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Notes -
Michael Lind, Eugenicons and the Motte.
Recently, Michael Lind, a notable political commentator and anti-immigration activist, took a stab at what he termed the "eugenicons". The most prominent of which being men like Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard and guys like Richard Hanania, whose face is prominently plastered over the article.
Linds piece paints these "eugenicons" as being not just factually wrong and out of their element with regards to the science, but also politically ineffective. As Lind sees 'race realism' and the libertarian ethos it allegedly expresses itself through these men to be "utterly incompatible" with broadening the appeal of the modern Republican party to working class Americans of all races. Lind, being a bit of a ‘soft’ materialist in the old Marxist sense, has a preferred view of the public as being in a bit of an economic class struggle. Though his view is far more principled and sophisticated than what you generally find among big L Americans Leftists.
Lind’s article is worth a read, and so are the various responses. The two better ones being from Steve Sailer and Brian Chau
Charles Murray did not respond in length, but remarked after reading Linds article that
Sailer, like Murray, voiced his disappointment that the article by Lind was not composed of anti HBD arguments of higher quality. And took issue with the view Lind expresses with regards to the state of the scientific literature at this time. Maintaining that Lind is far behind the curve on just how heavily the evidence has been falling on the side of HBD in recent years and that he also mischaracterizes some of the HBD positions as strict determinism. Pointing out that social causes have a very clear effect, as he cites his new favorite chart of various fatalities rising in line with the 'happening' of George Floyd.
These are all familiar notes for HBD folks, but they focus on facts and details over the broad stroke narrative. Something Brian Chau points out and extrapolates on. And it’s a worthwhile endeavor, given that someone whose been in the game for as long as Lind is probably not going to have his broader political viewpoint or his fondness for the American working class dissuaded by, as he put it:
It’s a fair position to hold, I suppose, so where does Lind get his ideas from?
As Chau sees it, Lind is working from a presupposition of political representation. That is, Lind sees himself representing the American working class. To that end it is no surprise he dislikes the HBD creed, given it is inherently divisive to the multiracial America. Something modern day classical Marxists have been pointing at for a long while, to little effect as they continue to support mass immigration, unlike Lind.
On that note Lind ties Libertarianism and HBD together, showing just how these two ideas are compatible. As Lind puts it:
This is certainly an observation. I think it would be easy, like Chau does, to point out that of the 4 big “eugenicons” only Hanania is ostensibly libertarian and otherwise poke holes in it. But I think that draws us away from the truth value of the statement as it relates to Lind and his position as a representative of the working class American. In a broad class interest narrative, there is an obvious pathway where the notion of free market success correlates with ‘superiority’. At the very least, if we value success in modern society, and we place some stock in the notion of heritability of traits, we end up with an undeniable truth. The lower classes are inferior to the superior upper classes. But as it relates to the "eugenicons", again, it’s not necessarily a truth anyone of the 4 mentioned, Sailer, Murray, Winegard and Hanania, are guided by politically.
Lind goes too far then, or does he? You don’t have to to go full send Capitalist Darwinism or whatever. Most people have the self reflection to look at themselves as a less than perfect part of a greater whole. Or that would be my view. Except that is the minority view of a National Socialist. So I think, to the extent American politics exist as is represented in media, Lind might be more correct than not here. And if “eugenicons” are not viscerally racist in their soul, I’d argue they do have to contend with the old ghost of “Social Darwinism”. Merely pointing at The Bell Curve and HBD as a truth can’t qualify as just another feather of truth in the cap of HBD folks. In the words of Eric Turkheimer, this truth could rival the atom bomb.
Chau's criticism of Lind is that Lind is not seeking truth but instead seeking to represent a class of people. To that end, if there is a truth that can harm them it’s not his duty to have that truth guide him but to shield the people from it. They are stronger together, class solidarity and all that. And through that lens Chau contextualizes some of Lind’s more extravagant misrepresentations of HBD ‘truths’. It’s simply not Lind's job to represent this truth. Lind is representing a class of people. Protecting both its class interest as well as its dignity, at the very least.
Beyond this you will have to read Chau’s article as he takes broader issue with the worldview Lind expresses.
On the whole I find Lind’s position to be stronger than I had suspected after seeing the "eugenicons" pile on him for the various errors and factual misrepresentations made. So long as Lind is accurately representing the people he feels with, his position will remain strong. Particularly since it is dealing with immediate problems that are likely to result from the HBD 'atom bomb' being released on the public. I had always assumed that biological truths would lead people towards something like ethno-nationalist 'democratic' socialism. But I’m now more willing to believe that America could surprise me if the bomb was dropped on them.
On that note it is not clear to me if Lind’s representing of the multiracial American working class is for its protection or ours.
I feel deep disconnect with Lind and with what appears to be your beliefs. It is not, in fact, good to lie. It is worse to congratulate yourself for your lies on the basis of some is-ought confusion. The self-servingly populist, paternalistic – no, probably even maternalistic – posture of a portly mother hen shielding her simple-minded salt-of-the-earth «electorate» from «shock jocks» with their nasty statistical tables, which Lind adopts, is despicable; hypocritical, condescending, emasculating and evokes every sadistic impulse I have. So it's a bit hard to engage in good faith.
But, just to remark on one strategic detail.
Turkheimer at al (see e.g. the discussion about HBD trutherism as x-risk factor here) imagine themselves arguing from a place of wise pessimism: they cannot let this infohazard be mainstreamed, the risk of degenerate social developments from its implications in people's minds is too great, thus white lies are necessary. Naturally, this is optimistic about the counterfactual development in the condition of HBD denialism. But more than that, this is wildly and irresponsibly blithe with regard to eventual failure. That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch comes to mind::
Sailer gibes at liberals for the attitude mocked here, and I believe he's literally correct about a fraction: the predilection to High Modernist social engineering schemes plus callousness toward muh inbred Flyover Country hicks and badly hidden fear of «urban youth» (or what's the term now?), if reinforced with a theory of biological differences between groups, would make at least a minority de facto genocidal. But the rest are just making a foolish mistake. Pegging your ideological commitment to a contingent practical fact which does not inform that commitment is bad praxis; is egoism. Do you just double down in on rhetorical suppression, burnishing your Respectable Person creds in the process and hoping it never fails? What if it does and you've cleansed the debate of any principled opposition to that which you're trying to prevent? Your side gets routed. I won't go so far as to say that «anti-eugenicons» create a self-fulfilling prophecy, modern Americans at large really won't be willing to «kill all the poor» or some such. But they are sowing the seeds of chaos and conflict greatly surpassing the current culture war, and they cannot credibly take responsibility for those seeds never sprouting; indeed they cannot even legibly discuss the issue.
I've been observing the AI safety debate lately, and it irritates me there as well: in contrast to doomers with their bizarrely abstract takes on «the space of Optimization Processes in full generality», many AI optimists only have weak arguments contingent on minutiae of engineering and overconfident physical estimates, like «the brain is near Landauer limit already» (it's not, Yud is 100% right it's OOMs from the mark). E.g. George Hotz seems to believe we shouldn't air strike datacenters because AI just can't get that much smarter than George Hotz, certainly not soon. He'll crumple like tissue paper when this is falsified. The creationism debate comes to mind as well.
Denying facts is morally wrong and strategically wrong. You can only do that when your side is so overwhelmingly advantaged, there's no point to caring. Well, this is the case sometimes.
Probably not for American anti-immigrationists, though. Good luck proving to some Vivek Ramaswamy that, since Sailer is a poopyhead and HBD is not true or at least not handshakeworthy, America shouldn't grant citizenship to millions of qualified third Worlders.
(this turned into a bit of a ramble as I'm having trouble expressing this, hope its readable)
I think most of the modern western world is how it is today precisely because of the extreme amounts of information and truth suppression.
I can't argue against the fact that most people in the west genuinely believe every single ounce of propaganda that is poured into their heads. A lot of which isn't just some pie in the sky stuff about morals and ideas but things that are in direct conflict with everyday realities and basic common sense. Yet people either believe the propaganda or contextualize what their lying eyes are seeing to not go against the broad narrative of the propaganda.
Propaganda works. Lying works. If I want mass immigration from the third world, what truth can aid me? Why rely on any truth? Why hope that the masses share my grand and noble vision for the EuroAfrican future when they are so short sighted and stupid? I can just lie to them and they will eat it up like children watching a toy commercial.
I don't believe this is an issue you overcome with ideals and values about truth. If you want society to function, you lubricate it with lies. This works. I want my society to function. I don't want mass immigration. Why contort myself to fit the truth into the heads of those who don't want to bear it? Just replace the lie already in their heads with another one.
I guess what I am trying to get at there is that I don't believe in human ontological moral innocence. I have no reason to believe that, if left alone, people will gravitate towards good. That if I remove one layer of lies there is a truth waiting under it. That under the skin of these ethno-masochist bobble heads there is a National Socialist waiting to be free.
I want European ethnicities to continue to express themselves, evolve, survive and thrive. I genuinely don't have a 'true' argument for why Estonia shouldn't be flooded with brown people.. Sure, I might believe it will be bad and that non-stop mass immigration will lead to the end of the native ethnic expression of themselves, both culturally and genetically, but... What even is that? My belief? Why do I care? Why should it be more important than the belief of EU bureaucrats on the goodness of EuroAfrica? I've never even met an Estonian. What if someone doesn't share my belief? What if they already believe the propaganda that diversity is our strength and that Estonia will be better after a few million third worlders?
To put it another way, it literally doesn't matter to me how truly statistically bad my ingroup is. So long as they are my ingroup I care about them. Anyone trying to get me to dislike my ingroup through statistics and crime rates is evil. And me not bowing down to their tricks is noble and good. As an example: It's bad for your economy. Ok, to borrow your own line of thinking, would it be good to ethnically replace Estonians if it was good for the economy? What if I just believed that being open to mass immigration was what made me a good person. Is that true? Would that belief offset the truth of mass immigration being bad for the economy? I mean, what good is an economy for if it's not bettering the lives of people.
To reach some conclusion from this ramble, truth just isn't a part of the game here. Even if you care about it. It's just your personal preference. It's not more inherently valuable than the 'delusions' of your outgroup. And more importantly, the mechanism by which you get people to believe in the truth is not necessarily based on any truth.
I might not like Eric Turkheimer and I might personally despise his brazen lies. But on a bigger picture level, where we drop our own ego and just look at the world as it is, guys like him and Lind are much closer to having their truth out there than any boorish HBD truth seeker ever will be, and they are more honest and self aware of their intention. They represent something good. World peace, the working class, human dignity, being kind. Your justifications, on the other hand, are what? Truth uber alles, because... It will out someday, probably? And it's good anyway even if it might be bad after all the lies we told about it?
My question to you and someone like Sailer would be this: Who will enforce the view that we shouldn't kill all the untermensch after the truth gets out? Why should someone believe that when the truth is that they are parasites making the lives of everyone else worse? Surely we should ensure, with propaganda, that people believe the 'correct' thing, right?
It seems rather straight forward to me that you would do this by doing the exact thing Turkheimer and friends have been doing for decades.
The alternative to HBD is not people treating each other well, it's the continued search for a reason that some groups do worse than others. I think you may be aware of some of the other popular theories and they imply some troubling things.
Can you speak more plainly? What are the other popular theories you're talking about?
Active and widespread racial discrimination seems like a pretty popular theory.
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«Looking at the world as it is». What is that if not truth? Even in denying its value, you can't make do without it.
As for me, I just like truth as a terminal good, and certainly I prefer the triumph of truth to the survival of Estonians as a distinct people (though as you observe, not even Estonians care very much; and individually they will be mostly fine either way). I straightworwardly like honest people more and want societies to have more honest people. The notion of in-group favoritism is not alien to me, but I despise «my people» who turn out to be egregious liars, mostly lose interest in their welfare and exclude them from the ingroup. So this is a matter of value differences.
On a meta level,
If you do not feel that there's anything but arbitrary particularism to your values, then I advise you go find better values. This is my major problem with hidebound European nationalisms: what are you lot even defending? Senile sentimentalism? Loyalty to a land and bodies buried within, like some lamb visiting his mother's grave? «Uh we want there to be Estonians/Finns/Romanians in the future» – who the hell should care any more about enabling that than Eliezer Yudkowsky cares about an alien obsessed with computing SHA256 hashes of audios of cows mooing? If you cannot give birth to a single philosopher capable of making an intellectually non-vacuous case for your contribution to the canvas of the Universe that justifies you not just dissolving in a greater body, how do you hope to contend with elite bureaucrats appealing to universal humanism and other overpowered ethical principles? Especially if they already hold the levers of propaganda. Even tactically: how do you intend to lie, and to whom?
But a) I could make a case for the survival of distinct peoples, even Estonians and b) I also believe that my values correspond to instrumental advantages. Truth offers a way out of local minima and toward a higher Pareto boundary for all players.
Say, @Skibboleth claims above:
Well, it that were true in any way that matters, we'd probably see less resistance to it. And worries about some future turn to Eugenic National Socialism are not remotely the concern – compared to the immediate implications which offend leftists. Namely: Affirmative Action discredited, «it's about inssuficient school spending» laughed out of the room, «systemic racism holding them down» debunked (together with the entire civic religion built around white guilt), «immigrants will assimilate and become productive just fine» goes down the drain and so on. All those translate to policy proposals, from an even more vigorous rooting out of obfuscated AA to rebalancing of budgets and policing to more merit-based immigration. This might seem bad for the leftist's case which you seem to understand as basically «brown people deserve more nice stuff». But I think their case is a degenerate, compromise-riddled implementation of their defensible and popular intuitions about fairness and justice. Redistributing jobs to «marginalized minorities» with the goal of breaking path-dependent poverty does not work; but you can still redistribute wealth, and you'd have more wealth to redistribute if you optimally allocate jobs. Sure, one can argue that without the promise of returns, charity is harder to solicit. But do people in the current year seriously understand AA as investment? I think this hard-nosed optimism is a polite fiction, a tribute to last vestiges of Protestant ethic. It dies, along with boomers.
Crucially, though, I return to the tactical issue of «whom do you lie to?» It is ironic that your cynical viewpoint is also very democratic. You think you need to convince «the plebs» to enact policies on their behalf, but is this true? Do they not tolerate poorly justified mistreatment, only ineffectually grumbling or sometimes burning shit on the streets, if the entire Professional-Managerial Class is on the same page and moves swiftly through the playbook?
So I contend that to get anywhere, you need to win the favor of Elite Human Capital. And you cannot, not from the battered position of some nativist or white identitarian, do that without intellectually sound arguments. To develop those, yes, you need truth.
Great post.
I have never heard AA framed as an investment before but now that I think about it it's actually a great framing. Growing up around lower to middle class white people in the midwest everyone I knew hated AA and resented it but if I'd been around in the 60s and thought of it as an investment for society I might have actually supported it. It's appealing: Why not give better opportunities to 15% of the population? Shouldn't we invest in those people, to make peace with them and so they can have a greater contribution to our society? It sounds great on paper.
Of course the situation as it works out just reinforces the importance of telling the truth about things.
For clarity, it was only in the early noughts that it stopped being viewed as an investment. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing - it definitely generated more support for the idea, in line with your reasoning, but it also had a tempering effect, giving it structure and a more results focused viewpoint which would never have tolerated the policy of wishful thinking that currently appears to prop up AA.
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Can you clarify your stance on two questions for me?
The reason I ask is because you talk about caring for your ingroup regardless of other things. Which is not necessarily a problem. If I were told that something boosted my local economy, this would not be the sole factor in my view of that thing. But you seem to be going down the route of always supporting the ingroup.
Both 1 and 2 are a yes.
But on top of that, always supporting the ingroup is what everyone is doing. The argument that Africans will improve the Estonian economy is not there to say that your outgroup will benefit your ingroup. It's there to make you believe Africans are now a part of your ingroup.
If I believe Africans are of my ingroup the question of the factual economic realities of mass immigration from Africa are irrelevant. Insofar as one believes more people of ones ingroup will 'enrich' ones societies, which is definitionally what one would believe if they were a part of your ingroup, the rest follows naturally.
The act of 'telling a lie' in this context is just a protection of the truth from the outgroup. As an example: I might understand someone to be against mass immigration from Africa. But that's genuinely only because they are bigoted. Which is true. They might say that Africans are bad for the economy. I object to this on a basis that it's untrue in some sense. Because my greater truth, derived from the fact Africans are a part of my ingroup, trumps everything else.
I think this becomes apparent when lib/left/progressives go from supporting mass immigration because its good to implying that it's a punishment when challenged too much on the factual premise of the alleged benefits of mass immigration. They do believe mass immigration is good for them and their ingroup. And if it's bad for their outgroup then that's also good for them.
I find it hard to call this sort of thing a lie. More that, when it comes to the ingroup, we tell the truth, and when it comes to the outgroup, we protect ourselves.
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If HBD is such a dangerous position that it cannot be allowed to be popularized, either because it will be used against the working class, or because it will be abused by the working class - then the broad spectrum suppression requires policing the left flank that attempts to do "corrective" racial discrimination in the opposite direction, so that race can be maintained at a lower standard of relevance for most people.
This is where the Turkheimers and Linds of the world have, in my opinion, really fumbled the ball. I think there are a sprinkling of people who are both anti-HBD and against the "corrective" racial discrimination advanced by the 'social justice' ideology, but they don't seem to have enough power to enforce this view at this time - except, perhaps, for the Supreme Court.
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