Celebrating Western Heritage Pride

On the practical value in affirming pride in one’s heritage.

By guest author Immpresario.

The point has often been made that we each differ too much in the minutiae of what we believe for us to gather around a common understanding of a positive vision as a foundation for fellowship; that it is foremost the negative vision of our current anarcho-tyrannical regime that binds us in brotherhood.

I am not entirely convinced that this is the case. Wherever we might differ in the details of the ideals we hold sacrosanct, the one thing I see first and foremost when interacting with people at our gatherings is not a desire to “clear them out,” but instead a very real and tangible desire for a high-trust society in which the principles and traditions of Western civilization, American civilization in particular, are cherished and maintained.

The hard part is defining what exactly that means and presenting it in a way not only for it to be persuasive to those within our circles, allowing us to make explicit what we already understand implicitly, but also for it to be an attractive proposition to those not yet comfortable with our ways of thinking.

How do we define what is good and communicate it clearly and convincingly? It is a philosophical question.

Usually, when we say that something is a philosophical question, we mean that the question at hand has no clear answer. Is the man walking the dog, or is the dog walking the man? Would you act to save the five people trapped on the tracks but doom the one toward whom you’d be diverting the trolley? It’s a philosophical question, we’ll say, having become so accustomed to the interminable failures of philosophers over the course of centuries that the very idea any of these self-obsessed imbeciles would be able to produce actionable advice applicable to a real-world scenario is preposterous.

This need not be the case.

I remember very well listening to a series of philosophy of justice lectures given at Harvard by Michael Sandel, a cretinous snake whose joy in misleading his audience was truly an unusual display of malice.

At one point, Sandel is speaking on the topic of John Rawls and the veil of ignorance — the idea that in a truly just society, all policy would be drafted as though no one involved in the process could have any knowledge of what his own role in society would be:

You might end up black or white. Maybe in a wheelchair. You could be straight or gay, born into a wealthy family or living in extreme poverty. The distribution of income and wealth and opportunities should not be based on factors for which people can claim no credit. It shouldn’t be based on factors that are arbitrary, from a moral point of view.

For most of us, I trust that it is no challenge to see how farcical this is. We want what is best for us and our future progeny, not because this is all some random roll of the dice, but because we make the choices ourselves.

The argument made, however, is that none of us have any right to take credit for the accomplishments of our ancestors because none of us had a hand in building any of the temples, churches, bridges, railroads, corporations, or civic institutions that form our society; therefore, we have no greater claim to any of these things than does any other random person walking the same streets as we do. This is what lies at the heart of birth lottery theory, dispossessing and disenfranchising white people. It is perhaps the singularly most evil product of postmodernism.

In the audience is a young man, Mike. He questions what he is being told and offers a rebuttal. But the rebuttal is dismissed, and Sandel smugly continues his routine. Mike buries his brow in the palm of his hand and appears to be in deep anguish — he knows that what he is hearing is poison. He knows that what he is being told by the man on the stage is nothing but lies. But he doesn’t have the words to strike at the heart of this evil.

What I set out to do over six years ago was to describe the foundational principles of particularism so that no young American will have to struggle to explain why it is so important to appreciate and preserve his heritage.

The first of these principles is that of pride. In approaching this topic, I shall begin by introducing its opposite: shame.

How shame impacts human action is very well understood. In the fields of business, but perhaps more importantly in criminal justice, how humans respond to disciplinary action has been very carefully studied for millennia. The reason for the importance of successfully establishing feelings of shame when applying disciplinary justice is pretty simple: shame is inextricably linked to responsibility.

This phenomenological relationship that binds feelings of shame to feelings of responsibility is at the very core of every theory of law ever devised. It is the reason why expressions of remorse and the acceptance of responsibility play such a significant role in sentencing.

Humanity has from the earliest written records exhibited an implicit understanding that without contrition there exists no responsibility to atone for evil acts.

Most well-adjusted people don’t even require an outside institution to administer discipline. In a home where children hold their parents in high esteem and are raised in an environment of trust and mutual respect, misdeeds are a lot less likely to be kept hidden — as shame prompts a responsibility to own up to mistakes, both honest and dishonest.

But pride and shame are not different psychological phenomena; they are only the names we have ascribed to the extreme ends of the same scale. They are unidimensional. We might call this scale “esteem” to disambiguate it from the sin of pride, but perhaps that is a discussion for another time. For the purpose of this article, I will only focus on the practical effects felt by the phenomenological relationship which shame and pride share with responsibility.

Let’s say, for example, that you are expecting a child and you build a crib. Several years down the line, when that crib is no longer in use, your child having long outgrown it, it’s been shoved into a corner of your garage. Whatever feelings of sentimentality you have toward that object will be directly linked to the amount of pride you took in its construction.

If you recognize that you didn’t even do that good of a job and that you never put that much effort into it, you might condemn it to a bonfire. If you spent some time building the crib and tried your hardest to make something nice but also understand that your lack of experience or skill led to flaws in your work, you might see that it still has value and that someone else could use it, so you put it up for sale.

Or maybe you took the time to develop your skills, you designed a crib to your own tastes, built it using quality hardwoods, and took care in sanding it before paint so that there would be no splinters or rough spots — what if you took actual pride in your work? Would you sell it? Or would you give it a fresh coat of paint and hang on to it for your grandchildren to enjoy one day?

Whether we recognize it or not, the amount of pride we take in our work is inescapably linked to the amount of responsibility we feel toward being diligent in doing a good job and taking good care of the things we build. In the field of business philosophy, this has been understood for a very long time. People who take pride in the work they do are more likely to do a good job, people who take pride in their team are more likely to work harder to support their colleagues, and people who take pride in their workplace are more likely to refer their friends when staffing needs have to be met. The wider implications are, of course, felt more significantly. Just as individuals who take pride in their work are more likely to rise higher in the competence hierarchy within their company, businesses that successfully cultivate cultures of pride are more likely to rise in the larger competence hierarchy we call the market — while businesses that fail to maintain a culture of pride in the workplace will tend to fail or be outcompeted.

What does a society look like where people take no pride in the work they do because they stand to gain nothing from any investment of effort above the minimum requirement? Yes, there were the Stakhanovites, but by and large, the Soviet experiment suffered from the endemic effects of poor worker morale. There were other factors that contributed to the dissolution of the USSR, but the inability to cultivate cultures of pride in the workplace undermined any capacity they might have had to achieve a prosperous society from the very onset.

The obvious comparison is, of course, the capitalist West, the United States of America at the forefront, and its societal mechanisms that don’t just allow for, but directly incentivize, hard work and entrepreneurship. In an environment where pride in one’s work is encouraged because it results in tangible rewards and not simply recognition in state-funded media, the product is a society where innovation flourishes.

Especially so when the citizens of that society are given to a low time preference and have strong pattern recognition abilities.

Pride then can be seen as not only essential to corporate culture because of its role in maintaining a productive work environment, but a fundamental element to the success of capitalism as a whole. The same applies to military organizations and academic institutions.

So far, though, I’ve only spoken of pride and shame from an individual perspective. What about feelings of pride or shame on behalf of other people? How do they impact our actions?

If your father strikes you because you have disappointed him gravely, are you going to respond the same way to such a harsh disciplinary measure if your father is: i) a successful man in whom you have a great deal of trust, whom you respect deeply, whose temper is slow to rise, or ii) an alcoholic and a deadbeat who regularly lays hands on not only you, but also your mother, over even the slightest grievances?

Stefan Molyneux built his entire brand on the idea that all the ills of modern society stem from fatherlessness and a crisis in parenting. Much can be said about the shortcomings in Molyneux’s reasoning, but he is not entirely incorrect, for what he is grasping at but failing to describe is the central role that pride plays in informing our responsibilities. Our interactions with our parents illustrate this perhaps more starkly than any other available example.

Feelings of pride or shame in the people with whom we most closely associate profoundly impact our development as individuals precisely because of how integral these emotions are to our feelings of responsibility.

Feeling embarrassed on behalf of someone else might seem a little nonsensical on the face of it, but feeling ashamed or cringing when someone else does something stupid or behaves awkwardly is really beneficial both to ourselves and our communities.

The feelings of shame we experience when we watch fools online destroy their reputations and careers because they can’t keep their feet out of their mouths informs us of a responsibility not to tread a similar path.

But what about feelings of pride on behalf of someone else? Isn’t it profoundly stupid to feel proud of something that someone else has done? If we are to follow the logic of individualism to its extreme, then yes, it’s an absurd sentiment to affirm.

Recall what was said earlier, though. Implicit in pride is responsibility.

A win for a football team raises the testosterone levels of its devoted supporters, thereby showing a direct causal link between feelings of pride on behalf of someone else and positive health effects at an individual level. If the accomplishments of another set a good example, then there is great practical value in your honoring him and his legacy and in feeling pride in what he has achieved.

This principle applies to the small scale just as well as the large. If students are instilled with a sense of pride in the school or university they attend, they will either consciously or subconsciously seek to uphold its traditions and to maintain its culture. If cadets attending officer school are instilled with a sense of pride in their service and their command, they will either consciously or subconsciously act to preserve the traditions and culture.

A people that is proud of its heritage, whether it affirms it explicitly or implicitly, will seek to protect and uphold its traditions and culture, too.

So let’s cut to the bone of this issue then. Does it make sense for you, as an individual, to be proud of your ethnic heritage? The simple answer to that question is: yes, absolutely — it has practical value.

An affirmation of pride in your identity is also in and of itself an affirmation of responsibility to uphold the culture of your people, including the fundamental principles of Western civilization, chief among them being the sovereignty of the individual, personal liberty, and personal responsibility.

But you, the individual soul reading these words, did not appear on this earth merely by chance.

The abrogation of unchosen bonds is a central tenet of the cultural Marxists, but there exists no such thing as an unchosen bond. Just because you didn’t have a seat at a table and a voice to raise your concerns doesn’t mean that the link you have to your ancestry was unchosen. It was chosen by God. Or, from the perspective of evolutionary theory, you were selected for.

Imagine filling out a spreadsheet with all the data on your entire line of ancestry: first your parents, then grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and so on, going all the way back through pre-history and beyond. Once you’ve filled out all that data, select everything and hit sum. What is the result? You.

This idea of the lottery of one’s birth has been the basis for many an argument as to why moral obligations exist to care for others who in one way or another are disadvantaged by circumstances of their birth. It is also the basis of many arguments for why you should not feel any esteem for your heritage or your standing in society. The problem is, the entire concept of lottery of birth is nothing more than absurdist bullshit. It is propagated only by the maladjusted and subversive elements who recognize it as an effective means of attack against those who have a greater capacity for cross-species compassion.

But neither God nor natural selection operates on rolls of the dice.

You are the sum total of your entire line of ancestry, and there is nothing in that which comes as a result of chance. You are only the latest link in a long, unbroken chain of nothing but victories going back millennia. You have every right to be proud of that, and, as I laid out above, affirming pride in your heritage has practical value.

Suggested Reading

• “What Is Meaning?” by N.D. Wallace-Swan

• “The Land and Our People” by Charles Carroll

• “This Land Is My Land” by RedHawk