Counter-Currents
The Nebbish & the Knockout:
Thoughts on Arranged Marriages
Spencer J. Quinn
2,330 words
Years ago, my girlfriend and I attended a friend’s Hindu wedding. I remember all the colorful clothing and the strange dances and rituals the bride and groom performed. It was an enjoyable affair, but I have few specific memories of it. One from the reception, however, still stands out in my mind. I doubt I will ever forget it.
The reception was held at a restaurant which seemed a little too small for the event. Food was laid out on two long tables, and guests were expected to help themselves and find seating wherever they could. It was a bit cramped and crowded. My girlfriend and I found an empty booth, but because there were so many people also hunting for seats, we occupied only half of it, side by side, while leaving the opposite seat available.
Soon enough, she arrived.
I have no recollection of her name, although I am sure I learned it at the time. She came with plates of food for her and her two small children, and was perfectly nice. But she was, in a word, beautiful.
For me at least, being in close proximity with a beautiful woman is a rare thing, and when it does happen, everything seems to change. Time seems to slow down. I become aware of myself, of my breathing and movements. Everything I do becomes deliberate as I consider when I should look at her next, and for how long. This was an Indian woman. Tall, with flowing, lustrous hair; dark, intelligent eyes; thin, feminine eyebrows; flawless, light-bronze skin; and the kind of face that makes you believe in God. She had the classic hourglass shape, and was roundly endowed at the top. I snuck a peak at my girlfriend, and she was as impressed as I was.
Then he arrived.
This was, obviously enough, the husband. But out of context, it wouldn’t have been obvious at all. He was, in two words, not beautiful. Unimpressive might be the better word. Slender, balding, and wholly ordinary looking, he was perhaps an inch shorter than she was, and seemed to try to make up for it with a long, virile mustache. In a free and open society like America’s, a nebbish like that wouldn’t have a prayer with a knockout like her, yet there they were, doting happily together on their children.
Later, my girlfriend and I agreed that their marriage had to have been arranged (a suspicion later confirmed to us by the bride).
I think back on this event often now that I’ve come to identify with my race. Why not have arranged marriages for white people, too? What I saw that evening at the reception was a kind of cultural vigor which recognizes that too much freedom – especially for young people – can be self-destructive. Whites in the West are drowning in options, and, thanks to their overall prosperity, have extended their childhoods into their thirties and forties. From much of what I have read, the dating scene these days is brutal. Radical feminism has turned women against men; gay and transgender activism have turned people away from heterosexuality in general; and men have reacted predictably with the Men Going Their Own Way and Pick-Up Artist movements. The pill keeps young women out all night, and porn keeps young men in. All this in a society which is already balkanized along racial lines and heavily prejudiced against whites. Meanwhile, the song of traditional marriage – the bedrock of any thriving society – is being lost in all the cacophony.
Do we really want to put our children through all of this? Maybe parents arranging marriages once again might be a way to help them avoid all this anxiety. And if these parents share a common identity and outlook, all the better. Trust in one’s parents, respect for the importance of marriage and children, and a rejection of short-sighted individualism make up much of the psychology behind arranged marriages. Young people essentially opt not to extend their youth longer than absolutely necessary, and instead embark upon their adult lives much sooner than they would if left to their own devices to find – or not find – a spouse. This is what I mean by cultural vigor. People in arranged marriages tend to follow the first two points of my list of Advice for Young White People: they make themselves useful and they reproduce at replacement levels at least—and early, which is another demographic benefit.
Whites in the West have been so affluent for so long now, it seems we have forgotten what vigor is. I’m afraid it’s people like the Nebbish and the Knockout at the Indian restaurant who will inherit Western civilization (and ultimately corrupt it) rather than the inheritors themselves, who have become dissipated on the successes of their ancestors. Is this the way it has to be? Should we as whites just meekly accept the fact that our best days are behind us and embrace our fate as a second-class people?
Of course, I say no. How could anyone not say no, unless they are a coward, a hedonist, or something worse? I say that whites should resist the tide of Progress as much as possible. Progress is not our friend. Maybe once upon a time, over a hundred years ago, Progress was the friend of the abused and the exploited in sweatshops and factories. There really were Haves and Have-Nots back then, and Progressivism may have indeed protected the latter from the former when they needed protection. The commission created by the New York State legislature following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, for example, led to laws which mandated nationwide factory safety improvements. Child labor laws were a pretty good idea as well. But today, the champions of “Progress” tend to cast whites in the role of the Haves and non-whites in the role of the Have-Nots, even when in many cases the direct opposite may be closer to the truth. And then, with this bogus dichotomy established, progressives use their platform to attack the racial interests of all whites, regardless of what you have or have not.
Whites might not be able to stop Progress at this very instant. But we can slow it down. We can resist it to ensure that it spends itself that much sooner. Progressivism will eventually eat itself. It must. Progressives are already sexualizing children and committing infanticide. Pedophilia and pederasty are only a rave and photo shoot away from being tolerated among the Progressive mainstream. The insanity is raging on the Left, and soon its contempt for humanity will turn on itself, like the orgy of beheadings which concluded the French Revolution.
When this happens sometime this century, a critical mass of red-pilled, self-identifying whites will need to resist their enemies and rebuild whatever portion of Western civilization still remains to them. And the very best way to accomplish this is for high-quality, young white people to marry young and have children young rather than to do it in their forties, out of wedlock, or not at all.
Of course, this plan requires the sacrifice of freedom – although I doubt the nebbish at the Indian restaurant was sacrificing anything. It can go the other way, too. Instead of the Nebbish and the Knockout, imagine Plain Jane and the Dreamboat. In either case, someone is going to have to settle.
Seriously, guys – and I’m assuming most of my readership consists of men – which of you single and dating fellows would even consider committing to a woman who is a point or two less attractive than you are, but who is honest, hard-working, smart, family-oriented, and rejects feminism? A woman like that may have middling Sexual Market Value (SMV), but that underrates her Spousal Market Value, which is potentially through that glass roof. Remember Randy Quaid as an Amish bowler in the movie Kingpin, laughing at Woody Harrelson because his love interest (played by the gorgeous Vanessa Angel) didn’t exactly have childbearing hips? Yeah, we can laugh. But that paradigm shift we’re laughing at may be what saves us in the end.
I was introduced to the concept of SMV by the pick-up artist blogger Chateau Heartiste. Read him if you don’t. He’s brilliant and represents the crucial overlap between the Manosphere and the Dissident Right. Whenever he’s not making perfect sense opining about politics, culture, and human biodiversity, he likes to focus on the elusive quality of “game,” which seems to be a man’s ability – through a downright heroic self-confidence – to induce women into submitting to him, sexually and otherwise. Reading about how Heartiste conquered this woman or that is sort of like watching a grandmaster play chess: you can follow along and appreciate the moves, but you know in your heart you could never, ever be that good. In a world without arranged marriages, Heartiste offers the masculine antidote to feminine hectoring; a testosterone shot, if you will, for the white male demographic which apparently requires constant reminders of its own greatness – and prodding to in fact be great again.
But game makes sense only in a fallen world in which it’s every guy and gal for himself, and the sexual marketplace somewhat resembles a Middle Eastern bazaar after a sudden influx of soldiers and prostitutes. In this sense, Heartiste is the Machiavelli of Sex, focusing on the bigger picture (i.e., men dominating women) and caring little for moral niceties while achieving this end (i.e., her feelings about, well, almost anything).
But when I push for arranged marriages, I’m suggesting that we not live in such a fallen world to begin with. Arranged marriages, when done correctly and cooperatively with sons and daughters, renders game irrelevant, and sets us on the path back to demographic strength. And it’s not like arranged marriages don’t tend to work. According to Infogalactic:
Divorce rates have climbed in Europe and United States, with increase in autonomous marriage rates. The lowest divorce rates in the world are in cultures with high rates of arranged marriages such as Amish culture of United States (1%), Hindus of India (3%), and Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel (7%). In contrast, over 50% of self-arranged marriages in many parts of Europe and United States end up in divorce.
It’s also not like people don’t become demonstrably stupid when falling in love:
Brain scans show that a region of the brain that is essential to judgment, the brain’s frontal cortex, shuts down when people fall in love. Researchers using MRI scans found that the frontal cortex deactivates when someone is shown a picture of the person they love, leading them to suspend all criticism and doubt.
“When you look at someone you are passionate about, some areas of the brain become active,” Semir Zeki, professor of neuro-aesthetics at University College London said, according to the Daily Mail. “But a large part is de-activated, the part that plays a role in judgment.”
It’s also not like people don’t become just as stupid when not falling in love, but desperately want to. When I was going through a rough, lonesome period in my early twenties, my mother once offered to help me find a girlfriend. I emphatically refused. Why? Because I couldn’t bear the stigma of having my own mother find someone for me. I wanted game, you see. And I didn’t have it. And that hurt. I was playing a game that I was ill-suited for, and didn’t realize it. At the time, I remember wishing that my mother would just set me up with someone, anyway. I can’t say I regret that she didn’t, since things turned out pretty well for me. But I got lucky. Many people don’t get lucky.
Yes, parents can be cruel or dictatorial when arranging marriages, and young people can be coerced into entering destructive relationships. Yes, forced marriages can happen to the detriment of the young people involved. There is a negative side to any option we face. But if we expect our children to compete with the tots raised by our mismatched couple at the Indian restaurant, and if we’d like them to escape the demographic hole we’re digging today, perhaps we should do more than just consider formal arranged marriages for whites. Dissident Right and white advocacy circles stretch around the globe. We have the network. Why not use it?
In the long run, how much does all that sexual freedom matter, anyway? We all grow old. We all get ugly. Even Heartiste’s SMV will take a hit once he’s in his eighties. And what would we prefer in our old age? Being surrounded by grandchildren throughout the last third of our lives, or remaining single and childless, happy with the knowledge that we tore it up in our youth?
This all reminds me of an obscure Kinks song, “When I Turn Off the Light.” If you can overlook the fifth word of the first line, I hope you will find it a charming eulogy to the mundane, and a wistful rejection of the world of game. It embodies perhaps the extreme end of what I am proposing here (so please don’t settle too far down that SMV scale, okay?), but it does give a nice indication of what all of us eventually have in store if we go into marriage with the right attitude. I have a feeling our knockout from the Indian restaurant sings a version of this song to herself every night when she turns off the light. I’m sure many of us do.
Here are the first two verses to get you started. Enjoy.
Who cares if you’re Jewish,
And your breath smells of garlic,
And your nose is a shiny red light.
To me you are gorgeous,
And everything’s right,
When I turn off the living room light.
Your clothes are old-fashioned,
Your knuckles are bony,
Your hair looks a terrible sight.
But I don’t have to see you,
The way that you are,
When I turn off the living room light.
Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You.
18 comments
“Meanwhile, the song of traditional marriage – the bedrock of any thriving society – is being lost in all the cacophony.”
It is by DESIGN and if you look at a photo montage of Women’s Liberation in the USA they are ALL (((THEM))).
And for the destruction of morality just read this:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/07/jenji-kohan-and-the-jewish-hyper-sexualization-of-western-culture/
It is, let’s call it “BLACK MAGIC” that (((THEY))) have wielded against us. Whites have NO IDEA what TV and movies and all of that does to them.
What is called, the name came from the Muslims and was derogatory, Hinduism, is OUR ancestral faith. Our ancestors were BRILLIANT they predicted 6,000 years ago what it would be like today.
Indian Mythology by Veronica Ions, London, 1967
The kali yuga, or age of degeneration, is the one through which we are now passing. Dharma is one-legged and helpless, and . . . virtue has vanished. In this age, lasting 432,000 years [numerologically equal to 9, a number symbolizing completion], during which the deity is black, the majority of men are sudras or slaves. They are wicked, quarrelsome and beggar-like, and they are unlucky because they deserve no luck. They value what is degraded, eat voraciously and indiscriminately, and live in cities filled with thieves. They are dominated by their women folk, who are shallow, garrulous and lascivious, bearing too many children. They are oppressed by their kings and by the ravages of nature. Their misery can only end with the coming of Kalki, the destroyer [of foulness; the 10th and final MahaAvatara].
Schopenhauer called it the original belief of mankind.
Bhagavad-Gita:
As one fellow noted:
Just WWIII in progress. After some time it will be MadMax to the max. Karma & reincarnation simply rule the material sphere. Not a blade of grass moves without the will of God. Just find out where it actually moves. Hare Krishna.
Arranged marriages for Europeans is a great idea. But why not begin at the beginning? The issue isn’t the lack of arranged marriages, the issue is white women postponing marriage as long as possible, because they don’t want to waste any more of their youth and fertility on their husbands than necessary.
One only need to peruse the women’s sections of the internet to see this attitude expressed in clear and explicit terms.
You certainly aren’t going to convince them to marry a “nebbish” when they don’t even want to marry their handsome and attractive boyfriends when they are young and fertile.
The solution is obvious, which is why it’s never discussed. Raise the status of white women who marry young, and lower the status of white women who postpone marriage.
There are some obvious, and some not so obvious, ways to do that, none of them particularly easy in the current dispensation. But you aren’t going to get anywhere by avoiding the core issue.
You can hardly blame white women for postponing marriage and motherhood considering the mainstream conservative (and Christian) culture has demonized “teenage motherhood” for multiple decades now. My mother – happily married and pregnant with her first child at 19 – would be considered a scandalous failure today.
This sort of knee-jerk reaction may be a reason why the right always loses and never wins. Anti-whites claim “love” so reactionaries claim “hate.” Anti-whites claim “progress” so reactionaries proudly claim “regression.” It’s so bad that even TheOccidentalObserver once opined that white people don’t have “gurning contests” [1] where people contort their faces into ugly grimaces, which was supposedly more “masculine” than smiling, smiling being feminized and “liberal.”
So, anti-whites get to smile and we have to frown.
No wonder the right is so repulsive to young, beautiful, fertile white women.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurn#Gurning_contests
Good point about motherhood. Western cultures today seem to regard it as a necessary evil for any ‘successful’ woman; a an aspect of life to be delayed as long as possible – and then to be outsourced as far as possible to child care workers and schools – so that the family can get back to earning two wages to make ends meet.
The former Soviet Union glorified motherhood and rewarded (financially and through awards) those who had large families. At the risk of upsetting those still fighting the Cold War, I have to say I can’t see the downside to such initiatives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
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National Socialist Germany also provided incentives, awards for having children, Lebensborn program, etc. and is a better model for the future than the Soviet Union insofar as it goes.
See Carney, Amy: ‘Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS’ – but even there a lot of evidence shows how hard it was to get those policies to work (even amongst the most committed, the SS) and how soon the point of exponentially diminishing returns was reached. I’m not sure how propagandistic the book is since I can’t check out the sources in the German Archives, but the author seems to treat the SS and National Socialism very fairly, so I tend to believe her.
The conclusion would be that of Spengler: we were already a race in decline, and what has happened since is nothing more than proof of the thesis.
‘This sort of knee-jerk reaction may be a reason why the right always loses and never wins. Anti-whites claim “love” so reactionaries claim “hate.” Anti-whites claim “progress” so reactionaries proudly claim “regression.”’
Interesting point. Perhaps I should have used scare quotes more? I capitalized “Progress” or “Progressivism” in my article because Progressivism is a historic movement in the way Bolshevism was. This, of course, is apart from any positive connotations of the word “progress.”
Further, if I called it anything else, would readers have known what I was talking about?
I have been browsing old Soviet and early modern culture with it’s techno-dreams and social utopias, and found that it was implicitly and normatively white.
That is the idea of progress that my generation holds deeply, and the one which is being taken from them in the form of third-world invasion and environmental saturation. But they are being told that it will come anyway.
Nice piece. I agree about the arranged marriages, which is something that non-Indians discuss from time to time.
My only question is whether we should call what the left is doing now “progress.” It seems more like they’re trying to dismantle the culture. That’s not progress, IMO. It’s destruction, and both the motives and goals of the left now are very different than they were in the days when they were getting fire prevention laws passed.
According to a Chinese friend of mine, the arranged-marriage system in China typically allowed prospective brides and grooms to veto their parents’ choices of possible mates, within reason. I believe that this feature has also been present in some other cultures which have arranged marriages.
“Game” advocates remind me of people like Rush Limbaugh, who seem to believe that everyone has the potential to be a rip-roaring, successful entrepreneur, and that in an ideal society we would all start our own businesses. No, actually many of us don’t have the personalities, skills or desires to be an entrepreneur, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Likewise, many and possibly most guys aren’t suited to be Pick-Up-Artists, and there’s nothing wrong with that either! We need a culture which allows and encourages a full range of normal and eccentric human personalities. The British once were pretty successful at having such a society. Your suggestion that we not live in the fallen world of Game is key, in multiple ways.
Roosh pointed out just how dysfunctional and anomalous dating is to civilization. No other method fails as spectacularly at finding a life parter as dating. Dating is essentially a soft form of polygamy leaving a person a de-facto 10 time divorcee by the time they do actually marry, and usually late. Or it just leaves them as genetic dead ends sterile through their 30s and 40s. This is especially bad for a woman. The truth is no man of value wants to marry a woman past 27. Even picking up a phone book and randomly selecting a fertile woman to marry would work better than dating.
I’ve been thinking about this recently. What is sexual success? My great-great-grandfather was, as far as I know, with only one woman, his wife. I have been with 23 women across my life. He had 12 kids (8 at my age), I have none. Who is more successful? Who is the manlier man.
Sexual success is having game. Biological success is having healthy white children.
The purpose of sexual success is to lead to biological success. The former is judged solely and explicitly by the latter, and is subordinate to it. Thus it can be safely said that the grandfather was infinitely more successful.
I’ve reached the point of sleeping with anything that’s White to have a chance at having children (fight to keep it later), since no one is willing to have children and a precommitment to it and them. Even though this is against my ethics divs is killing me, in the end it is only the number of children – or, more broadly, inclusive fitness – that matters.
I’m an only child so inclusive fitness = completed fitness (direct reproduction) for me. If I had brothers or sisters, I’d dedicate all of my resources to helping them reproduce more. Remember the paradox about how it’s a good trade to sacrifice yourself for two brothers or eight cousins?
‘Risky Transactions’ (Salter, ed.) has a great paper on this in it.
Either you’re not actually sleeping with that many people (I assume you meant women), or you are leading an extremely reckless lifestyle. You’re having sex with lots of different women without using birth control of any kind? Are you wealthy to the point that you can afford to pay alimony to many different women for the rest of your life? How are you going to decide which of your children are going to grow up fatherless, or are going to be raised by other men? Isn’t it rather ridiculous?
Arranged marriage was the original form of eugenics, alongside caste. And arranged marriages are without doubt the most effective method by far, even compared to modern science.
>There is a negative side to any option we face.
No matter the supposed virtues of arranged marriage, it isn’t an option we really face, so much so that it isn’t really worth considering. As a race, we don’t seem to be really built for it, with arranged marriages in the West only occurring for immediate economic and political reasons, and never the norm throughout the general population.
Furthermore, it is an objectively *bad* option, especially plain for us on the Right familiar with assortative mating and attraction based on similarity, or homofilia — funny enough, 18th and 19th century upper class parents generally took this into account when marrying off their children. Not all peoples were so nice to their offspring however, and you can plainly see the dysgenic effects of arranged marriage by simply looking at the populations affected by it. It’s considered that at least some of the difference in sexual attractiveness between Europeans and their brown distant cousins is due to the practice of arranged marriage by the latter. And since virtually no one chooses a mate by looks alone, this must also account for some of the differences in IQ and other mental traits.
So basically the author proposes a solution that would lend us uglier and dumber — not to mention paint the right as nutty-er if we seriously start advocating for it — for a promiscuity problem which had apparently been solved in the past by less extreme means (don’t believe me? just open up any interwar novel and see how much sluttier people were in the 20s compared to the following two generations)
“In a free and open society like America’s, a nebbish like that wouldn’t have a prayer with a knockout like her, yet there they were, doting happily together on their children.”
Do you want white men to evolve to be like Indian men? Also, a certain other group I won’t mention did arranged marriages for centuries, but they didn’t fare well as well on the visuals or, in my opinion, a lot of other things.
European royalty arranged marriages because sex and babies were their treaties. Henry VIII’s troubles show it wasn’t a very smart way to do things.
I would agree that marriage is strong in India and that we can learn a lot from Hindu people. Moreover, there should be ways to incentivize marriage and make it simpler and less costly. I’m as tired of melodramatic, unoriginal 1950s love stories as anyone else, but white people more than any other group prize chivalry and romantic love, which I believe stems from higher Feeler psychology, which I believe is about half genetic. Whites aren’t being their best right now, but we don’t need to resort to full blown currycel reproductive strategies. Let’s take from the Hindu customs what works for us and leave the rest to Pajeet.
Also, I hate rejection of beauty. The two least admixed white groups, Scandinavians and Sardinians or Sards, are beautiful people. The former is as close as it gets to the Indo-Europeans and the latter to the Early European Farmers. Go on Facebook and look at these people yourself. Most of them would qualify as models in the US. White men are the most desired of any on dating sites, and white women would be first if old white divorcees weren’t fishing around for submissive Asian wives. Whites aren’t just the most desirable because they are intermediate genetically between blacks and Asians. They are the result of more choosing based on looks than any other race. How else would traits like light skin, blue eyes, and fiery hair become so common? I understand pretty people can be selfish and benefit from a halo effect, but those things can be overcome with proper understandings of morality.
It’s funny you should mention that people look bad as they age as an excuse to disregard looks. Whites are younger psychologically than any other group. Young people are relatively more ENFP on Myers Briggs and become more ISTJ as they age. Whites are ENFP relative to Asians and INFP relative to blacks, so they are psychologically younger than other races, something which our friend Frank Raymond noticed intuitively. They are also better looking on average.
Since the State in the U.S. would never encourage increased motherhood among its women, and even if so, it would result mostly in further mongrel children, rather than the children that are needed most, I think it will be up to us as the ‘White race’ to think of creative solutions to this problem. The best and most difficult would be to financially reward White women, in or out of marriage, to have more children. Also, to urgently find a way for White men to become far more educated and gainfully employed in a country which gives affirmative action only to ‘minorities’. School is nearly unaffordable without scholarships and grants, and jobs are flying overseas faster than White men can find them! We need to get together in private financial groups to pool money and create foundations to help our own — a la George Soros and the “Open Society” foundations. Arranged marriages are a great idea, but will take a while to catch on.
Unsubscribe from Heartiste. Read Jane Austen and Edith Wharton.
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