If you go to certain parts of Europe, one of the things you will experience is this class of people who sort of exist and sort of not exist. They exist, as in they are part of non-contextual reality, but everyone tries to ignore them. You notice them when their children beg for money or try to sell you some useless trinkets. This is often just a way to distract you while they steal your wallet. These are, of course, Gypsies or what the cultural enforcers call the Roma people.

Gypsies are not everywhere. In Paris it feels like they are everywhere if you hang around the tourist areas. In Copenhagen there are no Gypsies, at least not in the main areas like you see in tourist traps. They exist in Denmark. Official statistics say there are about 5,000 Gypsies in the country, but the nature of Danish society makes the pick-pocket lifestyle impossible for them. Instead, they find other ways to sustain themselves that do not involve street crime.

In other parts of Europe, they will be in what amounts to Gypsy ghettos. This is most common in the old communist bloc. Ghettoization of minorities has been the habit in that part of the world for a long time. With lots of different people thrown together in artificially constructed kingdoms, the best solution to social conflict was peaceful separation, so minority troublesome populations ended up in ghettos. This persists today for universally despised populations like Gypsies.

That is one of the first puzzles about the Gypsies. Throughout Europe they are hated, and they have always been hated. Even the efforts to embrace the new American religion regarding diversity and inclusion has not extended to the Gypsies. No amount of hectoring can overcome centuries of hatred. That raises an obvious question as to why these people continue to exist as a population. Why have they not disappeared through assimilation and self-deportation?

This becomes even more of a puzzle when you see that the locals have not just treated these people as pariahs. Some people have probably heard about the organized murder of Jews in the Second World War, but the murder of the Gypsy population dwarfs the other persecutions. Half of the Gypsy population was killed in the war, mostly because it was an opportunity to kill them. The locals just took advantage of the opportunity to rid themselves of these people.

Logic says that if you are at risk of death living where you live, then you would be smart to find a new place to live. American suburbs exist because of this logic. Fearing black crime, white people moved from cities into the surrounding suburbs. The Jewish population in American swelled a century ago because Jews were under constant threat in the Russian empire. The great wave of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century was mostl from the fringes of Tsarist Russia.

Despite facing “you’re not welcome” signs all over Europe, the Gypsy population remains a fixture. It says something about a people that they want to be somewhere that they are not wanted and will never be accepted. It could simply be that alienation reinforces their culture. They hang together because it is impossible for their members to assimilate into greater society. This results in their culture having a hostile and parasitic relationship with the host population.

This process operates for other subgroups. The Travelers in the English-speaking world are a lot like the Gypsies. They are not Gypsies. They are Irish, Scots, and English that probably came into existence in the 17th century. The people we are now supposed to call the Roma are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group that migrated out of the Indian subcontinent around 1000 AD. Despite having no biological, linguistic, or cultural connection to Gypsies, Travelers are remarkably similar.

The theory is that Travelers became landless people who learned to survive travelling around doing labor and stealing. That last part is what made them social pariahs and isolated them from the rest of society. Most likely, those who could integrate back into society and wanted to do it, were boiled off. The result was a selection process in favor of people with a strong desire for the lifestyle and the ability to serve the people inside their clans, resulting in an increase in Traveler-ness.

This turns up in genetic studies. Closed populations will tend to have specific genetic issues due to the founding population having those traits and the consequences of marriage only within the group. The Amish are another good example. What this means is that once a group is cut off from the main group, a process develops that reinforces this separation both culturally and biologically. In the case of the Gypsies, who they are depends in part on being despised by the host population.

Interestingly, Gypsies appear to be quite dull. Intelligence studies put their average IQ in the mid-70’s, which is what you see with Somalis. This may explain why they are most common in the duller parts of Europe, like the Balkans. A population of parasitic simpletons is not going to do well amongst the high-IQ Swedes, but they can survive among the atomized and tribal population in the Balkans. Even so, it is surprising that they have survived at all given their limitations.

As a comparison, Irish Travelers check in at around eighty-seven compared to the average for the Irish population of ninety-two. This makes sense. Their origin story suggests they were the losers in an economic game of musical chairs. Rather than end up in ghettos and trailer parks, which did not exist, they ended up as itinerant workers and thieves. In the modern age they are known for living in caravan parks, which are a rough equivalent to the American mobile home park.

The persistence of Gypsies raises another question. The open society that is being forced upon the West requires assimilation. It is assumed that minority populations wish to assimilate but are prevented from doing so because of whiteness. The Gypsies and the Travelers are two good examples of minority populations that refuse to assimilate because they know they would cease to exist if they did assimilate. The open society people have the same Gypsy problem as the fascists.

Of course, the question at the root of it all is what does the majority do about a minority population that cannot and will not fit into society? This is a problem that has vexed political philosophy since John Stuart Mill. You can force them to comply, but this comes at a cost, and it creates new problems like social unrest. You can remove them, but as we see with Gypsies, they just keep coming back. Even the mass murder of Gypsies in the last century did not remove them from Europe.

The irony is that the solution the world has arrived upon for dealing with this problem is the one which caused the problem in the first place. The isolation of unassimilable and incompatible people is what you see everywhere, not just with Gypsies. The “solution” to the Gypsy problem is to try to keep them bottled up on the fringes of society, which ensures that there will also be a steady supply of Gypsies. The solution to the problem makes sure the problem is never solved.

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