WEIRD White People
Western Civilization is unique and arguably worth preserving. Western Civilization was created and is maintained by White people, who are psychologically unique in their view of the world. What makes Whites, and the civilization they created, psychologically distinct compared to the global distribution of societies?
Joseph Henrich, in his landmark 2020 book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, calls Whites WIERD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. WEIRD people are nonconformist, individualistic, self-obsessed, analytical, and control-oriented. They focus on themselves - their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations - over their relationships and social roles.
Celina101 offers an excellent discussion of the book in her 6 July 2026 essay, White people are WEIRD: How a medieval church's obsession with marriage accidentally rewired human psychology and why it matters for everything from capitalism to your sense of self.
Celina presents several studies included in Henrich's book that demonstrate the psychological differences between Westerners and tribal peoples.
Celina notes what Westerners describe themselves in terms of their attributes and achievements. Nearly everyone else who has ever lived would describe themselves in terms of relationships and roles: their family, clan, and tribe.
Henrich contends that the divergence began 1,500 years ago, when Christianity that became the Roman Catholic Church waged an extended war against the extended family. It banned cousin marriage and ultimately clan alliances. This forced Europeans to structure their lives differently, emphasizing voluntary relationships with strangers. Celina notes that:
Over dozens of generations, that new social world reshaped psychology itself, making people more individualistic, more trusting of strangers, more rule-following, more analytical. And that peculiar psychology, in turn, became the soil in which markets, science, universal law and democracy could grow...
Only the Western Church spent six or seven centuries systematically at war with the extended family and only Western Europe ended up without one.
Celina writes that in an English village around 1200, a man was in a unique situation:
The clan is gone. He must find a wife, by mutual consent, outside his (now nonexistent) kindred, probably from another village. He must find land or a trade. If he wants security, insurance, opportunity, he cannot inherit them from a lineage; he must join things. And medieval Europe, remarkably, was full of things to join because everyone else faced the same problem.
... when kinship stops solving life's problems, people build voluntary associations to solve them instead, and those associations select for a completely different psychology....
So, Henrich's claim is that centuries of living inside such institutions did not merely change how Europeans behaved, it changed, cumulatively and culturally, how they thought and felt.
Celina points that these differences are much deeper than "individualism". They extend profoundly into perception and reasoning.
Henrich contends that this difference is predominantly cultural. Those who study Human Biodiversity (HBD) understand that such traits can be - and probably are - inherited at this juncture.
Celina writes:
Henrich's lesson is stranger and goes deeper: other people perceive differently, feel obligation differently, locate the self in a different place and the version of humanity that WEIRD societies mistake for the default is, in the long view, the anomaly...
Ultimately, most of the world does not think like us and we ourselves are the WEIRD ones.
Whether such differences are cultural or are also genetic - and they probably are, they are significant and persistent. This goes a long way toward explaining why importing people from different cultures - and different genetic stock - results in gross incompatibility with Western societies.
High trust vs low trust societies
The WEIRD attributes of Whites and Westerners explains how a cohesive, high trust society is a prerequisite to maintaining a functional Western society. That is, people must trust others enough to be able to form social, business, and political relationships with them.
Importing large groups from tribal-centric cultures (Somalis) and dominating cultures (Islam) into Western societies results in unassimilable groups of people from low trust societies. The result is not their adoption of WEIRD values and the assimilation of these groups into Western society. The ultimate result is the fragmentation of formerly cohesive Western societies into dysfunctional low trust societies. Arguably, that's the orchestrated intent.