Posted on January 18, 2022

Empathy or Greatness?

Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, January 18, 2022

I developed a sense of race at a young age. In grade school, friend groups were racial groups, and that seemed natural. The black students were unlike me and my friends: louder, more violent, uninterested in learning, and many seemed to enjoy intimidating us. My middle school was much the same, but with fewer whites. It was in early adolescence that I wondered why real-life blacks were so different from the angelic blacks in all the books assigned in English class. From what I could see, blacks weren’t oppressed; they got special treatment. In school, their misbehavior was punished less severely than that of whites — to close “racist” gaps in discipline rates and because whites took their suspensions and detentions quietly, while blacks often lashed out in anger at having to deal with the consequences of their actions. On public transit and in parks, blacks littered, made noise, and hassled people. No one interfered because everyone knew the possible consequences. Meanwhile, in school, it seemed that all we ever learned about was slavery and Jim Crow.

I came to see whites as an oppressed group: thoughtful and kind people often victimized by less noble creatures, browbeaten by hostile intellectuals. As I grew older I came to see the self-destruction of so many whites that is probably due in part to constant messages that our race is evil. It was whites who deserved sympathy and needed help — not the people pouring over our southern border or wrecking our cities. It is we who are taxed to keep the country afloat, we who are disproportionately victims of race hate, we who are dwindling in number, and we who are told perpetually to repent. What kind of privilege is that?

But empathy for one’s own has limits — as anyone with a drug-addict relative knows. Pew Research found that 56.3 percent of liberal white women aged 18–29 have had a mental-health diagnosis, far more than the 28.4 percent and 27.3 percent for moderates and conservatives. This breaks my heart. I want all whites to live healthy and meaningful lives. However, I know from growing up in a very blue state and attending a private liberal arts college that the vast majority of those women don’t feel the same way about us. I’d guess that at least 90 percent would be elated if many conservatives and “racists” suffered from depression or mental illness.

Caring about people who don’t care about you and often don’t care about themselves is draining, and far from guaranteed to do any good. As Gregory Hood once put it, “Perhaps the time has come for responsible whites to stop trying to save people who don’t want to be saved.” Why defend a nerd from a bully if the nerd doesn’t want help, and even praises the bully?

So, what makes whites worth saving? White greatness. In everything that distinguishes humans from animals, it is whites who lead. It is what Sam Francis, drawing from Oswald Spengler, summarized as, “Faustian dynamism . . . the innovative, aggressive, creative, mobile, aspiring, inventive, and daring qualities that have always characterized Indo-Europeans.” Francis expanded on this in an essay for American Renaissance in 1996:

But Aryan dynamism is not confined to military conquest and geographical exploration. It is also clear in the Faustian demand to understand nature. Just as Aryan warrior nomads overturned whatever cities and peoples stood in their path, so Aryan scholars and scientists, beginning with the Ionian philosophers of early Greece, have conquered nature and its mysteries, discarding myths, religions, and superstitions when they presented obstacles to their knowledge, and systematizing their discoveries and thought according to the Cosmic Order.

Alexander the Great’s solution of the Gordian Knot by simply slashing it to pieces with his sword is no less a racial trait of Aryans than the scientific achievements of Plato and Aristotle, Galileo and Newton, and hundreds of other scientists who were heirs of the ancient Aryans and who slashed through obscurantism and mythologies with their minds. Their descendants have cured diseases, shrunk distances, raised cities out of jungles and deserts, constructed technologies that replace and transcend human strength, restored lost languages, recovered forgotten histories, stared into the hearts of distant galaxies, and reached into the recesses of the atom. No other people has ever even dreamed of these achievements, and in so far as other peoples even know such things are possible, it is because they have learned about them from European Man.

Whites bring humanity to its highest peaks — no account of human achievement can conclude otherwise. This justifies fighting for white survival even if whites are now so sick that they cheer on dispossession. To return to the bully and the nerd, the nerd is worth protecting not because he is a suffering victim, but because after high school, the nerd will help to advance civilization, and the bully will become flotsam.

The first view of “white empathy” is a tribal variation of the philosophies and theologies of “harm reduction:” guard the helpless, help the downtrodden, fight injustice, etc. These goals have been common since at least the popularization of Christianity. The second view, valuing “white greatness,” goes back to Homer, but today it is more rooted in Nietzsche. He did not pity the miserable and oppressed. Instead, he believed in cultivating the best, and dared the world to do so, fearing that:

Today . . . only the herd animal receives and dispenses honors in Europe, when ‘equality of rights’ could all too easily be changed into equality in violating rights — I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of creative power and masterfulness — today the concept of greatness entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being able to be different, standing alone and having to live independently. And the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: ‘He shall be greatest who can be loneliest, the most concealed, the most deviant, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full.’ And to ask it once more: today — is greatness possible?

Which inspires you? Sympathy or love of greatness?