If we substitute the term tribe, for the word race, it may help us understand both the differences and the similarities.
Humans have always been tribal, from the bands seeking sustenance on the savana to the self forming discrete groups of east asia to the similar yet differentiated tribes of the migrating "native american".
We as a species have always been, and no matter how hard the mechanistic social engineers try to push multiculturalism, will always be, tribal.
That tribal nature, the desire and comfort from being with the like minded, with similar attributes brings strength, security, comfort and cooperative interaction. It also highlights the differences when different tribes meet on the fringes of their territories. Which is why we have the phrase, "Fences make for good neighbors".
Those who wish for the mechanistic society, where we are all just little LEGO blocks in a bigger construct, overlook the reality that humans are not hard plastic blocks, and that the differences are real, and will always be the primal force that differentiates culture.
People from different tribes, different races, different cultures (use whichever term fits) can join other tribes in one of two ways. They can choose to take on that new tribe's characteristics and assimilate, or they can be forced to as the captured slaves have been for millennia (throughout the world).
In short, homogeneity has never been the natural state of the human experience.
If the racial or cultural vibe stands in the way of mutual understanding, if it precludes or corrupts the reflexivity of meaning, if the vibe is the basis of irreconcilable conflicts about values, needs and preferences, then perhaps the vibe is the problem, something unresolved, unconscious and therefore deterministic, contrary to conscious agency. There are two reference points that come to mind, one that posits the laws of meaning/sense (Logos) as the ground of consciousness and the only path of transcending racial or cultural determinism (let us call it the Marcus Aurelius position); the other posits radical anti-dependency, rejection of any group identity as the mode of transcendence (let us call it the Nietzschean position). From Aurelius: “If the faculty of understanding lies in common amongst us all, then reason, the cause of it, must be common too ; and that other reason too which governs practice by commands and prohibitions. From whence we may conclude, that mankind are under one common law ; and if so, they must be fellow-citizens, and belong to some body politic. From whence it will follow, that the whole world is but one. commonwealth ; for certainly there is no other society in which mankind can be incorporated.” Zarathustra: “And he who would not languish amongst men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean amongst men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.” “They have something whereof they are proud. What do they call it, that which maketh them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguisheth them from the goatherds.” One thing I have learned through Covid is that the ‘vibe’ offers no moral guidance, and as such has no moral worth; like a rock or a tree it may be part of the landscape we walk upon, not part of conscious agency, even if it is ontologically implicated in how we came to be.
Still thinking about this, so I don't have much to say except that I acknowledge the universalist approach. Assuming that the vibe is not an active part of conscious agency (not sure exactly), and can be thought more of a passive landscape that may or may not hinder conscious expression, it is still part of reality, and as such worth taking seriously. Even that which should be transcended, we need to know and work with.
If the collective vibe has its own ‘destiny’, in the sense that all patterns of collective behaviour and sentiment have natural consequences, which in turn affect the political, organisational and technological spheres, then it is still up to the individual to go along with those patterns, be subsumed by the collective, or to carve out a new direction, individual ‘destiny’. This kind of destiny (of collective consequences) can be either trivial (everything has consequences) or fatalistic, if it is relied on as a substitute for individual moral and rational discernment, or it can be a lesson, a warning, for those who question its morality and rationality. The popular theorists of ‘national destiny’ generally present this concept as something sacred, more important that individual moral discernment, something to submit to, as embodiment of morality itself, which is another way of saying that one must submit to the rule of ‘culture’, as defined by our priests and heroic leaders, or else one is designated an enemy. The same trick was used politically thought history, and one of the current proponents of this unoriginal position is Dugin.
The vibe is real. I don't know how it feels now but 20 years ago there was a discernible change in the ‘air’ when crossing the border between Germany and Poland, a shift in how people are energetically oriented. But I noticed just as strong differences between cities, for example, the human vibe in Hamburg is radically different from Munich and from Cologne. The differences between cities suggest that the ‘vibe’ is possibly a residue of multigenerational local habits rather than race.
Humans evolved to have a strong sense of "US/ Them," else the Us gets killed/ enslaved by Them. Not taking this into account when creating a plan for the future will lead to exactly the kinds of failure we currently see worldwide.
Yes, same here. Kind of a "wait, biologists actually have no clue?" moment, plus all that research into the paranormal... It's also telling when you get a sense of deep sincerity and the drive to actually figure things out, then you read the deboonkers and they come across as complete fools.
This is actually a pretty brilliant article and I'm surprised I haven't run into it earlier. I have my own theories regarding "cultural vibe refraction" for lack of a better term. The idea that there is an ambient informational atmosphere created in any society that ties it together... generated from the reflected and refracted minds and emotions within it. I'll have to write that out as my own article here at some point. Likewise, you've touched on the important fact that the modern legalistic conception of "race" is extremely limited and has created an environment of ideological nihilism. Even the white-supremacist nazi types haven't really got a good idea of what race means aside from which census box you tick when you get hired.
I have taken to using the term "ethnos" to describe not only a physiological distinction, but a distinction of character inherent in a native population. "Race" has too much baggage as terms go, so what we should be looking at is the development of a characteristic ethnos. The next civilization is going to require entirely new modes of being from what we have now. Our work is to create a new ethnos that will develop the future we're right now too arrogant to see. Faustian civilization is not immortal, and the Ethnos of the next civilization is what we should be looking to build now. If we can get one rolling quickly enough, shortening the technic dark-age and cultural ravine between this civilization and the next may be possible.
Do you have a podcast or something? I think we should really chat. You seem to have preceded me by a few months in the development of your ideas, but otherwise we seem to be very much on the same page. I've even taking on terming my vision of the next civilization as "the holistic civilization." Take a look at my articles if you're curious:
Our sense when writing or making music that the language itself is speaking is support for Sheldrake's theory. I myself am sure that it points to the truth. It was such a joy to read your essay!
>>It is perhaps harder for Americans to see race in such a holistic way, given that they, due to their unique history, tend to literally think in black and white terms about it:
When I read the first part of this sentence, I was thinking you were going to go into the 'melting pot' issue. I believe that that is the first and most significant part of American's issue with this concept of 'race'. Europeans obviously had waves of conquest and great movements of people, but America was created that way. There isn't an American alive who didn't grow up in a community whose people weren't even a people a hundred years ago... we all came from somewhere else. For most of us our grandparents weren't even born near where we live now.
And as for the black vs white thing, that is indeed history, but it is also a deliberate media strategy. Back when OJ was on trial, day after day we were told what 'black' and 'whites' thought about it, but no one ever shared what hispanics, Jews, or Asians thought about it.
Yes, this is a big difference. In Europe you often have people whose families have been living in the same village for centuries. Although modernity has caught up of course. But there is still some deeper sense of identity beneath it all.
Interesting read. Thank you. And speaking of 'volk' and 'vibe' and 'morphic fields', immediately before reading this, i read this fascinating account, which i think greatly enriches this discussion, and which i think many of the readers here would appreciate https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/05/10/volk-and-freedom/
Because racial communism ('all men are created equal') is so ubiquitous, there is no end of ways to soften up the idea that there are collectives ('races') that are different from other collectives ('races') and *mixing* these collectives produces innumerable deleterious effects. So many adverse effects, in fact, that they completely overwhelm whatever (often purely imaginary) 'benefits' that arise from such mixing.
*Resistance to mixing* between collectives is a natural and normal 'immune response'. It doesn't matter if the mixing is between Irish and English or English and Somali. What's *abnormal* is the forced mixing of such collectives, physically and symbolically (When was the last time you saw a White woman in an advertisement without her hanging on a non-White man or woman?).
At the margins of the territories of collectives, there was sometimes mixing due to the proximity effect and that fact that across collectives, a low-status member of a *high-status collective* might be consider 'very high status' within a different - low-status - collective. But even then, such unions were not common.
The 'problem' of 'race' isn't fundamental to the specific character of individual 'races' but to the now-ubiquitous practice of *forced race-mixing*. When 'races' had territories and borders and lines of contact along those borders, the issues of 'race' were not the same as they are now with the territorial interlacing of 'races'.
I don't see a 'solution' to 'race' that doesn't involve address the role that *forced race-mixing* plays in the modern expression of how the notion of 'race' is mobilized to attack some biological collectives and not others, how the idea of 'race' is attacked in order to further race-mixing.
On the one pole we have Christians with their distorting dogma on race and on the other we have materialists who deny it because it violates blank slate theory.
It seems that only the “pagans” had a holistic and rational view of race.
I know thousands of Europeans afraid some sub 70 IQ Sub Saharan African or Muslim will stab them, or members of their immediate family. And, the crime stats prove it in every violent crime category.
We will fight to the death for our White Ethno-States, stick that in your "Morphic Field" and smoke it. Hail Victory. Hail Europa. \o
There just seems to be a general lack of understanding on this issue regarding two fundermental aspects of racial/ethnic genetic characteristics:
1. Standard distribution curves of genetic characteristics within a closed population and STD from the mean
2. The baseline anthropological gentetic diversity of the group you are studying (ie Indo-European/African orgin/Asian)
None of this is bad...it is just nature. Why do nearly all the fastest men in the world since 1970 have ancestry from west coast of africa? Why has nearly every single world's strongest man ever come from Northern Europe? ...Oh...that can't be true.... I must be a Right Wing Racist. I am utterly fed up with a 'certain generation' obsession with name calling...it is immature and shows a complete lack of ability to be factually objective and free of personal ideology.
If people of African origin ON AVERAGE have higher muscle mass and less fat than other races then their STD has shift to the right and a greater PROPORTION are going to be in the at group. ALL this generation hears from that last statement: 'ALL BLACK people are more muscular than ALL OTHER GROUPS..said this RACIST'
The irony of using the word 'nuanced' in this post
But you’re describing physical differences. Unless you are a materialist who argues personality/thought/choices etc (the soul) are really all down to physical brain states, which are determined by the type of meat in your skull, and different populations have different brains just like different muscle mass/melanin/etc
Very interesting implications when viewed through a Christian lens. Adam’s fall DID something to every human that came from him, and different theologians have speculated how sin nature was passed on. It’s not just the sperm, as Augustine posited. Adam broke the vibe, and thus twisted all of humanity.
"Contrast this with the story of famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “admission process” to the University of Munich in the 1920s: a tale of professors’ dogs doing the assessment, of intellectually curious exchanges leading to clashes or sympathy, and of hand-selecting students for seminaries."
Remind me, who won when Anglo-Teutonic war broke out later that century? And whose scientists and engineers were used to win said war?
The people with the better tech and doctrine where the Teutonics. The Anglos won because they scammed their brother Anglos in America (who had a lot of Teutonics amongst them) to fight. W/o America, WW2 would have been an easy Axis victory. Not due to tech, but natural resources plus production.
If we substitute the term tribe, for the word race, it may help us understand both the differences and the similarities.
Humans have always been tribal, from the bands seeking sustenance on the savana to the self forming discrete groups of east asia to the similar yet differentiated tribes of the migrating "native american".
We as a species have always been, and no matter how hard the mechanistic social engineers try to push multiculturalism, will always be, tribal.
That tribal nature, the desire and comfort from being with the like minded, with similar attributes brings strength, security, comfort and cooperative interaction. It also highlights the differences when different tribes meet on the fringes of their territories. Which is why we have the phrase, "Fences make for good neighbors".
Those who wish for the mechanistic society, where we are all just little LEGO blocks in a bigger construct, overlook the reality that humans are not hard plastic blocks, and that the differences are real, and will always be the primal force that differentiates culture.
People from different tribes, different races, different cultures (use whichever term fits) can join other tribes in one of two ways. They can choose to take on that new tribe's characteristics and assimilate, or they can be forced to as the captured slaves have been for millennia (throughout the world).
In short, homogeneity has never been the natural state of the human experience.
If the racial or cultural vibe stands in the way of mutual understanding, if it precludes or corrupts the reflexivity of meaning, if the vibe is the basis of irreconcilable conflicts about values, needs and preferences, then perhaps the vibe is the problem, something unresolved, unconscious and therefore deterministic, contrary to conscious agency. There are two reference points that come to mind, one that posits the laws of meaning/sense (Logos) as the ground of consciousness and the only path of transcending racial or cultural determinism (let us call it the Marcus Aurelius position); the other posits radical anti-dependency, rejection of any group identity as the mode of transcendence (let us call it the Nietzschean position). From Aurelius: “If the faculty of understanding lies in common amongst us all, then reason, the cause of it, must be common too ; and that other reason too which governs practice by commands and prohibitions. From whence we may conclude, that mankind are under one common law ; and if so, they must be fellow-citizens, and belong to some body politic. From whence it will follow, that the whole world is but one. commonwealth ; for certainly there is no other society in which mankind can be incorporated.” Zarathustra: “And he who would not languish amongst men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean amongst men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.” “They have something whereof they are proud. What do they call it, that which maketh them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguisheth them from the goatherds.” One thing I have learned through Covid is that the ‘vibe’ offers no moral guidance, and as such has no moral worth; like a rock or a tree it may be part of the landscape we walk upon, not part of conscious agency, even if it is ontologically implicated in how we came to be.
Still thinking about this, so I don't have much to say except that I acknowledge the universalist approach. Assuming that the vibe is not an active part of conscious agency (not sure exactly), and can be thought more of a passive landscape that may or may not hinder conscious expression, it is still part of reality, and as such worth taking seriously. Even that which should be transcended, we need to know and work with.
If the collective vibe has its own ‘destiny’, in the sense that all patterns of collective behaviour and sentiment have natural consequences, which in turn affect the political, organisational and technological spheres, then it is still up to the individual to go along with those patterns, be subsumed by the collective, or to carve out a new direction, individual ‘destiny’. This kind of destiny (of collective consequences) can be either trivial (everything has consequences) or fatalistic, if it is relied on as a substitute for individual moral and rational discernment, or it can be a lesson, a warning, for those who question its morality and rationality. The popular theorists of ‘national destiny’ generally present this concept as something sacred, more important that individual moral discernment, something to submit to, as embodiment of morality itself, which is another way of saying that one must submit to the rule of ‘culture’, as defined by our priests and heroic leaders, or else one is designated an enemy. The same trick was used politically thought history, and one of the current proponents of this unoriginal position is Dugin.
The vibe is real. I don't know how it feels now but 20 years ago there was a discernible change in the ‘air’ when crossing the border between Germany and Poland, a shift in how people are energetically oriented. But I noticed just as strong differences between cities, for example, the human vibe in Hamburg is radically different from Munich and from Cologne. The differences between cities suggest that the ‘vibe’ is possibly a residue of multigenerational local habits rather than race.
Philosophical gibberish.
Humans evolved to have a strong sense of "US/ Them," else the Us gets killed/ enslaved by Them. Not taking this into account when creating a plan for the future will lead to exactly the kinds of failure we currently see worldwide.
Delightful essay. I've enjoyed Sheldrake's books - he's one of the writers who led me to reject the materialist paradigm.
Yes, same here. Kind of a "wait, biologists actually have no clue?" moment, plus all that research into the paranormal... It's also telling when you get a sense of deep sincerity and the drive to actually figure things out, then you read the deboonkers and they come across as complete fools.
Yes! Exactly. Well said.
Same happened to me reading Michael Behe's work. Expected BibleWoo, instead got a role model of what science could and should be.
This is actually a pretty brilliant article and I'm surprised I haven't run into it earlier. I have my own theories regarding "cultural vibe refraction" for lack of a better term. The idea that there is an ambient informational atmosphere created in any society that ties it together... generated from the reflected and refracted minds and emotions within it. I'll have to write that out as my own article here at some point. Likewise, you've touched on the important fact that the modern legalistic conception of "race" is extremely limited and has created an environment of ideological nihilism. Even the white-supremacist nazi types haven't really got a good idea of what race means aside from which census box you tick when you get hired.
I have taken to using the term "ethnos" to describe not only a physiological distinction, but a distinction of character inherent in a native population. "Race" has too much baggage as terms go, so what we should be looking at is the development of a characteristic ethnos. The next civilization is going to require entirely new modes of being from what we have now. Our work is to create a new ethnos that will develop the future we're right now too arrogant to see. Faustian civilization is not immortal, and the Ethnos of the next civilization is what we should be looking to build now. If we can get one rolling quickly enough, shortening the technic dark-age and cultural ravine between this civilization and the next may be possible.
Do you have a podcast or something? I think we should really chat. You seem to have preceded me by a few months in the development of your ideas, but otherwise we seem to be very much on the same page. I've even taking on terming my vision of the next civilization as "the holistic civilization." Take a look at my articles if you're curious:
https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/post-faustian-ethnos-identity-and
https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/a-future-beyond-materialism-holistic
Our sense when writing or making music that the language itself is speaking is support for Sheldrake's theory. I myself am sure that it points to the truth. It was such a joy to read your essay!
Thank you! Jusy listened to your Mackie Messer rendition, beautiful! I always loved that song.
How wonderful to hear this! Yes, it’s the most beautiful song.
>>It is perhaps harder for Americans to see race in such a holistic way, given that they, due to their unique history, tend to literally think in black and white terms about it:
When I read the first part of this sentence, I was thinking you were going to go into the 'melting pot' issue. I believe that that is the first and most significant part of American's issue with this concept of 'race'. Europeans obviously had waves of conquest and great movements of people, but America was created that way. There isn't an American alive who didn't grow up in a community whose people weren't even a people a hundred years ago... we all came from somewhere else. For most of us our grandparents weren't even born near where we live now.
And as for the black vs white thing, that is indeed history, but it is also a deliberate media strategy. Back when OJ was on trial, day after day we were told what 'black' and 'whites' thought about it, but no one ever shared what hispanics, Jews, or Asians thought about it.
Yes, this is a big difference. In Europe you often have people whose families have been living in the same village for centuries. Although modernity has caught up of course. But there is still some deeper sense of identity beneath it all.
Interesting read. Thank you. And speaking of 'volk' and 'vibe' and 'morphic fields', immediately before reading this, i read this fascinating account, which i think greatly enriches this discussion, and which i think many of the readers here would appreciate https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/05/10/volk-and-freedom/
(Same article is also available through substack here https://paulcudenec.substack.com/p/volk-and-freedom)
That was a great read, thanks! Pre-war Germany really was a place teeming with ideas and possibilities, along with all the mayhem.
Because racial communism ('all men are created equal') is so ubiquitous, there is no end of ways to soften up the idea that there are collectives ('races') that are different from other collectives ('races') and *mixing* these collectives produces innumerable deleterious effects. So many adverse effects, in fact, that they completely overwhelm whatever (often purely imaginary) 'benefits' that arise from such mixing.
*Resistance to mixing* between collectives is a natural and normal 'immune response'. It doesn't matter if the mixing is between Irish and English or English and Somali. What's *abnormal* is the forced mixing of such collectives, physically and symbolically (When was the last time you saw a White woman in an advertisement without her hanging on a non-White man or woman?).
At the margins of the territories of collectives, there was sometimes mixing due to the proximity effect and that fact that across collectives, a low-status member of a *high-status collective* might be consider 'very high status' within a different - low-status - collective. But even then, such unions were not common.
The 'problem' of 'race' isn't fundamental to the specific character of individual 'races' but to the now-ubiquitous practice of *forced race-mixing*. When 'races' had territories and borders and lines of contact along those borders, the issues of 'race' were not the same as they are now with the territorial interlacing of 'races'.
I don't see a 'solution' to 'race' that doesn't involve address the role that *forced race-mixing* plays in the modern expression of how the notion of 'race' is mobilized to attack some biological collectives and not others, how the idea of 'race' is attacked in order to further race-mixing.
On the one pole we have Christians with their distorting dogma on race and on the other we have materialists who deny it because it violates blank slate theory.
It seems that only the “pagans” had a holistic and rational view of race.
I know thousands of Europeans afraid some sub 70 IQ Sub Saharan African or Muslim will stab them, or members of their immediate family. And, the crime stats prove it in every violent crime category.
We will fight to the death for our White Ethno-States, stick that in your "Morphic Field" and smoke it. Hail Victory. Hail Europa. \o
I suggest you work on your self-control, lest you expose your inner landscape. Goodbye.
There just seems to be a general lack of understanding on this issue regarding two fundermental aspects of racial/ethnic genetic characteristics:
1. Standard distribution curves of genetic characteristics within a closed population and STD from the mean
2. The baseline anthropological gentetic diversity of the group you are studying (ie Indo-European/African orgin/Asian)
None of this is bad...it is just nature. Why do nearly all the fastest men in the world since 1970 have ancestry from west coast of africa? Why has nearly every single world's strongest man ever come from Northern Europe? ...Oh...that can't be true.... I must be a Right Wing Racist. I am utterly fed up with a 'certain generation' obsession with name calling...it is immature and shows a complete lack of ability to be factually objective and free of personal ideology.
If people of African origin ON AVERAGE have higher muscle mass and less fat than other races then their STD has shift to the right and a greater PROPORTION are going to be in the at group. ALL this generation hears from that last statement: 'ALL BLACK people are more muscular than ALL OTHER GROUPS..said this RACIST'
The irony of using the word 'nuanced' in this post
But you’re describing physical differences. Unless you are a materialist who argues personality/thought/choices etc (the soul) are really all down to physical brain states, which are determined by the type of meat in your skull, and different populations have different brains just like different muscle mass/melanin/etc
Very interesting implications when viewed through a Christian lens. Adam’s fall DID something to every human that came from him, and different theologians have speculated how sin nature was passed on. It’s not just the sperm, as Augustine posited. Adam broke the vibe, and thus twisted all of humanity.
And Christ, the God-man, DID something to fix us
To paraphrase David Lane, “Whoever looks, acts, and fights White is my brother.”
https://www.poetry.com/poem/33582/the-stranger
"Contrast this with the story of famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “admission process” to the University of Munich in the 1920s: a tale of professors’ dogs doing the assessment, of intellectually curious exchanges leading to clashes or sympathy, and of hand-selecting students for seminaries."
Remind me, who won when Anglo-Teutonic war broke out later that century? And whose scientists and engineers were used to win said war?
The people with the better tech and doctrine where the Teutonics. The Anglos won because they scammed their brother Anglos in America (who had a lot of Teutonics amongst them) to fight. W/o America, WW2 would have been an easy Axis victory. Not due to tech, but natural resources plus production.