The Splintering Effect

1,803 words

[1]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.