Romance and Racism: A Response to Scott Alexander (Part 1)

Alt Title: Mirror Neurons, Empathy and the Non-Racist case for Racism

In this article, inspired by Scott Alexander’s beautiful Love And Liberty post, I make the entirely Non-Racist case for why Racism is a positive good; based primarily on widely reported perfectly politically correct studies.

I argue that much like primitive sexual attraction is a primary and irreplaceable source of Romantic love; racial similarity is a primary scientifically proven source of empathy. Therefore, even if there were no innate or cultural racial differences decreasing homogeneity or encouraging integration would be wrong.

Non-Sexualism is Evil: 

(To oppose Sexualism is to oppose Romance) 

Imagine you live in the AI powered Empire of an Asexual Scott Alexander II. One day he speaks to a woman that complains that her male crush is perfect for her personality-wise; but doesn’t find her sexy. Having heard many such complaints in the past; and wishing to end the resulting heartbreaks - he develops a philosophy. It’s called non-sexualism.

 It declares that consideration of sexual attractiveness in the choice of mates is morally wrong because it leads to heartbreak; and that society should bring all its social pressure to bear on those who don’t judge mates exclusively by the content of their characters. 

Now if you yourself are not an asexual male you are probably thinking murderously treasonous thoughts by now. But how would you translate these for an Asexual? I’d suggest:

“Evolution programmed us with a strong sexual attraction. It doesn’t matter if the nature of our attraction is in some way irrational. This urge is one of the key elements in romantic love and even if we can imagine a version of Romantic love without it; this version must definitionally be weaker. 

Romantic love is good; those who would reduce it are evil. 

Non-Sexualism is Evil.”

Of course sexual attraction might misfire, by evolutionary standards. After all, the evolutionary purpose of sexual attraction is to reproduce with a maximally healthy and fertile woman, and also bind man to her and by extension to his offspring after they are born. 

But you don’t immediately lose sexual attraction for a woman who looks like an Amazonian Goddess, just because she mentions that she had womb cancer and is therefore infertile (though if you desire children you might choose another mate anyway). And you don’t somehow gain it, if you are told that a woman’s horribly disfigured face is a result of a totally non-genetic condition like being burned in a childhood fire, making her an evolutionary bargain! 

Of course, sexual attraction is not the only trait that evolved in humans. Some traits may be negative; and their suppression may (emphasis on the may) be good. 

But a trait that is primarily a source of good things? Only a monster could oppose it. 

Non-Racism is Evil: 

(To oppose racial-homogeneity is to oppose empathy) (Empathy flows from Racial Similarity)  (And Mirror-neuron studies prove it)

Unless you are a Creationist; you understand that compassion and altruism evolved so that we would advance the interests of kin - who share our genes. Evolution doesn’t care one bit if you die or how you die provided your kin who share your genes live and pass them on. Of course, it’s easy to see how your genes would also benefit reproductively from friendly relations with nearby people, not least because your relatives could benefit from non-inbred mates. And so we can imagine how instinctive compassion might develop for non-immediate kin. 

Richard Dawkins considers this a happy misfiring of evolution; Jonathan Haidt thinks it was more a matter of group selection, but in either case an obvious question is raised that annihilates entirely the public ideology of both.

The Question is - What about people so different in genes and appearance; that your mind could never confuse them with kin at any distance?

People so different, from so far away that over 99% of humans who lived before the year 1800 never saw them in any positive context? People so different that even if you were to reproduce with them your children would look less like you than the avg child of an unintegrated neighborhood and share less genes with you than you do with the avg random member of your race?

Do you really think evolution misfired enough to make you capable of feeling the same level of instinctive empathy for them? And imagining for a moment that you do, how sure are you that you aren’t the Asexual Scott Alexander II of Empathy and that others have a different base level instinct from which their empathy flows. How do you know that whatever feeling you denote as empathy, while sharing some aspects with what normal people would describe it as; is not as different from the normal sentiment bearing that name as an Asexual Romance is to a normal (ie. sexual) Romance? 

If you believe in evolution; that is actually believe in it, not merely utter the words so you can mock the bible-bumpkins - you should already expect a particular answer to all these questions. You should expect to find that evolution didn’t misfire this much, and that where it did the misfiring was corrected. You should expect a massive gulf in instinctive cross-racial empathy to exist, and to be objectively measurable. It does, and it is. 

The Mirror Neuron Studies:

(Other race strangers cannot feel your pain and you can’t feel theirs)

Primates and humans are equipped with what are called mirror neurons, neurons which fire both when the subject acts/is acted upon and when they observe another subject acting/being acted upon. 

When you instinctively twitch in response to a video of someone else’s experience; that is a mirror neuron response. You are at a primal and non-conscious level feeling their experience (or at least what you would feel in their position). While this phenomenon might not be the only source of empathy, much like sexual attraction is not the only source of Romance - I think the reader will intuitively understand it to be a critical one. 

Here’s the problem. A person’s mirror neuron activation can be measured in response to seeing a person FROM THE SAME RACE receive a painless treatment (being prodded by a cotton tip), or a painful one (a needle injection). 

And his relevant mirror neurons are also activated in response to seeing a NON-PAINFUL stimuli administered to someone from a different RACE.

But NO Autonomic pain-mirroring response occurs cross-racially!

This is true in studies between Whites and Blacks observing same and other race hands being prodded with needles or cotton tips.

Study: Racial Bias Reduces Empathic Sensorimotor Resonance with Other-Race Pain (Journal - Current Biology - Cell.com)

Key quote: “Observing ingroup but not outgroup models’ pain led to resonant inhibition of the FDI muscle that was stimulated in the models: one-sample t tests confirmed that MEP contrasts (pain – touch) for the FDI (target) muscle were significantly different from 0 for the ingroup (t34 = 22.8, p = 0.007) model, but not for the outgroup (p = 0.3) model.”

Supporting study by different team at UVienna (Using EEG measures)

And of Whites observing White and East Asian faces receiving the same:

Study: Intergroup relationships do not reduce racial bias in empathic neural responses to pain

Key quote: “These results support a model of empathy for pain that consists of early, automatic bias towards own-race empathic responses and a later top-down cognitive evaluation that does not differentiate between races and may ultimately lead to unbiased behaviour.”

Size of main effect: P=0.01

* An earlier study with the same methodology except for the attempt to reduce bias is referenced in the paper.

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I’d like to make a few brief comments on a few critical aspects of the studies mentioned.

The First is that the statistical significance of each study is so positively huge as to eliminate any reasonable doubt that it’s findings are merely accidental. The second, as linked to above is that the main finding of each study (the absence of cross racial pain mirroring) is well backed by other studies using the same or similar methodology; so if you wish to dismiss it you are gonna have to show concerted fraud between different teams of researchers.

The third is that the lead researcher in the hand study claimed that the fact that since objects showed no decreased mirror neuron response when observing the painful treatment administered to a purple tinted hand; the observed discrepancy in cross-racial reactions must be a function not of racial difference in appearance but of bias. And yet, isn’t it far more plausible that the mind understands purple hands not to be a real, corrects for the glitch and simply defaults to them representing the observers own race? The human mind is so sensitive to correcting implausible distortions, that when you carve a face onto the hollow side of a mask it figures it’s made a mistake producing illusions like this one.

Hollow face illusion

I don’t think it’s fooled by purple hands.

Furthermore, if stereotypes are in play here what negative stereotypes did Australian college students have of East Asians in 2014?

But the case for the fixed and innate nature of the absence of cross-racial instinctive empathy is most clearly made by the failure of the Australian study to improve matters even by getting the subjects to feel a group identity with the East Asians observed on video.

In the Queensland Cheek-Needles Mirror Neuron study, some participants were first given a test on their moral values and then assigned and taught to recognize actors of both races who they were told matched their own. They reached near perfect identification of the faces of their moral ingroup. They expressed an affinity with it. It didn’t change results one bit.

I already made this point but I want to reiterate it. This is exactly what anyone who believes in evolution should expect. The historic record is pretty clear that the normal experience of seeing a group of people who looked as different from you as Whites appear to Blacks or East Asians appear to blacks… was not only rare but not exactly pretty. It was one of at best trade with total foreigners of less than trustworthy natures and more commonly one of war, slavery and extermination. Feeling a primal mirror neuronal empathy for a racial stranger was until recently, a very good way to end your bloodline. To expect that just because conditions have changed this is going to fade away is to be a young earth creationist at heart. But in any case, we don’t have to hypothesize about the origin of this feature. It’s enough that it’s here, measurable and undeniable.

A few questions remain unanswered. We’ve already established the absence of cross-racial primal empathy between strangers. What about close friends, relatives, kin? Clearly there are strong cross-racial attachments but are these missing this meaningful component or does friendship… change matters? Might this void be why the children of inter-racial marriages show such a high rate of mental and health complications?

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Regardless of the answer to the earlier questions; we have more than enough here to reach some conclusions about the nature of our existing post-1965 society. To actively maximize the number of people in a society who cannot instinctively feel empathy for each-other and deliberately bring them together within the same society; to stigmatize the opposing longing, to continue supporting diversity now that the permanence of it’s consequences is abundantly clear - how can that not be evil? How can Non-Racism not be evil? You might as-well stigmatize considering sexual attractiveness in Romantic choices.

Regardless, neither option could ever possibly be on the menu; at least not for long.

NON-RACISM MUST MORPH INTO ANTI-RACISM

While sexual attraction will inevitably lead to romantic favoritism and while you can’t directly get a normal guy to feel attracted to someone he feels no attraction for; you sure as hell can decrease his attraction to gals he finds attractive. Just play as much footage as you can through any medium you can of her or gals who look like her behaving repellently; till if she evokes any tension in his blood at all… he feels a suppressive disgust moments thereafter which precludes his acting on it.

Likewise, you can reduce racial favoritism by whites. All you have to do is play non-stop propaganda from childhood in which whites appear as the villains and blacks and minorities appear as the heroes. Then every-time a white girl disappears or is harmed, disproportionate interest makes you a bad person. Will this increase actual concern for the state of blacks? Maybe a little, but not by much.

But maybe just maybe you can cause whites to care as little for each-other as they do for blacks! This is the world we are moving towards at lightning speed. Vonnegut’s handicapper general society is real, you live in it.

WHAT TO DO?

End all non-European immigration that doesn’t fall within the existing rights of minority citizens (marriage visas). Offer to buy out the citizenship of and relocate all racial minority citizens. Within America, offer exclusively positive incentives for racial groups to partition into their own race majority regions where each can enjoy the benefits of racial homogeneity.

We cannot and should not want to surveil the daily interactions of tens of millions of people to minimize the consequences of our lacking primal empathy for them or them for us. Luckily majorities of non-whites, having never had their basic instincts demonized will be more than susceptible to this message.

Source: Pew research survey - If you read the survey, you’ll find that educated blacks are no less identarian than normal blacks. Exposure to whites doesn’t change matters when the gulf is so huge.

The hardest struggle will be the Intra-White one. Worship of diversity has become the State Cult of America; with even so-called ‘conservative’ opponents of increasing it embracing a good chunk of it as a positive good. It’s consequences are so blatantly destructive that the end of this cult would mean the total and irreversible delegitimization of nearly everyone in existing government, media and policy circles. They are as likely to reverse course as Carthaginian priests are to announce that: ‘Sorry it turns out Moloch is obviously not real, the scriptures show this pretty clearly, sucks we rolled your baby into the fire!’

It would appear there’s only one way through this predicament.

Harvard Delenda Est!

CON-INC Delenda Est!

And … Delenda Est!

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In upcoming posts, I’ll explore the writings of individuals like Bryan Caplan who openly describe their desire to reduce the ties that bind Americans together; lay out a strategy for ending our diversity malaise, and make other less politically correct arguments for the necessity of racial homogeneity.

I also have an article explaining (not merely describing but explaining) Extinction Level East Asian low fertility coming up.

Not to toot my own horn but think this is one of the most valuable right wing articles written this year.

“Yes, I’m a racist because I value empathy, It’s called basic decency. Are you saying you oppose empathy? Are you a young earth creationist? Don’t you believe in the science?

Why do you want people to care for each-other less?”

— Is if nothing else top entertainment material, but more importantly it’s an entirely accurate and compelling moral case for a longing people have tried and long failed to effectively articulate. Think of all the articles you’ve read this year, how many do you remember in detail? Can you tell me this isn’t one of them?

In other words, please give me your money so I can continue to write. Or at least your email.

A Note on “RACISM”,

Racism: Imagine that I were to write in support of the radical position of… excluding women from combat roles. Feminists would inevitably screech that that I was being a sexist. It might be tempting to defend myself with; “But no this explicitly sex based legal restriction on women, is not irrational or unfair but accurately captures their limitations and so this explicitly and unambiguously sex based restriction is not actually sexist.” But this would be a mistake.

“Sexist” is exactly what an entirely neutral observer, who for whatever reason felt the need to coin a term for this (maybe he was an alien from a society with no major sex differences) - would call support for sex based restrictions! The key trick of feminism was taking the most accurate definitional term and loading it up with negative connotations. In doing this, they stigmatized many earlier legitimate restrictions which are now dictionary examples of sexism. To make the defense previously made is to concede that all of these restrictions were ‘irrational and unfair’.

The same is true of “Racist”. If you believe there are innate reasons why government policy should distinguish between races and promote their separation, you really are a Racist. This is true even if you insist you think the races are equal! (Note: I Really really don’t but that’s a separate article).

The retort writes itself - “Separate but Equal! - He’s a racist!”

Just cop to it, and then define what kind of racist you are. Being known as a racist doesn’t weaken you as much as you’d expect. The Left could’ve dropped racism accusations a long time ago once Con-Inc was fully onboard with marginalizing ideological racists; but Lefties can never stop. They must always be pushing new frontiers and progressing, which means they must expand the old slur and apply it to the half the population that opposes whatever their latest project is. They cannot help themselves. The only reason ‘racist’ has power as a marginalizing slur, is because while the conservative is immune to nearly all other liberal insults… his response to being called a racist makes it unambiguously clear that he believes racists should be destroyed. The marginality of racism is maintained entirely by the Right’s response to the attack, and even the improved response; “That slur has no effect on me” signals the exact opposite of what it says.

Just call yourself a racist and smile. Much like, ‘Yes my dear, I’m a sexist’ - it’ll leave a powerful and positive impression*. No one was gonna be convinced otherwise anyway. The crowd after all, is a woman.

* Disclaimer: Do not try this near anyone that might fire you or get you fired unless you are already wealthy. Then you’ll be broke and unable to give me your money.

Comment below. Keep it civilized but otherwise fire away!