Uriah

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”