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Folklore for White Folk: stories for wypipo to meet the world?
Humans are driven by stories. Stories establish the legitimacy of rulers when hearkened back to legend, they establish sympathy with average voters via fictionalized humble origins, they motivate soldiers to fight against impossible odds and bind solitary faces into a single fasces. No nation or people have ever been able to cooperate or dominate without apportioning huge sums to the Storyteller Class: poets, priests, historians, dramatists, civic artists, on and on. The wars going on in the world today show the necessity of storytelling. When the Russian president had time to propagandize to the American public in his Tucker interview, he starts with half an hour of storytelling, selecting an arrangement of events to best suit his purpose. When the Ukrainians needed to motivate their countrymen to fight, they recruit the cosmic Star Wars actors to drench themselves in meaning. In the Holy Land, stories and religion meld together to incentivize soldiers and martyrs.
Stories legitimize and empower a group’s existence, and not just their present existence but their future. The Arab world, the Chinese and Japanese nations, the African tribes, the Native Americans, the Black Americans, the Mexicans — every group uses stories. There is no need for them to justify their use. So what of the children of Europe? What should we make of their folklore today?
The white story today is the one told in the classrooms of the elites, found in the the popular books and documentaries, and hawked by the newspapers. There is no need to overwrite and overwrought what has been written for years: slavery, colonization, oppression, and unearned privilege characterize the relationship between white people and others in the mainstream view. (Every story defines the relationship between the group and those outside of it. To the Romans, the others were barbarians in need of subjugation and command; to the Ancient Jews, the "nations" were in need of a light to enlighten them on G-dly matters. To the Chinese today, the Chinese are particularly ancient with superior cultural developments.) The white story is the only story in history which both subjugates a people to an eternally lesser reputation and yet believed by those it subjugates. It is an anomalously demotivating story.
But can we say that the white story transformed into something more global? Can’t the white American story, for example, just be the American story? Nope. If you relinquish the use of a powerful tool while the other groups around you continue to use the tool, you have permanently reduced your ability at a pure loss to yourself. Wokism has died down in public discourse, but it has not diminished its institutional potency, and there’s no guarantee it will not return in double force. There are still hundreds, thousands, of ethnocentric advocacy groups which promote their own empowering story from middle school to the halls of FAANG. Relinquishing your power can work when everyone else is on board, like with nuclear weapons, but it does not work when others are writing you in as the bad guy in their book. Black Americans will continue their storywriting, new Indian managers may continue to favor their own caste, the decades of liberal Reform Judaism are coming to an end, and China will continue trying to influence the Chinese Western population.
Relinquishing your power as a white person isn’t a noble deed when virtue is written by stories and you have burned down your library. No one will remember or care for your innoble sacrifice — certainly not God, the great storyteller who commands his children to write the best stories, even sacrificing their own children in the process. Neither will your non-white great grandchild care, who will despise you because of a story they read, and who — like the Brazilian — may have their craniums measured to see if they are non-white enough to secure a university spot. You may identify yourself as “merely American” or “merely a man”, but the Americans around you do not feel that way and neither do the mass of man on earth. Show me a successful nation in history filled with men — there is none, only those filled with particular peoples with particular stories.
Failing to establish a story means that white children will be passed up for jobs by both non-white and white employers. It means that the person who judges his college application will deduce points in favor of (perhaps) a wealthy Nigerian scion. It means that he will be disinherited even from “secular” storytelling institutions, as we see with the recent Disney leak by Project Veritas. If your kin happens to be trapped in a warzone, a Sikh leader of your country may direct the military to save foreign Sikhs rather than his own countrymen, as we read in Canada today. The stakes are significant and concrete.
“Isn’t it sufficient to dispel the bad stories?”, it may be asked, and the answer is a clear negative. Which restaurant would you patronize, the one which shows you its great features, or the one that stammers about how the rumors of rat infestation and food poisoning are exaggerated? Who would you rather go on a date with, the one who presents their best self or the one who tells you that they certainly don’t have AIDS? Even to attempt to dispel a bad story puts you in a significantly worse position than before. This is a dark art of discourse, typified in the old question asked of politicians: “how often do you beat your wife?”. Attaching a bad story to a person’s connotation, even when obviously false, harms the connotation. There’s a whole world of irrational but potent emotional alchemy that occurs when one stimuli is associated with a different stimuli of positive or negative valence. If I have you smell lavender and then scream at you, you now slightly dislike lavender even if you don’t realize it. If I do this repeatedly, you will learn to hate lavender. You say “white people were not the only slavers”, your children hear “white people as a conceptual space are associated with oppression and are implicitly negatively evaluated”. If you don’t believe me, tell your girlfriend “you do not look fat and disgusting” whenever she wears her favorite dress.
Whypeople
The cure for this social disease is for whites to rediscover their birthright as storytellers: to write their why, proudly and independently. Storytelling is their manifest destiny, a great continent that awaits their traversal. It is territory uncharted, constellations yet connected. It’s the plot to reality’s RPG and your bloodline’s DnD campaign. It’s the story old men tell their children as a sense of security and motivation shines from their face. “What is the story that most motivates my kin” is the story that must be told, for no other reasons than that it can be, because others do their own, because now it’s a competition, and because it’s ultimately fun.
The best story, IMO, wouldn’t focus on the deeds of white folk. Claims of having written the best literature or music, or having erected the greatest architecture, did not stop the Romans from asserting superiority over Greeks while appropriating all of their own inventions. Wars and conquest are also insufficient grounds for a story. The best story is captivating and shows the protagonist overcoming adversity to secure something they rightfully deserve. There are a number of ways to weave a purely secular story for the children of Europe. Does the European first domesticating dogs show his unwavering loyalty to his brethren? I don’t know, but it is pleasant to imagine. Did White people flee Africa because of oppression only to bear with the brutal cold and develop a unique nature through overcoming nature herself? It’s something you can imagine. Does their ability to drink milk show their unusual innocence and love for women? Sure, why not. Have white people the spotless reputation that has been wrongfully blackened by corrupt and wicked people? These are ingredients, I am not a chef. But any positive story — no matter how insane — is better than a lack of story and certainly better than a negative story. All of the peoples of the world when saying their own name feel a sense of pride, and it’s absurd to imagine that there should be an exception to that rule.
I feel like I’m a broken record- whites are not a monolithic group. I don’t have much in common with the blue tribe, I have less in common with Finns or Greeks.
My own kind of white people have positive stories. It matters not to me that my outgroup whites don’t.
This is I think the biggest issue white nationalists face. Why did Polish white nationalists get booed by the BNP and English Defence League they came to support? Because it's not just about being white.
I am white but I prefer my own culture to French white culture or Spanish and the like. And that is before we look at sub-groups.
Black Americans have a much more unified culture because it was built from scratch fairly recently and then migrated around the nation, cobbled together from white Southern culture, whatever remnants of scraps they had from prior cultures and mashed together. They didn't choose to be monolithized as you put it, it was a side effect of losing.
That isn't the case for white people, even restricting it just to white Americans. WASPs and Cajuns, Mid-westerners and East Coasters, Texans and New Yorkers. Rural and Urban. Red and Blue.
If you want to build a unified white identity, one of them first has to actually be picked as the one to coalesce around. And the problem with that is no-one wants to lose their existing identity for that to happen. Having your culture being monolithized with others is seen as a loss, not as a positive. Sunni and Shi'ite, Protestant and Catholic, so on and so forth. Everyone wants their version to be the one that wins. But for the union you speak of to happen, lots and lots of white identities would have to lose and be subsumed into the white collective.
Ironically enough perhaps, the one that is closest to being culturally dominant is the generic Blue tribe, so if you do want a single white identity, any time soon, you might have to throw in with them.
I don’t think this thesis pans out empirically. White Americans were quite fine with the idea of a unique white people and civilization pretty much from the get-go, so for hundreds of years, even while they retained their own special affinity to their unique ethnicities. When Europeans discussed colonization and their own continent in the 18th through early 20th century, they were always clear to bind Europeans together into a whole, separated from others. They may at times have placed special “powers” upon the Germany-derived (Saxons), but when speaking about the world they always divided white from other groups. All of this happened organically, which signals that there is an organic delineation that is intuitively obvious when comparing global populations. You simply don’t see an organic other-ization of whites until you get to edge cases like the most Africanized area of Sicily or the North Africa.
Your example of sunni and shia don’t make sense in the context of America where there are hundreds of Arab-specific or Muslim-specific advocacy groups with storytellers. Of course they have serious infighting between them, as does even the most unified people like Israel today with the Haredi. But when it comes to establishing a powerbase in America, they unify and unify their stories. You see the same when it comes to anti-Israelism in the Middle East: Hamas is Sunni, funded by the Shia stronghold. Even the Jewish people were once and still are different tribes, the Cohen tribe or the Ashkenazi/Sephardic division. Asians in America have Asian organizations like AAAJ with revenue in millions and they have a truly fictitious category, combining Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and Arabs.
So it’s just a mistake to confuse ethnicity with race here. Europeans have always defined themselves as a single people against the other peoples of the world, and this does not exclude predilection to unique identifiers. What it comes down to is the consequence you want. Do you think it is the optimal strategy to cling to a British identity and exclude your cousins, when the other peoples of the world are binding together all of their cousins to position themselves better in the longrun? Alliances are as old as time.
My point is that observably other people in the world are not doing that by choice. One identity has to win over the others. Even within Britain, the English identity being the dominant one is still not a settled issue. and then even within England the dominance of the South over the North is a live issue. So expecting it will be throughout Europe is just not going to happen.
Why are you so against keeping the unique identities of Europe and replacing it with some homogeneity? Within the US it may make sense for some kind of shared American identity to form, but America is so big, what you instead get are groupings that are very different from one another, I simply do not see that as a model for some kind of shared whiteness. I identify somewhat with the Appalachian borderers being as my family is Ulster-Scots and I identify somewhat with WASPs because another part of my family is English Protestants. And indeed within the black community, I can see the strand of where they inherited some of that borderer honor culture. My wife's uncles and my uncles have some very similar points of view despite being from different continents and being different races (both disowning gay sons!). I have more in common sometimes with those black firefighters than I do with my white Blue Tribe colleagues.
Alliances are a very different thing than identity. It's absolutely fine to have alliances over political needs, and desires, but that doesn't mean you have a shared identity. Alliances are practical and can shift and change depending on circumstances.
I’m not sure what you mean by “it isn’t a choice, one identity has to win out.” I’m trying to think of an example of what you mean but I only find counterexamples in the context of enlarged group dynamics. Someone could grow up in Pakistan where tribes matter, and then move to America and join the Desi student organization or a Southeast Asian networking society, while internalizing a story about colonialism and racism (anti-white) that may no even apply to their tribe. This example can just as well apply to a Native American who usefully identifies as “indigenous”, or a Saudi tribal member who begins to identify as Arab, or any other group. Even Korean descendants in America may cease to hate Japan and affiliate with Asian Umbrella organizations from middle school even to their job at Google, where they may advocate for more Asian employees without regard for Koreans specifically. All of this is volitional and the choice is informed by an intuitive allegiant identity, an organic understanding that you and your kin are better positioned by combining together related groups. This is, in fact, the very story of Europe until 21st century philosophers desperately tried to revise it. Your “English” identity came about through a useful amalgamation, but of course, Cornwall will always be unique culturally right? But if you had British members stationed in India in 1910, the obvious group dynamic would be that the Welsh and Scottish and British are one group — even if at home they have separate interests.
Is that not immaterial? Even within my household the dominance of the Apple TV between me and my sibling was a live issue. Even within my grandparents’ progeny the dominance over a house may be a live issue. This can apply in infinitely large or infinitely small directions, but whenever we look at group dynamics we clearly see the allegiant identities I mention above. Eg, where India is concerned, the petty squabbles of Pakistani tribes no longer matter.
Keep them until they get boring, it doesn’t matter, but
is absolutely essential unless you want zero power, demotivated children and probable replacement. In other words, if you genuinely love your unique identity, you must understand that it’s a small branch of a larger tree, and there is already someone with an axe trying at the trunk beneath you.
I disagree, even the earliest identity in Europe was the conscious decision by an old tribal leader, and even the identity “Welsh” or “Scottish” is the consequence of an old alliance. And Anglo-Saxon and all the other hyphenated-Brits… The clearest example of an allegiant identity is maybe Italian, which had different languages and customs at the time of its unification. Really I think it’s some sort of intuitive utilitarian formula. You can interbreed your identity but it will eventually become irrelevant, or you can combine it prudently and have a defensible identity, not unlike a country — or a union of “Greek” states.
But that is just temporary. Take them back home and they split. That is my point, it's an alliance not an erasure of the identity in the first place. If there were one identity. they would all just be British.
Temporary alliance based upon the situation is an entirely different animal than having one singular identity as you claim they must if they are to survive. The Scot and the Welshmen may then ally against the Englishmen in other situations. Temporary alliances based upon the situation seem to provide the benefit you want, without having to set aside the unique identities.
And in some circumstances perhaps the Scot and a Frenchman would ally against the Englishman, or a Jamaican and an Irishman against the Englishmen. (There is perhaps a pattern here.)
Keeping your options open as to which group is best to ally with, seems much the best choice, because it may not be those physically closest to you, or even culturally so, dependent on the situation.
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The red tribe is beginning to coalesce around a red/heartland identity, much of it white southern in character.
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