[Bret L]

((WNs may note that this book would not have had any modern notice
whatsoever were not large sections reprised in Anton LaVey's work.
Previous reprints had LaVey's forward. Of course, LaVey was really
Howard Levey. So you see that they have disingenuously disaffiliated
from him. Bret.))


Book Review

Might Is Right or the Survival of the Fittest, by Ragnar Redbeard

Originally published in 1886; 2005 edition edited by Darrell W.
Conder; available from Occidental Press.

Reviewed by Anthony Hilton

September 29, 2009

"Note: In biology, “adaptive” means (very precisely) promoting the survival and reproduction of an organism’s genes. “Natural selection” is the logical and empirical process whereby forces of nature affect the survival and reproduction of some genes over others. The terms, “natural selection” and “selection pressures” (particular causes of selection) help one think clearly.

Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during
the Franz Boas-dominated second half of the 20th Century. According to
Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological
forces and is instead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus
humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruism by
developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social
Darwinism was the idea that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” so
that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other
animals, and be as ruthless as we like: kill, kill, kill!!
Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since
it is part of what we inherit rather than learn, and it would be
unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we
inherited them, they must be adaptive and therefore good.

But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because,
say, a tornado, was natural didn’t mean we had to like it. That would
be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral —
confusing “what is” with “what should be.” It was also pointed out
that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but
via such non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion
of milk in adulthood and better immune systems. No “red in tooth and
claw” there. “Survival of the fittest” was declared a tautology,
meaning only that those organisms that ended up having the most
surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biology’s jargon,
the “fittest” — but only because “fittest” no longer meant that the
“fittest” somehow deserved to survive, or might be expected to
survive, but only that they in fact did survive.

The book under review, Might Is Right…, (MIR), would certainly be
considered by many to be the reductio ad absurdum of 19th-century
Social Darwinism. “Ragnar Redbeard” (RR) was evidently greatly
enamored of Darwin’s theory of natural selection including sexual
selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females
influences which genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like
Darwin, could not have known about genes or modern molecular biology.
Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important
modern term, “inclusive fitness”: “A man’s family is … part of
himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would
his own life” (p. 49).

“Ragnar Redbeard” was a pen name, but whoever he was, he was an
extremely well-informed, erudite person, albeit with a rather florid
literary style which might be off-putting for some readers. I came to
find both style and content quite amusing. In fact, it occurred to me
more than once that I was reading a satire, one suitably embellished
by esoteric Biblical references and Victorian phraseology: a worthy
companion to Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.

On the other hand, suppose MIR was not a satire. Then why would anyone
in the 21st century look twice at such a book? One reason would be the
emergence today of a rethinking of conventional wisdoms: in economics
(OK, communism is out, but aren’t there big problems with unregulated
market economies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and fractional
reserve banking?), in politics (what happened to the Republican Party
and “true conservatives”?), human nature (we don’t all have the same
IQ?), or race relations (diversity is not a utopia?). Much of this
rethinking is taking place on the internet, of course.

Some have even concluded late in their lives that they’ve been the
butt of a big ideological con game. They eventually realize that
humans, either individually or in groups, cannot possibly be at all
“equal” except in the restricted sense of each person theoretically
having one vote (“one idiot, one vote”). And is “democracy” really all
that sacred? Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we
have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated by Hollywood, the
mainstream media, and obscure elites. But many of us have given up on
utopias and now simply want to obtain or defend a half-decent way of
life which we are awake enough now to see is severely threatened if
not already lost — given the ubiquity of muggings, rapes, and car-
jackings in US cities, the Wall Street shakedowns, the dumbing down of
schools. So, having had so many of our assumptions about what is
“right” or “good” turned up-side-down, maybe we should re-examine
“Social Darwinism” too.

So consider several issues raised in MIR.

Much of MIR focuses, albeit a bit repetitively, on what RR perceives
as an unending history of horrible treatment meted out by humans on
their enemies and the logical and empirical imperative of relying on
“might” in the normal course of human affairs. He probably commits one
empirical excess in an especially misanthropic diatribe in Chapter IV:
While stating that the story of Jews stealing and murdering Christian
infants in order to use their blood for Passover rituals is a myth, he
accepts as fact an exceedingly high estimate of the frequency of human
cannibalism — perhaps understandably given the dearth of reliable
anthropological evidence 100 years ago.

Now, the anti-Social Darwinists complain that evolution and natural
selection are not always so horribly bloody. Quite right. However,
that does not mean that violence is never adaptive. Consider Genghis
Khan whose Y chromosome has been found by geneticists to be so
widespread across Asia due to the fact that the leaders of the Mongol
armies controlled the women in the areas they conquered.

Actually, RR may be advocating “power” more than bloody battles, thus
helpfully broadening the concept of might. No one has to tell us that
power is extremely important to human lives, but again, we should pay
attention. This issue is at the heart of a recent debate between Eric
P. Kaufman and Kevin MacDonald concerning the precipitous decline of
the West and of WAS(P) and Northern European dominance of the United
States.

RR is quite successful in demonstrating the ubiquity of power
relations, and then is surprisingly convincing in his argument that
striving for power is not only an essential and inevitable feature of
life but is highly desirable as a course of action for any man wanting
to make a success of his life (RR seems to be addressing primarily
males.)

About equality: one of RR’s main messages is that there is no such
thing, in any practical sense, and never will be; the idea of “equal
rights” is nonsensical. Instead, people vary in their abilities and
other characteristics all over the lot. People have always been and
always will be in a state of competition; so that the only thing to
do, really, is to strive to compete as well as one can and forget
about ever being treated equally. The only way to be treated as one
would like is to have the power to enforce such treatment.

An obvious implication for Whites in the West is that anyone happily
waiting for other races and ethnies to treat us “equally” or even
well, once they take over (very soon) as majorities in the US and
Europe, is an illusion. With the votes they will simply run our
countries as they see fit and to hell with us.

STOP!! Devout Christians will find the next paragraphs offensive! Read
at your own risk!

RR provides an extraordinarily articulate, and to me hilarious,
critique of Jesus Christ and Christianity. Might-makes-right being
his number one rule, he has nothing but contempt for Christ’s Sermon
on the Mount and celebration of the weak, the poor, the miserable. RR
values the courageous, the powerful, the ruthless. Why in the world
would any sane person value, desire, or want to emulate what Christ
recommended?

[W]e must either abandon our reason or abandon Christ…All that is
enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies — all that is self-
reliant and heroic, he denounces.… He praises “the humble” and he
curses the proud. He blesses the failures and damns the successful.
All that is noble he perverts — all that is atrocious he upholds. He
inverts all the natural instincts of mankind and urges us to live
artificial lives… he advises his admirers to submit in quietness to
every insult, contumely [outrage], indignity; to be slaves, de-facto.
… this preacher of all eunuch-virtues — of self-abasement, of passive
suffering. (p. 7)

Anyone who wonders if Christianity is fundamentally a malevolent
Jewish stratagem for emasculating goyim will find this treatise
exhilarating. Everything within the Christian church seems designed
simply to fleece the flock:

The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful? How divinely
glorious? And a Jew as the Good Shepard, who leadeth his lambs ‘to
green pastures, and quiet resting places, the pleasant waters by.’ …
For two thousand years or so, his fleecy flocks have been fattening
themselves up with commendable diligence — for the shearing-shed and
the butchers-block.” (p. 14)

With RR, not even the “golden rule” goes unscathed — on the grounds
that it makes no sense to follow it given that no one else does.
Shades of the alternative “Golden Rule”: “He who has the gold, makes
the rules.”

The theme extends to practical politics where “deceitful Ideals are
cunningly woven by dexterous political spiders, to capture and exploit
swarms of human flies” (p. 18). He follows with a searing analysis of
America’s “Declaration of Independence” which he says begins with “an
unctuous falsehood, a black, degrading, self-evident lie — a lie which
no one could possibly believe but a born fool. With insolent
effrontery it brazenly proclaims as ‘a self-evident truth’ that ‘all
men are created equal’ and that they are ‘endowed by their Creator’
with certain inalienable rights’” (p. 19). The subsequent…
“democracy” as practiced by Americans is viewed as an elaborate con
game, a view that should strike a chord after the recent bank bailouts
and the Iraq war.

We must then ask ourselves: Is the extreme altruism advocated by
Christianity at all responsible for the West “giving away the farm”?
Think about Teddy Kennedy and his Jewish associates who opened up
America to immigration from the whole world.

RR’s attack on Christianity and “equality” of course begs the question
of alternatives. As a friend recently remarked,

While many people (in our movement and without) sneer at what they see
as an emotional crutch for weaklings, the fact remains that the
birthrate is closely correlated with a hopeful, optimistic view of
life. No society has ever been able to function without a religion.
And it is most unlikely that anyone will be able to create a
religionless society in the future.

If that is true, and this writer agrees, a major contribution to the
survival of our people, the indigenous people of the British Isles and
Europe including those who migrated to the Western Hemisphere, would
be to develop a religious alternative to Christianity. Such a religion
would regard the survival of our people as its primary sacred goal and
hopefully would be more consistent with scientific knowledge. It would
establish communities of the like-minded of common ethny (as Jews have
done). It would develop either new rituals or utilize those imagined
as originating in pagan or Druidic times. Perhaps, as a friend
suggests, some existing Christian communities, especially those whose
main goal is “community,” could be gradually “retro-fitted” along
these lines. Keep the harmless features of Christianity, especially
the European cultural details, but throw out or simply ignore
everything that RR is making fun of.

What then do we now make of the main issue raised by MIR, the
relationship between “what is and what ought”? RR seems to be saying
that “what is” (e.g., human ruthlessness) determines directly “what
ought.”

First, we should note that evolutionary biologists/psychologists have
in recent years argued strongly that our values and morals do
originate in aspects of human nature (what is) that evolved
biologically. Actually, David Hume pretty much figured this out back
in the 18th century. This would be the first “link” — between brain
mechanisms (emotions, motives) that are adaptive and what a person
feels is the right thing to do even if the feeling of right is
logically distinguishable from what “really” is right.

That distinction is the basis for the “naturalistic fallacy” critique
of Social Darwinism. Oliver Curry has well reviewed why this fallacy
is, itself, a fallacy: The logical distinction between “is” and
“ought” does not detract from the empirical relationship between what
is adaptive and what a person normally values.

We must ask, then, if there is anything more important to us than our
own survival and that of our close relatives. If there isn’t, then how
could we do anything more ethical or morally correct than doing
whatever is adaptive for us and ours? For us, whatever is adaptive
should be morally correct, no?

But wait! Morally correct for whom? Isn’t there a flaw here in the
anti-Social Darwinists’ reasoning? They have in mind a morality that
not only applies to everyone on the planet but a morality of which the
consequences are beneficial to all of humanity, not just ourselves and
relatively close kin. Sounds like a corollary of Christianity! (Unless
Jesus intended that his principles apply only to relations among
fellow Jews.)

Such a moral principle necessarily stands outside of human evolution
in the sense that, according to all the widely accepted theory in
evolutionary biology, such a moral principle could not have evolved as
an adaptive trait of individuals. A moral principle is certainly not a
measurable physical force like gravity, permeating everything. It
exists only within a person’s brain.

This does not mean that people could not act according to such
principles. But it would mean that doing so would not automatically
“feel good” in the same way that helping oneself or helping one’s
family feels good. With enough propaganda, of course, nearly anything
is possible. But that’s what it is: Propaganda.

This is probably what’s behind the controversy over government-run
health care in the US: For most Whites, it doesn’t feel good to
support a program where they would pay disproportionately for medical
care for the hordes of non-Whites who now populate the country — even
if they could be convinced it was good for the country as a whole.

A universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity also runs into
problems because of individual differences:

1) Sociopaths/psychopaths apparently lack normal moral feelings/
values. They feel no guilt, so nothing like a universal moral
imperative to help humanity there.

2) The fact that, say, the desire for revenge is found throughout
the world as a human universal, would be consistent with it being
adaptive. But individuals will still vary in the strength of that
desire which is subject to the natural selection common to all
biological variables.

Finally, a universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity fails
to deal adequately with conflicts of interest. Individuals are often
in competition because of different interests: Hunters feel morally
justified in shooting a deer to eat. The deer, were he capable of such
thought, would feel differently about being shot. No common morality
there. Same logic within our species. What seems morally justified to
the Hatfields will not be to the McCoys.

So there would not seem to be a universal moral code by which everyone
would agree on the same ethical course of action in a particular
circumstance. Bye, bye Christianity.

So RR may have been onto something in taking his strongly Social
Darwinist position. His book’s heuristic value lies in the hard-nosed,
un-blinking acknowledgement that life is tough; one had better get
used to it, get prepared for it early in life, appreciate the warriors
among us and never go “soft” (except, as RR says, around close family
members and close friends!) If you cease being prepared, you’ll get
run over by those who are tougher and more ruthless.

MIR is not advocating indiscriminate homicide, since the real focus of
the game, evident by the end of the book, is simply “power”, which can
be obtained in myriad ways. A further caution would be that what has
been adaptive in the past may not be so in the future since relevant
selection pressures may change. What is adaptive in one situation may
not be so in another.

Long term, the unanticipated consequences may be the most important.
Biologically, it might seem adaptive to simply slaughter your enemy.
But as Daly and Wilson once suggested, whether one adheres to a policy
of “an eye for an eye” or a “massacre” should depend on whether an
attempted massacre of one’s enemy seems likely to be total. If they
don’t all get killed, the survivors may have a long memory and your
own survival and reproduction may suffer.

Here one might reflect on the Nazis’ “final solution” that ended well
before completion: The surviving Jews have displayed great energy in
obtaining reparations and hunting down escaped Nazis. The “Empire
Strikes Back” is the situation facing the British, as descendents of
once conquered peoples have non-violently emigrated to the U.K.
Similarly, Mexicans are subjecting the American Southwest to a
“reconquista” by presenting themselves as a useful labor force and
congenial nannies.

There is a lesson in MIR, then, for anyone attempting to protect his
family or his nation or a collection of allied nations, depending on
which level one’s adversary is targeting. For example, Whites in
America and Europe today are generally under threat. The lesson would
be to gain power, economic as well as territorial, establish enclaves
wherever convenient but eventually, as the late Sam Francis declared,
re-conquer the whole of one’s country. A few Christians may balk at
this, but encourage them to be hypocrites.

A slogan recently seen on a T-shirt, “Fighting Solves Everything”, may
be an oversimplification. But the attitude is a good one. Inculcate it
in your children.

MIR is available for only $10.00 from the Occidental Press. Get it for
your friends and relatives. "

Anthony Hilton (email him) is Assoc. Prof. (retired) in the Psychology
Department, Concordia University, Montreal.

((P.S. Fighting does not solve everything. Winning does. Bret.))

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RegnarRedbeard.htm