The Will to Truth

One of the key steps in my progress toward conscious race realism (as with many in our cause, it had been latent and waiting in me for a long time) came in my university days. This was no stark experience of the injustice of affirmative action or racial quotas; nor was I victim of crime at the hands of “minority groups” (setting aside, of course, the time a pair of Mexicans, mindless on crystal meth, broke into my school apartment and began to cook fish on the stove, plastic wrapping and all—but that is a different story). My college, all told, was relatively untouched by the egalitarian madness that even in those days was beginning to run rampant through American academia; and it is a testament to this particular college’s concern for merit, that I never recall hearing complaint regarding the very small number of “minority” students.

In my first year there, I happened to make the acquaintance of one of these, a young Black man by the name of T. He was a gregarious fellow to whom nature had gifted an intelligence unusual to his people, preserving meanwhile certain other readily identifiably Black traits and habits, almost to the point of caricature. A characteristic scene—I recall T. sitting in the lunch hall talking Plato, while he worked his way through a plate heaped with what must have been twenty drumsticks of fried chicken.

T.’s stamina in university, however, did not match his stamina at the table; within only a few months he had been expelled for breach of the college’s strict attendance standards. He had failed over a dozen times to awaken for his 9:00 o’clock lessons, for he had been passing entire nights gambling at the stock exchange, convinced that he would strike it rich and drop out of school. (No doubt this behavior in a Black man will amaze my readers.)

T. was a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant, and much of our debate centered on the question of the literal veracity of the Bible. I was in those folly days of my youth a militant atheist, and I sought with all my force to convince T. of the irrationality of his views. I spared no effort in this endeavor, but spent long hours studying this or that aspect of the question so as to confute him with my latest findings.

But by and by I realized something: T., despite his intellect, was on some deep level perfectly indifferent to the relevance of these facts or arguments. He had not come to university to study or to learn, or even to bolster his own beliefs with fact and argument; while I was poring over relevant books in the library, he was catching up on the sleep he had lost to the bourse. Surely, part of this was owed to that same trait which finally brought his expulsion—that trait which we might term “high time preference,” and an older generation might have called laziness, and an older and nobler generation yet lack of self-control. But there was something else, something deeper here: T., despite his intelligence, in some fundamental way lacked a concern for the truth.

T., of course, is but a single man. Yet what I noted in T. in those days, I have found echoed repeatedly and distinctly in numerous cases since, and indeed even in some of the foremost representatives of the Black community in America today—men like Cornel West, Eric Dyson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. In many cases, these men enjoy an exceptional IQ, which is palpable in their speeches and their writing; but although the question of relative IQ among the races is a convenient handle for demonstrating racial differences, IQ is but a single factor among many in the profound divergences between the races. In point of fact the races differ on the basis of their overall character much more than of this or that independent trait; each individual trait is given its quality and meaning by that character, rather than the other way around.

In the present case: men of equivalent IQ from the various races will, despite this basic and confirmable point of similarity, not think in the same way. They will manifest radically different approaches to argumentation, rationality, the question of what constitutes proof, etc. Logic, reason, dialectic, which we of the West are accustomed to considering universal human values, are in point of fact widely cultivated, as ends in-and-of-themselves, only among us. Only among Whites is IQ, or better say intelligence, tied to an idea, be it ever so incomplete, ever so vague, of the truth.

The darker races are well willing to lie on behalf of their peoples—a point which too many Whites have yet to grasp—but how many of them are willing to champion the truth on behalf of their peoples? Is it any wonder? When the South African Blacks have stolen the land of the Whites, we all know that those farms will grow wild and fallow, and that the fruit will rot from the vine, precisely as it has done in Zimbabwe: for to plant a seed or turn the soil is already to throw one’s being futureward; it is already to live past oneself. The entire terrain of the mind is like that Rhodesian earth: tended almost exclusively by men of European descent, coveted and abused by men whose ancestors for centuries had ignorantly trampled it. These peoples have not the patience to await the growth of a single crop: how then could they await the growth of the truth, which is so slow-maturing a timber that one might never see its fruition?

These peoples say “truth,” but they mean: “my desire.” It was the “truth” of T. that the Bible meant precisely what he wanted it to mean. It is a “truth” to Julius Malema that when the Boers are all massacred or forced on pain of death to abandon their lands, leaving behind them the keys to their tractors and their homes, the Blacks who inherit these properties will thrive off of them automatically and effortlessly. It is a “truth” of Black Lives Matter that young Black men are gunned down everywhere by bigoted policemen for no reason but the color of their skin, and of Ta-Nehisi Coates that reparations will mitigate the racial disparities in the United States. And, albeit in a somewhat different hue, with a somewhat different character, it is a “truth” for the Arab Muslim, that whatever the Qu’ran states regarding the justice of war and deceit against the infidel must be carried out as it is written: for “truth” and “faith,” “reason” and “belief,” are one and the same thing to him. Even to debate such people is so much wasted breath—unless we do so with an eye to attaining something beyond merely convincing them.

So far as the Jews go—but must I really say it? Almost no one calls into question their brightness—but that intelligence of theirs is almost everywhere the slave of some agenda, made to serve the advocacy and defense of their people, made to distort the clean clear rays of reason, so that these do not go shining light on the wrong subjects. Do not the Jews, in general and with occasional illustrious exceptions, prove precisely that intellect is not enough?

Thus the Asiatics, too: though our argumentation has better home with them, still they have almost always given greater credence to tradition than to truth; they understand truth as that which accords with authority, that which is imposed by the past. This, quite despite the Western-style revolutions which swept Asia in the last century; one has but to analyze the new societies that have replaced the old to see that the basic nature of these peoples remains unchanged. They can be rational to a greater extent than Westerners at times: but theirs is a utilitarian rationality in the main, and has little to do with the Divine Madness of which Plato spoke.

By the original Socratic idea of truth, truth is that which one seeks but never attains. Put in our scientistic language, the love of truth reduces “time preference” to zero, or widens the time horizon to such a point that it vaporizes and vanishes. This quest exists nowhere but in the White West: we of the West, and we alone, are truth-tenders. When Socrates dedicated his life to disproving what the God had said, that was Western of him. When Pilates, faced with the “truth” of a Jewish firebrand, expressed his immortal skepticism, that was Western. It is characteristic of Whites that they will not defend even their own rights, if they are not furnished arguments and reasons to do so. It is characteristic of Western societies that metapolitical critiques of existing regimes might lead to instability and even revolution in the same. It is characteristic of Western laws to protect, to greater or lesser extent, freedom of speech, precisely because we value truth and the fearless search for the truth. The great men of the West, be they poets or explorers or thinkers, seek audaciously to pierce the most distant horizon to discover what it conceals, despite the dragons that may be lurking there. Even in our science, the single unanalyzed presupposition is the value of knowledge. The idea or the ideal of truth is ubiquitous in our society; nor can our society be explained without reference to it.

We are speaking here of a fundamental root of the Western genius, in the older sense of that word—our guiding spirit, almost a divine impetus and enthusiasm, which has governed the greater movements of our peoples. Philosophy as it was known by the Greeks arose in no other part of the world; it is our tradition, our tradition-defying tradition, whose flame has been carried through different societies and regimes—but almost always by men of White descent. Spengler called this the Faustian element of the modern soul, taking it with something like fatalism and without critique; Nietzsche supplied that critique, and profoundly, in his Genealogy of Morality, calling this quality of ours the will to truth, and tracing it back, with justice, to our very origins in Ancient Greece.

Supposing you possessed an utterly unique tree of unmatched splendor, whose blossoms shed light and whose fruits granted life to the soul—would you not do everything possible to keep it safe, to shield it from all harm and all damage, to nourish it and to see to it that this utterly matchless plant were preserved and made to thrive? And is this Occidental love of truth not precisely such a tree, only infinitely more to be cherished, and is it not precisely now threatened, as never before, with drought, flame, and uprooting?

If the Whites are erased from this world, or have all sense of their higher destiny sponged from their memories and their consciences, no hand will recall how to tend the orchards of our culture and our heritage. They will wither and die; and the will to truth, that enigmatic, dangerous, audacious, irreplaceable, disquieting will to truth, which is our pride and our birthright, our might and our glory, will perish with it.