Complaints of “toxic” workplaces. Mass hiring of diversity-equity-inclusion commissars. Open-borders immigration sold to the public with tear-jerking images of refugee children. Trans mania spreading everywhere from kindergarten classrooms to corporate C-suites. Personal pronouns in work email signatures. White women kneeling in prayerful mass protests after yet another African-heritage male with a mile-long rap sheet resists a cop and is shot. Removal of traditional due-process rules to favor women’s sex claims. Talk of “reparations” on a trillion-dollar scale, to remedy racial inequalities. Ever-stricter limits on acceptable speech, debate and scientific inquiry. Declining support for truth itself, if the truth might cause hurt feelings. A heavy emphasis on trauma and victimhood in news media, literature, law, and psychiatry. Open governmental discrimination against white males.

All these are manifestations of a societal climate change that has been underway since the 1950s, with a sharply increased pace in recent years. The causes are many, but one is more important than all the rest put together. I am referring to the entry of women into public life, which—particularly in recent decades as women have ascended to the upper ranks of all important institutions—has given them unprecedented cultural and political power.

I’ve been writing about this for more than a decade. During most of that time, my hypothesis was rejected or ignored, presumably because it was considered too heretical. In the past year and a half, other more prominent figures have started to write about some of the particular institutional effects of women’s new power (e.g., on academia), presumably in part because it has become just too obvious to ignore. What I think is still being missed—or suppressed—is the true extent of this process of cultural feminization, and, more importantly, the disastrous future towards which it is driving.

The ubiquity of cultural feminization

Women’s new power is being wielded, and felt, not just in the universities, not just in H.R. offices, not just among mainstream media corporations and big publishing houses, not just among millennials, but everywhere, affecting everyone. It is what I have called a general “pink shift” in the culture. The fact that even traditionally macho institutions such as the military and sports leagues have been affected is a good indication of its power and breadth.

Women’s ascension to power in institutions, and in public life generally, has altered the culture for the simple reason that women, on average, do not think and act as men do. They are more emotionally sensitive and compassionate, more tuned into people and direct relationships rather than abstract rules and systems and hierarchies. They are quicker to form and join social networks, and to spread social contagions. They are more risk-averse, less interested in conquest and exploration, and more sensitive to environmental threats. They have less tolerance for the stressful combat of free debate, less respect for scientific inquiry for its own sake, less patience with the idea of judicial due process. Probably as a result of being more emotionally sensitive, they seem more easily influenced by narratives that emphasize short-term, emotion-evoking consequences, and seem less interested in dry analyses of long-term outcomes. Perhaps especially when they are childless (or their children have “left the nest”), they are more likely to embrace the “disadvantaged” of the world as their virtual children, feeling emotional pain at persistent inequalities among them, and seeking to alleviate that pain by almost any means necessary.

Of course, women differ among themselves in the strengths of their psychological traits, as do men. But the basic idea here is that the two sexes’ overlapping “bell curves” of trait distributions have significantly different averages or means, which I think is evident even on small, organizational scales, but is seismically obvious on a civilization level.

In short, women collectively have their own distinct perspective on the world, and, now that their power exceeds men’s, they are showing their disdain for the world men made, declaring: “We can do better.”

But can they do better? And why is this important question missing from Western public discourse?

Hiding their power

I had trouble getting my earlier essays on cultural feminization published even in smaller, decidedly conservative media. I can’t be absolutely certain of the reasons, but, as everywhere else in media, there were always female editors in the decision chain—often at the top—and of course thousands of female subscribers who might be angered by anything frame-able as “anti-women.”

The idea that women have unprecedented cultural power, and with it have been dramatically reshaping most of the world’s societies, is, of course, not inherently anti-women. Why can’t women just accept their triumph and take a victory lap? Why does there appear to be not just an overlooking of this historic social phenomenon but even (apart from a few opinion pieces) a sort of conspiracy of silence about it, especially among women?

One explanation is obvious. Women as the physically weaker, more risk-averse sex have traditionally wielded power less openly and directly. As such, they tend not to want to reveal their power, let alone crow over it; they prefer to emphasize their weakness and chronic victimization—which, among other effects, triggers a protective reflex among many men.

I don’t think that’s a complete explanation, though. I think that women like to hide their power not only because it’s more effective when hidden, but also because they realize, deep down, that female supremacy is hard to defend as an optimal way of steering civilization.

Even the feminist who openly seeks absolute female power—the kind of woman who asks “why do we need men?”—is well aware of (has “internalized”) the traditional, disparaging view of the female mindset. This is the view (one might call it the Aristotelian view, though it has been expressed by modern women as different as Ann Coulter and Camille Paglia) that women, relative to men, are irrational, flighty, suggestible, overly emotional, unstable, given to herd thinking, and prone to hysterias and other social contagions. And although this traditional view may seem crude and unfair, most women at least understand that there really is such a thing as the “female mindset,” that it does involve greater emotional sensitivity and people-centeredness in most situations, and that it makes women better mothers than they would be if they were more male-brained.

But is this female mindset somehow superior to the traditional male mindset when it comes to shaping culture and policy? I have never seen or heard a woman make this claim explicitly, probably because the weakness of the claim is obvious. Why would a female, maternal mindset be superior in the public sphere, when it is an adaptation for a very different environment, i.e., actual maternity, which in fact has occurred traditionally within the protective bounds of male-managed society? By the same token, why would the male mindset be inferior when it must be, at least in part, an adaptation for the public sphere—where men have reigned from the dawn of hominids?

It seems to me that women, having no solid argument to justify their cultural and political ascendancy (“it’s our turn” “men are toxic”), and knowing that debates in general play to male strengths, have decided simply to avoid the issue by pretending their ascendancy hasn’t occurred.

Female empowerment leads to social collapse

Not every social change driven by this “Great Feminization” process has been adverse, but it does seem that most have—and that the net effect is increasingly dystopian.

These bad consequences also seem very predictable, at least from a male perspective.

Some examples:

New, lenient policing and sentencing laws.

Short-term goal: Stop police oppression of African-Americans.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of law-breaking, rampant crime, business flight.

Municipal laws that prevent removal of homeless and other street people, offer food etc.

Short-term goal: Treat homeless people with compassion.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of homelessness, filthy encampments that spoil large areas of the city, more crime, business flight.

Generous welfare policies

Short-term goal: Treat the disadvantaged with compassion, reduce hunger, etc.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of indigency, spread of welfare dependency, impairment of family-formation (mothers lose incentive to marry), plus all the social pathologies that follow from these.

Promotion of anti-traditional behaviors/lifestyles (homosexuality, transsexualism)

Short-term goal: Empower the marginalized.

Long-term effects: Weakening of social norms, spread of what is effectively antisocial (anti-family) behavior, spread of associated mental illness in the most impressionable, i.e., children and young adults.

Opposition to restrictions on immigration

Short-term goal: Help the “huddled masses” (i.e., the same maternal sentiments expressed in Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet.)

Long-term effects: Incentivization of mass/illegal immigration. Destruction of national identity, lowering of trust, increase in despair, price inflation, brain-drain in origin countries, etc.

Restriction of speech, debate, legal due-process, scientific inquiry

Short-term goal: Prevent the emotional turmoil caused by “hateful” arguments, concepts, or simple observations, e.g., of racial differences in cognitive and behavioral traits.

Long-term effects: Destruction of liberal norms, a maternal “because I said so!” illiberalism, corruption of scientific culture, reversal of scientific progress.

Promotion of equal outcomes vs. equality of opportunity

Short-term goal: Reduce conflict and promote fairness by directly reducing financial inequality (resembling a classic maternal strategy for promoting harmony among children—also probably the norm in family-based paleolithic groupings)

Long-term effects: Destruction of normal, healthy incentives to succeed. Promotion of lazy, redistributive attitude (“I’m a victim of racism—give me money”). A centerpiece of communism/socialism and a key reason for its failure.

Promotion of “harm reduction” strategies (e.g., free needles) against illicit drug use

Short-term goal: Reduce mortality and hospitalizations due to drug overdoses.

Long-term effects: Incentivization of drug use.

The overall pattern should be clear: The feminine mindset, with its focus on short-term, feelgood outcomes in the culture and policy realm, tends to set up perverse incentives, thereby basically guaranteeing bad long-term outcomes.

Incidentally, the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has famously argued, with experimental evidence, that the “female brain,” compared to the “male brain,” is less good at understanding and building systems. It is easy to see why this would be so, if the feminine mindset is relatively blind to the mechanisms that determine a system’s long-run performance—the system in question here being the system of humans called society.

Women’s greater focus on the emotional and the short-term has other adverse impacts on culture and policy. One is the “witch-hunt,” social-contagion-prone atmosphere that now suffuses Western (esp. Anglo-American) culture—and I think derives from the heightened feminine sensitivity to the stress of debate (including greater pain from the cognitive dissonance generated by opposing arguments), and the broader feminine need for emotional harmony in groups. The speed with which women, led by their woke high priestesses, have been dismantling Western traditions in favor of fads and frenzies such as “gender-affirming care for children,” is stunning and ominous.

Even more ominous, though, is the weakness of public opposition, which, of course, is due largely to women’s reluctance even to acknowledge their power, let alone restrain its excesses.

Will the West continue to collapse by a slow process of social dissolution? It’s easy to picture that happening simply as a continuation of trends our cultural matriarchy promotes: Third-World-ization via immigration, white self-hatred, discrimination against men, low Western fertility, diversity over merit, sanctioned lawlessness for protected racial groups, etc. It’s also plausible that the collapse will be more sudden and catastrophic, via, say, lost wars, surrenders to invader-immigrants who are not so feminized (or so civilized), or even, one day, the sentimental granting of civil rights to “sentient” machines. Anyway, as far as I can see, all paths in our feminized civilization lead to the failure of that civilization. It’s almost beside the point to note that that failure will bring this brief, strange period of female cultural hegemony to a close.

* * *

This is a just a brief, minor note about an aspect of human populations that seems to be overlooked much of the time in popular discourse, namely the existence within countries of distinct strata of individuals. In discussions about the United States, this stratification is less overlooked, given the country’s huge African-derived population, its more recent Latino and Asian influxes, and its intense political and cultural focus on racial identity (for nonwhites anyway). But most other countries, and occasionally even the US, are treated as if their populations could be summed up in simple averages. My point here is merely that for stratified societies, this averaging will often be misleading, making it hard to understand phenomena such as the relative performances of emigres, or national achievements in particular fields.

The example that triggered this short train of thought is the “national IQ” comparison favored by HBD aficionados. Here is part of a typical national IQ chart:

Source: worldpopulationreview.com

Now consider the following chart from Wikipedia, showing the median household incomes of Asian-Americans. Note that the two top groups, numbering in the millions each, are Indian-Americans and Filipino-Americans, and that their median household incomes are quite a bit higher than that of Chinese-Americans.

This is not an ordering one would have predicted based on the national IQ chart. According to that chart, Filipinos and Indians have two of the world’s very lowest average IQs (~82 and ~76)—in fact, India’s score puts it below several sub-Saharan African countries. In contrast, the “Chinese IQ” is near the top at ~104.

Now of course there are at least several factors that could help explain this seemingly unexpected outcome. One, obviously—argued by many, though it’s beyond the scope here—is that “IQ” is not everything it’s cracked up to be. Another is that “national IQ” scores are inaccurate, or, at least, vary wildly in accuracy from one country to another. A third possibility is that some ethnic groups have had more time than others to build social capital and wealth in the Land of Opportunity. A fourth, a very well known phenomenon, is that the immigration process effectively tends to select for people of above-average drive and intelligence.

What I would like to add to this list of (non-mutually exclusive) factors is the simple observation that many societies around the world are highly stratified. This is due to the natural tendency of individuals to marry others of like educational background and socioeconomic status, such that the rich beget the rich, the poor beget the poor, the smart beget the smart and the dumb . . . well, you get the idea. India is one of the world’s most strongly and overtly stratified societies, with formal names for its social castes. The Philippines for its part is still notoriously feudal, with a thin but powerful politician/tycoon class (heavy with Spanish and Chinese blood), a small middle class, and a fertile majority of mostly ethnic Malay folk who exist more or less at rural African levels of development. China may be getting more stratified (a trend that worries its current leader Xi), but it still seems much less stratified than India or the Philippines—as a lingering effect of the Maoist decades, and probably also due to its greater racial homogeneity. (Published “Gini coefficient” estimates suggest that China has a lumpier wealth distribution than the other two, but long story short, I don’t have much faith in such estimates.)

The point, in any case, is that when it comes to comparisons of “nations” defined as immigrant populations of different national origin, one is comparing mainly the performance of the upper castes from those nations, not average citizens—and, roughly speaking, the upper castes of more stratified nations will tend to be further above their national averages, compared to the upper castes of less stratified nations.

This is true also in considering achievements in specialist fields, or feats where relatively small numbers of excellent individuals are needed. India, whose “average IQ” is about what one would expect of a high-performing person with Down Syndrome, has nevertheless produced a significant number of research Nobel Prize winners, certainly more than any other tropical nonwhite country.

By the same token, considering the performance of a country based on a metric, such as GDP, that covers* the entire population, is going to be misleading, in the sense that it obscures the differences—vast gulfs in many cases—between the benighted, down-in-the-mud lower castes and their wealthy, entitled, sharp-elbowed overlords.

That’s it. That’s the only point I wanted to make here.

***

The new Western culture, especially the American variety, offers the old-fashioned conservative male dissident many trends to bewail. Discrimination against white males! Promotion of LGBTQ lifestyles! The trans mania with its mutilation of children and destruction of women’s sports! Suppression of meritocracy, free speech, free scientific inquiry, and due process of law! Runaway entitlement spending! Open borders! Critical race theory! The ESG investing fad! No-prosecute policies in violent cities! Proliferation of social contagions and hysterical illnesses, from ROGD and PTSD to Tik-Tok Tourette’s! Cascades of cancellations of perfectly competent white males, e.g., for “grading too hard in organic chemistry,” or for cracking an off-color joke! Widespread exclusion (in effect) of males from important professions, including public relations, publishing, and clinical psychology/psychotherapy. “Math is White Supremacy!” “Showing up for work is White Supremacy!!” “Not being a pea-brained slob is White Supremacy!!!”

My argument here is that everybody should stop bewailing these trends as separate phenomena—should stop fighting “wokeness” or “ESG” or the trans mania. They should, instead, focus on the one factor that underlies and causes all of these social developments.

Of course, I mean women—or more precisely, women’s newfound power in organizations and institutions, and in the culture generally.

An assumption everyone seems to have made during the decades of female emancipation is that women see things more or less as men do, and are just as devoted as men to the principles underlying Western civilization. Not so! As some feminist writers, including Virginia Woolf, warned long ago, women when they enter public life in business and government tend to look around and see lots of things they want to change. They’re just not fans, to the extent that men are, of things like free speech, open debate, due process of law, meritocracy, free scientific inquiry, maximizing shareholder value, equality of opportunity, and so on.

It’s not that women have worked things out logically and carefully and comprehensively, and now want to formally enact a scheme they think is better. It’s more that things in Western civ, which was made by men, often go against the emotional grain with women, causing them real discomfort, and compelling them to react. Women’s instincts were shaped by evolution for a maternal and domestic context, and seem to bias them towards short-term, feelgood, nurturing, and protective outcomes—on average compared to men. These instincts seem to be especially aroused by things like persistent racial inequality, discussions of race-based IQ differences, ruthless meritocratic competition unleavened by sympathy for the losers, stern cross-examinations of women making rape claims, medical skepticism over women’s unverifiable symptoms, and the kind of frat-boy humor that has gotten so many men cancelled. Now that women are largely in charge, they question why we need such things—or peremptorily try to stamp them out.

There are some nuances to this general theory. First, a lot of women are not woke. But the argument here is really about women on average as compared to men on average, and I don’t think it could be reasonably disputed that women, on average and compared to men, are significantly biased in the direction of wokeness. It’s also obviously true that modest average psychological differences between the sexes could translate to big social changes when one sex takes power from the other. I would suggest too that the women who seek power in institutions are less likely to be “average” women and more likely to be childless activist types. There is, moreover, a hell of a lot of depression and anxiety among modern women, especially younger ones, and that as well may push many women to embrace the woke activism mindset as a therapeutic source of meaning and purpose.

Another nuance has to do with women’s apparently superior ability, compared to men, to align themselves emotionally within a group. This means, in effect, that women in an organization will tend to be less independent-minded, with the tradeoff that they can collectively punch above their weight. Among the examples that come to mind is the recent cancellation of Woody Allen from his publisher due to activism among the publishing company’s junior staff. (The publishing industry, like public relations and psychology/psychiatry/psychotherapy, is utterly dominated by women—“junior staff” in publishing generally means millennial women.)

Women, as I’ve suggested in a recent essay, may also have, collectively, a stronger drive to dominate organizations, to eliminate the greater discomfort they experience when exposed to male organizational culture. Certainly the female-to-male ratio in many organizations now is one that would be condemned as discriminatory (by women) were the proportions reversed.

A further nuance, which I think will become increasingly obvious and important as our societal “pink shift” advances, is that women, as they align emotionally within groups, and ultimately purge dissenting voices, tend to cause the institutions they control to become unstable. In other words, like hysteria-prone convents of half a millenium ago, female-dominated institutions become relatively susceptible to groupthink contagions that swing them irrationally this way and that. Today these contagions introduce relatively mild new absurdities like pronoun declarations and land acknowledgments. But I expect it’s all going to get loopier, and more harshly enforced, as time goes on and female control solidifies.

Lastly, somewhat hair-splittingly, I don’t think that women when left to themselves running male-built institutions necessarily become woke in the way that we see now. I see wokeness as a contemporary, contagious mindset (not quite an ideology) that corresponds very well to, and thus easily infects, the average female mind, still moreso the younger, more neurotic, more activist female mind. But in principle, under different circumstances, one could gin up something substantially different that would also spread well among women, provided that it pressed their main buttons. Certainly in the centuries before women took such a large part in public life, thought contagions among them were common and varied, though usually localized and rarely very consequential (rarely but not never—see, for example, the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria).

But back to my main argument: If wokeness and its variants are all epiphenomena of the new, historically unprecedented power of women in public life, measures taken against wokeness etc. could be ineffective if there is no acknowledgment of the true source of the problem. Indeed all means short of reducing women’s presence in public life might be futile.

I’m not advocating a specific strategy, but I think it’s important at least to highlight this dilemma, which Western countries obviously have no easy way of resolving. It may be that over time, the current, Cultural Revolution-like surge of wokeness subsides and becomes less radical, as the women pushing wokeness are increasingly forced to acknowledge some of its adverse consequences, such as rising crime from weak law enforcement, social dissolution from uncontrolled immigration, the institutional incompetence that flows inevitably from the abandonment of meritocracy, and the aforementioned institutional instability.

Then again, by the time things get bad enough for women to acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily better than men at managing our civilization, the process of degeneration might be very, very advanced. Indeed, it’s plausible that, by then, other, even stronger, less reversible adverse processes—ethnic conflict, for example—will be underway, effectively sealing the West’s fate.

***

Author’s note:

I’d appreciate it, reader, if you would link to my essays on cultural feminization (or otherwise cite them) wherever you see this topic being discussed. I’ve been writing about “cult-fem” for more than a decade—which, as far as I know, is much longer than anyone else. Some of my essays have circulated widely in recent years, and I’ve even placed one in a moderately well-read webzine. I like to think that my contributions have helped seed what is becoming an important public discourse. Yet those contributions of mine are almost never acknowledged by the better-known opinionators who have ventured into this realm in the last year or so. Being pseudonymous and writing principally from a personal website seem to have left me in the unhappy state of being “much read but seldom cited.” (I discuss the general problem of citation in the Internet age in my short essay “The Tree of Knowledge.”)

Also, though I don’t charge a subscription to this website, or put ads on it, or even solicit donations, you could buy a copy of my e-book (see image below, linked to its Amazon page) if you’d like to support my writing.

*

In prior essays on this site and elsewhere, I’ve argued that the spread of wokeness and its recent marked intensification (the “Great Awokening”) is best seen as a social contagion—of feelings and sociocultural ideas that broadly reflect women’s maternal instincts, and are much more transmissible among women than among men.

I’ve also suggested that wokeness is apt to be ultra-transmissible among females whose feminine, maternal energies aren’t absorbed by husbands and children and may seek another outlet. The terms “cat lady” and “wine aunt” refer to a subset of these individuals, but many unmarried girls and young women, as well as successful career women, also fit this description.

I’ve proposed, moreover, that wokeness is driven into institutions not just by the conversion of (especially female) workers already in place but also by the takeover of those institutions by women and tamed males, via biased hiring.

I’m more certain now than ever that all these hypotheses are correct, as far as they go. But I think there is one more aspect of wokeness that requires an explanation. I’m referring to what could be called wokeness’s spiraling frenzy—its tendency to move away from norms of belief and behavior and towards extremes, wherever it takes hold.

To put it another way: The woke women and their enablers who in the past decade or two have effectively taken control of virtually all major American institutions and professions have not been content to implement a modest set of reforms and leave it at that. As their power has grown, they have increasingly attacked the core values of Western civilization: everything from due process of law to meritocracy to the shielding of children from sexual deviants and predators. As their policies have become extreme, so have their methods. They have made it clear that they don’t want sober deliberations—they want emotional shock and awe!

One could argue that there is a counter-cultural logic to this movement—that it wants to collapse the existing order as completely as those hijacked planes collapsed the Twin Towers on 9/11.

But is the Great Awokening replacing the old culture with a new one that can bind society sustainably—a “successor ideology”?

Wokeness and the Great Awokening are driven chiefly by women, who have their own ways of thinking and persuading—ways that typically seem more emotional and less rational than men’s. So one might suppose that there is a genuine ideology being built here, albeit a feminine one that seems alien to the average male, and that the Great Awokening is just the final, dramatic dash in this “pink shift” takeover of Western culture.

However, to me, that’s not the full story. To me, the Great Awokening’s spiraling frenzy, and its attraction for people who are evidently mentally ill, suggest that it is for the most part only a temporary and reactive social phenomenon: a social “mania.”

Logic and Madness

As many have noted, the Great Awokening bears a strong resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The CCR’s spearpoints were cadres of “Red Guard” fanatics, young people (even teens) whose instability and restlessness, suggestibility, and high susceptibility to fanaticism were probably comparable to what one finds in today’s millennial Antifa brigades. These howling Maoist minions sought the erasure of whatever competed with Maoism, which in practice meant just about anything predating Maoist China—history books, art, architecture, temples, even genealogical records. Red Guards and their camp followers toppled statues of Confucius, pasted huge banners with their slogans everywhere, and went around attacking intellectuals or anyone even lightly connected to the teaching of pre-Maoist history or philosophy.

That was the counter-cultural logic part of it. But there was also the crazypants part—shocking, obscene, savage stuff, ultimately including murder and even cannibalism.

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over “counterrevolutionaries” …  Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. [NYT]

Not content with attacking living reminders of the old China, Red Guards also broke into cemeteries and dug up the skeletal remains of ancient Chinese emperors and nobles, desecrating them and denouncing the persons these remains had once been.

Other examples of these social frenzies come to mind. In some of the pre-Christian feasts of Rome and northern Europe, open drunkenness and debauchery, and various other intentionally shocking inversions of everyday social norms, were encouraged, at least in part as cathartic but controlled ventings of accumulated stress. (Modern parties, especially the ones teens and young adults have, seem like echoes of these displays.) As Samuel Johnson famously said, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Or a woman. The infamous convent hysterias of 1500s-1700s Europe supply many illustrations of spiraling frenzies among women, especially sexually frustrated younger ones. In the 1632-34 Loudoun case, for example, at a public exorcism of supposedly demon-possessed Ursuline nuns, a Sister Claire “fell on the ground, blaspheming, in convulsions, lifting up her petticoats and chemise, displaying her privy parts without any shame, and uttering filthy words. Her gestures became so indecent that the audience averted its eyes.” [link]

Sexual themes dominated the antics of “possessed” nuns, although there were maternal—or inverted maternal—themes too, for example claims of mystical pregnancy, and stories of secret witch conclaves (“witches’ sabbaths”) at which children were eaten.

Themes of sexual violation and impregnation, theft or killing of unborn babies, and witchcraft, along with the same spiraling of fantastic claims and odd behavior, were also typical in the medicalized versions of possession—”multiple personality disorder” and “UFO abduction”—that were popular among young women in the 1970-90s, and ended up discrediting many therapists and psychiatrists, as well as the whole idea of “hypnotically recovered memories.”

To me, these are examples of social manias—not just contagions (for even healthy, sustainable behaviors can be contagious) but contagions that spread intense and increasingly bizarre, often counter-cultural activities, and are essentially reactions to excessive stress.

A holiday from stress and inhibition

As the comment by Dr. Johnson implies, human beings in modern civilizations are inhibited and stressed by the social rules they are supposed to obey and the complex social environments they are supposed to navigate—the “pain of being a man.”

It makes sense that women nowadays would be relatively hard-hit by such stresses. Women’s basic lifestyle has shifted dramatically—much more than men’s has—over the past few generations. Women during this interval generally have had to face new stresses from:

• • higher education and the pressures at higher levels of the working world;
  • the postponement or abandonment of marriage and child-bearing;
  • a new (or newly de-civilized) courtship environment in which their natural desire for love and motherhood is taken advantage of again and again without being fulfilled.

All the while, women have been told (by the most authoritative sources, including Hollywood and feminist activists) that these changes represent “progress” and must not be resisted.

Women also, compared to men, appear to have an innately greater desire for “equality” and social harmony. Yet these lofty, sentimental social goals, during the same critical period, have slipped—frustratingly—further and further out of reach, as the West has intensified its effort to remake itself as a highly multi-racial/ethnic civilization.

In addition to having to face these new stresses, women are (on average) more emotionally sensitive than men, and thus are apt to be more affected by the same stressors.

Small wonder, then, that a very large proportion of women and girls in Western societies can now expect to be diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder. It probably also should be unsurprising that the essentially feminine notion of “trauma”—a highly stressing psychological injury—has now taken on an outsized role not only in Western medicine but also in the wider culture.

On the whole, then, the recent changes in the standard female lifeway, and the demographic makeovers of Western societies, have created a large and chronic background level of stress for women. But the severe emotional contagion of the Great Awokening was triggered only after additional, more acute stressors appeared in the first half of 2020: the pandemic with its lockdowns, social isolation, and widespread fears of illness/death; and then the inflammatory treatment—by left-leaning media, activists, and politicians—of various police killings of miscreant African Americans.

Thus I think one can fairly easily fit the Great Awokening into the broader category of stress-induced, stress-relieving social manias. Amid the furious revels of such manias, inhibitions are necessarily going to be relaxed (for some more than others, of course) and people who were relatively labile, even frankly nuts, to begin with will also be drawn in, given the camouflage these frenzies provide for their behavioral issues.

The function of boundary-pushing

A social mania—one that is true to the concept of mania—cannot run forever. It must end by depleting its energy source or by inducing resistance, just as an individual with psychiatric mania will become exhausted after many days without adequate sleep, and/or will cause herself to be hospitalized and treated by exhibiting increasingly abnormal behavior. If a social mania’s deep purpose is to relieve accumulated social pressures, then its tendency to be ever more immoderate might even be seen as functional—in the sense that the spiraling further and further away from social norms serves to reduce support and induce opposition, thus limiting the damage while allowing the requisite venting of steam. To put it crudely, a social mania with its spiraling frenzy is a societal “cry for help.”

This is all speculative. It’s also a group-level, forest-not-the-trees view that people with an ordinary individualistic bias might find hard to wrap their heads around. But it’s a novel take that I (obviously) think should be considered. On the whole, it suggests that the Great Awokening should interest us less as a new cultural movement, and more as a signal indicating deep problems with the existing culture and society. In other words, it’s a social version of a seismic tremor, or even earthquake, and its intensity and direction of slip are interesting mainly for what they tell us about the underlying stresses at work—stresses that are unbearable and thus have be relieved, in one way or another.

***

An unpopular cause I feel compelled to stick up for today is the cause of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, all of Brunswick, Georgia, USA, who were recently found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rightly or wrongly, I am convinced that this verdict is blatantly unjust. I also believe that many Americans, not just the jury and the prosecutor, are complicit in this injustice—an injustice that is much closer to murder (these men are likely to die in prison) than was the actual killing of Arbery.

Grievous miscarriages of justice occur frequently now in the United States, and often arise due to race-related issues that bias prosecutors and jurors. So why am I writing about this particular injustice, and not, say, the travesty of the Derek Chauvin verdict? I think it’s mainly because in the Chauvin case I read a healthy amount of commentary defending Chauvin, whereas in the case of the McMichaels and Bryan I read no defenses, only smug expressions of satisfaction or at least placid acceptance of this verdict, even among people who should know better.

The guilt of the McMichaels and Bryan is, in other words, part of the contemporary American “conventional wisdom” that I have come to distrust almost reflexively.

Why the McMichaels and Bryan were abandoned to their harsh fate so easily, even willfully and joyously, by their countrymen is something I’ll speculate about later in this essay, but first I want to go over some of the basic facts of the case.

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery

Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year old African-American man who lived in Brunswick, Georgia. Like many African-American men, he had a police record for at least moderately serious crimes, including bringing a handgun to a high school football game in 2013, and an attempted shoplifting of a TV from a WalMart in 2017. He was still on probation when he died.

In late 2018, apparently based on his own observations as well as those of family members, Arbery’s probation officer recommended that Arbery get a mental health evaluation. At this evaluation—the defense lawyers brought this up at the trial, but the judged ruled it inadmissible—Arbery described to the evaluator (apparently a psychiatric nurse) “auditory delusions sometimes commanding him ‘to rob and steal’ and sometimes telling him ‘to hurt people,’” as well as general difficulties controlling his anger. Arbery was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and prescribed olanzapine (Zyprexa), a second-generation antipsychotic that is also used treat schizophrenia and the manic episodes of type 1 bipolar disorder; however, he apparently didn’t take the drug for long, and there was no evidence of it in his system when he died, although there were trace amounts of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The MSM stories after Arbery’s death were heavily biased in the young man’s favor, and tended to omit or downplay anything negative, preferring to show a picture of him looking spiffy in his prom suit . . .

. . . and preferring to emphasize that at the time of his death Arbery was “planning” to attend a local technical college to become an electrician, and often went jogging for exercise.

In general, because of this overwhelming bias, it is hard to trust the information about Arbery that was provided by his family and their lawyer and cannot be verified, e.g., with documents. We can’t say with confidence much more about his background than what judicial records show, namely that he had a history of being armed illegally, and of attempting theft, and of showing signs of mental illness including serious impulse-control problems. This shouldn’t necessarily have had any bearing on the jury’s findings, but it does speak to the broader moral picture, and definitely belies the many MSM portraits of Arbery that were designed, in part, to whip up hatred against the men who killed him.

Late in 2019 Arbery had begun taking occasional jogs into a mostly white neighborhood called Satilla Shores, where the McMichaels and Bryan lived. A video camera also had recorded him, in his jogging clothes, walking into a house in the neighborhood that was under construction—this had happened several times, mostly at night.

In the months immediately preceding his fateful encounter with the McMichaels, there also had been several break-ins or thefts in the neighborhood, including the theft of a gun from an unlocked truck—reported by Travis McMichael on January 1.

On the night of February 11, according to Wikipedia:

Travis called 9-1-1 to report a slender 6-foot-tall Black man with short hair, wearing red shorts and a white shirt, who was trespassing on the site of a house under construction. Travis said, “I’ve never seen this guy before in the neighborhood.” The dispatcher asked whether Travis was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it just startled me. When I turned around and saw him and backed up, he reached into his pocket and ran into the house. So I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But he looked like he was acting like he was.” “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately”, Travis said on the call. He told the dispatcher that he was out in his truck, and that as many as four neighbors were out looking for the man. His father Gregory was one of the people out searching that night, and Gregory and at least one other neighbor were armed. Police responded and searched the house along with a neighbor, but found no one. However, surveillance video from that evening showed a man who reportedly looked like Arbery, briefly walking in and out of the house under construction. He did not take anything. The under-construction house did not have doors or windows.

While Arbery died before the mystery of the local thefts could be solved, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that exonerates him in all those thefts, despite the MSM’s implications otherwise. Given his background and the correspondence of his jogging and the local burglaries, it seems at least plausible—and evidently many Satilla Shores residents suspected—that he used his jogging at night as a cover for burglaries, and jogging in daytime to select his night-time targets. (I would be interested to know whether the burglaries continued after Arbery’s death, but haven’t seen any reference to such data.)

On the 23^rd of February, shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, Arbery once again ran into Satilla Shores, and into the house under construction, and once again was recorded on video camera.

A neighbor, Matthew Albenze, also spotted Arbery and called 911 to report the trespass on the building under construction. Wikipedia again:

The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked if the man was “breaking into it right now?” The caller replied: “No … it’s all open.” After the caller said the man was now “running down the street”, the dispatcher said police would respond. The dispatcher asked at 1:08 p.m., “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” The caller responded, with some parts garbled, saying: “And he’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing.”

Why Arbery ran away isn’t clear, but the perception among those who saw him was that he was trying to escape after stealing something from the construction site. Apparently he hadn’t stolen anything, but if he had known that the cops had been called, then, being on probation, he might have wanted to avoid another brush with the law. Then again, if Arbery was mentally ill, it is probably pointless to try to rationalize his actions.

Soon Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ house, where Gregory McMichael, working in the yard, saw him and recognized him as the repeat trespasser the neighborhood was worried about. He and Travis armed themselves and got into their white pickup truck, and gave chase.

The MSM accounts, and the account of the prosecutor, are worded to suggest that the McMichaels were racist good-old-boys who pursued Arbery that day simply because they wanted to hunt down, and snuff out the life of, an innocent black man whose only “crime” was “jogging while black.” To say that this is false, and as such represents both journalistic and prosecutorial misconduct, would be putting it very mildly. Both McMichaels had law enforcement experience, and obviously (all the evidence leans this way) were attempting a citizen’s arrest, a procedure that has a long history in the United States and at the time was specifically sanctioned in Georgia law. In other words, they wanted only to detain Arbery so that he could be questioned by police.

Whether they had sufficient reason to attempt a citizen’s arrest is debatable. However, to say that in the heat of the moment someone slightly exceeding his rights under a citizen’s arrest law automatically will be charged with false imprisonment, and then murder for defending his life when the mentally ill arrestee attacks him, is completely absurd. Citizen’s arrest laws are not meant to sanction vigilantism, but they also are not meant to be life-destroying traps for honest citizens who are trying to protect their neighborhoods—in what was here a demonstrable absence of effective policing.

The McMichaels tried unsuccessfully to cut off Arbery as he ran, and, they said later, even asked him to stop and let them talk to him, but he didn’t respond and continued running in an attempt to evade them. They could easily have shot him, if killing him had been their intent, but they did not; they simply kept trying to get him to stop.

At some point Bryan, who had seen the chase go by his own house, joined in with his black pickup truck and tried—again, unsuccessfully—to cut off the running man. Note that Bryan was not a close friend of the McMichaels; he was merely another resident in this neighborhood that was now literally up in arms over the rash of thefts and trespassings, and hoped to put the perp behind bars.

Ultimately the McMichaels gave up pursuing Arbery—apparently the neighborhood had many open yards through which he could always evade them—and simply parked their pickup at a crossing where they thought he was likely to appear in his attempt to get away.

At this point, just several minutes after Albenze’s 911 call, Travis McMichael, standing on the road by the driver’s side door, made his own 911 call—but then saw Arbery coming and handed the phone to his father, who stood in the truck bed:

a male caller said: “I’m out here at Satilla Shores …There’s a Black male running down the street.” The 9-1-1 dispatcher asked, “Where at Satilla Shores?” The caller replied: “I don’t know what street we’re on.”

Arbery now as he approached apparently saw Travis standing with his shotgun by the open driver’s door on the left side of the pickup truck. Arbery might have turned around or veered onto either of the lawns beside the narrow road. Instead he kept running towards the truck, though he altered course to the right side of the road, and then ran along the right side of the truck, just a few feet from Gregory McMichael who stood in the truck bed talking to 911. When he reached the front of the truck, Arbery suddenly cut left and charged Travis.

This was the impulse that killed Arbery. You and I, and pretty much every sane person aware of the story, know this, and know that we would never have done what he did. We know that we would have stopped, and we know that if Arbery had stopped, as he’d been asked, he would still be alive, the McMichaels and Bryan would be free, and none of us would have heard of any of them.

But Arbery charged Travis. Bryan, who had been in pursuit of Arbery, parked his pickup in time to catch most of this tragic encounter on his cellphone camera.

Arbery in his fatal lunge had almost reached Travis when the latter fired his shotgun, catching Arbery in the chest. Arbery kept coming and tried to wrest the gun away from Travis. Meanwhile Gregory McMichael, with the phone still to his ear and the line to the 911 dispatcher still open, screamed at Arbery to stop.

The caller shouted, “Stop! … Watch that. Stop, damn it! Stop!”

Why did Gregory McMichael shout at Arbery to stop? Well, obviously because he and his son had never intended to kill Arbery and were astonished that he was making it necessary.

Arbery did not stop. He kept struggling for the shotgun until Travis had shot him with it a total of three times. After the third shot, which went through the left side of his chest, Arbery quickly weakened, staggered, and collapsed to the pavement.

Aftermath

Alerted by the first 911 call, the police soon arrived. Arbery by then was dead. Travis McMichael was splashed in blood and evidently in shock (“No, I’m not all right,” he told the cop. “I just fucking killed someone.”)

But, along with his father, he cooperated. Bryan cooperated too. They freely discussed the events of the preceding minutes, evidently without any sense of having committed a crime. The police did not arrest them, and the local district attorney’s office did not charge them. The Brunswick Circuit DA, Jackie Johnson, saw the case as an unfortunate but not really criminal one involving a mentally ill young man who essentially had brought about his own death through his own impulsive and violent actions.

Johnson had connections to the McMichaels, though, so she recused herself and turned the thing over to a neighboring district, Waycross Judicial Circuit District. The DA there, George Barnhill, felt the same way about the case. According to Wikipedia:

On April 2, Barnhill wrote a memorandum to Glynn County police, recommending that no arrests be made. Barnhill wrote that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase “a burglary suspect, with solid firsthand probable cause”; that “Arbery initiated the fight”; and that Travis McMichael “was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself” when “Arbery grabbed the shotgun”.

By this time, of course, Arbery’s family had got a lawyer, “leaders of the black community” were getting involved, and there were demands for a prosecution. So the whiff of racial protest, with all that entails for a prosecutor’s career, was already in the air. Soon Barnhill washed his hands of the case, with a rather tenuous excuse:

Arbery had previously been prosecuted by his son, a prosecutor for the Brunswick Circuit District Attorney’s Office, in an earlier case [and] one of the defendants [Gregory McMichael] had served as an investigator on the same prosecution.

And so, on April 13, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office handed the case to another nearby venue, the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.

It’s unclear what would have happened if the case had simply been left at the Atlantic Judicial Circuit, with no new event to inflame the situation, but presumably its DA, one Tom Durden, would have been under the same political pressures as the two DAs that had passed on the case.

What did happen is this: On May 5 a local defense lawyer who had consulted informally with Gregory and Travis McMichael uploaded Bryan’s cellphone video to the website of a local radio station. Stories were circulating to the effect that Arbery had simply been gunned down while jogging, and the lawyer apparently thought that the video would convince the public of the McMichaels’ innocence. He thought wrong—not because the video shows the McMichaels to be murderers, but simply because it somewhat shockingly depicts a young African-American man’s death at the hands of two fairly stereotypical-looking southern white fellows. This publication of the video was, remember, in one of the hardest, most hysterogenic periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few weeks later, America would erupt in the Great Awokening after George Floyd’s death—but even now it was clear that this society was becoming very restive under pressure, and its politicians and politically sensitive prosecutors were doing what they could to placate the more restive elements.

From Wikipedia again:

Within hours of the video becoming public, Tom Durden, the district attorney for Georgia’s Atlantic Judicial Circuit, said that he would present the case to “the next available grand jury in Glynn County” to decide if charges should be filed. The convening of grand juries had been postponed until after June 12 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Durden accepted Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s offer to bring in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to investigate. [italics mine]

At this point, with the most senior state politician getting involved in what should have been an obscure case, and more or less signaling—virtue-signaling—which way it should go, the McMichaels’ fate was sealed.

The GBI found probable cause to charge Gregory and Travis McMichael within 36 hours of taking over jurisdiction of the case, and, on May 7, arrested and charged them with felony murder. The McMichaels were booked into the Glynn County Jail. At an appearance before a judge the following day, the McMichaels were both denied bond.

A few days later, Bryan too was arrested and charged.

Ladies of the Jury

When the case came before a jury, it was widely reported that eleven of the twelve jurors were white. It was much less widely reported that nine of those eleven were women.

Women, as I have been writing for the past decade, “wear the pants” now in most Western societies, i.e., have unprecedented and often dominant influence in many realms of culture. This is important because on average women think about and react to the world differently than men. Compared to men, for example, women seem much more emotionally aroused by stories of white-on-black racial conflict. Women, white women, also appear to have been the dominant participants in the bizarre BLM frenzy of the summer 2020 Great Awokening.

If the McMichael/Bryan defense lawyers had read my essays, they would have known this (I write this only half-jokingly—my essays are not that obscure) and accordingly might have tried a different jury-selection strategy—though really, as this and many other examples show, the jury system in the United States is generally unlikely to deliver justice in cases where the forces of Wokeness favor one side.

In any case, the jury members were mostly women, the DA that ultimately charged the three defendants was a black woman (she claimed at the trial, among other things, that the defendants “chased, hunted down and ultimately executed” Arbery), and the lead prosecutor in the trial was a woman. And of course, Al Sharpton sat in the courtroom with Arbery’s family, and a mob of demonstrators camped outside the court building, to remind those sensitive women of the jury what they would face if they delivered the wrong verdict.

The jury, without much deliberation, duly returned a verdict of guilty on most of the charges. These charges included felony murder for all three defendants—even Bryan who had not been armed and had done nothing more than pursue Arbery in his truck. Travis McMichael, who presumably would have been killed by Arbery had he not defended himself, was additionally found guilty of “malice murder,” which means murder with “express or implied malice.”

These charges bring a minimum 30-year sentence before the possibility of parole, and for Travis McMichael, with the additional malice murder rap, there may be no parole—that will be up to the judge.

The Biden Administration, of course, watched this show trial approvingly.

However, it isn’t going to let it go at that. No, the Biden Administration via its “Justice” Department will try to earn further brownie points in the eyes of its voter base, and at the same time try to crush the spirit of conservative Legacy Americans, by pursuing a federal hate-crime trial of the McMichaels and Bryan—scheduled to convene next year.

Meanwhile the state of Georgia, led by “Republican” Gov. Brian Kemp, will also send a message by prosecuting former Brunswick Circuit DA Jackie Johnson—the first one to recuse herself, remember—for “obstruction of justice.” This will ensure that, the next time a black person in Georgia is killed by whites for any reason whatsoever, local DAs will show the proper Stakhanovite zeal in prosecuting.

Flaws in the Law

Note that Georgia law defines the kind of murder alleged in the case as follows:

(a) A person commits the offense of murder when he unlawfully and with malice aforethought, either express or implied, causes the death of another human being.

(b) Express malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take the life of another human being which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof. Malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.

(c) A person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.

Did “all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart” on the part of Travis McMichael? The answer is obviously no. He did not shoot Arbery from the window of his truck (or at any time until charged) as he would have done had his intent been murderous; he phoned 911 prior to the fatal encounter; he did not flee the scene of the killing; he showed every sign of having been shaken by that killing because he had not expected it; and he cooperated with the police who came to the scene. If he had an “abandoned and malignant heart” (why are these vague and archaic descriptors even allowed in the legal code?) he would have acted like a typical premeditated killer, shooting Arbery in a way that would not implicate himself, and denying involvement if questioned. I can imagine that a lot of American men who are forced to live with the problem of Black crime will now prefer that option, at least those men who are not totally demoralized by show trials like these.

The bigger problem here is the implied notion, noted above, that even mildly overinterpreting a citizen’s arrest law, as any concerned citizen might easily do without bad intent, can abruptly (by the whim of a biased jury) turn the citizen into a felon, and then a murderer if he has to defend himself against the arrestee’s violence. If such a notion were valid, a citizen’s arrest law would be worse than worthless. It would be as if the government invited motorists to drive across a very long and narrow, guardrail-less bridge over a mile-deep gorge, having positioned the bridge in such a way that it constantly swayed and shimmied in the wind. It effectively would be no bridge at all—only a deathtrap for the unwary.

The Malignant Heart of the Matter

Is there even any point in arguing over the legal questions at the heart of such cases? I can remember many racially tinged travesties of justice in my adult life, going back at least to the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995. These cases always feel like inversions of the To Kill a Mockingbird setup—either an apparently guilty black man goes free or gets off lightly, or a wrongfully prosecuted white man has his life ruined. More importantly, the process by which these injustices occur is always (as in Harper Lee’s model of 1930s small-town Alabama) a social process involving race-politics pressures as well as a lot of venality, cowardice, and hysteria. Tom Wolfe somehow got away with writing a big novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, about the modern versions of these circuses, a novel that even in 1987 conveyed strongly the message that American society and its judicial system had been irretrievably broken by decades of racial factionalism.

Similarly, what really drew my attention to this case was the evidence of race-politics pressure on DAs and politicians, the jury’s disregard for the basic evidence that should have exonerated the defendants, the MSM’s wanton mischaracterizations of the case (go back and read their accounts!), and then, above all, the overwhelmingly positive, smug reaction to the verdict by so many Americans.

Of course, Twitter and social media generally are full of people who can cheaply virtue-signal while never having to deal with the unhappy realities afflicting ordinary Americans. Stephen King, for example, lives in a humongous complex on a barrier-island beach south of Sarasota—I know because I once lived nearby—at the least-accessible extremity of a wealthy neighborhood that was designed by its residents to keep out the riffraff, including anyone who looks remotely like Ahmaud Arbery. From that fortress King is unlikely ever to have to face the problem of burglary or thievery, and anyway any losses from such property crime would be infinitesimal in their impact on him.

But I think virtue-signaling is only a small and secondary part of this. Over the past few years, and especially since the COVID pandemic started, the more or less diffuse growth of wokeness in American life seems to have cohered into a Salem-like episode of socially sanctioned savagery—arguably almost as deadly as Salem, and much more broad and durable. I’ve even had the vague imaginative sense (from a distance, as an expatriate) that this mass hysteria has been developing into a kind of cult, presided over by a collectively summoned black perp-god, or purple-haired Gender Studies goddess, who in strident tones demands a constant flow of human sacrifices. (Another writer elaborated this human-sacrifice concept before me, so I will mostly leave that imagery to him.)

The centrality of pictures and videos should give us a clue to how these weird social phenomena arise. If, let us say, a young black man, a man like Ahmaud Arbery, is found dead in the street by gunshot one day, but there is no video evidence of how he was killed, what will be the public reaction? The reader knows the answer already, because such cases occur many times per day across the US, especially in heavily black cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Baltimore. There is generally no reaction, no wider resonance. The man’s family may weep. They may call on the police to solve the crime. But usually only if the cops identify a white suspect (a relatively rare event) will the case make out of the back pages of the papers, and only if the white-on-black killing is caught on video (much rarer) is the case sure to be lifted from the muck of the ordinary criminal court docket into the glare of a Woke Cult show trial.

People in general, and I guess women moreso than men on average, are apt to be distressed when they witness—for example on a video—a violent death. The distress in turn creates a sense of urgency to do something. (Consider how heavily US foreign and immigration policies in recent years have been driven by distressing images in the media, e.g., of wounded children in Syria or refugee children crossing the Rio Grande.) Distress also tends to suppress rational thought, making the mind more susceptible to the beating tom-toms (to paraphrase McLuhan) of mass delusion and madness. And when a killing depicted on a distressing video can be made to seem even remotely consistent with the central wokelore motif of evil whites harming innocent blacks—that very live snarl of wires in the American psyche—the mass delusion and madness will come together and start to lurch in a predictable direction. It will start to be controlled and guided, to do meaningful political work, by a political faction that I would say definitely has “an abandoned and malignant heart.”

It seems to me that there are usually two main group of actors that ignite these episodes: blacks who from basic instinct or family ties support fellow blacks in conflicts with whites, and a certain large stratum of white women who have, in regard to blacks, a powerful guilt and appeasement reflex. Once those two groups start up and gather steam, craven politicians and their judicial minions join in with the rapidity of scurrying rodents, and then the superorganism swells to its maximum size with the additions of journalists and millions of ordinary and celebrity virtue-signalers. This frenzied entity of many voices and noises somehow achieves a certain harmony as it demands “justice,” which is code for: give us a white victim.

One cannot overemphasize how uninterested in truth is this entity. In the case of Derek Chauvin, the entity assured us that the smirk on Chauvin’s face as he held down George Floyd was simply his sadist-cop’s delight at the approaching demise of his poor African American victim. Chauvin was a police officer with long experience of having to deal with unruly and bullshitting black perps, and of course did not have the clairvoyance to know that this particular perp, this one unlucky time, was telling the truth—but try explaining that to some vapor-brained leftist millennial or wine-aunt who is caught up in the full guilt-hate-love ecstasy of the Awokening.

In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the entity (speaking even through the man who is the current US president) assured us that the defendant was a white supremacist who had gone hunting for innocent protesters. The entity let it be known among the softer minded that Rittenhouse’s victims were black—this became a very widespread perception. Rittenhouse avoided becoming the next sacrificial victim mainly because the people he had shot in self defense were actually white. It must have helped too that he, Rittenhouse, was a cherubic-looking lad liable to trigger the protective maternal instincts of many American women—instincts that are normally directed entirely toward the shooting victim in such cases, at least when the victim is black.

In Georgia, of course, the victim was indeed black and the accused were southern whites who drove pickup trucks, carried guns, probably had a few Confederate flags around, and probably held African Americans in low esteem. On the great totem pole of wokeism, these men were the lowest of the low. Thus, the story the entity told of their vile misdeeds, in the MSM, in social media, in the courtroom through the mouths of sworn officers of the court, was a festival of lies and obfuscations, and essentially the defendants had no defenders other than their paid lawyers.

The victims of human sacrifice in ancient times often were drawn from the lowest, most marginalized castes. Is it not plausible that tens of thousands of years of primitive religion have worn certain paths into our minds such that even now we subconsciously act out those rituals—and perhaps can even experience, every so often, the vivid illusion that an angry god is present and wants to be appeased?

This particular deity will never stay appeased for long, though, will it? And as evidence accumulates that America’s grand racial experiment has failed, will Americans ever face up to that failure and respond rationally? Or will that failure just drive them crazier and crazier, as they deliver more and more sacrificial victims to a god who will not relent?

***

America’s leftist elites regard white American nationalism as their principal ideological adversary. But they have another adversary that is often overlooked: black American nationalism.

Black American nationalism is very easy to overlook, here in the third decade of the new millennium. Although it has had its day in the sun—even Lincoln was in favor of it, once upon a time—its best-known proponent since the Civil Rights Era, Malcolm X, died 56 years ago, at the hands of rival black nationalists, and the movement seems to have gone only downhill since. Already by the mid 1970s Richard Pryor was mocking the “Back to Africa Movement” in his stand-up routines. Black American nationalism also has been tainted (or so one is supposed to think) by the moral support it has occasionally received from overtly white supremacist organizations. In any case, although there must still be millions of black Americans of the nationalist persuasion out there, their movement has by now been relegated to the fringes—the black nationalists who make the news these days seem mostly violent, deranged and disorganized.

By contrast, black American activism that is not nationalist seems to have been doing pretty well lately, judging by the recent wildfire contagions of enthusiasm for BLM, the 1619 Project, the George Floyd hagiology, and Critical Race Theory. Last year, leading Democrats actually donned kente cloth stoles and bent a knee on the US Capitol’s marble floor during the announcement of police reform legislation, as if genuflecting to a Justifiably Angry Black God.

Non-nationalist black activists also seem to have been doing pretty well for themselves personally. Consider Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of BLM, whose income as an activist has enabled her recently to purchase several homes collectively worth several millions of dollars. Or Nikole Hannah-Jones, of the 1619 Project, with her consulting, if that’s what one should call it, for Shell and other large corporations, and her remarkable habit of promoting products in interviews and speeches. Or the so-called family of George Floyd, with their $27 million payout from the city of Minneapolis. Or Stacey Abrams with her novel and its lucrative adaptation for TV. Or Ta-Nehisi Coates with his comic books and film scripts. Or reparations-demander Ibram X. Kendi with the miraculous largesse he attracts from wealthy whites.

Now, granted, some of this flow of wealth to activists could be framed as prudent purchases of insurance by white-run organizations—inoculations against the cooties of “racism” and “white supremacy” that can afflict, and cancel, any prominent organization if it’s not careful.

But even moreso I think this wealth transfer reflects elites’ desire to reward and incentivize those who tamely do their bidding.

Malcolm X viewed elite-approved “black leaders” in his day with similar skepticism. He famously called Martin Luther King Jr. a chump and a stooge of white liberals for promoting the idea of peaceful integration within white America—an idea that to him was an empty promise, aimed as always at perpetuating white control of blacks.

I think he was basically right about that. And if contemporary America’s leftist elites have banished black nationalists to the fringes, and have instead anointed a bunch of racial-equity grifters as the approved “leaders” of black America, then surely black nationalism is something that Legacy Americans should support as energetically as they can.

I’m not just being enemy-of-my-enemy tribalistic here. I’m trying to be coldly logical. The leftist elites of the US, which is to say the leaders of the Democratic Party and their allies and henchwomen in academia, media, entertainment, big business, etc., need to keep American blacks in the country and on their side for the most basic electoral reasons. They cannot abide a black separatism that would lead to a new, black nationalist political party or—the elites’ ultimate nightmare—a substantial black exodus from the US to a new homeland, even an internal one. Obviously, such an exodus would, among its many consequences, fatally weaken those leftist elites, in part by removing most of the radioactive core that powers their racial-factionalist ideology.

There is also a strong moral argument here. African-Americans of today are descendants of West Africans who were brought to the New World against their will. Theirs is a population that was literally enslaved for a long time, and then was oppressed for a long time after that. Even as their oppression has eased it has become clear that they are, for the most part, trapped in a world not of their making. In other words, for all this time they have been denied the basic rights of ethnic nationhood and self-determination that most peoples around the world have traditionally enjoyed. The fact that European-derived whites, with their hyperverbal brains and their sentimental, empire-adapted ideology, have overwritten ancient wisdom about the primacy of ethnic nationhood and self-determination, and no longer consider it important, is—American blacks might say, with some heat—not their problem.

It shouldn’t be their problem, anyway. And yet it is. And it’s not just their problem, is it? This idea that nations should be substantially multi-racial/ethnic (“multicultural”), bound merely by civic nationalism, economic opportunism, and kumbayah songs, is really the ur-problem, the most deeply planted seed of destruction, in the United States and most other Western countries. This idea seems essentially Christian in origin, but was also elaborated in response to the circumstances of the modern West, including colonialism and the globalization of trade and labor. In the US, it was shaped inter alia by the issues surrounding the Civil War, and was used, e.g., to justify turning African slaves into Union soldiers and then Republican voters in the Reconstruction South.

Despite multiculturalism’s clash with traditional ways of organizing societies, and its century and a half of failure in the US, it persists—persists even as racial/ethnic factionalism ravages the country, burns its cities, corrupts its democracy, and ruins its quality of life.

Even worse, multiculturalism’s elite proponents have become ever more suppressive of traditional ethnonationalism—declaring it “white supremacy” if favored by whites—even as they openly stoke nonwhites’ racial/ethnic grievances to build their political factions.

So black American nationalism is really only one of a thousand notions rendered unacceptable by America’s multiculturalist cult—whose mindset has managed to colonize both of the major political factions, and has successfully compensated for its evidentiary shortcomings with an hysterical, Inquisitionist crushing of dissent.

Nevertheless, black American nationalism does have advantages that make it a more practical aim amid this woke, antinationalist Inquisition. For one thing, it’s about what American blacks want, and if they declare they want to live apart and self-governing, the elites have no good alternative to the granting of that wish. Again and again those elites have declared American blacks holy and inviolable. Even if the elites’ motive in saying so has been only political and expedient, many blacks, and liberal whites, have taken the assertion at face value.

Another practical advantage that should make black nationalism more viable as a white cause is that American whites, I guess for reasons relating to their Christian backgrounds, prefer to think of themselves as helping others, not as acting selfishly for their own benefit. What could be more unselfish than to carve out thousands of square miles from their fair land, and donate it to their black brothers and sisters, to give them a new and truer freedom?

Would the blacks who lived in such a country experience a decline in living standards? I expect that they would, at least initially and in material terms. But as naïve as it may seem for me to say so, the issue here really goes deeper than material considerations: It’s about self-determination and human dignity. There are about fifty million black descendants of slaves living in the United States, enough to form one of the world’s most populous countries, and in many ways they have made clear that they are a distinctive people who prefer their own kind to others. The claim that they must nevertheless be the permanent captives and pawns of one political faction or another, in a society of European origin that is majority nonblack—a society that also jails them at sky-high rates—is actually ludicrous. It is one of the many toxic lies Americans foolishly think they can continue to live with.

***

Why are Americans on the political Right so drawn to conspiracy theories, from the chemtrails lore and QAnon to the conviction that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful?

It’s hard to say anything with certainty about the causes of social trends, societies not being very amenable to the types of experiments that can settle such issues in other realms of science. But to me a plausible hypothesis is that all this conspiracy-theorizing is a conversion of complex, partly unconscious, and above all inadmissible knowledge concerning existential threats, into a form that the average person can openly express.

In other words, even if this conspiracy stuff seems ridiculous to most educated people, it is stuff that ordinary folks can understand and discuss, and even if the threats are in fact imaginary, they are in principle as salient and alarming as the real threats that are suppressed: Dire threats from the culture and media are converted into dire threats from the water and the air, even from medicines. Similarly, the implicit knowledge that America’s elite-driven culture corrupts young people is transformed, in the QAnon belief system, into a simpler narrative about a ring of elite pedophiles.

To put it yet another way: on the Right the collective unconscious knows that something has gone terribly wrong and is causing great harm, but it tends not to acknowledge this directly—it tends to acknowledge only imaginary wounds. Psychiatrists call such phenomena, when they occur in individuals, hysterical or somatoform or conversion disorders: For example, a woman’s husband has been cheating on her, but instead of acknowledging this, she develops an ailment with nonspecific and unverifiable symptoms.

Why can’t Americans openly acknowledge what has harmed them? Most obviously because the principal causes of harm over the past half-century are the very things that American cultural and political elites have held up as holy and beyond criticism—indeed, anyone criticizing them is, in the lexicon of America’s new, feminized, despiritualized Puritanism, a hater.

Consider the general reaction if one were to make, on social media or in person in polite company, any of the following assertions (which I regard as essentially true):

• The permitting of mass immigration to the United States from 3^rd World countries over the past several decades has been—in effect, from the perspective of legacy Americans—a fraudulent and treasonous ploy by the Democratic Party to pack the electorate in their favor.
• To further this scheme, Democrats have depicted it as a compassionate, Christian policy that only “racists” would oppose—notwithstanding the fact that ethnically based nationhood is and always has been the norm worldwide.

• Democratic Party coalition-building over the last half-century has also relied heavily on the stoking of anti-white feelings among American blacks, anti-male feelings among American women (especially single women who are inherently more susceptible to this message), and anti-heterosexual feelings among homosexuals.
• To reward the members of its coalition and further divide them from legacy Americans, the Democratic Party has succeeded in establishing policies that significantly discriminate against legacy Americans and in favor of women and non-whites. Incredibly, these policies, including the euphemistically named “affirmative action,” favor even affluent non-white immigrants over legacy Americans. Again, to quash opposition or even debate, Democrats have depicted these discriminatory policies as compassionate and necessary measures that only evil people could oppose.

• Major news media organizations, the advertising and entertainment industries, academia, Big Business, large segments of the legal profession, and of course most of the pseudo-opposition Republican Party, have for their own selfish reasons enabled and abetted these schemes.

• While these schemes have as their inevitable result the destruction of traditional American society and its replacement with a grouping that necessarily will be degraded, unstable, partly atomized, and riven with ethnic conflict, the “new America” in principle will be much easier for these cultural and political elites to control.
• Although the Democrats’ latest power-seeking move—large-scale rigging of the presidential election, mostly through ballot-harvesting in key Democrat-controlled areas—has outraged many on the right, the Democrats’ much more harmful method of electorate-packing has been ongoing for decades.
• Effectively the USA’s cultural and political elites have ruined a great country in their pursuit of greater power over it. Many of these elites may actually believe that their motives have been pure. Yet the gravity of their crime far exceeds anything that any traitor or indeed any foreign adversary has ever done to the United States.

Obviously, for the average American, stating any of these things openly and identifiably, beyond one’s circle of family and close friends, would risk immediate practical consequences such as social ostracism and job loss.

Less obviously, such a declaration would also have an important psychological consequence: To acknowledge awareness of this real and colossal crime while doing nothing about it—continuing one’s normal routines—would be embarrassing; it would amount to a confession of pathetic weakness and cowardice.

For most Americans, such a declaration could invite as well the recognition that for years, even decades, they have effectively collaborated in this crime, by voting for Democrats and Republicans who have furthered it, and perhaps even by participating in ritual denunciations of fellow Americans who have opposed it.

For all these reasons, I suspect, many Americans avert their eyes from the harshest truths about their situation, preferring to embrace fantasies that signal their distress without inviting the labels “racist” or “white supremacist” or being otherwise unmentionable. They call these fantasies “red pills,” but they are really only blue pills.

And perhaps the remarkable mass rallies for a president who was always evidently an inept narcissist, the MAGA-themed protests and other gatherings, and even the recent, brief mob occupation of the U.S. Capitol, should be seen in a similar light: as make-believe manifestations of a rage that dare not speak its name—manifestations that in the end are ways of losing, not ways of winning.

Is the United States in the process of remaking itself with a new ideology called Wokeism?

A lot of people seem to think so, but I don’t. The idea I sketch out briefly here is that the recent pandemic spread of Wokeism, a.k.a. The Great Awokening, is really only a transitory cultural phenomenon, more than a mass hysteria but less than the development of a full-fledged successor culture. Wokeism does draw upon trends in Western culture that have been underway for decades. However, as an ideology or culture it is basically incoherent and destructive, and does not offer a viable guide to a sustainable new way of life. Wokeism is chiefly marking a period of cultural upheaval—and is telling us nothing of how that period of upheaval will end.

The mess of Wokeism

Wokeism lacks a coherent list of do’s and don’ts, of the kind that normally make up a working culture. It shows no sign of having been thought through.

To give one example, the people who run BLM recently published a “manifesto” on their website which included a vaguely Maoist insistence on collective parenting:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

Apparently this was embarrassing enough, even for the dedicated banner-carriers and fellow-travelers of BLM, that this provision along with the rest of the manifesto was removed from the website soon after it was posted. When I went to the site address (https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/) as I was composing this essay, I got a simple 404 error—suggesting that BLM lacks not only sense but also basic IT skills.

Other features of Wokeism include demands for radical police reforms—radically weakening police powers—or even the defunding/abolition of police departments. Some municipal governments in the United States have been so well captured by leftists that they really seem willing to adopt such measures. But—to state the obvious—these measures, and the criminality and anarchy they are bound to unleash, are things that a developed society with a large, wealthy, and center-right business-owning class will not tolerate for long.

Further down the Wokeists’ unrealizable/unsustainable wishlist we find radical reforms to education, which have the ultimate goal of bringing about equality of outcomes for different racial and ethnic groups, especially in public schools where the Wokeists’ policy grip is strongest. Standardized tests will be de-emphasized, admissions exclusivity weakened, and discipline more or less abandoned, in order to accommodate more disadvantaged groups. Recitations of Woke ideology presumably will start to crowd out traditional subjects such as math and English. To again state the obvious: this cuckoo radicalism will mean only that any family having the means to do so will take their children out of public schools, leaving the unfortunate kids whose parents can’t place them elsewhere to suffer a long nightmare of Woke education.

Then there is the absurd idea of reparations, to be paid somehow to American blacks who, after 155 years of post-slavery systemic racism, have managed to become the world’s richest black population by far. I wonder how serious the Wokeists are about reparations anyway, since actual payment might be construed as an end to the matter, obliging both blacks and Wokeists to move on from all their racial grievance-mongering. (We all know the grievance-mongering will never be put to rest, as it serves an essential partisan-political function.) Actual payment might also do embarrassingly little to alter the essential situation of American blacks, who in many cases would end up worse following their rapid spending of their windfalls.

Open-door immigration appears to be a core policy of Wokeism, though it shouldn’t be, as it obviously harms the interests of American blacks. Even among immigrant groups, the open-door policy is apt to become unpopular to the extent that these groups see further newcomers as a source of unwanted competition for jobs. Of course liberal immigration policies have prevailed anyway in the US over the past few decades, and thus they are sustainable in that retrospective sense. But open-door immigration isn’t a culture or a pillar of a culture—it is effectively an anti-cultural policy, which almost by definition will destroy the host country’s traditional way of life and create a situation in which newcomer cultures will have to duke it out for eventual supremacy. Who seriously thinks that if Chinese-Americans or Indian-Americans take over large parts of the USA, they will continue to permit mass immigration from Africa or Latin America?

Similarly, if the wokeists succeed in making whites second-class citizens in their own country by mandating POC-preferences in jobs and university admissions—which they clearly hope to do—the end-result is unlikely to be a harmonious multiracial/multiethnic USA living under Wokeism. Much more likely will be the outcome seen in multi-ethnic situations elsewhere in the world, namely inter-ethnic strife, followed by the triumph of one or more, presumably nonwhite ethnicities—who may just divide the old USA among themselves and, in their new American country or countries, adopt nationalistic policies favoring their own. To them, the romantic multiracialism of early 21^st century whites may end up being seen as a tragically maladaptive cultural trait—vaguely reminiscent of the predilection for firewater that helped doom 19^th century Native Americans.

Wokeists embody the chaos of wokeism

Apart from Wokeism’s specific policy notions, look at the Wokeists themselves—especially the ones at the business end of Wokeism, where ideas are turned into action. Are these activists bustling Bolsheviks, busily setting up farmers’ or manufacturers’ or soldiers’ collectives? Not exactly. They seem like supremely messed-up people, a very high proportion of whom have histories of mental illness and/or severe sexual identity issues. They seem not only fundamentally unhappy but fundamentally set against the world as it is. That is why they burn and break and topple indiscriminately, destroying even statues of Lincoln. They seem to want the outside world to bear a closer resemblance to the disorder they have within. In other words, they don’t seem to be for anything meaningful. Does an Antifa Autonomous Zone look constructive? Is it something Western people could build upon? How about a burning, rubble-strewn downtown Minneapolis?

OK, but what about rich Woke-capitalist billionaires like Zuckerberg and Bezos? Aren’t they formidable enough to sustain Wokeism as a new culture?

Well, certainly, the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and their ilk are powerful. But I think they have zero intention of sustaining Wokeism in a form that could be called a new culture. They are primarily businessmen who have got to where they are by adapting rapidly in a dynamic business (and political) environment. They are now adapting to Wokeism, because it is a clear and present danger to anyone with commercial interests. Their adaptation is to feign support—they fear Wokeism and don’t want to be harmed by it, and think they can escape the firebombs and boycotts if they get out in front of the whole thing with various empty gestures.

Needless to add, corporations are not about to start hiring obese black trans performers, let alone 75-IQ kids from the ‘hood, to do anything substantive. Woke capitalists’ actions will mainly be limited to the patronage of a few, influential, black “public intellectuals,” who are essentially running legal protection rackets.

Woke capitalism may also encompass a more urgent hiring preference for well educated Asians and Latinos over whites—anyone but whites! But for the most part the corporate version of Wokeism will be symbolic. After all, competitive organizations need competent people, and Wokeism—because of its insistence on equality of outcomes—does almost everything possible to discourage the development of practical competence.

In short, Wokeism on its own can never be a constructive, society-driving ideology or culture. It may seriously damage or even topple the old culture of legacy Americans, and that process may take years and result in terrible destruction, perhaps on the scale of the French Revolution or even the Fall of Rome. But Wokeism is not itself a successor culture that will be around a couple of generations from now.

The importance of demographics and technology

I don’t claim to fully understand wokeism or its origins, but I don’t think anyone can understand it without first understanding how the cultural ground, so to speak, was prepared for it.

To switch to a viral analogy, wokeism was a pathogen that was always around. There is nothing really new about it. It is a mix, a pastiche, of a lot of old, discredited ideas most of which were first put forward by 1960s radicals. Why did it suddenly break out into a pandemic spread? I think the answer is that the big changes that made the outbreak possible were in the susceptibilities of host populations.

One big change was the cultural feminization that followed the mass entry of women into culturally influential professions such as journalism, publishing, law, politics, and science over the past half-century. I’ve written about this in earlier essays. Among other things, this feminization process appears to have made the culture profoundly more vulnerable to empathy-inducing themes of oppressed minorities, downtrodden refugees, and buzz-phrases like “systemic racism.”

American women have not been doing particularly well under their emancipation—their estimated lifetime prevalence of major depression is now more than 20 percent, to note one adverse mental health trend among many. Marriage and birth rates are falling. More and more women, having followed the dictates of feminism and sexual liberation, are living alone and childless. Amid the anxiety and bleak isolation of the COVID-19 crisis, many of them seem to have embraced Wokeness as a belief system that is almost spiritually sublime in its ambitions, and at the same time satisfyingly engages their maternal instincts to protect the weak. Other basic instincts may be involved as well. In any case it can’t be denied that women, particularly white women, have been enormously overrepresented at woke and BLM marches and protests.

Women’s cultural influence in America isn’t going away any time soon. Any new culture that takes hold, or any form of cultural reversion, presumably will have to suit them. But a glance around the world tells us that women on the whole are very flexible when it comes to culture, provided that certain basic needs are met—needs that center largely around motherhood. I can’t believe that Wokeism, in the long run, meets enough of those needs. It seems more like a yearning, a dance, a pose, a fling, than real life.

Apart from cultural feminization and the COVID-19 crisis, two other big factors have obviously been relevant. One is the Internet, and social media in particular, which has boosted in an unprecedented way the potential speed and scale of social contagions. (I think it’s also generally accepted, if not as well studied as it should be, that women tend to transmit social contagions among themselves much more efficiently than men do.)

The other factor is the 2020 presidential election, which has spurred various get-out-the-vote operations and generally has encouraged partisan activists to whip up emotions to energize potential voters. I think various left-wing/Democrat activists did just that in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and that was the spark on dry tinder that flamed into the Great Awokening.

That flame has dimmed considerably in the months since June. It may flare up again if the Democrats sweep on election day. But I think it won’t burn for 70-odd years as Marxism-Leninism did. It doesn’t have the coherence or the minimal connection to human nature that it would need to have. What stable ideology will form on the other side of Wokeism is unclear. But given the ongoing cultural decay of whites and the relative robustness of nationalism among nonwhites, it seems likely that Wokeness will only mark the transition to a new, probably nonwhite-centered culture—or cultures. Those cultures could, ironically, end up being much more conservative and traditional than the decadent mishmash from which Wokeness emerged.

Western societies almost without exception in recent decades have been transformed by the large-scale additions of essentially all foreign ethnicities to their legacy European-stock populations.

How this came about is less important than the fact that it happened and now festers as the central problem of Western civilization. But I think it’s fair to say that this transformation began, several decades ago, principally because Western elites wanted it, at least partly for reasons they could not openly defend. A simplified and somewhat cynical version is that Left-leaning politicians in the US, emboldened by their success in capturing “the black vote,” calculated that they could import other ethnic minorities from abroad en masse and ultimately assemble a permanent electoral majority that way. Businessmen and the rich, seeking a wider range of cheap-labor options, were eager to go along. This basic idea then spread to the elites of other Western countries.

The pan-ethnic flow has continued for those mostly-unacknowledged reasons, and also because recently arrived foreigners and their offspring have by now acquired substantial political power of their own. But the reasons that have been used to publicly justify this change, at least in recent decades, are different. The elites, who now include the mouthpieces of these new ethnic voting blocs, have been assuring the increasingly feminized, compassion-oriented legacy populations of the West that this historic transformation has been necessary as an act of compassion, and a recognition of universal civil rights—huddled masses and all that. For the special case of the USA, they have argued or implied that the country has always been a construct of immigrants, a “civic” rather than an ethnic nation, a “promised land” in the words of RFK.

This has always been more than a dry, reasoned argument. The elites have applied to the legacy lower orders a strong emotional and moral pressure to accept that multi-ethnicity, “diversity,” is good, that it sits on the correct side of history, that opposing it is bad and racist. Some European governments have been so successful in their browbeating that they now enforce this new moral code in actual law. But even Western elites that haven’t achieved that level of thought-control have been pretty effective in enforcing diversity dogma through threats of disemployment and social ostracism for dissidents—cancellation.

Diversity dogma as we know it today would not have had as receptive an audience in the 1960s. The cultural ground had not yet been prepared. The average Democrat then would be considered “far right” today. So when the floodgates to pan-ethnic immigration began to be opened around the middle of that decade, people were simply misled. The elites, instead of presenting the coming demographic transformation as a good thing, assured ordinary citizens that it wouldn’t happen. The influx of foreigners would constitute a social ripple rather than a sea change—nothing to worry about! “This bill we sign today”—claimed Lyndon Johnson of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Bill—“is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.”

It did, though. And in the context of those original false assurances, the mass migration of ethnically and culturally distant peoples to the West has been an ongoing fraud, perpetrated by Western elites against their own legacy populations. By the same token, the compassion-based, right-side-of-history argument used to justify mass immigration is mainly window dressing. Still, it has been remarkably effective, and it deserves an effective response. As I organize my own thoughts about this, I don’t suppose that I have anything truly novel to say, but still I think my presentation is a better one than mass immigration opponents in the popular media usually provide.

It’s not about “hate”

I have never been comfortable with arguments against mass immigration that rest heavily on the idea of immigrants as lawless primitives.

That’s not to say that immigrants never are lawless primitives. It’s probably always been the case that a significant proportion of them belong in that category. But an argument that focuses just on the lowlifes implies that all the lawful, hard-working immigrants are totally OK. And they’re not totally OK, any more than lawful, hard-working white Americans would be, in the eyes of their hosts, if they tried to form a huge expatriate colony within some ethnically and culturally distant society.

I know this because I’ve spent most of my adult life as an expatriate in ethnically and culturally distant societies, and despite being lawful and hard-working I’ve run again and again into the limits of host country tolerance for foreigners. Those limits have been manifest in laws, such as laws limiting the kinds of jobs resident foreigners can do, and the property rights they can enjoy. Those limits have also been apparent in attitudes, such as the presumption that a foreigner opposing a native in court should normally lose, and the widespread belief that foreigners should pay more for things than natives do, or the simple, murmured resentment among locals to the effect that “there are too many foreigners here.”

Locals’ limited tolerance for foreigners like myself has sometimes struck me as too limited, but the fact that it is limited has never seemed fundamentally wrong. Placing bounds on foreign influx and influence in a society has always seemed like obvious common sense—a common sense forged by biological and cultural evolution as a basic human instinct.

Calling this innate in-group preference “hate” is one of the contemporary Left’s most specious and dishonest ploys. Don’t be a hater! My own experience is that countries placing heavy restrictions on foreigners’ residency and influence typically have citizens that are very warmly disposed towards visitors from abroad—probably in part because those restricting laws give locals a measure of security, from which they feel more free to be hospitable.

Nor is my opposition to mass immigration in my own country rooted in hatred of foreigners: I have spent most of my adult life living in far-flung places among ethnically and culturally dissimilar folk, and even married one of them, so that my children are now ethnically and culturally half-American and half-foreign. In other words, it has long been the case that the people dearest to me are foreigners in whole or in part.

From what do the limits of our tolerance spring, if not from hate?

Well, from something more fundamental than a human emotion. An organism is not an organism if it does not have boundaries that separate it from its environment and from other organisms. If it is too permeable, it will not survive. Human societies are not as well defined in this sense, compared to flora and fauna, but clearly they have been shaped by a similar evolutionary logic.

If one needs to invoke an emotion as the force underlying the universally limited human tolerance of foreigners, why not invoke love? As in, love for one’s kin and country—love for one’s national and cultural identity. One can’t have those good things, those fulfilments of basic human needs, and open one’s borders to all the peoples of the world. It would be like opening the doors of one’s house to random strangers. Speaking of which: remember that scene in the film Doctor Zhivago when the doctor returns from the war to find his comfortable Moscow residence filled with several other families—his own wife and children now confined to a single room? It was a wrenchingly effective depiction of the Bolshevik disregard for basic human nature. And for the viewer, as for Zhivago, the proper objects of hatred were not the new tenants but the Bolshevik overlords that had sent them.

Naturally, when a flood of immigrants makes a citizen feel that he has been displaced, his country effectively overrun, a certain amount of hatred toward the foreign displacer is an understandable reaction, and historically has been pretty effective at motivating a reversal of the flood. But hatred in that context is merely a means, and a temporary one, not the end in itself.

Globally, and ideally, the end is a good and positive end: a system of distinct nations—homelands populated by what are, more or less, extended families, each with a dominant ethnicity and culture—in which good fences, fair trade, and moderate amounts of tourism, intermarriage, and urban cosmopolitanism make good neighbors. In principle, at least, a sane and farsighted world can realize that humane goal calmly through policy, rather than through conflict.

Diversity destroys democracy

There are other reasons to oppose the flood of multi-ethnic immigration that has hit the West in recent decades. One set of reasons, largely amounting to a negative version of the argument above, invokes the weakening of social bonds, the dilution of the usual sense of shared culture, neighborliness and trust in an ethnically bound society, the erosion of the usual feeling of belonging (“this no longer feels like my country”), with an attendant demoralization that has already been blamed, e.g., for the downturn in white life expectancy in the US.

Another set of reasons involves the economic distortions caused by mass immigration, which include downward pressure on wages, disemployment of the legacy population, and—no less important—a draining away of skilled labor from the countries supplying the immigrants.

Then there is the higher-crime/lower-quality-of-life angle, which is especially relevant when the majority of immigrants come from less wealthy and orderly places.

Lastly, there is an argument that has long seemed to me especially important and yet mostly neglected. This is the argument that heavy multi-ethnicity in a society is incompatible in the long run with democracy—at least, traditional, stable, Western-style democracy—and must in the end produce political dissolution and anarchy or anyway some other-than-democratic outcome.

In part, this is an argument from simple observation: Multi-ethnic states almost never form naturally, and when they have been set up artificially—e.g., by Western colonial powers over the past few centuries—the result usually has been fragmentation or the emergence of a strongman (e.g., Saddam Hussein) with a police state.

This is also an argument from simple logic: Shared ethnicity is a very strong social and political binder, perhaps stronger than any other, particularly when the ethnic group is a political minority and feels, or is told that they should feel, a sense of adversity and oppression. In principle, as left-leaning parties in the USA and elsewhere have recognized, a sizeable political coalition can be built from such aggrieved, bloc-voting minority groups, provided that the faction-building party can manage to keep the flames of grievance alive in them. I think it’s fair to say, and it is maybe self-evident from events ongoing as I write, that those flames must ultimately burn away the mutual respect and trust that a society needs to sustain a democratic style of government. Many of the founders of the U.S. Republic knew that factionalism, in general, would be a constant temptation and a major threat to its survival. Race-based factionalism, which the founders largely failed to anticipate, is arguably on historical grounds—not to mention, evolutionary-biological grounds—the most toxic.

In the US the Democratic Party, previously the party of southern whites, has been shifting towards this mode of racial-minority factionalism (which also encompasses non-ethnically defined marginalized groups such as women and LGBTs) at least since the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s. Over the decades, powered especially by immigration, this strategy has strengthened the party electorally, and on a superficial analysis would seem to have positioned it now for long-term electoral dominance. But really this strategy has been self-defeating, in the sense that it effectively has destroyed the social fabric of the USA, making democracy itself now untenable as a means of stable governance.

If I’m right that my country—presaging developments elsewhere in the West—is about to see the full collapse of its political system, then the Left’s current pandering claim that slavery was America’s “original sin” may have a grain of truth to it. I would call it not only America’s original sin but also the original seed of America’s destruction: Through slavery, Americans brought a large, racially and developmentally distant minority into the country. That ultimately prompted a massive conflagration before the Republic was even 90 years old. But what came afterwards was arguably worse. The decision not to give ex-slaves their own separate homeland (as Lincoln among others had wanted) but to keep them in the US as citizens led ultimately, perhaps inevitably, to the emergence of civil rights ideology, diversity dogma, pan-ethnic immigration, and the current caustic factionalism that I expect will prove terminal.

The same fatal seed may deserve blame for the fall of the West more generally, since American-style civil rights ideology long ago infected the elites of other Western democracies and at least partly accounts for their post-colonial embraces of pan-ethnic immigration.

Am I too pessimistic? We’ll soon see. In the meantime, I’ll be busy preparing myself and my family for life and work outside the countries of the self-immolating West.

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“Don’t feed the animals” is a concept I didn’t really learn until late childhood, when I traveled one summer to Yellowstone with my family, and saw signs everywhere with that warning. It’s a central concept of wildlife management in wilderness areas where humans intrude.

It’s a counterintuitive concept, but a crucial one. Many and perhaps most people, especially when motivated by compassion, tend to assume there is no real harm in their feeding an individual elk or bison, particularly one that looks hungry. What wildlife managers know is that such feeding endangers not only the food-bearing humans but, more importantly, the local animal populations that are being fed. Uncontrolled feeding by humans of wild animals makes them dependent on that artificial food source, effectively reducing their adaptation to their wild environment even as their population balloons from the sudden nutrient abundance. It sets up the possibility of a crash of the animal population, perhaps to zero, due to an interruption of the artificial food supply, a nutrient deficiency caused by the new supply, or perhaps an infectious disease that takes advantage of the new density of hosts.

The key point, from a wildlife management or conservation biology perspective, is that doing what seems beneficial at the level of individual animals can, in the long-run, be utterly disastrous at the population level.

It’s the Population, Stupid

Conservation biology is functionally akin to politics in the human realm. Both aim to manage populations of animals in their natural habitats, the big difference being that politics involves humans managing other humans, which obviously introduces many complications and complexities. When humans manage animal populations they are much more emotionally detached from their charges. They get no direct feedback or pushback from them. They focus on the goals that are most important and most objectively measurable. They would consider it absurd to promote “equality” among the individual animals in a given population, or to strive to eradicate harmful stereotypes, or to do away with patriarchal oppression, or to promote the civil liberties of animals that want to engage in homosexual activity, or to change their sexual identity, or to “increase the diversity” of an animal population by mixing in other populations or subspecies from other habitats.

Conceivably if we could read animals’ thoughts or emotions better than we can now, we would discern greater complexity in their lives and “cultures.” We would more routinely see animals as distinct individuals with individual needs. But for a conservation biologist, the overriding goals wouldn’t change. Those goals center on the idea of conserving animal populations, as populations, at natural, self-sustaining levels in harmony or equilibrium with the habitats for which they are evolutionarily adapted. Implicit here is the notion of an animal population as a distinct group with a distinct lineage and territory, and a relatively small inflow and outflow of genes from and to outsider groups. The survival of that population in its natural, wild state is the essential aim, compared to which the fleeting joys, sufferings and neuroses of individual animals are immaterial. In other words, the biologist “sees the forest, not the trees”—because the forest really is all that history will ever see.

Humans in the ancient world tended to think of themselves in similar terms: as members of distinct populations, extended families really, whose general health, prosperity, fertility—above all, survival—was the proper object of human politics and governance. Even if they focused on other cultural goals as well, they would have regarded an expanding or at least stable population as the ultimate measure of success. As Yahweh is quoted saying to Abraham in Genesis 22:17, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore…”

A word here about diversity: Conservation biologists value it highly, but the diversity for which they aim is not the same as the “diversity” that gets so much attention in the human political realm. Diversity in the lexicon of conservation biologists, or what is usually called “biodiversity,” refers to a diversity of distinct, habitat-linked animal populations, many of them representing different species or subspecies. It does not refer to genetic diversity within an animal population. In fact, conservation biologists tend to view a large flow from one population into another, or from one habitat into another, as a negative outcome, a destroyer of biodiversity, i.e., an invasion or conquest—thus the term “invasive species.”

Free-Agent States

Many people in the modern West, especially among the elites, prefer to see themselves as members of populations that are no longer like extended families of one ethnicity and culture. These post-traditional populations are more like modern sports teams, with flexible rosters of free agents whose attachments to the group are merely contractual.

Why has this new notion gained so much currency? The main reason is that it is a fait accompli. Prior to the 1960s virtually all Western societies were essentially ethnostates, and as such had at least mildly and implicitly racist policies in place, including policies on immigration. But the memory of toxic ethno-nationalism in the WW2 era, the post-1950s feminization of culture and policy, and a growing sense that nonwhites represent a relatively untapped source of electoral power, led the West’s political elites to try to expiate their racism with various policy changes, including relaxations of immigration laws. Unsurprisingly, these border openings were followed by ever-increasing inflows of nonwhites from developing countries—nonwhites in search of better standards of living via more generous welfare systems and more prosperous, stable economies. Heavy multi-ethnicity eventually became the status quo that the political system organized itself to benefit from and justify: Immigrant-citizens and the wider political and business-owning class that are favored by this arrangement now say what they must and vote as they must to maintain it. At the same time, the legacy populations that don’t benefit, and might have defended themselves, have been disarmed by threats of being tarred as racists or even “white supremacists.”

There is a long history of thinking about one particular Western country, the United States, not as an ethnostate but as a new type of nation, bound by a single set of beliefs in liberal democracy (“creedal” nation) or, even more loosely, by the mere rule of law (“civic” nation). However, even if one thinks those explanations are valid for the USA, they have never been expressly adopted by other Western countries, which—again—have long had ethnic bases for their nationhoods.

In any case, multi-ethnicity has happened and is here and for the immediate future will remain, because the factors that drove and allowed it still pertain.

But do free-agent states command the allegiance of their citizens sufficiently—are they knit together well enough—to allow them to compete, in the long run, with ethnostates? And anyway does the survival of a “group” with rapidly changing membership and no common culture really mean anything? What do its members have in common, other than possession of the same territory? If we really were to think of societies without attention to underlying changes in their ethnic composition, we would blind ourselves to certain stark realities, such as invasions and conquests, and even the slower national collapses that are maybe just as common and important. If one set of ethnically and culturally distinct people moves into a country, replacing its relatively infertile natives over a few generations, is there any sense in pretending the country has remained the same?

What if Ethnic-Group Survival Were Priority One?

Is doesn’t imply ought. People can, and will, practice politics any way they like. For most, being reminded that we in the West think of animal populations in one way and our own human populations in a quite different way would probably draw little more than a bewildered shrug. Others would warn, rightly enough, that the traditional ethnocentric view has its own hazards, on full display in the WW2 era, or in more recent, sometimes very bloody, inter-ethnic conflicts—or even during a relatively peaceful interlude a century or so ago, when many governments adopted eugenics policies including forced sterilization, essentially to “improve their stock” as a farmer might try to improve his herds of cattle or sheep.

But have these past excesses frightened us into running too far in the other direction? It just seems worth considering how our politics and societies would look if we reverted to the usual practice of defining our populations, our “nations,” in ethnic terms, with reasonable allowance for urban cosmopolitanism as well as the ethnic mixing that occurs at the margins of any population. Such a reversion would mean making the maintenance of our Western nations—under the wider goal of human population diversity—our first priority, as is the case, effectively, in traditional societies and even some of the West’s more successful and happy groups (e.g., Jews, Amish, Mormons).

We also would recover traditional, intuitive, easily recorded metrics for our nations’ health, namely their sizes and fertility rates. We would see our present low fertility rates and fast-dropping population numbers (i.e., for people of European ethnicity) as sure signs that something is wrong. Stability, or even rises in a population to fill its undeveloped territory, would be the goals.

This logic has the added virtue that it aligns with our deep sense that things have been bad and are getting worse, and it clearly belies the polyanna pronouncements—based on other, less relevant “data”—that we’ve never had it so good.

Returning to this way of thinking wouldn’t mean abandoning a humane approach to governance. But by making the sustenance of our nations, properly understood, our first priority, we would create a sensible barrier to the kind of social experimentation that tends to harm family formation and fertility. Moreover, thinking of populations in the traditional way, as extended families, should help restore the traditional sense of, and need for, community—that basic higher good that has been increasingly suppressed and lost in the individualistic modern West.

At bottom, thinking of nations in ethnic terms is realism, or at least a lot closer to realism than modern liberalism gets. Much of the energy of modern liberalism is spent in covering up its own irreconcilable contradictions, arguably the worst of which is the promotion, for political purposes, of ethnic identity and cultural separatism among nonwhites despite the implicit (if unrealizable) need to bind these groups, with whites, somehow in a shared sense of nationhood. And of course it is hard to find historical precedents for multiethnic/ multicultural societies that inspire optimism. Multiethnicism may have been tolerable at times amid the growth and wealth-building of empires, but it also seems to have torn its host civilizations apart whenever wider allegiances weakened. In any case, there are all too many, all too convincing historical precedents for population replacement through migration or invasion, aided by the consequent social decay and demoralization among the natives. It may be the way of the world that “peoples” and their civilizations don’t last forever; even so, there are fundamental reasons why we—even as conquerors—have been inclined to see such collapses as sad and tragic events.