Written by Spaceman Spiff.
A powerful minority of progressive elites promote narratives to manage society, ensuring their worldview dominates, including the pursuit of unpopular policies.
One famous example of this has been the encouragement of mass immigration into predominantly European countries in Europe and North America over the last generation, often against the will of the majority.
Along with this initiative has emerged a cluster of novel rules associated with diversity and inclusion, promoted by authorities as a necessity in nations now hosting a babel of ethnicities and cultures that have little in common.
What has emerged is a series of beliefs to manage this unstable situation. The most striking is the promotion of xenophilia, a form of madness unique to Western nations.
Abnormal impulses
Many Western countries now favour foreigners over natives. Job and education quotas, two-tier justice systems and a general air of preferential treatment permeate everything.
In most Western nations, the descendants of the people who built it are discriminated against in multiple ways, something non-Western countries would not tolerate.
We visibly celebrate overseas cultures with few accomplishments of note while criticizing our own as plunderers and exploiters. We ignore our unmatched contributions to the world.
This unusual state of affairs is unique to countries of the West and is particularly prevalent in the Anglosphere. Its origins are the racial tensions in the United States, which were given full expression after the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Left to our own devices most of us gravitate to living alongside people like ourselves, intermarrying and socializing with others with whom we share a similar culture and values. Overriding these instincts takes considerable energy and usually doesn’t work.
Even now, in this multicultural era with billions spent to encourage “diversity”, little has changed underneath. Most people do not mix. Those shouting loudest about accepting more refugees don’t live alongside them and have no intention of ever doing so.
By necessity, much of the energy to manage a society with competing ethnic groups is negative, principally fear of punishment if you speak out or object when tensions arise.
As the multicultural models of social harmony fracture, the efforts to shore them up become more extreme. These now include public condemnation, social ostracism and, increasingly, custodial sentences handed out by an exasperated judiciary.
Many are depressed at recent developments. How did it come to this? How did something instinctively rejected by most countries take hold in the West?
The short answer is propaganda, the means by which Western Liberalism operates. Hard marketing is used to persuade the public to accept things our societal masters wish to pursue, with just enough visible punishment and social consequences for transgressors to get the message.
But there is a problem with powerful narratives created through propaganda and fear. They require considerable energy to function. What happens when that energy is withdrawn?
Dead man’s brake
A dead man’s brake is a safety feature found in dangerous machines such as lifts or trains. With this mechanism, a brake is always on, preventing action or movement. A conscious choice or effort must be made to override it.
On a train, a human driver must be present to depress a foot pedal that disengages the brake so the train can move at all. If he is absent the train cannot move. If he withdraws his foot while the train is in motion—if he dies, for instance—the train stops. Hence the name.
The key feature of a dead man’s brake is that it requires energy to operate. Its default zero-energy position is OFF; only with energy can it go to ON.
Wariness of strangers, xenophobia, is the default position for most human beings. This is a hardwired evolutionary response to protect us. It served us well. It requires no energy to operate. Children quickly point out people who seem different.
Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial. We must be educated to make it happen, and explicitly taught to overlook differences. It must be reinforced to remain in operation as our instincts typically push against it.
This requires energy. In parts of the world not subject to Western educational norms, they do not teach it to children. Consequently, they do not usually adopt policies like mass immigration or asymmetric multiculturalism.
It is worth noting that xenophobia denotes a wariness of strangers, not hatred or disdain of them. In practice, our working assumption is people different from us may be a threat, and our actions should reflect this until proven otherwise.
Xenophobia is not the racial animosity the propaganda wishes us to believe, such as harming others based on visible differences like skin colour. Such extreme views are in fact rare. The underlying drive of xenophobia is caution, not aggression. Xenophilia attempts to ignore this sensible restraint, which is why it often fails without external pressure.
These instincts are deeply embedded within us because a cautious approach is a strong foundation upon which to preserve our lives and our cultures. It is the reason we have a nation and a culture in the first place.
Xenophilia, then, is a dead man’s brake. It requires energy applied to something that would not typically occur in nature. It makes us ignore differences in order to get along. Or so the theory goes.
Living in fantasyland
Progressive initiatives to override our instincts, usually labelled under the umbrella term “anti-racism,” are not based on real world evidence. They are aspirational concepts designed to demonstrate moral superiority. They give people things they can boast about but have no basis in reality.
Progressives believe they are showing the way, that they have risen above noticing superficial differences—an argument that sounds impressive and presents them in a superior light.
Progressive innovations like open borders and quota systems do not emerge from some new insight into the brotherhood of man or the discovery of new data. Rather, they are affectations designed to bolster a narcissistic projection and impress others.
These schemes attract the broken as they promise to provide an instant, socially approved identity as a campaigner against injustice—a good person taking on bigots and making the world a better place.
It makes the adopter feel superior. Even better, it makes critics seem inferior, as if they possess a less sophisticated understanding of important subjects like race or group relations. Those critics can then be safely dismissed as behind the times, conveniently avoiding the need to argue for an actual position. Who, after all, wants to be considered “racist”? Who wants to be known as an ignoramus or a bigot? Such people are beyond the pale, unworthy of engagement. Let’s ignore them.
That is all it is. Xenophilia is an act designed to demonstrate progressive greatness. It is not based on an examination of the facts. Nor is it based on real life experience. Most experiments in serious ethnic and culture mixing end in violence. Some end in genocide. National borders emerged for this reason, where even similar people found each other intolerable. Our instinct is to avoid this strife, and the mechanism by which this is accomplished is mild xenophobia, an innate wariness of those different from us, people who may be unsuited to the society we have carefully created for ourselves.
The more mundane casual xenophobia most of the world embraces is of a different character. It reflects millennia of collective experience. Other people aren’t quite like us, and if we let them in there could be trouble. Best to play it safe and protect what we have, while encouraging them to do the same.
The natural tendency to favour one’s own people, which we witness almost everywhere, provides a degree of protection while still allowing plenty of room to trade and rub shoulders with those who are different.
Acknowledging differences between groups often maintains peace in this way. It is a childish worldview that demands we pretend everyone is the same to demonstrate how sophisticated we are.
And it is reckless to invite the world into your homeland to advertise an unsupported belief that differences between peoples cannot exist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To risk it all because you are trying to show off to your social circle, like children in a playground.
The end is nigh
The success of xenophilia is based on propaganda, not the everyday experience of ordinary people. It exploits marketing techniques to override normal instincts and punishes anyone who notices reality.
But as more culture mixing happens and its failures become visible, the propaganda levels must increase accordingly.
So far, open borders enthusiasts have convinced enough people this is our problem, unique to nations founded and developed by Europeans. We are historically racist and need to apply ever more resources to make multiculturalism work.
The failures we see are failures of effort on our part to absorb newcomers. We must do better.
But it is becoming evident this is not the case. Many migrants are more honest than the propagandists and tell us to our face they do not wish to assimilate. They want to maintain and celebrate their own culture, not ours, a perfectly normal instinct that most of us share.
Strikingly, many migrant groups maintain their own innate xenophobia too, and are quite unembarrassed to openly favour their own people and express disbelief we do not do the same. In European nations, we are seeing a rise in political parties based on ethnic and cultural identities, a novelty in the non-tribal West. An inconvenient development for the xenophiliacs to contend with. Migrant groups enthusiastically voting for their own people, demonstrating the very xenophobia we are condemned for. Many are becoming aware of this farce.
The propagandists have no answer. How can they? Their message is always that we are the problem. Billion-dollar campaigns are now crumbling in the face of this reality. Such marketing efforts have a natural limit, and we are now reaching that limit. The brake is failing.
Consequently, champions of novel ideas like mass immigration must continually increase the energy to make their schemes work. Jailing people for posting memes “promoting hate” is one recent escalation. We can expect more as real life asserts itself and increasing numbers notice and then have the temerity to comment publicly.
As the propaganda fails to keep up, as more and more ignore it, we will inevitably become like the rest of the world as our hardwired tendencies assert themselves. Defensive xenophobia is the norm everywhere else, and it will become the norm in European nations in Europe and North America once again through necessity.
History teaches us different peoples do not mix well when sharing territory. What emerges is a form of tribalism, where foreigners now compete for limited resources inside our borders instead of safely outside of them. It doesn’t matter what academics, journalists and council leaders think about it. The record is clear, and it is usually winner takes all, not people holding hands and singing kumbaya.
It requires resources to make people override instincts evolved to help them survive, and that is now ending as our nations decline. There simply won’t be the funds to keep the show on the road, as the realities pile up.
None of this is to advocate for what critics label “racism,” the intentional denigration or abuse of different ethnic groups. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and with dignity.
It is simply an acknowledgement of reality: mixing different cultures is an expensive indulgence. It confers limited benefits on the host nation compared to what it potentially costs. History teaches us that it often creates tension and as a result calls for hesitation and examination. It should certainly be discussed openly, as it once was.
To artificially favour foreigners over natives with quotas and preferential treatment is abnormal. And to forbid any discussion on the topic is madness.
Too much immigration feels like an invasion, something virtually all human beings are hardwired to fear. It triggers something that cannot be educated out of us, the survival instinct most possess, the shunning of those too different to assimilate.
The prediction for open border policies, then, is conflict, not harmony—no matter how thoughtful and anti-racist people think they are. All it takes is one hostile group in your region to destroy centuries of balance, heritage and convention.
Xenophiliacs are those people we see holding up cardboard signs with naïve slogans like “no human is illegal”. Their desperation to attain social approval means they overlook the consequences of their beliefs, a shortsightedness that ensures they will be affected first, as real life intrudes to challenge their fantasies. When the energy to maintain those fictions evaporates their cardboard philosophy will be exposed.
Xenophilia is a dead man’s brake, and the man is dying. His foot will soon be off the pedal and reality is waiting, club in hand. What then?
Spaceman Spiff writes about the descent of the West at Postcards from the Abyss, where this essay was originally published.
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Wonderful commentary. I might add that an American author of African descent has written upon such mixing of peoples long ago. Look up some of Thomas Sowell’s works. His findings and conclusions hold up even to this day. Most salient point, quite often the disparity among peoples in culture and ability leads to violence. Examples given abound.
We don't like to admit it. To do so we are made to appear backward and provincial. In fact, humans are tribal. We may or may not evolve beyond that. Individually, most of us can get along with people of other tribes, if those other people are of the same inclination. However, in large groups, no. Our tribes prefer the ways and values of our tribe's culture. That is why you see the division in states like Minnesota and any others where large groups of immigrants have accumulated.
Nice to read you here on Aporia, Spaceman Spiff. Thanks for hosting him, Aporia.