Europeans are Not Individualist

Dispelling a Piece of Quackery

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A crisis is looming in the near future, for all of us. Many of our guys have recently been thrown out of work. Revenues are down across many business sectors, ours included (buy books!) My local grocery shelves are getting barer by the week. Probably after Trump gets elected, powerful thumbs will lift off the scales, and things will be allowed to get much worse. 

And people can feel the tension too. Maybe because it’s a US election year, there is a collective nervousness in our scene, and this nervousness causes guys to run back to comfortable priors, even if they don’t make sense. You saw this with COVID, and now you’re seeing it again—racist liberalism is on the rise. 

Racist liberalism is just all the assumptions of Jordan Peterson—meritocracy, individualism, Faustian spirit of the West, etc.—plus racism. It’s a variant of the idea that we can just go back to where the cancer was stage 2 or 3 and that somehow it won’t be terminal this time, as though modern liberalism is not the logical conclusion of earlier forms of liberalism. If you’re new here and not sure exactly what is wrong with liberalism, start here. 

We were discussing the return of racist liberalism in our Gumroad patron chat, and one of our guys pointed out that liberalism is more ensconced in the radical right than anyone thinks. Certainly, it’s proving stubbornly hard to get rid of. Maybe there’s something in us that is susceptible to it. But one of its core assumptions—that Europeans are inherently individualist—really beggars belief. 

There are some fairly obvious counterexamples to this, even to the superficially plausible idea that Northwestern Europeans in particular are individualist. It was not long ago that Celts and Germanic Scots lived in clans. In modern times, the Germans of the mid-20th century come to mind. And they were not some aberration either, full-born out of the brow of Zeus. Their ultra-collectivism had its predecessor in the Prussians, Jordan Peterson’s nightmare fuel.