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White Privilege (GSRRM)
Welcome to the Choice. Episode 0015. Whiteness conspiracy theory: The economics of whiteness part Three. White Privilege. … I’m Curt Doolittle
This podcast covers a collaboration between Harman and Doolittle on The Economics of White Privilege
PRIVILEGE VS WARRANTY
White Privilege is a misnomer for White Warranty. The individual and collectively the group warrants a standard of behavior and mores. Self-enforcement and punishment ensue as the group wants to maintain that Warranty.
The Cost of White Privilege
White privilege is real. I didn’t earn mine. But I pay to maintain it so that I may pass it on to the next generation as it was passed on to me. Any privilege can be abused. So, for example, every time I go into a store and am not followed around by security, I am given the opportunity to steal. Forgoing those opportunities is the opportunity cost that maintaining such privileges for myself and for others like me requires. Privilege is a commons. White people have privilege because white people can create and maintain commons. Some other peoples cannot.
The Origins of White Privilege
“White privilege,” and its precursor, “racism” have been used as weapons to create a burden of debt on white people and a claim of entitlement for non-white people.
That constitutes a real non-white privilege extracted from white people through systemic anti-white racism. Whites are amply warranted, therefore, in shrugging off the non-white burden and, should any be allowed to remain, educating them about the privilege they enjoy on account of complicity with systematic, institutional, fraud, aggression, demoralization, manipulation, and culture war directed against whites, for which they must be suitably and perpetually contrite and penitent, and all the benefits they have enjoyed at white people’s expense but have not previously been made to reciprocate, and for which they now owe restitution.
The Economics of White Privilege
Critics note that white privilege is unearned & conclude that it is therefore undeserved. But I have to pay for my white privilege, when it is extended to me, by not abusing it. E.g. if I’m not followed around by security, I’m being given an opportunity to steal.
To maintain my white privilege of not being followed by security, for myself and others, I have to pay the opportunity cost of foregoing opportunities to steal. Evidence suggests that enough white people are willing to pay for this privilege, in this way, to maintain it.
Some groups aren’t willing to forego opportunities to steal reliably enough to make the privilege of not being followed around by security worth giving them. By whining about white people getting this privilege (saying it’s unfair) they’re trying to obtain it at a discount.
The demand is basically that whites conduct all business and interactions with non-whites on ingroup terms. But this is not worthwhile if they are not ingroup, and won’t treat us as ingroup, by the standards we demand of ingroup members. It’s a parasitic demand.
The only other way to be uniform and “fair” (as these parasites define fairness) would be to conduct business & interactions w/everyone (even fellow whites) on low trust, out-group terms (have security follow everyone) but this is not optimal. It’s costlier for ingroup members.
I didn’t “earn” my white privilege. But I do pay for it, every time I am extended it and don’t abuse it, such as when I am not followed by security and nevertheless refrain from stealing. Payment of those opportunity costs is what maintains that privilege for myself and others.
Are all whites trustworthy and all non-whites untrustworthy? Certainly not. But it certainly pays to employ different risk management strategies with different groups, according to the risks, statistically, that they present. Accordingly, different out-groups get different terms.
Asians get better out-group terms in white societies than blacks, & whites get better out-group terms in Asian societies than blacks, even if none get ingroup terms because whites and Asians are lower risk and higher benefit, relative to blacks. It’s not just ingroup/out-group.
There are 2 kinds of blacks who object to being mistrusted, the untrustworthy, b/c it makes it harder to abuse trust, & the trustworthy, for whom it’s costly & embarrassing to be lumped w/the former. But if we can’t tell the difference, demanding not to be lumped is unreasonable.
There are 3 main, honest, productive, ways to minimize the cost of being associated with an untrustworthy group.
1) Signal, with speech, dress, mannerisms, etc, to distinguish & differentiate yourself.
2) Offer more positive value.
3) Suppress the parasitism of your own group.
Don’t demand ingroup terms from outgroups. It is NEVER worthwhile to extend you those terms, and those demands are always dishonest and parasitic. But by employing the methods above, you can obtain better out-group terms from others for your group.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that ingroups and out-group are generally defined according to kinship because closer kinship makes trust and altruism, the mechanisms of ingroup privilege, evolutionarily self-enforcing (they reward and propagate other instances of your genes.)
Conversely, kinship also makes defection, nonperformance, & irreciprocity (the basic mechanisms of out-group parasitism) evolutionarily unstable & self-punishing (they punish & therefore diminish & handicap other instances of your own genes.) This is why ingroup is kingroup.
The Economics of Association in Heterogeneous Polities
It’s because ethnic Europeans, particularly northern Europeans, largely because of geography and culture came out of the dark ages first, had the enlightenment first, developed the first fully middle-class civilization first, and did so both genetically, culturally, and institutionally, by using militias due to weak central governments, individual sovereignty because of militias, rule of law not rule by discretion, manorialism’s suppression of underclass rates of reproduction, and by aggressive hanging of criminal population for 1000 years, and as a consequence producing the highest trust society, with the highest trust population.
So, in commerce and politics, ethnic Europeans have obtained a premium for their (earned) reputation for relative trustworthiness and work ethic (middle-class public behavior), and they preserve the premium through the intergenerational transfer of those habits, norms, traditions, and values.
The problem is that high trust polities and a ‘deserved’ reputation for high trust is extremely expensive and no other people so far have been able to produce it except the Japanese and Koreans. This is the reason for the west’s higher standard of living.
The rest is due to demographic distributions, meaning that the vast majority of ethnic Europeans are within one degree of the genetic middle class (meaning that they can learn to use technology independently by reading), whereas the vast majority of peoples who complain about the reputational advantage of ethnic Europeans are from groups with historically larger underclasses, and therefore, lower medians, where cultural norms are determined by the median, and we are all judged by ‘averages (median) of our group”. Why? Because stereotypes are the most accurate measurement in the social sciences. They are verified or falsified every day in every personal interaction.
We are all punished for (experience discounts), and privileged for (experience premiums) our identities: manners, ethics, morals, habits, body language, hygiene, speech pattern, vocabulary, dress, fitness, and everything else.
To lose your discount or gain a premium, change your group’s sexual, social, economic, intellectual, and market value, by changing your group’s demographics, habits, manners, ethics, morals, traditions, values, rituals so that they are ALSO middle class (market) rather than whatever tradition you come from. it’s not complicated. Before the 1964 immigration act, everyone who came to America did it.
The lesson is that people are not scarce. Individuals are not special.Humans by and large are a commodity. There are, if anything, far too many of us. People must work hard to find some way of providing value to others so that they are useful in the marketplace for sexual, social, economic, political cooperation. And because value is rare, and people are not scarce, all people are careful in making the best investments that they can. And they invest in what they can see.
Hence why Jews and Asians do better than ethnic Europeans in American university acceptance, but no one criticizes them. While whites are criticized daily, and experience reverse discrimination in the academy, politics, and the media, while preserving their economic advantage in the workplace, and their social status.
So, it’s not a privilege, it’s a cultural premium for 1350 years of suppression of underclass reproduction and downward expansion of the middle class. And training your children to do what is uncomfortable in order to obtain long term benefits of conforming to middle-class behaviors.
And it’s almost impossible to alter for that reason.
People from other cultures or ethnicities assume white identity is arbitrary but it is merely the universal adaptation of middle-class market behavior on a civilizational scale.
Join the middle class by acting as middle class, and getting others with your identity to act middle class. It’s not complicated, but it’s terribly difficult, which is why so few cultures can do it without many generations of middle-class civilization.
The Flip Side of Colonialism: The Industrial Production of Prosperity:
Colonialism was a profound if not most profound good since the invention of farming – we dragged mankind out of ignorance, superstition, poverty, disease, hard labor, child mortality, early death, suffering, tyranny, and subjectivity to the vicissitudes of nature – kicking and screaming all the while.
Western failure was only in having the European civil wars to contain Germany, and contain Russia, and leaving our project of dragging mankind out of ignorance and poverty incomplete.
That failure led to the only significant problems of colonialism: (a) the failure to complete the replacement french despotism with English developmentalism. (b) the absence of the technology of fiat money credit that would have eliminated the need for gold and resource extraction. (c) the collapse left an opening for the Counter-Revolutions of French Socialism, Jewish Communism, Islamic Fundamentalism. (d) the introduction of medicines and health science without the introduction of eugenics (birth control). (e) the failure of our postwar investments in the third world which generally were too insubstantial to do other than delay or inhibit internal growth of demand.
Slavery was universal and whites were more frequently the subject of it (by muslims) than perpetrators of it. The vast majority of slaves when to the caribbean and south america.
Why? Whites are not malaria-immune but many blacks are. Whites have higher (hotter) metabolisms, and blacks don’t. Whites had to be taken from the criminal or impoverished classes and died in droves. Africans were captured by other Africans as prisoners of war in order their attempt to unify West Africa and complete the production of the West African empire (which would have happened had the brits not intervened – anglos were wrong as usual – too utopian.).
This meant that the warm weather colonies most able to produce high-value goods (particularly sugar) with Africans, (a) had more survivors, (b) spread the genres of previously constrained peoples to new territories, (c) forcibly modernized both cultures, civilizations, and Genes. And it was not ‘known’ that enslaved primitives were capable of civilized behavior at the time. It was only in the 19th century after the industrial revolution that we found that citizens were more profitable than serfs, were more profitable than slaves.
Creating middle classes by resource exploitation, and selling manufactured (value added) goods to developing peoples was the only means possible of dragging the vast body of dirty, ignorant, superstitious, violent, poor, disease ridden, un-domesticated human animals out of of their condition, and reforming their societies incrementally until they themselves could create a middle class civilization capable of self governance without threat to more advanced civilizations.
The west was punished in the ancient world for Truth, Reason, Law, and Technology, and punished in the current world for the same.
We dragged mankind kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, poverty, hard labor, starvation, and disease in the ancient world and the modern and in both eras the ungrateful rebelled like the children that they are.
Why? Because western truth forces you to face your sexual, social, economic, and political value in the face.
Why? Because that is what it means to be western: Truth Regardless of Consequences to the Status Hierarchy.
This Curt Doolittle for The Choice. Thank you for listening.