Unspeakabilities

     There are things we of Polite Society are not supposed to discuss. Indeed, throughout the history of Mankind there have always been such things. Mention of them was forbidden by custom and the threat of ostracism. However, the specific subjects within the realm of unspeakability have changed as time has passed.

     I’ve written about this subject on more than one occasion. It’s heavily entangled with this subject — the grand Do Not Touch of American sociopolitical discourse. There’s even more on that subject here, at the older Liberty’s Torch site. The difficulty of moving all that material to LT V2.0 is one of the reasons I continue to maintain it. But it will all be ported here in the sweet rushing fullness of time.

     Writing frankly about race, with proper attention to the facts and their implications, has made me something of a target. I get a lot of hate mail, including some from people who – drum roll, please – claim to agree with me. That subset has a peculiarly ironic feel; the mailer is castigating me for expressing his opinions out loud. While he’s gratified that I see things the way he does, nevertheless he’s incensed that I don’t have the “good sense” to keep them to myself. Ironies abound.

     But as some anonymous wag said long ago, “To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance.” That force has been swelling from the pressure of the most recent events. If the suppression – and the events – should be prolonged much further, there will be bloodshed to make Normandy Beach look like a mumbly-peg game between Cub Scouts.

     The first, fundamental unspeakability is that the black race differs statistically from the white and Oriental races in ways that are contextually significant. The three most important differences are:

• Intelligence;
• Aggressiveness;
• Propensity toward lawbreaking.

     These differences may flow from blacks’ adaptations to their historical environments, or they may have arisen from unwise social and political policies. There’s no way to be certain, nor is there a need to know. The important facts are the differences themselves, which are measurable, persistent, and strongly correlated with a host of social pathologies.

     This is the most unspeakable of all unspeakabilities, for it undergirds all the others. Even to suggest that those three subjects deserve a close examination – for the sake of proving otherwise, of course – is enough to provoke ostracism and public condemnation. The frank discussion of how an individual seeking merely to remain un-victimized should cope with those differences has been enough to reduce intelligent, courageous, highly accomplished men to untouchable status.

     I can write about these matters because I’m not vulnerable in the ways most other persons are. In particular, I don’t care what names anyone calls me. Draw the moral.

     The second unspeakability is the failure, supported by good-hearted persons of all political inclinations, to recognize failure when they confront it. I have in mind the failure of legislative attempts to equalize the social, educational, economic, and penal positions of American blacks with those of white and Oriental Americans. From the 1964 Civil Rights Act onward to the present day, every such attempt has failed according to the objective metrics available. Yet after each failure, their proponents have doggedly insisted that we “do it bigger and harder.” This reveals an epistemological error that deserves large font:

     A failure tells us that our knowledge and understanding of the relevant subject are at best incomplete, at worst wholly mistaken. By contrast, a success – i.e., an improvement in some important metric – merely suggests that we might be on the right track. The prolonged failure of one’s chosen method, regardless of how much “bigger and harder” one persists, is like having Mother Nature beat you over the head with a tire iron, screaming “Try something else, you ninny!” all the while.

     Legislative ninnies, being persons of little competence though much confidence, have to be beaten for a very long time before the message comes through.

     The third and last unspeakability for this morning is the demonstrated willingness of the worst people alive to demand ever-escalating race-based privileges for blacks while nurturing whites’ undeserved guilt over our statistically superior status. The privileges being demanded have risen all the way to immunity from the penal law, as the recent Ma’Khia Bryant incident indicates. Before this, few Americans would have believed that prominent public figures would call knife fights among teenagers normal, common behavior. But while less blatant than this, the behavior of Ma’Khia Bryant’s mother is more significant by far:

     The mother of Makhia Bryant spoke to reporters about Makhia, “She was a very loving, peaceful little girl. She was 16-years-old. And Makhia had a motherly nature about her. She promoted peace.”

     Such statements are not uncommon from the (generally) law-abiding black families, friends, and neighbors of a fallen felon. We heard much the same about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and most recently George Floyd. Among American blacks, racial solidarity trumps all other considerations. Murderous violence, no matter how well captured on video, appears not to affect it.

     Some years ago, I wrote:

     When a society makes special provisions for a particular class of persons, such that those persons have a good expectation of not suffering for illegal or antisocial behavior, it has committed the worst imaginable injustice against the persons in that class who honor their society’s laws and norms: it has equalized the legal, social, and moral positions of good citizens and thugs. Thus, if ninety percent of such a class is law-abiding and decorous while ten percent is violent, dishonest, or disruptive, the latter category will come to overshadow the former in the perceptions of persons outside the class — not because ten percent is a majority, but because that anti-social subgroup is identified with the class’s special set of privileges.

     A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished.

     The American response to the failings of traditional aristocracies was the Rule of Law: the fundamental principle that the law must treat all men impartially, regardless of their identities or station in life. The old shorthand for this principle was “blind justice,” meaning that the law must not see one’s person, only one’s deeds. In a society that respects the Rule of Law, a king would stand in the same dock as a trash-hauler, were the two accused of the same offense. All that would matter would be the evidence for their guilt or innocence.

     In the absence of a scrupulously observed Rule of Law, classes with differing degrees of privilege will emerge. The flourishing of the members of each class will be influenced, often heavily, by the class’s privileges and how effectively they can be exploited. Men being what we are, we will be moved to use those privileges in our own interest, both against competitors within our class and against other classes.

     Success breeds emulation. If there are advantages to be had from the ruthless exploitation of a class privilege, over time more and more members of the class will be drawn into doing so. Thus, the coloration given to the class by its privileges will become stronger and more inclusive over time.

     This is not an unbounded progression; as in all other things, a tendency toward equilibrium will ultimately assert itself. However, the mechanisms by which equilibrium is restored are always unpleasant. The deterrents that curb full exploitation of a class privilege, if any exist at all, will be applied by other classes, whether through the law, other social institutions, or “informally.” “Informally” usually means lynching: the application of extra-judicial, often unmerited punishment to members of one class by members of another. In the usual case, the lynchers come from a more numerous class than the lynchees, though there are occasional exceptions.

     Lynching, if it goes unpunished, is itself a class privilege. There are satisfactions in it that are incomprehensible to moral men who live in ordinary times. As with other activities with innate satisfactions, the popularity of the practice will grow over time. A mob that’s tasted the blood of one aristocrat is seldom satisfied with just that one sip.

     Lynching writ large is genocide.

     Ponder that in the light of the developments of the year behind us.

     This time around, there is a Last Graf. Moreover, it doesn’t take someone of my intellect to write it. Anyone could do so, though few would relish the consequences. It’s too intertwined with the unspeakabilities of the previous segments.

     A society that values domestic tranquility cannot abide lawlessness. Neither can it tolerate a group that claims supra-legal privileges, no matter on what basis they’re asserted. The only effective response to such things is forcible suppression: the use of all the means available to crush those who claim, by word or by deed, to be above the law.

     That’s why we have laws.
     It’s why we have police forces.
     It’s why we have criminal courts.
     It’s why we have prisons and occasional executions.

     But the proper use of those mechanisms to restore order and reassert the Rule of Law has been deemed unacceptable – by the mouthpieces of the black racialists and their custard-headed white leftist supporters. And incredibly, those persons have succeeded in paralyzing those mechanisms for a long time.

     Either we get them back into operation, or we prepare ourselves for this scenario, if not worse. Choose according to your tastes.