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A friend of mine the other day commented upon the extreme bravery of the young men of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain; whatever one’s view of the wisdom of Britain’s war guarantees to Poland, the fact remains that when facing extreme odds of dying these young men never shrunk from duty. This friend then asked, why is it that these young men, in the RAF and other British Armed Forces, who so staunchly resisted a German invasion of the British homeland, would by and large, with a few noble exceptions, stand by over the next fifty years while their home country was invaded by the Third World? He similarly remarked on the unique tendency of whites as a race in taking extreme physical risks for no good reason, such as skydiving or other extreme sports.
The answer I provided was simple: white behavior optimizes for social status, not physical safety, wealth, or national survival. Seen through this lens, much of the perplexing behavior of whites make sense. White advocates in a sense are running a different behavioral algorithm, more similar to the world norm, than that of most whites.
Most of the world optimizes for three different things: wealth, power and beauty. For whites we can add a fourth good, social status, oddly achieved through “public displays of piety,” (PDP’s) towards the religion of their time, multiculturalism. While most of the world awards social status mostly on the basis of wealth, power and beauty, whites have developed a competing system that awards social status based on achieving and then deprecating those goods through PDP’s. Once upon a time, the deprecation of these goods for a social status based on morality was a positive for Western civilization. Now that personal morality has been replaced with the religion of multiculturalism, the resulting system is more destructive than a purely materialistic award of social merit.
Generally, much of the insanity demonstrated by whites is explained by “pivots” from a real good (wealth, power and beauty all being legitimate “goods” or blessings of God, if gained in accordance with Law) to the false good, PDP’s, which are manifestations of pride dressed up as religious or quasi-religious do-gooding. In addition, there is significant hostility towards whites who pursue any real good too eagerly at the expense of social status. Let’s review each category and white behavior toward each.
Wealth: This is probably the good that whites pursue most explicitly. However, for most whites, wealth is simply a means to a major PDP pivot. Thus, we see people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have no vision of the future or a legacy for their family, because their social status is optimized by giving all of that wealth away on Third World uplift projects. The family fortune that is the birthright of their children is going to be poured down the rat-hole of Africa so the parents can enjoy the adulation of their white liberal friends. Whites who choose not to waste their wealth on such projects are criticized, such as the attacks on Steve Jobs (shortly before his death, by a certain Mr. Sorkin in the NY Times), who preferred to keep his money for his family. Jobs, it should be noted, was by birth half Syrian, and likely enjoyed a certain genetic immunity to attempts at making him feel guilty for his success.
There is an additional pride to this outlook as well, the attitude that “I earned it, therefore I have the right to give it all away to enhance my status in the liberal white pecking order.” The upper class has this same attitude about IQ, i.e. by denying its heritability they can explain their success by their superior virtue instead of genetics and circumstance, which of course reflects more positively on their mutable qualities as a person. A more realistic view of wealth is that it involves about equal parts luck and ability, and the ability is itself probably half genetic based on intelligence and personality. So an individual can really take true credit for only about 25%. The Biblical trustee model as proposed by Rushdoony says that our gifts and luck for wealth are not our own, but rather are subject to claims by God and posterity. Thus, we have an obligation to steward the wealth, after paying God’s requirement, for our children, and they will do the same for theirs. We should see ourselves as but one link in a long chain with no particular claim beyond an immediate responsibility for stewardship.
Power: There are many manifestations of whites trading power for social status. The best example I can muster is the choice by John McCain to not attack Obama on the Jeremiah Wright issue, because to McCain it was more important to have a PDP regarding running a media-approved campaign than it was to win, and thus optimize for power. In the current Republican primary, we see how Newt Gingrich, a train wreck of a candidate and a defective man with absolutely no moral center of any kind, was able to nevertheless show some early success by bucking the false morality in his confrontation with Juan Williams where he stood by his statement of calling Obama the “food stamp president,” a phrase every politician knows is a dog whistle signal of (accurate) black stereotypes to white voters that Newt is on their side. White voters, tired of the false morality of the elites, vote for Gingrich because he at least stands up for them verbally (though he will betray them at the first opportunity in any case, but the voters have no better expectations of the other candidates). Chris Matthews reacted with the typical contempt for any white politician who appeals to the interests of the majority of white voters in this country who are tired of supporting a largely minority underclass. Even Ron Paul did a PDP, twice in recent debates going on about how blacks are “victimized” by the criminal justice system, invoking Rosa Parks and MLKJ as his “heroes,” and saying that “rich white guys” never get the death penalty. Paul knows good and well that rich white guys don’t have the same propensity to commit murder, which is why they don’t get the death penalty. It’s sad how deep the social status posturing goes even for a candidate as otherwise likable as Paul.
Beauty: In many cases whites will even trade beauty for PDP social status purposes. While white males are more biologically constrained in their choice of mates (men being much less flexible in what they find attractive in a woman), there are nevertheless quite a few Christian white males (usually lacking better options) marrying non-white women of less beauty to demonstrate social status on the race issue. White women, being more flexible, will more frequently pair up with less attractive minorities (just as they will pair up with less attractive men with wealth or power; this is a rational choice for women much of the time) in a PDP pivot of beauty for social status (e.g. Heidi Klum and Seal). Similarly, we see fertile white couples choosing to forgo having any or additional natural children in order to adopt a Third World baby. We also see hostility towards the beauty-optimization strategy, such as the recent media overreaction by a certain Mr. Siegel at the NY Times to Mitt Romney’s beautiful white family.
Further adding to the explanatory power of this paradigm is that you almost never see white people doing trades the other way. Companies would rather have a diversity program than make additional profits, politicians would rather lose than appeal to white interests and many Christian white debt slaves want to spend $20,000 on an international adoption instead of stewarding that wealth and having their own beautiful white children.
I should note that a great exception to this trend is the experience of poor Scots-Irish people who were elevated to astronomical levels of wealth through the discovery of oil in Texas, Louisiana and other mid-central southern states. The oil barons almost always optimized for wealth, using it to amass power and kept it for themselves and their children. They generally married blonde beauty queens and their politics were considered “reactionary” by the Left. Because of their weak backwoods theology that had as its central tenant cheap salvation, they did not have a firm understanding of the Biblical trustee family model, many of them indulging in crass luxuries and sexual immorality (hey, you walked the aisle and got your fire insurance when you were 12 at a Backwoods Baptist Church revival service, so why not have fun?). However, their relative insulation from the liberal media, at least when they first emerged in the 1930′s, caused them to have a more organic, natural reaction to sudden wealth than the typical social striving white from northern urban areas. For this they were bitterly hated by the media elites, and the state of Texas today is still particularly hated for its concentration of white, largely unapologetic goyish wealth. Unfortunately, many of these families made the mistake of seeking to raise the social status of their children, sending them to elite schools in the East where they were indoctrinated with these corrosive social status striving worldviews. As Tom Wolfe portrayed in A Man in Full, regional elites these days in places like Atlanta and Dallas are often at the forefront of promoting degeneracy in the arts lest people from New York think them merely rich hicks.
So to return to our first example, why was a young British man willing to risk his life to defend England in WWII and not willing to do anything largely to defend his country from Third World immigration? Simple: one enhanced his social status and the other diminished it. So the more fundamental question is: why this dichotomy? Simply, in the modern era mass media determined the norms of what activities garnered social status and which ones did not. For predictable reasons, the controllers of the British media were enthusiastic about war with Germany but welcoming to Third World immigrants, and white Britons responded to the system of incentives rationally once you understand the underlying social algorithm.
So many white advocates are naively on a quest for broadcasting the truth, as if men were swayed by facts, when the larger mission is creating spheres of influence where social status is not a false fitness signal but rather something that correlates with true goods, including national survival. The Internet offers great hope in this area, as people can virtually sequester themselves in Facebook groups, blogs, forums and other media that share their worldview, and can serve as an incubator for something that must eventually manifest itself in the real world in churches, business associations and informal networks. Over the long-term, groups whose social status incentive structures are more closely aligned to actual goods will tend to out-compete those that are not. Our task is to build a community that grows stronger with each new member. People will not make a rational decision to join such a community, but will be attracted to it because of our success in delivering real benefits to our members. It’s a topic for a future post, but not the least of these should be wealth-building, for which a cooperative group of co-ethnics and particularly co-ethnic Calvinists ought to be very advantaged. Similarly, with our own social support networks to insulate us from despair-inducing isolation we can utilize rhetoric the Establishment rejects to build entrepreneurial political projects that lead to real power. No white candidate for Congress ever talks about racial preferences, because it’s declasse’ to do so, and the one guy who did, David Duke, became a national phenomenon despite a lot of personal baggage, and likely would have been elected out of nowhere to the US Senate without that baggage.
Short term strategies can be copied from the Left, wherein we “critique” the motives of liberal whites engaging in displays of PDP. Just as the Frankfurt School and Saul Alinsky used the charge of hypocrisy to weaken and destroy conservative whites, we can use the charge of hypocrisy to mock and embarrass liberal whites. Our rhetoric ought to consist of about 20% factual content and 80% radical critique of white liberal motives and status-mongering. Expose it acidly and we can impose a social status cost upon attempted PDP’s.
Consider the example of a pastor who promotes miscegenation. Where does this pastor live? If in a lily-white area, you can attack him as a hypocrite. If he is the rare true believer who lives in the inner city, you can attack him as a foolish person who puts his family in unnecessary danger. The beauty of the other side being demonstrably wrong is that they are always fools or hypocrites. Either charge diminishes social status quite effectively.
It strikes me that a major project for white advocates ought to be the formulation of argument templates to radically critique the social status of liberal whites.
