State-Supported Extreme Individualism in Sweden
The following are excerpts from my forthcoming book (now in the final stages), Western Individualism and the Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future.
Extreme egalitarianism is especially apparent in northwest Europe. The “Jante Laws” of Scandinavia are paradigmatic: 1. Don’t think you are anything; 2. Don’t think you are as good as us. 3. Don’t think you are smarter than us. 4. Don’t fancy yourself better than us. 5. Don’t think you know more than us. 6. Don’t think you are greater than us. 7. Don’t think you are good for anything. 8. Don’t laugh at us. 9. Don’t think that anyone cares about you. 10. Don’t think you can teach us anything.[1] In short, no one must rise above the rest. Such egalitarianism is typical of h-g groups around the world,[2] and are antithetical to the aristocratic ideal of the I-Es.
Extreme egalitarianism results in high levels of conformism and social anxiety. Individuals fear social ostracism for violating egalitarian norms and standing out from the crowd—a phenomenon that has played a major role in creating a public consensus in favor of mass migration and multiculturalism. In Sweden especially there is no public debate on the costs and benefits of immigration; sceptics remain silent for fear of shunning and disapproval. Discussing the cancellation of a talk because it was sponsored by a politically incorrect newspaper, journalist Ingrid Carlqvist comments that “everyone with a different opinion in Sweden really is a Nazi! That’s the way it works in the New Sweden, the country I call Absurdistan. The country of silence.”[3]
Similarly, in his Fairness and Freedom, David Hackett Fischer describes the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” (envy and resentment of people who are “conspicuously successful, exceptionally gifted, or unusually creative”) that is characteristic of New Zealand.[4] “It sometimes became a more general attitude of outright hostility to any sort of excellence, distinction, or high achievement—especially achievement that requires mental effort, sustained industry, or applied intelligence. … The possession of extraordinary gifts is perceived as unfair by others who lack them.”[5]
The expression ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ originated in Australia but seems more characteristic of New Zealand. Successful people are called ‘poppies.’ This tendency is perhaps not as strong as it used to be, but, although some successful New Zealanders are accepted, “other bright and creative New Zealanders have been treated with cruelty by compatriots who appear to feel that there is something fundamentally unfair about better brains or creative gifts, and still more about a determination to use them.”[6] Doubtless because of the same egalitarian tendencies, the New Zealand system encourages laziness and lack of achievement—workers insist that others slow down and not work hard. “Done by lunchtime” is the motto of a great many New Zealand workers.
Such egalitarian social practices are common in h-g groups around the world[7] and support the general view that this important strand of European culture, especially apparent after it came to power beginning in the seventeenth century (see Chapter 6), reflects the culture of northern h-gs.[8] Reflecting this pattern, Scandinavian society in general has a history of relatively small income and social class differences, including the absence of serfdom during the Middle Ages. A recent anthropological study of h-gs found that economic inequality approximated that of modern Denmark.[9] Chapter 4 discusses the individualism of Scandinavian family patterns, including relatively egalitarian relationships between spouses—extreme even within the Western European context.
The strength of extended kinship ties is thus central to this analysis. Patrick Heady divides European kinship patterns into three categories, strong (Croatia, Russia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain—here labeled “moderate collectivism”), weak (France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland—“moderate individualism”), and very weak (Sweden, Denmark—“strong individualism”), running in a cline from southeast to northwest.[10]
Heady labels this pattern “parentally anchored and locally involved,” the extreme opposite being “origin free and locally detached.” Sweden is characterized by the weakest family system. Indeed, Maria Iacovu and Alexandra Skew provide a sharp contrast between the most extreme family forms in Europe, noting that in Scandinavia there is “almost a complete absence of the extended family.”[11]
The Scandinavian countries are characterized by small households (particularly single-adult and lone-parent households), early residential independence for young people and extended residential independence for elderly people; cohabitation as an alternative to marriage; and an almost complete absence of the extended family. At the other end, the Southern European countries are characterised by relatively low levels of non-marital cohabitation, by extended co-residence between parents and their adult children, and by elderly people with their adult offspring; this, together with a much lower incidence of lone-parent families, make for much larger household sizes.Thus the fundamental cline in family patterns places the most extreme forms of individualism in the far northwest. This categorization system is essentially a more fine-grained version of the well-known Hajnal line which separates European family types into only two categories, east and west of a line between St. Petersburg and Trieste.[12]
The Simple Household as a Fundamental European Social Institution
One marker of individualism is the unique Western European “simple household” type discussed extensively in Chapter 4. The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children. This household style has been typical of Scandinavia (excluding Finland), the British Isles, the Low Countries, German-speaking areas, and northern France—essentially Scandinavia plus the areas originally dominated by the Germanic tribes of the post-Roman world in Europe. The most extreme form of this household is in Scandinavia, where there is “almost a complete absence of the extended family.”[1] It contrasts with the joint family structure typical of the rest of Eurasia in which the household consists of two or more related couples, typically brothers and their wives.[2] Before the industrial revolution, the simple household system was characterized by late age of marriage as well as methods of keeping unmarried young people occupied as servants and circulating among the households of the wealthy. The joint household system was characterized by earlier age of marriage for both men and women, a higher birthrate, as well as means of splitting up to form two or more households when the need arises.
The simple household system is a fundamental feature of individualist culture. The individualist family was able to pursue its interests freed from the obligations and constraints of extended kinship relationships and of the suffocating collectivism of the social structures typical of the rest of the world. This establishment of the simple household free of the wider kinship community eventually gave birth to all the other markers of Western modernization: limited governments in which individuals have rights against the state, capitalist economic enterprise based on individual economic rights, and science as individual truth seeking. Individualist societies in the post-medieval West developed republican political institutions and scientific and scholarly associations which assume groups are permeable and highly subject to defection—that there is a marketplace of ideas in which individuals may defect from current scientific views when they believe that the data support alternate perspectives.
State-Supported Extreme Individualism in Scandinavia
As noted above, the Scandinavians have the most individualist family patterns in all of Europe.[13] Lars Trägårdh describes the extreme form of individualism in Swedish society. It may seem paradoxical in view of Sweden’s socialist economic policies and powerful tendencies toward egalitarianism, conformism, and law-abidingness. However,
what is unique about Swedish social policy is neither the extent to which the state has intervened in society nor the generous insurance schemes, but the underlying moral logic. Though the path in no way has been straight, one can discern over the course of the twentieth century an overarching ambition to liberate the individual citizen from all forms of subordination and dependency in civil society: the poor from charity, the workers from their employers, wives from their husbands, children from parents (and vice versa when the parents have become elderly).These trends toward individual freedom and lack of dependency on superiors go back at least to the medieval period. Michael Roberts noted that the peasant in medieval Sweden “retained his social and political freedom to a greater degree, played a greater part in the politics of the country, and was altogether a more considerable person, than in any other western European country.”[20] Similarly, Lars Trägårdh:
In practice, the primacy of individual autonomy has been institutionalized through a plethora of laws and practices … . Interdependency within the family has been minimized through individual taxation of spouses, family law reforms have revoked obligations to support elderly parents, more or less universal day care makes it possible for women to work, student loans which are blind in relation to the income of parents or spouse give young adults a large degree of autonomy in relation to their families, and children are given a more independent status through the abolition of corporal punishment and a strong emphasis on children’s rights. All in all, this legislation has made Sweden into the least family-dependent and the most individualized society on the face of the earth.[14]
In this regime, families become “voluntary associations”—despite continuing to exhibit high-investment parenting as indicated by high levels of time spent with children. Nordic families are relatively prone to “independence (of children), individualism, and (gender) equality.”[15] The “Swedish theory of love” is that partners should not be dependent on each other—that true love means not entering a relationship as dependent on any way (e.g., financially) on the other person.[16] Surveys of values confirm that Nordic societies cluster together in scoring high on “emancipatory self-expression.”[17] Nordic societies also cluster at the top of social trust, despite also being high on secular/rational values, despite trust typically being associated with religiosity.[18] Finally, the high standing on “generalized trust” provides economic advantages because it lowers “transaction costs”—less need for written contracts and legal protections, law suits, etc.[19]
The respect for law and a positive view of the state are historically linked to the relative freedom of the Swedish peasantry. The weakness, not to say absence of feudal institutions, corresponds with a history of self-reliance, self-rule, land ownership, representation as an estate in parliament, and the consequent willingness and ability to participate in the political affairs of the country. There is, of course, a strong mythological aspect to this oft-claimed lack of feudal traditions in Sweden. …This passage is reflected in the writing of nineteenth-century historian Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847). Geijer noted that feudalism (consisting of hereditary rights of the nobility and serfdom for peasants and which Geijer regarded as oppressive) developed in most Germanic societies beginning with the conquests of the Franks; however, “in Scandinavia itself, … the fiefs [i.e., land parcels granted to the nobility] never became hereditary, even less was serfdom introduced among the people.”[22] Moreover, traditional Swedish kingship was not oppressive: Geijer “was a firm believer in constitutional monarchy with a strong personal influence of a potent king—emphasizing the unique bond between the monarch and his people that Geijer regarded as an historical fact in Sweden.”[23]
[Nevertheless,] the consequence of the relative inclusion and empowerment was that their status as subjects was balanced by their position as citizens. As an estate in parliament, they had a part in passing laws which in this way gained popular legitimacy. Furthermore, since the peasants and the King (at times joined by the Clergy) often were joined in a common struggle against their common adversary, the Nobility, many peasants came to view the State, in the figure of the King as in some sense being “on their side.” To be sure, in actuality political alliances shifted, some Kings were more powerful than others and the Nobility was at times close to achieving the kind of subjugation of the peasantry that was the norm in much of the rest of Europe. But all things told, the peasant struggle to retain their legal, political and property rights was remarkably successful, and by the time that democratic and liberal ideas made their way to Sweden from the Continent in the nineteenth century, they were effectively fused with these politically strong yeoman traditions.[21]
The king did not act as the highest conciliator nor judge the free man in the absence of his equals, for all the judgments were given with the people or, what is the same thing, with an elected jury. In war the king was the commander, though the people did not follow him unconditionally in anything except what it had itself taken part in deciding or which the presence of the enemy in the land made necessary. All other warfare was not a national war but merely a feud, in which the king could also freely engage with his men, that is those who owed him particular allegiance (fideles) [i.e., the king’s “permanent war-band”[24] or “comitatus,”[25] i.e., a Männerbünd] or allied themselves temporarily with him. For no free man, even if subject to a king, was the king’s man, but his own. To be called the former required a specific relationship.[26]Geijer claims that “in Scandinavia we know the original government to have been ruled by priests,” and he contrasts this priestly regime with “the first ‘Odinic’ rulers.”[28] As noted in Chapter 2, Odin was the “god of battle rage” and strongly associated with the Indo-European warrior culture.[29] [30]
The warrior nobility was a nobility of service and of the court and for a long time did not, and only with the expansion of royal power, gain any preferential rights with regard to the people. Nor were any of the advantages that accompanied it hereditary or even permanent in respect of a given person.[27]
The rule of law rather than despotism by kings was the norm: “Rule of law was essential to the social contract that underpinned the emerging Swedish state, and adherence to the law by the king and his administration was essential to the legitimacy of the state.”[31] The values embedded in the law became internalized social norms.
Berggren and Trägårdh explain Swedes’ acceptance of strong state controls supporting egalitarianism as necessary precisely for achieving individual autonomy:
From the perspective of what might be termed the Swedish ideology, active interventionism on the part of the state to promote egalitarian conditions is not a threat to individual autonomy but rather the obverse: a necessary prerequisite to free the citizens from demeaning and humbling dependence on one another. As a culture and a political system Sweden cannot simply be described as communitarian, that is, as a society in which the citizens prize their voluntary association with one another above their empowerment as individuals. In fact, the official rhetoric about solidarity and social democracy notwithstanding, Sweden is not first and foremost a warm Gemeinschaft composed of altruists who are exceptionally caring or loving, but a rather hyper-modern Gesellschaft of self-realizing individuals who believe that a strong state and stable social norms will keep their neighbor out of both their lives and their backyards.[32]At the level of the family, Berggren and Trägårdh agree with Patrick Heady[33] (see above) that Sweden “stands out” from the Western European family system. As noted above, a key aspect of the Swedish system is that young people had to assume individual responsibility for their marriages and for getting on in the world: “Young people were controlled by internalized systems of self-control, not least the tradition of ‘night bundling’ which, though in no way unique to Sweden, was very widespread and prominent.”[34]
Sweden is thus on the extreme end of individualism. “Sweden—and to a somewhat lesser extent the rest of Scandinavia—[became] the least family-oriented and most individualized society on the face of the earth, scoring at the extreme end of emancipatory self-expression values and secular-rational values.[35] The downside includes high levels of divorce, lack of filial piety, “alarming rates of stress and psychological ill-health,” and an individualist youth culture that in the contemporary world is able to be exploited by commercial interests and much given to sexual promiscuity and drugs.[36]
The moral communities of the West have deep historical roots as well. In Chapter 5 I noted that Christian Europe had become a moral community based on Christian religious beliefs rather than an ethnic or national identity. Moreover, the medieval moral community created by the Church, the Puritan and Quaker religious leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth centuries discussed in later chapters carried on the primeval tendency to create moral communities as a source of identity. Moreover, as discussed below and in Chapter 9, such moral communities have come to define the contemporary culture of the West.
These moral communities are indigenous products of the culture of the West—products of Western culture in the same way that kinship-based clans, cousin marriage and harems of elite males are products of the people of the Middle East.
It is thus reasonable to attempt to find evolutionary predispositions toward creating moral communities. A theme of several chapters has been the uniqueness of northwestern European peoples—the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples. As noted in Chapter 7, despite roots in Proto-Indo-European, the English words ‘fair’ and ‘fairness’ appear only in the languages of northwest Europe where they originally referred only to behavior within the tribe, clearly a marker for the importance of moral reputation within the group.
The proposal here is that the moral communities observed at the origins of Western history and surfacing recurrently in later centuries tapped into a pre-existing tendency among individualists to create such communities as a force for cohesion that does not rely on kinship relations. Beginning after World War II and accelerating greatly in the 1960s and thereafter, these moral communities have been dominated by the intellectual left which is bent on dispossessing European-derived peoples from their homelands.
Moral communities are pervasive throughout the institutional structures of the West; however, because of their widespread influence, moral communities are particularly noteworthy in the media and the academic world. For example, whereas mainstream social science had been relatively free of morally based ingroup-outgroup thinking prior to World War II, such thinking has had dramatic effects on the social sciences and humanities in later decades, to the point that academic departments and scholarly associations in these areas can be accurately characterized as “tribal moral communities” in the sense of Jonathan Haidt.[1B] This is most obviously the case in areas such as social psychology, sociology, and ethnic and gender studies.
The result has been that academic research communities and the media rigorously police research and commentary that conflict with racial egalitarianism or promote the interests of European-derived peoples, and these attitudes have been internalized by a great many White people. Researchers such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, and Ralph Scott who attempt to publish findings on race differences or on public policies related to race find themselves socially shunned, and they quickly learn that there are steep barriers to publication in mainstream academic journals and no mainstream grant support for their research.
For example, when scholarly articles contravening the sacred values of the tribe are submitted to academic journals, reviewers and editors suddenly become extremely “rigorous”— demanding more controls and other changes in methodology. Such “scientific skepticism” regarding research that one dislikes for deeper reasons was a major theme of The Culture of Critique in discussions of the work of Franz Boas, Richard C. Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, the Frankfurt School, to name a few.[2B]
One result of this reign of academic terror has been that conservatives often self-select to go into other areas that are not so compromised, such as the hard sciences or computing; there is also active discrimination against conservative job candidates and Ph.D. applicants.[3B] The system is therefore self-replicating.
The Extremism of Scandinavian Political Correctness
Although all Western European-derived societies are undergoing replacement-level, non-White migration, there can be little doubt that Scandinavia and especially Sweden, are extreme in welcoming replacement of their peoples and cultures. As elsewhere in the West, a major role in these transformations has been played by Jewish activists and Jewish media ownership,[1] but Scandinavians seem particularly favorable to these transformations.
In previous chapters it was argued that the Scandinavian countries are on the extreme end of the northwest-southeast genetic cline, with higher levels of Indo-European-derived and hunter gatherer-derived genes than most of southern Europe. I have also described individualists as creating societies based not on kinship, but on reputation and trust within a morally defined community—i.e., reputation based on honesty, trustworthiness, and upholding the moral values of the community. Effective groups require social glue to keep people unified. Kinship is one way of achieving commonality of interests. Participating in a moral community that actively polices its boundaries on the basis of whether individuals have the above-mentioned qualities is the social glue of individualist groups.
The reputation-based moral communities discussed here have also been strongly egalitarian—characterized by socially enforced egalitarianism as typified by the Jante Laws of Scandinavia (Chapter 3) and the Tall Poppy syndrome noted in societies of the Second British Empire—New Zealand and Australia (Chapter 8). Individuals who excel or “think they are better than others” are shunned and ostracized.
Reputation-based moral communities thus lead to groupthink as individuals trust one another to have honest opinions, and individuals who deviate from group norms are shunned. A Swedish attorney commenting on a legal case where an innocent person was convicted of a crime, noted that many people were involved in the decision and all agreed with what turned out to be an unjust verdict:
When the same people participated in all or most of [the decision], a groupthink developed. … Strong trust between people is often described as one of Sweden’s great assets [but] it cannot replace a critical approach to serious allegations, even when they are self-accusations [i.e., a confession by the accused].[2]Strong social trust is indeed a great asset of Sweden and other countries with a significant Nordic population, leading to societies based on individual merit (a facet of reputation) and low levels of corruption. However, as in the above example, it can lead to groupthink as individuals who stand out or dissent from group norms in any way are ostracized—a facet of the Jante Laws and the Tall Poppy syndrome of Northwestern European culture: it’s not only excellence that is punished, but any deviation from group norms, including opinions shared by group members.
Egalitarian groups thus make decisions by consensus, not in a top-down, authoritarian manner. Once there is a decision-by-consensus, dissenters are seen as willfully ignorant or obstinate, and they lose status within the group.
Strong tendencies toward egalitarianism can thus easily lead to powerful social controls, either formal or informal, on behavior which are designed to ensure that individuals do not deviate from consensus attitudes, as noted in Puritan-derived cultures (Chapter 6) which became dominant in England and had a strong influence on the United States. Thus, even though Scandinavian cultures have been described as the most individualistic in terms of family functioning (Chapter 4), it is not surprising that these cultures may exert strong controls on individual behavior to ensure conformity to the norms of a moral community.
Both egalitarianism and socially enforced norms (conceptualized in moral terms) thus typify these cultures. Sweden appears to be extreme in these tendencies. Whereas Chapter 3 discussed Sweden’s egalitarianism, here I describe the intense social controls that have virtually banned discussion of the negative aspects of immigration and multiculturalism, support for which has become a consensus among the Swedish elite.
Sweden has declared itself a “humanitarian superpower”— a superpower in which no sacrifice by the Swedes on behalf of Third World migrants is considered too great. The equivalent of a new Stockholm will have to be built within 11 years to house the migrants, and official policy is that Swedes should make sacrifices to ensure sufficient housing for the continuous flow of immigrants, including repurposing churches (while mosques are being built). The government buys virtually any standing structure to be turned into immigrant housing, and there are proposals to confiscate vacation homes “for the greater good.” Meanwhile, Swedes have a lower priority for housing than immigrants, and thousands can’t find an apartment, a situation that is particularly difficult for young people, especially those wishing to start a family. Leading politicians openly say that Sweden does not belong to the Swedes, and that Swedes and Swedish culture is bland or that Sweden does not have a culture. [3]
This phenomenon is a violation of the general finding that people are less willing to contribute to public goods (e.g., public housing, health care) to people who don’t look like themselves.[4] Thus, the European societies that inaugurated national health care programs did so when they were racially homogeneous. A likely reason universal health care has been so slow in coming in the U.S. is its historically large Black population, as well as the post-1965 multicultural tsunami.[5]
A critical aspect of the success of Swedish multiculturalism is that Swedes are terrified to violate the moral consensus surrounding migration for fear of ostracism and loss of job. They are engaging in groupthink that demands allegiance to a moral community as defined by the media and the political culture. In effect, considering the genetic distances involved, this is an extreme form of what evolutionists term “altruistic punishment”—willingness to punish one’s own people and sacrifice them on the altar of a moral ideal for fear of violating the norms of a moral community (Chapter 3, with further examples in Chapter 6).
A Swedish journalist, Ingrid Carlsqvist comments on the enforced silence on any criticism of multiculturalism, particularly in the above-ground media. Violating the silence is met with moral outrage intended to produce shunning and ostracism — in other words, there is a socially mandated groupthink where people are terrified at the thought of having dissenting opinions:
The situation in Sweden is far worse than in Denmark [which, as noted above is quite different from Sweden genetically]. In Sweden NOBODY talks about immigration problems, the death of the multiculti project or the islamisation/arabisation of Europe. If you do, you will immediately be called a racist, an Islamophobe or a Nazi. That is what I have been called since I founded the Free Press Society in Sweden. My name has been dragged through the dirt in big newspapers like Sydsvenskan, Svenska Dagbladet and even my own union paper, The Journalist.[6]This phenomenon has nothing to do with Christianity. Sweden is the most secular country in the world. Its elites are hostile to Christianity and more than happy to donate Christian churches to the non-Christian newcomers or to destroy churches to make housing for them. Rather, it is a new secular religion of moral consensus. They are behaving like the Puritans and Quakers, as discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, but without the religious veneer. Of course, we see the same thing throughout the West, albeit to a lesser extent. Western societies have uniquely been high-trust, reputation-based societies, a basic corollary of the psychology of Western individualism.
There is now a morally framed consensus throughout the West that has taken advantage of this tendency toward groupthink by so many Westerners. The movements discussed in CofC were originated and dominated by tight-knit groups of Jewish intellectuals and were promulgated from elite universities and elite media. They were framed as having wide-ranging moral implications that essentially come down to toppling White, non-Jewish males (and ultimately females) from positions of power. These movements have achieved consensus among large percentages of non-Jews in the West — with disastrous results.
Ironically perhaps, one of the major findings on multiculturalism is that it erodes trust not only of ethnic outsiders, but also of people of one’s own race. We can thus look forward to Swedes and other Westerners being less trusting, but by the time this happens, Sweden will already have been transformed into a non-homogeneous society prone to intra-societal conflicts and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods. When trust evaporates, Swedes may become more willing to stand up to the suicidal consensus.
Groupthink implies failure to look at the facts of the situation rather than idealized versions that reinforce the consensus. Groupthink thus makes it difficult to question multicultural mantras like “diversity is our strength” by considering the research on the effects of importing ethnic and religious diversity. In the case of Sweden, research indicates that, as in the United States (Chapter 8), Swedes, especially highly educated, relatively affluent Swedes, are the first to flee diversity, typically while failing to question its value.
We’ve found a so-called “tipping point” at around 3-4%, says Emma Neuman, research economist at Linneuniversitet. When the non-European immigrants are that many in a residential area then the native Swedes start moving out. …Despite such implicitly nativist behavior, these Swedes are unlikely to publicly dissent from the consensus opinion that forbids any discussion of the effects of importing non-European diversity. The question of whether Swedes benefit from an increasingly segregated, culturally and racially divided, conflict-ridden society is never raised in public.
The effect doesn’t revolve around immigrants generally. Immigrants from European countries do not result in a moving effect, only non-European immigrants. It is reminiscent of the phenomenon of white flight in the USA where whites move away from neighbourhoods where many blacks move in.[7]
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[1] M. Eckehart, How Sweden Became Multicultural (Helsingborg, Sweden: Logik Förlag, 2017);
- Roger Devlin, “The Origins of Swedish Multiculturalism: A Review of M. Eckehart’s How Sweden Became Multicultural,” The Occidental Observer (September 9, 2017).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/groupthink-sweden-miscarriage-of-justice-sture-bergwall
[3] See Kevin MacDonald, “Pathological Altruism on Steroids in Sweden,” The Occidental Observer (April 4, 2015).
[5] Kevin MacDonald, “Racial Conflict and the Health Care Bill, “The Occidental Observer (March 3, 2010).
https://fof.se/artikel/segregationen-okar
[1B] Jonathan Haidt, “Post-partisan Social Psychology.” Presentation at the meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX, January 27, 2011.
https://vimeo.com/19822295
http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html
[2B] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 2nd edition: Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2002), especially Chapters 2 and 6.
[3B] Kevin MacDonald, “Why are Professors Liberals?,” The Occidental Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Summer, 2010): 57–79.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321716607_Why_Are_Professors_Liberals
[1] Aksel Sandemose (1899–1965) in his novel En Flyktning Krysser Sitt Spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, 1933). Although originating in a work of fiction, the Jante Laws have been widely recognized by Scandinavians as accurately reflecting a mindset typical of their society.
[2] Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.
[3] Ingrid Carlqvist, “I Want My Country Back,” speech given at the International Civil Liberties Alliance in the European Parliament, Brussels (July 9, 2012).
https://www.trykkefrihed.dk/i-want-my-country-back.htm
[4] David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 386.
[5] Ibid., 486–487.
[6] Ibid., 487.
[7] Christopher H. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge:
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[8] Burton, et al., “Regions Based on Social Structure”; MacDonald, “What Makes Western Culture Unique?.”
[9] Eric A. Smith, Kim Hill, Frank Marlowe, D. Nolin, Polly Wiessner, P, M. Gurven, S. Bowles, Monique Borgerhoff-Mulder, T. Hertz, and A. Bell, “Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among H-gs,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 10 (2010):19–34.
[10] Patrick Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to an Aspect of European Kinship,” Cross-Cultural Research 51, no. 3 (2017): 285–310.
[11] Maria Iacovu and Alexandra Skew, “Household Structure in the EU,” in Anthony B. Atkinson and Eric Marlier (eds.), Income and Living Conditions in the EU (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010): 79–100, 81.
[12] Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.”
[13] Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to European Kinship.”
[14] Lars Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism: The Swedish Theory of Love and Its Lutheran Imprint,” in Between the State and the Eucharist: Free Church Theology in Conversation with William T. Kavanaugh, Joel Halldorf and Fredrik Wenell (eds.) (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014): 13–38, 21–22.
https://books.google.com/books?id=nA-QBAAAQBAJ
[15] Ibid., 33.
[16] Ibid., 27.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid, 26.
[19] Ibid., 26–27.
[20] Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1967), 4–5.
[21] Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” 32–33.
[22] Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” in Freedom in Sweden: Selected works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, Björn Hasselgrn (ed.), trans. Peter C. Hogg (Stockholm: Timbro Forlag, 2017): 125–306, 142.
[23] Lars Magnusson, “Erik Gustaf Geijer—An Introduction,” in Freedom in Sweden: Selected works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, Björn Hasselgrn (ed.)., trans. Peter C. Hogg (Stockholm: Timbro Forlag, 2017): 13–60, 26; emphasis in original.
[24] Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” 139; emphasis in original.
[25] Ibid., 138.
[26] Ibid.; emphasis in original.
[27] Ibid., 140.
[28] Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” 155.
[29] Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, Barbarian Rites, trans. Michael Moynihan (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011; original German edition, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Verlag Herder, 1992), 49.
[30]
This contrast between the “Odinic rulers” and the previous priestly regimes is consistent with Marija Gimbutas’s controversial theory that the Indo-Europeans introduced a warlike, male-dominated culture, replacing previously existing, more female-centric cultures.
The following is speculative, but it’s interesting that a theme of Norse mythology was a primeval battle between the Aesir and the Vanir, the former seemingly referring to the Indo-European conquerors with their highly militarized culture (with gods such as Odin and Thor), while the latter possibly referring to the previously resident hunter-gatherer culture discussed in Chapter 3. The main god of the Vanik was Freya, associated with magic and compatible with the idea that priests were the original rulers in Scandinavia and that the culture was much more influenced by women than the highly patriarchal culture of the Indo-European conquerors. As noted in Chapter 3, this culture was quite sophisticated and supported a large population, so they may well have been able to put up a formidable defense against the invaders; after all, as noted in Chapter 3, the hunter-gathering cultures of Scandinavia held off the advance of agriculture by the farming culture of the Middle Eastern-derived farmers for 2000–3000 years. I suggest that the mythology ultimately refers to real battles that must have occurred but are lost to prehistory. According to the mythology, the Aesir used typical military tactics, while the Vanik used magic, and the two sides ultimately arrived at a modus vivendi. It’s therefore tempting to explain the relatively egalitarian thrust of Scandinavian cultures compared to other Germanic peoples as emanating from this cultural fusion.
Marija Gimbutas, Bronze Age Cultures in Eastern and Central Europe (The Hague: De Gruyter Noulton, 1965).
[31] Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” 132–133.
[32] Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, “Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State, Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olav Wallenstein (eds.) (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010): 11–22, 14–16. One might note that Sweden’s extreme individualism is a disastrously poor match with Middle Eastern collectivism and the Muslim religion which Sweden is nevertheless energetically importing.
[33] Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to an Aspect of European Kinship.”
[34] Berggren and Trägårdh, “Pippi Longstocking,” 17.
[35] Ibid., 19.
[36] Ibid., 20.
[37] Aksel Sandemose (1899–1965) in his novel En Flyktning Krysser Sitt Spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, 1933). Although originating in a work of fiction, the Jante Laws have been widely recognized by Scandinavians as accurately reflecting a mindset typical of their society.
[38] Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.
[39] Ingrid Carlqvist, “I Want My Country Back,” speech given at the International Civil Liberties Alliance in the European Parliament, Brussels (July 9, 2012).
https://www.trykkefrihed.dk/i-want-my-country-back.htm
[40] David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 386.
[41] Ibid., 486–487.
[42] Ibid., 487.
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The article “How and why Sweden became multicultural”
translated from Swedish is somewhat misleading as it does not mention
the fact that the first law against “hate speech” there came already in
1948 as a result of pressure from the American Jewish Committee and
World Jewish Congress against Swedish interests around the world and
directly against the government. The immediate pretext was the
publications of the national socialist Einar Åberg.
“Initially, his agitation upsets only Jewish congregations in Sweden, but when he distributes his material on an international scale, both the American Jewish Committee and the World Jewish Congress start pressuring the Swedish government directly to do something about it. There are calls for a law for the specific purpose of outlawing Åberg’s activities, and the new law would sometimes be referred to as Lex Åberg – The Åberg law. The Madhouse: A Critical Study of Swedish Society, By Daniel Hammarberg.
One can say the goodwill the Swedish government was trying to protect was a result of being the kind of “moral community” you are describing. But, clearly, the turn towards destruction of the Swedish nation by giving “minorities” – in reality much larger and more powerful groups than Swedes, Norwegians, Danes etc on the global level – special protection, started when it became necessary to protect that moral goodwill against Jewish organized interests. Sweden was of course also vulnerable as a small country that had been neutral during the war. When the 1960s came, free speech, even formally, already had been partially destroyed by the “Åberg law”.
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Professor MacDonald doesn’t seem to know that Swedish publications are run by Jews (the Bonnier family), and that Jews pursue what they think (they have a strange document, the ‘Talmud’) are their exclusive interests. Their money presumably is controlled by Jews as what’s called a ‘fiat currency’, meaning that it is printed or electronically duplicated as a completely monopolistic currency. People in Sweden who object are subjected to stringent controls, which perhaps MacDonald will discover in maybe 25 years time.
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============================== “Initially, his agitation upsets only Jewish congregations in Sweden, but when he distributes his material on an international scale, both the American Jewish Committee and the World Jewish Congress start pressuring the Swedish government directly to do something about it. There are calls for a law for the specific purpose of outlawing Åberg’s activities, and the new law would sometimes be referred to as Lex Åberg – The Åberg law. The Madhouse: A Critical Study of Swedish Society, By Daniel Hammarberg.
One can say the goodwill the Swedish government was trying to protect was a result of being the kind of “moral community” you are describing. But, clearly, the turn towards destruction of the Swedish nation by giving “minorities” – in reality much larger and more powerful groups than Swedes, Norwegians, Danes etc on the global level – special protection, started when it became necessary to protect that moral goodwill against Jewish organized interests. Sweden was of course also vulnerable as a small country that had been neutral during the war. When the 1960s came, free speech, even formally, already had been partially destroyed by the “Åberg law”.
----------------------------------------------------
Professor MacDonald doesn’t seem to know that Swedish publications are run by Jews (the Bonnier family), and that Jews pursue what they think (they have a strange document, the ‘Talmud’) are their exclusive interests. Their money presumably is controlled by Jews as what’s called a ‘fiat currency’, meaning that it is printed or electronically duplicated as a completely monopolistic currency. People in Sweden who object are subjected to stringent controls, which perhaps MacDonald will discover in maybe 25 years time.
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“I strongly feel that …the dismantling of whiteness
is critical to both the eradication of racism and the survival of the
Jewish people.”
That says it all. Strong feelings, not reasoned evidence, justifies relentless attack from every possible angle on an entire race people so that jews can feel “safe.”
Who are they fooling.
They’re a power-hungry people filled with a savage, unjust and irrational hatred of anything that stands in the way of their acquisition of power.
And what stands in the way of that power is the one group who believes in freedom in general and freedom of speech in particular.
And freedom of speech is the one thing – the only thing – we have that allows us to uncover illusions and discover the truth.
But when you do that unpleasant facts soon emerge.
Theonly thing to do in that case is develop the capacity for self-criticism and a willingness to expose your ideas to a process analysis and correction.
That’s the last thing an authoritarian, anti-democratic people can do.
They’re also unoriginal and unqualified to build a civilization of their own. So they develop the ignoble qualities associated with all sneaky predators and insatiable parasites.
But that’s where their much celebrated intelligence (largely a myth) is exhausted.
Oh, they’re good at infiltration, subversion and destruction in their quest for power.
But they’re not damned good at social management.
That’s why everything they control falls apart and is falling apart now.
In any event, the important thing is that this old song wheeze about them having to “absolish Whiteness” so they can feel safe, is properly translated into something simple and direct, ie;
Freedom-loving Whites stand in our way of absolute power.
That says it all. Strong feelings, not reasoned evidence, justifies relentless attack from every possible angle on an entire race people so that jews can feel “safe.”
Who are they fooling.
They’re a power-hungry people filled with a savage, unjust and irrational hatred of anything that stands in the way of their acquisition of power.
And what stands in the way of that power is the one group who believes in freedom in general and freedom of speech in particular.
And freedom of speech is the one thing – the only thing – we have that allows us to uncover illusions and discover the truth.
But when you do that unpleasant facts soon emerge.
Theonly thing to do in that case is develop the capacity for self-criticism and a willingness to expose your ideas to a process analysis and correction.
That’s the last thing an authoritarian, anti-democratic people can do.
They’re also unoriginal and unqualified to build a civilization of their own. So they develop the ignoble qualities associated with all sneaky predators and insatiable parasites.
But that’s where their much celebrated intelligence (largely a myth) is exhausted.
Oh, they’re good at infiltration, subversion and destruction in their quest for power.
But they’re not damned good at social management.
That’s why everything they control falls apart and is falling apart now.
In any event, the important thing is that this old song wheeze about them having to “absolish Whiteness” so they can feel safe, is properly translated into something simple and direct, ie;
Freedom-loving Whites stand in our way of absolute power.
The Jewish origins of multiculturalism in Sweden
In The Culture of Critique and
other writings I have developed the view that Jews and the organized
Jewish community were a critical necessary condition for the rise of
multiculturalism in the West. In Chapter 7,
on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy, I focused mainly
on the U.S., but also had brief sections on England, Canada, Australia
(greatly elaborated recently in TOO by Brenton Sanderson), and France.
One question I often get is about the role of Jews in Sweden and other European countries with relatively few Jews. Now there has been a translation from Swedish of an article, “How and why Sweden became multicultural,” that summarizes academic writing on the Jewish role in making Sweden into a multicultural society. This article should be read in its entirety, but some salient points:
Assimilation to Swedish culture was viewed as an unacceptable goal:
I agree entirely that Jewish influence stems from their being an academic and media elite, as well as their ability to develop highly effective, well-funded activist organizations. Here, the role of Bruno Kaplan of the World Jewish Congress is emphasized.
This is an important contribution to the understanding of the impending death of the West. Needless to say, such an analysis does not obviate the need for an understanding of why Western cultures have been uniquely susceptible to ideologies that view the destruction of the West as a moral imperative. Nevertheless, it is vitally important to understand the forces that have actively sought to move Western cultures in this direction.
============================================
One question I often get is about the role of Jews in Sweden and other European countries with relatively few Jews. Now there has been a translation from Swedish of an article, “How and why Sweden became multicultural,” that summarizes academic writing on the Jewish role in making Sweden into a multicultural society. This article should be read in its entirety, but some salient points:
The ideological change started in 1964 when David Schwarz, a Polish born Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Sweden in the early 1950s, wrote the article “The Immigration problem in Sweden” in Sweden’s largest and most important morning newspaper – the Jewish-owned Dagens Nyheter (“Daily News”). It started a rancorous debate that mostly took place in Dagens Nyheter, but which subsequently continued even in other newspapers, on editorial pages and in books. …As in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jewish activists were aided by Jewish media ownership. Activists stressed the need to reshape immigration policy to atone for persecution of Jews—in the case of Sweden, the role of the Swedish government vis-à-vis Jews during World War II. (Similarly, in the U.S., Jewish activists emphasized that the 1924 immigration restriction law was motivated by anti-Semitism, and many activists, including academic activists like Stephen J. Gould [in his notorious The Mismeasure of Man; see here, p. 30ff] claimed that U.S. immigration restriction resulted in Jews dying in the Holocaust. Even Stephen Steinlight, who advocates restriction of Muslim immigration [and only Muslim immigration], termed the 1924 law “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,”a “monstrous policy”; see here, p. 5.)
Schwarz was by far the most active opinion-former and accounted for 37 of a total of 118 contributions to the debate on the immigration issue in the years 1964-1968. Schwarz and his co-thinkers were so dominant and aggressive that debaters with an alternative view were driven on the defensive and felt their views suppressed. For example, Schwarz played the anti-Semitism card efficiently in order to discredit his opponents. …
It was the conservative Rightist Party who first embraced the idea of cultural pluralism and greatly contributed to shape the new radical direction. It is worth mentioning that the chairman of the Rightist Party 1961-1965, Gunnar Heckscher, was the party’s first leader of Jewish descent.
Assimilation to Swedish culture was viewed as an unacceptable goal:
The starting point was thus a cultural pluralist perspective, which meant that immigrants with massive government intervention and financial support would be encouraged to preserve their culture (and thus send out signals to the world that Sweden is a tolerant country where everyone is welcome). The meeting between the Swedish culture and minority cultures would be enriching to the whole community and the majority population would begin to adapt to the minorities. …The article notes, and I agree, that Jews are motivated by the desire to break down ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies because of fear that such societies may turn on Jews, as occurred in Germany, 1933–1945, but also because of traditional Jewish hatred toward the Christian civilization of the West. It concludes by noting that, besides Jewish media ownership, Jewish influence was facilitated by the dominance of academic anthropology by the Boasian school — a Jewish intellectual movement — and its views on cultural relativism and denigration of Western culture.
It is not a coincidence that Europe’s organized Jews consistently dissociate themselves from politically organized critics of Islam, because every negative generalization towards a minority group ultimately can hit the Jews.
I agree entirely that Jewish influence stems from their being an academic and media elite, as well as their ability to develop highly effective, well-funded activist organizations. Here, the role of Bruno Kaplan of the World Jewish Congress is emphasized.
This is an important contribution to the understanding of the impending death of the West. Needless to say, such an analysis does not obviate the need for an understanding of why Western cultures have been uniquely susceptible to ideologies that view the destruction of the West as a moral imperative. Nevertheless, it is vitally important to understand the forces that have actively sought to move Western cultures in this direction.
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