Dying of Despair: What Should We Do About Cultural Decline?

Our elite betters have being doing a little worrying lately about the decline of the white working class. Whether it is Charles Murray in Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, or J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, or now Deaths of Despair by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

According to Steve Sailer, Case and Deaton compare the "declining lifespans of working-class white Americans since the turn of the century" -- featuring suicides and drug usage -- with the much more optimistic culture among African Americans.

What's the difference? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that poor and working-class whites are universally devalued as racists and deplorables while blacks are "a triumphant race, celebrated all over the world for their soul."

In fact, cases of groups and tribes and nations "giving up" are not at all uncommon. Whatabout native Americans? Whatabout Russian men in the aftermath of the Soviet Union? And whatabout Germans that were universally convicted of war and race and anti-Semitic crimes after World War II?

My point is that groups and nations are giving up all the time. Just don't let it happen to me and mine!

But I also have a theory about this. I call it Little Darlings, and get seriously into it with "The Cruel Fate of the Ruling Class's "Little Darlings." My argument is simple. If the ruling class is saying how wonderful you are, and is shoveling free stuff at you, and bidding for your votes, be wary. They are not doing it because they like you, or because they care about people like you. They are using you as foot-soldiers in their power project.

And the day will come when they don't have a use for you.

I like to use the example for Napoleon's march on Moscow in 1812. He marched the flower of France to Moscow and spent the summer there. But when it was time to retreat then it was every man for himself and many starved and died. Napoleon himself, of course, returned to France in a carriage protected by an armed guard.

When you've been praised and flattered and patted on the knee for years, it is a shock to the system when suddenly Sugar Daddy don't have that twinkle in his eye no more.

That is what has happened to the white working class, and for understandable reasons. In the 1960s our liberal friends stopped obsessing over the exploitation of the working class. They moved on to the exploitation of blacks and women. So the ruling class narrative changed.

From the 1960s onward, it became increasingly unfashionable to criticize blacks, but trendy to criticize whites. Not surprisingly, blacks reacted to this new dispensation with increasing exuberance, while whites became more depressed and withdrawn. As black egos expanded after their civil rights victories, they increasingly shot each other in knuckleheaded beefs. Meanwhile, as White Privilege became a preoccupation of the press, whites increasingly shot themselves, or drank themselves to death, or overdosed on synthetic or natural opioids.

In other words, people really do care what you say about them.

Of course, people are now worrying about the white working class. What do "we" do about their "deaths of despair?"

Well, my advice would be the same as the advice of Frederick Douglass.

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!

And this is true of all groups that well-intentioned elitists decide to help. But then there are the ill-intentioned elitists, that are spewing pejoratives at the groups they wish to marginalize, calling them racists, white supremacists, and Nazis.

The evil of all this talking-up and talking-down, I think, is well illustrated by the situation of the Jews. Jews have tended to be a small minority within a larger community, and this has exposed them to the risk of being a convenient scapegoat for the larger community. The whole purpose of the scapegoat phenomenon, according to Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, is to get a divided community to unite. But the only way you can do that is to battle against a common enemy.

How do the Jews do it, and keep their morale up through Pogroms and Holocausts? They do it by creating and maintaining a culture of innocence. Jews can never be wrong, because anti-semitism and centuries of oppression. Sure, it works, but it also keeps Jews as outsiders, eternally vulnerable to a society that needs a scapegoat, as the Russian Czar needed in 1905 and as Hitler needed after World War I. See, I don't think that developing a culture of innocence is a good idea, any more than I think that scapegoating a small minority is a good idea.

And that is why I urge blacks and women to return to the cry of Frederick Douglass. "Do nothing with us!" Why? Because while it is great to be the Little Darling of the ruling class, there will come a day when you need to stand on your own two feet and when you will not have the ruling-class cheering section and the ruling-class pom-pom girls on your side. And what will the robin do then, poor thing?

Well, unless you have developed the requisite intestinal fortitude in advance you will perhaps lose heart, and become like the culturally marginalized all down the ages. Except the Jews.

Anyway, someone has been "doing something" about the white working class. His name is Donald Trump. He is telling the white working class -- and all Americans together -- to cheer up because he is going to make America Great Again.

So I say, take heart! And then fortify yourself with a stiff course in intestinal fortitude so that when the Trump Era ends you have the courage and the strength to push back against ruling-class Mean Girls.