Anti-Togetherness: The Virtues of Disunity, by Fred Reed.
A Truth Not Welcome: People do not like being with those different from themselves. Sometimes, briefly, we find it interesting, as in traveling, but for extended periods, no. This distaste pervades society, often unnoticed, with consequences.
Instances of untogetherness:
People cluster by intelligence. With high consistency, we choose mates of intelligence close to our own. Likewise with friends: If you have an IQ of 100, or 150, you are unlikely to have friends of 150, or 100. Bright people join Mensa not from snobbery but because they want to be around people like themselves. On the internet this takes the form of distributed cognitive stratification in which people from around the globe congregate by intelligence.
A woman I knew while living in the Heart of Darkness once said, “In Washington, you assume that everyone is in the ninety-ninth percentile.” She herself was, and her friends were chemists, high-end journalists, authors, and so on. She meant her remark as shorthand for a common sort of clustering.
People associate by age. We rarely have close friends who differ from us by more than ten years. People of fifty shrink in horror at the thought of being trapped in a bar full of screaming twenty-year-olds–and vice versa. Teenagers suffer their parents because they have to, and escape at every opportunity–to the relief of the parents. It isn’t dislike, just a lack of much in common.
Men and women would rather not be with each other too much. In social and domestic settings, yes. Men would prefer to work with other men had they the choice. Men do not want to go fishing with women, or drink beer and argue politics, and when it comes to talking about their feelings, most men would rather die. Women presumably prefer their own. …
If a group of men are sitting around shooting the breeze and a woman shows up, the conversational dynamics change. The men will speak differently, talk of different things, be wary. Yet heaven help them if they say that sometimes they don’t want female company.
In the military the consequences of forced togetherness are grave, and not just in that women can’t do many of the things required of soldiers. Thirteen men in a squad will work easily together to get a job done. Add a woman and all the men will compete for her sexual favors, even if she isn’t using them, which is possible. …
We prefer to spend time with people of our own level of education. If you have a doctorate, you probably have no friends who are graduates only of high school–and vice versa. The same goes for white-collar and blue-collar people. Few bus drivers socialize with lawyers.
We prefer to be with our own race. Look at what people do, not what they say. Blacks do not find the company of white people compelling, and the most liberal of whites spend ninety-five percent of discretionary time with other whites. If whites do spend time with blacks, those will be of their own age, educational level, accent and, except in couples, sex. They will probably feel self-conscious anyway.
The cultures of blacks and whites differ starkly and any association occurs only to the extent that the blacks simulate the culture of whites. Distance is proportional to difference. Whites and Asians socialize more easily than blacks and whites because they have more in common. …
Ease of association is inversely proportional to difference, and difference is a sort of vector sum of many things: social and economic status, skin color, native fluency in English, sex and sexual orientation, and so on.
Another truth avoided by the PC crew and their PC fantasies. Their fantasies guide them as they make rules for society, and we get to pay the price for their denial.
Our current policy of compulsory amalgamation is fueled both by resentment and ideology. Women and blacks think they endure discrimination by men and whites and so insist on inclusion they really do not much want. The result is lawsuits, and sometimes far worse. Cities burn because we insist on employing white policemen in black regions.
Much of today’s anger would diminish if we allowed people to live in neighborhoods of their own kind, and study in schools of their own kind, and be policed by their own kind, and to establish clubs as they like. We could call this something like, oh, say, “freedom.”
