Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

I’m sorry it bothers you that I’m not a racist – I don’t hate anybody really. Well, I hate a person or two but they deserve it.

—racialist but not racist?–

I dunno. We all have families, tribes, nations and races that we are involuntary members of. We all have cultural and religious organizations we are involuntary members of – although we can work to alter them. We all have occupational organizations we are at least partly voluntary members of if an economy is good enough. We all have territorial membership that is often open to choice given willingness to pay the price.

—“According to the academic definition of racism at Stockholm University, you have to 1) recognize the existence of discrete sub-species within Sapiens Sapiens, and 2) place the races in a hierarchy of superior and inferior, to qualify as a racist. You don’t have to hate anybody.”—

I place the races in a hierarchy of the relatives scales of their lower classes, and the ability of the upper classes to create an advanced society. That is all. I might organize them also by rate and depth of sexual maturity or success at delaying such. These two factors are as scientific as we can be at present in determining the causal differences between populations in building complex advanced prosperous societies.

—“So you’re a textbook Stockholmian racist ;)”—

I don’t qualify for point 2, which is imprecisely stated, and could suggest that all members of a race are inferior or that different races have different numbers of inferiors because of historical climate and agrarian modes of production. I state only that westerners (whites) have achieved more than any other groups, at least three times, in the prehistorical, ancient, and modern worlds, by the use of what I call ‘testimonial’ (or martial) truth, combined with the political strategy of aristocratic egalitarianism (sovereignty). And as such we were successful at profiting from the rule of and the domestication of those we ruled – including ourselves.

Now it may be that westerners possess some uniquely superior traits, and I might suggest that’s true, but whether they are meaningful is something I am pretty much questioning. (appearance, aggression, balance of verbal and spatial IQ, and some strange ability to operate as a single pack more easily possibly just because we’re calmer).

Now let me flip it around, and say that groups of people, universally, demonstrate kin selection in democratic politics. It is what it is. It’s not a subject open to debate, the evidence is universal. Someone would have to be painfully ignorant or a liar to disagree with it.

So it’s DEMOCRACY that makes Race a problem. In monarchies there is no access to power, and so the market is the only method by which groups can compete for status.

Access to political power is what creates the problem of racism.

Race isn’t the problem. Democracy (access to non-market power) is the problem. It generates conflict which in turn generates demand for the state, which in turn generates tyranny.