Not sure that I buy the empathy thing. Consider environmentalism and animal rights. Compared to other races, whites are much more concerned with those things. Like, PETA is super white. Blacks enjoy pit bulls and dog fights. Asians also enjoy dogs, as snacks. Maybe dogs are special. But you can also look at environmentalism more broadly. Whites love hiking, whales. I mean, Snow WHITE’s superpower was talking to animals. Are white people empathizing with animals and nature? If so, interspecies empathy would seem to bridge a wider gap than interracial empathy. Or maybe, whites are relating to animals in some other way than empathy. If whites don’t have empathy for animals, whatever they experience is at least somewhat reasonably effective in being empathy-like.
Great objection! I think, that as Kryptokogal noted cuteness is another primal source of empathy. I also think, mirror neuron activation specifically towards animals is likely to occur when a race spends a considerable amount of time reliant on domesticated animals (Most East Asians are lactose intolerant) because it increases the quality of animal products (pre-factory farming). Upper Caste Indians, themselves largely lactose tolerant, are known for being pretty concerned with the humane treatment of animals.
There's hardly gonna be an evolutionary punishment for evolving mirror neuronal empathy towards mammals. Outside of Africa (where competition with Elephants had it's existential qualities); humans have long been the unambiguous victors in conflicts with animals. It's in conflicts with other humans that they need all the psychological help they can get.
Also mirror-neuronal empathy for animals is probably not as widespread even among Euros as you imagine. Cat burnings were going on in France as late as the late 1700s. Fox-Throwing used to be quite a German hobby (1600s). In Gone With The Wind (1930s) a horse is whipped to death and the audience didn't exactly emerge hating Scarlet-O-Hara; and references to country-folk drowning dogs are hardly absent or shocking in the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.
Also it's not really equally extended to all animals but ones that have particularly cute/neotenous features (big round head, little face and big round eyes). People bred floppy eared dogs to look like eternal puppies. Cats are basically the exact size of a human baby their whole life. Cultures without dogs simply could not have competed or survived...we can't see for shit in the dark and if you're just out there on the plains at night you better have a dog to bark his ass off when he smells a bear nearby. Once you get to agriculture and specifically long term storage of grains and food as is necessary over a long cold winter like you get up north, you need cats or you're going to be eaten out of all your food stores by mice and rats (and then probably get the plague). Actually some people think it was killing cats that was partly responsible for the Black Death...seems possible that more cat haters died and more cat likers lived through the plague so maybe some Europeans actually have a genetic pressure event causing them to be more sympathetic to mammals. I just pulled that out of my ass but it makes sense to me. Even in suburbia today, people get mouse and rat problems, but not if you have pets. That's keeps them away.
Seems to be a result of the Hajnal Line and whites (or Western European whites anyhow) being genetically selected for lower ethnocentrism and even species-centrism. I'm a bit skeptical that most American whites are going to be convinced to support racial separation as easily as other races, we have a natural tendency and cultural instinct toward fascination with things that are exotic and different.
I have more empathy for animals than I do humans and this true of a LOT of people. It's not really okay to just say it like that, but it's obviously true. We all watch TV and movies where humans are endlessly being slaughtered and murdered and don't bat an eye. But if a dog gets killed in a movie?? Everyone will flip the fuck out and hate the movie. I was just watching Fallout which is basically like this...a dozen people get dismembered and murdered every episode. But a dog got locked into a freezer box for like 3 minutes on the show and I could barely tolerate watching the episode before it was freed (and guarantee that was the standard audience response).
I thought more about this, and I think I agree with most of your argument in the post. I come from an aggressively diverse place in every possible way and I know that it clearly drives people to self-segregate into their religious, racial, kinship bubbles, to whatever extent possible. You don’t even need incentives tbh, you just need to take away the taboos. Most well-adjusted adults are intuitively aware of the line past which they cannot muster any empathy no matter what their ideological beliefs are. Children mix a lot more freely though and should be allowed to(but not forced to) in children-only spaces of schools and sports venues. In general, I can get behind anything that removes restrictions on people’s free choices- that’s my belief in the moral intuitions of everyday ordinary people being mostly sound ig. The part about pushing people in a certain direction by subverting their incentives is a bit less palatable, but it honestly wont even be needed here, I think.
I wondered about the effects of childhood association and exposure to different kinds of people because it is clearly a confounding variable in measuring the differences in empathy. Genetic distance is obviously a continuous spectrum and we evolved in an environment with quite a few “cousin” human species that filled some of the gap between us and other animal species. There has to be a clear threshold of genetic distance past which you lose empathy for people, and my guess is that this threshold is actually quite malleable in your childhood based on your environmental conditions, but it is more or less fixed for adults.
One more thing to consider, is that you don’t need to completely shield people from their out-groups. In fact, it seems to give people an implicit memento mori to be more keenly aware of the empathy distinction. If you take it too far and shield people from any reminders of their out-groups they just become decadent and complacent and start thinking in stupid universalisms. To that end, a small amount of “contamination” and contact with out-group communities is necessary.
"The part about pushing people in a certain direction by subverting their incentives is a bit less palatable, but it honestly wont even be needed here, I think."
- We've had way too much heavy pressure in the opposing direction I think for a mere abandonment of it to be feasible though. At best you get a society a little more like the pre-woke one where everyone acts hypocritically all the time, some of the children take the lies seriously and you end up exactly where you are now again unless you basically eliminate sincerity from the human condition. Whites will inevitably compete to show devotion to the civil faith by actively increasing integration unless it is entirely undermined as an ideal.
I don't think positive incentives for separation alone (the only ones I'm promoting as govt policy) will make America minority free or fully segregated, so I'm confident we'll have enough minority exposure to, inasmuch as it might work that way, avoid falling into braindead universalism. But I'm not sure it does work that way for Euros; except maybe with Blacks.
Your evolutionary points about human behavior are not wrong. But I disagree with the lesson you take from them. See, this is exactly why the left and many people have basically made evolutionary psychology a taboo topic that they hate. Because they assume "is" means "ought" or that just because evolution wired in a tendency that it provides a good excuse for submitting it to it. I don't like this because I personally am fascinated by and have always loved learning about evolution since I was like 8. So I don't like the topic becoming taboo or right coded.
So here's the thing: you say if your truly believe in evolution, you must accept your premises as true. Well, I REALLY believe in evolution. I talk about it IRL probably almost every day. It informs my entire worldview and way I understand people.
But I also don't give a fuck what evolution wants for me. My goals and evolution's goals are not the same. Like you said: "Evolution doesn’t care one bit if you die or how you die". That is absolutely true. So I also don't care one bit what evolution wants for me. I will pursue my own interests and goals, thank you very much. I'm not interested in being a slave to some unthinking force of nature. I consider it my mission to game evolution and the traps it has set for me. Not to bow down to it. It consider me a meatbag that's here to pass on genes and get out of the way. Fuck that.
All that said, a couple things. Romantic love is literally the weakest, most unreliable, and most fleeting of all forms of love. Eros was considered lowest on the totem pole of forms of love by the Greeks, for that reason. It lasts long enough to get to weaning stage and that's about it. So I wouldn't uphold it as the highest virtue, love based on friendship (philia) is far longer lasting and deep and true, according to classical philosophers, and I tend to agree. So your AI Alexander II is likely wise, bc eros is compelling in the same way that crack or heroine is compelling, while philia or agape are much more solid, reliable, and long lasting (if that's what you're going for).
As far as cross racial empathy, okay I buy the premise. But also most people feel more empathy for a toddler of any race than they do an adult that looks like them. I'm too lazy to look for the study but people have a more empathic response to children and puppies than they do adults of any race. So does that mean going by your theory we should basically just get rid of most adults and distribute a litter of puppies to everyone? And how do you explain that most American and European adults have more empathy for the babies of entirely different species (so long as they're cute fuzzy mammals) than they do the adults of their own species?
Also, these things collapse in on themselves. No matter where you live or how homogeneous it is, there's always an outgroup to hate. If you live in a diverse metro, you probably feel closer to or more empathy to your race, even if you don't admit it. But if you live in a town where everyone is your race, the animosity just moved to some other division like religion or customs. You can keep dividing this down at every level until you're in a super rural area with just two families, and they're the rivals. There's always a group to fight with.
One last thing...you call yourself a futurist and I assume that means some sort of interest in transhumanist type things or using technology to make humans better (apologies if that's an incorrect assumption). The thing is, it's the more "highly evolved" people who tend towards universalist cosmopolitanism. At least if you go by IQ. One way to look at IQ, which is extremely predictive on many measures, is preference towards and level of comfort with evolutionarily novel situations. The closer one is to a mindset that would be totally happy in a primitive tribe from 20,000 years ago, the lower one's IQ tends to be. Individual variation exists of course, but on average high IQ people are characterized by their preference for and high adaptivity to evolutionarily novel circumstances, which includes more universalist Star Trek like views and less emphasis on kinship affinity. Those mindsets and interest in something like transhumanism are both examples of evolving past evolution, in a sense.
"As far as cross racial empathy, okay I buy the premise. But also most people feel more empathy for a toddler of any race than they do an adult that looks like them. I'm too lazy to look for the study but people have a more empathic response to children and puppies than they do adults of any race. So does that mean going by your theory we should basically just get rid of most adults and distribute a litter of puppies to everyone?"
- You are right that cuteness is clearly another source of primal empathy which I failed to mention in my paper. I'll definitely have to mention it in the follow-up. That being said, maximizing empathy is not literally the only goal in the world lol; and even if it was offing all the adults and replacing the kids is by definition a self defeating way to do it. This isn't a very good reductio.
"No matter where you live or how homogeneous it is, there's always an outgroup to hate. If you live in a diverse metro, you probably feel closer to or more empathy to your race, even if you don't admit it. But if you live in a town where everyone is your race, the animosity just moved to some other division like religion or customs. "
- Well yes, but having same/different values to someone is a pretty legitimate reason to like/dislike them. Only in the liberal mentality where we try to turn the deep, moving and rivalrous sentiments held by billions throughout history into cheap aesthetic substitutes that basically all say the same thing is this even remotely confusing. No Catholicism isn't just cool cathedrals; It's a system of views many of which give me the willies.
The issue with race described here is the existence of clear handicaps in ability to empathize with people EVEN IF THEY DO SHARE your values. Maybe they can be in some cases surpassed; but what's the point of deliberately designing a society on hard-mode? Is this some kind of bizarre quasi-religious soul-purification ritual like Ghandi sleeping naked next to his naked niece but not violating her?
It'd be one thing if we had some incredible things to learn from other races. But at worst you can find over 80% of what is valuable or beautiful within the European world. It's not even like there's a competitive advantage to be found in scouring the low-hanging fruit of almost entirely unproductive peoples. Our almost century long fetish for everything external has kind of picked the fruit clean; before we pretended the grass was edible and made enjoying the dirt a sign of refinement.
"So I also don't care one bit what evolution wants for me. I will pursue my own interests and goals, thank you very much. I'm not interested in being a slave to some unthinking force of nature."
Ok, what are these though?
"The thing is, it's the more "highly evolved" people who tend towards universalist cosmopolitanism. At least if you go by IQ. One way to look at IQ, which is extremely predictive on many measures, is preference towards and level of comfort with evolutionarily novel situations."
True. And this is good. I'm glad hurting foreigners just because they are foreign is not generally celebrated. I'm glad we feel some moral duty to outsiders. And I'm glad we retain an explorer mindset. High IQ Europeans did not generally feel differently back when they almost universally opposed all non-white naturalization and supported segregation.
And the restrictions on Non-Euros came with a policy of remarkable openness to different Euro immigrants and cultures. Normie Americans knew who Edith Piaf was and enjoyed her songs. I guess now some Zoomers remember Derniere Danse from French class.
Yeah, well that's the thing. If you look at the individual gene level, then sure, Ghengis Khan is one of the most evolutionarily successful people ever. But if you look at the population and cultural level...Mongolia is one of the most unsuccessful, backwater cultures on earth and they have had seemingly zero cultural influence on the world despite Ghengis being great great great great grandpa to like a quarter of earth's population.
And which cultures have completely dominated the globe? Not the inward looking ones who only want to do business with their own cousins and kin, that's for sure. Virtually the whole world or at least every place with nice cities speaks English, and uses the US dollar. And for the most part, they didn't even need to do it by genociding or outbreeding anyone else...everyone else wanted to be like them and did whatever they could to become them. It hasn't mattered one bit that people are still pumping out 9 babies each in shithole places...because the best of everyone converts to and becomes cosmopolitan because its just obviously better and preferable to most people, so you don't even have to proselytize. A tiny minority has been dominating global economics and culture for hundreds of years now and everyone else just wants to get in the club (or if they don't it's mostly out of resentment). And which other great civilization are people still obsessed with that's still influencing everyone thousands of years later? That would be the one that had the most diverse collection of people and trading partners and languages, which apparently some huge percentage of US men are still thinking about on a daily basis. Meanwhile no one gaf really about the other mono racial ancient civilizations. Well, except the Vikings, and I think that's mostly just because we imagine them all to have been super hot. So I guess I'm just saying that genetic evolution is one thing, but cultural and memetic evolution is too. And all these antisocial religious guys who think they're going to outbreed the modernists are fooling themselves because even if they ended up like Ghengis (which they won't), insular kinship based cultures historically always lose in the long run.
Don't get me wrong, being obsessed with ethnic diversity for no reason other than a strange religious like commitment is a dumb thing and I quite like my boring neighborhood of quiet people like me who take great pride in our landscaping. And it's almost always a bad idea to force it on people and also obvious that the most demographically diverse locations are also the most self-segregated. But also you can just leave people to their own devices and the people who really just want to hang out with their own family will do that and the people who seek out the best minds and artists and business partners from wherever they come from will also do what they like to do...and those are almost entirely the people whose names are known and remembered in history books. The only time the former get remembered more than a century is if they snap in resentment and go on a murdering spree. So I guess I'm saying let the people who want to stay segregated with kin do so and let the ones who don't want to do so, and hopefully things will be fine though you have to watch out for and guard against the murderous resentment sprees.
As for what my personal goals are that don't line up with evolution's goals for me? Mostly I like learning new things and having my mind blown and laughing really hard and trying to make others laugh and creating beauty in my surroundings and figuring out how the world works and getting to look at beautiful views and growing my garden and taking care of my pets and making friends. Evolution does not care if I get to do any of those things. But lucky for me I am not a bat or a mouse or a horse, so I am blessed with fortune to be in the position of getting to decide. Isn't it glorious? Would you ever want to be anything else, other than something you got to choose?
Also, I disagree that whites have been culturally tricked into not preferring their own race. (1) Whites are more individualistic than other races. They want to be valued for their own accomplishments and qualities, not their ancestry. (2) Whites like to signal to each other about their universalist concern and fair-mindedness and impartiality. They do this for their own status, status primarily among other whites. (3) Liberalism, including freedom of association, is a cultural product of whites. Forgive the critical-race theory, but liberalism is made by whites for whites, because whites like it and are good at it. It fits the white psychologic disposition.
Not every white fits the above 3 qualities. But, they are especially true for whites having high human capital.
I agree, I think there is a bit of cope going on because a lot of people on the right WANT whites to act like other races because they think it would be in their self-interest. I'm skeptical you can separate the unique aspects of white psychology though, perhaps we were able to be more xenophobic in the past due to limited exposure to other races but that doesn't mean we will just suddenly go back to being that way.
I wasn't aware of the studies on the mirror neuron effect. I suspect that I'd see a null response for blacks and most other races, but possibly a mirror response to east-asians, because I grew up a weeaboo surrounded by Japanese made gadgets.
Though, as your example with the Asexual Emperor Scott Alexander II points out; I may be an outlier in that respect. Certainly the Xenophilic elites of Western society are inflicting their minority psychological nature onto the rest of society, which can be shown to align to what you'd expect of evolution acting upon races. The average person is heavily propagandized to fight crime think that stems from their own innate psychology clashing with top down ideological messaging.
I think for me it might go in order from whites> Asians > blacks but I think most white people are not gonna have a complete null response to any race (could be wrong about that though). I think if I were to see a video of a black guy getting brutally murdered I would be pretty disturbed and mentally imagine that happening to me, granted the response would be stronger if he was white or had other characteristics in common with me.
Yeah, I just mean a null response to the test in the studies. Seeing someone chopped up might be operating on a different mechanism entirely, for all we know.
Half the country went completely apeshit from seeing a drug addict multiple felon get "murdered" (or at least die) on a couple minute long video in 2020, and he was a big black guy, so yeah.
Not sure that I buy the empathy thing. Consider environmentalism and animal rights. Compared to other races, whites are much more concerned with those things. Like, PETA is super white. Blacks enjoy pit bulls and dog fights. Asians also enjoy dogs, as snacks. Maybe dogs are special. But you can also look at environmentalism more broadly. Whites love hiking, whales. I mean, Snow WHITE’s superpower was talking to animals. Are white people empathizing with animals and nature? If so, interspecies empathy would seem to bridge a wider gap than interracial empathy. Or maybe, whites are relating to animals in some other way than empathy. If whites don’t have empathy for animals, whatever they experience is at least somewhat reasonably effective in being empathy-like.
Great objection! I think, that as Kryptokogal noted cuteness is another primal source of empathy. I also think, mirror neuron activation specifically towards animals is likely to occur when a race spends a considerable amount of time reliant on domesticated animals (Most East Asians are lactose intolerant) because it increases the quality of animal products (pre-factory farming). Upper Caste Indians, themselves largely lactose tolerant, are known for being pretty concerned with the humane treatment of animals.
There's hardly gonna be an evolutionary punishment for evolving mirror neuronal empathy towards mammals. Outside of Africa (where competition with Elephants had it's existential qualities); humans have long been the unambiguous victors in conflicts with animals. It's in conflicts with other humans that they need all the psychological help they can get.
Also mirror-neuronal empathy for animals is probably not as widespread even among Euros as you imagine. Cat burnings were going on in France as late as the late 1700s. Fox-Throwing used to be quite a German hobby (1600s). In Gone With The Wind (1930s) a horse is whipped to death and the audience didn't exactly emerge hating Scarlet-O-Hara; and references to country-folk drowning dogs are hardly absent or shocking in the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.
Also it's not really equally extended to all animals but ones that have particularly cute/neotenous features (big round head, little face and big round eyes). People bred floppy eared dogs to look like eternal puppies. Cats are basically the exact size of a human baby their whole life. Cultures without dogs simply could not have competed or survived...we can't see for shit in the dark and if you're just out there on the plains at night you better have a dog to bark his ass off when he smells a bear nearby. Once you get to agriculture and specifically long term storage of grains and food as is necessary over a long cold winter like you get up north, you need cats or you're going to be eaten out of all your food stores by mice and rats (and then probably get the plague). Actually some people think it was killing cats that was partly responsible for the Black Death...seems possible that more cat haters died and more cat likers lived through the plague so maybe some Europeans actually have a genetic pressure event causing them to be more sympathetic to mammals. I just pulled that out of my ass but it makes sense to me. Even in suburbia today, people get mouse and rat problems, but not if you have pets. That's keeps them away.
Seems to be a result of the Hajnal Line and whites (or Western European whites anyhow) being genetically selected for lower ethnocentrism and even species-centrism. I'm a bit skeptical that most American whites are going to be convinced to support racial separation as easily as other races, we have a natural tendency and cultural instinct toward fascination with things that are exotic and different.
I have more empathy for animals than I do humans and this true of a LOT of people. It's not really okay to just say it like that, but it's obviously true. We all watch TV and movies where humans are endlessly being slaughtered and murdered and don't bat an eye. But if a dog gets killed in a movie?? Everyone will flip the fuck out and hate the movie. I was just watching Fallout which is basically like this...a dozen people get dismembered and murdered every episode. But a dog got locked into a freezer box for like 3 minutes on the show and I could barely tolerate watching the episode before it was freed (and guarantee that was the standard audience response).
Yeah, Marley and me was a real tear jerker
I thought more about this, and I think I agree with most of your argument in the post. I come from an aggressively diverse place in every possible way and I know that it clearly drives people to self-segregate into their religious, racial, kinship bubbles, to whatever extent possible. You don’t even need incentives tbh, you just need to take away the taboos. Most well-adjusted adults are intuitively aware of the line past which they cannot muster any empathy no matter what their ideological beliefs are. Children mix a lot more freely though and should be allowed to(but not forced to) in children-only spaces of schools and sports venues. In general, I can get behind anything that removes restrictions on people’s free choices- that’s my belief in the moral intuitions of everyday ordinary people being mostly sound ig. The part about pushing people in a certain direction by subverting their incentives is a bit less palatable, but it honestly wont even be needed here, I think.
I wondered about the effects of childhood association and exposure to different kinds of people because it is clearly a confounding variable in measuring the differences in empathy. Genetic distance is obviously a continuous spectrum and we evolved in an environment with quite a few “cousin” human species that filled some of the gap between us and other animal species. There has to be a clear threshold of genetic distance past which you lose empathy for people, and my guess is that this threshold is actually quite malleable in your childhood based on your environmental conditions, but it is more or less fixed for adults.
One more thing to consider, is that you don’t need to completely shield people from their out-groups. In fact, it seems to give people an implicit memento mori to be more keenly aware of the empathy distinction. If you take it too far and shield people from any reminders of their out-groups they just become decadent and complacent and start thinking in stupid universalisms. To that end, a small amount of “contamination” and contact with out-group communities is necessary.
"The part about pushing people in a certain direction by subverting their incentives is a bit less palatable, but it honestly wont even be needed here, I think."
- We've had way too much heavy pressure in the opposing direction I think for a mere abandonment of it to be feasible though. At best you get a society a little more like the pre-woke one where everyone acts hypocritically all the time, some of the children take the lies seriously and you end up exactly where you are now again unless you basically eliminate sincerity from the human condition. Whites will inevitably compete to show devotion to the civil faith by actively increasing integration unless it is entirely undermined as an ideal.
I don't think positive incentives for separation alone (the only ones I'm promoting as govt policy) will make America minority free or fully segregated, so I'm confident we'll have enough minority exposure to, inasmuch as it might work that way, avoid falling into braindead universalism. But I'm not sure it does work that way for Euros; except maybe with Blacks.
Your evolutionary points about human behavior are not wrong. But I disagree with the lesson you take from them. See, this is exactly why the left and many people have basically made evolutionary psychology a taboo topic that they hate. Because they assume "is" means "ought" or that just because evolution wired in a tendency that it provides a good excuse for submitting it to it. I don't like this because I personally am fascinated by and have always loved learning about evolution since I was like 8. So I don't like the topic becoming taboo or right coded.
So here's the thing: you say if your truly believe in evolution, you must accept your premises as true. Well, I REALLY believe in evolution. I talk about it IRL probably almost every day. It informs my entire worldview and way I understand people.
But I also don't give a fuck what evolution wants for me. My goals and evolution's goals are not the same. Like you said: "Evolution doesn’t care one bit if you die or how you die". That is absolutely true. So I also don't care one bit what evolution wants for me. I will pursue my own interests and goals, thank you very much. I'm not interested in being a slave to some unthinking force of nature. I consider it my mission to game evolution and the traps it has set for me. Not to bow down to it. It consider me a meatbag that's here to pass on genes and get out of the way. Fuck that.
All that said, a couple things. Romantic love is literally the weakest, most unreliable, and most fleeting of all forms of love. Eros was considered lowest on the totem pole of forms of love by the Greeks, for that reason. It lasts long enough to get to weaning stage and that's about it. So I wouldn't uphold it as the highest virtue, love based on friendship (philia) is far longer lasting and deep and true, according to classical philosophers, and I tend to agree. So your AI Alexander II is likely wise, bc eros is compelling in the same way that crack or heroine is compelling, while philia or agape are much more solid, reliable, and long lasting (if that's what you're going for).
As far as cross racial empathy, okay I buy the premise. But also most people feel more empathy for a toddler of any race than they do an adult that looks like them. I'm too lazy to look for the study but people have a more empathic response to children and puppies than they do adults of any race. So does that mean going by your theory we should basically just get rid of most adults and distribute a litter of puppies to everyone? And how do you explain that most American and European adults have more empathy for the babies of entirely different species (so long as they're cute fuzzy mammals) than they do the adults of their own species?
Also, these things collapse in on themselves. No matter where you live or how homogeneous it is, there's always an outgroup to hate. If you live in a diverse metro, you probably feel closer to or more empathy to your race, even if you don't admit it. But if you live in a town where everyone is your race, the animosity just moved to some other division like religion or customs. You can keep dividing this down at every level until you're in a super rural area with just two families, and they're the rivals. There's always a group to fight with.
One last thing...you call yourself a futurist and I assume that means some sort of interest in transhumanist type things or using technology to make humans better (apologies if that's an incorrect assumption). The thing is, it's the more "highly evolved" people who tend towards universalist cosmopolitanism. At least if you go by IQ. One way to look at IQ, which is extremely predictive on many measures, is preference towards and level of comfort with evolutionarily novel situations. The closer one is to a mindset that would be totally happy in a primitive tribe from 20,000 years ago, the lower one's IQ tends to be. Individual variation exists of course, but on average high IQ people are characterized by their preference for and high adaptivity to evolutionarily novel circumstances, which includes more universalist Star Trek like views and less emphasis on kinship affinity. Those mindsets and interest in something like transhumanism are both examples of evolving past evolution, in a sense.
"As far as cross racial empathy, okay I buy the premise. But also most people feel more empathy for a toddler of any race than they do an adult that looks like them. I'm too lazy to look for the study but people have a more empathic response to children and puppies than they do adults of any race. So does that mean going by your theory we should basically just get rid of most adults and distribute a litter of puppies to everyone?"
- You are right that cuteness is clearly another source of primal empathy which I failed to mention in my paper. I'll definitely have to mention it in the follow-up. That being said, maximizing empathy is not literally the only goal in the world lol; and even if it was offing all the adults and replacing the kids is by definition a self defeating way to do it. This isn't a very good reductio.
"No matter where you live or how homogeneous it is, there's always an outgroup to hate. If you live in a diverse metro, you probably feel closer to or more empathy to your race, even if you don't admit it. But if you live in a town where everyone is your race, the animosity just moved to some other division like religion or customs. "
- Well yes, but having same/different values to someone is a pretty legitimate reason to like/dislike them. Only in the liberal mentality where we try to turn the deep, moving and rivalrous sentiments held by billions throughout history into cheap aesthetic substitutes that basically all say the same thing is this even remotely confusing. No Catholicism isn't just cool cathedrals; It's a system of views many of which give me the willies.
The issue with race described here is the existence of clear handicaps in ability to empathize with people EVEN IF THEY DO SHARE your values. Maybe they can be in some cases surpassed; but what's the point of deliberately designing a society on hard-mode? Is this some kind of bizarre quasi-religious soul-purification ritual like Ghandi sleeping naked next to his naked niece but not violating her?
It'd be one thing if we had some incredible things to learn from other races. But at worst you can find over 80% of what is valuable or beautiful within the European world. It's not even like there's a competitive advantage to be found in scouring the low-hanging fruit of almost entirely unproductive peoples. Our almost century long fetish for everything external has kind of picked the fruit clean; before we pretended the grass was edible and made enjoying the dirt a sign of refinement.
"So I also don't care one bit what evolution wants for me. I will pursue my own interests and goals, thank you very much. I'm not interested in being a slave to some unthinking force of nature."
Ok, what are these though?
"The thing is, it's the more "highly evolved" people who tend towards universalist cosmopolitanism. At least if you go by IQ. One way to look at IQ, which is extremely predictive on many measures, is preference towards and level of comfort with evolutionarily novel situations."
True. And this is good. I'm glad hurting foreigners just because they are foreign is not generally celebrated. I'm glad we feel some moral duty to outsiders. And I'm glad we retain an explorer mindset. High IQ Europeans did not generally feel differently back when they almost universally opposed all non-white naturalization and supported segregation.
And the restrictions on Non-Euros came with a policy of remarkable openness to different Euro immigrants and cultures. Normie Americans knew who Edith Piaf was and enjoyed her songs. I guess now some Zoomers remember Derniere Danse from French class.
Yeah, well that's the thing. If you look at the individual gene level, then sure, Ghengis Khan is one of the most evolutionarily successful people ever. But if you look at the population and cultural level...Mongolia is one of the most unsuccessful, backwater cultures on earth and they have had seemingly zero cultural influence on the world despite Ghengis being great great great great grandpa to like a quarter of earth's population.
And which cultures have completely dominated the globe? Not the inward looking ones who only want to do business with their own cousins and kin, that's for sure. Virtually the whole world or at least every place with nice cities speaks English, and uses the US dollar. And for the most part, they didn't even need to do it by genociding or outbreeding anyone else...everyone else wanted to be like them and did whatever they could to become them. It hasn't mattered one bit that people are still pumping out 9 babies each in shithole places...because the best of everyone converts to and becomes cosmopolitan because its just obviously better and preferable to most people, so you don't even have to proselytize. A tiny minority has been dominating global economics and culture for hundreds of years now and everyone else just wants to get in the club (or if they don't it's mostly out of resentment). And which other great civilization are people still obsessed with that's still influencing everyone thousands of years later? That would be the one that had the most diverse collection of people and trading partners and languages, which apparently some huge percentage of US men are still thinking about on a daily basis. Meanwhile no one gaf really about the other mono racial ancient civilizations. Well, except the Vikings, and I think that's mostly just because we imagine them all to have been super hot. So I guess I'm just saying that genetic evolution is one thing, but cultural and memetic evolution is too. And all these antisocial religious guys who think they're going to outbreed the modernists are fooling themselves because even if they ended up like Ghengis (which they won't), insular kinship based cultures historically always lose in the long run.
Don't get me wrong, being obsessed with ethnic diversity for no reason other than a strange religious like commitment is a dumb thing and I quite like my boring neighborhood of quiet people like me who take great pride in our landscaping. And it's almost always a bad idea to force it on people and also obvious that the most demographically diverse locations are also the most self-segregated. But also you can just leave people to their own devices and the people who really just want to hang out with their own family will do that and the people who seek out the best minds and artists and business partners from wherever they come from will also do what they like to do...and those are almost entirely the people whose names are known and remembered in history books. The only time the former get remembered more than a century is if they snap in resentment and go on a murdering spree. So I guess I'm saying let the people who want to stay segregated with kin do so and let the ones who don't want to do so, and hopefully things will be fine though you have to watch out for and guard against the murderous resentment sprees.
As for what my personal goals are that don't line up with evolution's goals for me? Mostly I like learning new things and having my mind blown and laughing really hard and trying to make others laugh and creating beauty in my surroundings and figuring out how the world works and getting to look at beautiful views and growing my garden and taking care of my pets and making friends. Evolution does not care if I get to do any of those things. But lucky for me I am not a bat or a mouse or a horse, so I am blessed with fortune to be in the position of getting to decide. Isn't it glorious? Would you ever want to be anything else, other than something you got to choose?
Also, I disagree that whites have been culturally tricked into not preferring their own race. (1) Whites are more individualistic than other races. They want to be valued for their own accomplishments and qualities, not their ancestry. (2) Whites like to signal to each other about their universalist concern and fair-mindedness and impartiality. They do this for their own status, status primarily among other whites. (3) Liberalism, including freedom of association, is a cultural product of whites. Forgive the critical-race theory, but liberalism is made by whites for whites, because whites like it and are good at it. It fits the white psychologic disposition.
Not every white fits the above 3 qualities. But, they are especially true for whites having high human capital.
I agree, I think there is a bit of cope going on because a lot of people on the right WANT whites to act like other races because they think it would be in their self-interest. I'm skeptical you can separate the unique aspects of white psychology though, perhaps we were able to be more xenophobic in the past due to limited exposure to other races but that doesn't mean we will just suddenly go back to being that way.
Why do I see the hollow face for what it is? I don't see the illusion. I intuitively saw the front and back sides.
Globalists use every tools they can get their hands on but the Right are arguing over whether this is true or not. Will to power is not in them.
Good post! You’re becoming one of my faves on j the stack
I wasn't aware of the studies on the mirror neuron effect. I suspect that I'd see a null response for blacks and most other races, but possibly a mirror response to east-asians, because I grew up a weeaboo surrounded by Japanese made gadgets.
Though, as your example with the Asexual Emperor Scott Alexander II points out; I may be an outlier in that respect. Certainly the Xenophilic elites of Western society are inflicting their minority psychological nature onto the rest of society, which can be shown to align to what you'd expect of evolution acting upon races. The average person is heavily propagandized to fight crime think that stems from their own innate psychology clashing with top down ideological messaging.
I think for me it might go in order from whites> Asians > blacks but I think most white people are not gonna have a complete null response to any race (could be wrong about that though). I think if I were to see a video of a black guy getting brutally murdered I would be pretty disturbed and mentally imagine that happening to me, granted the response would be stronger if he was white or had other characteristics in common with me.
Yeah, I just mean a null response to the test in the studies. Seeing someone chopped up might be operating on a different mechanism entirely, for all we know.
Half the country went completely apeshit from seeing a drug addict multiple felon get "murdered" (or at least die) on a couple minute long video in 2020, and he was a big black guy, so yeah.