Materialism's blind spot

From a review of a film about the destruction of the White farmers in Zimbabwe:

Human beings don’t strive for money and food. They strive for power. Africa was far wealthier under European imperial control than it is now, but Africans don’t want wealth as much as they want sovereignty. Detroit would be far more prosperous with some White technocrat instead of Kwame Kilpatrick, but Detroit’s urban Blacks are smarter than White Americans. They realize something we don’t: It’s better to starve with freedom than feast in submission. Mugabe’s assuredly a miserable thug, but he’s their miserable thug.

Throughout the movie, the family desperately appeals to their White cultural traditions, insisting on their universality. According to decades-old government records, they have a lawful right to keep their farm, but what are “rights”, “laws”, and “justice” when those in power have no use for them? And why should they? Western values enable White supremacy. Zimbabweans—being less intelligent and educated—will never win if they play by the White man’s rules. They’ll win by playing to their strengths: brutality, terror, and superior numbers.

Two points. As Ex Cathedra has known, defining liberalism's goal as creating a new dominant group with the power, resources and status of the vanquished group, group status is as driving a motivator as money, even a greater one. Materialism is blind to this deep human drive, especially in males. Men's personal status is rooted in their groups' status. It's what our Founding Fathers meant by ambition.

And any group will try to privilege its own strengths. For Whites --when they had the power and the self-confidence to back them up-- it's rules and principles and law. For people like the Zimbabweans, who have neither the aptitude nor the attraction for that, it's their strengths: "brutality, terror and superior numbers."

The author concludes about The Most Foolish People On The Planet (C)

We as a people are too abstract, idealistic, and removed from our instincts to act in our tribal interests in the same way other populations do. If anything, the more trials we experience, the more resolved we become in our folly. This doesn’t mean we’re doomed. It’s actually liberating. We don’t need to sit around and wait for things to get bad enough for our people to rise up. What we need to do is adopt a new set of principles and our people will pursue them with the crusading zeal we Whites manifest when stirred by an abstract ideal.