Uriah

But you see this in all the broad faced countries, or you used to anyways. The constant revanchism, the racially tinged ultra-nationalism which distinguishes the Germans or Koreans from their neighbors.

These peoples fight so often partly because they are brave, but also because they are not deterred by the hard, boring work of real soldiers, which can be so draining it makes deadly combat seem like a relief. If you could handle feudalism, you can handle war.

The idea that human beings have been self-domesticated is very old, but the execution of the idea is always wrong. Biologists have traditionally imagined domesticated people as being easy going hippies, whereas the truth is that civilization makes you hard, not soft.

It's wolves who are shy and fearful, not bulldogs. Domesticated animals don't piss themselves in fear constantly and lose weight when trapped in captivity. They can take it. A domesticated human isn't Jeff Lebowski, he's Fedor Emelianenko

Biologists are right though, I think, in describing wild humans as “xenophobic”, in the sense that American whites live in constant fear of blacks to the point of reflexively praising them for doing nothing. The Russian attitude toward foreigners is more "civilized", fearless.

Alpine peoples are obviously very different from other (French, North Italian, German, Slavic) but to me the one striking mannerism they all share is a tendency, during argument, to invade the personal space of the other guy and go nose to nose like Tony Soprano.

Everyone has an invisible bubble around them which strangers aren’t supposed to enter without permission. The size of the bubble, dictated by stress, informs a person's intuitions about “rights” and “privacy”, in Norwegians the bubble is huge, in Alpines it’s tiny.

The lack of fear Alpines show makes them willing to boldly approach others, especially in Mediterranean countries, and this sometimes manifests itself as a kind of Pepe LePew rapiness. They're vulgar, laugh loudly at dirty jokes, and speak bluntly about everything.

Some peoples have genuinely unique personalities, like the Jews and Irish, but most national characters were not selected for per se but emerge from unusual combinations of traits. To give one relevant example, the Germans:

Northwest Europeans have a distinctive mental style, an nerdy memory for facts and little details and a way of seeing the world autistically, abstractly, to store facts about human beings in the same mental compartments as fictional characters or animals.

The Germans are uniquely dangerous people because they combine this kind of nerdy facility for organization and planning with a hardness and racial arrogance more typical of Slavs. They are very much like other Alpines with one important exception: they are competent.

The kinds of cruelty, on a national or individual level, that Germans are capable of is related to this sort of crossroads personality. NW Euros are autistic and inhuman, but this is mitigated by their softness. Slavs are hard, but also warm. Germans are neither warm nor soft.

Russians too have a character that is the result of an unusual combination: an Alpine ease around people mixed with a stoic, unemotional harshness shared with other northern peoples like Scandinavians.

Practically anything I have written about the broad faced people of Europe and the Middle East is true, maybe doubly true, of East Asians who also traditionally practiced collectivized agriculture. You can think of Alpines as “domesticated”, but also as “Orientalized”.

So what then it is like to be wild, at least by European standards? The best illustration would be the pathological shyness of Norwegians, who have a way of filling up a bus one by one while always maintaining the maximum possible distance between passengers.

But the people of British Isles are also quite long headed and not quite the same and Iberians are downright extraverted . The common element between them is a softness toward children and animals, an easy going laziness: a philosophy of “that’s just like, your opinion, man”

They wander and emigrate more than Alpines, easily feel cramped and stifled by monotony. They indulge themselves in flights of fantasy; they wander mentally as well as physically. They speak theatrically, “idealistically” They do not take orders well.

There are three clusters of people in Europe that produce large numbers of great distance runners: 1. Norway 2. Iberia and 3. Britain, especially Wales. The universal pattern, in Europe or in Africa, is that people who raise animals in hills, like the Kalenjin, can run for days.

There is essentially a trade off: active human societies of hunters, herders, or isolated farmers maintain strong lungs, primarily I think to survive respiratory infections. When life becomes sedentary and stressful cortisol no longer pays for itself.