Reason #3 - White people are no longer my most important ingroup
In 2018 I moved from a racially diverse swing state in the Sun Belt to a homogenous red state up in corn country. This decision was largely motivated by politics—I was looking to retreat to an imagined Hyperborea free of crime and degeneracy where my volk had political autonomy.
The next two years were the most miserable of my life. But they were also among the most instructive, and ultimately were what made me leave WN on an emotional level.
To put it bluntly, most of my white neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.
And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.
I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “fuck you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.
To be sure, the Midwest met my expectations of being safer, more affordable, and less degenerate than the coastal Sun Belt. But it turns out this was a bad thing for my temperament!
It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings. If you’re a contrarian novelty-seeker you will quickly get ostracized in an environment like this because people like you are a genuine threat to the social order. You can make friends with 95th percentile openness people who see you as a curiosity, but when push comes to shove they will never choose you over the Shire.
It turns out affordability also produces a dearth of luxury and vastly less impressive elites. Gas stations and convenience stores in the Midwest are much nicer than where I grew up, but the city centers are equally less glamorous. And the people who rise to the top of the food chain are never quite as inspirational as they are in places where things are actually happening. They stop being sharp or hungry really early on in life—it’s like they universally have “big fish in a small pond” energy. They work hard until they can coast off a sinecure, at which point they become totally unremarkable and function on autopilot for the rest of their life.
It turns out that a cultural ecology where most quality women get married early on in life—either in college or immediately thereafter—is really bad for the dating prospects of a 25 year old man. In practice a society that encourages late marriage is actually much better for more bookish eccentric guys, who tend to be late bloomers in developing their masculinity and ability to seduce women.
Ironically enough, if you are the sort of extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual who gravitates to “trad” ideology as a young man, you probably aren’t temperamentally suited to dating normie conservative church girls who organically live that way. They much prefer unreflective stoic chudbots with rough hands and smooth brains; to these women any kind of emotional expression is coded as womanly. After you date around for a few years you’ll quickly discover that you are a lot more attractive to the bohemian art hoe daughters of the coastal elite.
Of course this revelation won’t come easy to an inexperienced young buck who’s only been with a handful of women. That hipster chick’s tattoos or stripper past or body count of 17 will likely intimidate you. But once you’re nearing 30 and have come into your own as a man, the same girl will seem an ingenue compared to your own triple digit past, while the churchy trad girls you once idealized as innocent little angels will instead seem like frigid judgmental viragoes who could never understand you.
Still, different people have different preferences, and I won’t resent someone for being more risk-averse or thrifty or chaste than me. Different strokes and all that.
But other faults aren’t so easy to dismiss.
The absolute worst thing about the Midwest was the lack of introspection I encountered there. Even smart Midwesterners aren’t very reflective, and they don’t seem to trust people who are. They have an instinctive disdain for the idea of examining themselves through the lens of history and cultural anthropology. Compared to Southerners or Northeasterners, they really don’t like comparing themselves to other people and thinking about why those differences emerged. People there would get very hostile when I tried to start conversations comparing their region with others where I’d lived, regardless of how polite I was about it.
In fact, many of them seemed hostile toward the very idea of someone moving around in the first place. When I first arrived a lot of people were genuinely incredulous that someone from another state would ever choose to live there, and thus regarded me with suspicion. Midwesterners seem not to like people who move. Many of my new social circle had never lived outside their immediate area and still were geographically very close to their parents.
This was bizarre to me as someone from the Sun Belt who had moved around a lot as a young man. Both of my parents came from vastly different regions of the country, and had themselves been raised in itinerant families that regularly relocated to where the money was. To me moving all the time is just something that normal responsible middle class people do to achieve prosperity, but in many parts of the agricultural Midwest there appears to be something of a stigma to it.
In my opinion this is a loser mentality. America was conquered by pilgrims and pioneers and hardscrabble immigrants—a good American is supposed to chase opportunity wherever it exists. When we smashed Dixie we were also smashing the feudal lord-peasant fixation on some cheesy loyalty to “the land”.
But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act. These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny. Instead they produced families that became weirdly attached to their generic little plot of fungible prairie dirt, and as a result we now have huge pockets of the country full of overcivilized and effete Teutons with no conquering spirit who treat outsiders like shit.
These people think of themselves as “Real America”, but they are in fact the least American in their outlook of all the country’s regions. They are the least individualistic, the least ambitious, the most inclined to prioritize comfort and safety over everything else in life. America has left barely any mark on them—in temperament they’re just a bunch of stodgy Rhinelanders.
Anyway, believe it or not the point of this article isn’t to shit on Midwesterners. I’m just trying to emphasize that I had grown up taking certain things for granted about White people because I always lived in the most “Faustian” parts of modern White civilization—the American Sun Belt.
As a young man I was always around the most adventurous and entrepreneurial segments of my race—the people moving to where the action was. I had always dealt with a moderate to high level of diversity, which made whites a bit more tribal and aggressive, as well as more worldly and outward-looking, and typically more conscious of and curious about group differences.
In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of white person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere. Certainly nothing like you’d find in a city like Miami / Austin / San Fran, or even Phoenix / Dallas / Tampa. This realization made me far less of a racial purist and helped me reassess what I really value in life.
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of white people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. My experiences taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense.
They have no destiny except under the caligae.
While I no longer consider white people to be my primary ingroup, race certainly remains a crucial part of my identity. But now it stands alongside many other important factors in determining who I relate to, including nationality, ethnic heritage, culture, language, religion, social class, profession, and so on. These factors intermingle and shape my identarian sentiment in hazy concentric circles—kind of a right wing intersectionality.
For instance, if I were stranded in a sketchy third world airport I would hang out with a black American before I would a Serb, but probably after I would a white Canadian or Australian or Brit (unless they were dressed in a way that strongly coded leftist politics or I knew the black guy voted Republican, in which case I’d probably choose the black dude). Ceteris paribus a black American is about as familiar to me as a white Frenchman or German. Meanwhile, nine times out of ten I will feel more camaraderie towards an assimilated Hispanic or Asian man my age than a white woman I’m not currently trying to date and have never hooked up with.
