What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
– Sun Tzu
Passivism is the current NRx strategy because right-wing activism always fails.
Passivism gets a lot of flak, such as in this Twitter conversation which inspired this current post and this Esoteric Trad’s post I found after I wrote most of this, from people who want to do something. A lot of this criticism seems to be because people don’t understand what passivism is and the previous explanations of it have been rather abstract and arcane, so, I’m going to explain in my continued attempt to cut to the core of neoreaction and what if offers.
First, passivism is most definitely not doing nothing. Second, if is definitely not pacifism. Passivism is simply the opposite of activism, which is left-wing political action by the people.
As Mao once said, power comes from the barrel of a gun. Power is violence. The ability to force your will on others, even if it might be concealed behind a few layers of a civilized facade. In society, many men have more violent force than any single man, now matter how strong he might be, so man’s capacity for violence comes from his authority, which is, essentially, how many armed men can a man get to follow him?
Authority comes from either illusion or legitimacy. Legitimate authority comes from men obeying you because they accept you are their rightful leader. Illusion comes from people obeying because they believe others perceive you as legitimate and are afraid of the violence they will enact should they disobey. It is necessarily tyrannical. Legitimacy lasts until it is squandered or the authority dies. Illusion and the tyranny that results lasts until someone openly disobeys without consequence and is dispelled.
Right now, the left holds power and it holds legitimacy. People believe the left should rule because they believe in equality and the rule of the people, two left-wing ideals. Cthulu continues to swim left as people hold these ideals ever stronger.
Politics is downstream of culture which is itself downstream of politics. This is confusing, so we’ll call the former politics and the latter metapolitics.
Politics is the workings of the political machine. It is voters voting, protesters protesting, activists acting, courtiers courting, judges judging, educators educating, assassins assassinating, revolters revolting, and so on. It is the sausage being made.
Culture is society: it is your language, beliefs, rituals, religion, customs, moral, etc. The culture determines what political actions are legitimate.
Metapolitics is the system itself. It is the core political beliefs and institutions that the culture works itself within. It is where real power resides. There is overlap between culture and metapolitics.
Activism is democratic politics. It is action by the people for the people to influence the people’s laws. Activism is necessarily leftist because it assumes the people should be involved in politics and in the power of the people to change politics, which are both inherently leftist concepts. In an ordered, right-wing society, the people do not engage in politics (at least, until society becomes disordered and the people throw a revolution), so there is no activism. Activism should be avoided for this reason alone.
Activism, being politics, only has authority to change things if it is viewed as legitimate by the overarching culture and metapolitics. Any action not viewed as legitimate is a crime, or, if not, is viewed as something beyond the pale that most people want to distance themselves from.
In our culture, racism is illegitimate. So a group of racist, well-behaved Tea Party protesters marching for lower taxes are extremists, while a group of blacks burning down their shopping district in support of other blacks’ right to assault police officers and asian shopkeepers with impunity are a human rights movement.
In our current culture and metapolitics, any folk activism is inherently illegitimate. Hence, why Trump is at fault for inciting riots when leftists mob his speeches and is at fault whenever one of his supporters hits someone, yet no Democrats are responsible for when left-wing activists cause riots and attack people. Trump is engaging in folk activism. Hence, why Moldbug gets banned from tech conferences by supporters of communist butchery. Hence why Piss Christ and The the Holy Virgin Mary are art and drawings of Muhammed are provocation. In the situation where anti-abortion activists go to jail for making videos and people selling baby parts do not, right-wing activism is useless. It accomplishes nothing.
Activism accomplishes nothing. Using inherently left-wing tactics to stop the left is self-defeating. Folk activism is inherently illegitimate in the West (the East is a different story) no matter what form it takes because the culture and metapolitics dictates that it is. Even if folk activism started working and started convincing people, power, ie: the cops and military, is in the hands of the left and the activists will just be arrested.
So instead of trying to engage in politics we need to go upstream. The problem is culture is a left-wing sewer becoming ever more left. Evangelicals have tried to change this and have failed miserably. Real culture has been totaled (we’re a multicultural melting pot now) and is illegitimate (old books are racist and sexist). Pop culture and left-culture are all that is left. There is no way to right culture, it is in an ever-downward spiral. Culture will remain a sewer until restoration.
Activism is pointless and self-defeating and changing culture is impossible. What can be done though, is a restoration, a complete reset of the metapolitics. Through reset, culture will be forcibly changed and legitimate politics will be inherently changed.
Restoration will not be easy. It will require a great man to make the reset and the supports necessary for the great man. (If you think activism is good, but doubt the great man, you are failing at being right-wing).
Passivism is building the supports for the great man to commit the restoration.
Instead of openly and futilely resisting the left on its home turf, democratic politics, you can fight on our turf, the family and the community. The left rules democracy as democracy is inherently left-wing, but the family, the church, the local community, are all inherently right-wing organizations.
What you need to do is build virtue in yourself, in your home, in your mannerbund, and in your community. Any activism you partake will be useless, but you can build around yourself. You can subtly alter the core polticical beliefs and institutions around you. How this will take shape depends on your particular circumstances.
You can not change the education system to stop being leftist, but you can homeschool your kids. You can’t stop the Supreme Court from driving bakeries out of business, but you can become an elder at your church and keep gay “marriage” out. You can’t change divorce laws, but you can build a working home with a good woman. You can’t stop the feminist invasion and destruction of male public spaces, but you can create your own male private spaces.
Instead of focusing on activism, which has become popular because the powers behind the left found it a useful myth to deploy, work quietly at what you can change. You can not change the world (unless you happen to be the great man) but you can set up a support system, so that when the great man appears, he has something backing him.
This is becoming worthy, this is the passivist strategy: work in the shadows to build bonds and structures. Build virtue in yourself. Build a strong family with many children and teach them your values and how to succeed. Build a religious community that holds to traditional values. Build a mannerbund of men devoted to each other and their values. Join community, religious, or fraternal organizations, then slowly capture them. Build a functional community around you that people want to join. Build bonds of virtue, loyalty, and ideology. As you build, you will naturally accrue legitimacy, authority, and power.
Keep building those structures and those bonds and wait. Build until victory is inevitable, then, when the time is right, when the great man appears, strike. At this time, the right time, there will be action, no activism, simply action. Victory will happen because you have built power behind the scenes. Your enemy will have lost his legitimacy and will be ruling through illusion. The great man will have legitimacy, authority, and power based on the bonds you and hundreds, thousands, of others like you built. He will act and shatter illusion and the restoration will commence. This is accepting power. All that’s left is to rule.
****
The problems with activism were amply demonstrated by General Piquemal. The former commander of the French Foreign Legion engaged in activism, he attended an anti-immigration march. This was the result (watch the video if you want):
A former general was forced to eat pavement for protesting against the Cathedral. He accomplished absolutely nothing with his activism, was hospitalized and will soon stand trial for his activism.
This man once led a renowned 7,700-man armed rapid deployment force. Until recently he was the head of the National Paratroopers’ Union. I don’t doubt he is highly respected with many connections. How much more could General Piquemal accomplish if instead of getting arrested, he quietly built up a virtuous, pro-French, anti-immigration brotherhood among all the highly organized armed men he has led and worked with. Then bided his time until the right moment real change could be accomplished. The man who could have led the future vanguard of restoration (or even been the great man himself) is now a known subversive complaining about the conditions of his cell.
This is what activism not in service to power leads to, a waste of good men, valuable resources, strategic positioning (a known subversive does not have the potential for surprise on his side), connections (as a known subversive, how many potential allies will be wary of becoming potential subversives themselves), morale, and face/respect (a general eating pavement at the hands of the cops just makes the general look weak), with no real gain.
****
To see the benefits of passivism, we need only to look at Golden Dawn. Look at the brief wiki synopsis of the history of Golden Dawn compared with its electoral results. The decades they engaged in political activism they had essentially no support. But when they switched to a passivist strategies of building structures and offering crime protection and social services, they became a major force. (I should note, economic woes also helped with this).
Read this study of Golden Dawn’s appeal to youth. There is nothing about marches, protests, get-out-the-vote, etc. or any other sort of activism. Instead, what they focused on was building structures. They held history courses for children, they held meetings to build bonds between young men and the party, they had camps to build young men up, they donated food to the community, etc.
Golden Dawn is the most successful extreme right-wing party in the Europe because they followed a passivist strategy. They did not engage in activism, they built structures. I think they may have struck too soon but time will tell.
****
Activism accomplishes nothing, wastes time and resources, and may land you up in jail, removing your ability to be useful. Instead of wasting resources attempting to fight first, then seeking victory, we need to set-up the conditions of victory, then strike.
Passivism is winning the battle before it is fought, it is creating the conditions of victory before the enemy is even aware a battle will be joined. It is building the local support structures, so that when the time is right and the great man appears, he will have the support necessary to coast to victory in such a way that historians will view his rise as inevitable.
It is tempting to want to engage in activism because the left-wing educational-media complex has spent decades indoctrinating you into thinking that writing letters, voting, marching, etc. is how things get down. For the leftists it seemingly worked, but that is only because their passivist strategies of the long march and institutional capture had already created the conditions of victory before the first hippy or civil rights marcher hit the streets yelling ‘make love not war’.
Activism works when it is service to power because the power is already there to implement the changes. It does not work when it is not serving power.. Activism worked for the left because they already controlled power and all it did was give power a veneer of democratic legitimacy. In eastern Europe activism works because there are still right-wing power centres, we do not have those in the West.
I understand the appeal of activism. It feels good. You get a dopamine hit from the (false) sense of accomplishment. You get some status among your pals for doing something. It’s fun to go out protest with the guys, stick it to the man, and maybe even beat up a few antifa. You think your accomplishing something. It feels good to be working for cause greater than yourself and losing yourself in an active organization.
But it’s like voting, it’s political masturbation. You have the illusion of power and the illusion of accomplishment without actually actually doing anything of import or bearing any real fruit. Political masturbation is not necessarily harmful, so you can do some harmless theatre for the lulz as long as you don’t convince yourself you’re exercising people power, because that is a leftist, democratic way to think.
Passivism on the other hand is real work, hard work, with no immediate sense of accomplishment. It’s a slow grinding process of building bit by bit with no visible end in site. But this work is how civilization will endure during the dark times ahead and how it will be reborn at the restoration.
So accomplish something real, be passivist.
F.N.,
Perhaps the activism was invaluable to the General (and his sympathisers) in that it has thoroughly convinced him that he is not living in a ideally functioning democracy and that his state has become totalitarian, despite the Cathedral’s protestations to the contrary. No, activism isn’t the solution, but it is something to get arrested. Arrests are throughout the New Testamant scripture after all.
A.J.P.
Is passivisim really a good name for this? You are describing the process of setting up patriarchy. Basically engaging in masculine social action that creates informal hierarchies while contributing social value. I would not consider creation to be a passive activity which is why the name feels wrong.
Hey, don’t forget my critique of Passivism, too (fourth item from the top):
https://antidem.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/short-takes-april-2016/
Good post, and good summary of the obvious objection to the passivist strategy by AntiDem. I suspect the right answer is something along the lines of low-intensity activism as part of a passivist strategy, to keep it purposeful and avoid the trap of nihilism, but this is just off the top of my head and requires elaboration.
What seems pretty clear to me though is that a shift in the cultural trend is a matter of long-term, ungrateful work made of slow progress and small victories, rather than large political battles without tomorrow.
Very thoughtful essay.
It seems that the tenets of passivism are 1) become worthy 2) some things happen 3) accept power. Where people are disagreeing it seems is exactly what those “some things” are. Face it, throughout human history those “some things” are violence. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when one authority loses legitimacy and then becomes weak, minor strong men begin to assert power, fight with each other, and then through this process of violence a new authority is brought about. This can take several generations.
Objections to passivism are based on what “some things” need to be done to bring about a restoration. The way passivism is usually put makes it seem as if something magical will happen, power will just be given to the worthy, and the process will be clean, clear and violence free. There seems to be a misapprehension that passivism is a do nothing, or magical thinking philosophy.
I understand that activism won’t work, because that is the left’s game. They set the rules, which are as follows: heads the left wins, tails the right loses. If the right starts to win at the activism game, the left simply changes the rules so that they lose. So activism won’t work. If not activism, then passivism, but what the hell does that even mean? What do we do? What does it entail? How does it work? These points need to be explained. Become worthy. A worthy man is a man of action. He wants to do something. It’s in his nature. So what should a worthy man do? Seizing power through democratic and demotist means, a la left wing type activism won’t work. Yet this man must somehow build power and authority in his own family and comunity while at the same time being subject to the whims of the Cathedral, then how exactly is this accomplished. Scenarios need to be fleshed out and history should be examined to show how this is accomplished.
Sorry about the multiple comments, but longer comments obscure the “post comment” button, so I had to break the comment down in order to post.
I have a scenario of how having authority and being worthy means in a situation where seizing powers may come up. Let us imagine that a county is under imminent assault by the Feds. A man has been killed trying to defend his property that the Feds want to take. The people of the county are angry, riled up, and view the Feds as illegitimate. A local man, Joe Brown, grabs his guns, and goes door to door seeking supporters. Helicopters circle overhead, and the Fed’s armored SWAT vehicles are rolling in. He exhorts his fellow townsmen to stand up and fight. But these people don’t really know Joe Brown. They view him as a hot head. He has no authority, and has not shown himself to be worthy of following in any way prior to this. So the doors are bolted, the curtains closed and the people hide in their basements and let the
Feds do as they will.
Scenario number two, exactly as above. Except instead of Joe Brown, the local sherrif decides to take a stand against the Feds. The people respect the sherrif, see him as a legitimate authority who stands with them and their interests. In addition, let us suppose that a couple of ministers back up the sherrif, and say the time has come to make a stand. And another two prominent men of the county do so as well. This adds to the legitimacy of the sherrif and the stand he wants to take. the sherrif commands a dozen armed deputies, and has proven his ability to lead men.
When the sherrif exhorts the men of the town to grab their guns and take a stand, now the doors are opened, the men come out and are ready to fight and die with the sherrif. Most people are followers. They need a leader, and want to be a part of some legitimate power structure. The sherrif is worthy, has authority, and the men trust him in his judgment that now is the time to fight and seize power locally from the oppressive Feds.
The the final way, rather than passivism or activism, is that, economically, autonomous economic forces will make welfare liberalism obsolete, and then, socially, social media will continue to erode the ability of the left to impose their cultural will on people unchallenged. By blogging, tweeting, and posting, we’re slowing affecting the narrative, gradually pushing the Window to the right.
Action > passivism.
This is certain elements within NRx trying to remain relevant.
Moving on.
A rather persuasive article.
In my late 40s, I cannot say that I had ever thought of it quite that way.
Whether it interests you to learn why, at my age, I would be receptive to your ideas is for you to say. Obviously, I am no important person to you, yet the reason may be worth mentioning, anyway, as follows. You can make of it what you will.
During the past decade or so, the incredible hostility of my country’s democratically elected leaders has astonished me. Hostility to what? Hostility to the notion that the people (the tribe, the demos) that have elected them ought, more or less, to be demographically preserved and promoted. One notices rather a lot of “demos” in these sentences. This leads even a lifelong American patriot to begin to question traditional American republican democracy.
So, when your article has a rightward thrust to it, when one of its premises is that democracy is suspect, I am predisposed to listen.
Augustina’s points are thoughtful, too. She asks, “Yet this man must somehow build power and authority in his own family and comunity while at the same time being subject to the whims of the Cathedral, then how exactly is this accomplished?”
Is she old enough to clearly remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989? Is she old enough to remember how utterly astonishing an event, in context, that was? Perhaps not. Is this relevant? Well, I think that it is.
In retrospect, what had happened in the Soviet Communist power structure is that the original generation of revolutionaries had at last passed away, leaving power in the hands of men who lacked conviction. The Soviet Communist power structure pretty much surrendered, because it could no longer discern sufficient cause to fight.
How Augustina applies this observation to our current circumstance is for her to say. As for myself, I suspect that there is something to it — and, if there is something to it, then, in the meantime, passivism as here described may represent a significant part of the solution.
The only thing I wonder is this: The fall of Soviet Communism only sort of had a great man. Two semigreat men, in fact: Mikhail Gorbachev; and Boris Yeltsin. In many ways, the two were bumblers. Neither was a Washington, a Frederick the Great. And, yet, it was enough.
The Right is probably stuck with the passive approach until it can figure out how to do things better.
if you can’t manage anything else my advice is to go so the movie version of V and watch the Northfire guys, they are a Leftist parody of a Right wing party but if you watch the movie you’ll notice how good a job they actually do. That is a start for workable model if you delete the leftist material , dial the totalitarianism back and don’t mind going fash. If not that come up with something else.
There are things that won’t work, anything Leftist such as the NDSAP platform, “Leave Me Alone ” any Libertarian, Constitutionalism or Minarchy which are Leftist too,anything as heavy handed as Singapore for the US . Beyond that, its up to the Right. Once they’ve done that, understand they want power as much or more than the Left does , you can have it. Till than you are screwed
First time poster; been lurking a few weeks. I have a question.
It’s intuitively appealing to describe “passivism” as intrinsically right wing, and “activism” as intrinsically left wing, and your post really got me thinking!
But…isn’t the “Cathedral” and its mechanisms just a kind of left-wing “passivism”? I think the best argument you could build against that is the Cathedral is originally a right-wing construction, co-opted by the left. But then, so much of the way it operates now, from the way it seeks legitimacy through democratic elections to liberal laws and a fundamentally egalitarian constitutions seem to be left-wing.
The lesson of history is that the “great man” you have in mind will not simply appear and offer leadership to millions of people ready to hear, understand, and act on his call. Instead, the “great man” is a product of the political situation brought on by activism. Washington, Napoleon, and Hitler are examples of such a political figure, whatever their merits or demerits. In each case, political activism created a situation in which such a man could obtain power and lead. But there is no way such a figure arises ab nihilo, any more than a tree grows without soil and sunshine.
FN, this was a flabergastingly good article. Something tells me you’re in line for a ‘best of the week’ award. I really do think a lot of this controversy is down to the name, which even on the tongue sounds like ‘pacifism’, which is of course caustic to our minds in light of what we see around us. We do need action, but we need elitist action, not demotic action. Its easy to capture the imaginations of the people because the people are stupid. But can you capture the imaginations of those who could be truly useful. The incident involving the French foreign legion guy makes me cringe. WHAT WASTED POTENTIAL!
One minor quibble, Golden Dawn isn’t really the most successful far right party in Europe. That would probably be Jobbik in Hungary, who generally score somewhat higher. Then of course one can actually ask whether Orban or the new Polish government are basically far right, with a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy to paper over their caeserism.
@John Smith – I think we’re aiming a little higher than Washington, Napoleon, and Hitler.
Washington, Napoleon, and Hitler were all leftists.
Do you think it’s dishonest, or absurd to continue to claim that people “don’t understand” passivism? Is it maybe just a remote possibility that you don’t understand activism at all? Like Yuray, you don’t even bother to define the word. For some reason, “activism” in the mind of neoreaction, is either waving a sign on a street-corner, or slav-style thuggery.
The two overall tactics of any activist group are either: 1) appeal to the people, or 2) appeal to authority. “Passivism” is simply the second option. And it’s probably not the best option, because the elites are pretty lunatic liberal. However, many in nrx have convinced themselves that over time their ideology will be adopted by the Googleplex ruling elite and by “becoming worthy” (lol) they’ll someday be able to push a “restoration.” This is fantasy.
Funny enough, a few days after publishing an article claiming “right wing activism never works” Social Matter comes out with a new site that is not only yet another propaganda outlet, but specifically asks readers to contact them for “volunteering” and “networking.” How on Earth does this not constitute activism? This blog itself is activism. Oftentimes, all an activist does is disseminate propaganda. “Passivism” is merely your activist strategy, which is again, likely the least effective, laziest, and lowest liability strategy available, and one that has never even once in all of history worked, ever, which is why nobody knows what it is, and why it makes no sense.
Tempted to write much more, but these points alone ought to raise obvious questions for you.
>“However, many in nrx have convinced themselves that over time their ideology will be adopted by the Googleplex ruling elite and by ‘becoming worthy’ (lol) they’ll someday be able to push a ‘restoration.’ This is fantasy.
Anyone who thinks that we are going to convert any significant number of the present “Brahmin” elite to our cause needs to get their head examined. The only thing that can be done with the current elite once REHOWA (Reactionary Holy War) happens is to either to send them to Gulags or just drag them to the local soccer stadium, put them up against the wall, and shoot them. As you said, any other idea of how things will have to go down is pure fantasy.
In addition, it must be said that it seems like a there are some people in NRx who see their involvement largely as a journey of personal growth (this is where the “becoming worthy” part comes in). While I understand why that appeals to some, and why they want to go down that road, it’s not particularly anything that I’m very interested in. I’m not claiming to be perfect – Lord knows, I’m a fallen sinner like everybody else – I’m also in my 40s, have been around the proverbial block a few times, and other than maybe wanting to lose a few pounds or pick up studying languages again, I’m pretty satisfied with who I am as a person and where I’m at in life. I’m about as “worthy” as I feel the need to be right now, so while I wish genuine and wholehearted good luck to those who are off on a great quest for self-discovery and self-mastery, they can go on ahead with that without me.
As for me, I’m here to write scathing reactionary commentary and chew bubble gum – and I’m all out of gum.
And Antidem… Isn’t there something patently absurd, almost adorably naive about believing one can “become worthy” and somehow obtain power via that “worthiness.” What rulers or trendsetters in power right now are “worthy” people? This would be adorable if it wasn’t so pathetic that people are repeating it. Being virtuous and healthy is a great goal, but that is not how influencing politics or culture works.
This entire debate over “passivism” is revealing a lot about many of the people involved in nrxn. Either due to their youth or distance from successful movements, they don’t seem to understand what they’re trying to accomplish, if anything. Many of the things Mark lists in this essay are the very core definition of activism: networking, building bonds, refining theories, indoctrination, improving the quality of your people, etc. Even in left wing activism, the idiotic sign-waving is practically meaningless compared to these other activities, known as “praxis.” Here you prefer the term “passivism” which is obviously an awful and humiliating term to associate yourself with if you understand anything about psychology and linguistics.
Much of this may have to do with a) the personality traits of people involved in nrxn and their inability to comprehend social rituals. b) the hysterical paranoia in the Right made worse by the sensitive, sheltered, and whitebred. c) many work in the “Cathedral” now, or see themselves earning big shekels in it later so they are incapable of making the minor personal sacrifices necessary to seize the moment and become the leaders they dream of.
dem , nrx is not a ’cause’. for me, it’s a philosophy that imho is supposed to help better understand the world and maybe gradually affect change. What you’re describing seems too Stalin-like.
Incredible that I’m now censored more by the Right than the leftists.
LOL, George Washington is a Leftist?
Anyway, yeah, the idea that the “great man” will simply appear and that people will be already prepared to follow is not supported by political history. What is supported is that activism lays the groundwork for such a man to appear and creates a movement for him to lead.
I averred that “Conversion of Elites is both necessary and sufficient for the Restoration.”
I’ll stand by that.
You can assign any value of probability to that you like without arguing against it.
Reed, we’re rather fond of Slav Style Thuggery. If one has the power to deploy it with impunity, then you have real and not just the fake stuff.
Activism iss (is and only is) act of symbolic importance in liberal democracy. If you reject liberal democracy, then you reject its sacraments. And you’ve been around long enough to know that’s how we use the term.
The original post and conversation are good, though I can’t agree with the author’s conclusion. In response to the last comment, it is true that we cannot take seriously the idea of repairing contemporary liberal democracy by participating in it. Nonetheless, activism is required to establish the conditions under which a “great man” (or, more likely, great men) will appear and lead a movement to replace liberal democracy. Liberal democracy, as we have known it in the West, is on borrowed time and is being replaced even now by various shades of authoritarian socialism. It will eventually be replaced, even if people don’t realize it has been replaced. Leadership, vision, and activism are necessary to replace it with something better.
> “I averred that “Conversion of Elites is both necessary and sufficient for the Restoration.”
“Conversion of Elites” could take many forms, including liquidation of the current elites and their replacement with new, better Elites.
> “I averred that “Conversion of Elites is both necessary and sufficient for the Restoration.”
Our present elites are full SJW, and that’s not ever changing, so my response is:
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les SJWs à la lanterne!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les SJWs on les pendra!
Si on n’ les pend pas
On les rompra
Si on n’ les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les SJWs à la lanterne!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les SJWs on les pendra!
If Passivism has any utility at all, it’s in building a new elite to accept power once the present elite has been sent to gulags or taken à la lanterne. If it’s not even going to do that, then it really *is* just self-indulgent navel-gazing.
Well I doubt this comment will appear cause practically every single blog out there has blocked and censored me because they are so incredibly fragile about their precious “passivism,” but the absurdity of what you’re arguing, Nick, is practically impossible to argue it’s so idiotic.
Do you consider evangelism to be activism? Do you consider even volunteering to do something good for the community to be activism? Cause those are also forms of activism. All of neoreaction has autistically reduced “activism” to sign waving awhile arguing for a form of activism – “passivism” – that is simply a lazy, low-liability, and ineffective form of the exact same thing you are obsessed with critiquing.
Indeed, Hestia is actually one of the most activist groups in the New Right and certainly in NRX: recruiting people, formulating strategy, imposing policy, blacklisting people who disagree, this is so obviously activism that it baffles me that I even have to debate it.
Confrontation in meat-space [reality] frightens some. So just admit it and slink off.
We need to stop calling the Left pussies. The real pussies are on the Right. The left has power because THEY TOOK IT. They weren’t afraid to be MEN and take it. Regardless of their current state.
To avoid fighting when you should because you’re not guaranteed an easy victory means you are fit only to be a slave – and there’s no need for slaves in the age of machines.
Golden Dawn’s primary social service they were willing and able to deliver was violence to protect Greeks from Immigrants. When they backed down from Civil War the Left won. Greece is now a Muslim Refugee Camp. That’s Golden Dawn’s “passivist” success.
But I bet the Mannerbund is rocking as long as the remaining Greeks stay inside. I wonder how you say Mannerbund in Greek…or for that matter Arabic.
@John Smith – of course Washington was a leftist. He just wasn’t as nasty a character as Robespierre, so he gets to keep a good name.
Among other things, passivism seems to operate under the delusion that if one just keeps a low profile and doesn’t make any trouble, the left will leave them alone. This fundamentally misunderstands leftism, which is messianic and coercive: they must save your soul – save you from yourselves – whether you want them to or not. To quote myself from my most recent blog post:
“[The left] will stop at nothing, nor will they respect any borderlines, in enforcing their dictates. As Fred Reed noted, in the New Order, no one will be left alone – not anyone, not anywhere, not ever. There is no corner of the internet hidden enough, no small-town bakery obscure enough, no private sanctum deep enough within your own walls, no low-down barroom dingy and smoky enough, and no alley in Chinatown dark and narrow enough that the Puritan left’s Inquisitors – whether they are officials of the state or private vigilantes – will not insert themselves there in their hunt for demons to exorcise and witches to burn.”
Don’t believe me? Ask a Branch Davidian.
There is nowhere you can retreat to where the left won’t follow you. Eventually, they will sniff out your secret hiding places, and insert themselves into them. Then you’ll be instructed to let black Jewish transsexual illegal immigrants into your Mannerbund, and every last one of its members will be fined into homelessness by some or another Orwellian equality commission if they refuse. Or you’ll be infiltrated, named, and shamed by some clever SJW vigilante with a hidden camera. A few hundred calls from an SJW lynch mob to your boss asking why they employ a hateful Nazi extremist later, you’ll find yourself unemployed and wondering how you’re going to put food on the table for your kids. And yes, the left is perfectly happy to starve your children to make a point. Don’t believe me? Ask a Ukrainian Kulak.
Sooner or later, one way or another, you’ll have to fight them. It’s one thing to say that you’ll go to ground for the moment and wait until the time is right to strike. I’m all for that. Inevitability is pulling on the current system; it is unsustainable, collapsing under its own weight – things that can’t go on forever, don’t. Saying that we should let gravity do most of the work is sensible. And maybe we’ll get lucky, have a collapse, go through a decade or so of horrendous poverty, and end up with an American Putin. One can hope.
Speaking of Russia: On a cold winter’s night around Christmas of 1992, I went down to the West Village to see a poetry reading by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. A year and a half earlier, Yevtushenko had stood next to Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White House, facing down the tanks that the plotters of the August coup had sent to depose Gorbachev and restore the Soviet Union. Had the events of those days gone differently, Yevtushenko would have been shot as a traitor. I talked to him one-on-one for a few minutes after the reading. I remember him as a slight, soft-spoken man with the mannerisms of a mildly absent-minded intellectual. But when the time came to stop writing, to take to the streets and to stare down the barrels of tank cannons for what he knew was right, he did.
What if Yevtushenko, and others like him, hadn’t done what they did? What would the world look like then? The Soviet Union was doomed to fall, and soon, you say? Nice 20/20 hindsight. It didn’t look that way in 1991. Yevtushenko, deprived of that luxury at the time, took a risk with his life. He won. So did we all.
And had things gone differently, you would be deriding Yevtushenko as a fool, as you (Don’t bother denying it!) are now with Gen. Piquemal.
So, humbug on passivism. Frankly, the more I look at it, the more passivism looks like an attempt to turn the fiercest, smartest, and bravest intellectual movement of the new century into a right-wing version of a New Age self-help movement – or worse, a way for lonely spergs to fulfill their dream of finding some bros to hang out with and, y’know, be all alpha and stuff together.
Humbug, I say!
“I’ll teach you how to escape death…
…there is a raven in the eastern sea which is called Yitai (‘dull-head’). This dull-head cannot fly very high and seems very stupid. It hops only a short distance and nestles close with others of its kind. In going forward, it dare not lag behind. At the time of feeding, it takes what is left over by the other birds. Therefore, the ranks of this bird are never depleted and nobody can do them any harm. A tree with a straight trunk is the first to be chopped down. A well with sweet water is the first to be drawn dry.”
-Taikung Jen, in a conversation with Confucius
Fascinating. In Poland, there were once two factions: positivists and romantics. Romantics fought the uprisings, arguing that even when they lost, they reminded everyone that Poland still exists. Positivists were arguing that uprising accomplish nothing, they only destroy the structure, and instead they were fighting analphabetism, publishing books and so on. Your passivism essentially seems to be positivism, while activism is romantism.
Eventually positivists won – they had the most support in Greater Poland (Posen) and they built structures so good that once occasion came, they organized the biggest victorious Polish uprising and helped two other victorious uprisings.
FN,
Good essay, but there is one fatal flaw. The only way for passivism to work is by men to find appropriate mates and have many children.
This will not be possible for young men.
I understand you’re not a huge fan of Roosh. But the fact of the matter is that it looks like sexual hedonism (or MGTOW) is the future. The number of marriageable women is an ever decreasing number. This war was lost before most of us here were born.
@Guest,
Don’t give up so easily. You just need one good woman.
http://letthemmarry.org/get-them-married-conference/
Even passivism will not work without removing the undercurrent towards the left: https://meinwords.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/source-of-progressivisms-strength/
I see one problem with passivism. The left seems to be unable to build institutions. They enter previously established institutions and co-opt them to the production of more leftism. Social justice is currently sweeping like wildfire through the American evangelical church, for example. Based on this, I think that passivist institutions can only exist on a very small scale. An institution of an significant size will come under the focus of victims advocates. Victims will be manufactured and the institution will be forced to cede power to leftists. Resistance will be met with official government intervention, likely from social workers and law enforcement officials. The Cathedral is currently feeding on old institutions. Your new passivist institutions represent energy stored in the form of social order. What’s to keep the Cathedral from strengthening itself through consuming that order and energy?
This was inspirational to me… very true. Oh how I yearn for a revolution.
Subtracting particularities through a redaction to formality, you could easily replace tabooed terms with a description so general that this passivism becomes identical to anarchist gradualism. The only major difference would be the necessity of completely erasing the great man and replacing him with the great mass. I’m not trying to convince anyone of the formal isomorphism of passivism and anarchism, only to establish the former’s proximity to the community organizing methodologies of left libertarianism. I am not prepared to make an argument here but I’m beginning to suspect that both neoreaction and anarchism are psychopathologies of the same order, differing only in direction of their symptoms, akin to affect sensitive psychoses.
Good article, but are you ready for a Road War?
30 Mosques in Luton.
How you going to out passivism them?
30 mosques in Luton.
Will you hold a protest in front of each? Will you vote UKIP? Are you going to run for office with the BNP? Will you right a stern letter to the local councilor? How about a public flyer? Are you going to burn them all down with the entire neighbourhood? Are you going to shoot Muslims until you run out bullets or get shot by police; can you carry 50,000 bullets? Will any of that stop the invasion and permanently remove those mosques?
>>>Indeed, Hestia is actually one of the most activist groups in the New Right and certainly in NRX: recruiting people, formulating strategy, imposing policy, blacklisting people who disagree, this is so obviously activism that it baffles me that I even have to debate it.
If you think is activism (and it’s not) and Hestia is the most activist RW organization, then why are you constantly accusing NRx of doing nothing and passivism of being an excuse to do nothing?
FN – thanks for the snark. I thought better of you but eh, so be it. For all your snarky questions you’ve still failed to enlighten me as to how you’re planning to “out passivy” Islam in Europe.
The reality none of you want to face is right there staring at you from the birth rates.
It’s not snark, they’re legitimate questions. “Activism” is not a plan. Those who condemn passivism have yet to put forward a legitimate alternative. So, what are you going to do? What are your plans? What activism are you and Reed and all the others condemning passivism going to start doing that are going to turn back the invasion? What are you going to do that will make your activism succeed where the BNP, UKIP, Conservatives, the EDL, the BUF, Enoch Powell, Oswald Mosley, et al. have all failed?
It’s easy to talk shit about passivisim, but what’s the alternative you propose?
Those 30 mosques are not going to move themselves. No activism I can see is going to remove them any time soon short of burning them all and murdering a substantial portion of the Muslim population, and nobody has an army willing and capable of that.
Muslims are 5% of the UK population. It’s growing rapidly, but there still a small minority and will be for a long while. It would be great if we could right things now, but that is not going to happen. Nobody has made any remotely plausible plans for how to turn it around now. So, until somebody does, we should build our strength, make plans, and conserve our resources, not waste our strength on fruitless activism.
I am under no delusion voting doesnt really matter, but to NOT do anything reeks of just giving in. I can understand a focused mission while having the appearance of ‘passive’, but other than that, isn’t passive WHAT THEY BEAT INTO US?
The only problem with Passivism is the name. Need a phrase that connotes energy, strength, patience, and realism.
Passivism (I prefer to use the term Individuality, or Going Your Own Way, Personal Emancipation Declaration, Patriarchy, etc.) is definitely vital, but insufficient to ensure survival, or to reverse the declension of society. Just because you decided to live your own life does not mean the overlords are not coming for you.
The baker did not go looking for trouble; the gays came looking for him, and tried to force him to be a part of their perversion by baking them a specialized cake. When he refused, he was dragged before the State, and charged with a crime.
In my opinion, the real goal of Passivism (for the want of a better term) should be, not only to live free, but to actively, passively and continuously make effort to convert others into a Passivist lifestyle, using soft (nonviolent) means. Passivists should be willing to play the long game. They should acquire the necessary skills to create and maintain a parallel society as they gradually unplug from the current rotten one.
Maybe we should call this “Active Passivism”.