Mailvox: clinging to the myth

MS clings to the myth of equality between different human population groups:

I don’t need to base anything on race; the problem with many blacks in America is their culture. A lazy, irresponsible, INFERIOR culture compared to eurocentric “white” culture. If they adopted our culture tomorrow, most of their problems would disappear (IMO).

He’s completely wrong. Africans don’t adopt European culture for three reasons. First, because they can’t. Second, because they prefer their own culture. Third, because Europeans have increasingly abandoned it themselves. Europeans have been trying to force Africans to adopt European culture for more than 200 years. It’s not possible, and more to the point, it’s not their choice.

Think about it. What could be more racist, what could be more culturally imperialistic, than to insist that Africans must adopt European culture? This is even worse than Muslims imposing Sharia on everyone; Sharia at least permits the dhimmi to retain their religion and customs. Why should Asians not insist that Europeans adopt their culture? If we put it to a global vote, I’m quite confident the Han Chinese would win.

Africans have a perfect right to live the way they want to live. So do Europeans. This is why desegregation is not only doomed to failure, but is intrinsically immoral. It is also likely to destroy whichever culture has the longer time preferences.

Remember, there are no shortage of whites, especially overweight, unattractive white women, who genuinely prefer the African culture of living fast, consuming conspicuously, and dying young in a promiscuous, matriarchal society to the European culture of living conservatively and saving to build for the future in a sexually restricted patriarchal society. As with all things economic, these are questions of preferences and time-orientation, not morality or science.

History has conclusively demonstrated that there is only one way to successfully turn a short-term orientation people into a long-term one: kill off a sufficient percentage of those members of the population group with a short-term orientation before they bear or raise children. This process takes somewhere between 750 and 1,000 years and I suspect that Jared Diamond may have been onto something even though he didn’t understand the full significance of the European geography in this regard. My thought is that the near-continuous warfare between small and competing groups, in combination with their ongoing contact with advanced civilization, allowed the European nations to kill off enough of their short-term oriented troublemakers to collectively develop long-term time orientations.

Remember, the Roman legions didn’t permit their soldiers to marry until AFTER their 20-year term of service was complete.

Not only have Africans not had enough time to go through his process, given when they first encountered European civilization, but they have actually been collectively reverting thanks to the federal and international aid policies of the last 50 years. Neither geography nor law nor even religion are sufficient to convert short time preferences into long ones. Such ideas are mutu, magical thinking akin to the idea that murdering an albino will lead to success in business.

Permitting the barbarians to destroy civilization is not going to benefit either the savage or the civilized in the long-run. The fact that the majority of people in our society cannot grasp this simple fact is, in itself, an indication of the way in which our society has already been barbarized.