Don't Drink the Collectivist Kool-Aid

Recently the outrage that occurred in Chicago, in which a young mentally handicapped man was kidnapped and tortured by four people, has spurred a national debate that utterly — and maybe intentionally — misses the point. 101 years ago a silent film was made in America and came to be known as The Birth of a Nation or The Clansman. Everyone has learned in American History class how this film cemented the ideology of the Klu Klux Klan by portraying blacks rising to prominence in the community as a threat that would ultimately attack and destroy the foundations of white society.

 

 

This is of course a mean spirited myth concocted amid post Civil War resentment and has done its part to impair race relations in the US to this very day.

 

Today Black Lives Matter have perhaps had a more nuanced history, but in this group lie the same pent up frustrations and the same style of myth making. The myth that white people have it in for blacks, especially constables, is of the same facile caliber as the ideas presented in the 1915 movie “The Clansman”.

 

It all rests on a paranoid fallacy, a conflation of an imagined bogeyman of the unconscious mind with individuals. This idea feeds into collectivism, the idea that the group should be privileged over the individual. Collectivism is insidious as it has it’s foundation in the natural tribal instinct of humans, but collectivism is a worse incarnation of the same concept by far.

 

While tribalism is a result of our evolutionary history and is designed to help our survival as social animals, collectivism politically seeks to give all the power to the tribal group which the collective ideology idealizes. To give you an idea of the difference, imagine a club that decides that it's the best club and that they have the right to dispose of the members of other clubs as they see fit. Collectivism thus suborns the tribal instinct, invests it with higher meaning and worships actions which advance the interests of the group, especially violent actions.

 

Collectivism thus finds outlets in labeling individuals, in separating people by colour, creed and class. This is both it’s attraction and most hateful aspect. It preys on people who don’t feel that they have fortitude as individuals, tells them that they are weak and powerless, and that they need the group to give thier life meaning and direction, and that they should surrender their individuality to the needs of the group. Collectivism is thus cult mentality thrust onto the political sphere, and treats characteristics incidental to the individual, whiteness, blackness, femaleness and maleness, or any other incidental fact as a method to distiguish worth.

 

Collectivist ideologies also doesn’t have a really solid understanding of the concept of individual blame. A collectivist will always try to pin the actions of a few onto a group, and will justify violence as advancing their own group. This is the crossroads that we find ourselves at with the recent torture-kidnapping in Chicago and why it has sparked such a conflagration of public sentiment. It’s not because it’s horrible, that would only make the front page for 12 hours, it’s because the attack causes mutual outrage.

 

The black collectivists are just as vocal as the white collectivists in generating virtue signalling outrage, baiting each other in verbal conflict and driving a wedge in discussion. The white collectivists use this kind of facile argument; “well what if four whites did that to a black disabled man?” while the black collectivists will reject the idea that a problem has arisen.

 

The truth is that the black community didn't ask for these criminals to defend them, and white people didn't ask for fake outrage from Stormfronters. That's because apart from the twisted up vocal minority on either side there is no commitee of white people to which we all belong and gives us all our ideas, and there's no association that regulates and controls the thoughts of black people either.

 

I'll let brian have the final word: