Amerika

The enduring question of the white nationalist movement of the 1990s was “why do white people not unite?”

The answer is complex. First, white people celebrate their internal divisions, such as ethnicity and caste, as because without those, we have no social order and are doomed in any case. Second, most white people find many or most other white people annoying and corrupt, and the last thing they want is to join those in a movement that compels them to ignore failure, ineptitude and moral corruption just to “unite.”

But even more, white people are constrained by the fact that internal competition is more extreme than external competition and so we struggle against each other, oblivious to our shared interests:

Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist. That is, he thinks that people are not engaged in class struggle, in which proletarians unite against the bourgeoisie. Instead, people reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. Consider the origin of the ancient grudge laid out in the opening line of Romeo and Juliet: “Two houses, both alike in dignity…” The Montagues and Capulets fight not because they’re so different but because they’re so alike.

The closer we are to other people—Girard means this in multiple dimensions—the more intensely that mimetic contagion will spread. Alternatively, competition is fiercer the more that competitors resemble each other. When we’re not so different from people around us, it’s irresistible to become obsessed about beating others. Girard’s framework vastly improves Freud’s phrase “the narcissism of small differences.” It’s also a framework for Kissinger’s quip: “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”

In other words, we are busy struggling among ourselves for social status and rank, and as a result, prioritize external threats as secondary. This makes sense when one considers that internal threats are more likely to manifest and destabilize the individual than external threats, which tend to be remote in time and place.

This internal competition present the primary threat to civilization: the individual decides to externalize costs of his behavior, and acts against the needs of civilization, confident that he will not be made accountable because he is equal. Thus the only way to avoid the crisis of internal competition is to find some unity of goal, or purpose, by which everyone works independently toward an end state.

That provides the most vital condition of human existence, which is a results-based test: did the actions of the individual result in fulfillment of the goal, or were they against that purpose, or even indifferent? Those who are net contributors toward the goal, despite any mistakes they have made, become the in-group of that civilization, creating a basis by which it can advance itself.

Until we have purpose, we will be forever competing against one another, winning tiny tokens like those given out at a carnival, while the actual quest — restoring Western Civilization, so that we can all have the existential comfort of belonging to something meaningful — passes us by.

Tags: competition, rené girard, unity