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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.
It doesn’t bother you that your children and great grandchildren will face a worsened quality of life as a result? They will be confronted with their “character” written in the stories of others and, consciously or unconsciously, lose motivation. Their social and career outcomes will be worse. Other groups have perceived the vast benefit of monolithizing related tribes into one single group, and there are no signs of this slowing down.
I would also say: it’s dubious that humans can even replace a positive tribal story with something else. This seems ingrained in the same way that belonging to a tribe is ingrained. “Being really good at math” is not a sufficient plotline to make up for an empowering origin and destiny.
Blue tribers(or damnyankees) shooting themselves in the foot out of neurosis doesn’t matter very much to me. I don’t like them very much.
And I would posit that the red tribe is undergoing that process of monolithizing. My children and grandchildren will have positive and empowering tribal stories, some of them made up and some of them true- c’est la vie. Some of those stories will come from me, or directly from their maternal grandparents; others will be in the red tribe water. But I have no desire for them to go the way of damyankees and carpetbaggers; those are my enemies, not minorities(who are, after all, just perfectly sensibly trying to take care of them and theirs). Seeing them hang themselves is schadenfreudelicious(it is to a word, I just invented it).
I see where you come from, but how can you devise a captivating and holistic identity which specifically excludes red tribe? And while you may not like them now, perhaps you would like red tribe if they stopped behaving self-destructively?
You perhaps misunderstand me. I don't like the blue tribe and am perfectly happy to require at least some assimilation to red norms for a captivating and holistic identity. The blue tribe behaves self destructively from a group cohesion perspective, and this does not move me to pity or frustration. They are my enemies. I feel bad for some of the innocents caught up in it(trans kids most especially), but there's not a lot to be done about it.
When Jonah was commanded to preach at Nineveh to achieve the conversion of the Assyrians, lest they be destroyed in God's wrath, he refused until swallowed by a whale for the reason that he did not actually want the Assyrians to avoid destruction. I find this highly relatable.
Alright, but what I am trying to get at is what you intend your story to be. Is this a single-family story? Do you intend to somehow keep your ethnic-specific identity eg as an Irishman?
The red tribe seems to be broadly coalescing into a big tent story about heartlanders in the same boat. This narrative takes strong historical liberties- my ancestors would not have gotten along with midwestern Germans, for example- but it is a narrative and doesn't overtax the assimilative capacity of anyone like me.
I am a Cajun and Cajuns are historically quite good at keeping a distinctive identity even when part of a broader whole. I also have many family stories of overcoming hardship. None of this places me or mine outside of a heartlander identity but cements the state of belonging within it.
As is probably well known, I have a strong religious identity and strong religious identity can often partially substitute for lack of ethnic ties. I don't expect this latter property to be necessary in twenty years, but it is another reason why me and mine will do OK.
I understand why dissident blue tribers consider it a crisis that there is a lack of positive stories about white people as a class. The solution for them is to join the red tribe, which regards its own ancestors positively. Honestly I'm not sure why people like me would want to establish an overarching 'white' identity in coalition with the mainstream blue tribe; as far as I can tell, deep reds can manage our own relations with the blacks and hispanics just fine, the mainstream blues won't stop trying to make our lives harder for no reason and bailing them out from their self inflicted wounds is just stupid.
In order to do that, I have to voluntarily embrace yet another vision of the world in which my ancestors were the bad guys. One of the core tenets of the “heartlanders of the world, unite” narrative is that the residents of large cities have always been snooty, effete, degenerate bullies, using their unfair control of media and industry to push never-ending cycles of hateful ideas and corrupting technology on the honest and hard-working people of the hinterlands. The immense scientific, cultural, and industrial achievements of the major urban centers? Yeah, those were bad actually.
The hallmarks of the urban elite’s artistic output - say, classical music, or Renaissance painting and sculpture - are actually just hoity-toity status-grubbing frivolities that snobs pretend to like in order to impress their college classmates. Science and technology promised to uplift humanity, but actually just divorced us from our natural God-given productive capacities and started our perilous descent toward transhuman abominations.
I understand that you specifically might not believe all of these things, or at least not fully. However, these are all claims I see made explicitly all the time, even by people whose entire lives and livelihoods are only possible because of the products of urbanite intellectual genius. Hell, much of the South’s financial life during its antebellum heyday was entirely dependent on the inventions of Yankees like Eli Whitney and Robert Fulton. (And much of its later financial life has depended on the inventions of different Yankees, like Henry Ford.) Heartlanders like to see themselves as the ones who actually make stuff, without whom the whole operation of society would crash down because urban degenerates are incapable of producing anything worthwhile. This narrative bears little resemblance to real life, either historically or currently.
I don’t say any of this to double down on the other extreme - the sneering, self-absorbed contempt that people such as yourself correctly perceive as emanating from some parts of “Blue Tribe” culture. (I’ve put “Blue Tribe” in quotations because, like “Red Tribe”, it’s a largely illusory, Frankesteinesque conglomeration of disparate elements; in other words, fake and gay.)
I’m in that rapidly-shrinking category of Americans who can legitimately trace their ancestry to all of David Hackett Fisher’s “founding American ethnicities”. My dad’s bloodline includes Mayflower Yankees and Cavalier potentates, including several notable early slave-owning politicians. My mom’s ancestry is deep Borderer through her maternal line - my maternal great-grandmother and her husband were hicks through-and-through, from a podunk Arkansas town. I have family in the heartland, and they’re great people; I wouldn’t want to disrupt their way of life, and I find there’s a lot to be said for it.
However, what you’re asking me to do is to relinquish my sense of pride in the very impressive accomplishments of the parts of my heritage that, in my opinion, truly made America great - the Yankee industrialists and inventors and thinkers - and to embrace an identity of defiance and resentment toward them, in favor of throwing my lot in with the Americans who have, for one reason or another, contributed arguably the least to America’s greatness, with the exception of the military sphere. This is quite a tall ask, and I would like to see Southern/Midwestern whites exercise some level of empathy and grace toward it, rather than the scorn and derision you’ve consistently demonstrated. There is still the possibility of a reconstituted White American identity that recognizes in equal parts the contributions of America’s various white ancestral groups, but I fear that people such as yourself are actually one of the largest obstacles to that project.
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