My journey home started at the Helsinki airport. I drove from Turku to catch a noon flight, so I left several hours for the usual nonsense at the airport. I had plenty of time as the process of going through security and passport control was fast and efficient. It’s not like the Finns take a bunch of shortcuts. It’s just that the Finns are smart and sensible, so the people staffing the various posts at the airport are smarter than you’re going to find at an American airport. There is a lightness to it that you don’t see in America.
I had read Ed Dutton’s latest book on the flight over and it occurred to me that a good example of his thesis is the airport comparison. The very basic argument he is making is that the West is getting dumber due to selection pressure working against the traits we associate with general intelligence. As a result, the West is getting less capable. If this process is not arrested, collapse is inevitable. We will not have enough smart people to run the systems of the West, so we will retreat into less complex societies.
The Helsinki airport runs like other airports, but it is run by a people with an average IQ over 100. The Baltimore airport, in contrast, uses the same systems, but it is run by people with an 85-IQ. Now, in fairness, the typical Finn is not working security at their airport, so the average IQ of the staff is certainly below the national average. On the other hand, the management layer at the Helsinki airport is probably a full SD smarter than what you’ll find at a typical American airport, with lots of diversity hires at every level.
In other words, the Helsinki airport is like 1950’s America when all of the important positions were manned by people from the majority population and that majority population was smarter than today. Meanwhile, the BWI airport is future America, maybe not too distant future America, where the important positions are staffed by a hodgepodge of whoever washed up here, managed by a significantly dumber white population, with the help of loads of diversity. The future of the West is the TSA on a bad day…
Leaving Russia by train, you pass through a town called Vyborg. It is an old city, probably founded in the 11th century, but no one knows. It has changed hands many times over the centuries. The Finns, Swedes and Russians have taken turns controlling it. Today it belongs to the Russians and is a craphole. The population has rocket high drug and alcohol abuse, along with the social dysfunction to go with it. The point is the same problems ailing the West are showing up in even the remote parts of the world…
On the train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, a Finnish passenger pointed out the window at an old dilapidated building just outside the city. He said, “That’s where they held Finns who were being sent to Siberia.” By “they” he meant the Bolsheviks. You get the sense that there remains a strong underlying suspicion and hatred of the Russians….
Watching Russian TV, I saw ads for Kazakhstan. They were hilarious. It was like Borat was hired by their chamber of commerce to create the ads…
Riding the train between Finland and Russia, you get to see the border control of both counties in close comparison. The Finns are professional and clearly trained to evaluate each passenger based on their experience. The Russians are just following a procedure, without putting a ton of thought into it. More important, the Russians operate under much tighter rules. Their superiors don’t trust them to do too much thinking on their own, so they have a rule for every condition. Low trust societies need lots of rules…
The collapse of the Russian collusion myth was hilarious, but the aftermath concealed the real damage that has been done. The Europeans follow the lead of the American media, which means they now have the Russian collusion virus. I saw this show on the BBC, which is supposedly about how the Russians secretly influence European elections through control of dissident politics. It’s every bit as nuts as the Russian collusion nonsense and every bit as damaging to the political culture of the continent…
The scars of socialism can still be seen outside Saint Petersburg. The run down housing blocks and abandoned concrete buildings are a reminder of the failure of greatest and most monstrous social engineering experiments in history. Mixed in with those ugly reminders of the past, there are new housing blocks that look like they are built by people, rather than prison guards. There are even housing tracts that are rather stylish, like an eastern version of an American suburb. Russia is still poor, but it is getting better…
I had the pleasure of spending time with Ed Dutton. He is even more eccentric in real life than you see in his video. He is also razor sharp and very witty. He translated a Finnish speech for me in real time, which was like having Rowan Atkinson explain a speech by elves to the denizens of Middle Earth. Of course, we both had been drinking, so that certainly had something to do with it. You learn a lot about an Englishmen after he has had a few drinks. We are very lucky to have Ed Dutton on our team…
The one thing Europeans struggle understanding is what it is like to live in a city like Baltimore. I was chatting with some people, trying to explain to them how Baltimore can have a crime rate 200 times higher than Finland. They were baffled as to why blacks shoot one another over sneakers. I felt like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Patrol cars on fire off the shoulder of North Avenue. I watched hoppers glitter in the dark near the Hampsterdam Gate…..”
I’ve always been skeptical of the global white nationalist movement, for the simple reason that what ultimately has defined the West is competition between people. The Chinese are smart, smarter than Europeans, but they could not make the great leap out of the Malthusian trap that happened in Europe. The reason is the Han came to dominate their region long ago, so they put their smarts to work concentrating their domain. The Europeans used their smarts competing against one another to dominate Europe.
You see the residue of the competition everywhere you go in Europe, even in the Nordic countries, which are very close ethnically and culturally. There can be cooperation on a range of interests, but ultimately, that cooperation has to be based on ethnic nationalism, not racial solidarity. The Finns have to want to keep their own lands, before they can cooperate with Italians, who want not keep their own lands. Europeans need to love themselves again, before they can come together to defend Europe…