If Essentialism makes a comeback in the post-Hitler age (inevitable, since people born after 2000 by and large increasingly see WW2 with the same fuzzy, vague feeling that the Napoleonic Wars produce on everyone else - albeit this is anecdotal), how exactly would you want it to manifest itself, given that this article implicitly promulgates it? I would assume immigration policy would be one, but how else? Should it be used as a day-to-day heuristic? If so, how?
African Americans disproportionately commit violent crime (we can debate the reasons as to why, but the fact itself is undeniable), should AA majority neighbours be subject to extra police surveillance? Men commit the quasi-totality of all sexual violence (and indeed all violent crimes in general), should women be given custody prima facie? Should they be barred from certain jobs which involve extended contact with children: working at a daycare for instance?
I insist upon this because after eons spent on right-wing twitter, it becomes very obvious that essentialism is very selectively applied, for instance there is unanimous acceptance (and glee) over the low IQ scores and their n-th order effect when it comes to Niger-Congo ethnic groups. I have never seen any discussion on male violence and what should be done to restrain it. Anti-Essentialism also applies to ridiculous leftist believes that men are also victims of patriarchy or that all differences in violence between men and women come to "society" and men being punished for their feelings or something.
In fact, the venn diagram between knee-jerk anti-feminists whose views on women differ scarcely from the same tribal societies they claim to loath and racial/cultural essentialists is practically a circle. This is something worth grappling with. An amusing artefact of this absurdity is that while the grooming gangs are rightly considered to be a tragedy, the only lens in which they are viewed is through a pakistani-on-white crime one, not a male-on-female one. In fact, these same people always promulgate the ludicrous belief that women somehow oppress men by making up rape claims or by "longhousing" them, or that "society" favours women, or that institutional misandry is somehow a thing (I wonder why the authorities covered up decades of mass rape then?).
As for 'young right-wingers' and their purported beliefs, the real life polling data from Western countries paints quite a different picture, and the UK is an outlier in how left-wing the youth is. The idea that BAP, Kunley Drukpa and their acolytes somehow have any bearing on the future of political thought in the country or elsewhere is laughable - and mercifully so.
I have to say that I find the WW2 reductionism (which in itself is evidence of the all-consuming Hitler preoccupation of the post-war generations) a bit unconvincing and tiresome. Its intellectual geneology is long and predates even Rousseau. Jean Finots book (very popular when published) is already a fully developed anti-essentialist work.
There is probably a 100 pages worth of stuff that could possible be said on this. Left-wing rejection of essentialism is effectively doctrinaire and akin to religious belief. However, right-wing essentialism, especially of the online variety, is egregious self-serving and very often scientifically illiterate, and mostly consists of regurgitating Richard Lynn.
Agree about a lot of right-wing essentialism being scientifically illiterate and selectively applied, particularly manosphere stuff. I can see why many would prefer the happy 'everyone is the same' delusion if they think that is the alternative. But I don't think abandoning anti-essentialism means we need to give control of public policy to basedgroyper1488.
My proposal for how public policy should change would primarily be to stop the more egregious forms of anti-essentialism, rather than to start proactively crafting public policy according to different group tendencies. So you could say I'm an anti-anti-essentialist rather than an essentialist.
One specific thing I'd like to see an end to is the assumption where if a policy is found to have some disparate impact, the policy must be wrong, rather than that there really is a group difference. A recent example would be the the AI facial recognition trial that was paused because it identified black people more than other ethnicities: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/19/essex-police-pause-facial-recognition-camera-use-study-racial-bias. This could be enacted via an amendment/replacement to the equality act whereby if a group really does behave differently, accusations of racism etc cannot be used to change a policy.
On the violent crime in general, again, it wouldn't be deciding based on demographics to surveil AA neighbourhoods, this would happen naturally if there was more crime. I would like to prevent the police being forced to stop doing this due to racism accusations.
On immigration policy yes, I'd like to see it be informed by genuine anthropology, both the dangers of producing multi-ethnic societies, and of the stickiness of cultural differences.
Re: men working in nurseries, I'd be open to banning that if the risks are deemed too high. With child custody, I think you probably don't need to rely on group tendencies as you can look at the individual parents involved, and as far as I know, custody does already default to the mother unless there's a good reason not to.
Speaking of slop-essentialism, I’ve seen this bleed into discussions of national identity and membership among segments of the online right, especially those from Anglo Settler societies like Australia.
It is common for them to adopt a definition of the national category in question that is rigidly defined by ancestry or race. I’ve even seen some Twitter randos claim that Aboriginals aren’t Australian for example.
I think what they miss is that the statement “Cathy Freeman and Chris Hemsworth are Australian” or “The Rock and Sylvester Stallone are American”is no more illegible and contradictory than the statement “Gisele Bundchen and Ronaldinho are Brazilian”. It is quite clear that neither phrase is saying that the individuals referred to are the same race or ethnicity.
Whaddya think? Do you think there’s any flaws in what I said?
I don't think you can ever rigorously define what a national identity is. My own position is that it has an ethnic core but can accept newcomers under the right circumstances. I think it's better when it can kind of be implicit, with an officially civic definition, but mass immigration means the question becomes more fraught and explicit.
I'm not Australian but I probably wouldn't exclude aboriginals from having an Australian identity. However I would guess than some aboriginals themselves would not identify with Australia.
My current position is that a hard, neat distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is a vast oversimplification of the nuances as to how nations work.
Moreover, I also think you can easily argue against mass migration independently of whatever model of national membership or identity you adopt.
EDIT: I also do agree with your point about mass migration making the question of “who is X nationality” explicit. Prior to the post-pandemic surge, questions of who is and what is an Australian simply didn’t register much on my mind, nor in society by my experience.
Very well put, thank you. It seems that essentialism is downstream of vibes politics, even for humanities professors and public intellectuals.. for example it's common to be essentialist about pop neuropsychology - 'it's hardwired!' - but this doesn't necessarily mean that anything as crank-adjacent as genetics or natural selection may (in polite society) be said to influence the hard-wiring.
We accept that males commit more crime, but that men are a neccesary category in society, whereas minorities are not. Right wing politics accepts this and believes in tough on crime policies, and even eugenics as attenuators. Ultimately women's sexual selection in large part made us what we are including our proclivity for violence and lust. Also, that male violence and even psychopathy to some extent can be beneficial in protecting the group, when coupled with impulse control, contentiousness and obedience these male traits can defend civilisation from equally violent males whose proclivity for violence is attached to brains without much else going for them.
Also the problems with blacks are not entirely that they are ‘inferior’ it's that they bring slightly hostile ethnocentrism and politics, that abbets their dysfunction and parasitism - e.g. anti racism culture which gives them welfare and fails to jail them.
Blacks are quite talented just in ways that are zero sum, they compete for status via physical violence, intimidation, entertainment and are a net drain economically. Because they have their own ethnocentrism their talents at the zero sum do not improve the status of America more broadly but the gains go to their group.
Muslims too, push asymmetry, they have their own ethnocentrism but disparage the outgroups and don't collaborate much with it unlike other ethnic groups who take on either a more dhimmi like supportive role or are assimilatory to our ethnocentrism.
Thus we don't need view things entirely from the perspective of superior — inferior but from a friend-enemy distinction.
It is inevitable that minorities will bring some ethnocentrism, we are entitled to ask if it's well aligned and less threatening (like with Sikhs, Latinos, Cubans, Secular Persians n.b you still may not want cultural displacement) or if it's hostile such as blacks or Muslims
The point wasn't whether men are necessary or not. It was simple a question as to what essentialist politics would look like - i.e. to what extent can and should prima facie assumptions (when empirically grounded) be applied to institutional functionality.
The rest of what you've written is quite obvious. Yes indeed, immigrants are not necessary to societal functioning - if we're being quite honest, it is clear that their presence in both Britain and Europe has been a huge net negative on every level, especially viz. "the woman question", grooming gangs and daily rape horror stories along side the general deterioration of civility in the public commons (very noticeable in Luton or Seine Saint Denis) is undeniable.
And you are of course quite right that men are the way they are because of female choice (egg v sperm, gamete asymmetry). I'm not "blaming" men for being more violent or more lustful. It is a simply a primate reality, and for better or worse, men and women are inextricably linked together - all men have mothers, all women fathers. Simple realities which are often oddly forgotten.
I just wanted to provide another perspective on the justification for our embracement of 'racism' on the basis that humans are tribal and we should protect ourselves front he tribalism of others regardless of whether anyone is inferior or superior
Most blacks are not criminals, like most men are not, so treating the individuals a certain way because of the group as a whole is perhaps not justified.
I felt the need to add that the reason we might treat all members of a group a certain way is not because they have x% higher chances of being a rapist - but because they carry another tribes ethnocentrism. And a groups ethnocentrism being a force for bad probably does increase if their group is more criminal - as they might adopt anti white, pro crime, pro mass immigration narratives (that increase crime more)
White privelage was a fantastic concept tbh. The idea is that if your white you benefit from the ethnocentrism of other white people regardless if you are racist or not. But of course this game theory dynamic can be applied in the opposite direction - if your an apolitical member of another group you still benefit from the ethnocentrism your more tribal group members push.
For example moderate, interpersonally pleasant Muslims are probably still quite into anti racism, anti colonialism etc - despite coming from a vastly more tribal people. This asymmetry is part of what caused the rape gangs, one group being highly tribal while another remains atomised and their ethnocentrism suppressed. This ethnocentrism does protect even moderate Muslims and makes them a bit feared, and gives them prestige via some victim status.
Latinos are somewhat dysfunction but them being deracinated and not hostile I'm ethnocentric terms has made them a lot less offensive and probably over time reduced their criminality a lot - as criminals are the enemy of white civilisation, a role they probably don't want to assume considering they increasingly feel part of said civilization
.
Sorry if I'm talking past you or not quite addressing the points - tbh I just wanted to get some of these ideas out my head and onto paper and this comment section is serving that purpose a bit
I not even sure if it is really about essentialism as that everyone crafts their arguments as a way to win on a particular issue and is often very annoyed when those same arguments are applied anywhere else. Everyone wants argument to be a gun that can hit only a specific target they want that noone else can use.
For example, liberals keep going on about "toxic masculinity," almost always implicating western men. And it is true that something like this exists. But it is also obviously true that non western men on average have even more of that toxicity yet libs never use it to argue against immigration.
We also keep hearing from environmentalists how bad it is for the planet that western people consume so much world's resources. But surely that is an argument against more immigration as any increase in Western population would generate more heavy consumers?
When discussing incels, one almost always starts with Eliot Rogers' killing spree just to underline how heinous incels are. And yet in this decade we had more trans mass shootings that incel mass shootings.
I am not here to argue against immigration or pro incel. All I am saying is libs had their way for so long they are not used to anyone connecting the dots they present in an unflattering way.
Quite honestly, I think anti-essentialism is closer to the truth than essentialism. The main reason for that is people adapt to circumstances rationally. For example, you yourself wrote that the clan structure of Pakistani society makes it easy for them to exploit the British welfare state. As long as it is profitable, it will be kept. If for example there will be a massive cut in welfare, and people will often feel the need to move away from their extended family, because good jobs are somewhere else, they will in a few generations become individualistic.
Same for gender/sex, we see a far smaller difference today than in the age when men were mining coal and women were washing clothes by hand. Todays "email job" people are nearly neutral.
Race difference also does not make sense. It is true that in Africa the growing season is year-round. The flip side is that everything is trying to kill you. Recently I was on a business trip to Aalborg, Denmark and I remarked that the entire place is basically grass, grass and some more grass, and nothing else. Basically just have a large enough herd of cows and it is free steaks forever. Is that supposed to be the difficult, challenging place where intelligence is supposed to evolve?
If Essentialism makes a comeback in the post-Hitler age (inevitable, since people born after 2000 by and large increasingly see WW2 with the same fuzzy, vague feeling that the Napoleonic Wars produce on everyone else - albeit this is anecdotal), how exactly would you want it to manifest itself, given that this article implicitly promulgates it? I would assume immigration policy would be one, but how else? Should it be used as a day-to-day heuristic? If so, how?
African Americans disproportionately commit violent crime (we can debate the reasons as to why, but the fact itself is undeniable), should AA majority neighbours be subject to extra police surveillance? Men commit the quasi-totality of all sexual violence (and indeed all violent crimes in general), should women be given custody prima facie? Should they be barred from certain jobs which involve extended contact with children: working at a daycare for instance?
I insist upon this because after eons spent on right-wing twitter, it becomes very obvious that essentialism is very selectively applied, for instance there is unanimous acceptance (and glee) over the low IQ scores and their n-th order effect when it comes to Niger-Congo ethnic groups. I have never seen any discussion on male violence and what should be done to restrain it. Anti-Essentialism also applies to ridiculous leftist believes that men are also victims of patriarchy or that all differences in violence between men and women come to "society" and men being punished for their feelings or something.
In fact, the venn diagram between knee-jerk anti-feminists whose views on women differ scarcely from the same tribal societies they claim to loath and racial/cultural essentialists is practically a circle. This is something worth grappling with. An amusing artefact of this absurdity is that while the grooming gangs are rightly considered to be a tragedy, the only lens in which they are viewed is through a pakistani-on-white crime one, not a male-on-female one. In fact, these same people always promulgate the ludicrous belief that women somehow oppress men by making up rape claims or by "longhousing" them, or that "society" favours women, or that institutional misandry is somehow a thing (I wonder why the authorities covered up decades of mass rape then?).
As for 'young right-wingers' and their purported beliefs, the real life polling data from Western countries paints quite a different picture, and the UK is an outlier in how left-wing the youth is. The idea that BAP, Kunley Drukpa and their acolytes somehow have any bearing on the future of political thought in the country or elsewhere is laughable - and mercifully so.
I have to say that I find the WW2 reductionism (which in itself is evidence of the all-consuming Hitler preoccupation of the post-war generations) a bit unconvincing and tiresome. Its intellectual geneology is long and predates even Rousseau. Jean Finots book (very popular when published) is already a fully developed anti-essentialist work.
There is probably a 100 pages worth of stuff that could possible be said on this. Left-wing rejection of essentialism is effectively doctrinaire and akin to religious belief. However, right-wing essentialism, especially of the online variety, is egregious self-serving and very often scientifically illiterate, and mostly consists of regurgitating Richard Lynn.
Agree about a lot of right-wing essentialism being scientifically illiterate and selectively applied, particularly manosphere stuff. I can see why many would prefer the happy 'everyone is the same' delusion if they think that is the alternative. But I don't think abandoning anti-essentialism means we need to give control of public policy to basedgroyper1488.
My proposal for how public policy should change would primarily be to stop the more egregious forms of anti-essentialism, rather than to start proactively crafting public policy according to different group tendencies. So you could say I'm an anti-anti-essentialist rather than an essentialist.
One specific thing I'd like to see an end to is the assumption where if a policy is found to have some disparate impact, the policy must be wrong, rather than that there really is a group difference. A recent example would be the the AI facial recognition trial that was paused because it identified black people more than other ethnicities: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/19/essex-police-pause-facial-recognition-camera-use-study-racial-bias. This could be enacted via an amendment/replacement to the equality act whereby if a group really does behave differently, accusations of racism etc cannot be used to change a policy.
On the violent crime in general, again, it wouldn't be deciding based on demographics to surveil AA neighbourhoods, this would happen naturally if there was more crime. I would like to prevent the police being forced to stop doing this due to racism accusations.
On immigration policy yes, I'd like to see it be informed by genuine anthropology, both the dangers of producing multi-ethnic societies, and of the stickiness of cultural differences.
Re: men working in nurseries, I'd be open to banning that if the risks are deemed too high. With child custody, I think you probably don't need to rely on group tendencies as you can look at the individual parents involved, and as far as I know, custody does already default to the mother unless there's a good reason not to.
Yep there has been a revival of slop-biological essentialism.
Speaking of slop-essentialism, I’ve seen this bleed into discussions of national identity and membership among segments of the online right, especially those from Anglo Settler societies like Australia.
It is common for them to adopt a definition of the national category in question that is rigidly defined by ancestry or race. I’ve even seen some Twitter randos claim that Aboriginals aren’t Australian for example.
I think what they miss is that the statement “Cathy Freeman and Chris Hemsworth are Australian” or “The Rock and Sylvester Stallone are American”is no more illegible and contradictory than the statement “Gisele Bundchen and Ronaldinho are Brazilian”. It is quite clear that neither phrase is saying that the individuals referred to are the same race or ethnicity.
Whaddya think? Do you think there’s any flaws in what I said?
I don't think you can ever rigorously define what a national identity is. My own position is that it has an ethnic core but can accept newcomers under the right circumstances. I think it's better when it can kind of be implicit, with an officially civic definition, but mass immigration means the question becomes more fraught and explicit.
I'm not Australian but I probably wouldn't exclude aboriginals from having an Australian identity. However I would guess than some aboriginals themselves would not identify with Australia.
My current position is that a hard, neat distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is a vast oversimplification of the nuances as to how nations work.
Moreover, I also think you can easily argue against mass migration independently of whatever model of national membership or identity you adopt.
EDIT: I also do agree with your point about mass migration making the question of “who is X nationality” explicit. Prior to the post-pandemic surge, questions of who is and what is an Australian simply didn’t register much on my mind, nor in society by my experience.
Very well put, thank you. It seems that essentialism is downstream of vibes politics, even for humanities professors and public intellectuals.. for example it's common to be essentialist about pop neuropsychology - 'it's hardwired!' - but this doesn't necessarily mean that anything as crank-adjacent as genetics or natural selection may (in polite society) be said to influence the hard-wiring.
We accept that males commit more crime, but that men are a neccesary category in society, whereas minorities are not. Right wing politics accepts this and believes in tough on crime policies, and even eugenics as attenuators. Ultimately women's sexual selection in large part made us what we are including our proclivity for violence and lust. Also, that male violence and even psychopathy to some extent can be beneficial in protecting the group, when coupled with impulse control, contentiousness and obedience these male traits can defend civilisation from equally violent males whose proclivity for violence is attached to brains without much else going for them.
Also the problems with blacks are not entirely that they are ‘inferior’ it's that they bring slightly hostile ethnocentrism and politics, that abbets their dysfunction and parasitism - e.g. anti racism culture which gives them welfare and fails to jail them.
Blacks are quite talented just in ways that are zero sum, they compete for status via physical violence, intimidation, entertainment and are a net drain economically. Because they have their own ethnocentrism their talents at the zero sum do not improve the status of America more broadly but the gains go to their group.
Muslims too, push asymmetry, they have their own ethnocentrism but disparage the outgroups and don't collaborate much with it unlike other ethnic groups who take on either a more dhimmi like supportive role or are assimilatory to our ethnocentrism.
Thus we don't need view things entirely from the perspective of superior — inferior but from a friend-enemy distinction.
It is inevitable that minorities will bring some ethnocentrism, we are entitled to ask if it's well aligned and less threatening (like with Sikhs, Latinos, Cubans, Secular Persians n.b you still may not want cultural displacement) or if it's hostile such as blacks or Muslims
The point wasn't whether men are necessary or not. It was simple a question as to what essentialist politics would look like - i.e. to what extent can and should prima facie assumptions (when empirically grounded) be applied to institutional functionality.
The rest of what you've written is quite obvious. Yes indeed, immigrants are not necessary to societal functioning - if we're being quite honest, it is clear that their presence in both Britain and Europe has been a huge net negative on every level, especially viz. "the woman question", grooming gangs and daily rape horror stories along side the general deterioration of civility in the public commons (very noticeable in Luton or Seine Saint Denis) is undeniable.
And you are of course quite right that men are the way they are because of female choice (egg v sperm, gamete asymmetry). I'm not "blaming" men for being more violent or more lustful. It is a simply a primate reality, and for better or worse, men and women are inextricably linked together - all men have mothers, all women fathers. Simple realities which are often oddly forgotten.
I just wanted to provide another perspective on the justification for our embracement of 'racism' on the basis that humans are tribal and we should protect ourselves front he tribalism of others regardless of whether anyone is inferior or superior
Most blacks are not criminals, like most men are not, so treating the individuals a certain way because of the group as a whole is perhaps not justified.
I felt the need to add that the reason we might treat all members of a group a certain way is not because they have x% higher chances of being a rapist - but because they carry another tribes ethnocentrism. And a groups ethnocentrism being a force for bad probably does increase if their group is more criminal - as they might adopt anti white, pro crime, pro mass immigration narratives (that increase crime more)
White privelage was a fantastic concept tbh. The idea is that if your white you benefit from the ethnocentrism of other white people regardless if you are racist or not. But of course this game theory dynamic can be applied in the opposite direction - if your an apolitical member of another group you still benefit from the ethnocentrism your more tribal group members push.
For example moderate, interpersonally pleasant Muslims are probably still quite into anti racism, anti colonialism etc - despite coming from a vastly more tribal people. This asymmetry is part of what caused the rape gangs, one group being highly tribal while another remains atomised and their ethnocentrism suppressed. This ethnocentrism does protect even moderate Muslims and makes them a bit feared, and gives them prestige via some victim status.
Latinos are somewhat dysfunction but them being deracinated and not hostile I'm ethnocentric terms has made them a lot less offensive and probably over time reduced their criminality a lot - as criminals are the enemy of white civilisation, a role they probably don't want to assume considering they increasingly feel part of said civilization
.
Sorry if I'm talking past you or not quite addressing the points - tbh I just wanted to get some of these ideas out my head and onto paper and this comment section is serving that purpose a bit
This would be the game-theoretically optimal Nash Equilibrium
I not even sure if it is really about essentialism as that everyone crafts their arguments as a way to win on a particular issue and is often very annoyed when those same arguments are applied anywhere else. Everyone wants argument to be a gun that can hit only a specific target they want that noone else can use.
For example, liberals keep going on about "toxic masculinity," almost always implicating western men. And it is true that something like this exists. But it is also obviously true that non western men on average have even more of that toxicity yet libs never use it to argue against immigration.
We also keep hearing from environmentalists how bad it is for the planet that western people consume so much world's resources. But surely that is an argument against more immigration as any increase in Western population would generate more heavy consumers?
When discussing incels, one almost always starts with Eliot Rogers' killing spree just to underline how heinous incels are. And yet in this decade we had more trans mass shootings that incel mass shootings.
I am not here to argue against immigration or pro incel. All I am saying is libs had their way for so long they are not used to anyone connecting the dots they present in an unflattering way.
Quite honestly, I think anti-essentialism is closer to the truth than essentialism. The main reason for that is people adapt to circumstances rationally. For example, you yourself wrote that the clan structure of Pakistani society makes it easy for them to exploit the British welfare state. As long as it is profitable, it will be kept. If for example there will be a massive cut in welfare, and people will often feel the need to move away from their extended family, because good jobs are somewhere else, they will in a few generations become individualistic.
Same for gender/sex, we see a far smaller difference today than in the age when men were mining coal and women were washing clothes by hand. Todays "email job" people are nearly neutral.
Race difference also does not make sense. It is true that in Africa the growing season is year-round. The flip side is that everything is trying to kill you. Recently I was on a business trip to Aalborg, Denmark and I remarked that the entire place is basically grass, grass and some more grass, and nothing else. Basically just have a large enough herd of cows and it is free steaks forever. Is that supposed to be the difficult, challenging place where intelligence is supposed to evolve?