BY DANIEL JUPP

A phrase we sometimes use about progressives and radical leftists is that they are self-hating. We use this phrase when we are referring to the phenomenon of white ‘liberals’ so emotionally invested in hating their own skin colour, their own nations, and their own ancestors. Think of most of the Labour Party today.

Racial identity politics is of course enthusiastically supported by these people, who deeply believe in and support every identity except the one they were themselves born with.

We are so used to hearing from these people and dealing with them, and they have had such a powerful influence on our society in recent decades, that we sometimes forget how bizarre and unnatural their kind of thinking is. For psychologists talk about ‘in-group’ preference. There is now over 50 years of research on in group preference, which is the automatic tendency to favour a group of which one is a member.

Human beings will always form membership groups, and always show an inbuilt bias in favour of other people who share that group.

Given this instinct, much of modern political life becomes confusingly unnatural, which might explain a great deal of the alienation many of us feel from the political process itself.

So, if we are predisposed to form groups and prioritise those groups, isn’t it odd that we have so many people today who have been conditioned, who can be conditioned, to detest a group to which they themselves belong?

If we are talking about race, or even merely culture, we are talking about forms of grouping that people, through most of human history, have been prepared to fight or kill for.

Wouldn’t it make sense for everyone to favour the racial group they themselves belonged to, not as a moral endorsement of racism or supremacism, and not as a learned ideology, but simply as a rather obvious in group subject to the same rules that apply to any other in group? Wouldn’t their brains be hardwired to do this, automatically, without thinking about it and without requiring ideological instruction to do this?

The teaching of national and racial self-loathing would not work if it didn’t have a psychological carrot as well as a stick. Even the dumbest and most indoctrinated student has to get something out of that denial of natural in group preference that their brain is biologically configured to prefer.

What is the psychological reward, the dopamine hit, the sugar rush of benefit that allows an individual to adopt race hate theories describing their own race?

Self-love. Narcissistic affirmation of the worst and most anti-social traits an individual can possess.

Under wokeness and Critical Theory the white adopter of these attitudes sacrifices his group for himself. The denial of the natural affinity of the group is the ultimate affirmation of the perfection of the self. When an individual hates the group he was born into, when he accepts a definition of that group as inherently worthless, his acceptance become his own worth.

If my group is naturally worthless, and yet coming from that group I still manage to recognise their worthlessness, then I must be particularly worthy, I must be a truly exceptional individual to transcend my whiteness, to overcome the supposed conditioning imposed by my supposedly white supremacist culture.

Perversely, the squirming willingness to be punished and berated for a group trait, equates to the singing of choirs of angels around the throne of the Self. Group mortification becomes individual apotheosis. Like some medieval flagellant proving their sanctity by whipping their own flesh and taking immense pride in the humility of self-harm, the racial flagellant whips his nation, his ancestors, and anyone possessed of his own skin colour.

Group hate, hatred of your own group, is self-love.

It’s a vanity saying, ‘I am better than all my kind’.

That’s the appeal, and for people who cannot access vanity by actual individual qualities (by achievement, by looks, or by some exceptional quality they actually possess) it’s especially appealing. It’s an instant shortcut to superiority, and all it takes is the adoption of an ideology with ready packaged opinions and the complete betrayal of your own people.

I am significant and special, because I deny what I am.

How sad.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s SubStack is available here.