The Self Love in Group Hate

The psychological attraction of betraying your own people

A phrase we sometimes use about progressives and radical leftists is that they are self-hating. We use this phrase when we are referring to the phenomenon of white ‘liberals’ so emotionally invested in hating their own skin colour, their own nations, and their own ancestors.

Racial identity politics is of course enthusiastically supported by these people, who deeply believe in and support every identity except the one they were themselves born with. We are so used to hearing from these people and dealing with them, and they have had such a powerful influence on our society in recent decades, that we sometimes forget how bizarre and unnatural this kind of thinking is.

The human brain is naturally designed to be very, very good at organising its own perception of the world in ways that contribute to the survival of the individuals paying attention to their own automatic responses. Even in the innocence of childhood, some children possess a wariness around strangers that is by no means universal, but which is a powerful and obvious survival mechanism when you see it in operation.

I have two children, and both are too young to have yet received much in the way of ‘stranger danger’ lectures in school or, when they attended it, nursery. They have had a minimal but not detailed discussion of these things in formal schooling, supplemented by a few repeated cautions from mum and dad. One of the fascinating things about parenthood is seeing how different your children can be, even with you providing a consistent and shared environment for them to grow in.

My son is a gregarious innocent. Despite being the elder of the two, he has yet to develop any instinct of wariness whatsoever. In his absolute innocence, everyone is his friend. He will immediately start chatting with children and adults he doesn’t know. He will approach them, and act in every case like this person he is seeing for the first time is an old and proven companion. The depth of his belief that the world is a paradise where no ill intent is even conceivable both humbles and worries me, because this is the kind of innocence that paints a target on a back. It’s as terrifying for a protective parent as it is heartwarming for someone who has utterly forgotten ever being so accepting themselves, if they ever were.

My daughter, by contrast, is the exact opposite. Bold, bossy and demanding at home, in ways both sometimes adorable and sometimes infuriating, I have joked on several occasions that my daughter will have staged a coup and taken over a country before she hits the age of 16. But she seems to have completely naturally acquired a wariness that my son lacks. It’s not due to any gender based fragility as far as I can tell, and it certainly doesn’t come from us telling her different things regarding being cautious than the things we say to our son. But where my boy is as undiscerning as a boisterous puppy, my daughter will assess people around her, adults and children alike. She will hang back a little, or look people up and down, carefully weighing whether they are, it seems to me, trustworthy. She doesn’t lack confidence, and she loves showing off and being highly social, but there just seems to be a part of her that suspects, that watches, that is possessed of the awareness that other people are not, automatically, her people.

Psychologists, whether of the professional or armchair variety, talk about in group preference. There is now over 50 years of research on in group preference, which is the automatic tendency to favour a group of which one is a member. Henri Tajfel led a group of psychologists in 1970 to produce the first “minimal group” study, and countless variations on the theme since have generally tended towards the same conclusions. Broadly speaking, as a 2019 article by Scott Barry Kaufman summarised in Scientific American, group favouritism occurs early and always shows a strong and consistent instinct to prioritise group members over outsiders in a variety of ways. Kaufman described it like this:

“People are really quick to sort themselves into categories, or social groups, and to form a preference for their in-group. In-group favoritism starts early, and has been found in children across a wide range of categories, including gender, race or ethnicity, language, nationality, and religion….psychologists have shown over and over again that even under the most minimal conditions, people more positively evaluate their in-group members, allocate more resources to them, and hold stronger implicit favoritism towards them. Minimal in-group bias has been found in young children-- even as young as age three-- highlighting the deeply ingrained nature of this bias among humans.”

For convenience, I have retained the links that Kaufman supplied to corroborating evidence or articles, all of which illustrate that in group preference is one of the most ingrained and automatic psychological mechanisms we can think of.

Human beings will always form membership groups, and always show an inbuilt bias in favour of other people who share that group.

Given this instinct, much of modern political life becomes confusingly unnatural, which might explain a great deal of the alienation many of us feel from the political process itself. The science (as opposed to ‘The Science’) tells us that it is perfectly normal for a group to prefer its own members over people who are not in the same group. It tells us that even if the basis on which such a group is formed is trivial, even if the group members are told it’s entirely random, the instinct for in group preference is SO strong that it applies just as much with a ‘meaningless’ grouping as a significant one.

One experiment, for example, told children that groups would be formed by flipping a coin. The people leading the experiment made sure to emphasise the randomness of the selection, meaning that anyone could have been placed in a different group. Despite that, all of the children thereafter treated the group exactly as if it were truly significant, as if it related to some important shared characteristic or benefit instead of mere random chance. When supplied with things to distribute, they instantly decided to advantage their own group.

So, if we are predisposed to form groups and prioritise those groups, isn’t it odd that we have so many people today who have been conditioned, who can be conditioned, to detest a group to which they themselves belong? If we are talking about race, or even merely culture, we are talking about forms of grouping that people, through most of human history, have been prepared to fight or kill for.

Wouldn’t it make sense for everyone to favour the racial group they themselves belonged to, not as a moral endorsement of racism or supremacism, and not as a learned ideology, but simply as a rather obvious in group subject to the same rules that apply to any other in group? Wouldn’t their brains be hardwired to do this, automatically, without thinking about it and without requiring ideological instruction to do this?

If a group decided by coin toss can immediately be taken seriously, then so can the groups that are defined by innate characteristics like skin colour.

Woke ideology, and the critical race theory adopted as a now mainstream and socially dominant attitude, does two contradictory things. On one hand it seems to not only accept that in group preference is a natural condition of how our brains work, it also over emphasises the extent of its influence and the inescapability of its dictates. It says at one and the same time that racism is all pervasive and never avoided, and that it (CRT, or wokeness) is a method for escaping this malign force which touches everything. Whilst applying race as a lens through which everything must be viewed, it defines viewing things through a racial lens as the most grotesque evil ever engaged in by mankind, and the evil that motivates all other evils.

This leaves woke people and white advocates of critical race theory in a curious position where everything they express and believe is the contradiction of everything they express and believe. This functions for example as pure political hypocrisy, as the reality that these people talking about racism are based on their fundamental beliefs enacting racism, defining one race as the source for all evil and advocating a racial reckoning that continually targets one race for criticism, demonisation, and diminishment. But more than that, since it sees white racial in-group preference as the operative agent in all circumstances, an agency that cannot ever be escaped, the white woks person must constantly defer the ‘point’ of his ideology altogether.

Because if whites are inherently and always favouring whites in all they do, and if every social boundary and taboo and practice exists solely to prioritise white people, then the woke ideology can, according to its own assumptions, never succeed. It can’t create a non racist, non white supremacist, non racial preference society, because it believes by definition that white people cannot move beyond, overcome, or train themselves out of racist attitudes. White people are always going to be racist no matter what. Society is always going to enact white supremacism no matter what. The racial group preference will always be there, and is ineradicable.

In which case, wouldn’t things like racial sensitivity training be considered pointless-nobody can be trained out of these behaviours if they are white since the nature of whiteness is to be racist. Amusingly, most white critical race theory supporters recognise this is a problem, which is why they talk about allyship and always give those rancid mea culpa confessionals about their own racism. This is the racial bowing, scraping and apologising you must do to end racism and escape your collective guilt…but you can’t end it anyway and the method I’m demanding you adopt doesn’t work.

These theories, which of course are simply race hate theories that call themselves a solution to race hate theories, cannot provide any kind of logical framework for their own existence and development. They can’t answer this question:

If white racism (the ultimate in group preference, apparently) is so dominant and so pervasive and so inescapable, where does the ability to transcend it, even temporarily, come from? Where does a theory about white racism come from, and how can white people be following it, and how can it be so powerful within the system supposedly designed solely to prevent such opposition to its racism ever succeeding?

If in group preference really is deeply hardwired into our brains, hating your own race should, you would think, only ever be a perverse and despised minority reflex, not an influential and significant force. And if what critical race theory says about whites is actually true, then there shouldn’t be any whites prepared to ally with other races or challenge the ‘white supremacist system’ either.

The greatest argument against the assumptions of white critical race theory advocates, is the existence of white critical race theory advocates. Just as the greatest argument against the truth of the assertions of wealthy black individuals regarding racism, is the existence of their prominence and wealth within the system they claim is oppressing them.

It’s long been the case, of course, that white people have seen their collective racial consciousness, their awareness that they exist as a group, suppressed and defined as an evil. Being aware of your whiteness in an affirmative or positive sense is defined as white supremacism, and the Great Crime of our age. By contrast, it’s also long been the case that collective racial consciousness is encouraged, celebrated and approved when it comes from non-white races. Black racial consciousness is officially condoned and heavily funded.

How this situation came about in majority white nations where in group preference is the most natural and influential psychological impetus we know is pretty remarkable. It required multiple generations of direct political action intended to establish this vast hypocrisy. White western politicians, for generations, had to be working against the natural instincts of in-group preference. White western culture had to undergo a psychological operation or series of such operations that never relented, and never lost, each one normalising levels of cultural and racial masochism few if any human societies had ever previously displayed. And through this long process, every more naturally inclined leader and opinion former had to be suppressed and defined as ‘another Hitler’.

All of this, too, had to operate continuously and powerfully despite the ever present, readily available, easily confirmed truth….that no other race on Earth was doing the same thing, that in every other region no such bizarre ethnic, racial and cultural masochism, no such denial of one’s own group identity and no such prioritisation of all other identities, existed. Indeed, all this occurred whilst collective racial consciousness and in group preference increased everywhere else. Anti colonial movements, for example, were specifically pro the particular racial groups of the particular former colonies decoupling from the old European empires.

An interesting case in point here is Japan, which Joe Biden has just criticised as a “xenophobic” nation. Japan had a savage race based policy of supremacism in the early to mid 20th century with abuses to its name far worse than those ascribed to the British Empire, and equal in many ways to those enacted by Nazi Germany. It performed murderous and torturous experiments on Chinese captives it regarded as sub-humans. Yet unlike its western counterpart Germany it did not rush to embrace national and racial self loathing after WWII. It did not, unlike European powers, suppose that it’s brief colonising period required it to, in a fit of guilt, fling open its borders and rapidly replace a Japanese population with a non Japanese population. Instead it retained some of the strictest immigration laws in the world, with almost no criticism until today for doing so.

Something inoculated Japan against the hatred of the culture and people of a colonising power, and that was not that Japan behaved better than European nations. It was that the Japanese were not white, and therefore the entire structure and ethos of the various supposed routes out of racism did not apply to Japanese crimes. Which suggests that these ideologies were never intended to address racism, really, but to attack whiteness, to allow racism where it had not before existed (as a tool for globalism).

The reason Japan is finally attacked along the same lines as western nations, at least externally, is that the project of racism against white people has already won, has already normalised massive demographic replacement in western nations. That process has been running since WWII and is now a very smooth machine, that victim is already neatly trussed. The spider of globalism must finally therefore turn its attention to fresh victims to drain and destroy, whether that’s through war in Ukraine aimed at Russian collapse, or unsubtle rhetoric aimed at the opening of Japan’s borders and the beginning of an end for its racial homogeneity.

Bit if in group racial consciousness and preference is natural, how were white Europeans, Brits, Canadians and Americans persuaded to lose that in group racial preference? How were multiple peoples born with distinct histories and features, in lands they had but recently shed blood to preserve, persuaded to reach the point we are at today, where still existing majorities are treated as an inferior and powerless group within their home nations? It is, of course, the teaching they received, and the Marxist then Cultural Marxist nature of that teaching (which is why these attitudes of hating your own group are strongest in universities).

But the teaching of national and racial self loathing would not work if it didn’t have a psychological carrot to supply, as well as a stick. Even the dumbest and most indoctrinated student has to get something out of that denial of natural in group preference that their brain is biologically configured to prefer. What is the psychological reward, the dopamine hit, the sugar rush of benefit that allows an individual to adopt race hate theories describing their own race?

Self love. Narcissistic affirmation of the worst and most anti social traits an individual can possess.

Under wokeness and CRT the white adopter of these attitudes sacrifices his group for himself. The denial of the natural affinity of the group is the ultimate affirmation of the perfection of the self. When an individual hates the group he was born into, when he accepts a definition of that group as inherently worthless, his acceptance become his own worth.

If my group is naturally worthless, and yet coming from that group I still manage to recognise their worthlessness, then I must be particularly worthy, I must be a truly exceptional individual to transcend my whiteness, to overcome the supposed conditioning imposed by my supposedly white supremacist culture. Perversely, the squirming willingness to be punished and berated for a group trait, equates to the singing of choirs of angels around the throne of the Self. Group mortification becomes individual apotheosis. Like some medieval flagellant proving their sanctity by whipping their own flesh and taking immense pride in the humility of self harm, the racial flagellant whips his nation, his ancestors, and anyone possessed of his own skin colour. Group hate, hatred of your own group, is self love.

It’s a vanity saying ‘I am better than all my kind’.

That’s the appeal, and for people who cannot access vanity by actual individual qualities (by achievement, by looks, or by some exceptional quality they actually possess) it’s especially appealing. It’s an instant shortcut to superiority, and all it takes is the adoption of an ideology with ready packaged opinions and the complete betrayal of your own people.

Nor is it whites alone who are experiencing this process. No level of group achievement makes a group too worthy to be subject to this perversion of natural instinct-in fact, high achieving groups suffer most from the revenge of low achieving members. Historic success is cast as moral crime. Even having been subject to incredible levels of persecution as a group does not protect from this inversion of the natural feelings of in group preference.

In the current wave of antisemitism and Jew hatred in the US for example, in the shameful Hamas supporting protests that have followed the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, we find….a young, female, educated Jewish activist. She, like the white politicians and woke students who decry their own whiteness, gains individual validation and pride out of the gross spectacle of betraying the group she was born into.

I am significant and special, because I deny what I am.

Such people would not exist without that group hatred being funded by malign billionaires and foreign nations, but at the same time such individuals could not be purchased without the reward of Self Love they obtain with every display of Group Hate.