Aporia’s basic truth is hereditarianism - the reality of inborn human differences. Why is the Netherlands richer than the Congo? Why do white Americans earn more money than blacks? Aporia is willing to “go there.” Why do people in London have higher incomes than the rest of Britain? You might think Aporia would apply the lessons of hereditarianism - London acts as a magnet for talented people from across Britain, Europe, and the entire world. No, says a 2024 Aporia article by the writer Arctotherium, the explanation is magic dirt:
But since immigrants cluster in high-productivity areas, thereby driving natives away, immigrants’ incomes are artificially inflated. For instance, in Britain, ethnic minorities are overrepresented by a factor of three in London, which has 50% higher productivity than the rest of the country. Were it not for them driving white Britons out of the city, white British incomes would be higher, and ethnic minority incomes lower, than they actually are.
Arctotherium doesn’t explain why London is a “high-productivity area,” nor why such areas arose. He links to other writers who discuss past cases of immigrants creating such areas, but explains that this is not a process that is happening today:
German and Jewish immigrants in Eastern Europe and Huguenots in Germany both created new high-productivity centers. But in practice, all of the major high productivity centers attracting Third World immigration today were high productivity long before the current wave of immigrants showed up. New York, London, Paris, and Berlin have been economic centers for centuries, and even Silicon Valley, where high-productivity immigrants are incredibly thick on the ground, was already the world’s most important tech hub by 1970. As such, locals and immigrants are effectively competing for access to the same limited set of productivity centers created by locals long ago.
If white Americans turned Silicon Valley - once a sleepy area with a few Mexican forts - into a massive technological productivity center, perhaps they could do the same thing when “displaced” by migrants and forced to move to Dallas or Indiana. Arctotherium doesn’t suggest this. The only solution he provides is immigration restriction - which, even if it could be enacted, would not reverse the “displacement.” Whites would be left to bitch and moan about how the migrants took all the magic dirt while being poor and posting comments to Aporia.
One can contrast Arctotherium with the white nationalist writer Harold Covington, who died in 2018. Covington promoted white nationalist migration to the Northwestern US, authoring a series of novels in which such a migration occurs and results in the creation of an independent Israel-type state. Covington’s “Northwest Republic” is safe, happy, and prosperous, its residents don’t fret that they lost out on “high-productivity areas,” they create such areas via their intelligence, cooperativeness, and work ethic. The world of Covington’s novels is one where his assumptions - white superiority and the failures of diversity - are straightforwardly true.
The real world is rather different. Relative to most other races, whites do score higher on tests of intelligence. But the other assumption of Arctotherium’s ideology - the destructiveness of diversity - is directly refuted by places like London. Some white nationalists like Guillaume Durocher have, to their credit, grappled with this honestly. Arctotherium responds by creating an ideology quite similar to wokeness. The high productivity of Londoners isn’t because of their intelligence or effort - no, it’s because they hogged all the magic dirt and have “artificially inflated” incomes. Like wokists, he tells people that the achievements of the disfavored group come at the expense of the favored one.
Think about how strange it is that the truth-telling hereditarian magazine is arguing against the immigration of high-IQ white people. It would have been a foreign idea to Covington, whose imagined racial utopia welcomed any white who made it to its borders; among the immigrants were Russians. But it makes sense if you understand the psychology of grievance and zero-sum thinking. Once you treat the outgroup’s success as occurring at your expense, it’s a habit you’ll apply more broadly. Thus you have the groyper Nalin Haley (son of Nikki) complaining about a Trump administration official who dared to be born outside the country, or people from outside South Carolina attending university there.
Does Arctotherium matter? Does Aporia? Somewhere in America, there’s a tech oligarch who always voted Democratic, who’s having an unpleasant experience with liberalism. His eyes are open to new ideas, he follows edgy Twitter accounts, he clicks a link to an Aporia article. It seems scientific, it seems supported by studies and data. Pretty soon he’s got a MAGA girlfriend who identifies as a “clean meat enthusiast.” The brainworming will continue until society starts pushing back against this nonsense. That cannot come through attempts to cancel it for supposed racism, which just give it the cachet of a hidden truth it does not deserve. Hereditarianism is true. When honestly applied, it’s our best weapon against the grievance-mongering pseudo-hereditarianism of the Online Right.
Our eyes will remain open where others blink. Dogmas will not deter us. Truth is our lodestar and that the fog of ideology will not deter us. This was once how Aporia Magazine described itself - it has since changed its “About” page to the less grandiose “we publish articles on important/censored topics like intelligence, human biodiversity, evolutionary psychology, immigration, identity, crime, religion and AI.” There are many good writers at Aporia, but it’s also home to content that does not befit that heady self-description.
Aporia’s basic truth is hereditarianism - the reality of inborn human differences. Why is the Netherlands richer than the Congo? Why do white Americans earn more money than blacks? Aporia is willing to “go there.” Why do people in London have higher incomes than the rest of Britain? You might think Aporia would apply the lessons of hereditarianism - London acts as a magnet for talented people from across Britain, Europe, and the entire world. No, says a 2024 Aporia article by the writer Arctotherium, the explanation is magic dirt:
Arctotherium doesn’t explain why London is a “high-productivity area,” nor why such areas arose. He links to other writers who discuss past cases of immigrants creating such areas, but explains that this is not a process that is happening today:
If white Americans turned Silicon Valley - once a sleepy area with a few Mexican forts - into a massive technological productivity center, perhaps they could do the same thing when “displaced” by migrants and forced to move to Dallas or Indiana. Arctotherium doesn’t suggest this. The only solution he provides is immigration restriction - which, even if it could be enacted, would not reverse the “displacement.” Whites would be left to bitch and moan about how the migrants took all the magic dirt while being poor and posting comments to Aporia.
One can contrast Arctotherium with the white nationalist writer Harold Covington, who died in 2018. Covington promoted white nationalist migration to the Northwestern US, authoring a series of novels in which such a migration occurs and results in the creation of an independent Israel-type state. Covington’s “Northwest Republic” is safe, happy, and prosperous, its residents don’t fret that they lost out on “high-productivity areas,” they create such areas via their intelligence, cooperativeness, and work ethic. The world of Covington’s novels is one where his assumptions - white superiority and the failures of diversity - are straightforwardly true.
The real world is rather different. Relative to most other races, whites do score higher on tests of intelligence. But the other assumption of Arctotherium’s ideology - the destructiveness of diversity - is directly refuted by places like London. Some white nationalists like Guillaume Durocher have, to their credit, grappled with this honestly. Arctotherium responds by creating an ideology quite similar to wokeness. The high productivity of Londoners isn’t because of their intelligence or effort - no, it’s because they hogged all the magic dirt and have “artificially inflated” incomes. Like wokists, he tells people that the achievements of the disfavored group come at the expense of the favored one.
Even white immigrants earn Arctotherium’s ire, as he complains that “there was a one-time influx of scientists from the former East Bloc, especially the USSR, which interrupted training and credentialing for American STEM scientists in the same fields, squeezing out American researchers.” There may well be some truth to that, if jobs in state-funded universities are limited by funding constraints, the sudden arrival of a bunch of Russian mathematicians may make it harder for an American to get a tenure-track job. But what then does the American do? Does he go to work selling shoes? No, he goes to work in computer programming, engineering, or some other job where his intelligence is valued and ultimately makes his country wealthier and more able to subsidize mathematical research.
Think about how strange it is that the truth-telling hereditarian magazine is arguing against the immigration of high-IQ white people. It would have been a foreign idea to Covington, whose imagined racial utopia welcomed any white who made it to its borders; among the immigrants were Russians. But it makes sense if you understand the psychology of grievance and zero-sum thinking. Once you treat the outgroup’s success as occurring at your expense, it’s a habit you’ll apply more broadly. Thus you have the groyper Nalin Haley (son of Nikki) complaining about a Trump administration official who dared to be born outside the country, or people from outside South Carolina attending university there.
Does Arctotherium matter? Does Aporia? Somewhere in America, there’s a tech oligarch who always voted Democratic, who’s having an unpleasant experience with liberalism. His eyes are open to new ideas, he follows edgy Twitter accounts, he clicks a link to an Aporia article. It seems scientific, it seems supported by studies and data. Pretty soon he’s got a MAGA girlfriend who identifies as a “clean meat enthusiast.” The brainworming will continue until society starts pushing back against this nonsense. That cannot come through attempts to cancel it for supposed racism, which just give it the cachet of a hidden truth it does not deserve. Hereditarianism is true. When honestly applied, it’s our best weapon against the grievance-mongering pseudo-hereditarianism of the Online Right.