the human condition

Understanding The Psychology Of Gang Members

A lot of energy is currently being directed into solving the gang problem. I grew up in a family full of gang members, so I have some idea. My father was one, my uncle was one, and my brother and one cousin grew up to be one. I went on to get a master’s degree in psychology, so have some special insight into the workings of gang member psychology. This essay shares some of my relevant observations.

The first point worth noting is that the mainstream narrative around the psychology of gang members is grossly inaccurate. This is because the mainstream narrative has been determined and advanced by middle-class people with no experience of gang culture.

Thus, there any many common misconceptions. In reality, people don’t join gangs for economic reasons. If they did, then wealthy America would have far fewer gangs than India and China, when the reverse is actually true. Neither do they join gangs because of colonisation. If they did, there would be no such things as white gangs. Nor would there be Tongan gang members, as Tongans were never colonised. Neither do they join gangs because of a lack of educational opportunities. The narrative that poverty, colonisation or lack of opportunities causes gang membership is pure Marxism.

In truth, people generally join gangs because they are horribly anti-social, and in joining a gang find a community of like-minded people. The vast majority of anti-social mentality comes, in turn, from two major causes: one material, one spiritual.

The material cause is really physiological: abuse and neglect resulting from shit parenting. Shit parents hit their kids, swear at them, lose their tempers in unpredictable ways, and fail to meet their children’s emotional needs. Shit parents fight with each other, do hard drugs, get institutionalised, break up with each other and refuse to get their own mental illnesses treated. All of this leads to immense stress in their children during their most crucial developmental years.

This stress leads to severe delays in emotional development. Brain structures exposed to massive traumatic stress in early childhood can mis- or underdevelop in a wide variety of ways. This leads to behaviours commonly seen in gang members, such as getting upset easily, which is often a consequence of a phenomenon known as limbic hijack. The brain is wired to react to threats to one’s person, and other considerations (such as long-term consequences or consideration for other people) are deprioritised.

The end result is selfishness. A person who is suffering naturally puts themselves first, so a person who is habitually suffering learns to habitually put themselves first. For someone who has consistently done so throughout their formative years, selfishness becomes character. People who have suffered a lot as children tend to put themselves first as adults even when inappropriate to do so – as if they were still children. Understanding this lingering trauma-based childishness is key to understanding the psychology of gang members.

The vast majority of gang members have suffered an upbringing characterised by severe abuse and neglect, whether physical or psychological. This is why the first thing that has to be understood about gang members is that they are, emotionally speaking, literally children still. If you would take the mind of a three-year old child and put it in the body of a 110kg male who everyone else was scared of, it would behave with similar levels of impulsivity, selfishness and aggression to the typical gang member.

A recent X post by Steve Stewart-Williams showed that toddlers are the most violent age group of all, and that people gradually become less violent as they age out of toddler mentality and grow into adults. Anyone whose emotional development is stunted, e.g. by traumatic abuse and neglect, won’t grow out of this toddler phase as fast, if at all. Some of those end up as manchildren with tattoos and bad attitudes.

It’s at this point where a reader might object that the vast majority of abused children do not go on to become anti-social or gang members. This is absolutely correct. The second factor, the spiritual factor, must be in play as well.

The spiritual cause of anti-social behaviour is even more complex than the material. Ultimately it’s a matter of thinking that evil is good and good is evil. This requires a complete spiritual warping, something that usually only happens in evil circumstances.

The main spiritual aspect is mimicry. Growing up trash like I did, I observed the high esteem afforded to adults in gangs. Other family members acted like older people who were in gangs, whether family or friends, were the coolest thing that it was possible to be. Men who had reputations for being particularly aggressive or cruel were afforded the most respect of all. In an anti-social environment like this, normal and healthy moral values are twisted and warped beyond recognition.

In anti-social families like mine – of which there are thousands in New Zealand alone – decent people are treated with contempt. As with pre-civilisational savages, kindness is seen as a weakness. Respect comes from having done time in prison, or having earned a reputation as a fighter. Children in such environments naturally mimic the displayed values of their elders, and come to value aggression and cruelty themselves. In doing so they start to climb the reverse dominance hierarchy of the anti-social. In this reverse dominance hierarchy, feelings are weakness, and turning them off and going down the psychopathy spectrum, a.k.a. “hardening up”, is an act of heroism.

A normal person would be ashamed to behave with the mindless, impulsive aggression that the typical gang member does. Gang members don’t think of their actions as childish, though, but rather classy, rebellious, cool or heroic – much the same way children rationalise abusing people. Do you remember hitting a younger sibling to “teach them a lesson”? If so, you have a good idea.

In a gang environment, however, all the common values are inverted. Reckless stupidity becomes bravery. Mindless sadism becomes dominance. Shallow preening and posturing becomes class. Perhaps worst of all, a soulless moral nihilism becomes dispassionate reason. It’s a total slave morality, but with a bestial veneer. A moral revolt of those not even fit to be slaves.

Perhaps the crucial spiritual aspect is a refusal to believe in any spiritual consequences for selfish actions. Of all the gang members I have met, I have never met one who believed in karma, and if I ever did I would assume that this person was on the way out of the gang scene. The universal logic seems to be that if you can escape legal consequences, then you escape consequences.

In summary, it’s the combination of bad material and bad spiritual influences that creates the anti-social mindset that leads to people joining gangs.

Just getting abused doesn’t make a gang member. Many people who get heavily abused as children become depressed rather than sadistic. Many swear off the idea of violence altogether and become the most peaceful people of all. A heavily abused child is many times more likely to become sadistic than a non-abused one, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Just being evil doesn’t make a gang member either. Plenty of evil people go into politics, religion or marketing instead of becoming gang members. Many would argue they cause much more suffering thereby. Gang members are rare: there are around 10,000 in New Zealand, which is only 1 in every 500 people. If the rate of evil in the general population is 5%, then gang members make up at most 1 in every 25 evil people.

The combination of physical and psychological damage is key. An abused child who has learned that gang members are exemplary has no real chance at life. It’s very likely they become a gang member too (there are multiple men in my family in this category). The only real solution – given that gang members are allowed to breed – is philosophy.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Second Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Second Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of excessive freedom. The Second Rejection is the contention that excessive freedom leads to chaos.

Order might be suffocating, and breaking out of an excess of it might feel wonderful. It might feel so wonderful, and the freedom such a relief, that it becomes easy to believe that the more freedom, the better. But, just as with order, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. When the last vestiges of order are obliterated, one is left with something more resembling chaos than freedom.

In the same way that a classroom becomes chaos without a teacher, because all are maximally free, society becomes chaos without a ruler. If you, like me, have had the experience of being a relief teacher of a class of primary school kids stuck inside on a rainy day, you will understand that even the perception of unlimited freedom leads quickly to chaos. The line between freedom and chaos becomes thinner and thinner the more freedom there is.

The valuation of freedom above all rests on a certain interpretation of human nature. The assumption of the Left – both its establishment and alternative forms – is that human nature is inherently good.

Here they go much further than Mencius’s argument that a person observing a child crawling towards a well will naturally act to prevent it falling in. The argument is closer to that of Rousseau’s noble savage, in which human nature, unspoiled by modernity, is naturally desiring of peace and goodwill for all living beings, unblemished by malice.

The main problem is that people are naturally selfish, even if they are not sadistic. The world is complicated, and it’s not always obvious if a certain action is a fair one. Consequently, many people just act on what is best for themselves, and rely on the outside environment to provide self-correction. Thus, simple ignorance is enough to guarantee that, given enough freedom, people will take advantage of each other. Without at least enough order to have law, social carnage is the result.

This is why the belief that people don’t need rulers is considered childish by the alternative centrist. It reminds one of children asserting that they don’t need bedtimes.

One can easily imagine what would happen to a society without any laws. Films such as The Purge give us some idea: there would be enormous numbers of revenge attacks, reprisals and blood feuds. The history of Anglo-Saxon England before the imposition of the Danelaw is rife with blood feuds. We know from psychological studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment that there are very dark streams of malevolence within the human heart. To some extent it’s only fear of legal consequences that keeps this under control.

The French Revolution is perhaps the most famous example of sudden extreme freedom. Although freedom was one of the rallying-cries in 1789, by 1793 the revolutionaries were already chopping off heads en masse. It seems that the more extreme the freedom, the more tenuous, and therefore the greater the need to protect it by purging anyone who might threaten it. This can, of course, be considered a new form of order, which illustrates the degree to which the pendulum of history naturally swings between order and chaos.

The common failure of co-operative societies is a further example. It sounds good having a job where you only work if you feel like it, because it affords the maximum possible freedom from slavery. In practice, few people really feel like it unless they keep their production for themselves. So very little gets done.

Perhaps the failure of Communism itself is the ultimate example. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” would be a great slogan if human nature was inherently highly altruistic, instead of opportunistic and callous. The freedom to choose not to contribute is too much for most. The vast majority of people will choose idleness over drudgery and submission to a boss.

The freedom to remake society is also the freedom to destroy everything good about it. This is never the plan, but seems to nevertheless keep happening. Awareness of this is what inspires the Second Rejection.

The major flaw of leftism in general is the leftist misconception of human nature. Human nature isn’t evil, but it certainly isn’t good either. The Second Rejection is also, implicitly, a rejection of the naivete of the Left. In rejecting absolute freedom, the alternative centrist rejects the inaccurate (both misguided and stupid) narratives about human nature that have plagued the Left since the beginning.

An excess of freedom is not limited to legal freedom. Social freedoms are also political, and also subject to the Second Rejection. At time of writing, the New Zealand Parliament has a Green MP with a reputation for coprophagia embroiled in an indecency scandal, and the Spanish Parliament recently produced someone similar: a man filmed eating his own excrement. The ongoing trans hysteria is another example of freedom having undesirable consequences. The alternative centrist happily says No to such dubious freedoms.

All of this degeneracy reminds of the madness of the Weimar Republic (which presages the Third Rejection).

The general rule could be described thusly: when social order is overturned, freedom is the result, but if a new order is not imposed – at least to some extent – the freedom will collapse into chaos.

Plato describes this exact phenomenon in detail in Republic. A lower class of person demands freedom above any other consideration, such as propriety: “In democracy […] there’s no compulsion […] to submit to authority if you don’t want to.” As a result, democracies lack moral authorities and moral guidance. People simply follow their most bestial impulses – fear, lust, wrath, greed – unless or until something stops them.

The end result of too much freedom, Plato tells us, is tyranny. People who are too free can never agree on what the right way forward is, and the all-too-inevitable end result is the rise of a dictator who promises to use force to smash through the deadlock. It can seen thusly that an excess of order and an excess of freedom both lead to dystopic misery.

Even worse, the struggle between these two visions of dystopia causes more dystopia. Without a mediating force, the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left fight it out on the battlefield, often resulting in Pyrrhic victories for whichever of the two remains.

The alternative centrist, in both the First and the Second Rejections, rejects both too much order and too much chaos. But the problem of warfare between the two remains: the pendulum of history keeps swinging, and with each return destroys the lives of millions. Some degree of balance needs to be struck between order and freedom. This presages the Third Acceptance.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the book that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Cheap Labour Spectrum

If you are incredibly fortunate (or unfortunate), you will have inherited lands that bring in such an income that you don’t need to work. This will place you in society’s ruling class. If you do not inherit such a fortune, you will have to sell your labour to those who did in order to survive. You will have a position on the Cheap Labour Spectrum.

This position, in turn, is primarily a matter of your negotiating position with regards to employment.

What is the best alternative for you to taking this job? For a member of the upper class, the alternative is to sit at home collecting rents. For everyone else, it’s starvation – there are no longer any commons to hunt or gather as they have all been enclosed. Everyone else is on the Cheap Labour Spectrum, where the upper class tries to pay you as little for your labour as they possibly can.

At the top of the Cheap Labour Spectrum are those in the best negotiating position. This will be friends or family of the upper class. Those who inherit the land usually have someone else manage it. These stewards of the great estates are at the very top of the spectrum. Often they are minor aristocracy themselves, and work to gain political, business or cultural contacts, not because they need to.

In more meritocratic systems, those in possession of the most important skills also have excellent negotiating positions. People who understand how the national electricity grid works, who can perform extensive surgeries, who can lecture the sciences – they will always be able to command an impressive income. They could be said to comprise the upper middle class.

The next level down are the unextraordinary professionals and managers. These people might not be brilliant, but they are willing to work hard for long hours. They sacrifice themselves for the landowners, and this is generally rewarded: the landowners can’t push people willing to work 80 hour weeks down the Cheap Labour Spectrum because there isn’t enough supply of these people. So they make up the core middle class.

In the middle of the Cheap Labour Spectrum are people like you and me (probably). Here one might have a small amount of savings or some skills of minor note, but the general trend is towards getting ground into oblivion. Even if one has a supposedly decent job, time and rent/mortgage pressures will eat heavily into one’s quality of life. This is the fabled lower middle class. In a time of high social mobility (i.e. not today’s Clown World) it’s an okay place to be.

If there’s an upper working class right now, it’s the trades. Many tradesmen today are earning more money than people supposedly above them in the middle class. However, one’s position on the Cheap Labour Spectrum is not a question of income, it’s a question of negotiating power: two related but differing concepts. Even if the tradesman makes more money than some of those in the middle class, he is still more vulnerable to mass immigration.

The middle working class, or core working class, are doing it hard. They’re low enough on the Cheap Labour Spectrum to not be considered fully human by the upper class. As such, they are targeted for replacement. All over the West right now, the simple retail jobs that would have gone to such people now go to cheap labour imports. One can see already that, at the lower levels of the Cheap Labour Spectrum, the quality of life is very low indeed.

Even further towards the lower end of the spectrum are people earning the minimum wage. These are the lower working class, the real precariat. These people have to exhaust themselves through work, but are paid barely enough to live on, and they consider the thought of one day owning a home a sick joke. In the modern West, this is the lower cutoff point of the Cheap Labour Spectrum.

Indentured servants are the next step below this cutoff. Indentured servitude might not legally exist in today’s West, but it has existed in the recent past. Over 300,000 people are believed to have crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants up until the American Revolution, mostly from Britain. A modern form of indentured servitude is when a people smuggler will confiscate a person’s passport while waiting for that person to work off a debt.

Modern wage slavery is akin to indentured servitude. It has been suggested that the secret goal of saddling young people with student loan debts is to make them more desperate and to weaken their employment negotiating position, pushing them down the Cheap Labour Spectrum. Many indentured servants in the Americas were granted land upon the completion of their tenure, a privilege never afforded to 21st Century wage slaves.

Serfdom is the stage below this. In serfdom, a person is bound to a piece of land as a labourer. In theory, the serf and his family get military protection from the landlord, but in practice the lord gets the lion’s share of the serf’s production in exchange for a few promises. The serf might not be cheap enough labour to be expendable, but they’re getting down there.

Slavery is the lowest stage of the Cheap Labour Spectrum; the purpose of the spectrum itself is to drive people towards slavery. Even here, there are divisions. The chattel slavery of the American South was one of the most brutal and dehumanising forms ever practiced. Barbary Coast slavery was also brutal. In certain other slavery systems, the law restricts the extent to which slaves can be abused. Some forms of debt slavery are little different to indentured servitude. In any case, to be a slave is to be at the bottom of the Cheap Labour Spectrum.

In ancient times, slavery meant literally capturing your enemies at spearpoint and enslaving them, or buying them off a king who had enslaved his enemies. In modern times, it’s more a matter of pushing your enemies down the Cheap Labour Spectrum. By opening the borders to hordes of cheap labour, the ruling classes push the middle and working classes further down this spectrum. This is why mass immigration takes place everywhere in the Western World, despite never having been voted for in any democratic election.

For the 99% of us plebs not in the ruling class, social status is primarily a matter of where one is on the Cheap Labour Spectrum. That’s why the number of dollars per hour a person earns is considered the ultimate measure of their value. That number is a measure of how much leverage the upper class has over them – it’s a measure of the degree to which they have not been brought to heel.

Escaping the strictures of the Cheap Labour Spectrum is not an easy task. Because so many of us are on it, a high proportion of us get pushed towards the bottom by sheer competition, making it harder and harder to escape. Perhaps the best hope is a revolution that destroys the modern labour system completely, or a mass dieoff that collapses the labour supply.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Game Theory Of Immigration

Imagine a situation – let’s call it 1970s Sweden – where 99% of the population are Swedish. In such a homogenous society, there is a high level of genetic relatedness. Even people who are not direct family will have a common ancestor a few dozen generations back. Any two Swedes from the same city have an excellent chance of having common family, even if through marriage.

In such an environment, the nation is like an extended family. Any two randomly-chosen Swedes will be some kind of cousin, even if distant. Going back 25 generations – some 500-600 years – means a person will have tens of millions of ancestors. In a country of ten million such as Sweden, that means multiple common ancestors.

Imagine an altruistic action that cost a Swedish person, but which benefitted their society. Putting a shopping trolley away, picking up rubbish, volunteering for community work, donating to charity, choking down rage when someone offends them.

Lets say this person’s pro-social action cost them 100 units of misery, but provided two units of joy to 100 people in their community. If 99 out of 100 members of their community are related to them in some way, that means that 198 units of joy were created for that person’s kin. If everyone in the community contributed in such a manner, then even with a few freeriders it would be possible to have a very high standard of living.

Now imagine a situation – let’s call it 2020s America – where some 50% of the population are of one nation, related by flesh and blood, and where some 50% of the population are from other nations. In such a heterogenous society, flesh and blood relations are not the norm. It’s more common for people to live in neighbourhoods with others who don’t share recent common ancestors.

In an environment like this, society is not like an extended family. Half of the people one meets will be complete strangers – friendly? hostile? no-one has any idea. Any two randomly-chosen Americans have a 50% chance of being part of the same nation, and a 50% chance of being as distant as any two randomly-chosen Earthlings.

Lets say, as in Sweden, that a person’s pro-social action cost them 100 units of misery, but provided two units of joy to 100 people in their community. Because only 50% of the community are kin, that means 100 units of joy were created for the American’s kin from that action. It’s an even equation, and we would expect, therefore, the average American to be somewhat indifferent about such pro-social actions. And they are. This is the main reason why American infrastructure is less well maintained than Swedish.

Now imagine an immigrant whose kin makes up 1% of the local population. It doesn’t matter which country they live in, just as long as their kin are only 1% of the population, and the other 99% are mere strangers.

This person’s pro-social action also costs them 100 units of misery and provides two units of joy to 100 people in the community, just like it does for everyone else. But there’s a difference for the immigrant. Only 1% of the community belong to the immigrant’s kin. So the pro-social action – which costs 100 units of misery just as for anyone else – only provides two units of joy to the immigrant’s kin.

Why not, then, restrict pro-social actions solely to one’s nearest kin?

This is the question that many immigrants end up asking themselves – and the more diverse a society becomes, the more others ask it as well. The inevitable end result is a low trust, dog-eat-dog society.

Imagine now, an action that cost only ten units of misery but produced two units of joy to 100 people in the community. This wouldn’t be a major volunteer effort: it would be more like putting one’s shopping trolley away or putting one’s litter in the bin. Those basic civil behaviours that many Westerners consider normal if they’ve never been to the Third World.

The Swede and the American would both do it without thinking. The payoff for both is obvious. But the logic for the immigrant is different. Ten units of misery might not be much, but 99% of the benefit from making the effort will go to strangers. Only two units of joy will be received by the immigrant’s kin. So it’s still not worth taking the action.

One can see, therefore, that even minor acts of civil respect are no longer performed once the surrounding population is sufficiently different.

These potential actions constitute a basic Prisoner’s Dilemma. Do I cooperate or defect? Co-operating here means to spend time or energy on upkeeping or improving society. Defecting is spending time and energy on one’s closest kin or oneself only.

We can see from basic evolutionary psychology and game theory that people are much more likely to cooperate if doing so would benefit their kin. They know that their kin are much more likely to cooperate in return. This is the basis of altruism. But there’s a flipside: if not enough of one’s kin would benefit from an action being taken, one doesn’t take it.

It’s not as simple as this, of course. People in reality don’t make such hard distinctions between kin and non-kin as in this thought experiment. But however you figure it, there are thresholds of diversity that, once passed, dissuade people from taking various pro-social actions. If the energy from a pro-social action does not help one’s kin but instead just dissipates into the wider world, then why bother? Many people reason this way, and it’s entirely natural.

It’s often asked by social commentators why people don’t contribute anymore. The answer is blackpilling: society has become so diverse that it no longer makes sense to. In diverse societies, people tend to “hunker down”, as described by Robert Putnam in his lecture E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. Putnam summarises the findings of social psychology research into diversity with “The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them.”

In more specific terms, consider the above logic in terms of support for taxation.

A Swede in 1970 might pay 100,000 Swedish krona in taxes, and not complain, reasoning that his kin will get 99,000 krona in value from it. Even if he assumes that there are no economies of scale from government spending, and that taxation has a redistributionary purpose only, enough of his kin benefit from the redistribution that he can easily reason society is made better thereby.

An American in 2025, by contrast, might pay the equivalent of 100,000 Swedish krona in taxes, and complain heavily, reasoning that his kin will only get 50,000 krona in value. “I can spend my own money better than the Government can,” is a common refrain in America, for this reason. The tax money one pays mostly goes to someone else’s kin. Any economies of scale earned mostly go to someone else.

An immigrant to either society in 2025 might reason that his 100,000 krona only pays back 2,000 krona in value to his kin. Might as well not even bother working if this is the case. Especially if the tax money that pays your welfare is paid by non-kin. Why would anyone feel guilty about being on welfare, if it’s non-kin who have to pay for it?

All this explains why the more diverse a country is, the less taxes people pay. Countries like Sweden, where taxes mostly go to help the kin of the taxpayer, vote for higher taxes than countries like America. Immigrants, for their part, vote for low taxes if a net tax payer and for high taxes if a net tax receiver.

All this also explains the voting patterns of the various American demographics. Highly white, high-trust states like in New England vote for high taxes, just like highly white, high-trust Sweden. White people in multicultural areas like Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta vote for right-wing parties and for low taxes. Blacks and Hispanics vote for high taxes and more welfare; Asians and Indians vote for low taxes and less welfare. These patterns are to be expected given the game theory of immigration.

As a final thought experiment, flip misery and joy around and think about crimes.

A Swede will be highly disinclined to commit a crime against a random member of his community, because they are probably related. Although many crimes, in practice, are committed against kin, this is almost entirely a function of the proximity effect. In terms of inclination to commit a crime, the vast majority of people are more inclined to attack non-kin, which is the main reason Swedes commit so few crimes.

An American who lives in a community that is 50% kin can be predicted to be only moderately disinclined to crime. Indeed, crime rates are much higher in America than in Sweden. Revealingly, white Americans in 95% white American communities commit crime at a similar rate to white Europeans in 95% white European communities. It’s a different story in the urban jungles of the big cities. There it’s possible to find whites much more violence-prone than the average Swede.

An immigrant who lives in a community that is only 1% kin has very little reason to care about crime. If 99% of people are non-kin, then crime and its consequences are someone else’s problem. Thus you might as well do crime if you feel like it. This is principally the main reason why certain immigrant groups commit such tremendous rates of violent and sexual crimes against the locals. As can be seen in the table above, Kuwaitis commit an incredible amount of violent crimes in Denmark, yet Kuwait itself is not particularly dangerous.

In summary, investigating the game theory of immigration makes it clear that as a society becomes more diverse, ever-more marginal pro-social actions get taken less often, and that society deteriorates. A study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that “Trustworthiness declines when partners are of different races or nationalities”. In other words, diversity destroys trust. Because the solidarity inspired by trust is the bedrock of society, it’s no exaggeration to say that diversity destroys society itself.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!