Agency is Fake, Causality is Looped, and We're All Meat Robots in a Race Spiral

Belief in unidirectional causality begets racial nationalism. 

If people are equal they have an equal capacity to oppress others. To claim that whites are inherently better at oppressing others is to claim that some are superior,( or inferior depending on your perspective) to others. This is a self-refuting argument since on the one hand you postulate the humans are equal while on the other you say that whites are inherently better at oppressing. There is no claim of inherent difference that leads to a conclusion of inherent sameness. Therefore one cannot extract a conclusion that humans are equal if they believe that they are inherently different.

There are two ways of looking at this, and then a third distinct way. 

One we will call the clockwise approach while the other we call it the counterclockwise approach. In the clockwise approach, white racism causes black unemployment, black unemployment causes black crime, black crime contributes to white racism. 

White racism --> black unemployment --> black crime -- (weak effect) --> white racism

In the counterclockwise approach, black crime causes black unemployment and white racism, white racism weekly contributes to black unemployment.

Black crime --> black unemployment 

                      \---> white racism -- (weak causality) --> black unemployment 

Which you view as true would depend on a moral presupposition of who has more agency in the relationship. If whites have agency things go clockwise, if blacks have agency counterclockwise. If causality is bi-directional then people are equal. Bi-directional causality means that causality is going in both directions at the same time, both clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously. People can only be equal if causality is PERFECTLY bi-directional. Bi-directional causality is the third distinct way. One might say that they can postulate the bi-directional causality is true and then also postulate that causality goes more in One direction than the other but in practice this just collapses into unidirectional causality. 

Here are three examples: 

Uni-directional form 1: Israel abuses Palestinians, which causes Palestinian resistance, which weakly contributes to Israeli fear.

Uni-directional form 2: Palestinians terrorize Israel, which causes Israel to defend itself, which weakly contributes to Palestinian resistance.

Bi-directional form: both are to blame and causality is going both directions simultaneously.

All assertions of unidirectional causality eventually cause racial nationalism on both sides. The side that is viewed as "victim" must adopt a protective racial nationalism while the side that is viewed as "oppressor" must fear an uprising of the "victim" and develop a jingoistic and aggressive racial nationalism. Choosing to attribute causality to one side or the other is an example of ought therefore is, which is an inversion of the traditional approach where is therefore ought. I am referring here to Hume's Guillotine and the three patterns I have outlined in Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts. Here are the three forms:

1. Is there for ought (traditional arguments) "things have always been a certain way therefore they should always be that way!" 

2. Is therefore NOT ought (Hume's Guillotine) "just because things have always been a certain way does not mean they should continue to be that way!" 

3. Ought therefore is (modern progressivism) "humans ought to be equal therefore they are! Black crime ought not to be a problem therefore it isn't! Trans women ought to be women therefore they are! Society ought to be able to function without police therefore it can! Democracy in Afghanistan ought to be possible therefore it is! Women ought to be the same as men and therefore they are!" etc. etc.

Viewing one group (blacks or whites) becomes an example of the third form (ought therefore is) unless you can bring proof to substantiate your argument. Blame equates to ought therefore is. When you assert blame you are already playing the third form progressive game. Blame is not the same as causality, so in theory it could be possible to assert the counterclockwise position without blaming blacks. In reality humans are not that sophisticated and it always collapses into a more crass and simplistic outcome. Since reality is simple, and since minds are simple, nuance and nuanced arguments are mostly a waste of time. The simplistic version of a complex idea always prevails in the mass imagination. 

The moment you start blaming people you have already accepted a progressive logical structure since you are blaming people for nature, and that involves an argumentative style that starts with "ought" and concludes with "is" or another "ought." This is the trap anyone who wants to speak realistically about race faces. You will always be bated into an argument where you must assert that morality came first, and therefore your viewpoint is subjective, and therefore because it is subjective it is no more valid than the opposite viewpoint, and therefore since the opposite viewpoint is more "humane"  it is morally superior.

Then if you say that no one is to blame, but policies should be adopted to stop black crime anyway, you will be lured into a logical trap where since no one is to blame then nothing needs to be done about it. The left wing presumption here is that "is therefore ought" is a logically unacceptable structure of thought.

The trap is demanding that you make a moral assertion about a fact. This is a red herring, and puts you in the position of playing defense on their turf and their terms. There is another approach, which is to say that the human race possesses less self-control, self-awareness, and agency than anyone thinks, that blame does not even make sense because the human species is not really sentient. That nothing is to blame in an organic system. That consciousness is not really real, that people are trapped in their "loops" (to borrow a term from the TV show Westworld), and that there's no agency in an organic system. That THE WILL of humans is largely an illusion, and that there is no true self awareness in a genetic species. In fact one might even assert that natural selection itself limits self-awareness because those who become too self aware cease to breed. Oh one might achieve some modest self-awareness of their own thought process and psychology, perhaps after years of therapy, but self-awareness as a collective species is a non-existent possibility for the vast bulk of people. When I say as a collective species I mean that the species would develop a self-awareness of its own patterns, its own structures. This level of greater self-awareness is not even conceived of by most people, and thus, the species is not capable of it. This is obviously a more depressing conclusion.