(or, How to Create a 21st Century Racial Identity and Self-Interest.)
3,759 words.
During the early days of the most recent conflict between Israel and Palestine, many in the fringe political milieu I inhabit were not only picking sides but demanding that others follow suit unless they were presumably federal assets. The most popular position was with the Palestinians and for the full obliteration of Israel, and without getting into the weeds on the precise points (both sides are ethnonationalists who employ very different concepts of both nationalism and ethnos), the argument went something like: if Palestine wins, the West will be flooded with Jews. If Israel wins, however, the West will be flooded with Palestinians.
The latter would be the worst possible scenario, so it followed that we ought to endorse our distant Islamic brothers which we want absolutely nothing to do with and whom by all accounts seem to view us with similar hostility. What if by extending the time horizon of this game, both outcomes result in more Arab Muslims in the West?
You may notice that both poles of this binary result in the West absorbing a foreign group against its wishes, and we are merely tasked with selecting the least-worst scenario. It becomes apparent that across the political spectrum, an overwhelming segment of Whites – for our purposes, those of European extraction – lack a fundamental understanding of how to operate in their own self-interest. This involves not simply asking “what’s in it for me?” but suggesting “here’s what could be in it for me.”
The response for what to do with the Holy Land would then look very different. My suggestion was to give it to Mongolia, but I was also trying to appear aloof and heroin-poisoned online.
This is a common occurrence for political radicals: the compulsion to broker a one-way friendship with an international ally, or to pick a side they feel might incidentally serve their survival somewhere in a chess match they were not invited to. It further seems only common in Westerners, and even more specifically only a narrowly defined segment of Whites. This is a group which understands that it exists, and it understands that every other group acknowledges they exist in this category, yet perpetually finds itself grasping at foreign strategies with greased palms. Eastern collectivism doesn’t seem to install properly into this demographic, fully immersive Christianity and ancient Paganism grind against a round hole as a square peg, class-based identifiers do not resonate, and with no other identity seemingly desiring a partnership the appeal of “multipolarity” feels like a bait-and-switch serving a rival interest.
This should not be surprising since the name of the game is respect through sovereignty rather than pity through trauma-bonding.
If a German, a British, and a Scandinavian man enter a crowded bar in Nigeria, they will be identified as “the White guys” no matter how skillfully they can explain their thoroughly nuanced ethnographies as particular. This is a phenomenon that becomes undeniably pronounced in multicultural environments, so as much as one might advocate along ideological lines for an alternate reality, it would behoove the competent White man to be aware of his surroundings for the purposes of survival.
Some may desire society to move beyond this form of categorization, but you do not have that privilege, and you lack the sufficient privileges to manifest a status quo.
With that in mind, why does it seem so difficult for even the most politically, culturally, and ethnically aware to advocate for their own self-interest? The rest of the world seems to understand what Whiteness is (even if the edges are blurred) and Whites are the least likely group to accept this rhetoric, often struggling to recast themselves as an oppressed minority. Leftist critiques (mostly their premises) can be real if you let them: it simply comes down to understanding that they can be embraced as a positive.
The first step is understanding what Whiteness actually is, which is a graduation of the genetic legacy of Europeans and the multifaceted civilizational history of the West, strengthened in a feedback loop of revealed preferences and affiliations.
Everybody intuits that being White is not simply skin colour, although that is an important corollary. Even those who despise White people agree that it includes a behavior set, something genetic and even ontological. While Albino Africans are often identified as paranormally valuable, it is understood by family and tribe that they are not White. We also observe those who are not White but exist on a separate strata even in their own hierarchal context, examples being light-skinned Brahmin or upper-caste South Americans recognized as something else within their society.
Once again it appears the opponents of Whiteness understand very acutely what qualities it contains, as if they had inherited a stack of values genetically. While they exist upon the furthest edges of this phenomenon understood as Whiteness, we must acknowledge where there is a periphery there must axiomatically exist a center, something that one can genetically graduate into, although perhaps never fully.
Jews possess many of the outward qualities that appear White from a distance – even boasting generations of European habitation – but are careful to never fully accept the identity. They are Jews, they see themselves as another thing, and everyone in the world understands it goes far beyond skin colour. It is necessary, but insufficient.
While Whiteness is generally comprehended by the entire planet, it is not the identitarian fount from which all attributes flow. It has been said that everything is downstream from race, meaning the broad categorical aggregates that appear to undergird the composite peoples. The concept of race – of White People, and thereby Whiteness – is a modern construct that seeks to not only describe genetic connectivity, but political congruity. However, we must be clear that ethnicity is not downstream from race; ethnicity is the great lake which feeds the rivers and streams of culture, language, politics, and genetics. More accurately, these all exist in a synthetical feedback loop, but these generate the umbrella of race, the boundaries of which are being negotiated along scientific and geopolitical lines.
This does not make Whiteness less real; on the contrary, we can now understand it to be crucial to survival in a globalized world, and it now comes into sharp relief as an emergent philopolitical project. It rises to thrive in the paradigm of technological interconnectivity of diasporas and centralizing identity power centers, especially crucial as Europeans are a minority on the international stage.
There is a unique belief in inevitability that comes with the Western state of mind, one which dominates the Californian discourse emerging from the 1960s counterculture which endeavored to usher us all into the dawning of a new and perhaps catastrophic era of enlightenment, right up to Tech Accelerationism and its similar convictions of utopian Kurzweil-grounded futurism. Ray Kurzweil proselytized his entire career that technological advancement is inevitable; it naturally advances at an exponential rate, eventually designing itself beyond our authority, the reaction to this inevitability forming the bedrock of the e/acc movement. Similarly, the counterculture of the 1960s, echoing millenarian belief structures stretching back thousands of years of Christian European history, believed a revolution of the mind-body-spirit was both imminent and unstoppable. There are other striking similarities between the revolutions of consciousness experienced by the Baby Boomers and what we experience now, but for now we are only concerned about the blinding light in the near distance that we are certain is divine.
Even a Lebanese thinker like Nassim Taleb, blessed with proximal Whiteness through his education and propensity to shitpost, speaks of “black box” technologies as Known Unknowns; innovations that we know must exist and are awaiting to be discovered, therefore instigating a race for whom discovers them first, regardless of possible negative applications. This fixation upon the future in linear time coupled with certainty of forecastable apocalypse creates a distinct cartesian conceptualization of time which allows a more ambitious relationship with time itself, standing in stark contrast to cyclical time as understood throughout the Eastern world.
As Nick Land wrote, but summarized more effectively by Christopher Sandbatch: English is a language with which to do apocalypse with.
You can witness this blossom in our popular discourse, notably with the triumvirate of “It’s Happening / It’s Over / Nothing Ever Happens.” During every significant event that threatens to jostle the zeitgeist, you will eventually hit all three of these refrains if you stick to the story’s development. Rarely does anyone establish what “it” is; what is this thing we are expecting to occur that has us regularly experiencing such emotional flux? Contrary to deflating admissions of stasis, circumstances are always shifting, things are always in movement, and the status quo is always evolving under pressure, albeit incrementally, and usually in areas we aren’t acknowledging.
While our fixation upon the end times has roots extending deep into the European psyche, Baby Boomers seem to represent an important demarcation as the prophetic generation: the first generation that believed it could shepherd society to the benevolent collapse. There is a profound inevitability regarding this mass movement of peoples to a higher plane of enlightened deconstruction, and it is our charge to lead the parade along the conveyor belt.
Whether it be the Age of Aquarius or the End of History, there was an overwhelming sense that the end of the world was in sight and it fell to them to see it through. This sentiment has replicated across generations and become the fertile soil from which nearly every future forecast twists from. We now yearn for the end times, and it is precisely this yearning that we weight every news headline against.
This quickly becomes an obsession with revolution itself as the singular cure for the fallen state, harnessing 19th century dreams of spontaneous mass upheaval through a decentralized awakening. In fact, our concepts of revolution are all inexorably linked to a history we want to revive and apparently inhabit. Sam Devlin correctly identifies the problem, writing:
“Both sides have engaged in a grand ‘transvestiture’ over the course of the last three centuries, inverting their historic attitudes towards capitalism, progress, relativism, universalism and other issues.”
Our understanding of revolution is hyperreal; a bewitchingly fake reproduction which legitimizes the now inapparent fakeness of the original, like a deceased musician’s hologram performing to a live audience thereby heaping cultural capital to the “real” record company’s former mass-produced entertainment product. Our agitation for revolution is a simulacrum, the distilled product we consume rather than inhabit.
We are unable to discern whether it is a dream or a memory, but we are certain we know what it looks like, and it inexplicably looks like a cinematic union riot led by the youth donning quirky uniforms.
However, beneath these epidermis of simulacra lurks a soul we mistake for a parasite or some sort of racial imperfection: the tectonic plates of Whiteness buried beneath the mind virus fueled by technological revolutions coupled with the drive towards universalism implied by the rhetoric of revolution. Woven into this virus is the desire for some grand innovation to save us from the absolute terminus of all existence, as opposed to a naturally regenerating cycle of death and rebirth found across the planet. A cycle we are powerless to influence, and one that dismisses all human action as impermanent and thereby unimportant. Whiteness is the obsession with the sort of decline that is afforded by embracing linear time.
This takes the form of all the grievances that are levied against Whites, which once again we identify as fundamentally correct but not necessarily negative: the violent relationship with the unknown and seeking a divine process as a revolt against the universe.
A system is what it does, and a people are what they repeat every day. We inhabit the dialectic between obsession with the past and controlling the future, between traditionalism and futurism. We understand the naked hubris of these things we do, but that knowledge directs rather than halts us. Arriving at these conclusions means admitting that many Leftist critiques of what they deem “Whiteness” have been correct (especially those non-White pioneers of “Whiteness Studies”) where we diverge is believing that it is something that must be corrected.
Presented before us is the pathway to identifying what our self-interests actually are.
You do not possess the privilege of denouncing Whiteness; you can only absolve yourself of it in death. You also do not possess the authority to force the rest of the world to delegitimize the word; they hold the power to cut through your peculiarities of ethnography and ideology and identify you as “the White person” within their context. The rest of the world is not mistaken, and for every Israeli or Palestinian you defend you will find yourself no closer to finding enthusiastic allies of your own self-determination.
There is only the profound Whiteness: a relentless and multitudinous self-analyzing revolt against time and space, perpetuated by a people who have never truly asked themselves “what do we want with the Holy Land?” Once they answer that question, you behold the It, and its Happening forms before you as a chalice to grab.
The 21st century man cannot be a believer, he must be an agent of change. The tools are splayed out to fashion an escape from this punishing and anesthetizing dialectic he experiences while searching for the correct witch’s brew of ideology and faith to wish the world into order. Believers are passive biomass. They could once be counted on as a resource in times of civilizational contraction – maintainers of the folkways and language as the center of power is utterly discombobulated – but presently they cannot avoid being drafted into the culture war by broadcasting accelerating consequences. Believers are peasants, and now even denizens of the vast rural outbacks compress under demands of individual greatness, a grand leveling of classes that has granted a new ecosystem of consensus building and alleged democratic power.
There is no demilitarized zone in the culture war.
The fracturing of the public along niche interests has unleashed swarms of networks against every sacred precinct of authority where each failure is magnified, criticized, and mocked with more vigor than ever before. The institutions of the status quo struggle to repress it, and can barely control it. The margins of society, however, can neutralize but not replace the Center where true power resides. It is a mistake to believe that revolutionary forces can assume a position upon the throne. Martin Gurri spies the final destination, explaining:
“The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. […] If an educated person of that era were transported to the present, his first question would be, ‘Who won — Catholics or Protestants?’ For us the question has no meaning. Both sides endured. Neither won. Something different evolved. Much the same, I suspect, will occur with the dispute of hierarchy and network.”
Synthesis is the end result of nearly every conflict, it just depends on who enjoys the dominant position at the point of victory. That which is devoured is internalized, and conquerors typically find themselves merging with their property despite their best efforts. Rather than shuffling the decks of our identities, we are traumatizing our essence by degrees. What matters most is which identity enjoys the dominant position.
You could be forgiven for believing racial identity is irrelevant and it is obvious even the most racially aware prefer to define themselves along different priorities, more immediate psychological demands. These Networks of Critique appear to be working, should we not attune our efforts to the identities that can be narrowed into blades against the power structure that has attacked us? It’s right about then you must return to that bar in Nigeria, to the categories you can’t control, to the entities you can’t barter with.
At one point we predicted the internet would atomize us in a space of boundless imagination, but in reality, we interconnected with stronger bonds than ever before, forcing the already heavily individualized Western mind into an unfamiliar tribal state, leaving us to forge new types of relationships. It is understandable to yearn for a reset in all this chaos and return to a simpler time that our ancestors would have enjoyed.
The only measure of success is thought in action. Faith in either collapse or miraculous collective redemption is not enough. The relentless self-analysis of 21st century Whiteness prohibits belief of the kind our ancestors enjoyed. But therein lie the keys to deeper understanding; it is one thing to believe in the sacrifice of Christ, it is a different thing entirely to understand Divine Providence is the wind at your back in His name.
Now rather than stoically standing against the discursive winds thereby eventually exposing your twitching inner flesh to nature’s hostility, you can sail upon these winds of identity politics and master them, conquer them. Whiteness is fully internalizing your position against those who identify you as the violent adventurer obsessed with empire, admitting their assertions are accurate, and finally accepting the violent relationship with the unknown and the quest for divine processes as a revolt against the universe can be redeemed with the correct anchoring to historical values rather than ancient identities, bespoke ideologies, or, perish the thought, new religions.
The only question you need to ask yourself is “what do I want?” If your values are fully subsumed into your being, and your faith is imbued in your soul, you are able to answer that question. Anything else is a consumer-ready simulacrum. The conflict finally reveals itself as Ideas vs. First Principles, where first principles will be what captures and holds these ideas you place in orbit around it. Ideas can be adored like relics or ingested like cocaine, and taken to excess they can utterly conquer uninitiated minds.
Where ideas take root and replicate like nanomachines into webs of inward facing analysis, they become ideologies which quickly exude the adhesive to comfortably trap prey for the rest of their lives. Ideologies typically fail due to their inability to fulfill their purpose of scientific universalization along murky metaphysical lines, but prove extremely useful in their acute investigations of social crises. There is no better analysis of power dynamics than what is found even in the kookier reaches of Marxism, but these must remain as punishingly massive microscopes rather than inhabitable schema.
It is cozy to believe the Proletarian revolution is inevitable, it is similarly cozy to believe the Age of the Strong Gods will arrive one day and clear the world of the weak on behalf of us. These systems, more often than not, end up wielded by those who simply desire power and influence, as Paul Hazard outlines in “Crisis of the European Mind.” There we see how Liberalism as we understand it today grew out from the Enlightenment, which was a different beast entirely.
What began as the serious investigation into the mechanics of existence under the translucent banner of rationality was mutated by degrees into Rationalism, perverted by philosophers and social activists into something with the sole purpose of deconstructing. A naturally generative evolution was corrupted by tumors draped in the velvet of ideology for the purposes of abolishing the status quo.
The gentleman scholar at one with nature became an agent of social critique, unable to affirm and doomed to question until everything is equitable sludge. The revolt was hijacked and turned on itself, as it often does, as active agents are wielding ideas along sometimes puzzling fault lines. Carl Jung once said “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people,” but technology has revealed that ideas more often than not are cast through people in a more nuanced synthesis.
Within these magisterial halls one loses grasp of their own soul’s drive to action, convinced by Strange Gods that internal inconsistency is prohibited when in reality it is the only power we have. European Pagans can never remove themselves from the context of Christianity, conversely why is it Christians believe in ghosts and luck? In David Hackett Fisher’s classic tome “Albion’s Seed,” he traces the various folkways that defined the major waves of European migration into America, and among this anthropological accounting were “Religion Ways” and “Magic Ways,” how was that possible for so many centuries? When someone points out that the birth of Christ falls upon a pagan holiday, you are drawn into a battle against yourself. Whiteness is identifying this, acknowledging its reality, and validating the relationship.
Whiteness is balancing conflicting universals within the soul of the individual while possessing enough inwardness to know the interior is not synergistic with the exterior. His proximity is not to be found in the lateral tribe of a cyclical universe.
White men in America can stand against abortion and be apathetic to how many abortions Africans undergo. Somewhere in America, a pagan unwraps his Christmas present: 2 tickets to the Witan conference. Holistic consistency of beliefs is a standard set by the scientism of the ideological mind, a standard you do not need to sanction. The dialectic we inhabit is between universalism and particularism, faith and ideology, the stasis of historical order and the revolutionary drive against the dark unknown. A First Principle of Whiteness is: who cares?
The current geopolitical goal of Whiteness is to reconcile the internal conflict as perpetual revolt while the external conflict is defining what Whiteness is. You are surrendering the conversation unless the global minority of Whites can abandon reactionary impulses to emulate other identities and thereby stand outside the terms and conditions set by hostile actors. This isn’t a game you can win by playing by the rules.
The more basic your demands are, the more you can ground yourself in this deterritorializing information revolution that commands us to rethink the existing paradigms of power, identity, and allegiances. Accepting that Whiteness is real is the first step many will be unable to take, and the lightness of one’s skin and genetic heritage do not appear sufficient to grant one access to this category. The reconfiguring of this identity along technological lines requires agents of a more vital momentum. Following that, understanding that Whiteness is not a plague will be the next great filter, which proves nearly impossible for many self-identifying Whites to comprehend.
But for those who are able to model themselves as the 21st century Gully Foyle, they will be able to ask themselves what they want above all others, and maybe that involves violently retaking the Holy Land for ourselves before setting our sights upon the galactic horizon.