend to notice a substantial improvement in my state of mind just before (and during) storms. And it looks like there’s a pretty damn reliable correlation between altitude and suicide rates as well. High up in the mountains in Georgia is clearly not the most ideal location for me, but ironically the very symptoms made worse by being there make it even harder for me to work my way out.
Let me answer one of your questions:
“If, even according to White Nationalists themselves, Jews can do such a great job of securing their own interests in even the most diverse societies as a minority, well . . . why can’t we?”
Because it’s just not sustainable. Even Jews are seeing increased rates of intermarriage and assimilation, and they’re the most ethnocentric people on Earth. They sustain their identity in the diaspora by constantly defaming and vilifying (White) gentiles as seething with “virulent anti-Semitism” that might jump on them at a moment’s notice. Obviously this isn’t a healthy mentality, and not one we would want to replicate. More importantly, the success of Jews in a multicultural society hinges precisely on the fact that these societies are highly dysfunctional. If you’re a small, specialized and privileged minority, you can escape to your little gated neighborhoods and continue to wield social, political and economic influence unopposed, while the rest of the population is locked in a struggle for living space, jobs, status, and political representation. Obviously, this doesn’t work for Whites, who belong to a wide range of socio-economic classes, and who are the necessary scapegoats diverting attention from Jewish power, and the overall dysfunction of the multicultural system. Most importantly however, multiculturalism makes for an uncohesive society (as demonstrated for ex. by Robert Putnam’s work), and one replete with ethnic nepotism and tribal politics. This isn’t sustainable, and it can’t last forever. And in the meantime it’s not very pleasant to live in.
And lastly, it’s just ugly. Visit a homogenous, historic European ethnostate like Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Iceland, etc., and then go back to a major U.S. city like Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York. You’ll see what I mean.
I basically agree with everything you’ve said here, and I think it goes without saying that I’d rather live in Iceland than Chicago. I also think biology is part of the explanation of why ethnically homogenous areas will tend to have superior outcomes to more diverse ones. However, there are still some “diverse” areas I’d rather live in than some ethnically homogeneous ones.
One question we’re dealing with is how destructive “diversity” per se is. A separate question we’re dealing with is how destructive different types of “diversity” are. And I think studies like Putnam’s are conflated between these two questions because of the fact that increasing “diversity” in practice today mostly means increasing the immigration of lower–IQ, less conscientious populations into established communities. But I’m not sure that has to be so, and it’s not clear how much changes when it isn’t so.
For one thing, even if traits like IQ and conscientiousness are largely biologically fixed for individuals, average group differences are still malleable over the long run. I always like to make the point when talking about average group differences on traits like these that if we killed off the top 20% of a group high in these traits every few years and killed off the bottom 20% of group lower in them, the average position of the two groups would reverse within a few decades, and we could end up in a world full of industrious Pakistani geniuses and slow, lazy Ashkenazi failures.
Now, I’m not proposing we implement eugenics through mass murder, but simply taking the idea of removing criminals from the reproductive population through incarceration seriously alone can go a long way—whether we even change the moral consensus around things like sterilizing inmates or not. Crime rates have been falling across the board for the past several decades—including amongst blacks—and against the claims of critics, the increased incarceration rate over the periods of time in question is beyond doubt one of the biggest explanations for this.
When you look solely at places where different groups are reasonably matched for traits like IQ and industriousness, you do get far less ethnic conflict—at the extreme, picture a place like Hollywood, where only the most successful subset of all racial groups are even able to interact with each other at all. I’m sure there are still complaints to be made about the effects of diversity in places like these, but it also most certainly doesn’t get as ugly as a place like Chicago. And the problems that do emerge seem to revolve around ideological conflicts leftist whites are, unfortunately, as capable of creating and contributing to as anyone. I’ve certainly known almost–exclusively white parts of California that I think you’d have about as miserable a time in as you would in some other more diverse areas.
In short: on the one hand, we can talk a lot about how idealistically we’d like the process of establishing ethnostates to play out, but we’ve all heard plenty of similar idealistic talk from advocates of diversity, and to me they can often both sound roughly similar. I think both idealistic hopes have roughly similar possibilities of playing out as expected, and similar likelihoods of going awry. I suppose I’ve yet to be successfully red–pilled on the history of Germany, as I’d still personally be inclined to use Nazi Germany as an example of ethnonationalism going awry.
But in the end, the position I come down to is that whether either ideal can be made to work ultimately depends on the reasonableness of the people trying to make it work. Put it this way: if you have really smart people sincerely trying to run diverse areas, and really crappy people trying to establish ethnostates, the former will probably have somewhat more success than the latter. And if you have really smart people sincerely trying to establish ethnostates, and really crappy people trying to run diverse areas, the former will also probably have more success than the latter. And what it comes down to lately is that I’ve lost faith in the particular way that the particular people who want to run diverse areas will do it (for God’s sakes, we can’t even admit that taking criminals out of the gene pool through the ethically and legally legitimate means of incarceration as punishment for crime is a good thing—feminists can’t even get on board with that idea in the context of rape, despite overwhelming indication that sexual violence is in fact influenced by specific genes directly related to those offenses, when that’s the one thing you’d hope they’d be good for). That means I’m at least a passive ally of the alternative right—and I’d like to find myself in a position where I feel warranted to become a much more active ally. People like Greg give me hope for that possibility, which is how I ended up here. But the counter–movement is still relatively small, which first means it selects for a certain kind of above–average personality in the first place, and second makes quality control far easier than it eventually ends up becoming in a large “uncontrolled” mass movement. So I’m nervous about what will happen when white nationalism becomes large enough to actually implement itself here in the real world for just exactly the same reasons I’m skeptical of democracy as we have it in the first place.
So, to answer the question “How do we fix Chicago?” I think more than one political strategy could do it, but the real answer depends in no insignificant part on who’s actually in control of the process of trying to fix it. And that’s something that nobody can really control once an abstract idea becomes a mass movement—something that democratic means will devolve to the lowest common denominator, and authoritarian means carry extremely high potential for nepotism and abuse.
To wrap all of this up, then, probably what a lot of it boils down to is that I’m a political skeptic in general, and my approach is probably somewhat similar to Jack Donovan’s in that my priority is to find and support my own personal “clan” well before it comes anywhere close to wanting to change the world outside my own walls (although I’d like to see a world where everyone has similar freedom to join whatever “clans” involving whatever rules they’d prefer, and forced diversity is obviously an obstacle to that). In any case, for now I’ve found the closest thing to my own personal “clan” on anything approaching a political level that I’ve seen yet.
I’ve yet to see evidence that anyone, no matter how smart, can fix a place with demographics like Chicago. Innate group tendencies evolved over tens of thousands of years, probably more, and thus always win out. Eugenic measures like removing the worst 20% don’t factor in regression to the mean. If I understood correctly, your opposition to ethnonationalism is on the grounds of skepticism that something so idealistic as an ethnostate can work (as if there have never been any). But it strikes me as far more idealistic to believe that someone can turn this big, bloated multiracial boat around before things get beyond fixing. The only way to fix Detroit at this point is kick everyone who lives there out and start anew. As for ethnostates? They work. Which is why I left North America and moved to the parentland. It’s not everything, but at least I know I’ll still have a country to save in twenty-five years from now.
Chicago as it exists today is already a result of bad leadership and policy. I don’t think someone can inherit that and turn it into something beautiful overnight. But if you put someone in power there who understands how to play the long-run game and accepts the influence of things like environment, education, *and* genes on human behavior, and somewhere else you let white power race war types try to establish an ethnosociety, I do think there’s a pretty good chance that the former would turn out looking better than the latter in the end. Even if it took, say, 80-100 years. Of course regression to the mean is a real phenomena, but if it had the implication you imply when you try to use it to refute my suggestion – to suggest that long-term change is impossible – that at least is obviously false, or else human beings couldn’t have evolved into being in the first place.
I don’t inherently prefer an “ethnostate” type approach more or less than something like, say, a “soft eugenics” type approach (implement generous maternity leave in proportion to the traits of the mother – higher scores on IQ, conscientiousness, and so forth equal more incentives; explicitly remove criminals from the gene pool and admit that prison is partially a means to this end, to help remove criminal tendencies from the next generation; tie welfare to disincentives to reproduction; and so on – but also take things like lead contamination in the environment very seriously). I think either type of approach *can* work, and *can* fail, and whether they do one or the other depends on how many intelligent quality people you have around with the will to try them and how many low-quality people you have around who want to get involved and muck it up. So I’ll adapt to wherever it looks like those people are. If we were to be transported to the 1920’s, there’s a damn good chance I’d be a liberal. Today – right now – the ethnonationalist right looks to me like the most reasonable hope. But in some ways for me that’s more circumstantial than ideological as such. That’s all.
I hope that makes what I was actually trying to argue a little clearer.
I guess my point was that trying to create a successful multiracial society with demographics like those in the U.S. is something unprecedented, and which has met with failure every time that it’s been tried, whereas ethnostates have been successfully formed, and remain successful to this day. I have to wonder why anyone would prefer to torture themselves and their people over a long period of time for the faint hope of overcoming inherited racial differences, when establishing a nation-state seems both more feasible, and is in so many ways more beautiful and wholesome in its end result. I guess I’m speaking as someone with close connections to an Old World nation, but I just can’t fathom why anyone would prefer to spend the next century in Chicago trying to make it work, when they have the option to rebuild a great, historic nation instead.
According to my proprietary “Counter-Currents Author Rankings” (basically, running a EWMA through the monthly Top 20 Articles data), Aedon Cassiel was already, as of Aug-2016, the 6th-ranked contributor to the site, following a meteoric four-month rise.
Dear Aedon,
I love these kinds of “Why I Write” articles. Very glad to see your work here and surprised that you are such a recent arrival.
My reasons for writing here are too simple to make an article out of…basically achieve the 14 words and that can only happen after the expulsion of the majority of the Organized Jewish Community and the dismantling of their power structure. (Also, I’m too long-winded and serious to write at The Daily Stormer.)
Best of luck to you and your wife. I remember when I learned why most toasts are “to your health,” because if that’s not where it should be, then nothing else is either.
Hope to meet you in person some day,
PLB
Great article. Keep them coming.
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