1,803 words
It’s a tragic thing watching a great nation splinter itself to death. I wonder if it can even be helped? The strong, brilliant center of American culture, which was established and then defended for so long by those of European descent, now appears to the world like the yolk in a cracked egg. Either it’s still whole or it’s rotten . . . we won’t know for sure till Humpty Dumpty has his great fall.
Once upon a time, we were the dominant culture, derived from the waves of Northern European settlers who had come to the New World to break the land and hew a civilization out of a savage landscape. There were other cultures in America, to be sure, but many of these subcultures didn’t so much compete with the dominant culture as compete with each other to see who could best fit in with the dominant culture. We were all Americans, you see. Back then, it was something to be proud of. And if you were not so proud of it, well, there were plenty of social and political pressures to keep you from running your mouth and ruining the party for everyone.
This pressure had an ugly side, I’m sure. But it was this pressure, along with the manifest greatness of the American people and their ingenious political system, which kept the dominant white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon culture dominant for almost two hundred years. Everyone else wanted to be a part of that dominant culture, even if they could never actually become so.
On the night he murdered Emmett Till for flirting with his sister-in-law, J. W. Milam, a white man, drove up to Till’s aunt’s house with a handful of Negroes who understood well enough that Till had gotten himself in trouble for the indecent things he had said to her. These Negroes and many others like them identified more with The Man than with the arrogant, troublemaking members of their own kind who don’t know how to act in front of a white lady.
This is how things are: the center pulls you in like gravity, even if you can never be an integral part of that center.
These days, however, more and more Americans are rather like satellites in orbit, how are being drawn by just as much pressure to break away from the center as they have pulling them in. This is the Splintering Effect. As portions of our population break off from the center and form cultures which compete with the dominant one by virtue of being antithetical to it in many ways, the center gets smaller and weaker, and the less gravitational force it exerts. Instead of a hard, indomitable center for American culture, we now have a smaller, softer center, surrounded by hard, little subcultures which are still being influenced to some extent by the gravity of the dominant culture, but are loyal to themselves first and foremost.
Why is this happening?
The answer occurred to me recently while I was watching a transgender activist and Democratic Party adviser being interviewed on television. He was most concerned about the Trump Administration’s reversal of President Obama’s decision to allow schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms corresponding to the gender they identify with. He called this an outright attack on vulnerable LGBTQ students across the country and referred to President Trump as a monster.
I have never trusted people like this. In my adult life, they have always annoyed me. Growing up, the only people I knew who were like this were black – Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mainly. These are people who make a living based not so much what they do, but who they are. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are professional Negroes. They find a soapbox, they flatter their supporters, and they hector everybody else into ceding to their supporters’ whims. That’s it. In my book, this makes them nothing more than frauds.
This transgender activist is just another in a long line of frauds like Sharpton and Jackson. He bellyaches about the dubious problems of his supporters and wants the rest of us to do something about them. His qualifications are that he is not strictly heterosexual and that he can speak coherently on television. These are hardly qualifications for anything, really. Yet they are enough in today’s world, just like they are enough for Sharpton and Jackson to do what they do. But what is the most fundamental thing these three have in common that makes them frauds?
They seek to achieve influence without earning it.
I can’t think of a pithier way of saying it. These people achieve nothing in any absolute sense, yet act as if they have. They substitute nature for attainment. In effect, they become their own resumes. Sure, some of them pretend to attain things. They become community organizers, or they get advanced degrees in “queer studies,” “African-American studies,” “women’s studies,” and the like. The letters Ph.D. might look dignified after one’s last name, but we all know it’s not real. Reading political tracts disguised as scholarly dissertations, attending protests and rallies, and writing self-righteous and scathing papers which toe a very particular political line are a far cry from studying medicine or engineering, in which all that matters are results. There’s no bottom line, no moment when one is forced to offer data to support one’s claims . . . and no occasion for them to shut up. It is nothing more than cargo-cult mummery.
So how does this all explain the Splintering Effect?
Because it is human nature to obtain as much as possible while doing as little work as possible. This is why we invented the wheel. Why carry or pull something heavy when we can reduce the strain by simply rolling it? This is also why computer engineers invented looping. Why write slight variations on the same piece of code a thousand times when you can simply write it once and tell the computer how many times it should repeat itself?
Honest or industrious people look to reduce the amount of work they have to do with a particular task in order to increase amount of useful work they can accomplish overall. Dishonest or lazy people look to reduce their amount of work because they don’t like to work. So when they are given the opportunity to make a living and gain influence without having to work for it, they take it. It’s human nature.
The Splintering Effect causes these opportunities to arise. If our cultural center were strong enough, its gravity would minimize them. People would not want to break off from the cultural center – or they would be too afraid to. And with fewer people identifying away from the cultural center, you will have fewer frauds attempting to pander to them. I am quite certain that those Negroes who accompanied Milam that night respected the power of the American (or at least the Southern American) cultural center – even though they could never truly be part of it. Men like that would have no time for the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world.
What caused this splintering? I would imagine there are natural and unnatural explanations. In terms of natural explanations, we can look to the general prosperity of our nation. With greater prosperity comes greater freedom, which includes the freedom to pursue less useful and more frivolous activities. Since we are not fighting for survival, our culture can afford to prop up frauds like our transgender activist. Like I said before, it’s human nature.
The unnatural explanation, on the other hand, stems from a loss of faith among whites. At some point during the twentieth century – perhaps after the Second World War – whites deemed it acceptable for people (whites and non-whites alike) to develop other identities. Before this, the general attitude of whites toward non-whites was, “It’s fine that you’re not like us, but act like us as much as possible or keep to yourselves, and everything will be all right.” This was why people like Marcus Garvey and Cesar Chavez had far less of an impact upon mainstream American culture than their black and Hispanic equivalents do today. Once upon a time, whites in America made life difficult for those who didn’t conform to their standards and values.
f course, once the splintering really got rolling in the 1960s, it was impossible to stop. Looking back, it almost seems inevitable that our once strong and monolithic central culture has splintered into something much smaller and weaker.
There’s an additional – and quite nasty – drawback to all this. As freedom increases for those who identify as being separate from the central culture, freedom decreases for those who remain in the center. This is something I am sure everyone on the Alt Right knows firsthand. The number of things conservatives and Right-wingers are not allowed to say or do is growing almost weekly in contemporary America. It’s almost, but not quite yet, gotten to the point of oppression.
So what should whites do about this? First, we should eschew the splintering game entirely. In other words, we must never enter such an orbit ourselves as embittered minorities in the same manner as blacks, feminists, transgender people, and every other satellite culture we see these days. This may seem unlikely now, but I’m sure it won’t in thirty years, once whites become a minority in America. Instead, we should never forget that we are the mainstream. We are that hard, central culture around which everything revolves. Without us, it wouldn’t exist, which is why we cannot be replaced. Hence in the future, we should never rally around a white Al Sharpton who wishes only to make a living pilfering the public coffers for the benefit of his supporters. That would imply that there is a cultural center consisting of people other than ourselves, which can only mean a vastly inferior center than the one we have now. We should never agree to live in such a world.
As our limitations increase and our influence decreases, the more we as whites should coalesce into the hard cultural center of our ancestors, albeit on a smaller scale than before. We should also shuck off the splintered satellite cultures which now intend to destroy us as quickly as possible. Resolutions such as these should sound familiar to people on the Alt Right because they are absolutely essential to White Nationalism. They are the repudiation of the Splintering Effect and the fraudulent behavior it engenders. They are also a call to return to how things were before things got so culturally and racially confused.
This basically means that, as white people, we should find a way to start over. And when we do, we should be on our guard against the dangers of the Splintering Effect.
10 comments
Culture as such is a big “Begriff” because everything is culture. As such, an individual white ethnostate is inherently culture, and you yourself are the source for what all white people should ascend ideally. But, in times of decadence in quite every manner, the perfect rolemodel can’t predeposit the position of fellow white people.
How do you want to connect to people like the male swedes, who are, openly said in leftist media, less aggressive than an australian woman because of culture? Nobody can talk with those people, at least I am refuging to such ignorance. The same counts for south- and northamericans.
As I said, culture is quite omnipresent, and I am learning a lot about European culture when I read counter currents especially, and it is a whole lot more. But when I am thinking of American ‘culture’, I’m thinking about Clint Eastwood and Andy Warhol, Rockwell and jewish behavior, liberalism. Get your shit together, Americans. Nuanced, it is all your fucking fault, and you are culturally splitted like Israel. Fucking deal with it, you’re the germ!
What I really hate is the plausabilization about group behavior and such things. It’s a pain in the arse when experts want to define social things. Seriously, it’s a misery.
Find your polarity goy! We’re drowning.
“But when I am thinking of American ‘culture’, I’m thinking about Clint Eastwood and Andy Warhol, Rockwell and jewish behavior, liberalism. Get your shit together, Americans. Nuanced, it is all your fucking fault, and you are culturally splitted like Israel. Fucking deal with it, you’re the germ!”
As an American living in Europe, hardly can I dispute what you say. Yet I must respond that America did not spring of the void; it is not as if it was born of some mysterious seed preexisting in the soil of the New World. America is a European phenomenon, it comes of European roots and origins; it is the product of European philosophies and European peoples. If Europe suffers now from American influence—and truly, I believe it does—it is all the more absurd for Europe to blame America for this fact. It would be like the aborigene who, when struck in the head by the boomerang he himself has thrown, curses the boomerang.
America is not the germ, as you say; at most, it is the rampant disease. We must seek the germ nowhere but in Europe.
As an American also living in Europe, you have a point, but it’s much more accurate to say that America is derived not from Europe, but really from the British liberal and economic traditions (and those French thinkers which were influenced by it). Hence why the Conservative Revolutionaries in Germany emphasized the fact that Germans should more naturally be tilted eastward, towards Russia, rather than toward French and British ideals. The liberal and capitalist traditions are what need to be rejected (or at least transformed, since I think it’s far too late to try to end them entirely).
At the same time, however, was American society really problematic prior to the mid-19th century? It seems to me that it worked quite well until progressives began interfering with it – the Civil War being one of the first and most blatant manifestations of these encroaching changes. So even there I don’t think it’s so simplistic as to say that America was bad from its foundations – even though the seeds of what it later became were already planted there.
I agree altogether with your clarification, Mr. Morgan, and I am most pleased to hear the thoughts of another American this side of the Atlantic. Britain’s role in the establishment of the liberal tradition is indisputable, and there is no question that the United States takes its relevant customs and proclivities from that tradition in particular. And Germany was surely in many ways the last to succumb to the same.
Nonetheless—if I might respond to a clarification with a clarification—the classic liberal philosophers were hardly restricted to Britain and France. They arose in Germany also in Kant and Marx, and in the Netherlands, in Spinoza and Erasmus. Thomas Mann himself, when he was still an enemy of liberalism, made an Italian, not a Frenchman or an Englishman, into the mouthpiece for liberal doctrine in The Magic Mountain—which, given the number of liberal developments which have issued from that country, is wholly justifiable. One might make a good case that Hobbes himself derived many of his ideas from Machiavelli, thus locating the first origin of liberalism considerably farther South than England, or even France. And even supposing the origins of liberalism are to be found predominately or exclusively in those two countries, one must still explain how and why liberalism gained such impressive influence throughout the entirety of Europe—which certainly cannot be said for the better part of the non-Occidental world. Liberalism is a European phenomenon, one way or another—and America is the same.
So far as American history goes, I would be the last to say it was rotten from the start—though I suspect that the seeds to which you allude could not have matured into any other fruit than that which we now must taste in such quantity. The question is whether a republic like America’s first government can long hold at bay the progressive influence? Or whether there is not something within the idea of republicanism as such which makes progressivism ineluctable?
I agree that it would be overly simplistic to say that liberalism/progressivism ONLY originated from France and Britain. As you say, the ideas which underpin them came from many sources. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that liberalism, and capitalism as we know it today, arose, triumphed politically, and eventually flourished in those two nations first, and were initially spread into the rest of Europe, and eventually the world (under the auspices of British imperialism and the French Revolution), by them. Therefore Britain and France share a much larger share of the responsibility than do any other nations. This is not to say that we have to reject them entirely, but if we want to trace the roots of how the world got to its present situation, they lie in those two nations. And it’s not difficult to see the enormous debt that the US owes to those two countries in terms of its traditions.
Nevertheless, you are correct to say that the fact that Europeans everywhere, both East and West, have embraced liberalism can’t be blamed solely on outside forces. (Although we can’t ignore the fact that America has kept all of Western Europe under its thumb – militarily [including through invasion and occupation in some cases], culturally, and politically – for over 70 years now, and has been seeking to replicate this same success in the East for nearly 30 years now, either.) This is why I say that at best we can only hope to change liberalism, not reverse it entirely. It may be true that republicanism inherently leads to progressivism, I’m not sure offhand, but I also know that there is no Western nation that will accept any other form of government at the present point in history, so we have to work with what’s at hand. Although it is interesting to wonder if that is the case.
We won’t be able to take part in the Splintering anyway as it was specifically tailored to take us down. We won’t the able to turn the cannons in the other direction, they are bolted into the ground.
This is not to be black pilled or take the darwinist route of only the best survive (to be overwhelmed by numbers), I guess its an obstacle that asks for imagination as well as sheer guts.
America itself was never about Europeans or whites, it was about making money. This place was called “The Plantations” for god’s sake! Any sense of nationalism or racial solidarity was an after thought. In the end it does not matter if you believe that or not, its all myths and narratives anyway. I guess we have to make our own and hope/work hard for enough people to believe it and to have an impact.
A very interesting article, Mr. Quinn. I might suggest the addition of an idea to your thesis, which I perceive as essential to it.
I perceive the following problem with your thesis: aristocratic epochs tend precisely to “substitute nature for attainment,” and to believe that what a man is, is immeasurably more important than merely what he does, because what he does depends decisively on, and follows directly from, what he is. At most, the deed is, for the great-souled man, a chance to prove his quality, or even to revel in it; but never is it primary. Yet it goes without saying that aristocratic times do not suffer the kind of fragmentation you rightly draw our attention to. What then is the specific difference between our time and times of aristocracy, which has permitted this “splintering effect” of which you speak?
I believe it must be sought in the dogma of human equality, the most democratic of all dogmas. Only within the context of the dogma of equality is the contemporary liberal idea of “identity” at all possible or meaningful. Then it follows we can only get out of this fragmentation, we can only extract ourselves from it, insofar as we are willing and able to critique the dogma of equality, both in our philosophies and, with greater difficulty yet, in our very spirits.
” The strong, brilliant center of American culture, which was established and then defended for so long by those of European descent…”
I wouldn’t call what American institutions did in defense of Western culture a defense, it is best described as a complete betrayal. Where were the leaders that should have been generated by the political, Christian, and military institutions; where were the masses of whites flooding the streets, committing acts of violence in defense of our race, and nations. You only see that kind of activity on the far-left side. There has been some serious criminal negligence on the part of our leaders, and institutions.
Interesting hypothesis. However, the author never mentions that the “Splintering Effect” would not happen were it not for the (((Splinterers))). My belief is that this sort of cultural decay is NOT inevitable, but is incited and promoted by (((those))) whose sole aim is to bring down that which they hate and can never be. Yes, the white race – far more than any other – suffers from an overabundance of altruism which, ironically, is one of the most important necessities in founding and maintaining a higher civilization. But, when used AGAINST us, as we see being done with open-border immigration and open-morality culture, it is a self-inflicted poison.
I have a saying… “When anything goes — EVERYTHING goes.”
A few weeks ago, in a local sports bar, I was watching one of those “talking heads” programs in which they reviewed a video in which a young white boy, approximately six years old was forced to wrestle a girl of the same age. Now, the young boy knew that this was the wrong thing to do, so he ran away from the girl as long as he could. It was painful to watch this young white boy run in circles, trying to do the right thing, while spectators in the stands laughed. Eventually, the white girl caught him, she was a little larger, and so was able to pin him. This is what the jews want, to destroy gender differences, whether it be in the movies with the common motif of the strong alpha female, or in the current armed forces, in which white females are used as front line troops (I don’t care about non-white females, they can use them for cannon fodder all they want). The jews want to destroy all racial, and gender differences, it gives them a larger pool of drones to be used in defense of Israel.
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