Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

––The Third Man (Reed, 1949)

This quote is historically inaccurate––the cuckoo clock is a German invention, and Switzerland’s history is a far cry from 500 years of “brotherly love.” False or not, this is an expression of a genuine worldview. This quote’s underlying philosophy goes something like this:

Violence, horror and the struggle for life are not separate from mankind’s greatest achievements, they exist alongside them. It is these very struggles that propel humans forward. Remove all struggle, all threat, all risk, and you remove some essential element from life that makes greatness possible.

The pursuit of utopia produces mediocrity, not utopia; heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. I don’t want that, neither do you and neither does anybody.

Of course, Harry Lime is the kind of scoundrel who cripples little kids when it lines his pockets. Philosophy is just another tool to him. He tells Holly his real outlook on the ferris wheel:

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs––it’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, and so have I.

These views of life are exceedingly common, though few possess the self-awareness to put it so plainly. To Harry it matters little whether Vienna is under control of the Russians, the Americans or the Austrians themselves––probably it matters to him little whether he’s in Vienna or Cairo or New York. So long as there’s an angle he’ll work it, and enjoy himself too.

Compare him to Holly Martins, the movie’s protagonist. Martins is a broke writer of Westerns, with a naïve moral code and no practical sense. The corruption and cynicism of postwar Vienna are incomprehensible to him. Throughout the film, he tries to make right a very wrong situation, with predictable results. Early in the movie, Calloway describes him as being “born to be murdered.” He’s right.

Holly: I suppose it wouldn’t interest you to know that Harry Lime was murdered? You’re too busy. You haven’t even bothered to get the complete evidence…And there was a third man there. I suppose that doesn’t sound peculiar to you.

Calloway: I’m not interested in whether a racketeer like Lime was killed by his friends or by an accident. The only important thing is that he’s dead. Go home Martins, like a sensible chap. You don’t know what you’re mixing in, get the next plane.

Holly: As soon as I get to the bottom of this, I’ll get the next plane.

Calloway: Death’s at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals.

This movie always reminds me of one of Kipling’s best poems, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” If eugenics was adopted worldwide tomorrow, suckers like Holly Martins and mugs like Harry Lime would continue to live their lives without change. The struggle for life, dignity, identity, etc. will never end, but it can exist alongside tremendous feats of human accomplishment. That’s about the best we can hope for.

1/2 Finnish, 1/2 English/Welsh/Ulster Scot.

(poster by TankTaur)

One self-improvement trick, adapted by Steve Pavlina from the software industry, is to try some new habit, diet, exercise regimen, etc. for 30 days. If, after the 30 days elapse, you decide it’s not worth keeping up, at least you can say you tried it and stuck with it. If you do want to make it a permanent habit, it’s much easier when you have 30 days of practice under your belt.

This strategy can be adapted to politics as well. Let’s say you want to support a certain candidate for office, but you don’t have the time to volunteer hours and hours for him. Instead, you can do a 30-day trial of advancing his campaign in some small way every day. For example, you could:

• Talk to a new person about his campaign every day
• Wear a button with his name on it every day for a month
• Hand out at least 5 of his “issue cards” to new people every day
• Support him in the comments section of 3 different websites every day
• Post 10 flyers every day
• Spend 15 minutes every day researching your candidate’s positions, policies and goals
• Employ the sabril strategy on one opposition blog every day (“I’m a lifelong liberal, but when I read…”/”I’m a conservative at heart, but this year…” etc.)
• Meet at least one other supporter in person every day, even if it’s just for coffee or walking together between classes.

Similar strategies can also be used for any issue that you want to publicize. How did you first become enlightened to Issue X? Try to enlighten other people through similar channels.

Usually, 30 Day Trials are to help strengthen a weak area in your life. For example, if you are untidy, you might resolve to clean your house for 15 minutes every day for 30 days, by which point it should be second nature. So if you are very cerebral, but bad at talking to people about politics, you might try having a conversation with someone every day where you mention something political that you do or believe in.

Also important is that the activity should be manageable. “I’m going to write 5,000 words every day for 30 days” is a laudable goal, but if you have a full time job and several children, you’re not likely to make it the whole 30 days if you don’t already have a pretty solid habit in place, or an amphetamine addiction.

Yesterday I posted a quote from Steve Sailer about Christopher Hitchens. Later, I found out that he died, which got me thinking. Here are some thoughts on (the little I know about) his life:

• Not believing in God doesn’t make you immune to irrational beliefs and ideas. Hitchens admired Leon Trotsky, said that “there is no gene for IQ” and even supported America’s war against Iraq. To paraphrase the old joke, he abandoned fairy tales which begin with “Once upon a time” for fairy tales that begin “Some day there shall be…”
• Like many leftists, Hitchens’ own behavior disproves many of his conceits. In adult life, he found out that he was something like 1/8 Jewish on his mother’s side and started to identify more with that part of his heritage. Nothing unusual in that, as it shows how ethnic group identity is important, even to people who make a big show of it not being important.
• Was Hitchens the credulous or the worldly type of communist? From what little I’ve read of him, he seemed about 3/4 credulous and 1/4 worldly (I could turn this into a racial hygiene joke if I wasn’t so tired) and a bit too verbal to see the reality behind the words.
• Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s younger brother, is a traditionalist conservative.. The brothers Hitchens had some sort of falling out. Although they patched it up, they were too different in temperament to be friends. One of Peter’s books, The Broken Compass, sounds very interesting, and if it wasn’t too late I’d ask for it for Christmas.
• I think Christopher Hitchens is also a good object lesson in how intelligence is not the same as wisdom or sense. If the best argument Hitchens could come up with against race-hatred was “it’s not scientifically supported,” then that belies incuriosity at best, maliciousness at worst. The average VNN member could probably come up with a better argument than that, even if they didn’t agree with it.
• Too, framing the debate about certain scientific issues as “hatred versus righteousness” makes you vulnerable to the very forces you’re trying to suppress––as Steve Sailer noted in the original quote. It would be much better to say something like “No scientific theory, however well-founded, justifies mass murder” but that might be too nuanced for Vanity Fair.
• I wonder if Christopher Hitchens had any sense of what gives most people meaning in their lives. How would his values, if widely adopted, improve the life of, say, the night manager of a canning plant? Not saying they wouldn’t––but if they wouldn’t, at least he (and his ilk) could come out and say so. 

I’m not religious, but certain strains of anti-theism remind me of  The Editing Room’s parody of the movie Pleasantville:

TOBEY MAGUIRE

So we’ve taken this group of people that, for the most part, used to be very happy with their 50’s lives…and screwed them up, making them head toward lifestyles like [ours], which the beginning of the movie established as being difficult, hard, and painfully upsetting.

REESE WITHERSPOON

Yes, but we’ve also made them free.

TOBEY MAGUIRE

Free of something they otherwise didn’t know was not free. Haven’t we really just done more harm than good? Didn’t someone once say “Ignorance is bliss”? These people didn’t ASK for their lives to be altered, they were happy.

WRITER/DIRECTOR GARY ROSS

(interrupting)

Hold it! Those are interesting points, but they’re actual issues. I can’t deal with those, so cut it the hell out and go masturbate. Now, back to pointing out the wrongs of racism and other things that are obviously bad.

AUDIENCE

Hey! Racism and dictatorships and all that ARE bad! Thanks, Gary, you’ve sent me a very important message that I otherwise didn’t know!

Religious people are not necessarily happy. Many religions inculcate a morbid sense of guilt, victimhood, shame, superiority, unworthiness, etc. Some hold back human achievement in measurable ways. Still, if you’re going to take away some consolation, and then offer in its place “Well, here’s a picture of a nebula that you could understand if you were smart,” don’t be surprised when people fall right back into an “irrational” belief system, and probably a worse one, with all its concomitant wars, absurdities and abuses.

Alt-rightists should keep this in mind too. If you’re going to take away the ideal of Total Human Equality, and then offer in its place “Well, here’s a picture of a standard distribution,” don’t be surprised if some people fall into hate-based racial Marxism.

Someone (no idea who) suggested that Alt-rightists stop picking fights with liberals and instead seek out self-sufficient people outside of the elite, e.g. small business owners, software developers, small town doctors, prominent housewives, et cetera. They have less invested in THE and are not likely to fall into nihilistic rhapsodizing when they realize it’s untenable.

Focusing on leftists makes them seem like an overpowering, even God-like force. This is not the case, in America at least. The #1 pet peeve reported in my poll about this movement is “lack of social infrastructure.” Is that so impossible to change?

the only society in which talent in children would be evenly spread across social classes is a totalitarian state in which ability has no relationship to success in life. It is a logical necessity that in a society in which ability has any relationship to success, children of the most successful people will be overrepresented among the gifted…This is not a political statement nor one that relies on a particular definition of ability. It’s just the way things inevitably work out in a world where parent-child correlations on ability are as large as the world we live in.

Poll Results for “Eugenics And…” poll:

Poll Results for “Pet Peeves” poll:

These polls are still open, so feel free to vote, if you haven’t already.

“The Sabril Strategy” is my term for a suggestion sabril offered in a Half Sigma comment thread, on how to spread the truth of human biodiversity (and thus, by proxy, subjects like eugenics):

Just do a google search of blogs and discussion boards now and then for keywords like “race” and “intelligence.” When you find a discussion, just make a simple post as Halfsigma suggested. Give a few facts about your life — don’t lie, but spin things a bit to make yourself seem a bit SWPLish. Say that you believe in HBD, but don’t use the phrase “HBD” or any other lingo. Then disappear.

It’s kind of like advertisements for Coca-Cola — no single advertisement convinces anyone, but the cumulative effect of seeing lots of advertisements does.

What does this look like? Something like this:

Before I went to college, I believed in something like what [username] wrote. And, it’s true, my college experience very much reinforced this view. (Socialist bake sales ftw!)

When you think about it though, this “nurture, nurture über alles” viewpoint is pretty boring. First of all, we know it’s not true––and it’s kind of depressing. If we’re all just putty waiting to be molded by society, then there’s nothing to differentiate you from me, besides appearance and consumer choices––the latter being an expression of how I’ve been shaped by cultural forces, not any innate character. So superficial!

When I was three years old, my Mom gave me a few G.I. Joe’s. These “little guys” (as I called them) had to endure months of being swaddled in toilet paper, rocked to sleep, playing in the playmobil dollhouse and other assorted indignities (“Little guy is scared without the nightlight on”). When I went to preschool, a boy commandeered one of my little guys, and made him go on a death-or-glory run over the tanbark.* I don’t think these different playing styles were just due to “society.”

It’s sometimes reassuring to know that your character isn’t entirely under your own control. That’s not an excuse to be a jerk––but if you have, say, obsessive-compulsive disorder, it helps to know that you’re not a bad person, just one who was probably predisposed to this in some way. That way, you can respond to it intelligently, instead of blaming yourself for being a “fuck-up” or lapsing into defeat. It’s also really helpful if you have a bad habit of comparing yourself to other people––knowing that another person just won the genetic lottery takes some of the edge off the envy. I said some.

Here’s a more combative example, a reply to an imaginary thread about “race and intelligence”:

Interesting thread. Reading all this is very weird, because I used to see the world very much the way, say, [username x] did. Seeing these ideas from the other side is very, um, mind-expanding, let’s put it that way.

I think what changed my mind was observing how I, and my friends and our parents, behaved in real life. Clearly there’s something going on, if people will act in a very “racist” way even though professing racism is extremely low-status. Don’t believe me? Think of one of your more successful and popular friends––one that you’ve always envied a little bit. Now imagine them saying some racial epithet at a party. Don’t tell me a little part of you didn’t positively giggle, to have a reason to feel superior to her.

“But I’d feel superior to her because racism is reactionary and retrograde”––really now? Is that why you lock your car doors when you go through the wrong neighborhood––because you can read the character of the people on the sidewalk? If racism is so retrograde, why does almost everyone practice it in their daily lives, whether they’re “progressive” or not? Even Noam Chomsky moved to the suburbs when forced busing began in Boston.

If “racism” in deed is really the terrible thing we say it is, then most people are willing to risk catastrophic loss of social status to practice it––even dedicated anarcho-syndicalists and “progressive party people.” It seems more likely that the real sin is to point out what everybody does anyway, which belies our self-concept as enlightened and open-minded.

This would also explain why people go berserk anytime race and IQ are mentioned. If you want to try a thought experiment, imagine for a couple of minutes what the world would look like if blacks were (on average) less intelligent than whites, and whites were (on average) less intelligent than asians. How would that world look different from the one we live in now? Short answer is: it wouldn’t.

“Intelligence doesn’t mean anything!” Really now? Didn’t you say that George W. Bush was an idiot 10 years ago? But Bush has had every conceivable advantage in life, and he didn’t even have to deal with racism! If he’s an idiot, what hope does some poor inner city black kid have?

It’s a funny paradox, that in order to be seen (by oneself and by others) as open-minded, one has to be willfully ignorant of science and its implications. And they say belief in God is dangerous…

This is overly long because I wrote it very quickly, but I hope it gives you an idea of how you can implement the Sabril strategy, especially online.

Here’s another example, reply to an imaginary thread about eugenics:

I believe in eugenics. Good genes are one of the best things you can give your kids. Not perfect genes––perfectionism always seems to have such disastrous side-effects––but a shot at good health, good intelligence, good looks, and so on.

I know several kids of sperm/egg donors, including one girl raised by lesbian parents. I’m sure these parents picked a donor with an accomplished history––med students are pretty common donors––which is, when you think about it, a eugenic action.

Note that this has nothing to do with any master race type ideology. I believe that kids are important, some people aren’t competent to have them and some should have many of them. In his heart of hearts, [username y] agrees with me––though he’ll never admit it.

You can copy and paste these if you want, but it could backfire. Use your own discretion.

*This is a true story.

Bach - Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in C minor, BWV1060

W.F.Bach Flute Concerto in D major, WFB C15