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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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