We need to start trusting our primal survival instincts again

“Never judge a book by its cover.”

“There’s some good in everyone.”

Our grandparents would look at a scenario like this and decide, correctly, that the visitor on their doorstep was not going to get an answer or an invitation.

“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

“Always give the benefit of the doubt first.”

Some of those sound like good advice to you, don’t they?

But are they, actually, good advice? Are these truisms enough moral instruction for children? Is that all they need to know before you send them to fly out of the nest?

Stranger danger

Or, do they need to hear these, too?

“Don’t talk to strange adults.”

“Be on your guard around suspicious looking people until you determine they’re safe.”

“Don’t automatically open the front door just because someone knocked.”

“Remember that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

The West, and America in particular, have been the subjects of a psychological manipulation project for at least 60 years. It’s been successful at dulling our God-given natural instincts. It has convinced us not only to ignore but to actively distrust our intuition.

It has done this by reframing our normal instinctive responses as “bigotry” and “cold-heartedness.”

The big lie

I’m not proposing a grand, conscious conspiracy from a government or shadowy organization. I don’t think this project is a fully plotted out “plan” by criminal masterminds.

Instead, I think that cultural forces — activist groups and politicians, media, universities — have collectively bought into a cultural push that benefits their interests at the cost of yours. They make money and accrue cultural power from your cooperation with their project of convincing you that you have to “be nice” and “be empathetic” to whichever favored group they promote. Whether this is fiscally, emotionally, or physically safe for you doesn’t matter.

In short, you’ve been lied to, and you now believe the lie.

You think you’re “racist” and “a bad person” when you cross the street to avoid a group of five young black men at night. You’re a “xenophobe” if you want illegal aliens deported and don’t wish them housed in the motel next to your daughter’s school. You’re “transphobic” if you don’t want grown men in lipstick traipsing through public bathrooms or your daughter’s college locker room.

This is a leftist mindset, but it does not only afflict the left. Just as the majority of women today, including many on the right, see the world at base through a feminist lens (men are responsible for women’s problems), many on the right are just as susceptible to turning off their intuition out of fear of being seen as “mean.”

Who goes there?

Let’s look at a real-life example. To understand this, you should watch this short video of a doorbell camera. It’s only 40 seconds long, but you need to see it in order to follow where I’m going next.

The scene is a front porch in a well-kept suburban neighborhood. A black woman and her young daughter walk onto the porch and ring the bell. The woman speaks to the camera and claims she wants to borrow a cup of sugar. Getting no response, she speaks more:

“You don’t have to answer, but, uh, I know you can hear me. I can hear you on the inside.”

Note that.

Still getting no response, the woman then stops pushing the doorbell and starts physically rapping on the door. The video ends at this point.

The variation in how people respond to this video concerns me. It is quite obvious that something is off about this woman’s behavior, yet many seem to believe it was the homeowner being “rude” or “weird” for not answering the door. That’s a direct reversal of reality.

Just a cup of sugar?

Wilfred Reilly, a college professor and podcaster (disclosure: I know Wil online, have appeared on shows with him, and I like and respect him), reacted with a post that claimed the video showed “the most sane and conventional interaction” and that right-wing people reacting badly to it were “panicking” at something totally benign.

“This is literally a neighbor asking to borrow a cup of sugar,” Reilly wrote.

No, it’s not. And there was nothing “sane and conventional” about this situation.

Let’s go through the “tells,” the alerts to potential danger, throughout this 40-second video.

1. The neighborhood appears to be solidly upper-middle class. The woman who shows up is dressed in pajamas, a T-shirt, and has a shower cap on her head. She claims to be the homeowner’s “neighbor,” but this is unlikely (possible, but unlikely). Yes, I’m afraid that the fact that she’s black, and that she is dressed that way, does make it less likely that she lives in the neighborhood. Noticing this is not “racism”; it’s just plain, obvious common sense.

Therefore, we already have reason to believe the door-knocker is not being honest.

2. Is it really likely that a “neighbor” you have never seen before would come over to your house to borrow a cup of sugar? Really? To onlookers like Wilfred Reilly, this seems normal. To me, it seems like a ham-fisted use of an old cliché by someone working an angle.
3. Notice the attitude of entitlement and implied aggression in what the door-knocking woman says. “I know you can hear me,” and “I can hear you on the inside.” Does that sound like something that a kindly neighbor would say if she were hoping to get a favor from you? Would you take that tone with a stranger from whom you were asking for help? It’s simply not believable, and with all due respect to my friend Wil, this shouldn’t be difficult to discern.
4. It’s possible that the woman really was home alone with her daughter and had to bring her daughter along to ask for sugar to finish making cookies. But it is not likely. It is more likely that this chick is working an angle for money and that she uses her daughter to appear harmless and to melt hearts. None of us can know for sure, but the “I’m sure she means well” interpretation is not a rational choice in this scenario.

Neutered intuition

There would be no point in writing this column decades ago, because the majority of people had common sense.

They had not yet been convinced that their instincts were false and that their intuitions were nothing but bigotry. Our grandparents would look at a scenario like this and decide, correctly, that the visitor on their doorstep was not going to get an answer or an invitation.

But modern Westerners have neutered their own intuition. IQ has nothing to do with it. Brilliant people, average people, and dim people alike have shut down their gut responses because we’re all afraid of being accused of being “discriminatory.”

It’s worth thinking about how “discrimination” simply means “making a choice between multiple options.” Modern Western culture — woke culture — doesn’t want you exercising judgment or making choices. Do we really think that’s to our benefit?

This tableaux on a suburban porch did not turn into anything truly dangerous or noteworthy, of course. But it could have. And the attitude taken by people who think the homeowners were in the wrong is the same attitude that gets nice people taken advantage of or killed.

‘The Gift of Fear’

It’s easiest to see in the extreme cases. Travis Lewis, a black man, killed Martha McKay’s mother and cousin in 1996 (the McKays were white). Under the spell of “there’s some good in everyone,” Martha McKay befriended her mother’s murderer.

Twenty-six years later, Lewis killed Martha McKay, too, in the same house in which he killed her mother.

Terminal naivete and gullibility will get you and your family hurt, exploited, or killed. Modern Americans, particularly white Americans, suffer badly from this. Some are only going to learn at the very last moment, when they realize the nice man they wanted to help is about to pull the trigger in their face.

You don’t have to be one of these people. I have a prescription for a cure: Read Gavin de Becker’s groundbreaking book “The Gift of Fear.”

De Becker, who grew up in a violent and unstable home, has become the premiere personal security expert in the world. “The Gift of Fear” takes readers through real-life scenarios, illustrating the “tells” you should watch out for, guiding you away from self-endangering thinking that shuts down your gut instincts.

Read it before it’s too late.