Empathy as a status signal

Today’s bourgeois status signal is tomorrow’s right wing extremism

You can explain a lot of modern culture wars by the fact that money ceased to be a real status symbol. In the 21st century, being well-known means that money will just arrive automatically. The bigger status symbols now are empathy and trust in authority. This is why veganism and climate change activism attract such hostility. With money no longer being the status symbol, but now just being a by-product of having a high social status, the new status symbols now attract hostility.

The reason there is a pre-Greta and a post-Greta when it comes to climate change activism, is because Greta introduced something that was severely missing. Greta represents the kind of hypersincerity you can only get from autists. Autists have beliefs, tastes, opinions and ideas. Everyone else only has beliefs, tastes, opinions and ideas, filtered by the social context they inhabit. To insist that Greta does not really believe what she professes to believe, is like suggesting that the creator of Dwarf Fortress just wants to make money selling video games.

It is as if she recreated the whole field and now there are various emanations of Greta, characterized by increasingly less sincerity, beginning with an African girl who sees her village go to shit, followed by an Al Gore who figured out a policy problem while vice president, then an AOC and eventually finally culminating in a Taylor Swift, where all autism has dissipated and social perception becomes everything.

One of those things people tend to skip about the poor, is that they can’t afford to trust authorities, nor can they really afford to care about others. They’re forced to inhabit a here and now. As they slowly get their shit together as they age, they will expand their circle of empathy, to include abstract categories elites have already transcended. They care for example about the demise of the white race, which was a big concern among Western elites during the early 20th century.

Elites already transcended this concern however, expanding their circle of empathy to include the overall state of the biosphere. Worry about the relative share of white people and the relative quality of new generations of humans moved towards worry about the domination of the human population through our sheer numbers, until it moved towards our overall footprint on our environment.

It’s not that Prince Harry and Megan or some other members of the upper class figured all of this out on their own. They mingle in a crowd, where some people do most of the thinking and then over time the crowd develops a certain view of the world. That’s what happened to progressive elites.

You can see a good example of this transition with Bertrand Russell, the kind of guy who did a lot of thinking for the elite circles in which he mingled. Before the 1940’s he writes that it would be a waste to eradicate black people from the planet because they can be put to good use in the tropics and that the occasional global plague might be the most pleasant way to prevent overpopulation. Then after Hitler’s defeat he professes a belief in the gospel of human equality and begins worrying about things like nuclear war instead. So as a typical member of the upper class, simply parroting Bertrand Russel was sufficient to keep you in line with consensus.

Paul Ehrlich is essentially a conservative, in that he rediscovers the old elite worry about human overpopulation. This is the typical habit of conservatives: They try to protect things that progressives already gave up on. By now, when you bring up there are eight billion of us, that we weigh more than ten times as much as the wild terrestrial vertebrates, you will be stamped as a reactionary.

The reason LGBTQI+ stuff now tends to go hand in hand with status symbols like veganism and climate change activism, is because elite belief in a future is also dissipating. You are instead supposed to just hedonistically indulge in the moment and pursue all your fetishes to their natural conclusion, because there isn’t really a future anymore. When there is no future, you might as well just merge with your object of desire. You might as well become the nubile teenage girl yourself, rather than striving to become the father who guards her chastity.

That’s the next transition we’re going to face. Low status white males feel very threatened by climate change activists and vegans. But climate change concerns are likely going to end up just like overpopulation and previous elite worries ended up: As an unsolvable taboo concern of right wing dissidents.

Today’s conservatives would have been seen as populist socialists in the early 20th century. Wealth inequality after all, is also a problem progressive elites gave up on trying to solve. But by the time the climate change crisis escalates and even low status white males become forced to come to terms with the fact that this is a real problem, elites will have already dropped the concern altogether. Just as overpopulation concerns were high status a century ago (back when LSWMs adhered to pronatalist religions like Catholicism) and very taboo today, climate change activism is at risk of just dying out due to elites no longer believing the problem can be solved.

Probably around the time when Alexandria-Occasio Cortez resigns herself to the sunlight being blocked by stratospheric aerosols, low status white males will insists that the actual problem of carbon dioxide accumulation needs to be solved and the elitists need to stop blocking sunlight. By that time of course, natural ecosystems will have started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses too and elites will have resigned themselves to their failure to address the climate crisis, just as they failed to address the dysgenics and overpopulation crises before. To mention the existence of a climate crisis, will become low status. It will be what your self-employed Uncle Bob brings up at the dinner table while you try to change the topic.

Keep in mind, low status white males eventually adapt to elite beliefs. They just do so slowly and hesitantly. Just as low status white males are very reluctant to accept that changing the atmosphere is dangerous, they were very reluctant until about two decades ago to accept that we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. You had about as much support for the idea that the Earth is 6000 years old in the United States two decades ago, as you do in the US today for the idea that humans are not causing global warming today.

My naive hope is to convince low status white males that just as they reluctantly accepted previous elite concerns, this elite concern is also legitimate. The earlier low status white males figure that out, the more chance we typically have of a problem genuinely being solved. The reason I bring this up is because I can already see the next step emerge: Normalization of euthanasia. Transgenderism is a phenomenon that emerged basically from nowhere in a time-frame of twenty years. The next perversion that will be normalized, is the desire to not exist.

You have about as much of a foot to stand on when you try to stop your teenage daughter from growing a moustache and amputating her breasts, as you do when she decides she wants to be dead. We’re even starting to see cases in Canada, of people who choose euthanasia due to suffering poverty.

No such choice is ever truly voluntarily. It is always an option you pick, in a context of circumstances you did not control. Let’s try to create better circumstances for when today’s children are adults: Stop dragging your low status white male feet in the sand and hurry up with adopting today’s status signals.

22 Comments

    • Misanthropes have more empathy than anyone else, they hate humanity BECAUSE humanity is generally unemphatic, self interested, and brutal. Supporting eugenics is also not contrary to empathy, eugenicists have empathy for ALL the future generations of humanity rather than just those living today. Allowing dysgenics to take hold will simply result in humanity forever being stuck in a mediocre and primitive state, until our species dies out. The empathetic thing is to ensure no more retards are born, not breeding millions of retards that will have zero quality of life because inequality hurts your feels..

  1. I am not sure…
    In the early 1900’s the white ‘race’ had reached their peak at 30% of global population… No threat to their existance there.
    So, I am guessing that the white elites were just racist, because they were following some version of ‘Enlightenment’, with its gross simplifications (e.g. of Evolution–blacks were considered non-humans) which caused the explosive development and their connected privileges (note: against everyone, including the majority of white people who were just poor and farmers or labor class).
    Similarly racist were the Chinese or Arabic/Ottoman or Subsaharan elites, those who had their own privileges, and likely for these and other reasons too.
    The majority, i.e. poor white/black/east-asian/arabic, had plenty of empathy, not to abstract people (as you too noticed) but to concrete people in need, no matter what race they were. Meaning, after they would hang out with immigrants/refuges or people of other colours/religions, they would get along with them pretty well.
    + + +
    As I have said before, I don’t understand why LSWMs bitch about things that are difficult and even unnecessary to answer, when there’s plenty of things to focus which are urgent and you cannot avoid addressing.
    Probably because of inertia/depression due to secularism->nihilism, if we have to be honest.
    + + +
    One has to look at people like Geert Vanden Bossche (and the people who help him explain to lay people his scientific insights etc), i.e. the kind of persons who are pro-science and open dialogue, AND pro-solidarity.
    These are healthy* people.
    They are doing the best they can (some of them probably don’t face financial issues), sacrificing their time (also, people like Dr. Marik, Dr. Kory, who jeopardize their social and professional status).
    Most LSWMs love them, excluding the odd ‘general-antivaxxer’.
    (*many activists are not healthy people and we all know it, for example because of their contradictions: they may care more about pets than about their human neighbors-of-different-or-neutral-views)
    + + +
    When droughts will hit European farmers even harder, and thus food prices will sky-rocket, which is soonish, then you will see more LSWMs trying to do something about it.

  2. Yes it will be interesting to see how the LSWMs react as the evidence and reality of climate change becomes impossible to deny over the next ten to twenty years as weather events become more and more extreme.

    This theory you have put forward in this post is certainly an interesting one, that they (the LSWMs) will finally repent, admit that they were wrong about CO2 and suddenly start caring about it once the elites and everyone else has already moved on.

    Or, perhaps, an alternative scenario that may play out is that the LSWMs will continue to deny that they were wrong all the way to their graves, as the pain of admitting that they were wrong about CO2 will be so great, once they realise the pain and suffering they have caused their grandchildren due to their ignorance. You talked about this in a recent Reddit post on the Greek wildfires:

    https://www.rintrah.nl/theyll-never-figure-it-out/

    In fact, I think that this phenomenon explains why so many doctors and scientists continue to push the boosters. They must continue believing the “safe and effective” narrative to keep themselves sane. Because it will cause them an enormous amount of psychological distress if they admit that they were wrong and that the vaccines are indeed dangerous, because they will come to the horrifying realisation that they put the lives of their patients, family and friends in danger, and are responsible for any current and future vaccine-induced injuries and deaths.

    And we see the same phenomenon also in parents who have gender transitioned their kids against their will, as explained excellently by Helen Joyce in this Twitter video:

    https://twitter.com/JEFFVARNER/status/1702084202290610198?t=zJNq_qPBQY74tj_UlXQIBQ&s=19

    • >they (the LSWMs) will finally repent, admit that they were wrong about CO2 and suddenly start caring about it once the elites and everyone else has already moved on.

      Nah, they’ll never admit they were wrong. They just move on to whatever the new LSWM talking point is. When you then confront an LSWM with this, they’ll claim those were other LSWMs.

      Note for example how you never hear an LSWM say “I used to be a creationist”.

      • Oops you’re right, I misinterpreted your post the first time I read it, now I understand the point that you were making.

        Yes the creationists sure are an interesting bunch. Consider the case of Ted Haggard. He was once one of the most highly respected evangelical Christian pastors in America, a hero of young-Earth creationists. Turns out the guy was a methamphetamine addicted homosexual. Here he is being interviewed by Professor Richard Dawkins:

        https://youtu.be/mmMv0ceWTVQ?si=8W67VIbxaFZXg2_t

  3. Empathy? This is a hate party. This commentariat is like Victorians doing the sex cult thing and having anonymous orgies. For that matter, if you are even remotely representative of an XR mindset, XR is a hate party too.

  4. Poor people are the empathetic ones. In the U.S. at any rate, the poorer a person is, the higher a percentage of their income they give to charity. If you are actually hungry, a poor American person is much more likely to give you some of their food than a rich American person. Loads of studies show that poor people are much better at sensing the distress of other people than rich people are. As people become richer, they become desensitized to the distress of others.

    • Rich people just care about what’s fashionable, which is why they’re all anti racist. Being anti racist doesn’t make you empathetic, most anti racist people hate the white working class and salivate at the thought of their suffering. Poor people are much more likely to be racist, as they don’t care about what’s fashionable; but if you think being racist makes you a bad person you’ve internalized the elite’s worldview rather than thinking about things critically.

  5. Why is euthanasia a perversion though? It’s for people to make their own decision on that, live and let live (or die). Also will help with overpopulation and reducing the climate burden.

    • It can not be anything other then an evil perversion. It will be marketed and start out with old sick people with only days left to live. It will end with all people that society consider unproductive will start to feel the pressure to end their life. Rich people will be kept alive as long as they can be milked for money.

      Don’t open pandora’s box, the outcome is certain.

    • Check out what is happening in Canada. People are being euthanized because they can’t afford housing and medical care. Doctors are actively pushing it on patients.

      I expected a slippery slope, but even I didn’t think it would be this steep and immediate.

  6. The elites notice a threat to their position. The share of white people is shrinking, overpopulation, climate change etcetera as you mention.

    They fail to find a solution but they always find a way to benefit from the problem and increase their wealth and de facto making the problem worse.

    Share of white people is shrinking in the world.
    Hey let the share also shrink in our own country, import a lot of non-white people and get a lot of cheap workers.

    Overpopulation. Take advantage of it and move the production to these part of the world instead and make more money.

    Climate change. We can solve it and maintain economic growth forever. Let invest in green energy and fool people to believe that it will solve the problem. We only got a lot of intermittent energy and now we have also made the energy crisis worse. Get out before the bubble burst and the scam is revealed.

    We have a lot of depressed youth, many who have been maimed by the gender change industry. Let’s euthanize them! Will they find a way to make it a profitable buisness, you bet!

    With the current system in place we can never really solve any of humanity’s great challenges.

  7. So when I say climate is unsolvable and billions must die, I’m low status and behind the curve, yet also ahead of the curve and even ahead of you so the same time?

    Cool story.

    This is why I do not give a black life about “status,” you status tards waste lots of energy chasing your own tails. It’s far energetically simpler to just be accurate.

    • *at the same time.

      Also, so you mean to tell me by your own admission that the history of progressivism is essentially that they accomplish none of their goals but do a shit load of social and economic meddling before they finally give up, yet when we “LSWM” point out that this behavior is essentially all cost and no benefit and is therefore not worth doing, this makes us somehow stupid? No, ALL leftists are midwits, and rightists are vastly smarter in ways the dunning Kruger effect prevents the the leftists from understanding.

      Lastly, I find it humorous that whereas a few months ago you made people sign off that they were “LSWM allies” before commenting, now your blog exists to shit on that demographic. If you’d ever like to know why you can’t maintain a consistent relationship, your personal lack of internal consistency might have something to do with it. I didn’t even need to trip balls on psychedelics to figure that one out.

      • >Also, so you mean to tell me by your own admission that the history of progressivism is essentially that they accomplish none of their goals but do a shit load of social and economic meddling before they finally give up, yet when we “LSWM” point out that this behavior is essentially all cost and no benefit and is therefore not worth doing, this makes us somehow stupid?

        Well, the main reason progressives never accomplish what they want to accomplish, is because of feet-dragging LSWMs.

        • Uh huh, sort of like how communist economics failed not because of their intrinsic unworkability, but because of secret rightist sabotage.

          Maybe you are just a retarded midwit who is not smart enough to actually get real results in any arena of life, and you need to just admit that you and all the ideas that drive you are collectively impotent, and sit down and let real men figure things out.

  8. I’m surprised. I figured you’d be in favor of voluntary suicide (the next fad after transgenderism, as you put it), given that in order for humans to truly reduce their impact on the climate, it would require the removal of billions of meat-eating, SUV-driving, McMansion-dwelling humans. The only way any real action is going to take place is from humans dying off, or humans simply becoming too poor to afford our current lifestyles.

  9. “My naive hope is to convince low status white males that just as they reluctantly accepted previous elite concerns, this elite concern is also legitimate.“

    Were the other elite concerns legitimate? Ell Oh Ell

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