Written by Noah Carl.

The writer David Oks recently penned an article titled “Why China got rich and India didn’t”. It went super viral, racking up over 3,700 likes. Notwithstanding this immense popularity, I don’t think it offers a convincing explanation.

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Written by Noah Carl.

It is well known that the US has a higher homicide rate than other Western countries. In the latest version of the UN’s dataset, it has a rate of 5.8 per 100,000 — compared to 1.3 in France, 1.1 in Britain and 0.9 in Germany. So the country is at least five times more homicidal than its former colonial ruler.

The standard explanation on the Right is simple: racial demographics. The US has a large black population, and black people (for whatever reason) commit homicide at incredibly high rates. Indeed, the US is about 14% black, while the blackest country in Europe, Britain, is only 4% black. Here’s what Ann Coulter had to say in 2013:

On the gun crimes, we keep hearing how low they are in Europe, and oh they’re so low and they have no guns. If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium. So perhaps it’s not a gun problem. It is a demographic problem.

How she could have known that white Americans commit murder at the same rate as white Belgians is unclear, since Belgium does not publish homicide data broken down by race or ethnicity. Indeed, the evidence we do have suggests that she was wrong. Belgium’s overall homicide rate in 2012 was 1.6. Meanwhile, the homicide rate for non-Hispanic white Americans in the same year was 2.7.

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Written by Alden Whitfeld and Arctotherium.

Jason Richwine coined the term “Irish Retort” to describe one of the most common tactics deployed in debates over immigration. Raise any concerns about mass immigration today and the response is automatic: “What about the Irish!”

When Irish immigrants arrived in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were poor, Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) and heavily overrepresented in crime. Nativists panicked then too. Yet over time, the Irish assimilated, climbed up the social ladder, and became indistinguishable from the average American. The implication is clear, though usually left unstated: today’s immigrants will follow the same arc, and any claim to the contrary is just recycled bigotry.

It’s a neat story, rhetorically powerful and emotionally satisfying. The problem is what it leaves out. Careful studies using multi-generational data show that differences in social outcomes are much more persistent than is commonly assumed. What appears to be rapid convergence is often an artifact of looking too narrowly or too briefly. With this in mind, let’s examine how well the story of rapid European assimilation holds up.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.1

This selection process radically alters how we interpret the observed convergence in outcomes. Abramitzky et al. (2014) show that most European immigrant groups that arrived in the early twentieth century, including the Irish, Italians and Russians, already had above-average incomes in the first generation. (There was often little difference between first- and second-generation outcomes.) It is not difficult to turn a group into a success story when many of its poorest members voluntarily leave.

Even after accounting for selection, European economic differences did not evaporate entirely. Using a unique three-generation dataset linking immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940, Ward (2020) finds substantial persistence in occupational income across European ethnicities. As this is the first study to use linked grandparent-grandson data, it demonstrates that intergenerational correlations are stronger when measured properly. As Ward notes, his findings cut directly against the “melting pot” narrative in which ethnic differences fade within a generation or two. They don’t.

Nor did immigrants simply arrive as blank slates and then absorb American culture. They brought their values, habits and norms with them, and these left durable imprints on the places where they settled. We understand this intuitively when it comes to cuisine: Italians didn’t just eat pasta themselves; they taught Americans to eat pasta.2 But the same logic applies in other domains.

A growing literature shows that cultural behaviors persist across generations and shape economic outcomes (Giuliano & Tabellini, 2020; Simpser, 2020; Richwine, 2023; 2024). Fulford et al. (2018), using ancestry data for U.S. counties from 1850 to 2010, show that counties settled by immigrants from richer European countries are more productive today. A 1% increase in GDP per capita of the weighted average of the origin countries predicts roughly a 0.3% increase in the long-run GDP per capita of the county.

And this effect is not simply driven by differences in education between immigrant groups. The researchers also find that once traits like historical state capacity (the length of time for which a nation has had an independent state), trust and cooperation are taken into account, formal education no longer predicts a group’s impact on county productivity. Berger & Engzell (2019) report similar results for inequality and mobility: differences across counties reflect the composition of the groups that settled them.

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: the nativists of the time were correct. Specifically, they were correct about the political impact these new arrivals would have.

The 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigrants entered a country with virtually no welfare state. But their descendants powered the New Deal and, more decisively, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, permanently shifting the American political spectrum leftward. Medicaid, Medicare, and the expansion of Social Security were not accidents; they were the predictable consequences of a transformed electorate (and are, incidentally, responsible for America’s fiscal woes). Any short-run cost-benefit analysis conducted in 1920 would have missed the point entirely.

The result was a durable “Europeanization” of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics. As can be seen in the chart below, there is a strong correlation between the fraction of immigrants in a county between 1910–1930 and support for state welfare spending.

None of this was unforeseeable. Contemporary observers like Senator David Reed explicitly warned, in defence of the Immigration Act of 1924, that mass immigration from populations less accustomed to self-government would produce electorates more reliant on the state.

There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.

Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.

What could not be modelled precisely was the timing. Political integration takes decades, and as such, these effects only became electorally decisive in the late 1920s, with milestones such as Al Smith’s 1928 nomination. Had someone conducted a fiscal analysis of this immigration wave in 1920, they would have concluded it was beneficial. But immigration reshaped politics itself: once immigrants and their descendants gained political power, they used it, and this was predictable.3

Studies of internal migration reveal that even regional differences within a country persist over time. Population movements change societies. While the Great Migration is usually discussed among historians insofar as it pertains to black Americans, numerically speaking, a larger number of white Southerners left the South. This movement measurably increased political conservatism, as measured by Republican vote shares, opposition to the Civil Rights Act, support for Reagan’s tax cuts, and opposition to the certification of the 2020 election (Bazzi et al., 2023a; 2023b).4

Evidence from crime and literacy further undermines the lazy analogy between European immigration then and Hispanic immigration now. Moehling & Piehl (2009) show that, while some European immigrant groups were overrepresented in crime, such as the Irish, it was largely in minor offenses like public drunkenness. Differences in serious crime were generally small. While Italians were somewhat overrepresented in serious crime, they still committed far less than Mexicans, who were the clear exception.

The paper also punctures the myth of European illiteracy. Literacy exceeded 85% for most European groups and large majorities spoke English. Again, Mexico stood apart, with substantially lower literacy and English proficiency.

The same pattern is seen in incarceration data from 1900–1930 (Abramitzky et al., 2024). Once again, Mexicans had much higher rates than native-born Americans, whereas all European groups were the same or lower.

Put differently: European differences were real but comparatively modest.5 That is not evidence of dramatic assimilation success; it is evidence that gaps were small to begin with. And the gap between whites and Hispanics, both historically and today, is far larger.6 Invoking the Irish or Italians as evidence for the power of assimilation is therefore not convincing.7 The Irish Retort doesn’t work.

This essay is adapted from a longer article published at Heretical Insights.

Alden Whitfeld is an independent writer who does research on immigration and politics. Arctotherium is an anonymous writer interested in demographics and the future of civilization.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

I’m pretty sure I was wearing my Rage Against the Machine hat when I bought The Portable Edmund Burke. I was young and radical. Reading Chomsky, Zinn, Marx, Fanon. In a charitable mood, I thought conservatism was solace for the old. In a cynical mood, I thought it was a cover for greed and plunder. But I had read about Burke’s eloquence and, fancying some well-written prose, I decided to give him a try. Besides, I delighted in gainsaying bad political arguments. And being intellectually arrogant, I was certain I would find plenty to mock in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

I was not converted overnight. I was not even converted ten years later. But I look back fondly on my first reading of Burke. I was not surprised by the force and beauty of his rhetoric. Even his critics conceded his brilliance as a stylist. But I was surprised by the force of his arguments—or rather, by their moral seriousness. For Reflections is not written like a tight philosophical treatise; it depends as much on the moral imagination as it does on formal reason. And the moral imagination is moved more by poetry than by axioms and deductions.

What I found in Burke was a reverence for tradition, an understanding that institutions are often wiser than individuals, and a recognition that stubborn problems are stubborn precisely because they admit no easy solutions. At the time, I believed that poverty was less a puzzle than a condition created by design. In principle, it seemed no more difficult to solve than elementary algebra. A better society was only a few radical changes away. Of all my early leftist beliefs, this optimism was the first to go.

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Written by Peter Frost.

Mean IQ has risen in Europeans over the past 10,000 years. This upward trend began when hunting and gathering gave way to farming, and it continued as farming brought a cascade of new challenges.1 Nonetheless, there were periods of stagnation and even decline, notably during the Imperial Era of Rome and, more recently, since the early 20th century.2

These are the findings of a new field of research, archaeogenetics, which uses ancient DNA to chart genetic change over time, such as changes in genes associated with cognitive ability. To date, the focus has been on Europe, where we have the most data. But at least one study concerns East Asia, where mean IQ has followed a similar trajectory over time, albeit with interesting differences.3 Eventually, we’ll learn how cognitive ability has evolved in South Asia, the Middle East, West Africa and other regions.4

A new picture of human evolution is taking shape. Was it ever anticipated by Charles Darwin or any of his contemporaries? This question prompted me to look through the early literature for anyone making the following points:

• Mean IQ rose at a faster rate when hunting and gathering gave way to farming.

• This rise continued well into the time of recorded history. It continued as long as new demands were made on cognitive ability, and as long as individuals who met such demands enjoyed higher reproductive success. Whenever this selection pressure weakened, mean IQ stopped rising or even fell.

• There was a positive feedback loop between human intellect and the products of human intellect.

Darwin, in fact, did argue that human evolution continued past the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. But he believed it proceeded at a slower pace. In this, he was influenced by two of his closest associates: Alfred Russell Wallace and Francis Galton.

Wallace thought that cultural change made genetic evolution less necessary for material advancement, particularly with the rise of civilization.5 Meanwhile, Galton saw civilization as weakening natural selection: “the finest young men” are killed in war; the children of short-lived parents marry earlier and have children earlier; and primogeniture prevents the younger sons of landowners from marrying.6

Darwin concluded that cognitive ability increased only somewhat, or perhaps not at all, as humans became “civilized”:7

Hence in civilised nations there will be some tendency to an increase both in the number and in the standard of the intellectually able. But I do not wish to assert that this tendency may not be more than counterbalanced in other ways, as by the multiplication of the reckless and improvident; but even to such as these, ability must be some advantage.

After Darwin, academia followed the lead of either Wallace or Galton. But one contemporary did argue that cognitive evolution accelerated during the time of modern humans.

His name? Friedrich Engels — the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx. Engels was interested in the natural sciences and the works of Darwin specifically. In 1859, he made a point of obtaining a copy of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. He immediately wrote to Marx:8

Darwin, by the way, whom I am just reading, is quite splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had not yet been destroyed, but now that has been done. Never before has such a wonderful attempt been made to prove historical development in nature, and certainly never with such success.

Over the following decades, he wrote several essays from a Darwinian perspective, most notably The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Apes to Man (1876).9

This essay seems to argue for all three of the above points, particularly the tendency of cultural evolution and genetic evolution to drive each other forward:

The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development. This development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape, but on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society.

The first part seemed obscure to me, so I went back to the original German and used Google Translate:10

The feedback effect of the development of the brain and its obedient senses, of the increasingly clarified consciousness, capacity for abstraction, and power of drawing conclusions on labor and language gave both [labor and language] constant new impulses for further development—a development that by no means came to an end once humans had finally separated from the apes.

In other words, there was a positive feedback loop between the development of the brain (consciousness, abstraction, reasoning) and the growing complexity of work and language, which in turn favored further development of the brain. This is the feedback loop at the heart of gene-culture coevolution — a concept that would remain unknown for another century and a half.

Am I seeing something that isn’t there? Perhaps my interest in gene-culture coevolution is making me assume that others share this interest, particularly the evolutionarily inclined. It is significant, then, that another writer also thought “the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution was made by Friedrich Engels in his remarkable essay of 1876.”

That writer was Stephen Jay Gould, and he saw the same feedback loop between genes and culture:11

An enlarging brain (biology, or genes in later parlance) then fed back upon tools and language (culture), improving them in turn and setting the basis for further growth of the brain—the positive feedback loop of gene-culture coevolution.

Adapting to nature: cold winters theory

According to Engels, gene-culture coevolution was not yet predominant when humans were still adapting to new natural environments as they spread around the globe. These humans were already modern Homo sapiens, as shown by his use of the term “fully-fledged man” [des fertigen Menschen].

[Man] spread over the whole of the habitable world, being the only animal fully able to do so of its own accord. The other animals that have become accustomed to all climates — domestic animals and vermin — did not become so independently, but only in the wake of man. And the transition from the uniformly hot climate of the original home of man to colder regions, where the year was divided into summer and winter, created new requirements — shelter and clothing as protection against cold and damp, and hence new spheres of labour, new forms of activity, which further and further separated man from the animal.

This is “cold winters theory” — the idea that the seasonal cycle of northern regions selects for planning, as well as the ability to create special clothing and shelters for winter. It had many proponents in the 19th century, but Engels is most likely referring to a paper written by Wallace in 1864:12

So when a glacial epoch comes on, some animals must acquire warmer fur, or a covering of fat, or else die of cold. Those best clothed by nature are, therefore, preserved by natural selection. Man, under the same circumstances, will make himself warmer clothing, and build better houses; and the necessity of doing this will react upon his mental organisation and social condition … a hardier, a more provident, and a more social race would be developed, than in those regions where the earth produces a perennial supply of vegetable food, and where neither foresight nor ingenuity are required to prepare for the rigours of winter. And is it not the fact that in all ages, and in every quarter of the globe, the inhabitants of temperate have been superior to those of tropical countries? All the great invasions and displacements of races have been from North to South, rather than the reverse.

Adapting to culture: gene-culture coevolution

With the rise of farming, the human mind no longer had to grapple solely with the cognitive demands of the natural environment. Cognitive demands were now being created by culture, itself a creation of the human mind.

Selection for cognitive ability thus shifted farther south, to temperate or even subtropical latitudes. Such regions had the greatest potential for population growth and hence for social complexity — what we call “civilization.”

Engels describes this new stage of human evolution:

By the combined functioning of hand, speech organs and brain, not only in each individual but also in society, men became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and were able to set themselves, and achieve, higher and higher aims. The work of each generation itself became different, more perfect and more diversified. Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind — religion.

The southward shift in selection for cognitive ability can be seen in ancient DNA. The inverse correlation between winter temperature and cognitive ability is strongest in the oldest European samples. It then grows weaker over time and finally disappears with the end of hunting and gathering in Europe.13

Engels ended his essay with a criticism of the “Darwinian school” for tending to see the human mind as a disembodied entity — a ghost in a machine — and not as an organ that has evolved to meet specific needs.

All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour.

Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them. In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.

Conclusion

It may seem jarring to see Engels advocating not only gene-culture coevolution but also cold winters theory and the idea that the human brain continued evolving into historical times. No less jarring is Gould’s apparent endorsement. For this, I have but one explanation: life isn’t simple.

Engel’s essay was never finished. It would eventually be published in 1925, long after his death, together with other incomplete manuscripts by him on the natural sciences. Had he finished it, and found a better translator, he might have influenced evolutionary thought in the years after Darwin.

As things turned out, the leading intellectual heirs of Darwin were Wallace and Galton. For different reasons, their legacy has discouraged researchers from investigating the recent evolution of cognitive ability.

Wallace rightly believed that the pace of cultural change overtook the pace of genetic evolution in our species. But he wrongly concluded that the growing importance of culture caused genetic evolution to slow down and lose importance. In fact, the human genome changed more quickly as Homo sapiens adapted to faster-changing cultural environments.14

Wallace’s view of human evolution gained broad support, particularly its corollary that culture is overwhelmingly responsible for human differences. The latter view became especially popular from 1933 onward, as alarm grew over the rise of Hitler and Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism — the original meaning of “racism.”15 For many, the struggle against Hitler would continue long after 1945 and eventually become a struggle against any belief that human differences are more than skin-deep.16

As for Galton, he rightly believed that civilization can cause cognitive evolution to halt or even reverse. But he wrongly assumed that stagnation and decline were the usual outcome. In fact, civilization has more often been an impetus for higher levels of cognitive ability.

We’re now in the year 2026. With Nature publishing the latest Reich Lab paper, we can read Engel’s 1876 essay in a new light and acknowledge its significance. Will the same be done for the papers by Davide Piffer, Emil Kirkegaard, Yunus Kuijpers and Michael Woodley of Menie?

The advance of science is due not only to exceptional individuals but also to our willingness to recognize them and build on their work.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Perhaps it will be a mercy killing. The humanities have finished their life cycle from triumph through decadence to decay. All that is left is the dying.

When I am in a surly mood, this seems right. The humanities deserve to die. They have abdicated their cultural responsibility, draining colleges of precious resources while promulgating progressive balderdash. Their eulogy, like that of a once-great man who became an eccentric crank in old age, will focus on the glory of their youth, passing over the waste of their later years in tactful silence.

Yet it’s hard to resist the feeling that something irreplaceable is vanishing beneath the decay. However degraded the modern humanities may have become, they still preserve fragments of a great inheritance: Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Melville and Tolstoy. One cannot watch such a tradition collapse with indifference. Instead one is led to melancholic reflection and interrogation: What purpose do the humanities, at their best, serve and what exactly is being lost with their disappearance?

My answer is unashamedly elitist.

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Written by Noah Carl.

The debate over the causes of persistent racial IQ gaps tends to get bogged down in statistical nitty-gritty. Researchers clash over questions like “how similar is the linkage disequilibrium structure in different ancestral populations?” and “do signals of polygenic selection persist when using effect sizes from family-based GWAS?” These questions are undoubtedly important (I do not mean to suggest otherwise). However, the excessive focus on such arcane matters risks distracting from the bigger picture: environmentalism is highly implausible.

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Written by Lipton Matthews.

Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at the University of Birmingham, is one of the most prominent voices in Britain’s Empire debate. He has gone so far as to assert that British rule was “far worse” than the Nazis. Andrews represents a broader movement within academia that sees Western colonialism as the defining evil of human history. This movement suffers from a profound lack of perspective. Conquest and domination were not Western inventions but recurring features of human society.

Britain spent over £12 million to suppress the slave trade during the 19th century, a large sum for the era. Yet today, Britons are browbeaten and made to feel guilty over their country’s past. Mongolians, meanwhile, face no such pressure — despite the Mongol Empire being responsible for some of the most catastrophic destruction in all of history. There are no calls for Mongolian reparations; no curricula are being scrubbed; no statues are being torn down.

The simple fact is that conquest, tribute extraction, forced labour, population displacement and domination of subjugated peoples are constants across human civilisation. What makes Western colonialism distinctive is not its brutality but the degree to which it’s been subjected to critical examination.

Few episodes in history match the Mongol expansion in terms of killing. The Mongols offered conquered peoples a choice: surrender and pay tribute, or face annihilation. During the sack of Baghdad alone, hundreds of thousands were killed in a matter of days. Mongol forces also destroyed the House of Wisdom, the largest library in the world at the time. Books were thrown into the river in such quantities that historical accounts describe the Tigris running black with ink, before turning red with blood. Deaths attributed to Genghis Khan’s conquests have been estimated at 40 million, representing roughly 10% of the world’s population.

Not only that. Research has found that Mongol invasions did lasting damage to institutional quality, measurable in contemporary GDP per capita figures. Nations invaded by the Mongols became more autocratic as a result; those that weren’t developed more liberal, decentralised institutions.

The mechanism is straightforward: when resistance was met with slaughter, surviving populations were forced to prioritise the military and national defence. After the expulsion of its Mongol rulers, China turned inward under the Ming dynasty, built the Great Wall and largely abandoned its maritime capabilities. (Zheng He’s fleet, which dwarfed that of even Christopher Columbus, was left to rot.) Russia consolidated into a single autocratic state as a response to the Mongol threat, having previously been a loose federation of principalities. Islam’s Golden Age was effectively ended by the sack of Baghdad.

All this, yet Mongolia receives close to zero criticism. Conquered peoples of Eurasia are not even mentioned in the debate. (As recently as 2008, Mongolian authorities erected a huge, stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan.)

Let us turn from Eurasia to the Americas. Before the Spanish ever set foot there, a vast colonial system had already been constructed by people indigenous to that continent — the Inca Empire.

Incan imperial expansion involved the systematic seizure of resources from newly conquered territories. All wild animals and mineral resources were claimed as property of the state, personified by the divine ruler. Gold, silver and other materials were appropriated from the peoples that had previously controlled them. And provincial elites were required to deliver an annual tribute to the capital.

More significantly, the Inca displaced subject peoples on a massive scale. Between three and five million (a third of the imperial population) were resettled, as entire regions were claimed by the state. At Cochabamba in Bolivia, the emperor ordered part of the eastern valley vacated, and some 14,000 workers drawn from surrounding groups were drafted in to produce food for the army. Underpinning all this was an intricate bureaucracy imposed upon subject peoples, who had no say in who governed them.

Some individuals were permanently detached from their kin groups and then assigned to Inca elites, serving as a kind of bound labour. This included adolescent girls, who were confined to segregated state precincts where they worked until awarded in marriage. These were not isolated abuses, but rather official practices of the Empire.

Among the occupational categories documented in chronicles of the period were administrators with specific responsibility for human sacrifice. Such individuals appear alongside gold miners, feather workers and storehouse guardians in formal registers of state duties. The victims of Inca human sacrifice were of course overwhelmingly drawn from subject peoples, and many were children.

The Inca Empire was, by any reasonable definition, a colonial system. It was built on conquest, seizure of resources, mass population displacement, and detachment of individuals from their local communities. The fact that its perpetrators were not European is irrelevant.

Another case of non-European expansionism with striking parallels to European empire-building is the Nupe colonisation of Okunland in what is now north-central Nigeria, lasting from 1840 to 1897. It warrants attention because it demonstrates that the features most commonly attributed to European colonialism — slave-taking, imposition of administrators and manipulation of local elites — were practiced by an African imperial power against an African subject.

The conquest of Okunland was motivated by political rivalry and appetite for resources. Internal power struggles between Nupe princes made the wealthy region of Okunland an irresistible target. Around 1840, forces led by Etsu Usman Zaki overran several Okun settlements. Between 1840 and 1850, the large town of Kirri was taken. When it fell, able-bodied men were carried off as slaves, and a tribute of 6,000 cowries was imposed on the survivors.

Kabba, the largest Okun settlement, held out longer. Nupe forces pillaged the surrounding countryside in order to starve the population into submission. Eventually, a peace treaty was signed under which Kabba agreed to pay a tribute of 72,000 cowries. The Okun people thus became a Nupe dependency.

What followed was a system of concentrated, unaccountable power. An official known as the Ogba functioned as the sole representative of Nupe authority in a given area. Wielding immense power with no formal checks on his conduct, his aim was to collect as much tribute as possible for Bida (the imperial capital). Matters grew worse under Etsu Maliki, reaching a “monumental level of absurdity”. Taxes were raised so high that when cowries and slaves were not available, people were forced to pay with their own children.

Like European powers, Nupe authorities sometimes governed through local intermediaries. In Oworoland, chiefs who collaborated had their authority extended across entire regions; those who refused were stripped of influence. Empowering local elites is therefore not a European invention. The Nupe did it decades before Britain employed similar techniques across Nigeria. Despite this, only the British version features prominently in debates about colonial injustice.

It is entirely legitimate to examine Western colonialism. What’s wrong is to examine it in isolation, as though conquest and domination were products of European modernity. The Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history, causing institutional damage that is still measurable in living standards today. The Inca established a vast colonial system complete with administrators for overseeing human sacrifice. The Nupe colonised Okunland using methods indistinguishable from those later employed by European powers.

Mongolian authorities are not being asked to apologise for 40 million deaths, even as they build giant statues of the man responsible. The Inca legacy is treated as just another part of South America’s cultural heritage. And Nupe colonisation of Okunland remains largely unknown outside of specialist circles. What motivates most academic critics of Empire, it seems, is not so much anti-colonialism as opposition to the West.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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Written by Bo Winegard.

In a recent tweet, the always provocative Richard Hanania wrote: “How you know the race and IQ people are just bigots: if you take IQ seriously, your main cause should be getting everyone on earth with a 110 IQ or higher into your country. This would be the only logical position one can hold.”

The race-and-IQ people targeted by Hanania are not specified, but he is presumably referring not merely to those who believe that human races vary in cognitive ability (since every relevant expert accepts that) but to those who believe it is important to speak candidly about race and IQ rather than retreat into silence or noble lies.

If so, the argument appears to be this:

Those who believe honesty about race and IQ is preferable to silence, and who nevertheless disagree with Hanania’s preferred immigration policy, are not merely mistaken but bigoted. And they are bigoted because they do not wish to admit everyone with an IQ of 110 or higher into the country.

Now, Hanania is prone to hyperbole, so before arguing against this claim, it is worth restating it in less incendiary terms:

People who believe IQ is an important trait, one that reliably predicts positive social outcomes, and who believe it is substantially heritable should support the admission of as many high-IQ immigrants as possible. If they oppose this, the most plausible explanation is racial animus or xenophobia. They are just bigots.

But even in this softened version, the argument remains unpersuasive. It assumes that if a person opposes bringing in, say, twenty million Chinese immigrants with IQs above 110, the only possible explanation is bigotry. After all, wealth is good—and larger, smarter, more specialized populations tend to generate more wealth. Refusing the opportunity to import millions of high-IQ immigrants thus appears, from this perspective, like refusing a winning lottery ticket. If not prejudice, what else could explain such “irrational” rejection of an obvious economic benefit?

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. That was my first effort to understand eternity and, therefore, my first effort to understand God. I do not remember how old I was, but, having been taught a kind of amorphous Christianity by my parents, I took the existence of God and life after death for granted. The precepts and dogmas did not particularly move me; what riveted me was eternity.

My young mind could not grasp a timeless reality, so I tried to conceive eternity as a series of days that never ended, one followed by another, and so on without limit. But this perplexed me. Surely everything must end; how could anything simply go on forever? And yet life after death was said to be eternal, and the eternal, by its very definition, does not end.

Each day then must be followed by another like an endless string of beads. But again the question returned: how could the beads continue forever? I pictured taking the beads off one after another but then realized that eventually I would have a gargantuan and ever-growing pile of beads with a still endless string ahead of me. The more I tried to imagine it, the more vexing it became. My mind was caught in one of those devious traps in which the harder one struggles to escape, the more firmly fixed one becomes.

For a long time, I did not resolve this tension. Being naturally skeptical, I was no dogmatic believer. Yet I accepted some vague outline of Christianity and found the thought of an omnipotent deity comforting, even if I could not fathom him. At the same time, being naturally neurotic, I feared damnation and struggled to subdue sinful thoughts. I would often feel a blasphemy rising to mind and then try to repress it, curse it, deny it, lest my soul be imperiled by my own iniquity. Some nights I lay awake for hours in an excruciating loop. An insult to Jesus would pop in my head followed by a contrite attempt to propitiate through praise followed by another insult.

The fear of hell haunted me.

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Written by Noah Carl.

The exorbitant price of housing is one of the most important issues facing young people in Britain and the US. And yet, whenever a right-wing politician draws the obvious link with mass immigration, he or she is accused of misdiagnosing the problem and using inflammatory rhetoric.

In the 2024 vice presidential debate, JD Vance referred to the “connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices”. He also affirmed that housing is “totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants”. For these seemingly anodyne observations, Vance was denounced as someone who “perpetuates racism”. And various fact checks appeared purporting to debunk his claims by appealing to “experts”.

In Britain, Nigel Farage has likewise been accused of “scapegoating” migrants for suggesting that immigration puts pressure on housing and public services.

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Written by Lipton Matthews.

Beliefs about female involvement in slavery have been shaped by a particular narrative. Women are seen as secondary figures, kept distant from the buying and selling of humans by patriarchal norms and their own feminine delicacy. In some historical writings, this narrative has been reinforced by an exclusive focus on women’s subordination, removing their agency from the historical record. The issue, of course, is that evidence paints a very different picture. When historians examine transaction records, probate wills, slave legislation and “runaway” advertisements, they find that women were not mere onlookers, but buyers, sellers and enforcers of the slave trade.

Understanding how the idea of the “passive mistress” initially took root is key. Its intellectual foundation was the legal doctrine of coverture, which stipulated that married women could not independently own property. Since over 90% of white Southern women were married, one might assume that few exercised genuine authority over enslaved individuals. The “nasty and unseemly business of transacting for human beings,” as one historian described it, must surely have been a male domain?

In fact, no. Quite early on, Southern legislatures deliberately created exceptions within coverture, particularly regarding enslaved property. Mississippi’s Married Women’s Property Law of 1839 was remarkably clear: a woman’s ownership of slaves “shall continue to her, notwithstanding her coverture,” and this applied equally to enslaved people acquired after marriage, as well as their descendants. Alabama soon followed suit in 1841. These were not minor legal footnotes; they were instruments specifically designed to safeguard a form of wealth that was routinely passed down through generations, often along distinctly female lines.

When one actually quantifies the extent of women’s participation in slavery, the narrative of female passivity unravels rather quickly. A study analyzing over 15,000 sale records from the New Orleans slave market between 1856 and 1861 (the largest such market in the antebellum US) revealed that women appeared as either buyers or sellers in 30.2% of all transactions. Even more telling is that women were not disproportionately concentrated on one side of the market. They were listed as sellers in 16.5% of transactions and as buyers in 17.2%, a near-perfect balance that directly challenges the notion that these were widows merely liquidating inherited property.

If women’s involvement in the slave market were simply a consequence of inheriting property after a husband’s death, one would expect to observe significantly more female sellers than buyers. The nearly equal distribution is therefore “inconsistent with White women being passive owners from, say, the death of a spouse.” Rather, it suggests they were actively acquiring enslaved people as property.

This phenomenon was not confined to the late antebellum period. Even in notary records from the 1830s, before legislative acts formalized married women’s property rights, women still appeared in 15.8% of all transactions. “Runaway” advertisements, another source of data on slave ownership, listed women as owners in 11.5% of all notices.

And when researchers cross-referenced census records with transaction data, they found that the women identified were no older, on average, than the general female population, and that their marriage rate was over 40%. This confirms that these were not primarily widows reluctantly forced into the market by circumstance. They were women of various ages, many of them married, engaging in the slave economy as a regular aspect of their economic lives.

One striking aspect of women’s involvement in the slave trade is the inheritance patterns — enslaved people, particularly enslaved women, were preferentially transferred to female family members across the generations. This was not accidental. It was a discernible cultural pattern that contributed to female wealth in both the Caribbean and the American South.

This becomes particularly evident in studies of colonial Jamaica, where probate wills and inventories shed light on the mechanisms of female inheritance. Analysing over 1,200 wills, researchers discovered that approximately three-quarters of all women who made them during the first century of British settlement in Jamaica owned slaves. Moreover, these women overwhelmingly chose to bequeath those slaves to other women, thereby “consolidating the possession of enslaved people within families along female lines.”

Individual examples help to illustrate this pattern. Mercy Bars left only five slaves to her son, while granting her daughter Sarah Ricketts “several large families of enslaved people.” Catherine Byndloss, in disposing of slaves she held explicitly “in my own right,” gave one man to her son Henry and four women to her daughter Jane. This preference was common. In Britain, women traditionally inherited personal or “moveable” property, rather than real estate. In Jamaica, enslaved people were frequently categorized as personal property, which “identified them, like clothing, furniture, and jewelry, as feminine possessions.” Hence for propertied women in colonial Jamaica, an enslaved person was as natural an inheritance as a set of silver candlesticks.

Daughters were also introduced to the slave market from a young age. Parents routinely earmarked funds specifically for them to purchase slaves. For example, one widow instructed that eighty pounds be “laid out in negroes” for her granddaughter, while one father directed his executors to acquire “choice new negroes two men and two women” as well as “a new negro girl to wait on” his daughter. Participation in slavery was not something women stumbled into; it was nurtured and normalized in the wider society.

The legal evidence confirms that female mastery was intentionally woven into the statutory framework of colonial slave management. In South Carolina’s earliest slave laws, which were modeled on Caribbean precedents, “mistresses were explicitly named alongside masters or incorporated into the gender-neutral rubric of owner, reflecting a common understanding that absolute ownership and authority over enslaved people was as much rooted in female mastery as male.”

The slave law of 1691 mandated that every “master, mistress, overseer” conduct monthly searches of enslaved quarters for weapons and punish enslaved people found without passes. It also recognized that female slave owners were “just as capable of killing or maiming their slaves as their male counterparts,” stipulating that if any person “out of wilfulness, wantoness, or bloody mindedness, shall kill a slave, he or she, upon due conviction thereof, shall suffer three months imprisonment.”

Gender was thus irrelevant to culpability; what mattered was the act itself. The slave code of 1740 went further, classifying enslaved people as chattel property — a designation with significant implications for women, as widows in South Carolina were granted absolute ownership of chattel as part of their dower. The same code required women who owned more than ten slaves to take part in slave patrols on equal footing with men, stating that “all persons, as well women as men, who are or shall be owners of settled plantations in any district, ought to contribute.”

The “runaway” advertisements placed by female slave owners in South Carolina’s colonial newspapers offer some of the most direct evidence we have regarding how women treated their slaves, and they make for stark reading. Rebecca Massey instructed that whoever captured her runaway slave Ruth should give her “50 good Lashes, and deliver her to me.” Mary Ellis went so far as demanding that her runaway slave Catharina be seized “dead or alive.” These were not the directives of women thrust into an unfamiliar role by widowhood. They reflected their authors’ precise understanding of their legal rights over enslaved people, including with respect to the use of lethal force.

The account book of one female slave owner in Jamaica records payments for “whipping Tom, whipping Adam, ditto Darby, catching Chaplin, and whipping him, catching, imprisoning and whipping four negroes” as well as “prison fees for six negroes.” Another woman ordered her executors to place an enslaved man “in irons till the first opportunity serves to send him off to be sold.” Mary Elbridge, who managed a Jamaican plantation for decades after her husband’s death, spoke of enslaved people in cold, utilitarian terms. To her, they were assets with depreciating values, “not valued at anything” once too old or sick to work.

The comforting image of the “passive mistress” — graciously presiding over a household, perhaps somewhat oblivious to the harsher aspects of slavery — is not merely incomplete, but actually wrong. Women bought and sold slaves, served on slave patrols, and meted out punishments. It is fashionable nowadays to blame everything on white men. Yet just as blacks took an active role in the slave trade, so did women.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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Written by Bo Winegard.

The French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, is often ridiculed by conservatives and analytical philosophers. By conservatives, because he was a political radical who railed against the West, despised bourgeois normalcy, lauded Che Guevera and refused to criticize Stalin long after his brutality was widely known. And by analytical philosophers, because his philosophy seems not only wrong but almost meaningless, full of gnomic prose and puzzling, paradoxical assertions. He was at times a dazzling writer, but also a charlatan. Even today, criticism of Sartre regularly makes the rounds on Twitter, with recent tweets mocking him for his physical appearance.

I am both a conservative and a fan of analytical philosophy, so I might be expected to share this disdain of Sartre. But I do not. In fact, I have long been attracted to his philosophy, and still find his greatest work, Being and Nothingness, invigorating (even if, at some 700 pages of difficult prose, it is a little taxing.)1 In what follows, I will defend Sartre’s philosophy from accusations that it is meaningless, obvious, purposefully obscurantist or simply irrelevant in a Darwinian world.2

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Written by Noah Carl.

The typical partisan (on any side of politics) talks and acts as if nothing would make him happier than for all his opponents to give up and for his vision to become permanently instantiated in policy. Ever indignant about his enemies’ desire to tear down everything that is good and pure, he wishes to convey that only total political victory would give him lasting fulfilment.

In most cases, I would argue, this is simply a delusion. I am not saying that he would experience no joy or satisfaction from achieving total political victory. I am saying, rather, that the happiness he experienced would be fleeting and short-lived.

Humans derive meaning from competing in groups. And it’s this competition — the struggle towards a shared goal as part of a group — that is the primary source of meaning for partisans. It is not the fact that the government’s policy program may eventually bear some resemblance to their own preferred set of policies.1

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Written by Jonathan Salem-Wiseman.

The reception to claims about an Indigenous “way of knowing” tends to be determined by our political tribe. On the left, the very idea of a distinct, non-Western way of knowing is accepted as an obvious truth, if not an unimpeachable piety. Indigenous peoples, it is argued, live in harmony with nature and are thus uniquely attuned to the “interconnections between all things.” On the right, such a claim is often met with derision, and is dismissed as the latest iteration of faddish, “noble savage” mysticism.

I think both these positions are wrong and misleading, and they overlook a much more interesting story. An Indigenous “way of knowing” is a real phenomenon, but it falls short of exaggerated claims about an epistemic access to the world that is just as rigorous as the natural sciences. I want to argue that an Indigenous way of knowing, properly understood, is explained by global psychological variation, manifesting as a set of differences in visual processing skills and cognitive dispositions.

A case study

An interesting recent development within anthropology is the idea of combining Indigenous ways of knowing with contemporary scientific methods.

In parts of Eastern Canada, this is typically referred to as “two-eyed seeing”, a framework developed by the Mi’kmaq Elder, Albert Marshall, which seeks to combine the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing with mainstream, scientific methodologies. In New Zealand, a similar idea was formalized in 2018, according to which knowledge is conceptualized as two canoes lashed together. In north-eastern Australia, the analogy involves the confluence of sea water and fresh water, which allows for interaction while maintaining separateness at the same time. Robin Kimmerer embraces something similar: “a polyculture of complimentary knowledges”.

In a recent article, Marshall and several other Indigenous scholars applied the two-eyed seeing model to study the aquatic health of a North Saskatchewan ecosystem. Participants included both local Indigenous Elders and academic scientists flown in from six universities. The big question was whether the Indigenous observers would arrive at the same conclusions as the scientists.

Where water quality and fish health could be described in terms of ‘turbidity’ (in Nephelometric Turbidity units) or ‘fish external anomalies’ (number of cysts, tumours, lesions and malformations) through a Western scientific lens, they could likewise be understood in terms of the physical appearance of the water (changes in water visibility or movement over time) or ‘fish aesthetics’ (changes in frequency of lesions or deformities over time) through an Indigenous lens.

After several years of study, the scientists arrived at a more optimistic assessment of the water and fish quality than their Indigenous counterparts did. Were they simply more objective? Perhaps.

Another possibility is that the scientists were outsiders and therefore didn’t have decades-old memories of water and fish qualities before the introduction of upstream industries that altered the health of the ecosystem.

It is also possible that the scientists overlooked or failed to include some rather obvious empirical criteria, like water visibility, before making their assessment. If one sample of water is less clear than another, this difference could be accounted for by the measurable, physical differences between the two samples. So the contrast is not so much between an Indigenous way of knowing and a scientific one, but rather between which observable criteria are most relevant. If the Indigenous participants were able to point to criteria that were systematically overlooked by the scientists, this might tell us something interesting about possible, subtle cognitive variations between the two groups.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, under the aegis of Indigenous ways of knowing, there are some exaggerated, quasi-mystical claims that run afoul of any responsible account of how knowledge is acquired. These “extra-intellectual” methods reduce to trial-and-error at best, and pseudo-scientific hunches at worst. Given the backlash such claims tend to generate, the case for Indigenous ways of knowing would be strengthened if they were simply dropped and discarded.

Second, there are differences between Indigenous ways of knowing and standard scientific methodologies that deserve our attention and merit further consideration. In the study mentioned above, the Indigenous participants were not claiming to intuit unobservable qualities beyond the epistemic reach of the scientists; rather, they were drawing attention to real, observable cues that were overlooked by the scientists, but which may well have been relevant.

Whether these subtle cognitive differences can themselves be empirically vindicated and explained in some way is the question to which I shall now turn.

Something WEIRD is happening

Most educated people have been taught that, despite cultural differences, there is a universal human psychology and, by extension, a common suite of evolved cognitive traits or dispositions.

It turns out that our assumptions about a common human nature rest upon data generated by psychological studies of a highly peculiar group: university students from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries. These “WEIRD” people are not representative of humanity, and thus the conclusions we have drawn about cognition, perception, personality traits, moral intuitions and behavioural dispositions simply do not translate to the global population.

This insight is the subject matter of Joe Henrich’s remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World. Despite our decades-long assumptions, Henrich and his colleagues have shown that university students at elite Western universities are not the human norm, psychologically speaking, and are in fact statistical outliers. It is Western psychologies, Western cognitive dispositions, that need to be explained. My tentative hypothesis is that Indigenous “ways of knowing” should not be viewed as anomalous or even peculiar — a unique phenomenon that requires special explanation — but as the global norm that existed before the Europeans began exporting their WEIRD institutions and practices around the world.

So what event was responsible for the onset and development of WEIRDness? According to Henrich, it was the Catholic Church’s “marriage and family programme” (hereafter MFP) that began in fits and starts in the early Middle Ages, and had the effect of transforming the structure of family and inheritance practices.

Now, historians have written about this before. Francis Fukuyama drew popular attention to the topic in his book, The Origins of Political Order. Henrich, however, was the first to explain its massive significance, arguing that the MFP not only abolished the intense kinship relationships that preceded today’s “normal” nuclear families, but also changed our psychologies — including our cognitive dispositions and thinking styles — in a profound and far-reaching way.

Before the Catholic Church launched the MFP in the early Middle Ages, European social life was structured by thick kinship ties. This meant many things, but a highlight reel would include: arranged marriages, cousin marriage, polygyny, patrilineally organized families, and the submergence of individuality within the larger community. In fact, individual identities were shaped by the various roles they played in the kinship network, which in turn exerted control over land and property. These kinship units were also tasked with resolving conflicts and providing a rudimentary “safety net” for the weak and infirm.

Despite the cultural and material differences between 7^th century Western Europe and the rest of the world, a time-travelling anthropologist looking down from a considerable height would observe one key, structural similarity: a dense system of kinship relations. All this changed in Europe when the MFP reforms were introduced. But why the change of Church policy?

It was certainly not out of morality or high-mindedness. Instead, the MFP reforms were designed to extract land and property from extended tribal families and clans. By implementing strict rules against cousin marriage, levirate marriage, polygamy, and arranged marriages, the MFP broke down the extended kinship networks of medieval Europe, and property that had previously been “kept in the family” was gobbled up by the Catholic Church.

By dismantling the intensive kinship systems, the MFP unwittingly led to smaller, mobile nuclear families, neo-local marriage and individual autonomy. This, in turn, led to impersonal prosociality (getting along with strangers, basically) and the development of important voluntary associations like guilds, universities, charter towns and market economies.

Max Weber was right to highlight the Protestant Reformation’s role in the promotion of individualism and other psychological traits conducive to modern economic life, but Henrich moves the origin-story back several centuries. The early Protestants certainly promoted the development of WEIRDness — but this historical trajectory was already set in motion almost a thousand years earlier by their theological adversaries.

Did the MFP actually cause this wide array of psychological and institutional changes. (Some have argued that European WEIRDness actually predates Christianity.) Henrich argues that it did, and brings forth a wealth of supporting data. Across ninety-three Italian provinces, there are measurable differences — often between neighboring villages — in the local population’s thought and behaviour, and these depend on the degree of exposure to the Church’s MFP. To this day, we can measure the differences in rates of cousin marriage between Northern and Southern Italians.

WEIRD perception

I will now zero in on the perceptual and cognitive dispositions that reveal the differences between Western and Indigenous minds.

First, there is some evidence that WEIRD individuals are more likely to be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. Two parallel lines of equal length appear to be unequal due to the arrow-like tips on the ends of each pointing either outwards (which makes the line look longer) or inwards (which makes the line look shorter). While WEIRD people are routinely duped by this, when non-WEIRD African cultures, like the San, are presented with the same visual stimulus, individuals typically report that the lines are the same length.

Henrich speculates that the reason for this difference lies in the fact that WEIRD people live in highly “carpentered” environments and spend their days navigating through a world of dry, medium-sized objects featuring lots of straight lines and right-angles, and thus the presence of the angled lines throws off our ability to judge the lengths accurately. (Though it should be noted that the difference in perception has recently been called into question.)

WEIRD people are also distinct with respect to “focal object bias” in scene description. Fancy jargon aside, this simply means that when WEIRD people are presented with visual images of, say, a lion crouching in the middle of a detailed forest scene (as in Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings), we are more likely to focus on the lion while ignoring the framing, contextual details.

Non-WEIRD observers, on the other hand, devote their attention across the entire picture and have an easier time picking out the interactions of the flora and fauna in the background.

This finding sheds light on the different assessments made by Indigenous observers and scientists in the fishery case-study mentioned above. While the scientists zeroed in on the measurable, physical anomalies on the fish, the Indigenous observers appealed to a broader range of seemingly peripheral, contextual cues to inform their assessment of the ecosystem’s health.

This supports the Indigenous scholars who maintain that Indigenous people are more apt to survey interconnections and inter-relationships than Westerners, even trained scientists (who are psychologically predisposed to focus on the shiny object in the middle). Several other WEIRD–non-WEIRD differences in visual perception have been documented in the literature.

WEIRD cognition

The distinction between WEIRD and non-WEIRD minds is also evidenced in cognition. As an aside, it is worth noting that these two populations, mixing and mingling for centuries, do not exist in separate boxes. Instead, the cognitive differences between them vary along a spectrum.

The most important cognitive difference is that between holistic and analytical thinking styles. But what, exactly, do we mean by “analytical” and “holistic” thinking? As Henrich notes:

The idea here is that intensive kinship cultivates more holistic thinkers who focus on broader contexts and on the relationships among things, including the interconnections among individuals, animals, or objects. By contrast, societies with less intensive kinship foster more analytically-oriented thinkers who tend to parse the world by assigning properties, attributes, or personalities to people and objects, often by classifying them into discrete categories according to presumed underlying essences or dispositions.

The purely analytic thinker looks out at a world and understands it as a collection of distinct, isolated objects possessing various identifiable attributes. These attributes, in turn, explain the objects’ actions and demarcate them from other objects. Each separate entity can be pried from its context and understood by virtue of whatever properties it has.

Analytic thinkers also tend to assume that time is linear, and that a trend will continue to unfold in its current direction unless something intervenes to disrupt it. And they tend to complete “I am X” sentences with words that refer to personal attributes, achievements or membership in idealized social groups” (like “a professor” or “a wine-tasting contest winner” or “a Toronto Maple Leafs fan”).

In contrast, the purely holistic thinker looks out at a world and sees a field of relationships, where nothing makes sense in isolation from these interconnections. Time itself is experienced not just as a linear flow of points in one direction, but as cyclical, as if attuned to the cycles of nature. According to Shawn Wilson, “the relationship with something (a person, object or idea) is more important than the thing itself.” Holistic thinkers complete “I am X” sentences by specifying social roles and relationships (“Michael’s father” or “a member of the Anishinaabe First Nation”).

To be somewhat reductive, we might say that holistic thinkers see the forest, whereas analytic thinkers see the individual trees. Given how Indigenous ways of knowing focus on interconnections and interrelationships, it should be clear that Indigenous scholars are making the same point as Henrich, often using the same descriptive language.

How do these different cognitive dispositions show up in the psychology lab? It turns out that when subjects are given triad tasks, holistic and analytical thinkers tend to pick different answers. (In such tasks, subjects must say which two objects out of three have most in common.)

To use Henrich’s example, subjects are given a picture of a rabbit, and are asked whether the rabbit goes with a cat or a carrot. The analytic thinker will probably choose “cat” while the holistic thinker will typically choose “carrot.” The analytic thinker is relying upon a rules-based mode of categorization (“both the rabbit and the cat are mammals, so they should go together”), whereas the holistic thinker is relying upon a relational mode of categorization (“the rabbit eats the carrot, so they should go together”). Again, there is no “right answer” here. In some contexts, it might be more useful to see cats and rabbits as fellow mammals; in other contexts, it might be more useful to know what rabbits like to eat.

The philosophers Michael Polanyi and Martin Heidegger have drawn a distinction between “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi) or “background understanding” (Heidegger) on the one hand, and focal or explicit knowledge on the other. The former refers to knowledge that is difficult to convey or write down but still invaluable. It seems likely that various non-WEIRD peoples possess extensive tacit knowledge about the environments they inhabit, and that this knowledge reflects their somewhat distinct faculties of perception and cognition.

A different worldview

It is not particularly surprising that as analytical thinking took hold in Europe, it led to a profound updating of pre-modern worldviews. Europeans began to view nature itself as separated from the supernatural and moral orders.

Material entities were no longer invested with intrinsic meaning or value, but were viewed instead as just matter in motion, open to quantitative description and analysis. There was no longer any larger suite of mysteries, no longer any purpose or “final cause” governing the cosmos. We were left with a universe that is desolate, empty and huge, despite being made up of tiny particles too small to be observed by the naked eye.

Human nature itself was likewise transformed: the soul and the body were pried apart and consigned to different metaphysical realities. Galileo even took colours, smells and tastes — what became known as “secondary” qualities — out of the physical universe and deposited them inside human consciousness. While this made possible the development of physics, it left us with a world that is alien to our common, everyday experience.

In his recent book Rationality, Steven Pinker discusses the work of Louis Liebenberg, a tracking scientist who has studied the hunting practices of the Indigenous San people in southern Africa. Despite their harsh environment, the San have survived for thousands of years by employing “logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, causal inference, and game theory.”

While they may not have heard of Bayes’ theorem, their hunters use Bayesian reasoning to determine the likelihood that an ambiguous track belongs to one species of game or another, based on prior probabilities. In other words, they employ the same basic tools of rationality as Westerners. Quoting Pinker, “The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species.”

I do not dispute Pinker’s claim. However, beneath this smooth surface of universalism churns important variation. When we look under the hood of our shared human nature, we find cognitive differences that are real and relevant.

These differences correlate with specific cultural practices and natural environments. Certain Indigenous groups may therefore have an edge in understanding their environments and how to navigate them — relative to other peoples, including Westerners. To speak of Indigenous ways of knowing is, therefore, not so unreasonable.

Jonathan Salem-Wiseman is a philosophy professor in Canada, specializing in 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy and political theory. He has published articles in Areo, Arc Digital, Merion West and Quillette.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Like many revolutions, the revolution in human biodiversity will likely disown its own forebears.

Consider Harvard scientist David Reich, a pioneer in human genetics, who has pushed back against racial equalitarianism more effectively than almost anyone in mainstream discourse. His 2018 New York Times article, ‘How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of Race,’ accomplished the apparently impossible, making the case for human biological and psychological diversity in a prestigious liberal outlet. In that piece, Reich explicitly rejected the dogma of human sameness and warned that genetics would discover undeniable evidence of racial differences.1

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

His book Who We Are and How We Got Here is, among other things, a sustained attack on the implausible notion that human races are the same, telling the unique evolutionary stories of different human populations, each facing different selective regimes.

For this, Reich should be commended. Yet his strategy for engaging liberals and others potentially resistant to human diversity is not wholly commendable. It relies heavily on cautious hedging, selective engagement with previous scholarship, and the castigation of more candid or speculative writers.

Strategic caution is understandable. Winning hearts and minds matters. HBD bloggers who attack pieties about human equality with a rhetorical sledgehammer are unlikely to persuade; they even may do more harm than good by alienating the educated lay reader. But caution has limits. It does not require mendacities. Nor does it require maligning others.

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Written by Noah Carl.

Why do some national and ethnic groups commit more crime than others? A popular theory among British politicians is that it’s due to lack of integration.

Addressing the unrest in Southport in 2024, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch argued that “we need a clearer strategy on integration”. Commenting on public disorder in Handsworth, former Tory MP Robert Jenrick said “it was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to”. He had a similar explanation for the Manchester synagogue attack, noting that the perpetrator “was clearly not integrated into our society”. Speaking in the House of Commons, Tory MP Chris Philp said “we have a problem with social cohesion and a lack of integration”, citing as evidence the fact that “there are some immigrant groups where levels of criminality are very high”.

The idea seems to be that groups that are culturally distant from mainstream British society tend to have higher crime rates, whereas groups that are culturally close tend to have lower crime rates. How might this work? There are several possible mechanisms. Perhaps culturally distant groups face discrimination in the labour market, which forces some of their members into a life of crime. Or perhaps culturally distant groups feel unwelcome in Britain, and some of their members start resenting the country.

While superficially plausible, the theory falls apart on closer scrutiny.

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Written by Lipton Matthews.

Economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Simon Johnson have practically become household names with their work on the “colonial origins of comparative development”.1 The central claim is simple. In regions where European settlers found environments suitable for settlement, they constructed “inclusive institutions” that protected property rights, constrained elites and encouraged entrepreneurship. But in regions where settlement was difficult, colonizers instead imposed “extractive institutions” that simply transferred wealth to the metropole.

This argument reshaped the study of economic development and culminated in Nobel Prizes for the aforementioned trio. However, it requires substantial qualification.

Extractive institutions do distort incentives, concentrate political power and curtail entrepreneurship. Hence they often slow growth relative to plausible alternatives. But slowing growth is not the same as preventing it altogether. In fact, evidence shows that economies frequently grow under extractive institutions, sometimes for long periods and sometimes quite substantially.

It is important to recognize that extractive institutions in Africa and the Americas did not originate with European colonialism. Long before Europeans arrived, many societies in these regions were governed by centralized, coercive regimes that relied on forced labor, payment of tribute and elite control over land. Empires and chiefdoms in the Americas extracted surplus through labor drafts and tribute systems, while large parts of Africa had hierarchical polities that exercised authority over almost all production. Colonial rule intensified, reorganized or redirected these extractive institutions; it did not create extraction from nothing.

Colonial Peru illustrates that extractive institutions do not necessarily imply economic stagnation. Spanish rule relied on coercive labor systems such as the mit’a, as well as monopolized trade and political exclusion. These institutions were deeply extractive by any reasonable definition. Yet reconstructions show that Peru experienced rising real wages and per capita output over extended stretches of the colonial era. Mining centers generated large surpluses, supporting complex networks of artisans, traders and service providers. By the eighteenth century, this dynamism was visible in urbanization rates. By the 1700s, urbanization stood at roughly 12 percent in Mexico and about 20 percent in Peru, compared with only 11 percent in Spain itself.

This economic activity was accompanied by meaningful investments in human capital. Colonial authorities and religious orders established schools, seminaries and universities across Spanish America. Literacy and numeracy spread, albeit unevenly. Evidence from numeracy estimates indicates that by the late eighteenth century, the gap in basic human capital among regions such as Argentina, Mexico and Peru narrowed substantially over time, falling from roughly 50 percent to about 30 percent by around 1780. These trends suggest not stagnation but convergence under extractive rule.

While a substantial share of colonial surplus was transferred abroad, enough remained to raise average living standards. Growth occurred not because institutions were inclusive, but because production, specialization and market integration and human capital formation continued under coercive systems.

The same is true in the case of the Dutch cultivation system in Java. The colonial regime was highly extractive. Village authorities were subordinated, peasants were coerced into producing export crops, and the system existed to maximize revenue for the colonial state. Yet extraction on this scale required a major reorganization of economic life: the Dutch build sugar factories and the transport infrastructure to go with them.

Evidence shows that areas near colonial sugar factories remain richer and more educated today than otherwise similar areas farther away. This is despite the fact that sugar production itself has long since disappeared. The explanation is straightforward. Extractive production required infrastructure, technology transfer and human capital. Meeting these requirements forced the colonial state to solve a series of practical problems: expanding irrigation, constructing processing facilities, and strengthening local administrative structures. Once established, these institutions did not vanish with the end of colonial rule. Growth arose not from inclusive institutions, but from the material and organizational demands of extraction itself.

The effects extended even to villages that were subjected to forced cultivation. These villages accumulated more communal land and enjoyed higher levels of education, including for cohorts educated during the colonial period. Extractive rule empowered local authorities in ways that unintentionally facilitated the provision of public goods. So while extractive institutions constrained freedom and entrepreneurship, they actually helped economic development.

The Cold Storage Commission in Southern Rhodesia reveals the same pattern in another sector, namely beef. Established to stabilize settler incomes and secure export markets, it enhanced production by enforcing quality standards, coordinating supply and investing in refrigeration. These measures were explicitly designed to benefit a narrow group of white producers. Yet they boosted the scale and efficiency of the food industry as a whole, and integration into global markets followed.

This case reveals that even racially exclusive institutions can generate economic growth when the colonial state is committed to building real, productive capacity. Growth was not inclusive, and its benefits were narrowly distributed, but it occurred nevertheless. Extractive institutions in Rhodesia created hurdles for some entrepreneurs and ordinary people, but they certainly did not prevent economic development.

The point is not that extractive institutions are optimal but that they are far less deleterious than is often claimed. When extraction is done in order to expand output, states are compelled to invest in both physical and human capital. The resulting institutions — schools, transport networks and administrative systems — then outlast the states that created them.

Furthermore, the popular idea that colonization invariably hurts long-run growth begins to unravel when examined systematically. Once other factors are taken into account, the simple fact of having been colonized carries little independent weight in explaining economic performance. (Hong Kong and Singapore are two of the richest places on the planet.) What stands out instead are disruptions that occurred after colonization.

Warfare, for example, imposes severe and lasting damage — destroying capital, fragmenting markets and diverting resources away from productive use. Trade policy also plays a key role. The turn toward protectionism in many postcolonial states prevented access to global markets and reduced competitive pressures. By shielding domestic industries, governments encouraged rent-seeking rather than innovation. And the costs of such policies accumulate over time.

Latin America offers an interesting case study. The region did not emerge from the colonial period with uniquely high levels of inequality. The decisive break actually occurred much later, during the twentieth century. While much of the world experienced a marked compression of incomes — a broad levelling driven by industrialization, expanded education and integration into global markets — Latin America moved in the opposite direction. From 1913 to the 1970s, inequality rose rather than fell.

This divergence was not some long-delayed consequence of colonial rule. It reflected a specific set of policy choices: protectionism limited exposure to global competition, while state-led development strategies concentrated gains in politically connected groups.

The broader lesson is clear. While extractive institutions are not something for which countries should actively strive, they can and have coexisted with sustained economic growth. There is therefore no simple contrast between inclusive prosperity and extractive stagnation. (The historical record is more complicated than that.) What is more, the “legacy of colonialism” cannot explain all or even most of the differences in income we see today. And its long-term effects aren’t uniformly negative.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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Written by Bo Winegard.

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
—The Gospel of Matthew 7:3-5

I suspect that hypocrisy is inherent to human consciousness itself. We treat our own tribe, our own sacred values, differently from those of our adversaries. Thus, I am not surprised when I encounter it.

Nevertheless, like other natural proclivities that we correctly try to restrain, we should not embrace or celebrate hypocrisy. And when confronted with evidence of our own hypocrisy, we should contemplate it seriously. We are all hypocrites. But the wise among us are strive to be less hypocritical than we were yesterday. The difficulty is that we often cannot see our own hypocrisy because it doesn’t look like hypocrisy to us.

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Written by Peter Frost.

“I found a region and a culture that finishes high in societal ‘trust’ rankings globally, yet has little trust in outsiders.”

In 2023, Shafi Musaddique left England for Estonia, “lured in by the promise of clean air, quiet and a chance to continue freelance journalism” — plus the benefits of a high-trust society. (Apparently, this promise is no longer available in England.) His disappointment wasn’t long in coming.

He found himself “living in one of Europe’s last remaining countries without proper hate speech laws, encountering racism and White Supremacists in broad daylight.” He also discovered that Estonians reserve their trust for insiders:

Estonia (and neighbouring Nordic countries) often score high in rankings that measure public trust. Yet such metrics hide the ingrained distrust of outsiders, handed down generationally. (Musaddique, 2026)

It’s no fun being excluded from a high-trust society, but how could things be otherwise? Most humans on this planet trust only close kin and long-time friends, so they don’t have the reflex of trying to keep the wider community clean, peaceful and orderly. If Estonia opened its borders to the rest of the world, it would become like … the rest of the world. And our journalist friend would have to seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Such an outcome doesn’t seem to worry Shafi, who prefers to frame the issue in moral terms: we have a duty not to discriminate against fellow humans. But do we? Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists within a community of people who, consciously or unconsciously, respect certain norms. It is thus culturally bound.

This point is made in a recent paper on the future of liberalism:

Besides the high-profile foreign policy failures arising from the failure to conceive of liberalism as culturally bound, it has also led to a neglect of the interests of the liberal moral community as such. Reconceptualizing liberalism, not as the universal birthright of humanity or the inevitable conclusion of rational thinking, but as a particular moral community with an interest in its own continuation, may be important to ensure that it does indeed continue. (Harwick & Bawa-Allah, 2026, p. 14)

Preservation of the moral community overrides the duty to be moral. If certain aspects of morality are leading your community to extinction, you should change course and adjust those aspects accordingly. You don’t just plunge ahead.

This is especially so for high-trust societies. Belonging to one isn’t like belonging to a football club. It requires thinking and behaving in ways that run counter to the way most humans think and behave. In concrete terms, it means being unusually prone to empathy, rule following and feelings of guilt (Frost, 2020).

But if high-trust societies like Estonia have such an ingrained distrust of outsiders, wouldn’t they seal their borders long before they risk demographic replacement? Aren’t there both geographical and psychological limits to social trust? As Shafi notes, “the borders of Estonian empathy fall short.” His hosts seem unwilling to feel empathy for the entire planet.

Of course, a single observer cannot fully answer this question. Let’s turn to the academic literature and see what it has to say. Its findings may surprise you. Or maybe not.

South Korea. This country has recently interested researchers because “its high level of in-group trust coupled with a low level of out-group trust offers an intriguing case for exploring the association between social trust and anti-immigration attitudes” (Kim & Kang, 2026).

South Korea has 2.7 million people of “migration background” — foreign residents, naturalized citizens and second-generation immigrants — who make up over 5% of the population (Yonhap, 2025). Admittedly, some are ethnic Koreans from China, Russia and elsewhere. There are also nearly 400,000 undocumented residents (Seo, 2025). In the elementary schools, 3.5% of all students are of non-Korean descent, with this figure rising to over 10% in a quarter of all cities, counties and metropolitan regions. About half of these students have origins in Southeast Asia, chiefly Vietnam and the Philippines. Compared to Koreans, they have lower attendance rates and trouble keeping up with classwork (Frost, 2021; Kim, 2024; Park, 2024).

How then does the host society respond to immigration? With surprisingly little pushback. When 1,245 South Koreans were interviewed for the World Values Survey between 2017 and 2020, a slight majority said they favored a liberal immigration policy:

Even more had no problem with immigrants as neighbors. These respondents formed a super-majority of 78% that included half of those who wanted strict limits on immigration. Evidently, consensus is needed in a high-trust society before people act on their personal beliefs, including xenophobia.

Along with the need for consensus, there is also the need for moral approval from authority figures, particularly those in government. If the government is considered trustworthy, and if it wants more immigration, people will suppress any misgivings they may have:

Those who are confident in the government’s capacity to manage potential security risks, are less likely to support restrictive policy preferences despite their security concerns. This moderating role of political trust has broader theoretical implications for understanding how institutional trust serves as an anxiety-reducing psychological mechanism; especially, when facing influx of immigrants (Kim & Kang, 2026, p. 13).

Sweden. This country has experienced a greater influx than South Korea in recent years, particularly from lower-trust societies within and beyond Europe. In 2019, 20% of the population was foreign-born and more than a third had one or two foreign-born parents.

A study of 1,352 young native Swedes showed that trust in the political system is key to reducing xenophobia. When politicians deliver on their promises and ensure well-being in the main areas of life, people trust the system, including immigration policy. The result is “a generalised expectation of trustworthiness and a widening of their circles of trusted others. This then translates into more positive attitudes toward immigrants” (Korol & Bevelander, 2023, p. 5599).

European Union. Social trust is higher in Europe as a whole than in the main immigrant-sending regions, i.e., the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It also varies across the European continent, being higher in the northwest and lower toward the south and the east (Beilmann & Lilleoja, 2015).

High-trust European societies have received most of the influx, partly because they offer a higher standard of living and partly because they are more accepting of cultural differences. This was the finding of a cross-country study of about 1,500 people in 29 EU member states: “residents are more tolerant towards cultural minorities in high trusting societies, liberal democracies, prosperous nations and in non-postcommunist societies” (Reeskens, 2012, p. 17).

Cultural minorities are less tolerated in Eastern Europe, as are sexual minorities and other people with unconventional lifestyles: “Tolerance towards people of deviant behavior is higher in economically wealthy countries, and only marginally higher in democratic societies and in culturally diverse countries, while it is lower in postcommunist societies” (Reeskens, 2012, p. 17).

This difference is attributed by Anatoly Karlin to the “Soviet freezer” — during the communist era, traditional values were better preserved in the East than in the West, which remained open to American culture throughout the Cold War (Karlin, 2018b).

Others have argued that this east-west difference goes back farther in time. For at least the past millennium, individualism, weak kinship ties and impersonal prosociality have characterized human relations to a greater degree north and west of the “Hajnal line” — an imaginary line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (Frost, 2025a; Hajnal, 1965; hbd*chick, 2014; JayMan, 2018; Schulz et al., 2019).

Perhaps both explanations are true. Because the Iron Curtain hindered the inflow of American culture, and because all regimes need to shore up their legitimacy by respecting local values, communism came to reflect the pre-existing characteristics of those who lived under it, including greater attachment to family and community.

While Eastern Europeans are less accepting of cultural and sexual minorities, they are more accepting of intellectual dissent (Reeskens, 2012, p. 21). This finding is consistent with both of the above explanations. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans favorably remember the dissenters of communist times. On the other, Western Europeans have a long history of excluding people for heresy, witchcraft and the like — the “Other” is a moral outsider, and not just a stranger (Frost, 2025).

With removal from the Soviet freezer, growing numbers of East Europeans have embraced the current Western model of intolerance for intellectual minorities and tolerance for racial and sexual minorities. This is especially true for younger generations, as shown by support for gay marriage in Estonia:

Younger generations of Estonian-speakers have been more exposed to American cultural messaging via the Estonian-language media. They thus have more liberal attitudes toward gay marriage. Older generations have been shaped much more by the media of Soviet times and are less liberal. No such generational difference exists within the minority of Russian-speakers, who continue to be influenced by media based in Russia (Karlin, 2018a).

Discussion

Some nuance is needed if we wish to describe high-trust societies as xenophobic. Clearly, they no longer are. They now receive immigration on a large scale, with only sporadic and ineffectual pushback. Violent incidents do occur, but, in the vast majority of cases, the victims are natives (Immigration to Denmark - Crime).

This begs the question. If high-trust societies are a minority in the world, and if their existence requires atypical levels of empathy, rule following and guilt proneness, why haven’t they been diluted out of existence? Why are they still around?

First, their authority figures used to act as gatekeepers. The line between “us” and “them” was not only between “kin” and “non-kin” but also — and more importantly — between “the trustworthy” and “the untrustworthy.” This dividing line had a moral dimension that was defined largely by figures of moral authority: church leaders, public officials, respected writers and so forth. Over the past century, however, these gatekeepers have come to see discrimination as immoral: we are now told to trust everyone equally; and if we refuse, we become the moral outcasts.

Second, high-trust societies have been economically more successful, and this economic success used to be translated into demographic success. When you can take people at their word and not have to check and double-check every commercial exchange, transaction costs are reduced throughout the economy, and many activities become cost-effective that would otherwise not be. Markets no longer confine themselves to isolated points in space and time, i.e., physical marketplaces. They can spread into all areas of life to create a true market economy.

In Western Europe, this economic success had demographic consequences. More people lived to adulthood, and more had the means to marry and have children. In particular, successful entrepreneurs married earlier and had larger families, if only to expand their workforce. The result was a long-running population boom, while population growth remained anemic elsewhere.

This boom overflowed the confines of Western Europe and pushed into other regions, particularly North America. As the actor John Wayne put it: “Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves” (Wayne, 1971).

All of this changed with industrial capitalism and the rise of labor markets in the 1800s. Industrialists found that they could more easily expand and contract their workforce by hiring and firing non-family members. Meanwhile, compulsory education made young people less available as a source of labor. Children became a net cost, and their numbers shrank. Thus ended the West’s population boom, first during the 1920s and 1930s and then for good in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to experience substantial population growth due to Western advances in medicine, sanitation and agriculture.

For a long time, Western societies didn’t have to worry about being replaced. They were doing the replacing. They thus fell prey to an excess of confidence that persisted into the amber zone and beyond. Today, the tables have turned. The West may be on the brink of a collapse as dramatic as the one that befell the North American Indian.

Let’s not end on a dark note. Yes, the West is on the brink, but it might still save itself. Recent data from the U.S. are showing a much smaller fertility decline for Euro-Americans than for other groups. As strange as it may seem, they are poised to become the most fertile group in the U.S. — thanks largely to subcultures like the Amish, the Mormons and the Hassidic Jews and, more generally, to conservative Protestants and Catholics. A similar pattern may be emerging elsewhere in the world (Frost, 2025b). Northwest Europeans seem to be adept at following rules, and this is no less true for the rules of natalism.

If immigration can be restricted — an admittedly big “if” — the West will cure itself through internal population replacement. We will be replaced, but by people like us.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

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References

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Frost, P. (2025b). Is individualism less toxic for northwest Europeans? Peter Frost’s Newsletter, August 21.

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Musaddique, S. (2026). My Estonia. White Man’s Dark Paradise. From the Frontier, February 16.

From The Frontier

My Estonia. White Man’s Dark Paradise

This week, I bring you a story that has taken years to publish. This one involves myself…

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4 months ago · 40 likes · 177 comments · Shafi Musaddique

Park, J-H. (2024). Korean schools becoming more diverse. The Korea Herald, January 7. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3297760

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