Blacks, unlike most other ethnic groups in the United States, enjoy some cultural privileges that other groups can’t claim access to.
The most significant one is effective immunity from the demands of political correctness in most of their cultural products. The most famous Black comedians, for example, use the word “nigger” as an anchor for their routines. For a White or even Jewish comedian to use that word is grounds for the destruction of your career, as happened to Michael Richards (AKA Kramer from Seinfeld) in 2006.
The privileges are a bit more profound in terms of creative liberties allowed to rappers and sports figures. Since the integration of professional and college sports in the mid-20th century, expectations of good behavior by athletes has been downgraded. Ideas of sportsmanship have gone to the wayside, for the most part, replaced by a sort of Black machismo. You hear sports fans of all races embracing Black patois when talking about sports — from the announcers to the fans.
The decision by American elites to roll back mass conscription — and the adoption of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas, so much so that Freud is essentially the font of modern pseudo-religious thought, no matter how many times that he’s discredited — has made it so that most masculine personality archetypes have been defined by academic and medical authorities as pathological.
Part of this definition has been justification for the creation of endless new cultural artifacts which are ‘progressive’ to replace the cultural record with new cultural products that reflect the ideas of equality more perfectly. Most of these cultural products are highly perishable, tending to fall out of fashion within months, to be replaced by another expensive production soon afterwards.
The idea of a man as tough, morally resolute, with the capacity to lead, protect, and create order — came to be seen as the font, also, of ‘authoritarianism.’ And the critics weren’t entirely wrong about that. What they were wrong about was in portraying authority — particularly paternal authority — as something evil.
Blacks, as a sort of compensation for their low position in integrated, post-Civil Rights society, get some special room in the culture that they probably wouldn’t be accorded otherwise. Although the critical establishment tends to marginalize Black film-makers, they do tend to elevate a small number of stars here and there. Music has been rather the opposite — as rock became niche, most of the biggest pop stars are either Black or Black-inspired.
What this results in is a White-centered culture which is effete and weak, because depictions of that might smack of the ‘authoritarian personality’ tend to receive severe criticism. When a few slip in through the cracks of censorship, they’ll be subjected to withering criticism later on. This same standard isn’t applied to Black culture, in part because it’s seen as a corrective to the past ‘crimes’ of White male authorities.
It’s not really possible for American conservatives to criticize this effectively, because they tend to accept the Freudian and post-Freudian critiques of Christian family life and paternal authority. When they criticize dysfunctional Black culture and cultural products, they tend to do it from the same frame as the people who critique them. They notice an inconsistency and see an opportunity to score irrelevant rhetorical points in a debate where the score doesn’t matter. Conservatives may also criticize the Black ‘fatherlessness’ epidemic, while simultaneously decrying the idea of paternal authority more generally.
Just about across the spectrum, even and perhaps especially on the alt-right, there’s a discomfort in straying from the Freudian-therapeutic frame — because outside that frame lies the buried lands of religion and philosophy.
What this has lead to is a coarsening of the general culture down to the ghetto standard, while feminine crackers hector one another for deviations from the anti-authoritarian ideal. The culture elevates the idea of the thug — even showering some of them with billions of dollars in illogical corporate mergers — while denigrating the more traditional alternatives, praising the soft, supplicating, nonviolent man-thing who’s more comfortable with spreadsheets than authority.
Due to its particular circumstances, the US needs both conflicting cultural concepts. It needs spreadsheet-man and hipster-man to go to college and hopefully to produce tax revenue. It needs thug-man to fill the prisons and to justify the vast administrations of the welfare state. And also, occasionally, to keep the weak men in line — which they are happy to have happen to them, because they’re so easily intimidated into compliance, being terrified of all kinds of violence.
Civilization demands actions of both creation and destruction, often within the same people. After World War II, Westerners progressively became terrified of both of these elemental forces, and hoped to tame them, to take the edge off of them, under the myth that apocalypse would result if this spiritual advance couldn’t happen.
neovictorian23 says
There is a Remnant of pre-’68er men still extant in Alaska; some of them are even kids right now. They’re not going to be able to save Los Angeles when the shit hits the fan, though.
henrydampier says
Would be easier to just clean up later.
Mai La Dreapta says
I think that the remnant exists in many places, not just Alaska. You have to know where to look for it. Also, Protestant evangelical culture has a lot of stored patriarchy which is currently being suppressed, but my experience coming from that background is that it doesn’t take much to bring it to the front. Feminist ideals have not actually been assimilated into your typical Midwestern evangelical husband; it’s just a thin veneer of egalitarian cant has been pasted over deep patriarchal roots. Once the top-down anti-patriarchal context is removed, I think you’ll see a healthy, normal family and social structure reassert itself pretty quickly in many places.
(Assuming, of course, that those places aren’t first reduced to rubble by vibrant multiculturalism.)
who dares wings says
“The imperus behind The Authoritarian Personality was the Holocaust, the attempted genocidal extinction of European Jews by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party. Adorno had been a member of the “Frankfurt School”, a predominantly Jewish group of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institute for Social Research.The book was part of a “Studies in Prejudice” series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Scientific Research.” Has anyone ever looked into the suicide of Walter Benjamin? He was a recreational drug user and had an essay on hashish already under his belt when Arthur Koestler gave him a going away present in Paris of a tin of morphine tablets before he set out on his ill fated journey for Spain. The OSS was waiting to collect him and hook him up with his Frankfurt School collegues who had already immigrated to the USA under the stewardship of Edward R.Morrow. Did he really kill himself out of despair after being held up at the border, or did he accidently OD while waiting for a clearance to cross The Pyranees?
henrydampier says
The policy of this website is not to assassin-shame those who are excellent at covert murder.
Andy Hartzell says
You equate Freud with the project of feminizing men and toppling the patriarchy. Yet Freud himself was an iconic patriarch, and his theories rest on the assumption that men and women are essentially different. The “Oedipus complex” makes no sense without sex roles!
Granted, today’s therapeutic culture makes use of Freud’s language to pathologize masculinity, but they had to “kill the father” to seize it. The project of deconstructing gender is not happening despite the discrediting of Freudianism, but because of it.
Therefore, I’d argue that adopting a Freudian perspective doesn’t necessarily weaken the conservative position. Not saying it’s necessary to rehabilitate Freud, but it’s not inconsistent with conservatism.
henrydampier says
It really, really does undermine the patriarchal family and Christianity, especially with what followed. Freud encouraged rebellion against paternal authority and against God the father, which is precisely what all the Freudians proceeded to do and continue to do to this day.
I find the contemporary stuff to be mostly consistent with Freud in terms of his methodology, behaviors, and cultural peccadilloes common to the many different Freud-like cults which abound today.
Feminists will tend to criticize Freud as being a ‘Patriarch,’ but we only have to look at all the people he appealed to to see that his philosophy was corrosive to what was once Christendom. His school aimed to usurp the authority of priests and fathers, and with the help of many American intellectuals, he succeeded.
Andy Hartzell says
Thanks for the response…I guess I half-agree. “Christendom” was already pretty far gone by the time Freud came along. He may have actually thought he was buttressing what was left of it…not the faith itself, but the social order, by locating a sort of telos in the libido. He didn’t aim to encourage rebellion…he aimed to make obedience more bearable by creating a psychic buffer zone. But his followers, led by Reich, went that extra step.
Toddy Cat says
“Ideas of sportsmanship have gone to the wayside, for the most part, replaced by a sort of Black machismo.”
I saw this happen firsthand. Cassius Clay was a very important part of this, and Joe Namath was the transmission gear to whites, with the Super Bowl Three victory over old-time sportsman Johnny Unitas being the most important event. It’s easy to make light of all this, but in an entertainment crazed society like the United States, sports matter.
henrydampier says
Ali definitely the template, but at least he believed in something in addition to himself.
Toddy Cat says
Ali was a transition figure, as was Namath. They still had some of the old sportsmanlike values on display, and their boasting had an element of over the top, “Tall Tale” Americana, about it, but they were definitely harbingers of the new era. Ali was at least partially kidding when he bellowed “I am the Greatest!”. The next generation would believe it…
indravaruna says
The ‘authoritarian personality’ non-sense comes from the jewish intellectuals from the Frankfurt School, they mixed Freudianism with Marxism creating what is called ‘Cultural Marxism’, this happened because jews became scared that the Germans and other Europeans had rejected International Socialism/Marxism and feeled more atracted to Fascism and National Socialism.
MtTopPatriot says
Proxies, pogroms, useful dupes, cannon fodder, diaspora, agenda, crisis as a means. Lenin was right when he said that father God is the opiate of the masses. Talk about dog whistles. And Mayo said the party must control the gun, and the gun never control the party, Cloven/Piven understood the reaping to be had by sowing a horde of helots to overwhelm society, and how without faith the corporate slave class would succumb to this tender white guilt trap. Resulting in a pseudo black supremacy writ large which with artificially induced disenfranchisement and cunning could be set loose upon society to reek havoc.
But you have to wonder at it all.
In the final cold hard analysis, when this cultural revolution reaches the point of widespread bloody unintended/(intended?) consequences, room to destroy works both ways.
It is interesting how these potential cultural conflagrations’, or should they be called fundamental transformations, keep fissling out. They keep lighting the fuse, the legacy media and hate merchants fan the sparks and pour gasoline on the fires, but they peter out. Of course optics play a critical role in creating a conflagration. But there are is a large audience on the sidelines of flyover country where a kind of fatigue for this stupid bread and circus is setting in. It is prime time breathless kabuki theater produced by worthless idealogs and class warfare warriors and a cabal of rich spoiled psychopaths.
But who do they all think they are fooling? Themselves? Are all involved so enamored by their cultural revolution and their radical chic and their superior entitlement mentality to rule over everyone so barn blind of the brewing resentment outside this fantasy world they insulate themselves with?
MtTopPatriot says
Everything to be said for the nine noble virtues and a warrior’s way. I think so many have drifted from these things most wouldn’t recognize their value if it hit them upside the head. They are things so far from the status quo of “normality” they are foreign concepts.
Personally I have noticed very few woman recognize these things in men, and find it obherent to their ideals and beliefs of what they consider is a “real man”.
Soon enough there will come a time where complimentary qualities in character will be essential to survival of the family and tribe, and clan, and those who can not adapt to the timeless patriarchal structure which has worked so well over time will become extinct. Matter of survival when it comes down to it. The state and other constructs of the statist plague will never substitute these wonderful concepts of kith and kin for people whose hearts run true to what men and woman are truly about and their respective places and roles in God’s grand structure of the universe.
That is how I believe in things.
It is a wholly satisfying and comforting arrangement. That my wife and I have our separate but unifying and complimentary roles works wonderfully. Lot to be said for such tradition. There is a deep and abiding quiet mutual respect as reward. Never mind the seamless division and management of labor toil and happiness which comes with it.
I can’t help but notice the foul advent and campaign of emasculation and sissifying of men across the media.
A hideous pogrom on masculinity and warrior spirit.
I watch it and shake my head in wonder what are those who are subsumed by such agitprop and brainwashing going to do when the ignorance of the truth of how violent and evil those who crave total power over our lives and liberty comes home to roost.
Where is their audacity and indomitable will, their dignity and spirit, their faith in a destiny wholly theirs and the great creators own?
Where is their prosperity and happiness?