Counter-Currents
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The following is a transcript, video (see below), and audio recording of Kevin MacDonald speaking during a panel discussion at this year’s Counter-Currents retreat on the subject of individualism. The title is editorial. We would like to thank Hyacinth Bouquet for the transcript. To listen to the audio recording in a player, click here or on the player below. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
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Individualism is a big problem. It is, in my view, explainable in terms of evolutionary history and background, Joseph Henrich of Harvard explains it with the medium of the Catholic Church. Whatever it is, individualism is unique. There is no other culture in the world that is individualistic like the West.
It’s context-dependent to a great degree. Once people start feeling threatened, then they start being more collectivist. They go into groups. We can just think about 1930s Germany. It had a very collectivist culture, a very unified culture; an in-group and out-group feeling was very strong.
What I see now, though, is that we see increasing anti-white hate in the media. It’s pervasive. You see it on MSNBC; someone like Joy Reid, or there’s Tiffany Cross. You see it in social media; people you’ve never heard of just hate on white people. Of course, in the school systems there is Critical Race Theory. White kids are being taught that they’re “privileged,” and that everything is their fault, and all that.
My belief is that this is one of the things that will really make us way more cohesive in the long term. They’ve actually done studies which show that when people are told that white people are going to be a minority soon, it makes them more concerned about things like immigration. White people, when they feel under threat, have much more of a sense of collective faith, in that we’re not going to all hang separately.
Tucker Carlson, I think, is the edgiest person in the mainstream media. He’s certainly not what we would all like, but he has called out anti-white racism — just recently; last week, I think, on MSNBC. It’s a very important thing. He’s got a huge audience. So the average white guy out there suddenly really wakes up and says, “Okay, we are hated; and why are we hated?” It’s over nothing; slavery in the past, but that’s long over, whatever you want to think of it.
Of course, the other thing is that he said MSNBC is owned by whites. So, he’s not going talk about the real owners of MSNBC, but the message is pretty clear. Some people may have looked it up.
In my personal experience, I think a lot of parents and grandparents are now getting the message. Their children, especially boys, are not going to get a fair deal here. They’re not going to get into the college they want; they’re not going to get the job they want. Things are really amping up in terms of anti-white hatred. It has to filter through at some point. I know there are white liberals who are absolutely immune to that — especially women, I think — but at some point, they certainly have feelings for their families, for their grandchildren, and that sort of thing. That can certainly put them on the same page as a more collectivist orientation — a feeling that we have to close ranks.
There are also things like the reality of open borders and the Biden administration. If you watch FOX News, every day they televise massive numbers of people coming across the border — four million people since Biden took office. It’s unprecedented; but they’re not white, and you’ve got to realize that this is going to make people feel more threatened. Of course, the MSNBCs of the world complain, “You shouldn’t even be talking about that,” and they question the whole enterprise.
It is important to get white people on board. We are being replaced. Speaking of Tucker Carlson, he used the phrase “the Great Replacement,” and he talked about white people being replaced. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) went crazy about that, but he fought back. He showed something from the ADL’s web page which said that Israel should not simply allow itself to be demographically swamped, because it would be very dangerous. Well, it’s going to be very dangerous for us, too! How could anybody doubt that?
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
The whole long history of ethnic warfare, and cleansing, and everything else which Israel is doing — it’s going to happen here. We had this “Kumbaya” image of the future, and it’s just not going to happen.
I think with those kinds of messages, with people crossing the river and all that, coming over the border en masse — it triggers implicit whiteness. We’re being swamped here, and pretty soon we’re not going to be able to vote, and any power that we hold in voting is not going to be enough to get a government that we want. We see that with the Republicans. They go along with so much of it, so often.
The thing I like to emphasize, as Jim Goad was saying, is that we tend to repress our instinct. I’m a psychologist. The problem is media control — especially, of course, the liberal media, but FOX News, too. They don’t really get into a lot of issues. What happens with humans — and humans are unique, with language, the prefrontal cortex, our higher brain centers — is that you are constantly inundated with these messages, and experimentally you can show that these messages will actually inhibit white ethnocentrism. They’ll show that when [white] people are told they’re racists, they respond very differently. They take a lot more time to think about it, and they’re actually repressing ethnocentrism. They’re told that they are ethnocentric, and these constant messages do have this kind of effect.
What we’re talking about, really, is top-down control. The academic world is really a hopeless place right now. Entrance to the faculty is intensely policed, of course. There is no way in the world that I could get a job, or any of you could get a job, if you told them what you believe about this kind of stuff. There’s just no way. They wouldn’t invite you for an interview, they would be horrible. That’s what this is: It’s top-down cultural control. The message is coming in, pervading our environment and inhibiting our natural instincts, and that’s exactly what has happened here.
The other thing about individualism is that we don’t take kinship all that seriously. I forget what the speaker mentioned. They don’t really have strong connections to their extended family. Well, if you go to the Middle East or you go to Africa, they do have very strong connections to their kinship group. They are part of a kinship group. That’s their first source of identity. We’re not like that. That’s what individualism really is. We have negativisms of a social group, and what I talk about is moral communities.
We have a sense of being on page, morally. Imagine a small hunter-gatherer band way back in the Stone Age in the North of Europe. The way you keep people on board is they have to subscribe to the group’s moral strictures, not kinship. They would take anybody into the group as long as they had a good reputation — “I can trust you,” that sort of thing. Whereas in the Middle East, if someone is your relative, you give them a job no matter how incompetent they are. You bribe them. There’s nothing like that here. That’s why Western societies are uniquely, by far, the least corrupt societies in the world — because of individualism, really. That’s very important for producing a modern kind of society.
But of course, in our society, guess who creates these moral communities? The media does all they can to do that. “White people bad,” the Holocaust, and racism are constant messages. That’s the moral community that we’re in.
White people are really prone to guilt, and Northern Europeans in general. I’ve seen some research claiming that guilt is uniquely Western European. That is, shame is different from guilt. Guilt means you have a sort of internal monitor — this cop who’s watching your behavior. It doesn’t matter if anyone else is around; you’re still going to feel guilty. Whereas shame is all about, “Where do I stand in the community? Am I going to look bad if I do this?” With guilt, nobody needs to be around; you can still feel guilty.
So I think we should emphasize moral issues, and do our best. Really, we have the strong moral case here, because we’re the ones who are realistic about human history: the conflict and the warfare that’s been going on forever.
It’s been interesting to me. Mike Peinovich of the National Justice Party, that’s his whole approach to activism. He wants to take issues that are obviously moral onto our side. He recently went to Waukesha in Wisconsin, where that black guy [Darrell Brooks] mowed down a whole bunch of people. He’s now in prison — no federal hate crime charges! If a white person did that, the feds would be all over that. That’s this kind of thing: There’s an obvious morality there. This guy was a black, anti-white racist. That’s the kind of thing that can wake people up to the moral issues that really should be talked about a lot on our side.
Roger [Devlin] was also mentioning ethics. Part of individualism is appealing to a wider, objective thing. That’s the basis of science and everything else. Western philosophers, even going back to the Greeks, they framed their arguments as universal, as applied to everyone. Kant and his moral imperative. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you, and that kind of thing; the Golden Rule. It’s very pervasive in Western societies, but it’s unknown in other societies.
What we have to realize is the moral basis of our society, but also take advantage of it and appeal to people’s moral stance in relation to what’s going on here, because we are being replaced. It’s an evolutionary disaster; it’s a disaster in every possible way, so we have to take account of that.
Thank you.
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5 comments
I’ve been preaching a variation of this since the 80s. Western man is ethical man – modally more so than any other race. That is both our glory, and, perhaps, our downfall. Whites have to be persuaded to be even minimally ethnocentric, while all other peoples are naturally maximally or near-maximally ethnocentric. It is a huge evolutionary disadvantage for us – the chief reason we are ineluctably headed to extinction if we do nothing (ie, absent acts of conscious racial resistance).
Of course we have morality on our side, which is one reason I have always HATED Nazi LARPing (and other overt expressions of aggressive White Power: someday such may be needed, as they already are in our Third World-dominated prisons, but we’re not at that stage of disintegration yet nationwide, and we certainly were not even close in the 1970s-90s). Such behavior simply announces that a) white preservationists {WPs} are moral cretins, and b) for the more discerning but still mainstream conservatives, we are fundamentally unserious. For this reason I even used to sometimes cringe when I’d receive my copy of Instauration back in the 80s/90s (“Primate Watch” – really? I get it, but still …. tactically speaking …).
Because of our collective inaction over all those ‘lost’ decades since the 60s (when the race war on white America formally began), however, the moral case for white preservationism is now both more necessary, and more difficult to make. When I was fighting the immigration invasion, starting in the mid-late 1970s, and later affirmative action (and the ongoing academic/cultural de-legitimizing of white America), the prowhite case was morally unimpeachable in part because the solutions were so morally unproblematic.
From a true Christian standpoint: 1) people have a right to (heterosexually) marry – but not necessarily to anyone they wish to (eg, in this case, to people of different races); 2) nations have the right to restrict foreign entry and/or settlement based on national, environmental, economic and other preservationist criteria; 3) societies have no obligation to tolerate pathological criminal predation by minority groups, nor is racial integration or ‘diversity’ any kind of moral imperative; 4) majorities are under no obligation to foreswear teaching their own histories to their own children simply to be ‘inclusive’ towards children from cultural out-groups, let alone to discriminate against themselves to provide special privileges to less meritorious members of other groups; and finally, 5) peoples have no obligation to maximize the fecundity of alien peoples via socialist inter-group wealth transfers.
IOWs, miscegenation, affirmative action, immigration, diversification, socialism and multiculturalism can all be banned or “not-maximized” without violating any aspect of ecumenical Christian ethics. We are also under no moral edict to maintain in perpetuity Puerto Rico as a territory, or, indeed, Hawaii as a state. Ridding ourselves of both would be good for white genetic and political interests.
The moral problem we now face, however, is how WPs should act (ethically) post-invasion. Saying we could have done something to prevent the current impasse from having arisen is obviously different from saying we may do what is necessary to return to the status quo ex ante. Yes, we can still eliminate affirmative action, halt immigration, ban CRT, etc. But the invasion was. The problem we face is that we must justify taking hard, coercive measures to rearrange our circumstances so they resemble those we had pre-invasion. Developing the ethical case for doing so is an astronomically more difficult task than if we’d never allowed matters to get so far out of our control in the first place. That is, even if many whites might wish we’d never allowed our treasonous ‘leaders’ to work for half a century replacing us, much of that replacement has now occurred, and undoing it will not be remotely as unproblematic (according to standard white/Christian morality) as having originally prevented it. “A stitch in time saves nine …”
@Lord Shang – You have clearly given this much thought; and as always, you have provided much food for further thought. I would only disagree with you in that I think we absolutely ARE at that point, as you expressed it: “…someday such may be needed, as they already are in our Third World-dominated prisons, but we’re not at that stage of disintegration yet nationwide”.
‘They’ are at digging up graves, my good sir. We are already at the desecration-of-our-history stage. As the eloquent Gregory Hood wrote in a recent article, “There is no telling what a government that desecrates graves might do.” (The Endless Reconstruction, Amren.com)
It’s been quite a while back that one of your comments lead me to the archives of Instauration Magazine. I have, in fact, downloaded the PDF of every single issue and stored it on a USB drive for my personal archives. I browse the issues at random, and I am constantly amazed at the crystal clear insight of the intelligent and thoughtful commenters. They knew — they knew all that we are seeing today was on the way. It’s eerie, and oddly uplifting to read from the vantage point of the current day.
And call me a reprobate, but I thoroughly enjoy the “Primate Watch”. Steeped as I am in daily anti-Whiteism from all levels of …. well, everything, I don’t feel one bit ashamed to enjoy the blatant race realism of that section.
Cheers to you, Lord Shang! I am an admirer of your commentary.
Thank you for your words of encouragement. I usually try to contribute something in comments, as opposed to mere ranting. I’m not sure I’m all that successful, however, as I rarely elicit much serious consideration. Despite the countless occasions I’ve been called a “racist” across my life, I’m not really a white nationalist per se, but rather a paleoconservative Occidentalist as well as honest man, which in this context means race realist (how can anyone not ignorant and with integrity not be a race-realist?). I’m a white preservationist because preventing white extinction is both the first duty of any sort of Western conservative, and the sine qua non for the survival of the West, which I regard as the world’s objectively best civilization, as well as the ultimate focus of my own loyalty and concern. I advocate a defensive prowhite politics for the obvious reason that we whites are being relentlessly attacked, and not just as white individuals, but as a race. But when WNs start engaging in real racism, or attacking Christianity (which I cherish, despite my own reluctant philosophical agnosticism, and would like to return to, if I can become convinced by theistic argument), or extolling pagan weirdness, or defending Nazi criminality, that’s when I part company.
My point wrt Primate Watch was merely a PR one: however accurate the information conveyed therein might be, it obviously played into racial stereotypes, and thus allowed the cuckservatives to get away with dismissing the publication as “racist” and “beyond the pale” in the minds 0f those unfamiliar with it – thereby enabling them to steer potential conversos away from confronting the hard facts and obviously correct arguments Instauration would make wrt the evils for white Americans of diversity imposition and importation.
I may be mistaken, but I have a dim recollection that cuckservative W.F. Buckley, Jr., not only referenced Joe Sobran’s qualified endorsement of Instauration as part of his overall denunciation of Sobran for the thoughtcrime of antisemitism (this I remember very well from reading his monster National Review article “In Search of Antisemitism” {later turned into a small book which I never read, having been a subscriber to NR when the original article appeared} back in the early 90s, which went out of its way to slander both Sobran and Pat Buchanan on very weak grounds), but specifically called attention to the phrase “Primate Watch”. How many decent, open-minded, true conservatives might have avoided Instauration and its vitally important editorial arguments simply because of language like that?
Per my main point in my comment above, prowhites must forever take into account the higher ethicality of whites when making our ‘pitch’. Whites are simultaneously the most ethical and as well as individualistic of races, which is why old-fashioned racism has fallen so far out of favor despite its group-survival value. The good news is that we have true empirically-derived ethics (ie, moral positions arising logically from the established facts of human diversity and history) on our side. We don’t need to be off-putting towards the legions of unfortunately racially more sensitive souls amongst our people in order to make our ethnonationalist case, nor should we be, for moral as well as tactical reasons.
Lord Shang – Thank you for the thoughtful exploration of your point of view on Primate-Watch-style “racism”, or for shorthand, I’ll call it “cartoonish racism”. I reject the word “racist”, but I must admit you are correct in your assessment that the majority of White people are offended by open and unapologetic cartoonish racism. I think they are quite mistaken, and that all other races take a gleeful pleasure in lampooning those unlike themselves — especially the sensitive, careful and tolerant White race.
Another problem is that the perception of what is, and what is not, racism has exploded over the past decade. Being on time is “White Supremacy”, and everything identified as “White Supremacy” is by the current definition “racist”.
White people were not always, as they are today, hyper-sensitive to cartoonish racism. That has been programmed into us over generations. You have correctly assessed the current reality, though — I give you that. A paradigm shift that removes the “racist” stigma is the paradigm shift that is needed. How else will White people ever start taking our own side with moral confidence?
Finally, you are a far deeper thinker than myself, and I have much to learn from you; therefore, with all sincerity and much regard, I defer to your greater wisdom
Evolution often proceeds in layers — by layering new things onto old.
White people who survive this battle for the 14 words will be selected on (among a few other things):
The ability to square the circle, to retain our individualism (and other moral fairness), within a fortress of racial realism and a healthy folk environment of mutual effort and assistance. As the ancient & modern Aryan Mages know: Extremes meet, all paradoxes can be reconciled. When you are at 99% stupid about race realism you are not *only* 98% away from being smart, but also only 2%. For us who know the deal already the change may have been a long and painful traverse all the way around the arc, but for those we shall lead, latecomers, it will come like yet another anti-white punch in the face – a quick bump, and across the 2% they will go — pretending they were always with us, lol.
The others who make it through this will have the ability to STFU and follow those who achieved item 1 above.
You always knew the answer wasn’t to become like a Jew, or other race.
(Whites who go that way become traitors quite often I have observed)
We have to find our own way and be true to ourselves — that is just the way we are.
Oh, and we will.
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