GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

September 6, 2015

Dismantling the Victimocracy 2

Filed under: GA — adam @ 7:23 pm

In my previous post, I discussed two forms of rebellion against the victimocracy: the anti-SJW strategy of the blog Vox Populi (by Vox Day) and American white nationalists. I thought afterward that I might be giving the impression, without intending to, that Vox Day was himself a white nationalist. So, then I got curious—aside from his asymmetrical anti-SJW warfare, what does Vox Day think of nationalism, white nationalism, and, of course (where all such questions lead), the Jews?

He is a realist on all such questions—nationalism is on the rise, which means that multiculturalism is a failure, which further means the Jews, who were the first beneficiaries of the loosening of the insistence upon ethnic homogeneity in European cultures, and then (a disproportionate number, acting explicitly as Jews) agents advancing an ever more thorough loosening, will have no place in national communities that will with good reason blame them for undermining their national cohesion and culture (and will, furthermore, be filled with brand new minorities who hate the Jews far more than, at least in America and the UK, the Anglo majority ever did—minorities whose immigration, once again, Jewish political activism was instrumental in accelerating). This process is well underway in Europe, where it is already widely conceded that the Jews have no future, but Vox thinks it is happening more slowly in the US as well. Vox declares himself pro-Jew and pro-Israel, and by his lights (and my own) I grant that—he is telling Jews the truth, including the truth that demonizing all critical comments about Jews and Israel as “antisemitic” long ago entered the time of diminishing returns. He admires Israel, its self-reliance and unapologetic self-defense, and strongly encourages Jews to move there. He is a libertarian, which also means that his discussion of social groups is generally qualified phrases like “a large majority of Americans will reasonably, if not completely accurately, see…”—that is, he tends to speak through large scale probabilities and decisions made through mimetic contagion in the heat of events, rather than of Jews, Europeans, Muslims, or anyone else as “objective” groups with “essences.” His discourse is, as one would expect, cleansed of victimary hand-wringing—if you (a Jew or anyone else) don’t like what people say about you here, then leave—it’s insane to think you can regulate the speech and thought of others. That will just make them hate you more (people have a right to hate, and to say they hate, whomever they like). He’s no Holocaust denier, but he also gives the Holocaust no weight in considering ethical questions of contemporary politics. He assumes it is obvious that people would prefer to live amongst people who look, believe, speak, and act more or less like themselves, and can be expected to be welcoming to others only under very limited conditions. (I should also say he doesn’t pay any particular attention to Jews—I had to do a search on the blog to gather together his scattered posts discussing Jews, Israel and antisemitism.) I suspect he would qualify as a white nationalist, but I don’t recall him adopting the label—at the very least, he must accept them as fellow fighters against the SJWs.

All this confirms my conclusions in the previous post: this is what genuinely post-victimary discourse looks like. If you don’t like it, you’re better off making your peace with the victimary. I like it, so it presents no difficulties for me. It is a language that draws upon evolutionary thought, von Mises’s “praxeology” (simplistically put, the application of free market principles to all human activity), game theory and military strategy. The abstract principles of liberalism and democracy and Judeo-Christian morality barely figure at all. Of course all this misses something, including the reason why Western society has installed the incredibly dysfunctional victimary software in the first place. (It’s not because of the diabolical cleverness of the Jews.) Mainstream Western society has lived in terror of antisemitism for 70 years because antisemitism was projected back to the origin of a war of such cataclysmic dimensions that we would not (so we assume) survive another like it. Of course, this means that the fear of antisemitism, and victimary thinking far more so, is essentially a cargo cult. We really have no reason to believe that more frank discussions of racial differences and hostilities, or freer expression of preferences for one group over others, would lead to some terrible global catastrophe. But human culture as a whole is a bit of a cargo cult—the communal destruction envisaged in the mimetic crisis we hypothesize at the origin of humanity wasn’t going to happen either. But some cargo cults are better than others—more generative of lasting peace (perhaps the crisis they imagine is more plausible). Vox Day refers regularly to (and prides himself on his mastery of) “logic” and “dialectic,” which seem to be foundations for him—a guarantee of social order. He would include, I assume, the libertarian insistence on reciprocal respect for private property. Of course, such things are part of any civilized order, but by themselves they generate hierarchies that the less logical and less or unpropertied will feel no obligation to respect. Nor are they much of a basis for the nationalism that Vox seems to consider intrinsic to human nature. It may be less multiculturalism than democracy and popular rule that must deemed a failure.

There’s no need to pronounce or speculate on any of that, or to expect this or that pioneer into the thickets of the post-victimary to have all the answers. Insofar as we (that is, myself, and anyone else who wants to join in) consider the victimocracy a suicidal cargo cult, we must roll the dice. We can’t imagine that the post-victimary will be a restoration. We can’t yet imagine what open discussion of inter- and intra-group differences will look like, with all the biological, anthropological and historical knowledge now in, and with all the interventionist political and therapeutic technologies coming into, our possession. But I, at least, prefer finding out to the alternative.

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