"It's better to invert reality than to copy it."-Giuseppe Verdi, 1870.
Is the West today a united or diverse culture? The orthodox position is that whites should be strictly united around the ideal of diversity. The idealistic vision is that whites achieve redemption by angrily rejecting their immoral, fallen history, and lovingly embrace the sunny future of diversity, the rapture. Heaven is Nature and the perfectly loving and diverse future; Hell is the disdainful and divisive past, the old law. Today, ethical and scientific facts that imply hellish disdain, and not love, are experienced as domineering or a "hegemonic discourse" and are worthy of attack: "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm!"
The nineteenth century was united by exalting high culture and distaining nature and diversity. We today have inverted this; we are united by disdain for high culture, and by exalting nature and diversity: so joyful, altruistic feelings exist between those in the group who embrace the new unity and leadership-but they direct antagonism toward outsiders. Today's new unity, as described in HUMAN SIN OR SOCIAL SIN, has inspired most scientists to readopt the theory of group selection for the evolution of altruism.
As Stanford neurologist Robert Sapolsky said, "Cultures magnify the intensity of between-group selection and lessen within-group selection with ethnocentrism, religious intolerance, and race-based politics, and so on... Most in the field now both accept multilevel selection and instances of neo-group selection, especially in humans" (Behave, Penguin, p. 364).
Anthropologist Pascal Boyer referred to, "...the extraordinary developments of biology and congnitive sciences." [and]... "It was only recently that social scienctists realized that these empirical disciplines were all making progress...[and]...promising a vertical integration" (Minds Make Societies, Yale Univ. Press, p. 277). The following studies support HUMAN SIN OR SOCIAL SIN:
E. O. Wilson, Of Ants and Men (PBS, DVD).
R. Sapolsky, Behave.
S. Bowles, The Cooperative Species (Princeton Univ. Press).
M. Bauerlien, The State of the American Mind.
P. Boyer, Minds Make Societies (Yale Univ. Press).
R. Wrangham, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution (Harvard Univ. Press).
J. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, & The Coddling of the American Mind[The best intro to the model]. "Paul Dachslager has revolutionized our understanding of the political culture and-using evolutionary science-has allowed us to understand in a very clear manner both the social culture of the present and past. He connects the present to the past in a manner that is both new and scientifically rigorous. Politics can now work with facts instead of emotion and intuition. Paul is able to perfectly explain the moral controversies surrounding the Trump presidency.
"These findings on the basic structure of political psychology have been supported by Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, The Origins of Creativity and Darwin's Bridge, S. Pinker's Enlightenment Now, Bernard Chapais (EBS: 11: 63-82, 2017), and David Buss's The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. I can support that these works reproduce Paul's evolutionary psychology for our political culture. These publications are a form of peer review. The model has been reproduced among African nomads and the newest findings on group selection in history. Paul's use of chimpanzee behavior to model history is the largest empirical data set for a chimp-like origins for humans.
"With this work we now have the potential to obtain a scientific and united knowledge of our history and political culture-as we do for nature. And unity in the West is a good."-Richard Lynn, Ph.D., Prof. of Psychology, Univ. of Uls
Dachslager has a few good insights in here, but the book is poorly written, very poorly organized, and extremely repetitive - it could easily have been a Master's thesis of 50-70pp instead of 570. It is clogged with an abundance of sometimes-irrelevant art and film criticism, which are sometimes repeated nigh verbatim multiple times: a fifth as many examples better-selected would have worked better. It is poorly cited: there aren't references at all for many assertions, and those referenced often don't contain a page number, just a title of a work.
The author's thesis and examples of the inversion of high and low, nature and culture, good and evil, asceticism and libertinism, Black and White, control and profligacy are helpful; his analytical framework of the body versus the social body is *very* helpful, especially in the interpretation of media. Likewise for his analysis of what people worship and in what way (today, diversity and the blacks who suffer like Christ for the sins of White folk, and rebels against the social body, such as queers, worshipped by degeneracy, suicidal inclusiveness, ethnomasochism, etc.).
The author has a notable anti-Christian bias, likely because he notices the genealogical connection between Puritanism and secular Puritan social justice warriorism, but is incorrect in his analysis nevertheless. He dances around the secularization of Puritanism without ever clarifying his thought or driving the point home (for which see Paul Gottfried, 'Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt'), and then veers in to left field by attributing modern postmaterial Leftism directly to Christianity, not to a corrupted and secularized Christian impulse engendered by the weakening of religious bonds and community.
Despite my low rating, due largely to the fact the book is 9x longer than it needs to be and poorly cited, I don't recommend not reading this: if you do, read the first chapter of Part I and the last 5 of Part II. If those were published as a full book on their own, it would be a four-star work.
*Marked as 3-star instead of 2-star because I'm the first review and don't want people to dismiss this book immediately.