RadixJournal - Uncomfortable Learning

00:00:00.000 John, welcome back to the podcast. It's been a while. How are you?

00:00:04.940 I'm fine. Thank you, Richard. And thank you for inviting me back.

00:00:08.480 Well, my pleasure. We haven't spoken for a couple years. Have you gotten into any controversy in the meantime?

00:00:16.260 Nothing comes to mind.

00:00:17.740 Well, I read something about your being expelled from a university and lots of social justice warrior hand-wringing and angst and probably screeching and hair-pulling.

00:00:35.800 Yes. Yes. Here's what happened in brief.

00:00:39.440 I was invited by a student group at Williams College, which I'd never heard of it. I'm not really up on the American college rankings.

00:00:50.780 Well, it's one of the best, actually.

00:00:52.360 My friends later told me it's a very prestigious, very tony college and hard to get into.

00:00:57.020 Yes.

00:00:57.860 Up there in the top left-hand corner of Massachusetts.

00:01:01.020 And I had some exchanges with them, and they agreed that I was going to come and give them a talk on Monday this week, the day before yesterday.

00:01:16.700 So –

00:01:18.020 Who is they? Because I was very curious. I did a little research before our conversation, but it seemed like there was a group called Uncomfortable Learning.

00:01:28.140 Uncomfortable Learning. That was the group, yes.

00:01:31.400 Yeah, so it was a student group that invited you, which shows some balls on their part.

00:01:38.140 Yes, it does. And in fact, one of the Uncomfortable Learning movers and shakers there, a young fellow named Zach Wood, who's black, or at any rate, mulatto. 1.00

00:01:55.760 Also, he is one who expressed disappointment most vigorously at the decision of the college president to disinvite me.

00:02:07.800 Mr. Wood said, I totally disagree with Mr. Derbyshire, but I was looking forward to confronting him,

00:02:13.200 which plays into my longstanding and oft-stated impression, belief, understanding that all this stuff, all this social justice warrior shrieking and stamping and fainting is quintessentially, not entirely, but quintessentially a white thing.

00:02:40.580 It's a white liberal thing. Blacks don't care that much. 1.00

00:02:44.440 You may remember back in 2010, I think it was, I went and spoke to the Black Law Students Association at the University of Pennsylvania, and they were very nice. 0.97

00:02:57.100 They got a very nice reception. Nobody minded anything I said, and I was quite blunt with them.

00:03:01.080 But it's the gentry white liberals who drive all this kind of thing. 0.99

00:03:08.060 I don't say they don't have black allies, but far more blacks than white liberals are willing to talk about these things.

00:03:17.720 I actually asked a black friend about this, and he said, well, we just kind of suspect that all white people think what you say anyway.

00:03:30.420 I don't know if that's really true.

00:03:33.040 Were that the case?

00:03:34.280 Yeah, I think it's a case where the main energy, social justice energy that leads to censorship and shouting down and all that kind of stuff does come from white people who view blacks as these maybe kind of innocent creatures that they need to protect, and that's their moral charge.

00:03:58.660 I think that's probably the dynamic at play. 0.88

00:04:00.820 I've written, I forget how many pieces I've written now about race issues that end with me sort of, you know, metaphorically throwing up my hands and saying, what the hell is the matter with white people? 0.97

00:04:17.780 We don't have a black problem. 0.79

00:04:19.740 Well, you've written the same thing, Richard. 0.96

00:04:21.340 We don't so much have a black problem in this zone as a white problem. 0.96

00:04:26.240 Yeah, I think that is definitely the case.

00:04:28.660 Well, before we get into some of these theoretical matters, let's dig a little more into the case at hand.

00:04:36.740 So this is basically an organic student group.

00:04:40.540 I was actually involved with some student groups of various kinds when I was a student, you know, a couple of months ago, you know, when I was in college.

00:04:49.320 No, just kidding.

00:04:50.020 Ten years ago or more.

00:04:51.140 But, but yeah, so, you know, it's, it's, these are organic organizations.

00:04:58.000 It's not too difficult to start one.

00:05:00.060 But you, you have to have, you have to be a self-starter of some sort and have a little gumption and then you, you, you, you're officially recognized and you kind of make, give a little report to the administration.

00:05:11.220 Sometimes the administration will throw some money at you to, you know, rent a venue or provide food or something like that.

00:05:18.180 But, you know, there are tons of groups like this doing, you know, the chess club or theater club or the debate society or whatever.

00:05:26.320 And so this is a totally student-led organization and they, they invite you.

00:05:31.020 I think that's a really fantastic thing.

00:05:33.020 That seems to be exactly what college is about or supposedly at least.

00:05:39.300 But then I, I read the, the president did one of these just, it was almost like his, his hypocrisy was so flagrant that I don't know how anyone could have actually even read his statement and not snickered.

00:05:56.180 Because he, he goes in and says, you know, free speech is just the most wonderful thing.

00:06:01.740 We love that stuff.

00:06:02.980 And that's why we have to censor John Derbyshire.

00:06:06.260 Yeah.

00:06:06.700 You know, there was a period separating those two thoughts, but it's just kind of amazing.

00:06:13.920 But so give us, talk a little bit about, I'm just kind of curious how these things play out.

00:06:18.780 You know, did you, did you hear from the administration itself or did you hear from the, the student group or what happened?

00:06:27.320 No, I, I heard right after the president made his announcement, I stopped hearing from the student group.

00:06:35.560 They have not got in touch with me.

00:06:37.620 I was having exchanges with them about what, you know, what I was going to talk about and the arrangements and the time and so on.

00:06:47.020 But I heard nothing after he made that announcement.

00:06:49.720 They, they just shut up completely.

00:06:52.380 Do you think they were, there was a lot of fear involved, I guess, on their part?

00:06:56.440 They thought they might get expelled.

00:06:57.860 I mean, the president was effectively denouncing them or something else to that.

00:07:03.680 And, and I, I've, I've made this point.

00:07:07.140 The, um, Williams has a student newspaper and one of the journalists on the newspaper emailed me about that.

00:07:15.680 And it happened, it just so happened that last week I gave a talk to some students at another university.

00:07:28.100 And, um, and I had mentioned that to the, to the guy that I was doing, having the exchanges with, Williams, the student leader that I was having exchanges with.

00:07:38.680 And, um, so this week, which now it's a news item and the, the, the student newspaper, Williams is writing it up.

00:07:48.720 And this reporter got in touch with me and she said, uh, I heard that, uh, you were going to give a talk to another student group last week.

00:07:58.680 Did, did, did that happen?

00:08:00.280 Where was that?

00:08:01.560 She was very curious about that.

00:08:03.780 And I emailed back to her and I said, I'm not going to tell you anything about my past college speaking engagements.

00:08:10.880 I said, I wrote in the email, I said, I don't care about this stuff on my own behalf.

00:08:17.160 I'm old and I'm independent.

00:08:20.020 You know, I don't care.

00:08:21.800 But for young people, this is dangerous.

00:08:25.120 Yeah.

00:08:25.240 And I, I cited the case of Jason Richwine, who I know slightly and who, and who's still struggling.

00:08:32.720 You know, a young guy starting out in his career and, um, and they come down on him the way they did.

00:08:40.460 Imagine how college students feel with this kind of thing.

00:08:44.060 Yes, it's real fear and it's entirely justified for you.

00:08:47.840 These social justice warriors are ruthless. 1.00

00:08:50.760 They, they, they'll hunt you down and shoot you in the head. 0.88

00:08:53.380 Yeah, I mean, uh, maybe not literally, but they'll, they'll do it online and, you know, the, the internet never forgets.

00:09:01.160 So, um, yeah, I mean, it, it really is a, it really is a tricky situation because college is the, uh, you know, the, your four years of experimentation.

00:09:11.000 As it were, when you are, are, are, are encouraged to try new things intellectually.

00:09:17.640 And most people actually spend their four years trying new things in terms of, um, uh, intoxication, narcotics and, and sex.

00:09:26.820 That's probably the main draw of college, actually.

00:09:30.440 That might have once been the case, Richard, but we are now, we are now a society under strong ideological control.

00:09:39.260 That's not the case anymore. 0.98

00:09:41.060 Well, well, I think that's, yeah, I think there's a lot of, uh, you know, stupidity and debauchery going on in colleges still. 0.99

00:09:49.520 I, I agree. 0.94

00:09:50.760 Things have changed and I think they might've actually, I think they've, you know, when I was a student, I, I was a student in the late nineties and the early two thousands as an undergraduate.

00:10:00.200 And then in the early two thousands and mid two thousands, I guess, as a grad student.

00:10:04.500 And, uh, I left in, uh, 2007 from where I was in a PhD program and I left that.

00:10:10.920 Uh, and I, I think things, things had changed over that seven year period where I was, you know, in and out of, of universities, but I, I think it's probably, I, I agree.

00:10:21.480 I, I imagine it has gotten more puritanical, uh, now, um, I guess what I was saying.

00:10:28.620 Fortunately, I have, I had a, I had an early training in, in, in, in this kind of thing, in, in working with higher education and inner society under strong ideological control.

00:10:40.920 I was actually a college teacher myself in, in, in communist China, uh, academic year, 1982 to 83.

00:10:49.540 Um, there's some nice photographs on my website of, of me, um, teaching students there.

00:10:55.980 Um, and that China at that time, you know, Mao had only been dead for six years.

00:11:02.060 Uh, it was, it was still, uh, very, very strictly totalitarian.

00:11:06.780 It's a bit better now.

00:11:08.340 Um, but at that time it was quite strict.

00:11:11.260 I was astonished.

00:11:12.320 I, I got some stories from, from that year of teaching in a little provincial college in China, um, under that kind of control.

00:11:21.240 And it's, this stuff is very familiar to me.

00:11:24.940 I could almost, I could almost be back there.

00:11:28.120 Yeah.

00:11:28.440 The commies barely hold a candle to the, uh, social justice warriors. 0.96

00:11:32.380 And, uh, well, I, this is, in, in, in, in, at least in a society like that, um, as China was in the early 1980s, you didn't, you didn't have that much to lose.

00:11:47.760 Right.

00:11:48.360 What, what typically happens to students who crossed some ideological line, uh, and I, I had a couple, I know a couple of friends of mine.

00:11:57.180 What typically happened was that at graduation, uh, in China at that time, and still largely today, after you graduate from college, you are assigned a job.

00:12:08.480 You're a, you were sent off to be a, this was a, this was a teacher training college, and you were sent off to be a teacher somewhere.

00:12:15.220 And if you had crossed some ideological line, you were sent to a really cruddy posting, you know, some slate quarry or coal mine somewhere to teach the kids under these really awful industrial conditions.

00:12:31.160 And on the other hand, if you, if you kissed up to the leaders and informed on your fellow students and helped along ideologically, you got a nice, nice, soft spot in a fairly prosperous city.

00:12:43.040 That was how it worked.

00:12:45.620 And it's in a way, I, I think we should dive into this issue of, of totalitarianism because I, that, that word is, of course, is overused and it's thrown around and all that kind of stuff.

00:12:56.300 And it's a, and then it's a kind of boogeyman, uh, of the 20th century, but we, we obviously don't live in a system that resembles, uh, the, the communist system as you described, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a lot of the same characteristics.

00:13:14.340 And, and in some ways you could even say it's worse because we, we don't have a government that is, uh, you know, from a vertical top-down way is not oppressing thought criminals, so to speak.

00:13:29.000 Like I, I've never, um, I, I've never been visited by a federal official and, and I haven't even been, uh, screwed over by the IRS, um, you know, fingers crossed, knock on wood.

00:13:42.040 Uh, but I, I get a tremendous amount of horizontal pressure, you can say, from, you know, people denouncing you, even to the point of, you know, some mild death threats that I don't take those very seriously, but they, they're there.

00:13:56.600 People denouncing you, uh, condemning you, making fun of you, you know, informing on you, so to speak.

00:14:02.920 Uh, so, so we have in a way, like in an American society, it's a kind of like horizontal system of control where, or horizontal totalitarianism, where the, the pressure is coming from society and, and non-governmental organizations.

00:14:18.060 And it's not really coming from the government, you know, directly, per se.

00:14:23.600 And, but in a way, as you, as you're saying, it could be even worse.

00:14:27.000 I've, I've, I've, I think there are these, um, cliches, I remember, the Soviet Union, you know, if you, if you say something, uh, say something ideologically incorrect, you might get sent off to Siberia to, uh, instruct mathematics to, uh, coal miners or something, you know, some, some kind of thing like that. 0.53

00:14:42.440 Well, the fact is in the, in the United States, you know, if, if, if you are labeled with racist or anti-Semite or, uh, you know, Holocaust denier or all these kinds of things, which, which are effectively thought crimes that, you know, you can, you can have, you, you can not have, have engaged in anything, any kind of physical violence or theft of property.

00:15:03.320 It is a thought crime.

00:15:05.180 Uh, you, you can, it can be in a way worse.

00:15:08.220 You're not sent to Siberia with a job.

00:15:10.260 Uh, you, your life is ruined.

00:15:12.440 And you're, you're, it's almost more of a, of a puritanical, you know, the, you know, look at the witch, look at the witch kind of thing.

00:15:19.040 So, um, I think we do live in a kind of totalitarian society and particularly with the internet, but it's just different.

00:15:26.940 It's, it's different than those 20th century totalitarian societies.

00:15:30.500 And so we, we sometimes have a difficult time recognizing what's going on.

00:15:35.440 Yeah.

00:15:35.900 Yeah.

00:15:37.220 Uh, there, there's an expression that sticks in my mind from, uh, Witt Vogel.

00:15:42.000 The, the political scientist, Carl Witt Vogel, he spoke about a beggar's democracy where, um, you can't kind of say what you like, but you can't, you can't get anywhere with it.

00:15:56.140 It can't get out.

00:15:57.160 The internet is coming, becoming kind of like that.

00:15:59.940 It's a beggar's democracy.

00:16:01.120 You can't say anything you like on the internet, but, um, uh, it, it's never going to ascend into any kind of practical action or get you into any kind of job.

00:16:11.020 And if you, if it's the wrong thing, it'll keep you out of jobs.

00:16:13.880 Yeah.

00:16:14.660 Yeah.

00:16:14.980 It's a beggar's democracy.

00:16:17.140 That, that's a, uh, that, that is a good metaphor.

00:16:19.580 Although I, I, I would suggest that with the internet that it is like that there's so much out there now that no one can, no single person can keep up with it.

00:16:29.280 I can't even keep up with my Twitter feed, you know, not, not to mention, you know, all the things that are published every day.

00:16:36.500 Uh, but so, you know, we, uh, you know, we, we live in this world of just massive overload.

00:16:42.580 It's almost like drives you mad.

00:16:44.800 Uh, but that being said, uh, it, it does seem like we've actually had a lot of breakthroughs recently where, um, just, just this, even this notion of the alt-right that, that mainstream people are picking up on.

00:16:58.960 And, and, and it does, it does seem like if we keep, let me mix a metaphor.

00:17:04.740 If we keep banging our heads up against the wall long enough, we'll break through at some point.

00:17:10.920 Yeah.

00:17:12.680 Well, um, well, live in hope there, Richard.

00:17:18.460 I can't believe I'm, well, I guess I am more optimistic than the man, the author of We Are Doomed.

00:17:23.980 Yes.

00:17:24.220 I think if you look at, if you look at human history in the round, um, the kinds of liberties that we've, we've enjoyed for the past century or so are very much the exception.

00:17:38.840 Uh, I, I, I'm a sit down and do a, do an actual head count at some time.

00:17:43.620 But I, I think of all the human lives that have ever been lived, not, not counting just barbarians living in the forest, you know, but civilized life.

00:17:54.480 I would think at least, surely at least 95% have been lived under despotic control.

00:18:02.540 You know, in the great empires of, of, of China and Tsarist Russia and the Incas, you know, uh, there's been very little liberty in human history.

00:18:12.840 So it's not something one should really expect.

00:18:15.340 It's very much an anomaly.

00:18:18.260 Well, but aren't you kind of indulging in some current year-ism by saying something like that?

00:18:25.260 Because, I mean, in a way, like, you can look at Tsarist Russia and say, oh, they weren't allowed to vote or something like that.

00:18:31.840 But in terms of actual personal liberty, there was probably more of it.

00:18:37.840 Um, well, it depends who you're talking about.

00:18:40.440 You know, Pushkin got sent off to the Caucasus by Nicholas because, you know, he wrote the wrong thing.

00:18:46.060 And, uh, and, and that was quite a well-placed, well-born person.

00:18:50.960 If you were, if you were a serf in old Russia, forget it. 0.99

00:18:55.860 Well, I know, but, but it, it does seem, I mean, I, I think you're, you are engaging in some current year-ism where you're taking what we expect for a human life now and kind of saying, oh, that is the norm.

00:19:09.980 And then projecting that backwards.

00:19:11.800 I mean, the, yeah, I mean, yes, a serf was bound to the land, uh, but, you know, we don't, that was a totally different point of history of technology, technological development and so on.

00:19:25.160 And in some ways, uh, a serf could actually say whatever he wanted at the local pub.

00:19:31.740 You know, I mean, it, it kind of, it, it depends on one's perspective and, and I'm not, I'm not trying to glorify serfdom or, or glorify the past.

00:19:41.080 I'm, I'm just saying that it's, you know, things are very different and I, I think we shouldn't, we, we shouldn't just glorify this, you know, post-American world as the end all and be all because we get to cast a ballot in a box every couple of years and, and, uh, you know, and so on.

00:20:00.300 I mean, in, in some ways we, I mean, as we're, you know, pointing out earlier, I mean, in some ways we have a, a shocking lack of freedom and liberty.

00:20:08.900 I don't know, Richard, we are, we are, we are, I don't, I don't care about the ballot box thing, but, uh, we are pretty much left alone by the authorities.

00:20:20.800 That's, that's what I was thinking of.

00:20:22.800 Although, on your side, I will say this, if you look at the history of the Cossacks, um, I was reading about the Cossacks recently, they were, they were largely Russian serfs who just got fed up with being serfs and just gone off into the wild spaces in the, in the, in the southwestern Ukraine and started their own communities.

00:20:43.020 So, there was a way out, which, there, there isn't now, really, there isn't, there are no more wild places, there's no way you can go.

00:20:50.900 No, that is, uh, that, that is true.

00:20:53.300 The frontier has closed.

00:20:55.440 Uh, we're kind of in this big, uh, in this big prison of the Western world together.

00:21:01.500 I, I think that is definitely true.

00:21:03.900 Uh.

00:21:03.960 It's a bit like, it's a bit like the Roman Empire, actually.

00:21:06.260 You could, you, you can't, you can't get out of it, you know.

00:21:09.360 I mean, they exiled Ovid.

00:21:11.600 Where did they exile him to?

00:21:12.580 It was the Black Sea, wasn't it?

00:21:14.560 Oh, yeah, that is true, yes.

00:21:15.720 Which is still under Roman authority.

00:21:18.040 You, you're in, you're exiled, but you, but they're still watching you, you know.

00:21:21.680 It's kind of like, yeah, if Barack Obama wants to send me to the Black Sea, I, I'm, I'm open for it.

00:21:28.900 I've actually been there, but it's quite nice.

00:21:30.860 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:21:34.180 So, it's all, it's all a matter of perspective, really.

00:21:36.340 I guess, I guess.

00:21:37.900 So, um, uh, so what were you going to talk about at, at your speech?

00:21:42.860 Um, were you going to give them the talk or, uh, or something like that?

00:21:48.140 Uh, the actual title was The National Question, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in the 21st Century.

00:21:59.360 And, uh, Peter Bremelow kindly allowed me to post the whole thing over at vdare.com.

00:22:04.700 So, if you want to read what I wrote, it's there.

00:22:07.640 Just, just give us kind of the gist of, uh, the, these horrible things that you were going to talk about.

00:22:12.300 I, I'm, I'm curious just, uh, how, how you're thinking about nationality and identity and race and, and things these days.

00:22:19.760 I started off with The National Question, what is The National Question?

00:22:23.360 And I refer them to Samuel Huntington's book, Who Are We?

00:22:27.800 And I said, that's The National Question, who are we?

00:22:30.580 Well, we're Americans, but what does that mean?

00:22:32.460 Uh, and then I got into what is a nation, uh, and, uh, and, and how do you approach that kind of thing from a conservative point of view?

00:22:43.740 And I, I told them, well, here's the un-conservative point of view.

00:22:48.380 The un-conservative point of view is the proposition nation business.

00:22:53.440 We are a proposition nation.

00:22:55.560 And I tossed and gored that whole proposition nation idea and said, okay, so what is a nation?

00:23:02.820 And then I moved on into ethnicity and I gave them some academic references about ethnicity, Vandenberghe and Walker-Connor, people like that.

00:23:13.740 Who I'm sure you're familiar with, and, uh, pointed out that, uh, emphasised that ethnicity is, uh, Vandenberghe actually gives the definition as perceived kinship.

00:23:29.840 So there can be a fictive element in, in ethnicity, it's perceived kinship.

00:23:35.420 And I gave them some quotes from the founders and the Declaration of Independence, you know, about how our British brethren,

00:23:42.840 and, uh, how they've ignored the appeals of consanguinity and said, you know, okay, but it wasn't just British in America at that time.

00:23:53.100 There were Dutch and French and, and Germans and, and, you know, blacks and, and Indians too.

00:23:58.760 But they were developing an ethnicity and, and, and the nation came out of that ethnicity, which was partly fictive.

00:24:07.500 And then I, I pointed out that most national ethnicities are partly fictive.

00:24:13.080 Sure.

00:24:13.480 I gave the example of the Italians.

00:24:16.020 Uh, one of the Risorgimento leaders famously said, uh, we have, we have made Italy.

00:24:22.140 Now we have to make Italians and so on, you know, so, so there's a fictive element there.

00:24:27.260 And then I got into, uh, 20th century history and what was, what was driving the later 20th century history.

00:24:36.360 I said there were basically two clusters of things driving it.

00:24:39.680 One cluster was the world wars together with the cold war.

00:24:44.040 And the other was the rise of the third world. 0.96

00:24:47.020 The colonists becoming independent and the demographic explosion of the third world and so on.

00:24:52.580 And then I talked about how these two things interacted.

00:24:55.560 And then I came home to the United States and how they played out in the United States.

00:25:00.840 For example, um, uh, pointing out, for example, it's not a coincidence that the two great revolutionary things that happened in the 1960s,

00:25:13.020 the civil rights movement and the 1965 immigration act happened in the very deepest depths of the cold war.

00:25:20.700 There was a cold war influence on them.

00:25:22.660 Um, and, uh, uh, I said, uh, for example, Marxist Leninist universalism, uh, you know, the proletariat has no fatherland.

00:25:37.380 And that kind of universalism returned an echo from American elites.

00:25:43.800 They wanted to have a universalism of our own too.

00:25:48.060 Or in fact, not so much of our own because half of them were Marxist Leninists, but, but they wanted, they wanted to promote a universal.

00:25:54.060 And that's why you've got things like the 1965 act and the civil rights movement.

00:25:57.920 That was a style of, an attempted style of universalism, a riposte to Marxist Leninist universalism.

00:26:06.280 And then I said, no, there was a symmetry there.

00:26:08.220 There's a pleasing symmetry because just as Marxist Leninist universalism had an echo over here,

00:26:15.700 ethno-nationalism had an echo over there.

00:26:18.200 I pointed out that the, um, the official Soviet name for world war two was the great patriotic war.

00:26:28.720 Yeah.

00:26:29.420 Actually, you don't need to filter it through Latin.

00:26:31.980 Etchets is the Russian word for father.

00:26:33.720 So it's the great fatherlandish war.

00:26:35.840 Right.

00:26:36.380 And, and so on.

00:26:37.340 And then when the Soviet, when the Soviet union fell and the cold war ended,

00:26:41.500 all these little ethno-nationalisms came up after, after being suppressed for so long.

00:26:46.960 And you've got things like the mess in what was Yugoslavia, uh, you know, and, and the Vietnam, uh, war can be seen in a similar mode and so on.

00:26:57.580 Well, yeah, I think the, there are a great deal of ironies to what you're talking about.

00:27:01.000 I mean, one of those is that, you know, part of Soviet policy was to, I wouldn't say create ethnicities because you could, you, it's not like they created them out of thin air, but, but to inspire them and to amplify them.

00:27:13.860 Uh, as I, even, you could maybe even say that I could kind of divide and conquer, uh, type thing.

00:27:19.940 Uh, and then this, uh, the, you know, the, the chickens came home to roost when, when a lot of these ethnicities, uh, uh, did want their day in the sun or their own, their own state. 0.88

00:27:29.340 I think that's one of the great ironies of it, you know, what other, I actually, uh, I, I have an extended quote from professor Huntington along those lines, talking about the 1965 immigration act.

00:27:41.660 What were the motives of the people promoting that?

00:27:46.580 And I, I mentioned a number of possible motives.

00:27:49.520 And then I said, well, I'm, I'm with professor Huntington.

00:27:51.800 He thought, and he wrote that it was an attempt by our elites to move us from a national model to an imperial model, because the leaders of nations attempt to unify their people, whereas the leaders of empires attempt to divide them so they can play them off against each other.

00:28:12.340 Right.

00:28:12.480 And I, that, that, that was my interpretation.

00:28:15.940 That was Huntington's interpretation, but I agree with it, of the motives behind the 1965 act.

00:28:22.040 Yeah, I think, I think that's a very perceptive, uh, perspective on this.

00:28:25.980 You know, one thing that I was thinking about when you're mentioning these things is that America seems to, it seems to have a concept of nation.

00:28:37.100 I, it's different.

00:28:38.940 It's, you know, it's funny because when we say things like the United Nations and the, and the so on, I mean, these are really United States in the, in the sense, you know, uh, you know, we, we sometimes will say things like the Polish, uh, Poland is a nation, you know, Poland is a state.

00:28:54.340 It's also a nation, but there's a difference between a government and a people.

00:28:58.000 That's a very important thing that I think, you know, Americans have kind of a funny terminology that we mix up all the time.

00:29:05.120 Um, but what, what I was thinking is that, um, obviously America is a state in the, that European sense.

00:29:13.160 It's a government, it's an, it's an order, uh, uh, a system.

00:29:17.540 Um, and so there, there is a, there is a kind of nationality question.

00:29:21.100 And then, uh, obviously there, there's always been a racial component to America that that's been there from the beginning, uh, you know, in, in the sense of not, not, and not only slavery.

00:29:32.920 Slavery is in a way, just one part of it, uh, it was a part of the confrontation with, um, uh, with Indians, uh, to some degree confrontation with, uh, Spanish Mexicans, uh, and so on.

00:29:46.000 There's, but there's always been this racial element, but you could say maybe today there, there, we seem to not have an ethnic component to our, to, to American nationality.

00:29:57.920 Where we, we, we can say we all believe in freedom or something, and we're all, you know, paying taxes to this government.

00:30:05.660 But we, we don't, we don't really have that sense that, oh, we're all Protestants.

00:30:12.040 Or, oh, we're all English speakers, or we're all related to, uh, the British Isles, or, or, or someplace else, or, you know, so on.

00:30:20.660 We, we seem to have this real lack of an ethnic kind of mythic.

00:30:25.260 Because if you're saying, you know, you know, ethnicity, uh, as opposed to race, which you could think of as biology, and nationality, which is the, the government.

00:30:33.120 You know, ethnicity is, is half fiction, half myth, half reality. 0.99

00:30:38.780 And, uh, and we seem to almost not have that anymore.

00:30:42.520 There, there are echoes of it, and, and, of, of being, you know, English-speaking people being connected to that world, being connected to Europe.

00:30:49.820 But, but we seem to really lack that.

00:30:52.700 Um, and I, I think that's a, it's a very sad thing.

00:30:55.440 America really has become a proposition nation.

00:31:00.120 Yeah.

00:31:00.560 Yeah, and, uh, I, I, I wonder, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of hopeless to wonder, but I can't help wondering if the, the nation that we had in, say, 1960, um, could have worked that out.

00:31:18.220 Uh, we can't, it's hopeless to try to work it out now, um, because we, we've taken in too many people from too many places. 0.59

00:31:26.320 But the nation as it existed in 1960 consisted mostly of people who'd been there in the first place, including blacks, and, uh, people who'd come in, in the pre-World War I, um, uh, immigration surge, who had almost entirely been European and mostly assimilated.

00:31:48.880 Uh, you know, uh, you know, it was a population with a, with a history of, of living together for decades.

00:31:55.560 And in the case of blacks and, and, and legacy whites for centuries. 0.93

00:32:00.100 Yeah.

00:32:00.760 And I, I wonder if we couldn't just have worked that out and come to this point, ended up in 2016 with a fairly coherent ethnicity with a fictive element.

00:32:12.300 You know, nobody's going to say blacks and whites are kind of the same stock, but then, as Professor Vandenberg says, every ethnicity has some fictive element.

00:32:21.840 It's a very normal thing.

00:32:23.140 Yeah.

00:32:23.240 And I, I wonder if we could have, if we hadn't had the 1965 Immigration Act, if we could have settled our differences with, with blacks, with our fellow, our black fellow citizens, who've been here longer than some of us. 0.96

00:32:38.240 They've been here longer than I have.

00:32:40.040 Uh, and, and, and come to some sort of, of fairly harmonious settlement.

00:32:47.800 Do you, what do you think?

00:32:48.620 Do you think that's possible?

00:32:49.460 Do you think a harmonious settlement is possible in a multiracial society?

00:32:55.100 It's, I would, I would probably say no.

00:32:59.520 I, I think this is, this is one of those questions.

00:33:01.780 And, and one thing that, you know, as one thing that's hard about answering a question like this is that it's not mathematics, you know, where you can isolate something.

00:33:09.720 Cause there, there are a lot of different variables and, you know, and as you said, um, very rightly is that so much of, you know, there, there was almost a kind of universalism of the cold war that was playing into a lot of this new Americanism of, you know, in the second half of the 20th century.

00:33:27.300 We, we've got to be even more egalitarian than the Soviets or something like that.

00:33:33.260 Uh, so it's hard to isolate these things.

00:33:35.060 I, I think you can imagine an alternative universe, uh, in which exactly what you said happened where, um, where, you know, cause a lot of these, these ethnic rivalries between Europeans, as you say, they, they were smoothed over.

00:33:49.740 And also there's just so much intermarriage that, uh, you know, who, who, you know, who, who is a real Irishman, you know, at this point, or, or, you know, it's, everyone's been kind of mixed up.

00:34:01.580 You could say for better, for worse, maybe we've lost something because of all these European ethnicities were, were, were mixed up. 0.99

00:34:08.780 Uh, but, and I'm sure we have lost something.

00:34:11.780 Have we gained something?

00:34:12.640 Maybe that's the real question, but I, I think in an alternative universe.

00:34:16.080 Still, still, uh, an ethno-national identity is possible.

00:34:21.180 I said, I said, yeah, I think it is possible.

00:34:22.780 Modern, modern Greeks would like to boast that they're descended from Aristotle and Pericles and so on.

00:34:28.080 Right.

00:34:28.420 But in fact, Greece was massively invaded by Slavs in the Middle Ages.

00:34:32.740 They're like, you know, 25, 30% Slav. 0.98

00:34:35.880 But if you say that to a Greek patriot, he'll punch you on the jaw.

00:34:39.660 Oh, I'll, I'll remember that.

00:34:42.300 But yeah, I mean, but I, I think in a way race throws this wrench into the machine where I don't, outside of doing something that I, I don't, I don't think anyone, well, I certainly don't want this. 0.95

00:34:56.560 And I think many other people don't.

00:34:57.680 And that is a miscegenation with Africans where, um, we, we become this, uh, you know, a kind of ethnicity that you can actually see there, there, there is a, you know, a mulatto ethnicity.

00:35:08.780 Um, that, that might've been the only way to solve that problem.

00:35:12.560 And I, I certainly don't see that as ideal.

00:35:14.460 I think North America is so big that in an alternative universe, there, there could have been some separation where, uh, you know, there's, there's some Southern region that is, is effectively an African region.

00:35:28.960 Um, but I, you know, I, I think again, that this is real alternative universe speculation.

00:35:34.700 I, I think once you throw in that other component of Americanism has to be this global force for good in so many people's minds, uh, I think it, it, it basically became impossible.

00:35:48.380 I, I, I think it, it, we were, we're kind of destined to have this rather, this fragmenting and, and rather unhappy, uh, society that we have today where, you know, no one wants to talk about race yet.

00:36:02.140 It, it, it, it seems to inform everything, you know, and, uh, you know, whites want to talk about it. 0.76

00:36:06.620 They don't, we don't care about race. 0.94

00:36:07.860 We don't see race.

00:36:08.640 And, you know, while they're, you know, choosing their school district and, and neighborhood specifically on demographics.

00:36:16.260 So revealed preference.

00:36:17.760 I had, I had a whole passage in my talk on revealed preference.

00:36:21.040 Yeah.

00:36:21.400 Yeah.

00:36:21.640 Right.

00:36:22.160 So I, I think it's, it's, it's almost kind of like, um, I, you know, with, with all of these different factors that were at play, I'm not sure we could have ever reached a happy reconciliation where, and, and I think we're going to have to, because we're not, we're not, I don't, you know, we're not going to ultimately, 0.98

00:36:38.620 gain anything by, uh, you know, being, you know, treating the blacks like, oh, you, you're just, you know, you are just the worst thing in the world.

00:36:48.600 You're all you do is crime and all that kind of, like, we're going to have to reach some kind of understanding, um, with Africans in the future. 1.00

00:36:57.000 And that's going to be hard, but it's, it's going to have to be an honest understanding.

00:37:02.340 It can't be, uh, it can't be what we have today, which is we don't want to talk about this issue slash we want to like snicker about this behind closed doors.

00:37:13.900 Or we, you know, we want to watch videos of blacks behaving badly on YouTube and laughing, you know, we, we need to get over that kind of thing. 0.99

00:37:21.840 We, we need to reach some kind of understanding, but, but again, again, I am, of course, more of the revolutionary type, but I think this will be a post-American understanding.

00:37:32.540 I think the, the, uh, the American idea was, was kind of, um, maybe you could say, uh, ruined by its success.

00:37:41.520 It's, it's kind of run its course.

00:37:42.900 I think we're going to have to, if we're going to reach an honest understanding where we can both go our own ways and both flourish, I, I, I think it will probably be in a post-American. 0.96

00:37:51.820 Yeah, but the trouble with that and the trouble with your separation is that it may not be possible for blacks to flourish.

00:38:02.940 They don't have the collective ability to, where, where have they flourished?

00:38:07.200 Well, when I say flourishing, I'm not talking about Silicon Valley is going to erupt in a African ethnostate. 0.83

00:38:15.620 I mean, I think there, I think, you know, you could say there, there's certain, you know, Africa was flourishing, not, not according to our standards, but before white men came in and, you know, brought all this, you know, we, we brought all this medicine and, and lots of other things that have proven ultimately dysgenic in that context.

00:38:34.620 You know, you know, a, a, a African society was flourishing on its own terms.

00:38:40.600 You know, I, I think I, I remember, I think Stefan Molyneux, who's a, he's an interesting guy, kind of anarchist libertarian who seems to resonate with some things that you and I might say.

00:38:51.720 He was mentioning, it's, I think it's a very good metaphor.

00:38:54.980 It's, you know, if you got, if you took a polar bear outside of the Arctic realm and you, you set him down in, you know, the, a North American forest in, you know, Montana or something like that, he would die because, you know, every rabbit that he wanted to, or every deer that he wanted to see would see him coming from a mile away.

00:39:19.120 It's this big white spot, you know, he, he, he, he's not evolved for that environment and climate. 0.99

00:39:25.960 And so you can't say that that polar bear is, is stupid or dumb or, or backward or whatever. 1.00

00:39:31.700 He's just, it's just not the right context for him. 1.00

00:39:34.720 And I, I think, uh, you know, a European society is really a terrible context for Africans.

00:39:40.120 It bringing Africans into our world, it's just, it's just going to inherently be unhappy. 1.00

00:39:45.440 It's just inherently, and we should never have done it.

00:39:48.980 And I, I condemn anyone involved with slavery because they, they did not have the, the foresight to see this.

00:39:55.280 They, they were just thinking about, you know, profit margins. 0.96

00:39:58.340 Let's use, you know, let's, let's use these niggers to make money. 1.00

00:40:02.240 I think that was basically what their thought process was. 0.98

00:40:04.380 And that, that is a very, I, I, that is a bad thing.

00:40:08.160 We need to think about, you know, our great, great, great grandchildren and, and the consequences of our actions.

00:40:14.080 Yeah, that, that was then, and this is now, Richard.

00:40:16.500 Here's, here's a statistic I put into my talk.

00:40:19.520 It's one of my favorite statistics.

00:40:22.260 I, I, I inherited my, my grandfather's atlas from 1922, atlas of the British Empire and Commonwealth.

00:40:30.360 And, uh, it has a good statistical tables in it.

00:40:35.740 So here's, here's a fact.

00:40:37.680 In 1922, the British Isles had over twice the population of British West Africa.

00:40:46.020 Mm-hmm.

00:40:46.700 It was then British West Africa.

00:40:49.000 British Isles, twice the population of British West Africa.

00:40:51.660 Today, British West Africa, which is now four countries, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, British West Africa has over three times the population of the British Isles.

00:41:03.660 Mm-hmm.

00:41:04.320 That's a tremendous demographic switch over just a human lifetime.

00:41:10.880 You know, in 1922, my father was, was a young adult.

00:41:13.840 Mm-hmm.

00:41:14.140 Uh, you've gone from the, the British Isles being twice as populous as West Africa to West Africa being three times as populous as the British Isles, which has more people now than they did in 1922.

00:41:27.060 That's, that's what's happening in the third world.

00:41:30.020 And the consequence of it is despair.

00:41:35.180 Mm-hmm.

00:41:35.320 Despair.

00:41:35.740 Look at the, look at those boatloads of, of, of Africans trying to get across the Mediterranean into Europe.

00:41:42.680 They, they, they see no hope.

00:41:45.420 They're young, they're young people.

00:41:46.720 They see no hope in their own countries.

00:41:49.120 They're only, it's a revealed preference again.

00:41:51.480 Yeah.

00:41:51.600 Their revealed preference is to live in a white country. 0.65

00:41:54.020 It's their only hope of a decent life.

00:41:56.680 Mm-hmm.

00:41:56.780 There's no decent life for most of them, unless you, you know, unless you're, you know, unless you're kin to the, to the president or some powerful bureaucrat.

00:42:03.220 There's no decent life for you in, you know, Sierra Leone. 0.53

00:42:07.080 You've got to get out of there. 0.97

00:42:08.200 You've got to go, go live in a white country. 1.00

00:42:09.800 Yeah, and also because, because of, that's the world we're in now.

00:42:13.140 Yeah, and also because, you know, the world has become small in the sense of communications.

00:42:17.900 You know, we, a, there was a, at one point when an African tribesman would have no earthly idea of what was going on in London.

00:42:26.740 But now they have a, they have a very skewed vision of reality.

00:42:32.900 It's, you know, they, I, you know, it would be interesting to actually think about what their perspective of the West is.

00:42:38.400 You know, looking at some television programs or, or, say, worldwide CNN or looking at pornography on the internet, which is probably something that they've, one of the first things they do whenever they get an internet connection, I would imagine.

00:42:54.880 So, you know, they, they have a skewed vision of it, but, but it is a vision nonetheless, and it is a vision of, of happy town, you know, of let's just go there and it's all going to be all right.

00:43:06.520 It's all going to be better and land of milk and honey kind of thing.

00:43:09.260 So, you know, there's also a big pull factor because of generous immigration policies in the West over the last 50 years.

00:43:17.720 There are now big communities of these people in all Western countries, and they're, they're writing home and they're calling home saying, come on over, it's great here.

00:43:25.760 So there's also, there's also, as well as a demographic push factor, there's also a pull factor.

00:43:30.960 Yeah. I don't, I, you know, I don't know the answer outside of we, I don't think, I think the answer is going to be, it's going to ultimately be a very, very hard one.

00:43:44.140 And it will, but it, but it's going to have to be about separation, or I think the ultimate outcome a hundred years from now is that we might, we might still have, you could say a white Jewish, maybe Asian, you know, financial elite, but we would have these countries, if you were to call them that, that are, maybe have little hyper ethnic groupings within them,

00:44:09.160 but have no sense of, of, of a shared history or destiny or basically just big marketplaces for, uh, low IQ plebs and, uh, you know, playing with their smartphones and stuff like that. 0.99

00:44:22.840 You can see some images of this kind of society.

00:44:25.040 And, um, I'm just thinking of this, uh, Judge Dredd movie that came out a few years ago that seemed to be a image of a future American society.

00:44:33.080 One of, of, of, you know, debased degeneracy and crime with, uh, with basically a, a government that was in charged, uh, charged with, you know, keeping law and order by, uh, in the most brutal means you could imagine.

00:44:46.420 So I, I think that is certainly one possibility.

00:44:49.700 Um, uh, you know, and we are going to see that we're, we're going to experience that anti-civilization unless we make some of these big, radical, hard choices.

00:45:00.960 And we decide that we, we want a, a space for us.

00:45:07.600 Um, and, and, and, and it, you know, and it's not going to be about, you know, just leave, just leave me alone or something or, you know, freedom and liberty kind of stuff.

00:45:16.700 It's going to have to be about identity and it's, it will ultimately have to be a very, uh, a very hard choice of saying we, we, we want our, uh, our place.

00:45:26.540 We want living space for us.

00:45:29.120 Well, there are, there are two, there are two big extended populations who do think like that.

00:45:35.420 One of them is the East Europeans.

00:45:39.120 Yes.

00:45:40.080 I don't know if you followed the meeting of the Visegrad 4 last week.

00:45:44.440 That's, uh, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.

00:45:49.860 And they certainly think like that.

00:45:52.480 And the Czech, the president of the Czech Republic made a, I don't know if you saw his Christmas message.

00:45:58.760 He said, uh, he, he signed off his Christmas message.

00:46:02.280 It was all about the immigrant invasion of Europe. 0.99

00:46:05.520 He signed it off by saying, this is our country.

00:46:08.700 Yeah.

00:46:09.180 It can't be for everybody.

00:46:12.040 It's ours.

00:46:13.960 So that you've got one group of people there who see, see the light, although a bit ambivalently because they also want to plug into, um, uh, Western Europe's, um, economic, uh, structure.

00:46:26.640 And that, that, that, that's sort of crippling them.

00:46:30.660 And they want to plug into America as well.

00:46:33.180 A lot of the Poland and Czech Republic are very pro.

00:46:36.120 They're kind of, kind of living in the cold war a little bit, in my opinion.

00:46:39.980 And the other big group is the East Asians.

00:46:43.180 Uh, Japanese are still with all their economic troubles. 1.00

00:46:47.680 They still set their face against mass immigration.

00:46:50.120 So the South Koreans, the Chinese, I worry about a bit.

00:46:53.920 Uh, but, uh, so far they, uh, they haven't been taking in big numbers of people.

00:46:59.580 So there are, there are people there, but, but we're not those people.

00:47:03.260 Western Europe is not those people.

00:47:04.640 And North America is not those people.

00:47:08.500 Yes.

00:47:09.740 Um, I, I, I totally, I totally agree.

00:47:13.300 Although I would always, I would flip it around and say, I, I, again, I, just to take the Hegelian perspective.

00:47:20.280 I, I, it's not that I think that exactly what you said is wrong.

00:47:24.160 I think it's right, but it's not the whole truth.

00:47:27.840 You could flip this around and say that because Americans and, and Western Europeans, you could say, have experienced this great trial that we have, our lands have been invaded.

00:47:41.920 We've confronted the other, we've seen it, uh, that we might be the ones to, uh, to change it for the future.

00:47:50.760 We might be the ones...

00:47:51.480 Oh, I know, I know.

00:47:52.100 You're in the, you're in the book of Job, aren't you?

00:47:54.680 Um, when thou hast tested me, O Lord, I shall be as galled.

00:47:59.920 Exactly.

00:48:01.440 Exactly.

00:48:02.480 Uh, so I, I, you know, again, I, I'm, this is all speculation.

00:48:05.860 It's not, you know, it's not mathematics.

00:48:07.620 There's not just one simple answer, but I think it is worth, I think it's worthwhile to, to see it in that way that, um, you know, there, there, there is a certain maybe innocence of living in, uh, in, in Eastern Europe of not, of not experiencing, you know, what, what we've experienced.

00:48:25.940 Uh, now, again, I, I'm, I obviously see the other argument to what I just said, so I'm, it's, you know, but, you know, there's something to be said, but I, I do think that, that, I, I think we all agree that that is the, that is the solution.

00:48:39.440 We're going to have to carve out living space, and it's going to have to be ours, and there's going to have to be a, uh, a big fat wall with no door.

00:48:49.120 And by golly, they're going to pay for it.

00:48:51.020 Right. 0.99

00:48:53.720 We can pay for it, but let's just build the, build the damn thing. 0.99

00:48:57.460 But, uh, uh, but anyway, uh, John, why don't, why don't we put a bookmark in the conversation? 0.60

00:49:02.720 But, uh, you know, this is exactly what I thought our podcast was going to be.

00:49:07.200 We're going to start off on a very specific topic, and then we would, uh, dilate into something really big about the future.

00:49:15.900 So, uh, this was a lot of fun.

00:49:17.440 We should, uh, do it again.

00:49:19.400 I hope so.

00:49:21.220 Great.

00:49:21.720 Thanks, John.

00:49:22.780 Thank you, Richard.

RadixJournal - February 26, 2016

Uncomfortable Learning

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