A while back someone noticed that white people in American are dying off at record rates. Digging into the numbers reveals that middle-aged whites have seen a spike in suicide rates as well as a spike in death from substance abuse. It got a lot of attention because white liberals are pretty much organized around exterminating white people. It is a suicide cult based on race. The so-called conservatives hid under their beds, but hate thinkers out on the fringe jumped in with their explanations and data analysis.

My best posts seem to be those where I don’t make an argument, but instead describe a phenomenon or analyze something happening in the world. I know I enjoy writing those posts more than the standard arguments in favor of a particular point of view. With that in mind, I thought a useful post would be a roundup of the various theories about The White Death, including a little of my own opinion on the topic. It’s a big topic that will surely make a few books, but here’s a first blush of some of the theories.

The Steve Sailer Theory: Suicide and death from substance abuse often go hand in hand and they tend to work over time. Sailer took a look at the ages involved, did a little math and noticed that the cohort with the spike in suicide and substance abuse were the 70’s generation. These were the folks who missed the summer of love, but made up for it in the disco era. For whites, this was probably the worst decade for drug abuse, social pathology and cultural decay. It was a a tough decade to be a honky.

The argument here is that peak partying for whites took a toll on this generation. Higher alcoholism rates and the aftershocks of excessive drug taking in the younger years resulted in higher death rates in the late middle years. There’s also the fact that this generation was the first to experience economic malaise. If you came of age in the 70’s, you did not enter a world brimming with optimism. For working class whites, the malaise never really ended, thus a lifetime of substance abuse for many of them.

The John Derbyshire Theory: John made the observation back when Merkel’s Millions were first flooding into Europe that the invaders were all young males. Further, the people welcoming them were mostly women. In the US, the middle-age death spike is exclusively white and heavily male. In subsequent podcasts, John put the two trends together. The white male had suddenly fallen to the bottom of the sexual pecking order. White males are now low status males, while the young dusky fellows from over the horizon are the top dogs.

Human biology is immutable so of if there is no future for white males, that could explain the spike in substance abuse rates and suicide rates among white males. After all, we are biologically designed to seek out females. If I understand John’s angle correctly, his theory is that the general war on men, by white women, in white societies is leading to all sorts of bizarre outcomes, one of which is the climbing death rates among white men. Maybe we can call this death by angry snapper.

Manosphere Theory: I’m not entirely sure I fully grasp this explanation, given that I don’t haunt these sites all that often. The basic claim is that masculinity has been degraded to the point where men are just lesbians with a dick. Instead of engaging in masculine jobs, hobbies and social roles, men have been forced into an increasingly feminized role in society. This rewards submissive men, but heavily penalizes normal males. Turn on a television and you clearly see they have a point.

The result is a general sense of despondency and disconnectedness. This leads to high substance abuse rates and higher suicide rates as this is not a role most men are bred to accept. This is the genesis of the “cuckservative” epithet to describe the new submissive male that is held up as the example of modern masculinity. If your main role in life is to bring black guys home to the wife, you’re better off dead. Like I said, I may be missing something here, but those are the general outlines.

The Despair Theory: Here is a broader look at the trend lines to include other types of social dysfunction, like the spike in opiate use. Flat wages, declining mobility, increased inequality, the proliferation of drug therapy, social decay and the decline in religion have led to a widespread sense of despair. This is the Robert Putnam angle. The globalization of economics has left people less secure in their lives, adding anxiety to the despair. Everyone is a bad decision by management away from suffering a severe decline in living standards.

If you look at what has been happening with the white working class, the word “despair” is a good descriptor. The economy has been horrible for these people and the ruling elite has unleashed a cultural assault that has blown apart anything resembling social structure. A factory man in 1965 could live a nice lower middle-class life. Today, that guy is working at a Home Depot and his wife has to work to make ends meet. These trends are now seeping up into the middle class, as evidenced by the Trump candidacy.

My Theory: My hunch is the White Death is a downstream result of a much longer trend. Think of the West as an industry and each ethnic group as a business in that industry. It got going in the 15th century with the age of exploration. The competition between countries, as well as the massive growth of the business, allowed the West to rocket ahead of the world in culture, finance and technology. The West was Silicon Valley while the rest of the world was Pittsburgh.

This long expansion ran its course like every other industry in history. It is a mature industry now, where growth is small. The sort of people who thrive in a booming industry are the people who like risk and like breaking form to try new things. In a mature industry, the rewards are to the conservative and rule bound. There’s no benefit to risk taking so there’s no reason to take risks. Similarly, there’s nothing but risk in breaking from the rules, so the best people avoid coloring outside the lines.

Thinking of Europeans, in the broadest sense, as risk takers and adventurers, trapped in a world where risk is to be avoided and adventure means having ice cream for desert, would explain a few things. Inviting millions of Exploding Mohameds into Europe tickles that desire to take risks and take on new challenges that is baked into the Western psyche. If you think about it, all of the problems that plague the West today are self-inflicted. It’s as if we are keeping ourselves busy by inviting trouble to our door.

At the more granular level, and this is probably truer of Americans than Europeans, is that there’s not a lot of fun stuff for men to do anymore. A century ago, a man with modest skills could do well by being physically courageous. Maybe that meant military service or striking out for the hinterlands to start a new life. Tough guys and bad asses were still getting the girls in movies up until fairly recent. Now the leading men are homosexuals, who share their feelings and cry a lot. Or, they are cartoons.

This is one of those topics that is open to all sorts of crackpot theories. It’s also one that will probably solve itself. In a healthy society, old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. That’s not the West today. Whatever is at the root of the White Death will give way to something more hostile than white guys hanging themselves or overdosing on horse. To use another hoary chestnut, no tree grows to the sky. The White Death will give way to something else. It will probably be worse.