“I am just a vigilant citizen
In a house that no one is living in
I am just a vigilant citizen
In a bed that everyone’s pissing in”-Cruel Hand, “Vigilant Citizen”
“Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.” -Aristotle
What is it about European civilization, and the Anglo-Saxon tradition in particular, that makes it so unique in the history of the world? There is a stunning cathedral in the center of York, England, called the York Minster that offers the perfect metaphor. Originally a Roman fortress, in 627 AD a wooden church was hurriedly constructed to be able to baptize King Edwin of Northumbria. A more permanent, but still humble, church was eventually erected, but it burned down in 741; a much more ambitious church with thirty altars was constructed on the site, and lasted until its severe damage in 1069 during William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North and its ultimate destruction in 1075 by a Danish Viking raid. From 1080 another church was built in the Norman style. The present structure, which took over two hundred years to construct (1230-1472), is Gothic in style and sits on the Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman foundations that came before. Given its size, intricacy, centrality, and importance, the cathedral requires consistent maintenance and renovation in order to preserve it in all its grandeur, but the expense is more than worth it to honor the region’s history and to be able to awe oneself in the presence of the cathedral’s stained glass, opulent ornamentation, magnificent architecture, and tombs of seminal religious and political figures. Visiting the Minster, you can time travel the two thousand years below the cathedral through the previous foundations and their artifacts, and climb the central tower to see the still-intact medieval walls of York and the nearly one thousand-year-old Clifford’s Tower that still stands on its outskirts.
The diligence, respect, patience, talent, faith, and cooperation it takes to create and maintain such a house of worship across many lifetimes is really a testament to civilizational pride and religious devotion, a true labor of love, and it speaks to something deep and profound in the Western psyche. I’ve written at length about the various contributing threads that have inter-woven over the course of the development of the West, but there’s one key factor that I haven’t considered in its entirety yet, mostly because it is a bit more nebulous and I needed to do much more research in order to speak with some “authority” on it, and that would be the role of giving, cooperation, and altruism.
The evidence for altruism having a strong biological component is mounting, and its occurrence varies across different races. Whites seem to have the highest levels of altruism, and are unique among the races for their de-emphasis on kinship and re-orientation of society to a more person-to-person “contractual” system, whereby cooperation between non-familial societal sub-groups and individuals takes on extra importance. To be sure, familial ties remain central to the organization of white societies, but beyond the immediate family, the ties, generally speaking, rapidly diminish. In Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote about the kin system in Somalia, where everyone was expected to know their lineage ten or twenty generations in the past as a form of social organization and hierarchy, which could certainly be a source of strength and function both as a “networking tool” and as its own kind of welfare system in times of need, but could also in times of instability, such as the Somali civil war, turn into a tribal nightmare. The kin system is not conducive to building a modern nation-state.
Kin selection is just one mechanism in the evolution of cooperation, which also involves three different kinds of reciprocity, a “guardian function,” and group selection, which with the de-emphasis of kinship in Western societies allowed for voluntary association and hence a much greater degree of cooperation, which in turn allowed for the development of more complex social, political, and economic systems. Coupled with the genetic impulse among whites to be more altruistic than other groups—perhaps owing to climatic factors, but more research needs to be done here—the ready embrace of Christianity conjoined with the unique and varying local pagan customs, rituals, and spirituality, helped facilitate an extreme emphasis on the individual and stands in stark contrast to Jewish and Islamic tribalism, though Judaism is much more insular than either as it is not a proselytizing religion and has its own ethnic component. With these considerations we can clearly see why Western civilization surged ahead of its competitors once the free market began to take root after the Black Death and as the works of luminaries such as Chaucer, Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch writing in the vernacular in the High Middle Ages melded with the Renaissance of classical antiquity’s intellectual and artistic traditions, and were widely dispersed following the invention of the printing press. This double fusion—first of Christianity with local paganism, then with a re-discovery and advancement of the ideas and ideals of classical antiquity—imbued Europe with tremendous energy and brought it to the doorstep of modernity.
Somewhere along the line, however, the altruistic cooperation that was once so central to the development of Western civilization became a monstrous Catholic-Guilt-on-steroids; the reversion to Christian universalism and abandonment of the pagan infusion of what is essentially an alien faith, often unconsciously received, became whites’ Achilles heel. To quote Barbara A. Oakley:
For cooperative behavior to continue in complex biological or sociological entities, that is, for entities not to fall prey to ever-present, ever-evolving defectors, some form of evolving active guardian function must be present that detects when debilitating or destructive advantage is being taken of cooperative or altruistic behavior. The guardian system must not only detect but also disable such noncooperative behavior or render the entity immune to the pernicious effects. Without such detection and mitigation mechanisms, we see modeled evolutionary entities that are wiped out by defectors (note: emphasis added).
These mechanisms are no longer present, and the defectors are eating away at the Western organism. These are the “enlightened free-loaders,” and we are the guilt-ridden “pathological altruists” who enable them. Metapedia defines pathological altruism as: “Sincere attempts to help others that instead harms others or oneself and where this harm could have been reasonably anticipated. It is often caused by cognitive and/or emotional biases that blind people to the potentially harmful consequences of their actions.” Our immune system is down and the carrion of our civilization is up for grabs. In fact, we’ll help you strip the carcass bare! As Mark Steyn says, “You don’t extinguish prudence for utopian delusions,” but that’s precisely what we’ve done. Pathological altruism and rampant white guilt under the manipulative guise of “liberalism” have enabled the transformation of the politics of the West—and the tributary of big-government-favoring Third World immigrants—into a kind of racial spoils system. This malignant form of liberalism, which is really not liberalism at all, is founded on premises closely hewing to Original Sin. That said, for Shelby Steele:
White guilt is not actual guilt…White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret. It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is....Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism…This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.
What passes for liberalism in the United States today, and indeed much of the rest of the West, is a useful racial and tribal extortion racket for non-whites. Our political process is becoming a farce as we pantomime our commitment to what this great experiment in self-determination was meant to be. There is perhaps no one more emblematic of this than the mawkish Chuck Schumer, incessantly whining and crying on television for some new entitlement or welfare program—or some stripping away of civil rights—in the name of COMPASSION and THE CHILDREN. It’s a cheap trick, but it works on the whites either already afflicted with an altruistic pathology or on those so encumbered by the guilt they’ve been marinated in their entire lives, they’ll willfully let the government cleave off half their paycheck so as to not be called racist. As Kevin Jackson says, “Race pimping has cost America trillions of dollars, as the money in race guilt is fantastic. Politicians line their pockets and those of family and friends, while delivering little to nothing to their constituents or the community at large.” Schumer and Company are living high on the hog (unless they’re kosher, in which case they’re living high on the New York bagel with cream cheese, lox, and capers), race-baiting their way to the bank.
Never mind that, pace Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, “The sociological truths are that America, while still flawed in its race relations … is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa.” No, the present dogma holds that there is something fundamentally cruel and insidious about the United States, deep-seated sins that must be atoned for, from its legacy of slavery to its legacy of colonialism. “That leads me to make several elephant-in-the-room observations,” says Sherriff David Clarke:
These “news” reports are followed by coverage of race hustlers calling for a “national discussion on race.” Provocateurs demand that all white Americans engage in self-flagellation, confess to false accusations of harboring racist feelings and admit that America is racist to the core. Like Pavlov’s dogs, many Republican politicians begin rushing to the nearest camera to flaunt their racial sensitivity…Do we allow false accusers to commit a criminal act and escape accountability? Not prosecuting a crime encourages others to commit similar offenses…Everyone is encouraged to feel aggrieved (everyone except white males). If no feeling exists, fantasize and make one up.
Thanks to American Renaissance, we know that there were over one hundred hate crime hoaxes in the U.S. between when Donald Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015 and the close of 2017. There are tremendous privileges afforded the victims of hate crimes, and the mass outpouring of media coverage, money, and—you guessed it—empathy incentivize minorities to fabricate these crimes in order to be a beneficiary of the White Guilt Industrial Complex. What’s more, there’s virtually no downside, as when the hate crimes are revealed as hoaxes, with maybe one or two exceptions, the individuals in question receive at worst a slap on the wrist. Contrasting sharply with the narrative of “white privilege,” Gregory Hood makes the observation that, “Political power comes from shedding the imagined privileges of whiteness, and securing the actual privileges of non-whiteness.” None other than Linda Sarsour proved his thesis when she said, “When I wasn’t wearing a hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.” This is really deranged when you step back from the hysteria and think about it, and the gruesome twosome of guilt culture and pathological altruism is not confined to the United States by any means. It is a pan-Western epidemic of guilt assuagement with no set number of Hail Mary’s to affect clemency and a suicidal selflessness cresting a wave of giving-giving-giving-induced endorphins. Clearly the guilt-motivated penance, the pathology of altruism, and the imagined moral high ground and real social benefits of “altruistic” virtue-signaling do not need to have any basis in reality, or even actually help people. And when they are institutionally enshrined, even better! Returning to Barbara A. Oakley:
The government-sponsored enterprises Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae allowed less-than-qualified individuals to receive housing loans and encouraged more-qualified borrowers to overextend themselves. Typical risk–reward considerations were marginalized because of implicit government support. The government used these agencies to promote social goals without acknowledging the risk or cost. When economic conditions faltered, many lost their homes or found themselves with properties worth far less than they originally had paid. Government policy then shifted the cost of this “altruism” to the public, to pay off the too-big-to-fail banks then holding securitized subprime loans.
Western elites and their clueless Goodwhite allies (colloquially known as “shitlibs”) are impervious to the mounting social, financial, and human cost in their endless pursuit of the brass ring of moral superiority. For some, it is purely self-serving, either through the acquisition of power and social capital, or because of the potent “helper’s high” that comes from giving and the perception of having “done good.” Others guiltily shrink away from confronting the harsh realities of existence while yet another camp toasts the cheap labor and cheap commercial products, drunk on the apathy of affluence—finally, still others’ eyes shine with malevolence, possessed as they are with raw hatred of the Western world and a desire to see it first reduced to ashes and then swept away forever. These groups are variegated in their present positioning, but all stand to gain from, depending on the group in question, our subjugation, demise, or erasure.
To be fair, there are many people out there who do good simply because it aligns with their moral code and because it is just the right thing to do, or at least appears to be, and not all who do good are pathological, but there can be no question that: 1) as a society, as a culture, and as a civilization (what’s left of it), we are thoroughly pathologized, and 2) there are many self-interested “defectors” who, though not morally, are rationally reaping enormous benefit from the absence of a “guardian system.” We venerate the barbarian Other at our own expense and worship the Great Flattening of our dynamic and exceptional civilization and call it “virtue.” It is worth asking, in the end, who really benefits.
Click for Full Text!