What is Reddit's opinion of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future?

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> I won’t be interacting with them often if I’m Quebec.

you will in Montreal lmao. like others in this thread said: Montreal is full of Anglos, and "Anglicized" immigrants who hate the Quebecois. Why they stay, I don't know... I guess we're not that bad after all.

> Regardless, I doubt they have had to go through what you and I have; the beginnings of the destruction of our cultures.

They are, and they're applauding it. Trudeau called them the "first post-National state" and they love it. Toronto is like 70% visible minorities and they applaud it as a successful multicultural experiment. Vancouver is essentially a Chinese colony, and all they can say is that it makes houses too expensive.

> What I am fundamentally getting at is that you and I face the same issues against our cultures; would it not be better to stand united against the common issue than watch either one be destroyed first?

No, because Anglos have been literally trying to destroy Quebec for centuries. There is no incentive for us to ally with them.

> And trust me, WE didn’t choose any of this. We aren’t responsible for it at all. It’s the damned politicians and radical liberals that have caused this, not men and women like me.

I doubt this. You brought up WW2, but it is Britain who fought precisely against ethno-nationalism and anything that threatened their global financial hegemony. And they continue to do the same thing with the help of Americans. The Anglosphere has been responsible for a ridiculous amount of war and massacres, and it's the "money above all else" ideology that Britain pushed into the world that is used as the justification for mass immigration.

There is also plenty of psycho-evolutionary work that shows that the Anglos & Scandanavians are just like this - they don't comprehend the threat that 'outsiders' pose until it's too late.

This picture always makes me laugh because one of best friends looks exactly like this guy.

Anyway, my reading recently is very blackpilled, mostly Ivan Illich (Deschooling society), Uncle Ted and Ellul (The technological society) etc.

I'd recommend reading Kevin Macdonald's new book though, it discusses the evolutionary psychology of Europe and how it shapes our cultures and politics today. It turns out, not all of Europe is the same! Shocking right?

For something a bit less rigorous, but something to think about, there is Jack Donovan's "A more complete beast". If you haven't already read his earlier books "The way of men" and "Becoming a barbarian" I'd also read those.

Lastly, Mika Ma's Harassment Architecture was hilarious, like Mr. Post's shitposting but on crack.

> It’s not easy finding an objective person today.

I don't agree, if you understand that 'objective' doesn't mean not choosing a political side. Some sides are based on informed opinions, and some aren't.

The first two links I gave you are informed opinions, there is no subjective bias. Bill Whittle, who has some great videos but isn't very active, and Professor Kevin MacDonald. And regarding the other post, if you want to read why both that article and Peterson are spreading false propaganda about Europe and White Nationalism: https://www.amazon.com/Individualism-Western-Liberal-Tradition-Evolutionary/dp/1089691483

Carl Linnaeus was probably the first serious scientific racist, and his characterisation of Homo Europaeus albus is as follows:

• Skin colour, medical temperament, and body posture: White, sanguine, muscular
  
• Physical traits: Plenty of yellow hair; blue eyes
  
• Behaviour: Light, wise, inventor
  
• Manner of clothing: Protected by tight clothing
• Form of government: Governed by rites

Make of that what you will. (In contrast, Homo Asiaticus is «Stern, haughty, greedy» in terms or behaviour and also «Governed by opinions». I think Carl would've approved of modern personality-score-based discrimination against Asians in American unis, but that's just my opinion; Slavs are mongoloids after all, if you squint).

We've gone a long way since then in most domains of biological knowledge and taxonomy. It would be rather easy to formulate what «White» means if serious constructive (as opposed to critical and deconstructive) scholarship on this topic was permitted in the mainstream, akin to the never ending stream of work on what it means to be a Jew. Aforementioned Kevin MacDonald, as it happens, has a book on that (he's not driven solely by negation) called Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. I believe it’s more rigorous and insightful than his other ones.

Some quotes:

> A major thesis of this book is that two influential strands are necessary for understanding the central features of the peoples and cultures of Western Europe: an aristocratic warrior culture (termed “aristocratic individualism,” in which egalitarianism is limited to aristocratic peers and deriving ultimately from the Indo-Europeans), and the hunter-gatherer (h-g) strand (i.e., “egalitarian individualism,” deriving ultimately from primeval northern h-gs)…
Thus an important thrust of Western culture has been to regulate behavior in order to create a relatively more egalitarian social structure—in other words, to recreate the conditions of h-g culture. As discussed in Chapter 5, this tendency was reinforced by the Church during the Middle Ages for its own reasons.
Love—another aspect of individual choice—has been valued far more in the West than in the other cultures of the world. Marriage in collectivist societies (i.e., the vast majority of human societies; see Chapter 4) is based on marrying relatives fairly independently of their personal characteristics.[230]  In European societies dating as far back as records can be found, spouses were chosen based on a variety of personal characteristics, including the personality trait of Love/Nurturance underlying close relationships of affection and intimacy.[231] …
Cross-cultural research shows differences in a wide range of traits related ultimately to individualism. Joseph Henrich and colleagues reviewed research showing differences between subjects from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) nations and subjects in a wide range of other cultures on social traits (fairness, cooperation, moral reasoning, self-concept and related motivations), perception (visual perception and spatial reasoning) and cognition (categorization and inferential induction, reasoning styles).[237]
> ...Regarding social behavior, much research has centered around the ultimatum game where anonymous strangers have a one-shot interaction for a sum of real money. […] If subjects are motivated purely by self-interest, responders should always accept any positive offer; knowing this, a self-interested proposer should offer anything greater than zero.
Subjects from the U.S., which Henrich et al. found to be the most individualist society in their sample, generally offer between 40–50 percent, and offers of less than 30 percent are typically rejected even though doing so is irrational and a form of altruistic punishment—i.e., the person refusing the offer is punishing the proposer at cost to self. Evolutionists have argued that such tendencies could only have evolved among people who knew the reputation of those they were dealing with—humans who evolved in small groups where the vast majority of interactions was with familiar people. ... Another study on a wider range of cultures replicated the finding on donation and the pro-cooperation effects of being punished. However, subjects from non-Western countries donated less (were less cooperative) to start with and were more likely to respond to punishment with revenge rather than increased cooperation.
…This suggests the fascinating possibility that a key strategy for any group intending to turn Europeans against themselves would be to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people.
WEIRD people tend to view themselves as independent and self-contained rather than enmeshed in social relationships and with a strong sense of social roles. They see themselves as having various personality traits (e.g., introversion/extraversion) that explain their behavior rather than having various socially prescribed roles (e.g., behavior appropriate for males but not females). They also tend to have higher self-image and are more likely to engage in self-serving biases, whereas in many non-Western societies, especially East Asian, people are more self-effacing. WEIRD people value a sense of freedom and are more likely to believe that their actions are freely chosen. On the other hand, people in non-Western societies have less of a sense that their actions are freely chosen and are more willing to rely on trusted others to make decisions for them. Moreover, in studies where subjects are paired with several other people who claim something that is obviously incorrect, Westerners are more likely to dissent from the consensus (although even most Westerners go along with the consensus).
In non-Western societies based on extended kinship, morality is defined in terms of whether an action satisfies obligations within the family or kinship group, whereas in individualist societies, morality is thought of as satisfying abstract notions of justice such as Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative…
WEIRD people also tend to have important cognitive differences from non-Westerners. We tend more toward analytical reasoning (detaching objects from context, attending to the intrinsic characteristics of objects, and developing rules for explaining and predicting phenomena) as opposed to holistic reasoning (attending to relationships between objects and their surrounding field). …For example, memory for objects is worse among East Asians if the background is removed compared to Westerners, implying that Westerners pay less attention to the background and relationships between background and objects in it. Moreover, Westerners tend to categorize objects on the basis of rules that are independent of function and hence more abstract whereas non-Westerners are more likely to categorize on the basis of function and contextual relationship.
These differences in a wide range of areas strongly suggest a biological basis for Western individualism. The differences between individualist and collectivist cultures—whether in fairness and altruistic punishment, moral reasoning, cognition, or perception—are all “of a piece;” they all fit into a consistent pattern in which Westerners detach themselves from social, cognitive, and perceptual contexts, whereas non-Westerners see the world in a deeply embedded manner. …The reputation-based moral communities of the West thus have deep historical roots both in Indo-European culture and in hunter-gatherer culture. In Chapter 5 I noted that Christian Europe had become a moral community based on Christian religious beliefs rather than ethnic or national identity. Moreover, the abbots and prelates of the medieval Church, the Puritan and Quaker religious leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth centuries discussed in later chapters carried on the primeval tendency to create moral communities as a source of identity. Finally, as discussed below and in Chapter 9, such moral communities have come to define the contemporary culture of the West.
> These moral communities are indigenous products of the culture of the West—products of Western culture in the same way that kinship-based clans, cousin marriage, sequestering women, and the harems of elite males are products of the people of the Middle East.
> Beginning after World War II and accelerating greatly in the 1960s and thereafter, these [egalitarian] moral communities have been defined by the intellectual left which is bent on dispossessing European-derived peoples from territories they have dominated for hundreds, or in the case of Europe, many thousands of years.

The question, thus, is whether this constellation of traits is a) invulnerable to demographic change and b) worthy of perpetuation and defense through some policies strongly informed by population differences.

Ultimately I believe that the answer is no on both counts. For all its beauty and historical grandeur, WEIRD is an awkward, mush-headed phenotype, an unsustainable, naive experiment of nature, a mere smug goodbot with no secure bootchain, as unfit for survival among intelligent kin-driven peoples as Amerindians were unfit for European plagues. Whites, the way they have evolved, are not an ecologically competent branch of Homo.

A maturation is needed. It is, indeed, inevitable. How it will look depends on you too, dear reader.

Related: an ifunny meme.

This is a welcome high-quality discussion and I have little to add except that 1. Holland's book seems like a nice addition to Heinrich's <em>The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous</em> and MacDonald's (yes, that one) <em>Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future</em>. Curiously, two of these came out in 2019, Heinrich's one in 2020 and I wonder if there are more. 2. Everyone seems to ignore The Female Question.

History of ideas and societies is discussed as if only men matter, even in this thread. While in the general case this might be approximately correct, Christianity is a unique religion in that it is tailored to female mind. As a result it has provided women with a natural coordination mechanism and, probably for the fist time in history, has transformed their self-interested manipulation of men into an explicit civilization-building force. This may not be obvious to us through the veil of feminist discourse that condemns Abrahamic faiths wholesale for their patriarchialism. Yet it is true.

The most salient aspect of that tailoring is that Christianity is founded on Love, or more specifically αγάπη: not on simple conservatism or cost-benefit analysis or lawful covenant or submission to divine authority, but on an overriding sentiment. Love is a minor thing to a Pagan man, and an auxilary aspect to a true partiarchical cult. Zeus and Jupiter were flawed, immoral, status-obsessed superhumans who mainly knew lust. There were gods and goddesses of romantic passion, rather far removed from the pinnacle of supernatural hierarchy; there was nothing like metaphysical significance of Love and obviously no society-wide ideation analogous to the whole Bride of The Lamb shebang (even if Vestal Virgins had some power). Judaism already knows love (and has a very curious related notion), but Christianity takes it further. Yahweh is a jealous god, an angry homicidal tribal elder, an abusive codependent father; Jesus is The Perfect Man who loves you unconditionally but whom you can fail, and also a Perfect Infant, and also a Perfect Father. This is a spiritual anchor for the half of humanity that does not invent ideologies. It is no surprise that lesser sluttiness of Christian wives was a major selling point of this new fad in Roman times, and that in our post-religious era women are the last to leave churches and monasteries. And it’s no accident that early feminists had some very confused expectations for female suffrage:

> Catherine Gasquoine Hartley thought suffrage would lead to free love. Sylvia Pankhurst thought it would put an end to war. Many otherwise sane suffragists thought it would, at the very least, put an end to political parties. Government would become a matter of administration rather than politics, as all good progressives desired. And drink would be banned.

Likewise, it makes sense that today’s Conservatives are so fixated on the problem of abortions.

Like Nietzsche said: “woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knoweth only love”, and while it is easy to mock his redpilling takes, I concur. It takes a very abnormal woman to respect or appreciate ideas or persons while not loving them. Few utterances strike me as more archetypally male than “at least it's an ethos”. A woman cares nothing for abstract consistency or principles, and even less for The Left or The Right or Tradition or Revolution. Thousands of years of love-religion have changed the male mind too, albeit incompletely. Chivalric ideal would be unthinkable in Rome. Neither would the Summer of Love, 1967, or mass protests of “Refugees Welcome” variety.

> Western, Christian society is founded on the concept of love (for one's partner, for art, for one's work, etc.). Love is 1) a self-valuable and self-justifying thing, requiring no further argumentation, and 2) deeply personal, tied to individual consciousness. Everything that civilization has created has been created mainly out of love - out of affection, interest, compassion, etc. The most fortunate are those who love their work first and the profit it brings second. From the point of view of common sense, this is understandable too: love allows one to concentrate naturally, without exerting willpower, on the task.
> So the legalization of sex by love in general and homosexual love in particular was quite logical. There are fewer punishments for love. Society became a little more Christian, a little less neuroticized. And that was it.
> But when these trends reach the Third World, they cause mass psychosis in the most banal way.

> You have to understand that in a traditional society, the concept of love does not exist as such. A man from the Third World is driven by lust and self-assertion, and all other matters are only means. That is, mentally, a man from traditional society is an pubescent teenager, a 12 years old, even if he is an ancient aksakal <...>.
> Anyway. In order to prevent these kids from crushing each other, a system of “traditions” – i.e. taboos and punishments – was developed through experience, allowing society to exist at least intermittedly not in the “Lord of the flies” but in “all is quiet in Baghdad” mode. If we take a closer look at these traditions, we'll see that about 10 percent of them concern the boys’ discourse – about drinking, eating, who’s in charge, who gets punched in the face – and the other 90 percent are ways of punishing women. The thing is that a woman has a certain default level of responsibility imprinted into her on a biological level, which is why the main conflict of traditional society arises – a woman who is left to herself will never, ever voluntarily bang with a punk kid. That is why they are degraded to the animal level, conditioned to give sex when they are told to. Thus, by the way, also the addiction to minors.

> Now imagine that “freedom of love” is coming from the godless West - that is, not only do women walk around naked (not “topless” but “totally”), but they also begin to get picky, to curl their lips. And our boys go crazy because of the suddenly unpredictable situation. The whole point of these "conservative revolutions" and other ayatollah-homeini is to drive the woman back under the veil and thus restore at least some confidence in the future for the society.
> And how has the legalization of homosexuality affected us? The last “10%“” of tradition has been cast aside, the innermost taboos of the boys have been thrown out into the sunshine in front of all the fair-minded people.
> They really don't understand why all this is happening (there is no love in their world model), and can find no other explanation than the West's deliberate subversion, coupled with its own deliberate suicide. "They degrade themselves, just to mess with us.

– t. some liberal Russian woman.

> But leftism emerged in Christendom and only Christendom. It's possible this is a coincidence, and that there was something else about Christendom that produced leftist thought. But when the pervasiveness of early Christian polemics against wealth and privilege, and the regularly expressed desire for an inversion of the social hierarchy, is taken into account, I don't think so.

(2.2) Ideas do not explain events or ideas.

Also see this.

(5) Mistakes. What's a major error of judgement you've made in the past about political or moral matters? This could be a descriptive error (e.g., predicting Brexit) or a normative issue that in retrospect you think you got badly wrong (e.g., failing to appreciate the importance of social cohesion).

So very many. It's hard to pick a specific one.

I think one important mistake is the notion of Individualism of the «Western liberal tradition», as Kevin MacDonald calls it. It's not really that.

Everyone is high on their own supply; every group (unless broken and gelded, like Russians in ~1885-1938) attaches a transcendental value to something which appears unworthy or arbitrary to outsiders. And now that we all speak English, it's easy to lose oneself in the other's reflections. Question to native speakers: do you know how English sounds? It sounds professional. It sounds special. It sounds nuanced. Full correspondence of connotations clicks only after a while: Oak Grove is Дубовая роща, Baker street is Булочная улица – silly, homely names, and ideas which are trivial and comfy (many teenagers were disappointed upon learning the lyrics to their favorite songs). Same with freedom. In practice, it's the freedom to be liked in a community. Archetypal Westerners, unlike the more clannish or lower-trust peoples, do not have the unreserved (but also demanding) support of family/clan, and thus they rely on moral approval of local consensus. Basically they are moral people, but without absolute morality of God (or at least Church) all they've got to go on is the morality of journalists and bored housewives (if even that). Hijacking of the aforementioned consensus, via media and gossip networks, is an easy way to compel them to near-suicidal levels of self-abasement and even sincere penance.

Another was me buying popular narrative on terribly rational, well-organized, borderline insect-like China. They have different sensibilities and a shifted time frame, but are not any more ruthless than the West, it seems; and not any more rational.

(6) Projects. Imagine you were a multi-billionaire with a team of a thousand world-class experts in any field. What would you build?

Why didn't anybody before me do all of it?

First of all, as per the Dark Forest, I would try to reduce my footprint, and do everything I can through other people.

Then I would investigate the specific chain of events that led to everyone in charge deciding that this performance is what should be demonstrated to heads of European states and representatives of major religions upon the opening of Gotthard Base Tunnel. I am not kidding – it's a very curious thing to me; at least as a window into aesthetics of European elites (no, don't say "it's just a creative interpretation of Swiss legends and local history"). Also, how come there's so little money put in nanoassemblers, (iterated) embryo selection, human cognitive traits GWAS...

Then I would try to establish secure communication with other very rich and influential people and try to figure out if they're seeing what I'm seeing and what is their plan for the next 20-50 years. Without that, it's all suicidal.

More optimistically/myopically, I would:

• Finance and advertize Urbit (or better analog) to create a wholly independent, widespread network for dissidents (many of Darwin's considerations are in fact very valid), focusing on smartphone usability and good cryptocurrency compatibility. No C jets!
  
• Following Moldbug's maxim about "Great art", craft guidelines for memes shilling what I consider to be constructive ideals of the future, disseminate them, then create grants for online creators to make it monetarily worthwhile for independent authors to create art with those ideals. It is astoundingly cheap (how much does Wildbow make? 6k/mo? And how many high-IQ high-impact people read him?) and I suspect plenty effective.
  
• Invest into intentional communities, grant them generous stipends and probably land plots, but build something of an adversarial boot camp for leaders. This would of course require serious thought, consultation and experimentation, but in the end my goal is to offer a package deal enabling a group of 50-10000 people to establish "micronations" with contract jurisdiction and have a reasonable hope of measuring up to the declared constitution. One focus would be raising fertility (so, Quiverfill-like communities, but not only).
  
• Massively scalable and automated animal experiments (in cheaper countries) for replication of contentious biomedical research.
  
• Grants and targeted persuasion for likely to be high-value individuals competing in worthless but lucrative areas (MOBA).
  
• Building a BAPist academy.
  
• Do stuff from this Viewpoint Focis

There are many other areas which could benefit from investment, e.g. fusion; but again, I do not have sufficient knowledge to prioritize and gathering such knowledge would be the first priority.

I mostly read books so I can't provide you with any links.

For some perspective on this whole sex differences in other cultures as well (not so much to do with trans people, mind you), I'd recommend this book, funny enough written by an extremely well-known feminist. Although she's come under fire for being a TERF.

I second this and also add that classical liberalism is (probably mostly) an emergent property of the Western European gene pool when under certain conditions of homogeneity and abundance. See &quot;Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.&quot; The gist is that since proto-Indo-Europeans the denizens of Europe have been more egalitarian and individualistic than pretty much any other group as figured by an examination of habitual practices, organizational structures, extent of monogamy and more. Just so you know where my biases are, I'm probably in agreement with that person claiming to be "alt right" on most things.