American Dissident Voices Broadcast of January 17, 1998 WHY SOCIETY IS NUTS by Dr. William Pierce I spoke with you last week about the question of sanity: about how to decide whether it's you or everyone else who is nutty when everyone -- or nearly everyone -- else is doing things or expressing opinions which seem clearly insane to you. And to be honest, I was using the terms "sanity" and "insanity" a bit loosely. A clinical psychologist probably wouldn't classify people as insane just because they're saying or doing things that objectively don't make sense. Most people who say or do things which seem crazy aren't clinically insane: they're just following the herd; they're just being fashionable. They have such a strong compulsion to be like everyone else and such a weak grip on objective reality that they will behave in a nutty way if they perceive others behaving that way. They care more about doing, saying, and even thinking like the people around them than they care about what makes sense. Technically speaking, they're not insane, but still something is clearly wrong. When a herd of cattle stampede over a cliff to their deaths, the individual cows may be perfectly normal, but still something has gone badly wrong for the herd. And that's sort of the way it is with our society today. Collectively we're doing a lot of things which not only don't make sense but which ultimately will destroy us. And millions of people who are intelligent enough to see this will not see it because they don't want to be out of step with the herd. They are terrified of being out of step with the herd. Let me give you some specific examples of the sort of collective nuttiness that will destroy us if we don't do something to get the loonies back in their cages -- or at least, get the herd stampeding in a different direction. Consider the dumbing down of America's schools. I first encountered this back in the 1960s, when I was a physics professor at a West Coast university. The problem was really a very mild one then. My habit was to give passing grades only to those students in the physics graduate courses I was teaching who demonstrated at least minimal evidence that they would be able to compete successfully in the rather rigorous world of professional physics if they were given an advanced degree and turned loose. I thought that my practice was a reasonable one both from the standpoint of upholding the standards of my profession and from the standpoint of being merciful to the students by not throwing them into an arena where they couldn't compete. I was giving them an early chance to change their career plans. But I was put under considerable pressure by the university administration to "lighten up" and stop flunking graduate students. I was "ruining the lives" of the students I flunked, they told me. I responded that the only reasonable way to flunk fewer students was to tighten up admission standards for our graduate school; we were accepting many students who never should have been given a bachelor's degree. That was the trend, the administration told me, and you can't fight the trend. Well indeed, it =was= the trend. And I understand now that I was at least partly wrong in thinking that I was being merciful to students by not letting them enter an arena where they couldn't compete. The trend has made that arena a much kinder, gentler place than it used to be, and many are competing in it now who wouldn't have been able to survive in it earlier. But what has happened to the standards in physics is nothing compared to what has happened to university standards generally. Physics has been spared the worst of the dumbing down because it is not the curriculum of choice for most students, especially not for Black, Mestizo, and female students. Another reason that some of our universities still are able to turn out a few good physicists is that physics is relatively non-political. Whether a particular hypothesis in physics is verified by experiment or not has very little impact on the sorts of ideas and issues of concern to feminists, homosexuals, Blacks, democrats, and so on. The people at our universities who have really suffered have been those who wanted to teach or to learn history or literature. From the viewpoint of the Red Guards, those are =dangerous= subjects, and they've had to clamp down hard on them in order to keep Politically Incorrect ideas from being propagated. Actually, the less history and literature taught the better, from their viewpoint. And they have arranged for this outcome by doing away with required core courses for undergraduates and substituting a huge number of completely trivial optional courses in their place. A great many 18 year olds, when given the choice between a fairly solid and rigorous course in European history and a nice, fluffy course titled "Sexual Meanings," say, or "Troubadours and Rock Stars -- a Comparison" will choose one of the latter -- especially since the latter will give them just as much credit toward a degree. Those two nice, fluffy courses I just named, by the way, are both offered for credit by Yale, and they are only two of many which may be taken instead of history or any other old-style course with substance and rigor. And if you want to study literature, more and more of our schools are phasing out the real literature of our people and phasing in the Freudian, angst-laden trash novels written by Jews or homosexuals, and they're beating the bushes for resentment-filled feminist diatribes or pretentious, anti-White stuff written by various Third Worlders. All of it's pretty depressing fare for any normal White person. And the impression it leaves on impressionable young people is that writing significant literature is pretty easy work: all you have to do is have a glib tongue and learn the fashionable clichés. On top of this general dumbing down of our schools is the almost total loss of academic freedom. When I was a professor, the academic freedom issue was about the right of Marxists, homosexuals, and other marginal types to introduce their biases into the courses they taught. A lot of traditional-minded professors thought that such biases had no place on a university campus, but the liberals -- especially the Jewish liberals -- supported the claims of the Marxists, the homosexuals, and so on, to teach whatever they wanted to teach. Well, the liberals won, and now there is no such thing as academic freedom. If a history professor at virtually any American university, for example, says in a course on the history of the Second World War that the Jews' claim that six million of them were killed in "gas ovens" by the Germans is somewhat exaggerated and not to be taken literally, he will be out on his ear in a minute, labeled a "Holocaust denier," and will be unable to find employment as a professor anywhere else. If a professor in a psychology course suggests to his students that homosexuals as a general rule have psychological problems that go far beyond the question of sexual orientation, he too will be looking for a career in another field. If a biology professor is not very careful what he says in talking about the differences between men and women, he will join his colleagues from the history department and the psychology department in the unemployment line. The mental blinders put on students are just as restrictive. At a growing number of universities students are expelled if they say anything in public which is Politically Incorrect or which offends someone in one of the favored racial or sexual categories. And these people are very =easily= offended. Stick your nose into the student newspapers published at most universities today, and you'll get a good whiff of this Politically Correct atmosphere. What has been done to our universities is the equivalent of stampeding our society toward a cliff. The quality of the higher education in America, the quality of the training we provide to our university students, is vital to our being able to remain competitive in a competitive world; ultimately, it is vital to our survival as an independent nation. And similar things have been done to many other institutions in American society: our armed forces, for example, where the requirement for Politically Correct attitudes on such matters as race and sex has led to situations which would be laughable if they weren't so dangerous. Pregnancies of soldiers and sailors have become a major impediment to military readiness. Some units come back from a tour of duty with more than ten per cent of their female personnel pregnant. The bending of rules and the lowering of standards to accommodate women has had a major impact on both combat readiness and morale. Dealing with and trying to prevent sexual harassment keeps many commanders tied in knots. And it's all completely unnecessary. An all-male military establishment would be much more effective and would make much more sense than the present military experiment in sexual equality on just about every ground =except= that of Political Correctness. But it is Political Correctness which prevails. Affirmative action has done about as much damage to American society and the American economy as any of the other lunatic schemes imposed on us by the minions of Political Correctness. Three decades of admitting, hiring, or promoting less qualified people on the basis of race or sex has lowered standards in our professional schools and reduced our economic efficiency. We are becoming a less competent nation. And that doesn't make sense either. I could talk about immigration. It is really crazy that our government refuses to enforce its own immigration laws or control our borders. A flood of non-Whites from the Third World continues to pour into this country, both legally and illegally. The government makes a pretense of stopping the flow of illegals and then give thousands of illegals what amounts to an amnesty with fully legal, permanent residence status to follow. And America's cities become darker and darker. Or I could talk about our courts, which have become one of my pet peeves. It's clear to every knowledgeable observer that the court system is broken, but no one will say so. In those parts of the country where non-Whites make up a majority of the jury pool, the courts have gone nuts. The sort of thing which happened in the O.J. Simpson trial happens every day, with juries handing down judgments which make no sense at all. Many of these judgments are in civil cases, with non-White juries deciding on astronomical judgments against companies based on frivolous claims of injuries. Every such judgment runs up the cost of doing business, and that cost is passed on to all of us. It's not just the formal courts of law. There's a growing number of quasi-judicial committees and commissions and boards springing up in the name of "human rights" and exercising punitive powers against Political Incorrectness. A news clipping from the _Toronto Star_ I have in front of me now is about the recent decision of the Human Rights Commission of Ontario, Canada. This commission has just levied a fine of $10,000 against the mayor of London, Ontario, for refusing to proclaim a Gay Pride Day as ordered by the commission. We tolerate this insanity; the normal White people of the United States and Canada tolerate it, and that doesn't make sense either. All of this insane behavior -- in our schools, our armed forces, our government, our whole society -- is based on two ideas, two motives, firmly rooted in a portion of our population. One of these ideas is that everyone is equal; that is, everyone has the same capabilities and characteristics: women are equal to men, children are equal to their parents, students are equal to their professors, Blacks are equal to Whites. The other idea -- or motive -- is resentment: the idea that if you have something I don't have then it's your fault and you owe me something. If there are more Whites in law school than Blacks, it's because potential Black lawyers are being held down by Whites. If there are more men in medical school than women, it's because men don't want women to become doctors and are oppressing women. It's not fair that you should have a better education than I, or better grades, or a better job, or a higher social status, or a nicer house. Since we're equal, I should have everything you have, and if I don't then the government, the school administration, the police, the local Human Rights Commission, or =somebody= must do something to change it. Heck, if you're better looking than I am, or if you're healthier, then you owe me, and you should feel guilty for it. These two motives -- egalitarianism and resentment -- were the driving force for the social revolution of the 1960s. Supported and encouraged by the Jewish mass media and led to a very large extent by Jewish activists among feminists, among students, and among homosexuals, a coalition of resentful egalitarians and resentful losers managed to turn American society upside down. The lunatics managed to gain control of the asylum. There was no really effective opposition to these people. Some universities held out longer than others, but none of them really put up a fight. Some military leaders saw where things were going and simply retired, while others went along with the trend. Basically, the reason that nobody put up a real fight against these deranged egalitarians is that the Jewish media were backing them 100 per cent, and the media bosses are masters of propaganda. Anybody who opposed the lunatics was blasted as a "hater" or a "bigot" or an "extremist." Most people, even if they weren't persuaded by the egalitarian propaganda, figured it was safer to go along with the lunatics than to oppose them. Our whole society has paid an enormous price for that lack of courage and lack of principle. After their initial successes the coalition of those who felt that they had been dealt a poorer hand than they were entitled to grew to include new categories of losers and victims who were convinced that they were being oppressed by society unless society gave them something to make up for what Nature hadn't given them. Old people were owed something by those who were not old. Disabled people were owed something by those who were not disabled. People with AIDS were owed something by people without AIDS. It has gotten to the point where even drug addicts, alcoholics, and criminals are owed something by the rest of us. It's truly a crazy situation. I am not implying, of course, that all elderly people or all people with some physical disability have let themselves be persuaded that society owes them something, any more than all women have let themselves be persuaded by the feminist lunatics that they are oppressed by men. But enough people have joined the coalition of convinced victims and losers to elect Bill Clinton twice, despite his criminal behavior -- or perhaps because of it. And that is really crazy. So here we are, stampeding toward the cliff. What can we do about it? Well, for one thing, those of us who are still able to think for ourselves don't have to go along with the stampede. Opting out of the stampede, of course, exposes one to some danger of being trampled by the rest of the herd. That danger is the cost of doing what is not only sane but what is right. But let's not exaggerate that danger. Let's not let it frighten us into inactivity, because there's also a reward for doing what's right. That reward is called self-respect. And of course, doing what's sane is a first step toward dealing with the herd's stampede toward the cliff. The ultimate reward for solving that problem is racial survival. And so another thing we can do now -- besides keeping our own thinking straight -- is make a realistic plan for changing the direction in which the herd is stampeding. Remember, most of the cattle are not really crazy. They've just let themselves be misled by a relatively small hard core of resentful egalitarians -- and by the Jewish media bosses who have engineered the whole stampede. If we had control of the media, it would be a fairly simple matter to separate most of the herd from the hard-core lunatics. The lunatics could go over the cliff -- or back into their cages -- while the rest of the herd stampeded in a more reasonable direction. Unfortunately, of course, we don't control the mass media: just this radio program and a few printed periodicals and a book publishing service and a few other things. Not much compared to Hollywood, the big networks, the _New York Times,_ and MTV, but it's a start. It is a voice of sanity in the lunatic asylum. Our voice doesn't have much effect on the lunatics or on those firmly in the grip of the stampede, but you'd be surprised at how many reasonable people there are scattered here and there in the herd who do listen. If you join your voice to ours, even more people will listen. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The text above is based on a broadcast of the American Dissident Voices radio program sponsored by National Vanguard Books. For more information about National Vanguard Books or the National Alliance see our web site at http://www.natvan.com or http://www.natall.com. To contact us, write to: National Vanguard Books Attention: ADVlist P.O. Box 330 Hillsboro, WV 24946 or e-mail: national@natvan.com please tell us if we can post your comments and if so whether you want your name or e-mail address given. (c) 1997 National Vanguard Books