It’s Fine to be Stupid and Poor, But It Shouldn’t be Celebrated

There is an impulse people have to celebrate “simplicity” as virtuous.

There is an idea of the “noble savage,” namely, that primitive people are romantic and experience life at some greater level than more intelligent people. This concept was integrated into left philosophy, but it seems to have universal appeal in the minds of modern men, who have a drive to find a mythical nirvana among the natural world.

There were various hoaxes surrounding the politicized leftist version of this notion, mostly claiming that primitive people lived without the social restraints imposed by Christian civilization. The most notable example is the infamous Margaret Mead Samoan hoax, which was promoted all through Western culture, including by Sigmund Freud. Mead, an anthropologist, claimed in her most famous work Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) that these island primitives lived in a sexual utopia without guilt or shame. This was believed in academia for decades before the debunking began, and it wasn’t fully debunked until the 1980s, when the people used as examples in the book, by then very old, went on record saying Mead just made it all up.

A twist on the “noble savage” concept is the idea that rural peasants, while not chasing around buffalo, have a more uncorrupted character than urban people. This is perhaps the right-wing version of this romanticization of primitive life as superior and desirable. Most people on the internet appear to believe that there are a lot of “real Americans” in urban areas living truly masculine, peaceful lives. In reality, however, most rural people in America are obese, stupid, and on drugs. Any farming that they do is totally chemically polluted. Most of them live on welfare and sit around watching TV all day. Virtually all young people in these areas want to move to the big city and engage in all of the things we all despise.

I’ve reached the conclusion that it is better to live in a rural area, because it does bring peace to be away from the deranged lunacy of a modern city, but this is a patrician understanding, and not something that the peasants who live in rural areas naturally understand. A peasant is always going to be inclined towards base behavior, which is why people in third world countries, rather than doing organic farming and communing with nature, engage in mass deforestation, large scale industrial pollution, and throw plastic trash everywhere, making most of the land uninhabitable. If poor people were not stupid, they would not be poor.

Just so, there is an instinct on both left and right to promote “the working class,” as if there is something noble about them. Again, if you look at the working class, you’re just going to find a bunch of stupid, fat people on drugs engaged in absurdly degenerate behavior. More intelligent people have higher morality, and if you take moral boundaries away from the peasants, they just go completely nuts.

There’s nothing wrong with stupid, poor people. They should be helped by the rest of society. Certainly when it comes to white Americans, our country has a duty to try and bring these people up out of the pit they are in. They are worse off than the middle classes because they don’t have the intelligence to navigate a society that has become a free-for-all.

However, none of this should be celebrated, and no one should think it is good to be stupid and poor. It’s not good at all. There is nothing noble about it. It’s disgusting. You shouldn’t be ashamed to feel that way. Fat people are disgusting. It is disgusting to leave the television on all day when you have other people in your house. Industrial pollution is disgusting. The preindustrial primitive peoples of the world lived better than modern third worlders, I’m sure, but their societies were largely barbaric and cruel, and they were anti-intellectual. There is nothing to celebrate here.

People should seek for a higher ideal, always. As I say, there is a higher ideal in living closer to nature, and in my experience, this does bring a certain amount of genuine peace. However, that understanding is intellectual. I’m sure that there are people who live in rural areas in America who have come to an understanding about the benefits of living closer to the land, and I’m sure some of them are not fat. But on the whole, living in a rural area, or with modest means, does not bring enlightenment, but rather the reverse: more enlightened people seek a simpler life.

Intelligent people (all Daily Stormer readers are intelligent) should not be ashamed of this or imagine that they’d have been better off as a peasant.