White People are Crazy

by John Hardin

I’m very white. Both of my parents are white, and I got a good white education, went to white college, studied science, and learned to think like a serious white man. I’m pretty good at it too, especially in writing, but I also sound white and act white. I’ve got the whole white shtick down pat, but I’m not proud of it, and I don’t think it healthy. In fact, I recognize it as a mental illness, and I am doing my best to recover from it.

You don’t need to go to college to learn to think like a white person. Spending time online will do it, even if the people you communicate with are not white. The internet itself is a white-man’s invention, and it shows. There’s no physical contact; it’s completely detached from reality, and everyone is trying to sell you something. How much whiter could it be?

When you look at the history of white colonization in America, unless you are white, you see cold-blooded murder and plunder for profit. You see genocide, slavery, poverty, exploitation, environmental devastation and unspeakable violence giving rise to an empire of unprecedented power and influence. Unless you are white, the colonization of North America looks like a terrible thing, if not the most terrible thing to ever happen. It was the world’s worst holocaust, but if you are white, you gloss over the genocide, slavery and other bad stuff as “unfortunate chapters” in a whole other story.

If you are white you see things completely differently. We don’t see ourselves as violent and greedy. Instead, we see ourselves as intellectually sophisticated and technologically advanced. For white people, it is the story of “the Enlightenment” (literally “whitening”), the rise of objective science, and our relentless search for truth, that led to certain technological innovations that made our rise to power inevitable. White people think that we built this empire because we are smart people, not because of the ruthless greed that drove colonial expansion. White people believe that we run the world because we’re smart.

When white people look at something like the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, they’ll marvel at the engineering, and think, “Isn’t it amazing what smart people can do when they work together for the good of everyone.” White people forget the genocide that made that bridge conceivable, the gold rush that made it possible, and the sprawl that made it necessary. White people somehow forget that 100 million people died, wolves and grizzlies were extirpated, millions of acres of the world’s tallest trees leveled, wiping out an abundance of salmon that people today can scarcely imagine, let alone believe, in order to make that bridge a reality. When you look at it from a wider perspective, smart people would have had nothing to do with that project, nor is it anything to be proud of.

White people somehow manage to take pride in the monumental achievements of empire, but largely overlook it’s crimes against humanity and nature. We white people take collective pride in things like the lunar landing, the ability to split the atom, and this new information wonderland we call the internet. We think these things demonstrate the superiority of our way of doing things. And by “our way of doing things” we don’t mean our habit of spending more on military programs than the rest of the world combined, while millions of our own people go hungry and sleep outside in the cold. No, we don’t mean that at all. Why would you think that?

No, we mean something else entirely. White people really believe that it was our relentless pursuit of the truth, that led us to a superior understanding of the world. That scientific understanding of the world gave rise to our great power, and that wisdom now necessitates the inevitable subjugation and assimilation of all other cultures. You see, we’re just smarter, that’s all. (I told you we were crazy)

I don’t just mean that White Supremacists believe this, of course they do, but liberal PC white people believe this too, deep down. White people can’t imagine that it could be any other way, and that’s especially true of “smart” liberal, PC white people. When you press them on it, white people all believe that our modern white dominated society constitutes an evolutionary advance over indigenous tribal cultures, and that our science is the ultimate authority on everything. That’s what white liberals mean when they say “we are evolving as a species.”

Being smart really matters to white people, and by “smart” I don’t mean “make intelligent decisions that lead to a rich and fulfilling life.” Smart means something else entirely to white people. Smart, to white people, means knowing stuff that nobody in their right mind would ever want to know, and knowing how to make money from it. Being smart is so important to us that we find a way to think of everything we do as “smart,” as in the previous example of the colonization of North America.

You see, when you are white, anything you do can be “smart.” Sometimes it’s “smart” to be cowardly. Sometimes it’s “smart” to attack unarmed people without provocation. “Smart” has no morals. If the outcome was favorable, it was a “smart” move. If the outcome was a disaster, we ask ourselves, “What can we learn from this?” and it makes us feel even “smarter.” We have “smart” bombs and “smart” phones and we want everyone and everything to be “smart” like us.

White people consider “smart” our great gift to humanity. White people know that there is a thin line between genius and insanity, but we don’t realize that we already crossed the line with “smart.” That’s why “smart” white people tend to be the craziest. In reality, our real skill, our unparalleled cultural achievement, as well as the key to our insanity, is our salesmanship.

White people are the best salesmen to ever walk the Earth. We can sell anything to anyone, including ourselves. Selling makes us feel smart. Of course, the first part of selling stuff is convincing people that you are smart, and that you know what you are selling. The second part of selling stuff is convincing the buyer that they are smart for buying your product. The more stuff you sell, the smarter people think you are, and the more stuff you buy, the smarter you think you are. Buying and selling stuff makes us feel smart, no matter how stupid the products, and sometimes, the dumber the product, the smarter we feel about buying and selling it.

In order to be a truly great salesman, however, you need to believe in what you sell. If you are black, native or latinex, you don’t have to believe in, approve of, or condone white culture, you just have to survive in it. White people, on the other hand, feel a strong need to believe in our way of doing things, so we constantly sell it to ourselves, each other, and anyone who survives their encounter with us.

White culture’s dark and violent history makes it hard to see our way of life as a good and benevolent thing. It’s what we call a “hard sell.” So, we don’t sell the past. We sell the future. We sell every new technological innovation as the key to an idyllic future utopia, that never materializes, because it was never more than a fantasy, but white people really believe in a future in which technology has solved all of our earthly problems and we’re all “smart”, good-looking, and rich.

By now, most white people have replaced “heaven,” the postmortem paradise of Christian lore, with Star Trek, the high-tech paradise of the future, a future so dazzlingly bright that it justifies, nullifies, and more than compensates for all of the crimes of the past. Secular white liberals believe as deeply in this future, as Christian conservatives believe in heaven, and like Christians, they will do anything to get there.

White people worship technology as our savior, but no matter how many times it fails to deliver, and no matter how many intractable problems technology creates, we still believe that the technology to make it all better is right around the corner. We avoid learning from the past, by focusing on the future. Isn’t that smart? You see, white people really are crazy. Unless you are white, of course, you already knew that.

That’s enough thinking like a white man for today. At thee bottom of this essay, you’ll find a piece of music I recorded coincidentally, during the period I was thinking about and writing this essay. It began as a piano-like accompaniment to another piece of music for a string quartet, but eventually grew into something else. I composed this piece on just one instrument, my diminutive circuit-bent Casio Magic Light ML1 keyboard.

Thinking about my condition, our condition, and the condition of the world, reminded me of what I love about circuit-bending, and especially the spectacular, dynamic, cyclical, yet unpredictable ways that this little keyboard malfunctions, glitches-out and loses its mind when you short-circuit its tiny electronic brain in certain ways. I think it kind of parallels what’s happening to us, our society and the world around us. I hope you enjoy it.