Spend time in a small business that has stood the test of time and you will learn the origin myths of the company and the founders. These myths will have plenty of truth content, but a lot will be fanciful or exaggerated. One reason is the story is inevitably told by the founder or his heirs, so it is self-serving. Another reason is the story is intended to give meaning and purpose to the people in the company. For an origin myth to work, it has to be inspirational and reflect well on the people in the organization.
People always have origin myths, of course. The most famous of which is the story of the Jews. The whole chosen people business is obvious nonsense. The flight from Egypt is at least plausible in some areas, but unless you’re willing to accept that God is an indiscriminate child killer, it’s a story that only Jews can believe. Still, the origin myth of the Jews has served them well for a very long time. These stories are central to Jewish identity and it is that strong identity that has allowed Jews to prosper.
If a strong set of origin myths correlates to a strong sense of identity and a strong people, then the reverse is probably true. The lack of origin myths, or a declining interest in the origin myths, probably suggests a weak identity. Perhaps the people have yet to come to identify themselves as a people or they are going through some sort of transition in terms of how they see themselves. The old myths no longer work, because they don’t fit the emerging narrative to explain how it is this people came to be.
This longish post in Foreign Affairs by popular historian Jill Lepore is an interesting read for a number of reason, not related to this post. The endless name dropping that torments writing in the humanities is a topic of its own. That’s mingled with self-promotion, in the form of references to the author’s books. Of course, anything to do with American history has to have a few paragraphs of the usual blather about slavery and Jim Crow. That said, it is worth the time to read it and the related posts on the site.
Lepore is one of those useful bellwethers in that she tends to write what the intellectual side of the ruling class is thinking. A big part of being a popular academic is to be in good standing with the ruling elite. They like being told about their wonderfulness from academics, so flattery is a big part of the game. That offers a window into the minds of the people who rule over us. What posts like this suggest is the people in charge are concerned with the fracturing they see from their position in the clouds.
That fracturing is predictable. Peter Brimelow predicted it two decades ago. Import tens of millions of strangers with strange customs into America and you’re going to get conflicts between the locals and the newcomers. The fact that these strangers were imported to replace the natives, who were not consuming and reproducing at levels satisfactory to the rulers, certainly did not help. Add in the rise of identity politics as a way to control the population and the result was predictable. Pat Buchanan predicted this.
Lepore is correct that people need a narrative that binds them together and explains why it is they are a people. America had an obvious one until the Civil War. When New England conquered the rest of the nation, the national story ended and was replaced by that new story that put New England at the top, as the ruler of the rest. That held together into the middle of last century, when Jews updated the tale to insinuate themselves into the story and explain their new dominance in the ruling class.
That American narrative worked until the people in charge decided they needed a new people and flung open the gates to unlimited immigration. A fascinating bit in that Lepore article is that she starts her essay in 1986 with the historian Carl Degler and his warning about the abandonment of nationalism. That talk would have happened around the time the ruling class was opening the borders. The implication that Mx. Lepore does not seem to grasp is that the hostility to nationalism preceded wholesale immigration.
On the other hand, she is a clever woman, so she could very well have done this on purpose, as a way of injecting the idea into the bloodstream of her peers. The academy is so narrow now, it is looking like a singularity from our perspective, but inside there is some room to maneuver. It requires a heavy dose of esoteric language and triple bank shot references to avoid detection. Perhaps that’s what she is up to by starting with that Degler speech and then ending with a piquant quote from that same talk.
That said, if the intellectual class in the West, but particularly in America, had not drawn all of the wrong lessons from the two great industrial wars of the 20th century, the ruling class would not have set about destroying the fabric of their countries. Perhaps the Frankfurt School notions were a bad idea after all. There’s no mention of this in the Lepore essay, but that an obvious implication once you read to the end. The finishing paragraph is a quote from Degler’s talk at that 19856 conference.
“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.
Again, there is no mention of open borders and the unprecedented levels of immigration in this essay, as those things cannot be discussed openly or rationally in the intellectual class. Still, the essay suggests that there is some interest by cloud people in what is happening among the dirt people. They can’t bring themselves to address the fact that you cannot have a common story when everyone is a stranger. Instead, they keep talking about Hitler and the other wrong lessons they drew from the events of last century.
There’s also the strange sense that these origin myths can simply be conjured and then imposed upon a people. The implication of this essay is that America needs a new one, so the people in charge better get busy creating one. The trouble is that white people are not allowed to have an identity and the non-white ascendancy does not have much to point to, as far as their contributions to the national story. Lepore offers something from Frederick Douglas as a starting point for this new national narrative.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
That is no doubt inspiring to the cloud people, but it says more about how they see themselves than with the facts on the ground. It’s also a negative identity, based on victories over demons that exist only in the imaginations of the rulers. It also suggests she or her masters would like to see whites written out of this new national story. In case it is not clear, “bigoted people among ourselves” is you paleface. Perhaps that can be a useful cri de guerre in the war with the dirt people, but it is not binding narrative.
The fact is, the rise of nationalism, populism and white identity politics is a result of decisions made long ago. The radicals killed the national narrative, because they said nationalism is a dangerous construct. Their solution was to destroy the nations of the West, which has meant destroying the national identities of the West. That has now devolved into a war on the native stock of the West. There can be no unifying narrative that includes the both the destroyers and their victims.
That brings us back to the start. That small business that gets gobbled up by a multinational cannot maintain its origin myths. The people in that firm can no longer identify with that story, because that story has come an end. If they stick around, it is because of new reasons, less inspiring ones than those that bound them to that small business. That’s what we are seeing today in modern America. The old narrative has come to an end. It is time for a new one. The question is, who will do the writing.
White Nationalism is the only answer for White People. A White only Ethno State out of a portion of the former United States. Where we can teach Western Civilization and work for our own interests. Where we can protect our People and punish those who break the law, not “Give them room to destroy” . Where it will be safe for our children to go to school and a man can walk into a convenient store without being killed. Where white women are not being preyed upon and raped by people of color. Where we can propagate ourselves and protect… Read more »
What about all the Whites who are on the other side of this thing?
Vizzini, we will treat them, or they will treat us, exactly with the same consideration as a minority of the Founding Stock treated their British cousins and brothers in the War of Independence. In that war, approximately half of the white population was run out of the country or killed.
Yet here we are, 230 years later, with a nation ruled by a traitorous globalist White class that is importing a vast brown underclass and replacement population. It didn’t take long at all for the legislature and courts to begin to be subverted by progressive Whites. It was happening not only within the lifetime of the founders, but within the span of some of their political careers.
“Cutting out the cancer” always seems to fail.
For a business to survive long term it must first survive the death of its founder. Grandad was an engineer for Douglass Aircraft. Old man Douglass died, and the company was gone. The founding philosophy died in the War Between the States and was replaced with, what only can be described as, a series of ideological puritanical holy wars. Odds are the country won’t survive the next shift. Debt, degeneracy, and demographic suicide will kill off the existing structure. Rehash of the rehash of things we already know. A healthy chunk of the right is hoping that the collapse will… Read more »
I read it as they were dragged out. The got soft and fat and were assimilating into Egyptian society despite being second-class citizens, peasants, slaves, whatever.
Once Mosses got them out of there, he and his buddies dragged them around in the high desert for a couple of generations until all the weaklings died off.
The untold story of our new rulers, the cloud people, is that they are not a natural aristocracy. Not all, but many are little more than jumped up white trash driven by avarice and a fear of falling back into the great muddle. This fear is a big part of their hatred for the unenlightened part of their tribe which they left behind a generation or three ago. The foreign parasites are what they are. In many ways the rising asian masters of the universe are even worse than the jews. The jews are at least limited in number. The… Read more »
As a History Major I’ll say this. The OT is probably the single most valuable and perhaps the most accurate historical document in existence.
You can believe or disbelieve the God stuff as you like. But the historical stuff has proven amazingly accurate. Many 19th Century British archaeologists made their names by reading the OT, figuring out where it placed an ancient city or battle, and digging.
Sure, lots of stuff in the OT did happen. The timeline is out of whack, but the events did happen. The flight from Egypt is one that has no supporting data. It’s a great just-so story, but highly implausible. The Chosen People stuff is obvious nonsense.
There is more evidence the Jews came from deep within the Arabian peninsula than from Egypt.
The Jews writing about the Egyptian New Kingdom in the 8th to 6th centuries B.C. would be akin to the Iroquois writing the history of medieval Europe.
What a clown.
Having left “Globohomo” and moved to a small town in the Midwest with an outsized university presence, I am constantly bombarded with the “negative identity” Zman identifies among “white” folk. It is a negative identity that needs a white male dominated society, and yet, I can find no evidence that such a white male dominated society exists; even in a town that is 70% – 80% white. We are operating in a complete fiction. The town seems to be run by crazed older women and cucked males. I’ve met a few males in my Gen X cohort that actually understand… Read more »
Hey, I’ve been there!! It’s a hoot, isn’t it? Wait until the university types that run things decide that what you really need to do is subsidize the mass influx of ghetto bangers from the nearest major metro. Hearing them insist that it’s White racism that turned the downtown of a pop. 20,000 town into an urban hellscape straight out of Baltimore is so funny, you’ll pop an aneurysm laughing.
I have actually been part of a discussion lamenting the lack of vibrancy of the local farmers’ market. I gently tried to explain that vibrants don’t like farmers’ markets, only to receive dumbfounded stares.
Watching the reaction of people that must have vibrancy among all else, you know they would destroy the pleasant farmers’ market if given the chance.
“This is why we can’t have nice things.”
It’s easy to feel threatened and doomed in these times. But other things are coming to an end too. The Hitler bogeyman doesn’t scare anyone anymore. When the mass media shows up to spin an event, dirts start chanting “F*** CNN! F*** CNN!” The NYT can’t sell subscriptions, and goes begging for money. Their arrogant journalists are now trying to learn code. Some high school kids they tried to smear are going to be set for life when the smoke clears. Everyone is watching the democrat party go insane. The next election is going to be a rout. The narrative… Read more »
I agree with you that the narrative is coming to an end. However, even if there is a new narrative that is favorable to a white ethnic minority I wonder if there is a place where it will be received?
I spent the weekend in “enemy territory” (a conclave of SJW local leadership) and the internal messaging has changed quite a bit lately. No longer open outrage at named targets. Instead it is simply “social justice” this and “social justice” that without further explanation or elaboration. Contextual clues are the only way to interpret it. Methinks the “Social Justice Warriors” have gotten some big open pushback from the normies, and the leaders here have gone to an underground “wink, wink” kind of approach. That’s a start, and a warning. There is pushback from people other than ourselves, but the SJWs… Read more »
What, in your opinion were the lessons that our elit should have learned from the 20th century’s industrial wars?
One lesson is that nations are most stable when they are homogeneous. Polyglot societies are just forms of empire, with one group ruling the rest, which is inherently unstable. Another lesson is borders must be defended at all costs. Once the boundaries between two people come into question, conflict is inevitable. After the Great War, Europe should have been organized into its many tribes with clear boundaries established in law. That would have meant the permanent partition of Germany into its many states.
In my past experience, the German peoples of the various nation states did self-identify with their city much more than they did with the country as a whole. The old license plates on their cars clearly gave a city/state code (the first one or two letters on the plate), and people noticed and took pride in “their” Stadt. I don’t know what things are like today.
The partition of Germany into “many states” would have left the German speaking peoples to the mercies of more powerful neighbors. The horrors of the Thirty Years War are still reminders to them of what can happen when you lose control over borders to more powerful neighboring states. And history never sleeps.
I wish I could remember who said it, but the irony that will destroy civilization is that our “Progressives” are still trying to progress from 1914 to 1915. The Western Left has never gotten over the “war credits” thing in WW1. In case you’re not up on Commie esoterica, the bigshots of the 2nd International (Lenin et al) proclaimed ex cathedra that the Workers of the World would never go to war against each other. When the Workers did, the Commies proclaimed that they, at least, would keep the faith — no true Communist would support capitalist warmongering. But they… Read more »
Somehow the communist hatred of nationalism was a part of their creed that certainly triumphed in the West. Even civnat conservatives seem to operate under the belief that the “nationalist” part of “national socialism” was inherently bad. But who on the winning side wasn’t a nationalist in WW 2? Look at Churchill’s famous speeches. Those are some intensely nationalist speeches. Likewise, the US was motivated to national fervor in the war effort. It was only later, when it was useful for the globalists, that nationalism became a bad word. Oh, sure, you can be “patriotic” — dissent is the highest… Read more »
The old American narrative may or may not have been mostly true, but it was largely agreed upon and used to perpetuate the civilization. One of the elements of the old narrative was that we all were beneficiaries and custodians of the narrative, but it was ours by inheritance, not a creation of our own. The establishment of the “me, me, me” attitude of the late ‘60s, aided and abetted by the popularization of the Internet, means that big parts of the culture are no longer content with simply being beneficiaries and custodians of the narrative handed to them. It… Read more »
A good reference here is, Joseph Campbell’s book, “The Power of Myth”. You can also view the series on YouTube. Origin myths are discussed and important to any healthy civilization. No assumptions of truth seem implied (IIRC) or even necessary. But the importance…that is not to be underestimated.
The seeming reference to a quotation from Degler’s finishing paragraph appears to be a misleading citation. When I accessed Degler’s December 1986 AHA presentation, it contained no such concluding mention of Douglas or Calhoun or “American Carnage” etc. as seems to be implied.
The new narrative is very simple: America is not a country, it is just a giant global cookie jar — and every Third World rape-ape on the planet is entitled to come here and grab a cookie. The only true Americans are Muslim refugees who came here a month ago. And if you don’t want rape-apes to have your cookie, then you are an evil racist who must be destroyed or replaced.
And yes, the new narrative, just like the last one, will be written by the Jews. You really had to ask?
It’s hard for a government to maintain that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” when the same government won’t recognize the existence of a Creator.
“The Torah devotes more than four books to the proposition that the Israelites came to Canaan after having been subjugated in Egypt for generations, and yet there is no archaeological evidence to support that they were ever in Egypt. A prolonged Egyptian stay should have left Egyptian elements in the material culture, such as the pottery found in theearly Israelite settlements in Canaan, but there are none. In short, the traditions of servitude in Egypt, the tales of the Israelites wandering in the desert, and the stories of the conquest of the promised land all appear to be fictitious.” Written… Read more »
By the late seventies I had made up my mind that everything that came out of their mouths or pens was bullshit. And very little that has occurred since then has changed my opinion.
Z: “…it’s a story that only Jews can believe”. Neat how you reversed the trope of the believing-Goyim.
The Frederick Douglass quote: “A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.” Justice, equality, rights, reason, natural law, separation of church and state, etc., good or bad, are all concepts that come from white people.… Read more »
“There can be no unifying narrative that includes the both the destroyers and their victims.” There can be if the victims perceive themselves as a sacrifice to something greater, and their destroyers market themselves successfully as something else to the people they’re destroying. I ignore most “alt-right” / “dissident right” examinations of pop culture (it can get weird and I don’t want to watch a twenty minute YouTube video about “Caddy Shack II” explaining what an offhand comment by Jackie Mason or Rodney Dangerfield means) but someone on the right wrote a good piece awhile back about the meaning of… Read more »