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Tom Rowsell, AKA “Survive the Jive”, recently posted a video Debunking the BBC’s Horrible Black History,1 where he deboonks the claim that indigenous Britons were of black African extraction. The video garnered over 100,000 views in a single day. Just the fact that such a claim might be seriously advanced at all—much less by the main ideological arm of the British state—would have utterly stupefied our recent ancestors and is deeply embarrassing. And yet, here we are. We’re lucky to have people like Tom with a large following who will push back on this nonsense.
But why do people believe total nonsense in the first place? Is it dysgenics? Yes, but that’s not the whole story. Is it contrarianism? Yes. Our whole epistemic foundation since at least the French Revolution has been “well ACKSHUALLY everything you ever thought about X was WRONG”. But that’s not the whole story either. There’s a deeper reason that people believe things that would (and should) have got them placed in an insane asylum just a few generations ago—a deeply evolved, adaptive reason.
We get an inkling of that reason out of an old article called The Purpose of Absurdity written by a neoreactionary figure known simply as “Spandrell”. I have devoted a whole chapter to one of his ideas in my new book, and was dismayed to find that he has taken down his whole website and all his articles. Don’t think that the internet is forever, friends.2 I still have the article, but out of respect to Spandrell who obviously doesn’t want it online, I won’t quote him directly but will rather summarize.
Ron Unz said in a comment on a Steve Sailer article:
The reason the King walks down the street naked in his imaginary suit is to draw out and catch those people unwilling to say they see what isn’t there.
In an actual historical example, the Emperor Caligula appointed his favorite horse to the highest official government position in the Roman State. How better to break the spirit of potentially disloyal Senators and military commanders, and determine which of them might have independent thoughts.3
Unz is a smart man and the fact that he had to come up with this realization on his own means history has failed us—history is there precisely to save us this trouble. And perhaps the most impressive historical tradition is the Chinese tradition. The Chinese tend to sum up their historical lessons in tidy 4-letter idioms, like “point deer make horse”. This refers to an episode in the Qin dynasty which is the dynasty where Chinese civilization moves away from feudalism and into an absolute monarchy ruling with a centralized bureaucracy.
When the Qin Emperor died in 210 BCE while touring the provinces, the only people who knew he was dead were his prime minister Li Si and his close minister Zhou Gao. The two conspired to get rid of the crown prince and heir apparent, so they sent him a forged imperial edict to commit suicide, which he did—this left the younger son Huhai to inherit the throne. Later Zhou Gao contrived to have Li Shi executed, then proceeded to mop up all those other potential challengers to Huhai’s title of Emperor.
Not long after this, Zhou Gao and the new Emperor Huhai had a falling out over the Chen Sheng rebellion, which Huhai blamed on Zhou Gao, which got the latter thinking about usurping the imperial throne for himself. So, Zhou Gao brought a deer into the palace and said to Huhai in front of all the ministers, “look your majesty, I brought you a fine horse.” The Emperor called his bluff and told him to just use his eyes, then looked around at all the ministers sweating nervously. Some proclaimed that this was a fine horse indeed, and that Zhou Gao had the best of tastes; some protested that this was not a horse but a deer, obviously. The latter soon found themselves executed, followed not long after by the Emperor himself.