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| Lana Lokteff in her racist propaganda video “Why They Want to Replace White People” |
Most professed fans of Ayn Rand’s are familiar with her having said in her essay “Racism” that the eponymous pathology “is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” But a disturbing number of white supremacists who claim to be loyal Objectivists, or at least to be deeply influenced by Ayn Rand’s thought, seem not to have taken Rand to heart, flagrantly ignoring Rand’s elaboration of those words. I am referring to the white supremacists who demand that Western governments restrict immigration of dark-skinned people from poor countries, often on the rationalization that such dark-skinned people are perpetually violent barbarians, and increasingly on the rationalization that these dark-skinned people are trying to “replace” native-born whites. These white supremacists who claim to be carrying Ayn Rand’s mantle simply deny, contrary to what their actions have made blatant, that they are racist and that they engage in the very actions that Rand’s essay identified as racist. And especially confounding is that this clique of white supremacists claims to be urging its bans on nonwhite immigrants in the name of . . . individualism. o_O
Among the racists who claim to be influenced by Ayn Rand, the twisted reasoning goes something like this: based mostly on cultural conditioning, or maybe even inborn biology or both biology and conditioning, nonwhites — mostly blacks, Arabs, and Latinos, but the racists can include people from India and other parts of South Asia too — are programmed to be collectivist. Sure, these racists aver, there might be some nonwhites who are individualistic, but they are unusual and therefore unimportant in the final analysis — the majority is what matters. By contrast, the only ethnic group capable of producing individualists in a sufficiently large number, these racists believe, is white people.
Then, continue the racists, nonwhite immigrants just vote for politicians who give them more tax-funded welfare payments. You could point out to these racists that in U.S. federal elections, the only immigrants who can vote are naturalized citizens, and that this rule applies in most of the USA’s state and municipal elections as well. But the racists just reply with made-up stories from Breitbart News and The Gateway Pundit about how undocumented immigrants and green card holders all illegally vote anyway. And, as the racists stress increasingly, the dark-skinned immigrants are instrumental to a nefarious plot to “replace” the native-born whites. Thus, say the racists, whites should learn to stereotype nonwhites in general as congenital, programmed collectivists, and should demand that the State use its guns to discourage and reduce such immigration from nonwhites. Favorite slogans circulating among this crowd include “Numbers matter; demographics matter” and “demography is destiny.” The racists then conclude by saying that believing and urging all this on the masses is what it means to be a great individualist(!!!).
These racists are not honest actors. But, for the benefit of any young person who might be confused by all this, I will try to explain how this racist pseudo-individualism is self-refuting.
“Individualism” Versus “Collectivism” — What Those Terms Actually Mean
Collectivism is the idea that holds that among human beings, the proper unit to be judged and acted upon is not the individual but some grouping of human beings. In contrast to collectivism is individualism — the recognition that the individual is the unit that acts, is to be acted upon, and to be judged. Essential to individualism is the recognition of free will — that it is only the individual who ultimately makes and enacts choices, and that it is therefore by one’s choices that one is to be evaluated and held accountable.
When it comes to judging someone’s character and moral standing — and especially when it comes to how the law is to treat a noncombatant in a peacetime context — the focus is to be on that person’s actions, which are almost always chosen. And, no matter how much an adult may be influenced by other people, her ultimate choice is, on a fundamentally physiological level, up to her alone in the privacy of her own mind. (If someone is mentally ill, mentally challenged, a minor, inebriated, or otherwise lacking in contractual capacity, one would still be on shaky grounds in denying that such a person’s actions are subject to his or her choices. When some condition impairs a person’s contractual capacity, that person still retains some modicum of choice in thoughts and actions.) Even when a law court recognizes that some forcibly inflicted form of harm was not consciously chosen — a drunk driver might have accidentally struck a pedestrian — choice is recognized. The drunk driver did not consciously choose to hit the pedestrian, but the drunk driver did choose to partake in a series of actions that made the hitting of the pedestrian a very likely outcome.
Human individuality and the faculty for choice are corollaries — to condemn a whole ethnic group as congenitally violent, dismissing the capacity for individual choice and dissension within the ethnic group as nonexistent or existentially unimportant, is to reject in practice the very concept of human individuality.
One can be an individualist and properly judge many people as a group . . . provided that one judges everyone in that group insofar as all members of that group are unanimous in each having directly chosen to partake in the same action. For example, it would be very collectivist for a European to denounce all Americans, or Americans in general, for Donald Trump becoming President of the United States and imposing his pathology. That would be unfair to individuals, as not all American individuals supported Donald Trump — he did not even win the popular vote. However, it would not contradict individualism to make a disapproving judgment about everyone who, knowing of his clamor for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border to keep Latinos out of the USA, supported Donald Trump for President . . . qua their role as Trump supporters.
To say that it’s proper to make a negative moral judgment about Trump supporters is not to assume that these people engage in cruelty in every waking moment. It is not to say they don’t love their children and grandchildren. It is not to say they always cheat their customers in their business dealings. It is not to deny that they ever did anything nice for anyone nonwhite. But it is to say, properly, that all Trump supporters did something unethical when they pledged to support Donald Trump for President — unethical because it has terrible consequences that were and are being imposed forcibly on those who didn’t support Trump, and because Trump’s own actions in public made it obvious long before November 2016 that his becoming President would yield such adverse consequences.
Hence, an individualist would not necessarily reproach all Trump supporters in their role as parents or accountants, but an individualist would properly reproach all Trump supporters in their role as Trump supporters.
Yes, an individualist can morally judge everyone in a group to the extent that the judgment is only on the action directly chosen by everyone in that group. And an individualist doesn’t go farther than that. An individualist doesn’t judge individuals according to actions they didn’t take (someone tacitly enabling and reinforcing another’s pathology is not really inaction, but a tacit action), and definitely doesn’t demand that the police exercise government force on individuals for actions of which they had no part.
What all forms of collectivism have in common is the attempt to elide that distinction. Collectivism is the attempt to evaluate individuals and hold them as being bound to chosen actions over which those individuals had no say, based on those individuals’ affiliation to some group when that group affiliation is not directly pertinent to the chosen actions. The collectivist feels comfortable ignoring distinctions in differing, or even contrasting, chosen actions among members of the same superficial grouping, as the collectivist presumes that it is only the superficial grouping that matters as a unit, not the distinct individuals. To wit, collectivism presumes that persons’ affiliations in groups beyond their own choosing are of greater significance than the persons’ own choices. (And it is self-contradictory to proclaim that one recognizes choices but that we should concede that every person having been born into a group not of her own choosing is the factor that informs and therefore determines her own choices. Such “pre-set choices” are a contradiction in terms, and the assertion is again to downplay the role of individuals’ choices.)
To summarize, the collectivist attributes a particular decision to an entire group of people when not every individual within the group personally decided to go with it; the individualist attributes such a decision to an entire group of people only as far as each individual within the group in fact made that decision for him- or herself.
Well-Known Variants of Collectivism
In civics discourse, the most common variant of collectivism exercised is based on political geography — the attempt to bind people together by law, as if they are acting as a single unit when they in fact are not, because all these people reside in a particular geographic area over which a single central governmental body holds jurisdiction. As I have explained before, that is Hobbesian Social Contract Theory. That is the notion that even if you withheld any conscious support for — or even vocally opposed — some tax or statute over peaceable actions and private property, the very fact that you occupy the same geographic territory as the majority that supported that tax or statute renders you of the same collective unit as those supporters, which somehow means that you did implicitly consent to that tax or statute with the majority after all.
Perhaps Amy, Rick, and I are all native-born citizens in City X. Amy and Rick are part of the majority that votes to impose a tax on the consumption of sugary soft drinks. I vote against that and loudly argue against it. According to the collectivism of Hobbesian Social Contract Theory, because Amy and Rick and I all passively fall into the same grouping — we were all born as citizens in City X — somehow I do ultimately implicitly consent to the soft-drink tax, notwithstanding my painfully obvious actions to the contrary.
Collectivism is also found in calls for a forcible redistribution of wealth and incomes by the State. The collectivism is specifically in the redistributionist’s refusal to distinguish how one individual’s choices differs from another’s — and the concomitant refusal to acknowledge that, to the extent that they operate peaceably in laissez-faire conditions, two adults having unequal wealth is the logical and just result of those two people having peaceably made choices different from one another’s. Mark Zuckerberg is billions of dollars richer than I am, but that doesn’t mean he stole that money from me or victimized me.
The absence of resentment, on my part, against Zuckerberg when Zuckerberg is enormously wealthier than I am should not be misconstrued as any belief on my part that Zuckerberg’s life or work is inherently more valuable than my own. It is simply the recognition that, inasmuch as parties are free and peaceful, the number of parties that willingly paid money to Zuckerberg for advertising space on his website greatly exceeds the number of people who willingly pay money to me for services that I offer. The individualist recognizes that Zuckerberg and I having ended up in different financial strata is simply Zuckerberg and I each facing the peaceable consequences of our own respective choices.
When a proponent of government wealth redistribution demands that the State rectify this inequality by forcibly taking some of Zuckerberg’s wealth and handing it to me, it places emphasis on Zuckerberg and me being in the same group superficially — we are both in the collective category of “Americans” or “humans” — while downplaying the fact that Zuckerberg and I are individuals who each made his own individual choices and are facing the repercussions thereof.
Indeed, the wealth redistribution is the attempt to use force to override the facts (1) that Zuckerberg and I embarked on dissimilar sequences of choices and (2) Zuckerberg and I peaceably accumulating vastly different quantities of wealth is logically inseparable from our having made different choices and trying to manage the consequences of those choices.
The whole purpose in coming to a decision and executing it is to experience the results of that decision. The choice itself cannot be divorced from its results (including its unforeseen consequences and the consequences that are considered a byproduct less important than the main goal that the choice was to reach). To call upon the government — which means the government’s guns — to obstruct someone from experiencing the peaceable consequences of her peaceable choices is to obstruct her freedom to make such choices. As far as government-imposed redistributions of wealth are concerned, the State employing its force of law to undo some of the personal financial gain someone reaped as a result of her peaceful choices is to impinge on her very freedom to make such choices. A governmental initiative to redirect Zuckerberg’s wealth to me, based on the premise that our common humanity overrides our freedom to experience the fruits of our respective choices, is thus a denial of individuality and a virulent manifestation of collectivism. In briefer terms, what is prioritized is the alleged social collective —“Society as a whole” — and the individual’s freedom of choice is reduced, sacrificed.
I know that many readers will find it unfair of me to attribute the disparity in wealth between billionaires and myself mostly to a benign difference in our choices, as many of these billionaires were born into much more advantageous circumstances from the outset — they had a “head start” over me — and no one chooses to be born into either a privileged set of circumstances or a disadvantageous one. As many other readers might consider it too long a digression from the main topic of this particular post if I rebut the “head start” objection in this post here, you can check out my rebuttal to that objection in this other blog post.
And, as Rand said, the crudest collectivism is racism. If persons A and B are of the same skin color, speak the same language, or grew up practicing most of the same ethnic customs, they are still individuals — and if person A partakes in an action that person B did not, then an individualist does not judge, directly reward, or forcibly punish person B for what person A did. Yet too many white supremacists, who claim to be individualists inspired by Ayn Rand, do just that.
What Makes It the Crudest Collectivism
José Inez García Zárate was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who made terrible choices that killed Kate Steinle. Jorge Garcia was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who did not inflict violence on Kate Steinle or anyone else, but was deported nonetheless. An individualist recognizes that José and Jorge are both individuals with free will, who made their own choices — even if they’re both named García — and therefore José’s actions have no bearing on Jorge’s moral standing or worthiness of remaining in the USA.
Yet I have heard white nationalists — real name: collectivists — cite the example of José Inez García Zárate to proclaim that Jorge Garcia and all other undocumented Mexican immigrants are violent and should be deported at gunpoint. As with forcible wealth redistribution, we find in Jorge’s deportation that the alleged good of the collective — the native-born white majority — is prioritized as the individual’s freedom of choice is reduced, sacrificed. It is immaterial to these collectivists that José Inez García Zárate killed someone and Jorge Garcia did not — as far as the collectivists are concerned, those two men fall into the same inessential categories of ethnicity and country of birth, and therefore José’s actions should influence how Jorge is to be judged and treated by law enforcement.In their interpretation, José and Jorge having superficial and unchosen commonalities proves José’s wrongdoing to be Jorge’s as well. To the collectivist, the very quality that determines the individual’s identity — the individual’s choices — is dismissed as irrelevant.
In the “Racism” essay, Ayn Rand’s words explain what I explained above: racism “means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions...” and that “a man’s convictions, values and character are determined” by circumstances “beyond his control. . . . Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice...” The citation of the José/Kate Steinle case to condemn Latino migrants in general is based not on the individualism of Ayn Rand but on collectivist presumptions. Such presumptions, Ayn Rand notes, are a “quest for the unearned. ...a quest for automatic knowledge — for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment.”
That is what the racist pseudo-Objectivists are doing when they dismiss Jorge Garcia as inhuman on the basis of José Inez García Zárate’s actions — too lazy to bother to evaluate dark-skinned immigrants as individuals, they apply their canned opinion of José Inez García Zárate to other Latino immigrants. These racists can say all they want that they were inspired by Ayn Rand and “We’re not racist” — but, by Ayn Rand’s judgment, they are.
In an exercise of such racism, Milo Yiannopoulos proclaims,
You’re constantly telling us white people are the source of all evil, that white people have all this stuff to apologize for. Well you know what? We’re not that bad. We did some pretty good stuff. We did Mozart, and Rembrandt, and Descartes, and Beethoven, and Wagner, and we went to the stars, we explored the oceans, we built Western civilization.
Can’t white people be proud of what white people have done?
The idea of Milo’s rant there is that because Milo and Mozart are both white, Mozart’s accomplishments are also Milo’s — never mind that Milo didn’t make the choices that Mozart made.😑 “We [white people] did Mozart,” Milo says. No, the opera Don Giovanni was not composed by “white people” in general; it was composed by Mozart. Period.
In her own lifetime Ayn Rand saw this sort of psychological parasitism in which Milo engages, and she brought it up in the “Racism” essay:
...the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her material grand-uncle was a state senator and that her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off the mediocrity of another)... — all these are samples of racism.
This reminded me of a rather disturbing boast I received online from an old man-baby who claimed (and, apparently, still claims) to be Objectivist. He spun this long yarn about how his ancestors were great Scotsmen, as if that said anything about him — and the implication was that of course it did. Sure enough, years later I learned he was delivering tirades online about Arabs and Mexicans, eventually going as far as castigating legal immigrants from India, arriving in Silicon Valley as engineers, for being “invaders.”
But the individualist judges a whole group of people insofar as the group’s members are classified together specifically according to their each having chosen to take the very action that the individualist is judging. As adopting and propagating collectivism in general and white supremacism in particular is an action chosen by individuals, it is consistent with individualism to denounce all white supremacists in their role of adherents to, and practitioners of, racism.
This is why Rand identified racism as the crudest form of collectivism. At least in the cases of wealth redistributionism and Social Contract Theory, these fallacies have some superficial plausibility to them. With racism, the sleaziness is harder to overlook. When a racist praises what he holds to be the collective achievements of people of his own skin color, it is plain that the racist is trying to take credit for celebrated actions he himself did not perform. And even more baldly ugly is how, in casting aspersions upon everyone in general from other “races,” white supremacists apply their dehumanizing prejudgments to individuals about whom they know nothing.
White Supremacists Presenting Their Collectivism As Individualism
I think that what I said above about individualism versus collectivism, with respect to skin color and “race,” is common sense. Yet I found it necessary to explicate because it escapes the comprehension of the clique of white supremacists who call themselves loyal defenders of Ayn Rand’s legacy. The phenomenon was of particular curiosity to me because the racist clique sounds intent on foisting the idea that native-born whites in general are individualists whereas nonwhites in general are collectivist, and the racist clique oddly seems not to notice that anyone who puts forth such a notion is directly contradicting himself.
The internal contradictions in the racist pseudo-Objectivists’ delusions are so numerous that I have lost count of them. The most obvious one is that because people of other skin colors have volition just as you do, you can’t be an individualist as you stereotype those people and deny their capacity for individual choice, which is to deny their individuality. To the extent that you issue sweeping and stigmatizing ethical judgments about members of a population on account of traits that are out of their control, you expose your own hypocrisy when you accuse those same people so disapprovingly of all being collectivists.
This internal contradiction is very apparent in the likes of white supremacist Stefan Molyneux who, by his own efforts, is still often mistaken for someone sympathetic to Ayn Rand’s viewpoint. Molyneux contradicts himself in statements mere minutes apart from one another in the same video — the one I discussed before, where he infamously tells a caller that people who disagree with Molyneux politically don’t deserve to be protected from mass shootings. Molyneux tells the caller that he should think of himself, first and foremost, as simply a member of a “tribe.” Then, establishing that the tribe is more important than the individual, Molyneux says that this tribe must revile “collectivism.”
Still posturing as the defender of individualism and enemy of collectivism, Molyneux propounds in a later video,
...the end [waning influence] of religion in the West had more to do with “I don’t want to be told what to do, I don’t want to have any rules, I don’t want to have any [unchosen] obligations, and I don’t want to have any need for sacrifice.” And the reality is that to maintain a civilization, it requires vigilance; it requires sacrifice, and it requires that you be passionately in love with something much larger than your mere mortal existence.
Gainsaying Ayn Rand, and similar to the totalitarians whom she fled, Molyneux demands the individual be sacrificed for the ostensive benefit of the collective. He even says, “I can’t judge any individuals. [ . . . ] No, it’s [social] patterns. I don’t care about individuals; I do care about ideologies. You can’t judge individuals; you can judge ideologies” — ideologies allegedly programmed into people by their skin color, cultural conditioning, or both.
And recently I came across a white supremacist who is even more explicit than Molyneux in this bizarre narrative about how whites, as a collective, are programmed to be individualist whereas nonwhites are programmed to be collectivist. It is Lana Lokteff of Red Ice TV. This was a YouTube podcast that started off being about UFOs and the paranormal but eventually came to be about the much more far-fetched pseudoscience that is “race realism.” As of my typing this, this channel has over 315,000 subscribers on YouTube. Fittingly enough, Red Ice TV interviewed Molyneux back in 2012 when Red Ice was still about UFOs — this occasion, in retrospect, shows us a moment when Molyneux and Red Ice were only starting to bridge into explicit racism.
In her video “Why They [Who?! Being Openly Anti-Semitic, She Usually Means Jews] Want to Replace White People,” Lana Lokteff pronounces at the 5:10 timestamp, “White people are rebellious and independent — a blessing but, right now, a curse. We don’t like being told what to do. We aren’t collectivists or easy to control like some others.” White people don’t like being told what to do? Someone should inform Lana that her friend Stefan considers that a detriment caused by the erosion of Christianity’s influence.
Then, consistent with Alex Jones’s paranoia about industrialization and biotech companies, at the 5:49 timestamp, Lana goes into what sounds like self-parody: “White people don’t always drink the toxic Kool-Aid: the chemicals [like H2O?!], GMOs, bad food, vaccines, etc. We shop at health food stores, eat organic, making a soft kale, making dependency on Big Pharma a bit more challenging.”
The alleged “defense” of white people by Lana Lokteff and the other racists is that they see white people, in general, as . . . collectively individualistic.😳 Molyneux has been explicit about this before. Citing the racist known as Anonymous Conservative (Michael Trust), Stefan Molyneux tells a sycophantic Bill Whittle, “if you drill down into the biology, you can see physiological differences between collectivists and individualists — between the r’s [r-selected people] and the K’s [K-selected] — which go a long way toward explaining why reason doesn’t work.”
White Supremacists Claiming Not to Believe That Race-Related Genetics Determines Behavior, But That Skin Color Is a Valid Proxy for Sizing Up Someone’s Cultural Influences — And, With Them, Someone’s Character
It is embarrassing that I have to explain something so basic to the racists: some whites are individualist and some whites are collectivist; some nonwhites are individualist and some nonwhites are collectivist. This is caused not by their skin color or even by the culture into which one was born; it is the culmination of one’s own choices. In some societies, the collection of customs — the culture — can be more encouraging of individualism or collectivism than in other societies. To dispute racists like Molyneux who conflate culture with skin color, customs themselves are chosen actions and therefore subject to change, and thus an individualist recognizes that a person’s character has more to do with her own choices than do the customs with which she was raised.
That brings us to a favorite rationalization of the racists. Some of them still insist that they do not agree with Molyneux that the genes associated with someone’s skin color concomitantly program someone to have specific customs, to be more violent or more economically productive than other people from other continents. These racists say they are ultimately concerned about culture, not genetic programming, but that someone’s skin color does indeed convey to them essential information about his cultural background and thus the likelihood of his being collectivist and violent.
According to these racists, because almost all nonwhites are collectivist, and because almost all individualists are white, someone’s skin color and country of origin are indeed reliable proxies in ascertaining who has been culturally conditioned into individualism versus who has been culturally conditioned into being collectivist. And, they conclude, this rule of thumb should be applied in law, with immigration policy in white-majority countries being consciously crafted to prevent nonwhites — presumed collectivists —from becoming the West’s demographic majority.
Again, as Ayn Rand noted, this epistemological approach is disgraceful in its laziness, being an attempt to short-cut through “the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment” — which takes place on a case-by-case basis — in order to pretend that one has arrived at a legitimately “automatic evaluation of men’s characters...” And in demanding that armed law officers of Western countries enforce such an approach, these racists would impose, at gunpoint, the fatal consequences of their own laziness upon impoverished nonwhites who seek entry into the West simply for a better life.
The proposition that immigration officials can properly discriminate against immigrants by “race,” with “race” being used to guess who comes from a “good culture” and who does not, is of course just another flimsy excuse for the racists to write off individuals as worthless when they know nothing about those individuals except their skin color and country of origin. The racist, being intellectually lazy, considers that to be a sufficient quantity of information when he calls for the State to apply force against other persons. Hence their empty-headed slogans “Numbers matter; demographics matter” and “demography is destiny.”
These white supremacists should stop pretending to agree with, or understand, Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Rand grew up in a culture that she considered to be primitive, collectivist, and violent. If she agreed with these racists — if she agreed with their slogans about demography being destiny — then she would not have come out an individualist in spite of the culture that conditioned her. And it definitely contradicts her when the racists proclaim that law enforcement should target dark-skinned individuals for actions that were not theirs, based on those dark-skinned individuals being the same ethnicity and coming from the same country as someone else violent — Ayn Rand was of the same ethnicity and country of origin as people who were violent.
In proclaiming that the cultural conditioning of dark-skinned people is all that concerns them and should concern everyone, these racists still deny the faculty of individual choice — the faculty that helped Ayn Rand rise above all that.
As what makes you an individual distinct from everyone else is the series of choices you have made in your life, it is also self-contradictory for these racists to pronounce that what makes them individualistic is that the wider social collective around them — the culture — molded them into being such. They believe that what makes someone an individualist is that he passively soaked in such “individualism” from the collective of “the culture” around him — not being primarily something he actively had to choose for himself to contemplate and implement, regardless and often in spite of the nearby cultural influences. In presuming that someone’s philosophic individualism is caused by a collective and not that individual’s own personal choices, even here they attempt to minimize the individual’s capacity for choice and autodidacticism.
When they propound that everyone passively developed into a philosophic individualist or collectivist according to his or her cultural upbringing, these racists are not merely presuming collectivist nonwhites to be passive drones that are predominantly shaped by forces external to their conscious selves — the “culture”-shouting racists even implicitly presume that of the people they call white-skinned individualists. These racists pose as individualists as they conspicuously give short shrift to the agency of the individual — even the very agency of the people they call individualists. Hence, these racists do not comprehend or practice any philosophy of individualism.
These racists keep shouting the word culture, but make it all too evident that they don’t know what it means. When they pontificate that individualists and collectivists alike are mostly the products of “culture,” they take “culture” as some primary — a Jehovah-like First Cause — that actively shapes all human beings who, individualist and collectivist alike, cannot help but be psychologically passive in the face of this “culture.” In reality, it is the individual’s faculty of volition that is primary. Human beings, individualist and collectivist alike — and of every “race” — are the ones actively exercising choices affecting the culture, either keeping aspects of it the same or changing them.
And the white supremacists make a sneaky partial admission of this when they blare that, instead of passively adopting the native supposedly-individualist culture of the West, nonwhite immigrants actively opt to convert Western culture into something more collectivist. But the white supremacists only acknowledge that these nonwhite immigrants can act on “the culture,” rather than it always being “the culture” acting on them, when it involves the accusation that any cultural change initiated by the nonwhite immigrants can only be in the direction of converting an individualistic culture into something more collectivist. The white supremacists take it for granted that it cannot happen in the other direction — of nonwhite immigrants affecting the culture in such a manner that individualism becomes more tolerated or even celebrated.
The white supremacists do not concede that these nonwhite immigrants, being psychologically active, are also capable of learning the importance of individualism on their own, possibly exploring aspects of individuality that too few native-born whites have considered. Ayn Rand wasn’t an immigrant from a primitive and collectivist foreign culture who passively assimilated into native-born white culture; having come from a primitive and collectivist foreign culture, she was the immigrant who taught new ideas concerning individualism to the native-born whites who had previously assumed they already knew everything there was to know about individuality. Likewise, the white supremacists would profit from considering that, instead of it always being immigrants from India or Honduras who should learn individualism from native-born whites, there could be a case where native-born whites might learn some new insight involving individualism that was thought up by such an immigrant from India or Honduras. Yet, for the ostensive benefit of what the racists deem to be “white culture” — their favorite collective — the racists would have the State sacrifice actual individuals at gunpoint.
And just so we are clear, if you say you want to ban (nonwhites) because of “culture” you are really banning them because of race, because you are assuming that they are all the same on the basis of ethnic origin. You’re not fooling anyone.— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) July 17, 2019
Conclusion
It is not that individualists are predominantly “made” by “the culture” in which they were reared — it is that individualists largely make themselves and then remake the culture. I have come across racists mindlessly repeating Andrew Breitbart that “politics is downstream from culture” — but these racists are loath to admit that culture itself is downstream from individuals’ choices. Among whites and nonwhites alike, individuals are less the product of their “culture” than their “culture” is the product of those individuals’ choices. That is why a woman who spent her childhood in a backwoods Czarist Russian Orthodox village and who endured Soviet indoctrination can emerge from such a cultural background as the preeminent author on the topic of individualism.
I anticipate that some of the racists might want to protest, “No, my having become a philosophic individualist indeed largely came from my own choices, often in defiance of the pressures of the culture in which I grew up.” Such a racist should consider that the same is possible of would-be immigrants from Africa or Latin America — the same would-be immigrants he has already dismissed as hopeless and deserving of nothing more than armed federal agents obstructing their entry into the West.
Ayn Rand stated it herself in a letter to someone who was neither white nor from a Western cultural background: “there will always be men who will respond to a philosophic truth in every country on earth.”
That is worth repeating. She did not say “there will always be men who respond to a philosophic truth . . . as long as they’re whites in a white-majority country with a Western Christian background.” She said there will always be men who respond to a philosophic truth in every country on earth. And if such people are being oppressed by their governments to the point where they are starving or at risk of being murdered, and therefore are trying to seek a safer and freer life in the West, it would be a travesty to Ayn Rand — and for the rest of us — if armed government agents block them from the same lifesaving freedom to which Ayn Rand escaped.
On Tuesday, May 7, 2019, I added the paragraphs about Ayn Rand saying “there will always be men who will respond to a philosophic truth in every country on earth.” On Friday, July 19, 2019, I embedded the tweet from Adam Serwer and the YouTube video from Yaron Brook. On Monday, January 27, 2020, I added the quotation and link from Stefan Molyneux wherein Molyneux tells a credulous Bill Whittle that ideological collectivists and ideological individualists are physiologically different from one another.
