NAXALT as Anti-White Sophistry

1,089 words

When given enough time to reflect, one can easily enough unravel most forms of sophistry. The very point of sophistry is to use false argumentation to deceive or manipulate the listener in real time, when they don’t have time to reflect and when they don’t have data at their fingertips. It’s usually easy enough to do. Simply appeal to people’s emotions, biases, and desires with logic which seems consistent—and do so authoritatively—and suddenly you have an eager and willing audience. This is how rhetoric works.

The sophistry known as NAXALT (standing for “Not All X Are Like That”) is a prime example of this. Many today use it to dismiss race realism—or any kind of realism, for that matter. A good example is pointing to a particularly brilliant black person in order to brush aside the claim that blacks are on average less intelligent than most non-blacks. Yet refuting NAXALT is trivial. Would we point to a particularly tall woman to refute the claim that men on average are taller than women? One does not need an education or even average intelligence to see through such spurious logic.

But if NAXALT is so spurious, what explains its staying power? One could say it is a superficial argument well-suited for superficial people. But that in and of itself is a bit superficial—especially when people can easily grasp the concept of averages whenever it doesn’t apply to human differences in intelligence and temperament. Not every dark, cloudy morning in April is going to lead to rain, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to leave your umbrella at home when you drive off for work. Other human-neutral examples abound. Essentially, the predictive power of NAXALT is too weak for the vast majority of people not to see through it.

One could also suggest that people can see through NAXALT, but deliberately refrain because they are too nice. After all, it takes a surfeit of sympathy to appreciate a person’s discomfiture when he’s prejudiciously ascribed traits supposedly belonging to his group but not necessary to him. But this is only half the story. A person applying NAXALT to exonerate this or that maligned group of humans is not brimming with universal sympathy like he thinks he is. Instead, he has merely shifted his sympathy away from one group of people and toward another. Realists making realist arguments don’t deserve sympathy, while those who benefit from an overall lack of realism do. Effectively, what blacks (or whatever marginalized group you can think of) gain with NAXALT, people who are concerned with realism lose. And if you’re part of the latter group, you will go without much public sympathy due to no fault of your own. NAXALT may be a lot of things, but it certainly isn’t moral.

So then what explains its success?

I propose that NAXALT survives simply because it is useful to prop up left-wing, democratic liberalism, which has been the principal ideology of the West at least since the Second World War. All ideologies require handy syllogisms—almost indistinguishable from mantras and slogans—which common people can easily understand and repeat in order to reinforce the power of those elites who espouse a particular ideology. Digging deeper, we find that NAXALT facilitates democratic liberalism on three counts:

1. It affirms the notion of universal progress.
2. It presumes biological egalitarianism as an axiomatic fact.
3. It results in discrimination against white men, who compose the prime bulwark against democratic liberalism.

Buried beneath all the rhetoric and histrionics accompanying NAXALT is the inherently leftist idea that humanity is a work in progress. Human beings are inherently malleable and at all times possess the germ of enlightenment and redemption. Thus it is not fair to categorize people according to their natural attributes, especially their negative ones, when in the future these attributes might change. This also makes them fair game for a beneficent elite to tinker with and improve. In fact, we can start the tinkering process right now through education, social engineering, affirmative action, miscegenation, and ostracizing those darn right-wingers who keep carping about racial differences. Don’t we want to make humanity better? Don’t we want a better future? Who’s to say that blacks won’t be able to attain the intellectual level of non-blacks if given enough time and opportunity? We are all equal under the skin, aren’t we?

As we can see, progress relies not only on shifting sympathies but also upon racial egalitarianism, another ideological lynchpin of the left. And egalitarianism relies upon something that most people possess in great quantities: ignorance. According to our leftist elites, the brain is a black box. So is the human genome. There is no way one can possibly open all that up and figure it out. Of course, we can, but to do that without a university lab, a bevy of research assistants, and a nest egg of grant money would require the uninitiated to do a deep dive into genetics, psychometrics, and neuroscience. The leaders of our liberal democratic society are correct to gamble that most people are not going to put in the considerable time to do that. Thus the success of NAXALT is ensured, which ultimately makes people susceptible to egalitarianism. This becomes useful to the left because it encourages people to form identity groups with which to challenge the left’s main rivals: traditional hierarchies based on blood and merit. If we are all equal, then why not?

And who formed these traditional hierarchies? Of course, white men did—and in many cases still do. Therefore, it can be argued that the point of NAXALT is to limit the power and influence of traditionally-minded white men. Yes, it is a specious and convenient form of sophistry. Yes, it is inherently political in nature. But one should not ignore its subtle racial aspect as well. Anyone who honestly employs the NAXALT argument to gloss over human differences in intelligence and temperament is no friend of white identitarianism or of whites as a distinct people. Try to see if you can find one.

In light of this, NAXALT emerges as particularly dangerous because the traditional hierarchies it invariably opposes reflected biological truths about humanity and were crucial for survival. However, were these traditional hierarchies always and everywhere based on truth? No, of course not. But on average they were. Perhaps this is this reason why people started resorting to NAXALT in the first place.

This essay is part of the Counter-Currents NAXALT Contest. Submit yours before the October 2 deadline!