Ireland’s reputation as being a world renowned place for free thinking writers, authors and journalist’s seems numbered. In today’s world of Marxist Universities and dumbed down consumerism, not many 21 year millennials are able to write, research and compose a decent article. It is also rare to find a student that is not blindly and fanatically following the Establishment left wing soundbytes, even though students are meant to question established thought patterns, in order to discover, create and invent new things and ideas. An Irish student has penned an article calling for diversity amongst nations to be upheld, as he states, the concept of egalitarianism has not worked in this sphere and has been shown to be a false paradigm. Egalitarianism and diversity seem to be at odds, meaning open discussion is required… something the left hates.
Michael O’Dwyer Conolly, who took over editorship of the Burkean Journal in Ireland in mid summer, after the founders, Declan Ganley and his son Michael Ganley abandoned it, subsequent to the disastrous abortion referendum, is well aware of the controversy and hypocrisy surrounding the issue and clearly says in his second last paragraph they we should be civilised about it and not offend anyone or rub it in their noses. Indeed hiding or ignoring the discussion on the issue of race and IQ is far worse than offence, and as his article alludes, has negatively affected countless millions, if not billions worldwide!
But sadly, once again, in today’s politics, the tail wags the dog, and politicians are the dog. The globalist elites and mainstream media are the tail… (we have all seen a dog who so enthusiastically wags its tail, it literally shakes the whole dog back and forth – there was a movie with a similar name and concept)
Worryingly however, the authorities are also becoming more and more subject to “the tail”. Here is another example of society ignoring biological fact over feelings and perceptions: A Mother is arrested in front of her children for calling a transgender person a man, which he surely biologically is?
Similarly IQ statistics, whether you agree with them or not, don’t care about feelings and nor should they, if they are meant to be scientific and objective.
There have recently been numerous discussions around this issue by high profile proponents of free speech like Stefan Molyneux in USA, especially in Australia and even on The Rubin Report. Molyneux has repeatedly cited research that proves beyond any doubt that race and IQ are directly linked and has invited many a professional and expert on the issue onto his show to discuss the matter. both Rubin and Molyneux have a million subscribers each, far more than many TV shows can boast…
Sadly our mainstream elitist world is not ready for this reality, even if it does negatively affect the 3rd world, and as Stefan explains, we will never overcome this problem and humanity will be stuck in a schism of perceived racism and repeat its history, destroying itself over it, until it matures in its thinking and breaks free from the totalitarian left wing ideologies enforced upon it by globalism and its world supremacist sponsors. Those suffering under perceived racism will not be helped and will suffer even more as the wrong medicine is applied to the problem.
Certainly, as a very liberal left wing country, Ireland and Irish elites certainly are not ready for it. Even though many normal people you speak to on the street, or privately, know it and accept it, they are just not allowed to admit it publicly. Ireland and Portugal are the only two European nations that do not have any populist or nationalist parties holding any office.
Even though the reflective article has nothing to do with nationalism, the usual globalist suspects of left wing oppression predictably rose to the occasion, falling over themselves to earn some easy virtue signalling brownie points and condemn the article. John Mcguirk, who works for Declan Ganley, dutifully echoed his bosses sentiment with the usual ad hominem “white nationalists” etc. putting words into the article’s mouth that were not there… the rest queued up behind to add their group think soundbites – we shall not mention them here for obvious reasons.
Responding to the left wing condemnation, author Mícheál O’Duibhir Conghaile suggested that “Ireland is in dire need of a New Right – one that is not cowed by leftists and liberals, one that supports free speech always and not just when it suits them”:
As evidenced this morning, Ireland is in dire need of a New Right – one that is not cowed by leftists and liberals, one that supports free speech always and not just when it suits them.
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— The Burkean (@TheBurkeanIE) February 10, 2019
The article has been duplicated here, in case oppressive political correctness suppresses free speech and removes it at source, was published by Mícheál O’Duibhir Conghaile on 09/02/2019
Not All Are Born Equal
“We are but dust and shadow,” – Horace
I am one of a few lucky people to be born in Ireland. More than that, I had the good fortune to be born just a few years before the turn of the millennium. All I ever knew as a child was an era of prosperity in a modern civilised country with one of the highest qualities of life in the world. The rest of the world was a faraway concept with no bearing on life on the Emerald Isle.
As a people we don’t appreciate how unique and rare a nation like Ireland is in this world. We live in an orderly country, with a mostly competent administration, and share it with other fellow Irishmen and women who are a good natured and fair people. It is all too easy to take these things for granted. It is precisely why Westerners like ourselves should take some time to travel in the Second and Third Worlds, or at least read the accounts of those who have.
It is true that we have our problems, I’ll be the first to admit that. Indeed we can all remember the 2008 crash and the years that followed, with great increases in unemployment, poverty, crime and all the social problems that came with them. Even now a homelessness crisis wracks the country, while hardworking people can barely afford a roof over their heads.
But compared to the world at large, our island is a paradise.
Countries like Ireland are the exception, not the rule. Functional societies are not a given. In most of the world, from the edges of Europe to the heart of darkness, and from Caracas through Baghdad all the way to Bangkok, you can’t take any of these national qualities for granted. Instead, you’ll find society is often divided into innumerable political, ethnic, religious affiliations that don’t always get on.
The governments are corrupt, and society can be vicious or even cruel when compared to what we’re used to here in Europe (as can be observed through rates of homicide and violent crime). That’s not to say that there isn’t incredible hospitality, warmth, and generosity in these places all over the globe, which of course there is – sometimes even more energetically than in our now-atomised Western societies.
Not so long ago (especially in the 90s) the world of politics and academia seemed to thoroughly believe that we were on course to global unity and great developmental leaps. Francis Fukuyama wrote his now infamous essay and then book The End of History, under the assumption that liberal democracy had triumphed, and an ever-converging world of globalisation was the inevitable path of history.
The world lived in the assumption that one day, possibly soon, every nation would become an Ireland. With thirty years approaching since the publication of The End of History, the world is a very different place than what was imagined within those pages. Illiberalism is resurgent in the West and much of the Third World is no closer to converging with developed nations across virtually all metrics than they were fifty years ago.
However, even back in ’90 an astute observer without the mental fog of ideology might have seen through these predictions. It simply didn’t line up with the data comparing socio-economic performance both between nations and between ethnic groups within the same nation.
Why is it that some countries are simply so much poorer than others even after decades of development with the help of Western financial aid and expertise?
Take the Koreas as an example. Sixty years ago, there was barely a building left standing on the Korean peninsula, having been subject to a century of Japanese colonialism and then a brutal war that saw American and Chinese armies obliterate what remained of their nation.
Now South Korea is one of the world’s wealthiest countries with a massive high-tech industrial economy rivaling anything in Europe. Even its Northern counterpart, which has been isolated and sanctioned by the entire Western world since its inception, has managed to put together successful nuclear and space programmes. That is no small achievement.
If we follow the argument that the Third World was held back developmentally by the brutal exploitation of colonialism, we have to ask ourselves: Why did Korea succeed, and Africa (specifically Sub-Saharan Africa) fail?
The idea of ‘convergence’ is a core tenet of globalist ideology. If all human beings are fundamentally equal, then the logical conclusion is that all societies, and therefore all nations, are equal too and so have the same potential to develop socially, culturally, and economically.
If you believe this, then the failings and dysfunctions of particular societies are only because of historical circumstance. Therefore, their problems can be solved by adopting the social and economic practices of developed nations.
This ‘convergence assumption’ is behind much of the ideology of supranational organisations like the European Union and the United Nations. It is also a major part of academia, specifically in economics (especially developmental economics).
We can assume then, that if peoples and nations are equal, they will equalise over time.
The main problem with this is that it simply doesn’t happen. Convergence only seems to occur when nations are either:
- European (the closer to core Europe the quicker).
- Directly descended from Europeans (USA, Australia, etc).
- East or Northeast Asian.
- Directly descended from East Asians (Singapore).
- Incredibly wealthy in natural resources e.g. the Gulf Arabs (economic convergence only).
Even within Europe, convergence is rarely complete. The peripheries tend to be substantially less developed than the core. There are legitimate historical reasons for this though; peripheral Europe was more often subject to war, invasion, and disaster for example.
The former Soviet Bloc poses an interesting question in this regard. After half a century or more of brutal and economically incompetent communist governance, they were finally freed from its clutches in the early ‘90s and have since been on the path of convergence. Poland has exceeded Greece, and Czechia in turn exceeded Poland and is on course to overtake Spain in socio-economic terms.
Russia, despite the best attempts of the United States to pillage its wealth via loyal oligarchs in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, has developed immensely in the past decade and is on course to exceed Southern Europe. After two devastating world wars and communist genocides that left the better part of 70 million Russians dead over a thirty-year or so year period (1914-47), followed up by another forty years of Communist economics, it still managed to emerge a superpower in the 21st century. As someone who has travelled around Russia, I can attest that convergence is well and truly happening there.
Yet it is not happening elsewhere in the world. China has grown incredibly since it freed itself from Maoist economics – far outperforming India, a country which inherited many excellent economic and political traditions from the UK. Yet aside from the sleeping dragon, few countries have seen such improvements in recent decades. Even inside Europe, divergence has been happening in many places rather than the expected convergence. Germany and Northern Europe have deepened their lead over the Mediterranean, though much of this might be down to EU policy damaging the industries of its Southern members.
Outside Europe, South and Central America have since minimal improvement. Brazil has spent half a decade in recession and Argentina defaulted on its debts. However it isn’t all bad news, much of Latin America can be expected to improve, if not necessarily converge, in the coming decades.
It is Sub-Saharan Africa that is the real worry for believers in convergence. Despite it being over half a century since European administrations vacated the continent, not only has it not improved, much of the continent is now poorer and has a worse quality of life than ever before. Believers in convergence and the equal potential of peoples cannot answer the question of African development.
A common argument used is that of the Marshall Plan, and the idea that it contributed massively to the development of post-war western Europe while the colonies fell behind and were neglected, but once again the data does not agree. In reality all the Marshall Plan did was show how ‘generous’ the United States could be when it wanted to stop the spread of its ideological opponent.
Ultimately there was little correlation between the amount of Marshall aid received and economic growth. Britain received the most Marshall aid but fell into stagnation. West Germany received the least and grew the most. France enjoyed solid growth even though it wasted massive amounts of money in failed wars in Indochina and Algeria.
Marshall aid may have sped up European recovery by a few years, but by no means was it a major factor in the convergence of European nations. Eastern Europe grew more slowly than West not because it didn’t receive aid, but because it was forced to adopt communist economic and social policy.
The idea of the Marshall Plan as a driver of convergence is popular because it gives us the illusion of having the power to solve the world’s problems with simple solutions. We prefer to think that we can fix things by throwing lots of money at them rather than raise uncomfortable questions about humanity itself.
Total aid to Africa since 1960 adds up to over $5 trillion. That’s the equivalent of about 50 Marshall Plans.
I would propose that we look not just to historical circumstance, but also to genetics to answer this conundrum. In the modern world, even questioning whether ethnicities are genetically different will result in your being shunned and even blacklisted. Yet people far wiser than today’s opinion-makers have been asking these questions throughout history. All the way back in the sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli was complaining that Italians were not as industrious, organized, and ‘virtuous’ as the Swiss. Such ideas have been common in politics and philosophy all the way up to the mid 20th century.
The uncomfortable question we have to ask ourselves is how much genetic inheritance affects groups of people. Human beings are defined both by their genetic inheritance and by their culture. We have both ‘hardware’ so to speak (genetically-determined), and software (culture, customs, habits, and norms). Human hardware is difficult to change, software is not. Egalitarians claim humans are all software, which just isn’t credible.
In an age so obsessed with equality there are few questions more important than this. Obviously all people deserve to be equal in the eyes of the law and in regards their rights, but when the conversation turns to national and socio-economic inequalities, we are faced with the question of innate potential.
It is this question that the entirety of modern political and academic discourse seeks to ignore. Attempted explanations such as that of the Marshall Plan fall flat, but another exists; that of national institutions. Many an economist and social scientist have grown popular by promoting this comforting thesis: poor countries are poor not because there is anything different about the people, but because the institutions differ.
In fairness to the proponents of this theory, institutions are extremely important. Their theory is at least half-true, but in a way that makes it more misleading than if they peddled outright nonsense. The Japanese, for example, had not taken the idea capitalism beyond its primitive form until Commodore Perry’s use of force opened up their country to foreign trade in 1854. The Japanese, unlike most countries, proved very adept at capitalism.
Conversely, a nation can be held back by an overzealous application of socialism. Eastern Europe until 1989 and Mao’s China are prime examples of this. Arguably this was also the case for the post-war United Kingdom, where Labour governments passed ambitious socialist programmes seeking to solve longstanding inequalities between the economic classes. This seems to have inadvertently caused Britain’s economic underperformance when compared to the Continent (though attempting to maintain Great Power status almost certainly contributed too). By 1980 it was about 20% poorer than France.
The institutional argument also applies to Ireland. For almost the entire 20th century we were an economic basket case thanks to an ill-conceived vision for the country’s future promoted by successive governments. The agrarian catholic ideal for Ireland did more damage to us than any force bar British occupation. Millions of people were forced out of the country simply because our institutions could not (or did not want to) successfully manage an economy. Often our most educated were the ones to leave, resulting in a case of globally unprecedented brain-drain that devastated our national potential and actually lowered our average IQ.
Despite this, the institutions argument is a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. It requires an understanding of human genetic diversity to make sense on a global scale (for example, why can’t certain countries create good institutions?).
This theory argues that a nation’s development potential is constrained by the basic psychological makeup of the population. The most important traits in this regard are intelligence and social trust.
Intelligence strongly correlates with many important factors like innovation and self-control. High intelligence means you can be a world-leader in cognitively-demanding fields. Sweden, for example, can produce fighter jets despite having only nine million people. Low intelligence means you have more non-functional people. These people might not be able to hold a job (especially in developed economies), they might be erratic or violent, and your society will often have to babysit them at great cost to everyone else.
Social trust correlates to corruption and selfishness, but it is a more malleable ‘hardware’ than intelligence. An unintelligent low-trust country will create incompetent and selfish institutions, and therefore find itself in a degenerative feedback loop.
The effects of intelligence and stupidity seem to be exponential. Take Singapore, London, Moscow or other IQ Shredders and notice how they accumulate an intellectual critical mass and become inordinately important nationally and internationally. Likewise, a massive gathering of unintelligent people will function inordinately worse than a small gathering of unintelligent people.
Charles Murray hypothesises a phenomenon of cognitive sorting; intelligent people congregating around other intelligent people. This plays into the concept of IQ shredders and has also led to social fragmentation and polarisation in many countries. Consider the way in which London gathers the people with the highest cognitive ability in the UK – the North of England isn’t less intelligent than the South, the most highly skilled people simply move to London. The exact same thing happens in Ireland with Dublin except on a smaller scale.
Underdeveloped East Germany similarly saw its intelligent professionals move to the wealthier West, leading to much slower convergence within a unified Germany than expected. The same thing could be said for North and South Italy, though there may be a minor innate cognitive difference between those regions.
Not only does this happen within nations, but internationally too. Europe and America often take the most intelligent and highly skilled of the Third World, incorporating them into their workforces. India’s high-IQ social castes have seen huge movement to the United States and the United Kingdom. By taking the cream of the crop from the Third World, we hamper their development – if they could not move to the West, they would be the agents of change in their home nations.
We must also apply this thinking to unskilled migration. Our policymakers assume that all it will take for an Afghan farmer to integrate into the West is an education and a job. But in a world where the job market is increasingly complex and high-skill exclusive, we ought to realise that not all our human imports are capable of navigating it. Many of our native people aren’t capable of navigating it for that matter.
Now that automation is becoming widespread, tens of millions of low-skill jobs will be eliminated across the West in the coming decades. It is not unreasonable to suggest that twenty years down the line, there will be a whole section of society (both native and migrant) that are permanently locked out of the workforce. Not everyone has it in them to be a mathematician or a roboticist. This will change the way we understand money and reshape our economies to their core. The only way to understand, prepare for, and manage this is through acknowledging real diversity among peoples.
If we stick to a purely egalitarian understanding of humanity, we are forced into increasingly complex and ridiculous mental acrobatics to explain the performance differences between humanity’s many peoples. Worryingly, when a cognitively underperforming nation fails to develop, someone must be scapegoated for this failure – usually Europeans – because the egalitarians cannot believe that the failure might be innate.
Setting aside the politics of the question, many people buy into the egalitarian idea because our explanation seems inherently pessimistic. The average human is an emotional creature, and the idea of a world where all peoples are equal is marketed as a prettier picture than the alternative. For the same reason we so often prefer stories of great heroes and evil villains, we prefer idealism to pragmatism.
Just because some nations and people innately have less potential does not mean we should rub it into anyone’s nose. Every nation and person should have self-esteem and pride. I’d suggest we think of nations like individuals: each one has its unique qualities, interests, aptitudes, and failings. And that’s okay. Why would we want or expect everyone to be the same? If anything, it demonstrates the need for greater understanding and cooperation with our fellow man.
Only when we learn to understand and appreciate our inherent differences without the clouding lens of ideology will we be able to work towards a better future for all humanity.
Note: Credit to Anatoly Karlin for many of the ideas expressed in this piece.
Source: Burkean Journal
