11/15/2022 08:01

Population Replacement

You know the delusion that somebody is busily attempting to replace people like me -- white, geriatric, comfortably wealthy, unimaginably privileged, and yet constantly frustrated -- with some other people who have contrasting attributes except for also being constantly frustrated. For a while this intellectual infection appeared to spread easily to susceptible individuals who were similarly white, geriatric, comfortably wealthy, unimaginably privileged, and yet constantly frustrated.

Now it turns out that not every white, geriatric, comfortably wealthy, unimaginably privileged, and yet constantly frustrated person is also susceptible. This truth, or possibly some completely different delusion, has led to an effort to infect people who are outside the pale, or outside the pale-skinned community, or who are pediatric, modestly wealthy or hardly at all, or whose privileges are within the range of at least the more wild of imaginations.

Juvenility may be the criteron most successfully loosened. One imagines the grandchildren of white, geriatric, comfortably wealthy, unimaginably privileged deludees might be accustomed to thinking of the world around them in terms of the white, geriatric, comfortably wealthy, and unimaginably privileged grandparents at whose house they enjoy Thanksgiving dinner every year. On the other hand, one could also imagine these same children going to public schools, playing with neighbors, and participating in community gatherings. Such activities might well impair susceptibility or, to reverse the point of view, improve immunity.

The concept of population replacement is a delusion of projection. Just because some of MY ancestors adopted the explicit intent of displacing all indigenous people, destroying their culture, and extirpating their legacy -- and with their compatriots came perilously close to succeeding in that design -- it does not follow necessarily that some other people are now plotting the same fate for us who are their beneficiaries.

Although in actual reality that would be poetically just the evidence suggests "we" are entirely capable of displacing ourselves from our place of domination simply by inventing so many criteria of "otherness" that almost all of "us" will be defined away. I do not say that is our only path toward fugitivity but it is enough.


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