Alpha Unit: OK, Jim Crow laws were proposed as a solution to a problem: White Southerners were being ordered to treat newly freed slaves (and free Black people) as equals, when it was clear that newly freed Black people were in no position to live as their equals.
Their solution? Forget all this “equality” stuff; it’s costing us too much. Let’s bring back the old, tried-and-true way we used to do things: Blacks subordinate to Whites and kept in their place. We’ll make sure it’s “legal.”
Occam’s razor. Look for the simplest explanation. This makes the most sense to me. The whole idea that Claudius is putting forward that White folks are just too nice to do this sort of thing, well, nope. Humans have a need to dominate others. The strong dominate the weak and the weak dominate the weaker. See countless works of literature, drama, and cinema, or, Hell, just read Nietzsche if he makes sense to you.
Also there are different types of sadism.
The First Type of Sadism – the Raw Animal Lust for Cruelty and Love of Humiliating Others Seen Most Prominently in Boys
I’m thinking this type is genetic or biological. This is a pure sadism that can be seen in boys, non-human mammals, and in adults, most especially in Black adults, especially African Blacks (US Blacks have had a lot of it enculturated out of them, but you still see it a lot).
Sure, all the other races display this raw sadism too, especially in times of war, but you see it most prominently in Blacks to the point where some feel it is an essential aspect of the Black Character, Personality, or perhaps, I would argue, Black Principle (if Black is a Principle like Masculine and Feminine are Principles).
This is extremely prominent in Black children, especially boys, and they are much more sadistic than White boys (Yes, I know all boys are sadists). It gets slowly enculturated out of Black boys as they grow up as with most of us males, but you still see it a lot in the ghetto types in young adult men and even women sometimes, where the basic Black Personality is at its rawest and least enculturated.
This is a raw delight in torture, torment, inflicting pain, violence, and even death on a suffering and tormented Other. It includes the love of observing a victim’s suffering.
Of course, you also see this same sadism in young White men (college boys in particular can be terribly cruel), but it’s just not as prominent as in Blacks.
Also, White culture profoundly dislikes displays of childish sadism in White adults. As an man, you’re supposed to have grown out that boyhood crap or had it beaten out of you if you were particularly diabolical.
In some ways, this sadism can be fun. I recall a Black man I knew named Michael. He hung out with this other Black artist, William, who was very introverted and odd. He couldn’t get laid with God’s help. His name was Charles and he had a university degree in art.
The cool guy’s name was Michael and he was a White-acting Black artist with a university degree in art. I was over at a mutual friend’s house and our friend commented that William had a date.
William was a very shy guy with low-self esteem and a hurt and somewhat confused expression on his face. I believe also had a strange high-pitched voice. He was extremely weird but completely harmless, and once you figured out how harmless he was, you mostly just wanted to laugh at him because he was such a nerd that he was a laughingstock, a comical figure.
He also couldn’t get laid with God’s help, even though he was quite straight. I’d never known him to have a girlfriend or even a date. At age 29, he was not only undoubtedly a virgin, but he’d probably never even been kissed.
I was absolutely dumbfounded.
“What?!” I nearly shouted across the room. “No way does William have a date! No way! That’s not even possible! Tell me you’re joking!”
This was a pretty mean thing for me to say, but I can be a dick. The Black guy, Micheal, roared with laughter so hard he nearly rolled on the floor for ten minutes. As you can see, he was laughing his ass off at the cruelty of my comment.
So Blacks can be a lot of fun if you want to get down with some mean, no-holds-barred humor. A lot of humor is cruel – face it – but Whites’ distaste for sadism limits their potential for humor a lot. We see this especially in the dour, party-pooper, no-fun SJW crowd, where every other joke is an evil bigoted crime that someone needs to get fired over.
In many ways, Idi Amin was the ultimate primal Black man. He displayed most of the raw material of the Black personality to an exaggerated degree. Not all of it is bad. He was wildly extroverted, always smiling and happy, had a nearly inborn sense of humor to the point of being a natural humorist, loved to party and have fun, and had a tremendous love of promiscuous sex. Idi Amin was a good time! As long as you were on his good side, that is.
And then there was his bad side, also in spades.
Whites and most other races probably used to be like this too, but centuries of civilization may have bred it out of us culturally and genetically. We can surely see a lot of examples of horrific sadism in Whites and Asians only centuries ago. One argument is that for a thousand years of civilization, most White criminals were quickly killed, often by public hanging. The idea is that this bred a lot of the criminal genes out of us.
Blacks from Africa, never having good through this process of weeding out criminal genes by execution, didn’t experience such a cleansing. On the other hand, perhaps White and Asian cultures have also accelerated so much in civilizational terms that this behavior is enculturated out of us.
That this love of sadism and cruelty appears so normally and freely in boys of all races suggests that it’s still part of the raw human personality. Although the dramatic morally superiority of US Blacks as opposed to African Blacks suggests that 300 years of exposure to White Christian civilization has had a calming, civilizing, and perhaps eugenically intelligence-increasing effect on US Blacks, which argues for the effects a more advanced civilizing culture can have on a population of a less civilized race.
The Second Type of Sadism – The Dominant Lording It Over Their Brutalized Inferior Victims
I’ve thought about this a lot, and there is another sort of sadism, that of the dominant inflicting their sadistic lordly violence against those they see as inferior.
Look at the delighted faces of those German policemen tormenting Jews in the street. You can say it’s revenge, but isn’t it more than that?
Look very closely at the faces of those Whites at those lynchings – boys, girls, men, women. There’s that same look as you saw in those Nazis above: the wicked gleeful look of the dominant bully inflicting torture and/or death at a contemptuously hated inferior. This poor Black sod’s hanging from a tree with his neck broken in a sickening way, and these Whites who look like your nice White relatives at Thanksgiving are having the Goddamned party of their lives.
What was all that habit of calling Black men boys and Black women girls about?
Why were Black children forced to apologize to White children they bumped into by addressing the White children as Mr. or Mrs. as if the White kids were adults and the Black child was still a child?
Why were the schoolbooks given to Black schools the refuse of the White schools – ripped, torn up, wrecked, and coming with a sticker on them saying that they were too destroyed to be of use to White kids, so they were only worthwhile for Black kids?
What was up with the torching of the Black business district in Tulsa?
Why were Black men lynched and murdered for the crime of standing up to White men and fighting back against them, even if the Whites were trying to kill them? In this case, the message was that of the bully: We will attack you in any way we choose, and if you dare to fight back and hurt one of us, you will die.
Why did White children torment their Black “friends” by forcing them, like slaves, to carry the White kids’ books to and from school for them?
Why did White boys manipulate and laugh behind the backs at their Black male friends and encourage them to commit crimes, so if anyone was caught, the Black would take the blame?
Why were Blacks waited on last in stores, and, even after waiting an hour, passed over again if a White person walked in?
Why did Whites whose land had been sold to Blacks long ago return to their land 50 years later and demand that Blacks hand over the sold land to its original owners, or else?
Why did even White women tell Black men who talked back to them, “I could have you hung from a tree just like that.”? See Of Mice and Men – and this was California in the 30s!
This is all nothing but raw, naked cruelty, and furthermore, there’s a brutal logic behind it: the societal enforcement of White dominance and superiority over Black submission and inferiority. That’s all it is. No need to conjure up fancy theories. Back to Occam’s again.
They did all of this abject and unnecessary cruel stuff because otherwise Blacks would commit a lot of crime? Get out. If anything, such treatments are designed to push people to their limits. Look at how Gypsies are (deservedly) treated in Europe? Does it stop them from committing crimes?
No, all of these punishments were done to enforce the sort of gleeful domination you see on the faces of the schoolyard bullies in 8th grade as they torment their designated victims.
And no, adults are not too mature to regress to childish games of sadistic dominance. I’ve seen so many cases of adults the world over delighting in the sadistic dominance of a hated inferior Other to believe otherwise.
They’re not doing it to stop crime. They’re doing it to get off. To get a rush. To get that glorious sadistic delight in tormenting an innocent victim you remember from boyhood. Remember how fun that was? Remember how tall it made you feel?
Well, those adults are doing the exact same shit for the exact same reasons.
Hi, Robert. That was an interesting detour about personality types. How would you describe the Basic White Personality?
Lenny wants to tend the rabbits, Asians are likely cruel to rabbits, Blacks want to tend themselves and give rabbits “da Black carrot” even if it kills the little rabbit. Whites looking beyond themselves and see good in all of Earth’s creatures. Asians do not respect the life of anyone below them. They’re very respectful of authority but will skin animals alive. Blacks are interested in whatever makes them feel good immediately, anyone but themselves be damned.
I completely agree that there is a sadistic tendency in people that is expressed toward those deemed socially inferior. I’ve seen it and, having been in foster homes for a time growing up, experienced it.
I’ve often wondered at what seems to be a mean-spiritedness of the culture in general during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if this mean-spirited character was linked to industrialization and to the growth of severe inequalities in society, both class and race based.
Those inequalities existed before the industrial revolution, but industrialization marked a new level of complexity in social organization, and the rise of many “new men” as elites. In the transformation of a society toward a new economic system and set of social relations, old inequalities are exacerbated, and the new elites who have risen to the top seem eager to shore up their position by waging a reactionary crackdown on dissent and calls to moderate their avarice.
The Social Darwinist, let-the-undeserving-poor-rot, bootstrap mentality of the upper class was encouraged in the general population by those who had risen to the top as a way to justify their behavior, and it had the effect of drawing out the worst tendencies in human nature in society at large. It was a bully’s ideology and encouraged ordinary people to let out their inner sadism, which ordinarily – without authoritative encouragement – would have been more repressed.
This is how you get gleeful lynchings, the hanging of elephants from a giant chain, the proliferation of freak shows where people can satisfy their inner monster by laughing at folks with severe genetic deformities.
I wonder if this witches’ brew of inhumanity cooked up by the propagandists of the new robber baron class was a factor precipitating World War I. Indeed the displacements of industrialization along with repression of the working class by disconnected and haughty elites and the whole toxic culture this gave rise to poisoned Europe just as badly as it had the United States.
The periods of the cruelest treatment of ordinary people tend to coincide with episodes of great economic expansion, the rise of new men and new families to positions nearer the top of society, and the complexification of society in general.
Another example is a century earlier in Britain, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the very beginning of the industrial revolution – or the first industrial revolution, as opposed to the second which I was referring to above – and began with the Enclosure Acts that forced peasants off the common lands so they could become the new urban class of industrial laborers.
During this time the Bloody Code reached its bloodiest extreme and more than two hundred crimes could be punished by death, even as a number of minors were executed for rather petty crimes. These were the classic Dickensian times, and they are marked by great new opportunities for moneymaking that attracted a class of people willing to subject other humans to appalling degradations for their own profit.
When we think of the medieval period, we often think of brutal tortures. But in fact such tortures, while they occurred in the medieval period, were used far more extensively in the Renaissance and early modern times than in the medieval period as was the death penalty in general.
Once again, what we find at that time is a transformation in the socioeconomic system, specifically moving away from feudalism in Western Europe and the rise of a new middle merchant class across much of Europe, starting in Italy. Perhaps the use of such punishments is meant to break the spirits of those who suffer most during such transitional periods so they are less of a threat to the elites, especially the new and very insecure/paranoid elites.
I suspect that what we see today, with the mean-spirited attitude of the neoliberal age – the expansions of the prison system going back to the 70s and 80s (the very dawn of the neoliberal age) and the electronics and digital boom – is another such period of social complexification, economic transformation, dispossession of whole sections of society and even of regions in general like the rust belt, and the rise of many new men (and women now) into the ranks of the ruling class.
For around forty years I’ve been seeing among the upper middle classes and above is an increase in callousness, selfishness towards and even dehumanization of various groups of people, from Blacks to working class (now often poor) Whites and anyone who isn’t at least upper middle class.
To address the idea that such periods help to breed out criminal genes from a population, I do not doubt this is true. These phases of societal transformation seem to yield a more docile population on the other end of them. But I think this process will eventually eliminate the spark of genius in our population and in the West in general.
It largely has eliminated this spark already. At least in the realm of the social sciences of fundamental thought like philosophy, modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago. Other fields that are downstream of basic thought have been able to flourish since then, but they will stagnate, and some are stagnating already.
Going back to civilizational and race theory, the difference between White civilization and Asian seems to be that White civilization has been far more creative for centuries now, despite Asians having higher average IQ’s. The spark of genius requires a high IQ but also creativity and originality, which mostly comes from people who are off-kilter and don’t easily fit into a very conventional, static society that looks down on new ideas or unusual behavior.
You, Robert, have mentioned before that many very intelligent and interesting people work in odd jobs and have little to show for their talents. I think such people have struggled in any society, but they struggle more as society becomes more closed-minded and starts distrusting anyone who isn’t stable, conventional, and predictable; in other words, someone who fits ready social expectations.
A lot of academics are very bright, but few have that special spark of brilliance in them, and if anything, having that is a detriment for someone in academia today.
As our society stiffens we will likely become less creative, whereas in the past few centuries, we’ve seemed to be able to accept originality even if many geniuses are not exactly paragons of stability. I am not saying that Asians are without creativity or the spark of genius, just that as their populations became more controlled and regimented, they exhibited fewer instances of real inspiration.
We are moving towards greater control and the consequent heavy formalization of life which sucks the naturalness out of life. We should probably expect relative cultural stagnation, at least compared to what we’ve been experiencing for centuries in the West.
The problem with African peoples and societies is an excess of naturalness or primal behavior, which, while it is energetic and creative, lacks the mental and social channels to develop it.
Higher intelligence on the other hand takes that same primal energy the Africans have in excess and focus that energy into socially accepted interests and goals. The problem with Asian societies is there is a serious lack of primal behavior, though I suspect some genetic potential for creativity remains in their populations and could be freed up if they loosened up a bit.
As to our current period of neoliberalism in the West, I think whatever good it did in juicing the development of the new electronic and digital economy is already finished and have been since probably 2008. At this point neoliberalism’s effects on society are very detrimental and could even touch off serious convulsions across Western society if it isn’t moderated.
Continuing on this path can only benefit a small handful of elites and only if they are able to maintain control. But they are gamblers, so they will try, and they seem unlikely to concede much to the population for the sake of reconciliation.
That should read “modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago.”
Ed Dutton made an informative video of what you are talking about, titled “The Psychology of the Genius: Autism and High IQ Criminal Traits”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUy-lpe8WqM
That’s a very interesting video. The one quibble I have with it is that I do not think the relatively incidence of genius in East Asian cultures comes down to ecology but more so to political structure, i.e. having a very rigid and oppressive social hierarchy that seeks to maintain itself and therefore weeds out whatever might knock things off kilter, like originality and creativity.
Notice how the ancient Greeks also became less creative after the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the vast Hellenistic kingdoms in which the monarchs were often megalomaniac despots. The old Greek polis was better able to cope with and accept the existence of genius than were the Hellenistic states and later on, Rome.
Now of course there was a lot of creativity in the classical world after Alexander, but Greek thought up to Plato and Aristotle still stands out as the gold standard of classical intellectual achievement and has been recognized as such by cultures all the way out to Afghanistan.
After Alexander’s conquests, the climate of the Greek world didn’t change, but it’s political arrangements did, going from the relatively open-minded and daring polis to the heavily bureaucratized and formalized Hellenistic kingdoms and then of course to the imperial machine of Rome.
I suspect that as power concentrates and rulers become more fearful for their position, an extreme conservatism sets in which prefers those sorts of people who don’t rock the boat but rather fall in line and don’t change much. Even pre-imperial and very early imperial Roman (Latin) literature is considered to be of higher quality than the literature of most of the imperial age, which saw an ongoing decline in quality.
It’s not politically correct to say it, but the issue might be put this way: Oriental Despotism selects against genius. And I am concerned that the West is tending in this direction.
That should read “relatively incidence of genius in East Asian cultures”
Also, just to expand on the low incidence of genius in East Asia not being due to climate, we can consider the fact that China and Japan, which are two example he gives in the video, are in fact much warmer in many parts than are Britain and Germany, and the most northerly parts of China and Japan are no colder than Britain and Germany, yet Britain and Germany have produced far more geniuses than China and Japan.
All of these cultures have had to struggle against harsh environmental conditions which require social organization, yet the social organization of Britain and Germany seem to have allowed the emergence of genius in the population, whereas that of East Asia did not.
So the issue isn’t climate. I think it has more to do with social arrangements and cultural attitudes, specifically a mistrust of change and originality for the sake of preserving the existing social order in East Asia.
This reminded me of your posts on bullying and in many of them you justified that it is simply human nature, therefore you will never get rid of it. Yes, that is simply a fact and people need to accept it.
However, you overly emphasized that bullying had to do with either the inability and/or refusal to conform to social norms and behaviors. Which I remember thinking was true, but way too myopic. There were simply more factors. Perhaps those other factors did not share as large a percentage in terms of the causes of bullying as the inability and/or refusal to conform to social norms and behaviors, but nevertheless there were more factors that were too significant to dismiss or overlook.
I think with this post you have identified a second major factor. It is sadism. All humans are sadists, just not equally. Like everything else in nature, there is a bell curve distribution with regards to this trait.
To wrap things up, there is a third and final major factor. It is the behavior of humans in groups, i.e. human sociology. One is inclined to go along with the group lest one also becomes a victim. One is inclined to go along with the group if the pack leader (Alpha/most popular individual) is the instigator, lest one risks incurring his/her wrath due to the refusal to conform and therefore loses status in the group.
One is inclined to go along with the group and perhaps even show more cruelty and sadism than what would be considered average in that specific situation in order to gain more social status in order to move up the social hierarchy of that particular group and gain acceptance, and or more power. One is inclined to go along with the group in order to avoid being identified with the bullied and therefore lose group membership and be kicked out and thus become vulnerable to other groups.
So to put it all together:
1) Bullying is caused by the inability and/or refusal to conform to social norms and behaviors. These norms and behaviors can range anything from ethnicity, height, weight, socioeconomic status, social skills, already-perceived lower social status, etc., etc. In this way a target is selected.
2) Humans have a tendency to lord over perceived inferiors and take pleasure in their pain, i.e. sadism. This is a major motivating factor which makes the bullies act on the perceived differences of the target. Sadism gives one delight; makes you feel “big” and “tall”. It boosts your ego.
3) Humans go along with the group even if they may not individually agree with what is taking place due to group dynamics and uncountable other concepts that one can find in a sociology book. Or to put it more bluntly, most people are cattle and will moo with whatever intonation seems right/true/convenient at the moment.
Fantastic comment, Tamerlane!