Kevin MacDonald on Whites & Individualism

Posted By Kevin MacDonald On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

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The following is a transcript, video (see below), and audio recording of Kevin MacDonald [2] 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 [3] or on the player below. To download the mp3, right-click here [3] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

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https://counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Kevin-MacDonald-at-2022-CC-Retreat.mp3 [3]

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?

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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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