Pathological Altruism and White Guilt

By Gerold

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Even the best of intentions often have unintended consequences. Although few people have bad intentions, many of our problems are caused by good intentions gone awry. And, this applies in particular to Westerners.

Note: I use the term ‘Westerner’ for people whose ancestors originated in Western and Northern Europe. And, I use the term non-Westerner for people whose ancestors originated elsewhere. This narrow definition makes it easier to understand the link that connects pathological altruism and Westerner (‘White’) guilt to the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP) which I will explain below. First, let’s get some definitions out of the way.

ALTRUISM

“Altruism or selflessness is the principle or practice of concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core aspect of various religious traditions and secular worldviews, though the concept of “others” toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions.”  Wiki [Link]

PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM

Although scientific literature first mentioned Pathological Altruism in 1984, it had minimal impact. Altruism is so highly regarded in the West that few dare criticize or question it. To hint that altruism could have a dark shadow smacks of sacrilege.

Almost three decades later, Barbara Oakley with 48 contributors wrote the book “Pathological Altruism” published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Conspicuous by its absence, we still hear very little about it.

Metapedia [Link] states that “Pathological altruism is sincere attempts to help others that instead harms others or oneself and where this harm could have been reasonably anticipated. It is often caused by cognitive and/or emotional biases that blind people to the potentially harmful consequences of their actions.” 

PATHOLOGICAL 

According to Barbara Oakley, “Pathological” is used in the sense of being excessive or abnormal, without implying any clinical diagnosis.” [Link] Admittedly, the term ‘pathological’ can be misleading when, in fact, ‘self-destructive’ or ‘group-destructive’ might be more appropriate.

CRITICISM

One major criticism of the Pathological Altruism thesis is by Diana S. Fleischman. [Link] She subscribes to Psychological egoism  which posits that there is no such thing as altruism because what appears to be altruism is simply self-interest. However, that’s just semantical sleight-of-hand. If we replace the word ‘altruism’ with ‘self-interest,’ this thesis still stands whether we call it Pathological Altruism or Pathological Self-interest or Destructive Self-interest. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

WESTERN EUROPEAN MARRIAGE PATTERN (WEMP) 

Humans had spread from the tropics to the Arctic. They then evolved according to cultural environments rather than different physical environments.

The term Nuptiality refers to the frequency or incidence of marriage within a population. Western and Northern Europe developed a nuptiality pattern unique in the world; it’s called the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP.)

One finds WEMP West of an imaginary line that runs from Saint Petersburg, Russia to Trieste, Italy. This Hajnal Line  separates Western and Northern Europe from the rest of the world in which two different marriage patterns emerge as indicated by the red line on the map below.

Blue lines indicate exceptions.

There are, of course, variations within this Western region, but the average age of Western marriage was higher than in the rest of the world. A large number of Western women married for the first time in their thirties and forties. As well, 10% to 20% of Western adults never married at all. Half of all women were married in the West while the remainder were widows or spinsters compared to about seventy percent of non-Western women who were married. [Link]

In other words, Western marriage rates and fertility were comparatively small, and a significant minority of women married late or remained single. For non-Westerners, early marriage was the norm, and higher mortality countered high fertility. Western spouses were relatively close in age whereas for non-Westerners, spousal age disparity was greater.

Grown Western children were more likely to leave their families to start their own households than were non-Western. As well, Western households had a larger proportion of non-kin such as servants circulating among them than did non-Western.

This produced a weak kinship zone that may date as long ago as the Mesolithic period [Link] which arrived in Northern Europe as late as 6,000 BCE. Abundant marine resources such as fishing, sealing and shellfish collecting along the Atlantic and Baltic coasts attracted large and fluid settlements which were unique compared to non-Western hunter-gatherer cultures elsewhere.

All these elements combined to encourage much greater non-kin social interactions among Westerners than among non-Westerners. Peter Frost [Link] that “there would have thus been strong selection for mechanisms that could enforce social rules in the absence of kin obligations.”

Because of relatively weaker kinship ties, Westerners had an edge in organizing other social relations such as statehood, ideology and market economies. Non-Westerners had to rely on external behavior control such as shaming, family discipline, and community surveillance. Thus Orientals place a high value on ‘face’ an idiom for one’s honor or prestige and ‘saving face’ by avoiding shame. This also contributed to lower creativity and higher collectivism in non-Western cultures.

It should be no surprise that the creators of Marxism and Leninism were Jews of non-Western origin. Hive-mind collectivists hate the Western notion of individuality and personal responsibility.

Weak kinship ties gave Westerners distinct advantages. One example is the Janissaries used by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Westerners have had more time to embrace nationhood than did Muslim government administrators who tended to rob their states for the benefit of their families, then their clan and lastly for their tribe. In order to overcome this, the Ottoman Empire for centuries relied on Westerner boys (Janissaries) captured in battle or recruited as a tax levy to form their elite national guard and, with training and merit they rose to high positions in government.

EMPATHY 

Empathy (compassion) primarily affective empathy  allows an individual not only to understand another person’s feelings but to experience those feelings. Affective empathy is strongest in Westerners and relatively weak in non-Westerners. A 2005 study [Link] found relatively low affective empathy in non-Western Oceanic and Chinese cultures. In Western “guilt cultures,” guilt outweighs shame to enforce social rules in the absence of strong kin obligations.

According to the Chinese Interpersonal Reactivity Index (C-IRI), empathy is perceived as a moral duty and not as an involuntary emotional response. Such emotion transference is confined to family members and usually not extended to strangers.

Western capacity for empathy is often pushed to its limits. We sometimes hear the term “aid fatigue.” However, turning off this empathy is difficult. Worse, it is easy to exploit Western guilt. Indiscriminate empathy is a weakness if not controlled. Empathy is essential for a healthy Western community, but when that community is no longer homogenous, empathy can be dangerous if not suicidal.

“White guilt” is a false sense of shame imposed by left-wing radicals and the late Saul Alinsky [Link] to advance their goal of wealth redistribution through social justice. Socialism is not an economic system; it is a wealth redistribution ideology. I’ve written extensively about the dangers of such collectivism. [Link]

GUILT vs. SHAME

Guilt focuses on behavior whereas shame focuses on self. To feel shame, you must be caught.

You feel shame when someone sees you breaking a rule whereas, with guilt, there need not be witnesses. You can feel guilty even when you merely think about breaking a rule. In other words, guilt can be self-inflicted. This makes Westerners susceptible to exploitation by others because guilt is more prevalent among Westerners than non-Westerners.

Shelby Steele, best-selling author of “The Content of Our Character,” sums up Western (“White”) guilt.  “White supremacy was finally defeated in the mid-1960s, not just in America, but all around the world. Those movements flew under the flag of many different ideologies. Some were communistic, some were Gandhi pacifism, some were nationalistic, but all of them were a rebellion against the idea that whiteness constituted a moral authority in and of itself. And those revolutions, they were all victorious. …

“The price that Americans and Europeans paid, the price the Western world has paid for that is to be forevermore stigmatized with the sense of the past, the racism, the imperialism, the colonialism of the past. Whites began to live under the cloud of suspicion that they really were, in their heart and soul, racist, imperialist, sexist and so on. So they had to prove the negative that they weren’t this way. … White guilt is not a guilt of conscience. It’s not a guilt of feeling. It is about fighting off a stigma that one is evil, that one is racist in some way, so that one acts guiltily even when one doesn’t feel guilty.”

MALADAPTIVE PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM

There are numerous examples of Pathological Altruism becoming maladaptive. One example is the modern welfare state that transforms “disadvantaged minorities” into helpless inmates of a custodial state. U.S. social security discourages people from saving yet the system verges on bankruptcy. Various healthcare schemes from Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc. have created a plethora of third-party parasites that dramatically increased health-care costs without promoting improved services. Subsidized student loans fostered the growth of university bureaucracies while producing graduates dumber with every generation.

Prohibition of alcohol in 1919 was intended to reduce crime and other social problems caused by alcohol. The result was an increase in crime  as gangsters like Al Capone saw tremendous business opportunities. Unable to learn from their mistakes, governments’ war on drugs created a multi-billion dollar, illegal drug industry and an ever-growing and expensive governmental drug-fighting Gestapo.

The well-intentioned U.S. government used Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to promote social goals by boosting home ownership loans for less-than-qualified individuals. After the last economic downturn, many lost their homes or were immobilized by mortgages that were underwater. Most legislation that has come from the left has proven to be disastrous in the long run.

These unintended consequences overwhelm the best of intentions behind them. Or, as the ‘Beatle’ Ringo Starr once said, “Everything the government touches turns to crap.”

Nor do governments have a monopoly on the law of unintended consequences. Unwilling to learn from Australia’s disastrous introduction of fast-breeding rabbits, U.S. catfish farmers introduced Asian Carp to rid the water of plankton and algae for healthier catfish. The voracious and aggressive Asian Carp jump out of the water, injure boaters and decimate native fish species.

Pathological altruism goes by many names; “bleeding heart liberalism” or the “cult of victimhood” or “white guilt-tripping.” It explains why people do stupid things in the false belief that they are helping others when, in fact, they are only hurting themselves.

There are endless examples of maladaptive pathological altruism. They included, but are not limited to burn-out of healthcare professionals, ineffective social programs that worsen the conditions they are intended to correct, enabling other people’s addictions, cat ladies, co-dependency, selflessness gone awry, gullibility, guilt, self-righteousness, virtue-signaling, genocides and suicide bombings.

An extreme example of pathological altruism is the “Male Norwegian politician raped by asylum seeker says he feels GUILTY that his attacker will now be deported because the man might suffer back in Somalia.” [Link] Can you imagine non-Westerners behaving like this? 

JUDEO-CHRISTIAN SLAVE MORALITY

I’ve also written extensively about Our Insane Judeo-Christian Slave Morality [Link] which developed during Hebrew bondage as a reaction to ‘master morality.’

Master morality values pride, strength, independence, courage, wealth, self-improvement, and nobility. On the other hand, “Slave morality is based on ‘resentment’ of the people who enslaved them. Thus, Slave Morality begins when resentment becomes creative and gives birth to values opposite to the Masters’ values.”

Master morality evaluates actions on the basis of consequences, unlike slave morality which evaluates actions on the basis of intentions. The left has good intentions, but unable to grasp reality, they fail to contemplate the unintended consequences of their actions.

Although Slave Mentality is a necessary psychology during bondage, the continuation of it outside of slavery puts people in guilt-ridden, secondary and inferior positions. Once freed from slavery, people exhibit both Master and Slave Morality to varying degrees.

“However, the twisted intermingling of Slave and Master Morality can enable others to exploit our weaknesses. We want money but we’re told, ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil.’ Timothy I 6:10 (Paul’s letter exemplifying Slave Morality). This sets us up for the guilt and sin the Church uses to exploit us to keep us in line, coming back for absolution and contributing the very money we weren’t supposed to want in the first place. Rinse, repeat.”

This plays a significant role in Christianity’s emphasis on sin and guilt. Non-Western Buddhism has no doctrine of original sin whereas Western guilt-driven empathy was reinforced when Judeo-Christian slave morality moved into empathic Northern and Western Europe.

ADD COMPLEMENTARY PROJECTION TO THE MIX  

Adding fuel to the fire is one of the most dangerous of our mental biases I’ve written about: Complementary Projection  “in which people believe that more people share their beliefs and values than actually do. We ‘project’ our beliefs and values onto other people and overestimate the extent to which other people also have them.” 

Complementary projection is treacherous because of its similarity to one of our greatest human foibles, self-deception. The more we fool ourselves, the more deceivers will profit from our gullibility much to our detriment. How else do we explain well-intentioned Europeans welcoming refugees who end up raping their hosts? [Link]

OPENING THE GATES TO THE MUSLIM CONQUERORS

Whether you consider Islam our enemy or not is irrelevant. For fourteen centuries Muslims viewed the West as their enemies, so your viewpoint does not matter. In fact, to a Muslim extremist, your naiveté is most welcome.

Westerners are unaccustomed to dealing with people who developed deception into an art form the subtlety of which is lost on most Westerners. We must understand the meaning and implication of several Arabic words or risk capitulating to Islam. In fact, Islam means ‘submission.’

Takiyya or Taqiya means dissimulation whereby Muslims are permitted to conceal their religion (Surah 3:28) Kitmān is another form of Takiyya (dissimulation) by silence or omission.

Tawriya is concealment or “creative lying” that allows lying in virtually all circumstances provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is true to him. Hans Wehr Arabic-English Dictionary defines tawriya as, “hiding, concealment; dissemblance, dissimulation, hypocrisy; equivocation, ambiguity, double-entendre, allusion.” [Link]

Muruna means deception using “flexibility” to blend in with the enemy or the surroundings the way a chameleon changes colors to avoid detection. It is “designed to catapult and advance Sharia by using Western means.”  [Link]

These are very brief definitions, but they demonstrate that these highly-honed methods of deceit and lying are more thoroughly ingrained in Islamic culture than most naïve Westerners realize. Ann Barnhardt writes, “mendacity (untruthfulness) is a core foundational plank in musloid society.”  [Link]

Psychologist Paul Ekman demonstrated that most people give off recognizable clues when they are deceitful. “Their consciences cause them, involuntarily, to sweat or raise their voices or make other recognizable gestures. However, Dr. Ekman’s research was exclusively with people from Western cultures. Muslims, on the other hand, show no discernible signs when they are being deceitful because there is no feeling of guilt.” [Link] Remember, Westerners are more inclined to feel guilt whereas non-Westerners feel shame and only when caught.

Examples of Western naiveté abound. “Finland police say Moroccan terror suspect in stabbing lied about name, age.”  [Link] “Mental health assessment ordered for Toronto woman accused of attack at Canadian Tire.” [Link]  The accused in Toronto called everyone in the courtroom an “infidel”, so it is noteworthy that in neither of those politically correct articles does the word ‘Muslim,’ or ‘Islam’ appear.

MILITARY COUPS

Dysfunctional republics often lead to military dictatorships. History gives us the Roman Republic, the first French Republic and numerous military takeovers in Turkey, Africa, and Latin America. Hugo Salinas Price reminds us of three major military coups in the early 20th Century. [Link]

Italy. Communists raped Italy, terrorized and looted its cities. The fascist Benito Mussolini organized paramilitary groups, beat the crap out the Communists, marched on Rome and took over the government. Order was restored, and Italy rose to great industrial progress.

Germany. Defeated in WW I, the victors hobbled Germany with economic extortions while its impotent Weimar Republic sank into sexual degeneracy and Communist disorder. Taking a page from Mussolini, Adolph Hitler routed the communists and took over the government. Order was restored, and Germany rose to great industrial progress.

Spain. The Constitutional Monarchy of Spain was ineffectual in governing Spain resulting in a political crisis in 1936. A Republican Party tried to install a more responsive government but was infiltrated and co-opted by Communists. Fascist General Francisco Franco led a bloody Civil War against the Communists and won. Order was restored.

Here are the timelines Price outlines for a military take-over.

“1. A numerically important segment of society accepts total permissiveness; any, and more or less all, behavior is tolerated and indeed, celebrated in its depravity.

“2. The disorderly elements of libertinism chafe at the criticism that the more conservative elements begin to direct at their behavior.

“3. Nobody loves a good fight more than the disorderly elements – whatever their code name, in whatever age they are present. So the “weirdos” begin to attack physically the conservative elements.

“4. The police do not dare protect the conservatives. They are afraid of the degenerates and their political connections, which might get any policeman fired for “brutality.”

“5. The country tumbles further and further into social disruption and broken heads.

“6. The stage is set for the arrival of a fascist leader.”

Does this sound familiar?

President Trump is assailed from all sides and lacks the support of both parties. Judges overturn his ban on sanctuary cities and travel from Muslim countries. He will likely not become the Amerikan fascist leader that the left fears. However, the military is already stepping in to control the Trump administration, and sideline Trump when necessary.

Trump has hired the baby sitters that he desperately needs; three generals with battlefield experience: White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. They effectively “rolled” him on Afghanistan. In addition to the three generals, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke each served in the military.

One thing the military understands is order. And, generals take their oath to the U.S. Constitution very seriously. Unfortunately, it’s going to get much uglier before it gets better in this Fourth Turning as leftist forces escalate their battle.

The left-leaning snowflakes exhibit complementary projection welcoming Muslim refugees into Europe. “Swedish politician says country ‘facing collapse’ due to mass influx of refugees.”  [Link] These liberals are clueless about the vast differences in culture let alone that the objective of Islam is to conquer the West with sheer numbers of migrants and a high birth rate. Muslims failed to defeat the West militarily for 1,400 years, but now Westerners are opening the gates and welcoming their conquerors. [Link] As Baron Bodissey writes, “a collective suicidal madness has entrenched itself in the West.”

Canada is another sad example of liberal/progressive immature ideologies based on guilt and wishful thinking. Illegal immigrants euphemistically called ‘asylum seekers’ are pouring into Canada. The police (RCMP) are assisting them, Quisling politicians are refusing to divulge statistics, and the ass media is complicit in the cover-up. Air-head Prime Minister Justin ‘Jihadi’ Trudeau labels critics as racist.

CONCLUSION

Western societies were formed by adherence to the moral standards of the group and not based on kinship like non-Western societies. At present, the West is floundering amidst perverse anti-White values and policies.

We need to find our balls, overcome White guilt and re-establish moral capital by seizing the high ground. Unless we develop and maintain a positive image of ourselves to counter the left’s false narratives; the West as we know it will commit suicide.

Without another fascist leader, the West is doomed.

Gerold