G. emails:
Greetings~
I will try to be quick with my worries, as it has brought to me considerable distress over my beliefs. I message you for help, because you were one of the few people to get me interested in this.
To introduce myself, I’m a Greek artist, interested with philosophy and ideas, and sensitive to them I guess. I first got exposed to group interests through HBD several months ago, and it caused me to have a breakdown, having to revisit certain beliefs I had about IQ, as I had a bit of a universalist/lefist view. It didn’t seem that bad then, but I was having a hard time changing myself, the whole process of change not being the problem, the issue being where it would lead me. I didnt want to become a ‘bad person’, to become something I considered reprehensible but that I couldn’t reject, thus causing me trouble. I’ve been having similar issue with neoreactionaries thinkers, the old school who try to argue against the liberal traditions of the west, and the sensitivity that I have to the individual has carried me through.
What happened a few days ago was that I got into the hard stuff. I started with Kevin MacDonald, but I ended up with White nationalism, William Hunter Pierce sort of stuff, the sort of race/ethnic centrism that argues for separation on the low end, and superiority and domination on the other. It has been traumatic for me, considering that even the SSRIs I am taking are not doing as well as I expected them.
The issue stems that this whole discussion about race and intelligence, the first phase being just accepting a general HBD stance while still remaining philosophically the same, the second my understanding of race-based questions, and the whole trouble I have had with squaring my philosophical views with what these people are saying. It feels like its trying to obliterate my views and trying to supplant them inside me, leading a lot of pain and crying on my end. I believe basically that human beings, if they understand things, have almost infinite abilities to change and cope with the world, that it is ideas that are the most important. Yet, here comes an ideology saying its not ideas, but genes and race that are important.
What specifically distressed me I guess is the hard stuff.
Recently I have begun reading Revilo Oliver’s work, and I have to admit, as somebody a bit on the center, it has distressed me a bit. He seems to be extreme in his views even for me, essentially focusing on total biological determinism in the potential of man, on disparaging Christianity and the faith, on saying how we are a nothing organism in the middle of a rock, and we will be only superior compared to other races if we biologically overtake and over-breed them. That’s not even getting into his ideas about Aryan/racial view of history. This goes against a lot of the thinking of WNs, which at least nominally in regards to not messing with other races, and the other minor issues of having a white ethno-state. I can somehow not mind and reject his whole stupidity about white aryan supremacy and the jews and the holocaust, but its still bringing me a lot of pain. It’s that he is smart, and even when I can ascertain when he is making obviously insane statements, like literal Jewish conspiracies where they control everything, I still am duped by the rest he says.
I’d like to know how one can deal with stuff like that. I seemed to have basically stumbled upon extreme right stuff, literal radicalizing myself, but its so intellectually well presented I can’t get it out of my mind, and I don’t want to become an extreme racialist such as himself.
Jim* says:
On that question of when to withdraw loyalty — obviously a good question. I’ve been thinking about it in relation to my family’s emphasis on “Education” when I was growing up. They encouraged me to be loyal to that institution, but as I grew older, I saw that the thing they valued in “Education” was not the institution, but “Education-itself.” And things became really interesting when I discovered for myself in the echelons of higher-education that the institutions of Education had become corrupt. But I simultaneously discovered that there was a reality (“Education itself”) behind the institutions that is effectively transcendent.
So the same *might* be said of various national projects — to some degree I think “American” as an institution, refers to something greater than merely the forms of statehood that currently exist under that label. It was an idea, and in that idea, something like a spirit. But once the institutions responsible for protecting & cultivating that spirit become corrupt, you have to return to the spirit itself and try to start a new institution, under a new name perhaps, etc.
But I asked about Judaism as I have asked others about Catholicism. How is it that Jews are able to retain loyalty to an institution which is so far afield from what it was originally intended, and isn’t it time to cut losses? To me, Talmudic Judaism seems no more true to Torah/Temple Judaism than staying loyal to pozzed America is true to that original spirit of Americanism.
You don’t have to testify here. And you also don’t need to deal with this question on your show if you find it disadvantageous or whatever, but the idea seems pretty well-defined to me so I thought I’d mention it. Plato says his true philosophers “are those who are able to grasp what is always the same in all respects, while those who are not able to do so but wander among what is many and varies in all ways are not philosophers…”
The Greek mind seeks the eternal, and so its first loyalty (as Kevin said) is to God, not to any institution.
1 Cor 1:22 — “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom.”