On white guilt and the white rioters
Commenter “Art Deco” writes (the first paragraph is a quote from a previous commenter}:
“The point is that Leftist[s] are motivated by guilt towards blacks. And they demand other whites share in their guilt by mongering.”
Rubbish. People who actually feel guilty do practical things or they sit in a chair depressed or they try to distract themselves. People who feel ashamed hide. They don’t recriminate against others. These people are aggressive and self-aggrandizing. They don’t hate themselves, they hate you.
Actually, people who feel guilty can do a lot of different things. As Art Deco indicates, some do practical things in an attempt to expiate their guilt, some are immobilized by depression, and some try to change the subject (including drowning themselves in drink or drugs).
But the claim that people feeling guilty “don’t recriminate against others” simply doesn’t fit what I’ve observed of human nature. Many don’t do that, but some do. Some use projection, for example, which is “projecting undesirable feelings or emotions onto someone else, rather than admitting to or dealing with the unwanted feelings.” People can get very nasty and aggressive when they do that.
Now, we can nitpick and say that someone doing this is doing it in order to not feel guilty, and that is at least somewhat true. It is a way of deflecting and casting off a feeling of guilt (or shame, which is not exactly the same), before it becomes too painful or sometimes even before it reaches full consciousness. But it’s usually in there somewhere, and the behavior described can be a reaction to it, one that can be very effective in protecting the person from unpleasant feelings and gaining a feeling of self-righteousness.
But in addition, I believe that quite a few of the rioters and especially the most aggressive ones are sociopaths, people who “just want to watch the world burn.” These people don’t feel guilt at all. They don’t even get the concept.
Since some time in the 1980s and/or 1990s, depending on where they grew up, many young people today have been raised with the idea that whites are inherently guilty. That sort of teaching has only been accelerating and spreading during the 21st Century. So most young white people deal with that indoctrination, and have various ways of processing it and reacting to it. But the effort to instill guilt is there, and deal with it they must.
[NOTE: I haven’t read this article yet; it’s long. But it was mentioned in the comments to a previous post, and it seems as though it might be relevant.]
The idea of the BLM/Antifa movement attracting sociopaths is an interesting one, Neo, and you may be right. I think the same about the jihadi movement. In each case, an ideology endorses the violence which the perpetrators wanted to commit anyhow.
The idea of collective intergenerational guilt, which has been forced upon at least two generations of white Americans by K-12, academia, the MSM, Hollywood and now by corporate America and professional athletics, is behind much of the current madness, to the point that millions of ordinary citizens believe in the dogma promulgated by the current pope of anti-racism, Ibram Kendi, for whom any disadvantage suffered by any black American, or by blacks in general, can only ever be the result of white malevolence in the past (“the legacy of slavery”) or in the present (“systemic racism”). This is the kind of magical thinking seldom challenged by anyone in authority and results in endless displays of virtue-signaling and self-abasement, not to mention the condoning of lawlessness and chaos, by white Americans who have been cowed into craven submission by power-mad charlatans and pseudo-intellectual con-artists.
Kate:
It is standard operating procedure. Nazis and Communists, for example, made use of the sociopaths among them.
When you are unhappy, you wind up expressing that unhappiness without every understanding that is what you are doing. And there are a LOT of unhappy people in the world who don’t understand how unhappy they really are.
Mike
This may all be just an acceptance that there will be no Zombie Apocalypse so rage and kill and burn where you can.
And yes, Neo, “usual suspects,” of whom there never seem to be a shortage, quite often include a generous supply of crazies.
Masochism is in there as well, both in white females and white males, and no one wants to look at this, but this masochism inevitably has a sexual component. Kissing the feet of black men and women is no doubt far from the end of the story.
No one wants to get into this. I entirely understand.
It’s worth noting, however, that Michel Foucault was a sexual masochist, a “bottom” as they are known.
The violent social justice people along with the media is using the old excuse of the ‘wife beater’ husband who says, “It’s not my fault I broke her jaw and knocked her teeth out, she knew better than to make me mad.” Lots of people who don’t accept personal responsibility for their lives can direct their energies and get the adrenal rush of joining with their fellow believers and tearing the crap out of cities for the good of mankind and it’s all Trump’s fault now because he has called us out and made us mad.
I think our nation has created a couple of generations of younger people who have a large percentage of mentally mis-directed screw-ups who now have committed to the cause that our nation dose not deserved to exist, they live to destroy us. Righteous anger is playing out every night and encouraged by the Democrats and the media and I am afraid it is just starting, there will be much more to come and we will probably never be able to deal with these act our people as rational, responsible human beings.
BLM/antifa attracts sociopaths… and sociopaths are a constant..
What varies is whether or not these people get a political ticket to act out
The left/Democrats have done this more than once in US history…
To hear Barnes (lawyer) who discusses such on the Viva Frei you tube over the KKK is to get a vastly insightful commentary into the use of the “brutal class”.
This is why all the victims the antifa/blm stand up for are essentially sociopathic criminals and not innocents (while one wonders about whether the blacks who feel the police may do something to them similar are subclinical sociopaths??)… and why to a T the people in the mob who attacked the young lad were also one and all pretty nasty criminals and deviants in their own right (one had registered sexual offender status).
One thing missing from Neo analysis above is what would sociopaths and psychopaths who dont feel guilt use as a weapon against the people they hate who DO feel guilt and who forget they exist and who are herd-able because of it?
You think this wasnt how Germany changed? Barnes also rightly points out that the communist revolutionary movement needs a fascist movement, even if not real, to oppose. without it there is no way to agitate the rest of the people, into their roles in this kabuki dance of death. If one doesn’t exist sufficiently realistically for them, they will make up one and assign crimes of the people to the to legitimize and screen the actions of what is crowds of sociopathic psychopathic people.
Both political groups used this ‘brutal class’ to do the dirty work and found it quite easy to pay them off, as they only needed to let them have license within boundaries to get their loyalty. A long time ago i brought up how in Latvia and other states they sought out the prisons and would put violent felons in charge of things like the police or certain areas. This brutal class was very loyal as they finally found a place where they were accepted and could act with license and not be fringe freaks hated by all – they only had to do the regimes dirty work with vigor….
in the case of Germany, force people to heil and to dance the dance macabre, in the case of Russia, find kulaks when there was none, torture false criminals to serve the party, and run camps…
One now finally has an answer as to why the ‘Good’ germans never rose up and stopped the regime. Not having the backing of the state and its organs, each actor was left without linkage and support of others… having the backing of the state, each sociopathic nut job and psychopath not only were supported, but were favored, and their choice of methods were ignored.
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to read books other than the popular ones which hide the depth of the reality of it (which is why they are allowed to be popular), is to let oneself be tricked into missing the key things needed to understand!!! (which is why its not understood)… to read the other items is to see the “banality of evil” and to see the leopards spots for what they are and then see what is akin to now. Sadly, Neo will not read the key things, and that is all i will say on that, other than it explains much as to the lack of clarity
Fascinating reading to take in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Political Writings. And others who are forgotten and erased (without those who want to know, why were they erased so that they could not read them and learn from them? what teachings were so critical and what was so important the forces spent their time erasing them first and imbuing a disinterest among the common people in delving while they could?)
Their personal treatises did not just contain musings and the personal, but also contained the methods and mechanics of what was around them. Anne was safe, her works were turned in more than turned out, there was only introspection and reflection.
The works of famous and world renowned Freda Utley had to be erased as if they did not exist!!!!! who cares that Ronald Reagan remembered her when she died and now, no one knows she exists? What could she have revealed that made her need to be erased BEFORE now? what was revealed in thirteen books we do not know were written?
Odyssey Of A Liberal was written by her… and we talk as if the liberal left is new? was it?
Riccio writes a book of nearly the same title “Walter Lippmann – Odyssey of a liberal”
and there is also: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz!
and Reconsidering American Liberalism: The Troubled Odyssey Of The Liberal Idea
by James Young
Yet we today cant answer why the left calls themselves “Liberals”…
nor do we want to know, preferring our own made up reasoning…
funny
All this psych 101 weak sauce has to stop.
These are deranged lunitics. People so horribly 51/50 that they believe communism is a good thing. These are the very same mindset that ensured all the quotas were filled on the trains going to the camps or gulags, provided guards to ensure the prisoners on those trains were properly brutalized and rallied to cheer the mass executions.
The left is actively and brazenly evil in its deranged degeneration.
This could explain the Democrat mayors and governors, who seem quite happy with the prevailing rioting.
Although, here in Wisconsin, we have a fool for a governor, which also enters into the problem. He clearly believes in the guilt of everyone who is not of the Left. Hence, the abandonment of Kenosha, and his current dissuaging the President from visiting Kenosha, as Governor Evers believes that the presence of Mr. Trump might cause more riots. Tony Evers seems to believe that Mr. Trump is responsible for the riots.
@miklos000rosza:
Yup. Absolutely. Solving problems is difficult when most of the population don’t want to even go there and there are taboos about mentioning some of the driving forces causing said problems. Look! Ponies!
As for White Guilt. For sure Joe and Karen Normie have been indoctrinated with this all their lives and either believe it in the same way that they (think they) believe in the GDP and the Balance of Payments (whatever they are).. or maybe they just go along to get along. None of the preceding has any relevance to the bleatings and retweetings of Karen Normie on social media — but then that’s never been connected to any form of underlying reality no matter the topic 😛
But I don’t think many people feel deep guilt. Why should we? We all have eyes to see. We all have secretly committed the Crimes of Seeing and Knowing.
Active Antifa types: Sociopaths, Mentally Ill, Degenerates, Mutants (but I repeat myself). At the very least they ought be imprisoned and sterilised.
And now, having read something by Art Deco that didn’t annoy me, I’m off to buy a lottery ticket. No… just kidding. But might plonk down a few more chips on Trump.
Evers, among many others, rejects reality. Any attempt to bring it to his/their attention generates hostility.
Explaining to people that you know they lie doesn’t stop them from lying to you.
Presumably they know better but they can’t support their position without lying.
So they take a position which they know requires lying to sell.
One thing which may make it easier on them is that they look so crazy, so detached from reality, that people don’t bother to engage.
There’s a big difference between mayors in 1967 and mayors/governors today. In 1967 the mayors were in touch with the business people who were the drivers of civic life. These mayors understood that a riot was costly not just today but for a decade. They wanted the riots to stop, now, and they weren’t shy about asking for help in making that happen.
Those business people are gone. The manager of the Walgreens doesn’t care about Minneapolis. The manager of Applebee’s doesn’t worry about city taxes.
Compare to Minneapolis, today. Neither the boy mayor nor the city council have any private economic experience. To them, the city is a big piggy bank they can rob to fund this and that and bike lanes. And mostly, it has been. Minneapolis is very wealthy, and a certain kind of person who likes living downtown will put up with a ton of taxes to be in the hip place.
That wealth takes a long time to burn through. Unless, of course, you have a couple of riots and a pandemic. That’s when the inexperience and foolishness of the progressives emerges full force. We can’t stop those peaceful protesters! They’re fighting Nazis! Police are Nazis! White people are Nazis (but we get a pass because We Care).
Business receipts downtown are 15 percent of what they were in early March.
Lawlessness is scaring even me, and I’ve worked some tough areas.
There is also a mostly unspoken dread spreading. People have seen the full police videos now. They’ve seen the autopsy report. George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, not police abuse. People realize that those four cops are not going to be convicted of murder. Perhaps Chauvin, the lead cop, may get convicted of some minor charge, but not murder.
Then the third riot happens.
Those who talk wonder what Attorney General Keith Ellison is up to. He’s not a good lawyer, but he has competent advisors. He already knows those charges won’t stand. Does he want more riots?
Probably.
Tony Evers does, indeed reject reality. When he was Director of Public Instruction, he switched Wisconsin’s schools from Phonics, to Whole Language. We now have a vast number of young people who are functionally illiterate.
White this, white that, white the other – what an absurdly meaningless distinction to obsess on, and how foolish they sound in their obsession. I find it hard to take such idiots seriously. They are an embarrassment to our species.
Banned Lizard:
And yet, if you now fail to make Whiteness your guiding light in all your political and economic and personal security calculations, you may well become extinct.
The first step on this difficult path is learning to say ‘They are an embarrassment to our Race.’ There… that wasn’t so bad now, was it?
No shame in it at all. We were the ones who wanted to Move On. They made us go back there.
@Scott..
Belief in Whole Language is indeed a kind of Reverse Shibboleth. Shoot on sight.
But this is Leftism all over. Dream up a Big Theory and then attempt to bash and bend Humanity to fit it.
Southern Wisconsin is a strange place, as is Southern Minnesota. Northern WI is a different, much more normal place, with low population density. I used to grouse-hunt there. Fresh walleye (a fish) are to die for, and easily caught too! People close to the soil, who farm, ranch, hunt and fish, small town types, are dependably preferable, in my experience, to urbanites.
I looked up Mandela Barnes; was the name male or female? Named after THE Mandela?
Yup, he, not a she, is black; attended a HBCU, Alabama A & M, but did not graduate (!). Not exactly a Midwestern school; average ACT score is a lowly 18 (Howard U. in comparison is 25, Yale’s is 34). His qualifications for Lt. Governor elude me. As SCOTTtheBADGER remarks, the WI governor rejects reality. So seemingly, do the majority of WI voters. Barnes is further evidence of that.
Hi, Neo. That’s a very interesting perspective, that drinking and doing drugs are an attempt to ‘change the subject’. I’d be interested in hearing more about that. I think I get what you mean, and I have my own interpretation of the point; but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it expressed in that way, so it caught my interest.
Cicero, I think my cousin was mentioning going on a walleye expedition a little while ago. I’ve never had walleye, which I excuse by virtue of being from the lower Great Lakes rather than up north more.
Philip Sells:
I don’t think I meant anything especially esoteric by “changing the subject.” Just that, if something is on a person’s mind and bothering him or her – such as feeling guilty – drinking or doing drugs can provide an escape from whatever is going on inside the person that is disturbing. Certain drugs can banish the upsetting thoughts, others can help a person focus on something else (art, music, sex, partying, any number of things depending on the person), some can just help a person zone out, and some involve being distracted by being around other people and drinking or doing drugs together. Alcohol can do any of those things, too.
LOL. No you are quite right. Look what the type has done to the Roman Catholic Church.
The world is full of self-loathing and weak people who, having found that they cannot obtain respect from their ostensible peers, choose the strategy of becoming an object of some formally antagonistic other in order that as a servile they will at least be “appreciated”
Zaphod, might have caused a certain amount of upset here with his generalization regarding females; but the need or desire to be appreciated or valued and included, and the relative -repeat, I said “relative” – disinterest in honor and self-direction in females is, I think unremarkable.
My personal opinion is that the United States at one time had a significant population of women who very much defied this stereotype. In fact, I cannot think of a single woman in my family who was not distinctly unlike that rather contemptible, shallow, set of twitter/selfie morons out there trolling for likes by making fish mouths and thrusting out their photo-shopped bosoms; much less – historically speaking – those man-faced New England neurotics who have turned their personal anxieties into both literature and social movements.
But now, it is pretty common to hear some co-ed demanding that after she has completed her degree, “society” be prepared to provide her with the proper appreciation for the “contribution” to the collective which she is prepared to make.
Perhaps that is not so remarkable as is the number of young pajama-boy males in their low rise girl type skinny jeans desperate to be accepted, too.
And don’t get me started on the middle aged guys who have an almost erotic fixation on professional sports.
Geez. Don’t they have a tennis racquet, or a fishing pole of their own?
Neo, I see what you mean. Aligns with my interpretation, pretty much. It is worth noting, though at the same time rather obvious, that alcohol is also a drug, probably the most common one.
@SCOTTtheBADGER: I don’t believe that Governor Evers is trying to dissuade President Trump from visiting Kenosha because the governor thinks Trump’s presence may cause more riots (though I do find it plausible that Evers is deranged enough to think Trump is responsible for the riots). Rather, I think Evers knows very well (1) that the citizens of Kenosha do not believe Trump is responsible for the riots, (2) that the citizens of Kenosha will welcome and be comforted by Trump’s presence, and (3) that he, Evers, will be shown to be a complete effing tool by comparison with the president. In other words, for Evers, Trump’s visit represents the threat (whether felt consciously or not) of a yuuuuge narcissistic wound.
One thing that never gets considered is that Latinos are already a much larger percentage of the population than African-Americans and their political influence is eventually going to catch up. That’s going to change a lot because there is no such thing as “Brown Guilt.”
Mike
@MBunge:
Because I’m a nasty fascist stickler for the Confucian Rectification of Names and like my terminology to be precise when it suits my mood (hehe), should mention that there’s not much Latino DNA in the recent influx of Latinos. There *is*, however, plenty of what painted the town red in Montezuma’s Day.
Unfashionable it may be, but it *is* incontrovertibly true that Breeding Will Out –> Ritual killings performed by cartels.
Blacks are a problem. Antifa is a problem. One or both together could well push USA into a Civil War.
But the ‘Latinos’ — This is a whole other kettle of fish. But lets not get too Apocalypto and disturb our slumbers. After all, they’re just Republican Voters in Waiting 🙂
Of course the Blacks won’t wake up and make common cause with Whites against the Browns. They should, but they won’t. Acting in their own long term self interest is above their pay grade. It’s incumbent on Whites to do that for them. For a price. <<- assuming that we must continue to live together in the same places.
Zaphod: “We all have secretly committed the Crimes of Seeing and Knowing.”
That is a strikingly true statement.
I got a fair bit into the article at Tablet linked to in the original post. But then he started a psychological analysis based on the 5 types generous, compassionate etc. and like so many he got it reversed. There was a widely reported study that originally said liberals were compassionate , conservatives were neurotic based on the 5 character types. So after a good while someone looked into the study data and saw they reversed the outcome, the conclusion. And there was an official fix but people remember the first version. The traits were totally reversed as to who they applied to. I stopped reading.
Why continue? Just saying watch for this psychological misdirection.
Molly G, I believe you are correct!
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bob-woodson-rejects-systemic-racism-class-race
I think Woodson makes a lot of sense. He has a great mind.
The efforts that Antifa/BLM are trying to achieve are ‘ignorant and want’ the things Dickinson warned about through the ghost of Christmas Past in ‘A Christmas Carol’. Their ignorance is clear. What they want I do not think they would like. They better be prepared for hunger, lack of shelter, insecurity, and lack of safety. They will not be in charge. They will live a sad pathetic life wishing things were like they use to be.
Now, we can nitpick and say that someone doing this is doing it in order to not feel guilty, and that is at least somewhat true.
__________
Most of the article is spot-on, but I disagree with the above. In my experience, it is precisely those who have only feelings of guilt, but which are not faced up to, who are most likely to attack others. (And I’ve seen this close up.) So it is REALLY the other guy who’s at fault.
On the question of sociopaths, I heard an interview with Lukianoff a few years ago, in which he said that what we are doing raising kids is almost as if it were designed to make them mentally ill. Unfortunately, I cannot find the bookmark, and searches have thus far come up empty. (It was him alone, not with Haidt, in this case.) One thing that has struck me is how much we have moved from the infinitely malleable and environment centric explanations that were dominant in my youth. Of course that was a wrong and dogmatic view, but that doesn’t mean it contained no truth whatsoever. You CAN do things to affect character. (As usual, the Greeks got it right.)
But if Lukianoff said is true, it makes it harder to see what we can do about it. We are MUCH better at messing people up than at improving them. (A rule that applies to just about everything, really.) We have a generation of permanently messed-up people. Ship them all to Manhattan a la Escape From New York?
SCOTTtheBADGER on August 31, 2020 at 5:57 pm said:
Tony Evers does, indeed reject reality. When he was Director of Public Instruction, he switched Wisconsin’s schools from Phonics, to Whole Language. We now have a vast number of young people who are functionally illiterate.
_________
I’m astounded that happened so recently. When I went to 1st grade, in 1959, my teacher was extremely displeased by the fact that my grandmother had taught me to read by “sounding it out.” Really. This was on Long Island, so I suppose the rot took hold early there.
BTW, I take my commenting name from the book she used. Much more interesting than the garbage they had us reading in school. I learnt early on just how terrible was the Officially Approved school reading list. This reached a peak in 4th grade, when I had discovered Sherlock Holmes, and was captivated. My grandmother gave me her copy of The Adventures. The 4th grade teacher told my mother to take it away from me because it was ahead of schedule! (True.) Fortunately Dad had the sense to tell Mom to ignore her. (I was the eldest. Later, Mom admitted that she had trusted teachers far too much, and my later siblings benefited from what she learned. Schools had already declined far from when she was in them.)
I think that the useful idiots filling the roles of footsoldiers for Antifa are simply anarchists. I don’t believe it is about guilt for being white. These are immature people who’s lives are not satisfying for some reason and they blame everyone and everything but themselves. The current political conditions are simply giving them a self-righteous justification for succumbing to their urges to destroy all that they blame.
Such people have often been pawns in other’s power struggles. The Spanish Civil War is a good example.
They feel guilty because of their superiority complex.
Eeyore, my Mom, an English teacher, introduced me to Thurber, and to Bertie Wooster in the Fourth Grade!
Eeyore & Scott – those authors, plus Heinlein and Asimov, among others, were my elementary school reading. Our town librarian was a friend of my mother’s (who was also on the Library Board for awhile), and let me & my sister get books from the adult stacks in junior high “because we could handle them.”
We must have been pedagogically backward in Texas, because I learned reading with phonics in 1958, and I think my kids were still getting some of that in the 1980s (or maybe they just had sane teachers going rogue).
HCorcoran on September 1, 2020 at 3:59 am said:
The efforts that Antifa/BLM are trying to achieve are ‘ignorant and want’ …They will live a sad pathetic life wishing things were like they use to be.
* * *
If they are sociopaths, as Neo suggests, they won’t really care so long as they can continue to hurt other people.
@ Cicero: Barnes seems more like a community organizer (whatever the heck that is these days) in his past life before he jumped into his professional political career. I am not sure how successful he was in helping the people he wanted to help (mostly all blacks) since no statistics or statement was given. I’m also not sure what led the people of Wisconsin into voting for him.
Regarding Alabama A&M’s medium ACT score, I don’t hold that as evidence in reflection towards Barnes’ ability or lack thereof. We don’t know how well he did in his classes or what he did during his time there. All we know is that he did not complete his degree due to incomplete work according to his wiki bio. The main reason I bring this point up is because medium ACT score says little about a university besides the fact that X number is the medium score. Yale’s 34 means little in the grand scheme of things.
This was linked by someone on another thread this month, but it’s such a powerful story I wanted to recommend it again.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/27/the-worst-part-about-fake-anti-racism-is-that-it-forces-us-to-live-lies/
by Katya Sedgwick
Make that “KNOWN to be untrue.”
Barnes at Viva Frei made a number of points that are outstanding. I will repeat them here with only a little commentary.
1) Tracking hate crimes in the south from 1860-1960. The amount of racism does not track against the number of crimes. What makes an event more frequent is that a sociopath is given political cover to, in the mind of the criminal, make a mafia-type move to chip away at a growing, out of control problem.
Barnes tracked this idea against terrorism in the 2000 decade and it fit that pattern of implicit approval. And that is why political cover seems relevant to rioting in 2020.
To this end the hot rhetoric of Nancy Pelosi et al are deeply irresponsible. The Frankenstein that was being fuelled for years by “Russian collusion” and other aspersions of illegitimacy, seems to be reaching a new pitch. It is my fear that what has been slow to start will be slow to stop.
2) Two mobs will fight where each has their own Rashomon version of events that contain almost no elements of the other version. Barnes quickly recounted the liberal version of the Wisconsin police event, and it was surprisingly detailed for being shockingly deficient.
Watching criminal or civil trials play out in unfair ways, in states that have a different makeup of judges or juries, is deeply aggravating to watch. I assume it is the same for the other side. Now these communities are going to watch not-guilty individuals walk away after hearing a villainous version of events.
What responsibility the media plays for riots and murders is not small. Painting the Kenosha kid as an alt-right murderer, in the presence of a huge amount of video, seems to be psychological or ideological dysfunction to me. For the media to make the same mistake after paying out a huge libel settlement to the Covington kid is mind-blowing.