Counter-Currents
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Greg Johnson’s address at the Seventh Northwest Forum, March 24, 2018.
There are contexts in which diversity is a good thing. For instance, diversity of goods in the marketplace, diversity of options in life, diversity of opinions in politics and academia, and a diversity of points of view on juries for awarding prizes or deciding court cases.
But in the context of contemporary politics, diversity means something very specific, namely integrating a variety of different races and ethnic groups into the same society or institution. Diversity also refers to integrating women and sexual minorities into institutions that traditionally excluded them, such as the military. Obviously, one can imagine a society without racial and ethnic diversity, but one cannot imagine a society without both men and women. One can, however, imagine a society in which men and women have fairly distinct social realms and roles.
Multiculturalism, multiracialism, feminism, and the LGBTQ agenda constitute the primary sense of diversity today. The people promoting it often have very little use for diversity of opinions and freedom of choice. This politically correct version of diversity is my focus here.
It is no exaggeration to say that praising diversity is the civil religion of our time. Whereas in the past, it was obligatory for everyone—especially the ambitious and powerful—to pay lip service to Christianity, today people compete to offer the most fulsome praise and heartfelt professions of faith to the God of diversity. Beginning with Bill Clinton, US Presidents—Republican and Democrat—have repeated the mantra that “diversity is America’s greatest strength.” Not just any strength, but our greatest strength.
Even as the military, police, and fire departments lower standards of physical strength to increase diversity, they proclaim that their true strength lies in diversity itself. Indeed, in 2007, General George Casey, then in command of all US troops in Iraq, proclaimed that “I firmly believe that the strength of our Army comes from our diversity.”[1] Not weapons, not technology, not training, not the muscles and character of men, not the unity of a common purpose. But diversity. Let us hope this theory is never tested in battle against a serious opponent.
Even as educational institutions lower admissions and graduation standards, gut curricula of demanding classes, create entire disciplines to give degrees and academic jobs to members of marginalized identity groups, and spend vast sums on minority recruitment and diversity propaganda, they claim that education is stronger than ever because of all the diversity, even though by all objective measures, society is spending more on education and people are learning less than ever before.
The same delusional thinking is rampant throughout every other sector of society: business, religion, charities, the arts, etc.
White Nationalists oppose diversity. We want racially and culturally homogenous homelands for all white peoples. Because our views go against the whole cultural and political mainstream, White Nationalists need to have a good answer to the question “What’s wrong with diversity?” I wish to offer four reasons why diversity would be a bad thing, even if whites were not threatened with extinction.
1. Diversity Means White Dispossession
The first and foremost reason why diversity is bad is quite simple. Whenever we talk about increasing diversity in a community or a business or a church or a school, that is always a euphemism for having fewer white people. Why in the world would white people think that’s desirable? There’s no really good answer to that.
So when someone says, “You’ve got a nice little town here—it’s affluent, it’s clean, it’s friendly—but it lacks a certain diversity,” the proper answer is: “So, you think there are too many white people here? What’s wrong with white people? Why don’t you like white people?”
Now some might respond that they don’t wish to decrease the number of white people. They just want to add some spice. But this reply assumes that there’s no such thing as scarcity, so that you can add new people to a community without increasing costs and decreasing benefits to the people who are already there. Yet it is legitimate to ask if increasing diversity will take away opportunities from whites while increasing the traffic, crime, alienation, conflict, and other social burdens.
Beyond that, even if someone says he does not wish to decrease the absolute number of white people, he is still maintaining that there are too many white people as a percentage of the overall population. So demand to know why he wants the white population to be diluted.
If diversity just means white dispossession, then obviously it’s a bad thing for white people. Obviously white people were bound to start resenting it. Now we are starting to resist it. White Nationalism is simply the inevitable resistance to the anti-white ethnic cleansing that we call diversity. Welcome to the resistance.
Of course increasing diversity is bad for the native peoples of any land, not just whites. When Whites came to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, weren’t they just increasing the diversity of the place? My first ancestor to arrive in the Americans set foot in Jamestown in 1618. He was fleeing oppression and poverty. He was trying to build a better life for himself and his family. And he was bringing diversity to the New World. But whites never get any credit for that. It’s always described as colonialism and genocide when whites do it. Isn’t it just as bad when non-whites do it to us.?
2. Diversity Weakens All Institutions
Diversity, we are told, will strengthen literally everything. Presumably this strength means that every institution touched by diversity will perform its function better. Neighborhoods will be better places to live. Governments will better promote justice and harmony. Schools will better educate and train students. Hospitals will better heal the sick. Armies and police will produce more security. Firemen and EMTs will save more lives. Churches will save more souls. Businesses will produce more profits. And so forth.
But this makes no sense. Every institution is defined by its goals. Thus to function well, every institution must find people who are good at promoting its goals. Teachers have to teach. Firemen have to fight fires. Soldiers have to fight enemies. Etc. The primary criterion for hiring and promoting people in any institution is ability to contribute to the institution’s purpose. No institution can be improved by introducing competing criteria of success, like diversity.
Therefore, as soon as diversity becomes the “greatest strength” of any institution, people will naturally lower its proper standards of success to promote diversity. For instance, soldiers and firemen must be physically strong to perform their functions. But when diversity becomes a value—especially the integration of women into professions requiring physical strength—standards are inevitably lowered, thus weakening the institution in the most important way: by making it less capable of performing its function. Thus diversity is not a strength. It is a weakness.
3. Diversity is a Source of Conflict
Diversity is a source of conflict within institutions and within societies as a whole. These conflicts impede them in performing their proper functions, even if one does not adopt the goal of artificially promoting diversity. A school divided by conflict cannot teach as well as a harmonious one. An army divided by conflict cannot fight as well as a unified one. A society riven by conflict is a less pleasant place to live than a peaceful one.
The idea that any society or institution is improved by diversity is an aberration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. No serious political philosopher or statesman of the past would have entertained the idea for a moment.
The aim of politics is to create social order and harmony. Basically, it’s the problem of getting along with one another. Social life has to deliver net benefits to its participants, or people will go their separate ways, and society will collapse. But beyond that, since we’re not just selfish individualists, we need to cultivate social responsibility and investment, so that people work to better society and are actually willing to die to ensure that it is preserved and perpetuated. Those are the great problems of politics: creating social harmony and a deep sense of an identification with the body politic, responsibility to the body politic, willingness to lay down one’s life for the body politic.
Now, how does racial and ethnic diversity help with those goals? Imagine you’re living on a leafy, idyllic suburban street where lots of children play. As the population grows and traffic congestion gets worse, however, you notice that a lot of people are driving through your neighborhood rather fast. They’ve discovered that your street is a short-cut from one clogged artery to another, so they’re racing through your once peaceful neighborhood, endangering little kids.
You decide to do something about it. You want the city to install speed bumps. To do this, you must first go to your neighbors and get them on your side, so you can go as a bloc to petition the city for speed bumps. But to get your neighbors on board, you need to be able to communicate with them. Wouldn’t that be nice? But in America today, there are lots of neighborhoods where you cannot communicate with your neighbors anymore. They don’t speak the same language.
Beyond that, even if you speak the same language, you still need to have the same values. White nations are now being colonized by people who are not invested in them at all. They are here simply to take. They come from societies that are characterized by public squalor and private splendor. Inside the walls of their houses, everything is lovely, but out in the streets there are dead dogs and potholes, and that’s just fine with them. That’s their value system. Try motivating people with that value system to get involved with putting speed bumps on your street, even if they have little kids, even if it might protect them. It’s very difficult.
To pursue common aims, you need to already have things in common. You need a common language for communication. You need to know each other’s minds. But then when you know each other’s minds, you’ve got to have the same values, or you’re never going to be able to pursue the same goals.
Diversity undermines all of these things. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to pursue or preserve the many social goods that were created when the United States or Sweden or any other European society was predominantly European, i.e., when people spoke the same language, had the same values, knew each other’s minds, and felt they could give to the community because it wasn’t going to be an act of unreciprocated self-sacrifice. Increased diversity causes decreased social trust, decreased social commitment, and the destruction of the public realm. That’s not good for society.
Thus philosophers and statesmen through the ages have considered racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity to be enormous blessings. For instance, American Founder John Jay—who had to think more deeply about the sources of political order than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—noted with pleasure in Federalist Papers No. 2 that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . .” Jay did not even regard Negro slaves or American Indians to be part of the American people. The Founders believed that trying to integrate them into the new system on equal footing with whites would have made the new society weaker, not stronger.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, had to create order in a multiracial society, which led him to embrace authoritarianism, not liberal democracy. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Yew stated, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”[2] Thus democracy in a multiracial context was not consistent with political order, particularly a political order that could pursue a common good. Democracy cannot reliably arrive at a governing consensus unless the people who vote are already quite similar to one another. Without a relatively homogeneous population, order has to be imposed from the top down. Thus as diversity increases, democracy fails.
The ancient verity that diversity causes conflict is also supported by contemporary social science. For instance, Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam studied 41 communities in the United States, ranging from highly diverse to highly homogeneous. He found that social trust was strongly correlated with homogeneity and social distrust with diversity. He found that even people of the same race and ethnic group trust one another less when they live in diverse communities. After eliminating other possible causes for variations in social trust, Putnam concluded that “diversity per se has a major effect.”[3] Diversity leads to the breakdown of social trust, which leads to the general decay of social order. Thus, according to Putnam, in diverse communities people trust the government and media less, feel politically disempowered, participate less in politics and community projects, volunteer less, give less to charities, have fewer friends, spend more time watching TV, and feel less happy about their lives.[4]
Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen arrived at similar conclusions from a comparative study of diversity and conflict in 148 countries.[5] Vanhanen found that social conflict is not strongly correlated with differences of wealth and poverty, or with differences between democratic and authoritarian governments. But it is strongly correlated with diversity. Whether they are rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, diverse societies have more conflict than homogeneous societies, which are more harmonious, regardless of levels of wealth or democratization.
Promoting diversity is a bad way to run any society, even ones not threatened by demographic decline.
4. The Deepest Source of Social Harmony is Genetic Similarity
Why is diversity a source of disharmony? And why is similarity a source of harmony? Is it entirely a matter of culture, namely a common language and system of values? Or is there something more, something deeper? I wish to argue that the ultimate source of political harmony is not culture. It’s genetics.
The civic nationalist idea is basically that we can create a unified and harmonious society out of radically different groups of people if we assimilate them to a common language and system of values. Civic Nationalists cling to the idea of assimilation, because without it, they will have to break the dreaded taboo of “racism.”
Of course we are not even trying to assimilate immigrants today. We have lost the cultural self-confidence to insist that foreigners adopt our norms and way of life. Beyond that, immigrants are very aggressively trying to assimilate us, one taco at a time. Furthermore, until such time as we regain the self-confidence to try to assimilate outsiders, conservative assimilationists should support a complete halt to immigration. And we have to ask: do they really want to assimilate our most recent immigrants? Can they actually improve America or any other white country?
Frankly, I am glad that assimilationism was abandoned when we opened our borders to the Third World. I don’t want to assimilate non-whites at all, for the more assimilated they become, the more likely they are to intermarry with whites and to gain power and influence in our societies. Thus it is best that their communities remain as separate and alienated as possible, rather than become entangled with the rest of society. It will make it much easier for them to go home someday.
But even if we regained enough cultural self-confidence to demand assimilation, it isn’t an easy thing. Most Americans today are a mixture of different European stocks. Some people think, “Well, that was easy.” But it wasn’t. Even the most superficial acquaintance with American history teaches us there was enormous conflict when very similar groups came from Europe to the United States.
The people of the British Isles are very similar to one another genetically and culturally. They even speak a common language. But the Irish were not welcome in America, primarily because of a single cultural difference: Catholicism. But that was enough to create enormous conflict and ill will.
These conflicts were exacerbated when even more culturally different groups came to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe. Because of these conflicts, the United States passed an immigration restriction act in 1924, not to deal with non-white immigration, which was virtually non-existent, but with white immigration from Europe.
I’m glad that America got through these crises and managed to meld different European immigrant groups into a new people: Americans. I am absolutely opposed to any attempts, even under the guise of humor, to reopen old ethnic conflicts in America. We are all Americans now, and most of the time when white people claim a hyphenated American identity, it is simply a case of a person of mixed European ancestry claiming to be Italian or Irish or Polish because of his surname.
Assimilation also had enormous cultural costs. For instance, Americans used to care passionately about the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. To assimilate large numbers of Catholic immigrants, Americans eventually simply stopped caring about religious differences. We stopped caring about a lot of historical and cultural differences between Europeans, just so we could stop fighting over them. Cultural assimilation, in short, erases cultural differences. Ceasing to care about them is a creeping form of nihilism that has alienated us from our ancestors, who would regard us as unworthy heirs who have abandoned their cultural legacy.
So it is absurd to say, “It was a breeze assimilating all these European groups, so let’s toss Pakistanis and Somalis into the melting pot!” It was hard enough to assimilate fellow Europeans. So why borrow trouble by importing even more radically different people? There is no selfish benefit or moral imperative that requires us to turn our societies into battlegrounds once again. Especially because this time, it is a battle we cannot win, since radically alien peoples could not be assimilated, even if we tried.
It was possible to assimilate fellow Europeans only because they weren’t that different to begin with. The United States never managed to assimilate blacks, American Indians, and Asians, most of whom are merely in America, not part of it. White assimilation was possible because, beyond all our cultural differences, we are genetically very similar.
Whites are actually the most genetically similar of all the races, because there were points in time in our evolutionary history when there were very few of us, and we all have common descent. So the genetic differences between Eastern and Western Europe and Northern and Southern Europe are quite small, and this genetic similarity was enough to bridge wide cultural gaps and conflicts.
5. Genetic Similarity Theory
J. Philippe Rushton was an evolutionary psychologist who is best known for his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior. He is less well-known for his research in what he called Genetic Similarity Theory.[6] When Rushton introduced the idea to me it was in the context of interpersonal relationships. He said, “Opposites don’t attract, and I can prove it with science.” But he could just as well have said, “Diversity causes conflict. I can prove it with science.”
Genetic Similarity Theory shows that affection, harmony, and altruism among humans, and living things in general, are functions of genetic similarity. The more genetically similar two creatures are, the more likely they will have harmonious relationships.
The ultimate explanation for this is the biological imperative for genes to replicate themselves. One might think that this imperative would lead to ruthlessly selfish and competitive behavior. But it does not, because the genes that seek to propagate themselves are present in multiple individuals. One shares the most genes with immediate family, fewer and fewer genes with more distant relatives, and some genes with everyone in one’s broader ethnic and racial group.
Thus each individual will have a tendency toward cooperative, harmonious, and even altruistic behavior toward those who share more of his genes. Individuals are even capable of sacrificing their lives for their families and communities if it secures the greater propagation of their genes among their fellows.
But the flip side of loving one’s own is hostility to outsiders. Thus human beings and other animals are willing to fight strangers to protect the genetic interests of their family, tribe, nation, and race. This is the foundation of politics, and politics by other means, namely war.
The science behind Genetic Similarity Theory is very strong. But we don’t actually need Rushton’s studies to prove this to us, because we are all familiar with a phenomenon that shows that genetic similarity breeds harmony: identical twins. Identical twins have the same exact genes.
I once met a pair of identical twins, and one of them said something quite touching and memorable. It should be the title of a book about twins. He said, “We’re not so much two people as one egg divided.” That was an indication of the level of harmony in their consciousnesses. Just sitting and watching them converse and interact, you could see that they knew exactly what the other was going to say, what the other was thinking; they could finish one another’s thoughts. And indeed, studies of identical twins, especially twins raised apart, demonstrate how massive and fine-grained genetic determinism really is, as opposed to environmental and cultural factors.[7]
The greatest harmony between two people is the harmony of identical twins. They know one another’s minds in ways that even fraternal twins or ordinary siblings just don’t. In fact, if you wanted to create the most harmonious society possible, it would be a society of clones. Of course you would need a bit more genetic diversity if you wanted to have sexual reproduction, but surprisingly little. In Iceland, it was discovered that the most harmonious marriages and the most offspring come from people who are as genetically similar as third and fourth cousins.[8]
Genetic Similarity Theory would predict that the happiest societies in the world are also the most genetically homogeneous. This is certainly true in the case of Denmark, which is routinely rated the happiest country in the world[9] and is also one of the most genetically homogeneous.[10] Genetic Similarity Theory also predicts that as a society increases genetic diversity, it will become less harmonious, unified, and happy. Even if such a society somehow managed to “assimilate” this increasing diversity to a common language and system of values, it would still be less harmonious and happy than a genetically homogeneous society. A society can increase its genetic diversity even by assimilating people of the same race, but the most dramatic increase in genetic diversity comes from immigrants of entirely different races. Increased racial diversity makes a society weaker and less harmonious. Diversity is not a strength at all.
White Nationalism is simply the idea of a society where everybody around you is kin. It is a society where you can understand and trust your fellow citizens. Where you can cooperate to pursue the common good. Where you will wish to contribute to grand projects, even though you might not live to see them completed. Where people plant trees so that future generations can enjoy shade. It is a society in which people feel such a strong identity with the body politic, that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for it, if they must. But most importantly, it is a society in which you can feel at home. That’s what White Nationalism is about: securing homelands for all white peoples.
Without homelands, our people feel rootless, detached, and alienated. They long to be around people with the same culture, history, and destiny. But it is more than that. They also long to be around people who vibrate on the same deep, unconscious frequencies of white racial kinship that bind us all together. That’s what White Nationalism wants to create again for our people.
We stand for brotherhood and belonging. Diversity takes those away. That’s what’s wrong with diversity.
* * *
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Notes
[1] https://www.army.mil/article/6405/gen_casey_announces_creation_of_diversity_task_force
[2] http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/08/lee-kuan-yew-interview.html
[3] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30 (2007), p. 153.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Social_Capital
[5] Tatu Vanhanen, Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism. (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 1999).
[6] J. P. Rushton, “Genetic Similarity Theory, Ethnocentrism, and Group Selection,” in I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt and F. K. Salter, eds., Indoctrinability, Warfare, and Ideology: Evolutionary Perspectives (Oxford: Berghan Books, 1998) and “Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory,” Nations and Nationalism 11 (2005): 489–507.
[7] Nancy Segal, Born Together―Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[8] https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080207/full/news.2008.562.html
[9] https://www.livescience.com/62150-why-denmark-is-happiest-country.html
[10] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161011131428.htm
9 comments
Unrelated question,
Do you plan to write a book that isn’t strictly White Nationalist in content?
“And he was bringing diversity to the New World. But whites never get any credit for that. It’s always described as colonialism and genocide when whites do it. ”
We also don’t get credit for being the only race to end slavery. Or for being the only country to welcome immigrants at all for centuries. Or for creating the USA (“You didn’t build that!”) Sigh.
John Jay College is an insult to the diverse people of NYC. It must be renamed! Now! I suggest Harriet Tubman School of Laws.
John Jay noted with pleasure in Federalist Papers No. 2 that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . .”
What a terrific article and is it any wonder that Europeans are waking up and beginning to take our own side both in Europe and the European Diasporas. Nationalism is perfectly healthy and more likely with every passing year. All the while msm-politics as usual is in decline
Can we have our statues back and rede american all the streets, parks, schools, hospitals etc is it possible to reclaim our civilisation? An example that has been triggering me is the removal of Kipling’s If on a college wall (a universal call to character and maturity from universal father to universal son) and placement there of Maya Angelou’s utterly mundane, cringey and selfish paeon to her own Wonderfulness as a “sassy” black woman. Her refrain “does my sassiness offend you” did provide some brief amusement. The notion that this is a fitting replacement for Kipling shows that we are descending into a much lesser and largely incoherent place in which ideas and character count for nothing.
The answer to the diversity-propaganda can not be the concept of identical twins, that´s obvious: nature wants diversity because equality is impossible. So the argument against what the White-haters call diversity has to be a different one. So: how much diversity, or, what kind of diversity? My approach is self-determination. People know quite well what kind of diversity they want and what they do not want; namely, they want diversity WITHIN the race and they do not want diversity ACROSS the races. I want all kind of Whites (and not just my identical genetic copies) but I want no single kind of african (in my extended familiy, in my nation, that is. Outside that, sure, great… but not as part of my nation). So what appears to be an insoluble logical dilemma, is, in practical terms, anything but that; as is so often the case with logic versus … what I would term “the present”, “the being”. If I had to argue what it is that is intuitively felt by everybody, I would say, and repeat myself: it´s platonic categories that simply exist. Race exists; people are aware of it and act accordingly (namely by segregation). Simple as that.
Don´t allow that question to be treated with the instruments of sophistry. Again: the case is very clear in terms of praticality: we don´t want no coloreds around. That´s all we need to know. If there are insoluble logical contradictions: know that that is irrelevant. It´s a glitch in logic, logic is an insufficient instrument to deal with that question, the question is easy to decide and everybody knows this.
Linkee:
Genetic Similarity Theory, Ethnocentrism, and Group Selection by J. Philippe Rushton
http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/race-genetic-similarity-rushton-indoctrinability-warfare-ideology-1998.pdf
‘..genetic similarity’
An opinion often heard is that since the genetic differences between human races are ‘so small’, race is irrelevant to human identity.
This article offers a different perspective. It shows that mice and human beings share about 97.5% of their functioning DNA. The genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans is only about 1% less.
So, small genetic differences matter.
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/dn2352-just-2-5-of-dna-turns-mice-into-men/amp/
This! Friggin’ this!
This is the message we must use. If we debunk the diversity myth, our fight will be already won.
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