On White Normie “Brainwashing”: A Reply to Kevin MacDonald, Paul Craig Roberts, & Other Dissidents, Part 1
Posted By D. H. Corax On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]Amy Biehl, an American anti-Apartheid activist who was murdered by blacks in South Africa in 1993.
3,168 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here [2])
There is something of a critical mass effect with much of the information we take in on a day-to-day basis. We can read or hear the same sort of thing 99 times without thinking much about it, but on the hundredth time it suddenly registers as if it is something new, and we then act on it. For whatever reason, recently reading Kevin MacDonald’s essay from September of 2022 [3] about the utter naïveté on racial matters expressed by the people at his reunion had this effect on me. It combined with the rest of the somewhat black- (or at least grey-) pilling articles and comments I’ve encountered on various dissident Right sites — most notably the Unz Review, where Paul Craig Roberts’ jeremiads against the “brainwashed” and “insouciant” nature of most Americans are a near-daily feature — to convince me to write this essay on an element of our situation that is often missed, misunderstood, or underappreciated by many on our side.
I have no formal training in psychology, so please forgive me if some of the concepts that I mention are already known by different names. I am also only self-taught in economics and history, although while I know far less than the two above-mentioned giants among intellectual dissidents, I still feel that I know enough about human nature in general and nature of American whites in particular to point out something that they seem to be missing, and which makes our situation less apocalyptically bleak than it might at first seem. In doing so, it may reveal the path towards solutions that could make it even less bleak.
To begin, let me introduce a concept which I call the “emotional hangar,” a part of white and East Asian mental architecture which seems to be lacking or is otherwise severely underdeveloped in those of pure sub-Saharan African ancestry. It is also weak, yet present, in other non-white and non-East Asian peoples.
As far as I can tell, the emotional hangar serves two major functions. To know what these are, let us look at what its absence or extremely weak form looks like, with examples from the lives of three men who dealt with pure sub-Saharans on a day-to-day basis for many years. One is an American policeman, another is an American teacher at an almost all-black high school, and the last is an American teaching at various universities in Africa.
Let’s begin with the last, Gedaliah Braun, who wrote a remarkable article in which he put forth the idea that virtually all differences between blacks and whites and the resulting social pathologies of the former fall under the broad umbrella of lacking the ability to perform abstract thinking well. Many black characteristics, such as having short time horizons, are familiar to most on the dissident Right, but there is one which they seem to view only from the angle of impulse control, but which is actually more complex: a lack of precaution involving conscious scrutiny of possible emotional reactions and their consequences. You can call this merely a form of a lack of impulse control, but I don’t think this fully captures it. Braun approaches awareness of the missing emotional hangar when he writes:
However harsh it may sound to say so, blacks are, in many ways, child-like, and this is illustrated by the often superficial quality of their emotions. They are easily provoked into violence and mayhem but, like chameleons, they can turn completely docile the next moment.
A recent incident is perhaps revealing. I was driving in heavy traffic, and cut in front of a black taxi. As luck would have it, we met at the light and the driver shook his fist at me, cursing me in anger. I raised my hand, acknowledging fault. Instantly, the anger became a broad (and, I believe, genuine) smile of friendship. This kind of instant transformation is common.[i] [4]
Now compare this with testimony from the other two:
As Tom Andrews, the nom de plume of a self-described “police officer in the United States,” tells us:
Even when there is no crime, blacks can get out of hand. We get a lot of runaway calls. Most of the time the parents are more angry than frightened, because most children have not been abducted; they just don’t want to come home. One call I took was about a black girl who was supposed to come home from her job at a convenience store only a short walk away. When she didn’t show up, the whole family became hysterical.
As I took the report, I had to give up on talking to the mother — only in her thirties — since she curled up into a ball on the floor screaming, while her own mother rocked her back and forth. Hysteria is contagious, and the younger ones started screaming, too. I couldn’t get answers to many of the questions I needed for the report, such as the missing girl’s social security number or blood type.[ii] [5]
And Christopher Jackson describes the hazard of teaching in “a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state” thus:
The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.[iii] [6]
What do all three of these have in common? Not simply lack of impulse control, if we define that as the behaviors exhibited by those with “a low-activity version of the MAOA gene, which previous research has dubbed the ‘warrior gene’ because of its link to aggressive behaviour,”[iv] [7] but an allelic variant with a racially biased distribution:
The warrior gene [is] found to be more or less prevalent in different ethnic groups. The 3R version, which produces less MAO-A, was found in 59% of Black men, 56% of Māori men (an aboriginal New Zealand group), 54% of Chinese men and 34% of Caucasian men. The 2R version, which produces the least MAO-A, is found in 5.5% of Black men, 0.1% of Caucasian men, and 0.00067% of Asian men.[v] [8]
And
Additional analyses revealed that African-American male carriers of the 2-repeat allele scored significantly higher on an antisocial phenotype index and on measures assessing involvement in violent behaviors over the life course. . . . The effects of the 2-repeat allele could not be examined in Caucasian males because only 0.1% carried it.[vi] [9]
Thus, since “monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) . . . breaks down neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine [and] . . . scientists have proposed that. . . low levels of this enzyme should imply more neurotransmitters — as there’s less MAO around to degrade them,”[vii] [10] a population carrying the warrior gene, but lacking the genetic and neurochemical configuration to keep it in check as Europeans do, is likely what causes our prisons today to look like Zimbabwe.
As you can see, while the high school teacher’s story is a textbook example of low impulse control, the other two really aren’t. In the cop’s account, the negress mother and her family were showing not heightened aggression, but misery and worry heightened to the point of a mental collapse; and in Braun’s account the black driver, he slipped out of his aggression as quickly as he’d slipped into it.
Yet, all three do share something in common: emotional shifts that are instantaneous and without a delay, building, or gradation that would allow them to be analyzed by the higher parts of the brain in preparation for the action that they may induce. This therefore reveals to us one of the major functions of what I’ve termed the emotional hangar: Just as an airplane hangar allows planes to start up and stand at the ready for potential action without actually taking off, with the option to be powered down and deactivated if there turns out to be no need for them to fly, so the neurochemical configuration of whites and East Asians allows them a way to feel gradations of emotions. The weakest emotions are kept waiting, often almost subconsciously, while the rational parts of their brains begin to go into overdrive, assessing what the weak emotions mean and planning potential courses of action in the event that external events should call for their full release.
[11]You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here. [12]
This process thus leads to increased survival rates in two ways: directly, by allowing for a more rational analysis of opportunities for both resource acquisition and danger avoidance; and indirectly, by facilitating the kind of complex, trust-based, cooperative social interactions needed to build and maintain the types of advanced civilizations that make advanced agriculture and capital accumulation possible.
For an example of the first, consider a group of hunter-gathers who are walking through the jungle when they hear something crashing through the brush, but can’t tell whether it’s a potential danger or prey. If they instantly react with either joy and aggression or fear and flight, they could easily be killed or potentially lose game. If they thought it was a sambar but it turned out to be a tiger, they’d be sitting ducks; but if they thought it was a tiger and it turned out to be a sambar, they would have retreated too far away by the time it became visible to catch it, and thus would have gone home hungry. But if they’d felt a small amount of fear — just enough to get their minds racing without getting their bodies to do the same — they could quickly take stock of their surroundings and move into a position where they would be close enough to kill potential prey, but also near enough to trees that they could climb to escape from danger.
As for the second, think of all the times you’ve become angry with someone and walked away, stewing and mulling the whole thing over before deciding how to deal with him next, if at all. You probably kept your anger on a slow boil in the hangar so that it didn’t bubble over until your fist was well out of range of his face, or until you could take your aggression out on a soccer ball or some other harmless way. Or, perhaps you simply eventually decided that it wasn’t worth your time to obsess over it. Sometimes you might even think it over and decide the other person was right, or at least had a point. These types of situations are micros, without which the macro of an advanced civilization would crumble — or simply not arise in the first place.
But the emotional hangar has a second major function as well, one which reaches to the heart of the true — and myriad, as we’ll see — nature of “brainwashed” American whites, to say nothing of Europeans. It allows emotions to be stored at the subconscious level, either to keep them from hampering the maintenance of social cohesion during times of stress and tribulation, or to keep them potent yet not debilitating in order to give power to the cultural and moral norms which provide structure and order in an advanced civilization.
A people that cannot continually feel misery and stress during times of famine and conflict, save for those moments when its full force is upon them, can neither work constantly to survive such perils, nor retain the emotional discomfort that will compel them to resolve never to suffer them again — or at least not as badly — and thus cannot make preparations for the future accordingly. On the other hand, a people that is completely debilitated by misery and despair will not be able to maintain social cohesion and/or act rationally well enough to survive. The ideal compromise from an evolutionary standpoint is therefore to keep the negative emotions constant, but weak and in the subconscious — something the emotional hangar allows for.
Beyond that, it allows for the optimal — and mostly non-violent — enforcement of cultural norms and morals. Consider the case of someone who breaks ranks with the European Christian social order by stealing or killing and gets away with it. And say, moreover, that he is not psychopathic and doesn’t lack internal constraints; he only acted out of desperation under extreme circumstances, and thus is not a constant danger to society. What, then, would be the optimal internal reaction for him from a social/evolutionary standpoint?
Were he to be overwhelmed by negative emotions, he might simply kill himself or become too debilitated to keep going, and thus would be unable to help the group press on through trying times — the strain of which successfully tempted him to sin. On the other hand, perhaps he can simply use reason to overwhelm and purge such negative emotions. After all, barring a metaphysical code of justice, it is perfectly rational from an individual standpoint for someone to try to minimize the pain felt from major crises such as losing a child (“I’ve got to pull myself together; lapsing into alcoholism and losing my job won’t bring him back”) or carrying out major crimes (“I’ve just killed a man! If I let anyone know, they’ll kill me, too, and that won’t bring him back. Better to just keep quiet, go back to my normal life, resolve to never do it again, and let guilt and misery — which won’t bring him back, either — die as well!”). These are events that have already happened and can’t be changed. From a social standpoint, not doing so all but guarantees that society will barely advance beyond the level of so many African tribes, whose members, as Braun points out (referencing William Stewart, the American linguist and sociologist who did extensive work among African peoples), do not internalize constraints and are entirely dependent on those imposed by tribal elders and other authorities.[viii] [13]
It is therefore best to prevent the negative emotions from overwhelming us, and to consign shame, guilt, and misery to the subconscious while one works and lives as normal. In this case, it will either overwhelm one and cause one to confess and begs one’s peers for forgiveness or a just punishment, or perhaps simply induces one to never again give in to such a temptation. This could possibly aid the future social order, if one warns one’s children or others one is close to about the unbearable misery that comes from making such a decision.
The degree to which pure sub-Saharans take almost casual pleasure in the most vicious varieties of murder and mayhem, as well as their apparent lack of shame or guilt, again strongly suggests just how primitive or absent the emotional hangar is in them. Recall, as Braun reminds us, that the various tribes involved in Rwanda’s genocidal conflicts actually filmed themselves dancing in the blood of their slain enemies:
The author of an article in the Chicago Tribune, describing the equally gruesome way the Hutu killed Tutsi in the Burundi massacres, marveled at “the ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible thought. It’s beyond my reach.” (“Hutu Killers Danced In Blood Of Victims, Videotapes Show,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1995, p.8.) The lack of any moral sense is further evidenced by their having videotaped their crimes, “apparently want[ing] to record . . . [them] for posterity.”[ix] [14]
Another aspect of African behavior that liberals do their best to ignore, but that nevertheless requires an explanation, is gratuitous cruelty. Here, Braun quotes a reviewer of Driving South, a 1993 book by David Robbins:
A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence . . . It’s like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise appear normal. . . . At the slightest provocation their blood-lust is aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and agonizing death. (Citizen [Johannesburg], July 12, 1993, p. 6.)[x] [15]
The murder of the pathologically altruistic American activist Amy Biehl and the trial of her killers serves as another stark example:
In 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old American on a Fulbright scholarship, was living in South Africa, where she spent most of her time in black townships helping blacks. One day when she was driving three African friends home, young blacks stopped the car, dragged her out, and killed her because she was white. A retired senior South African judge, Rex van Schalkwyk, in his 1998 book One Miracle is Not Enough, quotes from a newspaper report on the trial of her killers: “Supporters of the three men accused of murdering [her] . . . burst out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain.”[xi] [16]
All of this taken together goes a long way toward explaining why the kind of society which Europeans and East Asians, the vast majority of whom possess an advanced emotional hangar, habitually build has never appeared in sub-Saharan African lands under black control.
Of course, in this life everything is a tradeoff, and no strength or ability comes entirely without downsides which can, under the right circumstances, transform it into a weakness or liability. So it is with the emotional hangar and its ability to sublimate emotions. In a healthy society with a true Christian culture (as opposed to the banal, heretical bilge that tries to pass itself off as such in our time), or at least a culture not under the control of a foreign power or an alien and deadly ideology, the hangar allows for a strong yet flexible social order at every level, one which can be honest with itself. But in an unhealthy society which cannot or will not be honest with itself — one in which taboos function not to enforce civil behavior and the basic social order, but rather to suppress discussion of inconvenient realities — the hangar’s sublimative ability allows for the preservation of an unsustainable order built on a reality-averse ideology, one which ought to be tossed into the ashbin of history.
* * *
Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of readers like you. Help us compete with the censors of the Left and the violent accelerationists of the Right with a donation today. (The easiest way to help is with an e-check donation. All you need is your checkbook.)
For other ways to donate, click here [17].
Notes
[i] [18] Gedaliah Braun, “South Africa under Black Rule [19],” American Renaissance, August 31, 2019.
[ii] [20] Tom Andrews, “Policing While White [21],” American Renaissance, December 7, 2021.
[iii] [22] Christopher Jackson, “A White Teacher Speaks Out [23],” American Renaissance, December 7, 2021.
[iv] [24] Melissa Hogenboom, “Two Genes Linked with Violent Crime [25],” BBC News, October 28, 2014.
[v] [26] Ana Aleksic, “Is Maoa the ‘Warrior Gene’? High/Low Levels & Testing [27],” SelfHacked, November 10, 2020.
[vi] [28] Kevin M. Beaver, John Paul Wright, Brian B. Boutwell, J.C. Barnes, Matt DeLisi, & Michael G. Vaughn, “Exploring the Association between the 2-Repeat Allele of the MAOA Gene Promoter Polymorphism and Psychopathic Personality Traits, Arrests, Incarceration, and Lifetime Antisocial Behavior [29],” Personality and Individual Differences, Pergamon, September 28, 2012.
[vii] [30] Aleksic, “Is Maoa the ‘Warrior Gene’?”
[viii] [31] Gedaliah Braun, “Racial Differences in Morality and Abstract Thinking [32],” American Renaissance, January 14, 2020.
[ix] [33] Braun, “Racial Differences in Morality and Abstract Thinking.”
[x] [34] Braun, “Racial Differences in Morality and Abstract Thinking.”
[xi] [35] Braun, “Racial Differences in Morality and Abstract Thinking.”