When the Saxon Began to Chimp

White Apathy to Public Morality is Dangerous

H.L. Mencken famously quipped “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Given the accelerating rate of high-profile violence by deranged lunatics with the tacit approval of leading cultural institutions, everyone gets the feeling the United States is entering a new era of anarchic violence. The average man, in response, has so far proven ambivalent to vigilante reprisals of its own, instead begging the Trump administration to use his power to restore order.

While it’s easy to blame this on cowardice, the reason is far more nuanced, its foundation based on several generations of moral programming that largely eliminated personal retributive forms of justice for more republican ideals. In modern times it’s shifted to a hyper-moralistic and universalist view of the world. High time- preference flights of rage are frowned upon, and low time preference and peaceful avenues of change are the norm. Still, there are times when zero care of norms and procedure are given, admonishments regarding “being the bigger man” by backing down are laughed at, and only bloodlust remains. This sort of escalation when someone has had enough is known in internet lingo as “chimping out”.

While giving formal definitions to internet lingo that are more vibe coded than academic is futile, there is some value in diving deeper into what this means. Chimping can encompass political violence in the heat of the moment all the way to a directed, controlled, and long-term execution of a plan to right a perceived wrong. While chimping out is often violent, it can also take the form of saying something verboten in polite society out of frustration, or secretly sabotaging a perceived enemy’s plans in revenge for disrespect. A man senses that are no socially acceptable means to gain relief from a transgression, so he has to rely on other options. A chimpout is when the perpetrator breaks public morality to restore personal honor.

Something like a bank robbery for the sole purpose of enriching oneself is not a chimpout. Neither is backstabbing an opponent to rise in one’s social circle. However, a man calling a man in a dress a fag after he demands he say a preferred pronoun is a low-level chimpout. A group of guys banding together to set fire to a refugee facility put in their neighborhood is a high-level chimpout. People voting for the most brutal, nasty, and polarizing figure just to give the middle finger to the country’s elites is a chimpout. It’s the action of a person who feels forgotten or humiliated. They see social norms as chains that inhibit their lives while emboldening their tormentors.

Probably the best explanation of the chimpout comes from an unlikely source. Aaron McGruder of Boondocks fame gives a hilarious example of how two different cultures deal with a personal slight, coined “A Nigga Moment”.

For those who don’t watch the video, it starts with two black men bumping into each other on the sidewalk. They exchange harsh words which quickly escalates into a shooting match followed by getting killed by jittery police. The same scenario happens with a white guy and a black guy bumping into each other, the black man expresses harsh words, and the white man almost loses his cool before realizing it wasn’t worth blowing up his life over. He laughs and says, “wait a minute, I’m white!” before merrily walking away.

The two blacks immediately escalated the conflict and broke public morality to settle a matter of honor, so matter how slight, while the white guy didn’t see the infraction as enough to risk throwing his life away.

This sort of aversion to conflict escalation is common in complex, republican societies, where keeping the peace is paramount over getting revenge for slights. In more honor culture settings, like the ghetto, one’s personal reputation is more important than civil order. Every society has a mix of both, with many honor cultures having complex rituals to deal with disagreements in a civilized manner, even if it means killing someone. Strong honor cultures tend to scale poorly but give high agency to its actors. More republican cultures scale much better but at the cost of personal initiative.

While this sort of control and willingness to shrug off a slight is reasonable for something as innocuous as a shoulder bump by a stranger, it becomes less amusing the more dramatic the scenarios become. Say the white man got his car keyed and he shrugged and decided fisticuffs wasn’t worth it. It will strike many as a little cowardly but understandable. Now say he comes home, and some random guy is pissing in his garden. He watches in disbelief as he zips up and walks away like it’s no big deal. While he might control his anger even here, maybe calling the police to get civic institutions involved, most would consider giving such an interloper a good beating. Now say the white guy walks into the bedroom to see his wife getting railed by his next-door neighbor. The neighbor grins, finishes the job, then starts getting dressed, ignoring him. It’s at a stage like that that it’s pretty much expected to give some hard, violent retribution. At a certain point, personal honor trumps keeping the peace, consequences be damned.

This is from the mindset of a man who wants to be a respectable citizen while still having the propensity for violence, shrewdly calculating the risks involved. There are also those who are avoidant to violence simply because they lack the compunction and will to do so. These are the types who always look for authority to keep them safe, never contemplating dealing with matters themselves. The best way to explain such a person is as a natural slave, as this type would walk like cattle to his death before putting up a modicum of resistance. Most people are natural slaves, tending to cling to whatever the public morality is, changing their “principles” on a dime. Because they have no personal defense mechanisms and depend wholly on others, they make sure to stay within acceptable bounds. Even when the public morality is destroying their life, they will still cling to it. They want to believe things will get better, that their goodness will be recognized. They can’t contemplate another option.

For many, they will accept personal slights, and sometimes even a decrease in one’s status for the sake of community cohesion. However, when humiliation upon humiliation piles up and he sees his future being stolen from his children, with authority showing indifference or contempt, this man will feel something more dangerous than anger at his once adored institutions. He will have indifference to the morality of the regime and see no reason why he can’t burn everything down.

Back to Aaron McGruder, he likely has no love for white people. He does, however, have a deep love of his fellow blacks, along with a prescience and willingness to tell hard truths to them. In an interview from the early 2000’s, he states the precarious position blacks are in regarding whites.

I really want you guys to understand that time is running out. And a lot of black people say that, but for real, part of why the civil rights movement has been so successful. And part of why those who have come after in terms of our leadership have been able to maintain a presence is that black people have always had a certain amount of moral currency that we have been using. And let me be the first to tell you that’s used up. White America has been watching us act like fools for a long enough time where any sympathy they may have had to our plight is completely gone. You’re approaching a country that forget hating black people and not hating black people. They just don’t care.

You can be talking about affirmative action. They be like, “I don’t care. It literally is of no importance to me. I don’t care about slavery. I don’t care about segregation. I don’t care about you. I don’t care how many of you all go to jail. I don’t care. I don’t care at all cuz I’m broke.”

You can’t be the proud noble fighter when every single time someone sees a person that looks like you on television, they’re acting like a damn fool. How would they know? How would they know you’re not a damn fool? They gonna talk to you? Yeah, right.

Aaron hits a crucial point here. While whites are dangerous when they’re angry, they’re most dangerous when they stop caring. Not in an apathy way, but being willing to tear everything they once respected down to rebuild their esteem. Notice the key phrase: Moral Currency. What happens when the old moral currency doesn’t work anymore on whites?

Modernity has eliminated most honor cultures in the Western world. Much of the tribalism of groups like the Scots, Italians, Irish, and others have been subsumed into a more scalable form of governance, though the tribalism still manifests itself in strange, contradictory ways, like Sinn Fein being a primary cheerleader for gays and immigration. While this has created a level of trust and scaling that has created massive material prosperity, it has also made it susceptible to rapid erasure of personal freedoms in the name of the public morality, as well as a nasty purity spiral of people attempting to cash in on the social currency by being the most fanatical moral busybodies.

It should be clear at this point that there is nothing moral about many aspects of public morality. Social norms now require you to lie about obvious truths, sweep inconvenient facts under the rug, and ignore clear solutions to societal ills. It has also grossly restricted a citizen’s ability to deliver personal justice. In the state’s eyes, the use of force is only acceptable if your life is in danger and you have no means of running away. It also expects you to give the benefit of the doubt to clearly dangerous people in precarious situations. Any break from this is cause for swift and ruthless retribution, often worse than happens to your common street thug. The moral hierarchy is utterly broken, with racism being the greatest crime one can commit, oftentimes worse than even murder.

This sort of crazy moral inversion is why you get white people sentenced to life in jail for confronting a “jogger” in their neighborhood while violent urban vagrants can harass citizens with impunity. It’s why they tried to put a man who defended passengers from a subway psychopath behind bars. While petty thieves are a nuisance, they are a nuisance that are not a threat to public morality. Everyone knows stealing is wrong, but they can’t prosecute the petty thieves without possibly infringing on a higher moral principle, anti-racism, so it’s tolerated. However, those who perform personal, retributive violence in order to protect the wider community are seen as a threat to public morality. In the eyes of our hyper-moralistic society, only the State has the right to violent reprisals, and it can’t be trusted to individuals.

The core weakness of whites has always been moral smugness. You see this in your average conservatives who brag about how they don’t resort to violence when they don’t get their way. In their eyes, it’s better to lose with dignity than disobey the moral order. It’s better to watch your society collapse than do something that gets the church ladies angry. In other words, no matter how many guns they have, the average conservative is a natural slave.

Progressive elites have a moral smugness on top of a savior complex to those less fortunate. They want to be seen as virtuous. They are also natural slaves, just in a different direction. Note this is not even virtue in the classical sense, but a simulacrum of virtue for public display. While Western countries at their peak had personal virtues emphasized (Temperance, Patience, Diligence, etc), the new anti-virtues are moral preening and outgroup philanthropy at the expense of the in-group. While virtue is supposed to be its own reward, these anti-virtues demand recognition.

Both of these are a moral sentimentalism, more worried about one’s own conception of his moral standing than acting virtuously in the world. Morality involves having a deep love for something outside of oneself, and willing to do whatever necessary, even violence, out of that love. It’s built out of a selflessness as opposed to concern about one’s sentimental thoughts. There’s also no ability to act decisively without a sense of personal honor. Daniel Penny choked the vagrant because he could not contemplate doing nothing. His sense of duty demanded action. A man with personal honor will not tolerate his community and his culture extinguished by foreigners. A natural slave will.

We’re at the point that public morality is more a suicide pact than anything, something unscrupulous minorities have latched onto and amplified with glee. They see one of the core strengths of white societies, moral cohesion that allows cooperations without resorting to brute force, is also a weakness.

Some, like Aaron McGruder, know they are playing with fire. He understands that white people can be pushed far but have a breaking point, and when it is reached are capable of shockingly systematic acts of violence and destruction. Whites tend to want to avoid the nuclear option, both because of moral sensibilities as well as having much to lose. Countless whites just wanted a nice home, a little family, and a place in the backyard to grill. When even those little wants are torn away, the grillers have little to lose in burning the whole thing to the ground. Whites are patient, and can be more patient in planning retribution. Their chimp-outs are well-planned, well-executed, and show no mercy.

At the individual level, you have people like Gary Plauche. A karate instructor manipulated the family into trusting him, then molested his son. The molester was going behind bars, but that wasn’t good enough for Gary, who personally ensured the man would never hurt anyone again.

At a community level, you have World War II vets in the town of Athens in 1946. When a corrupt sheriff harassed the locals with impunity to fill his coffers and ran a rigged election, they immediately organized. A mass of hundreds of veterans had enough, surrounded the building where the ballots were being counted, and opened fire.

At a societal level we have, well…

While upper-class whites have been able to escape the consequences of their moral outlook through escaping to richer zip codes, many of the elites who aren’t natural slaves are looking for an off ramp. They have the most to lose in the short term materially, but also understand the current moral spiraling has no exit and will bring everything down with it. While many are being pragmatic, an increasing number are sick of the suffocating world they live in and tire of the increasingly byzantine moral codes to follow as well as the humiliation rituals they are expected to perform. In other words, chimping out is becoming an option.

Lower class whites are disorganized and victims of a ceaseless campaign to leave them demoralized and destitute. They also have no skin in the game and would love nothing more than to restore their sense of dignity. They have been ready to chimp for over a decade, and Trump’s election was a low-level chimpout. It’s gotten to the point that a shrewd charismatic figure who can gain their trust and rally them to action can be a destabilizing force. If Trump he fails, their post-Trump avatar will be far less friendly, and given the antipathy to public morality by some tech bros, someone will rise to the occasion.

That being said, if whites have a full-on chimpout, it may not be overtly violent. I would argue it would be best if it wasn’t. A thousand tiny, coordinated chimpouts will be far more effective than a bunch of high-time preference idiots deciding to march on Washington D.C. with some civil war fantasy, or an impotent bombing campaign a la The Weather Underground. It could be as simple as ignoring the courts while allies in police departments turn a blind eye. It could involve mafia-like institutions spreading all over ensuring only the “right” sort of people can buy a house in a neighborhood. It could involve “persuading” your leftist school principal to leave town and putting your own guy in his place. With enough small-scale chimpouts, there isn’t enough force projection to enforce public morality, and even the natural slaves notice the winds shifting and react accordingly. This, in turn, allows for larger scale chimpouts.

Some things, like remigration, is likely going to require force that involve taking over the government, but there are a thousand mini chimp outs whites are executing right now that will collapse of the old morality. In conclusion, you have less and less to lose in pursuing your personal honor against the leviathan that wants to cut you down. Always chimp, but be smart about it.

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