A lot of the criticism of passivism comes from Step 2: Accept Power. Critics correctly point out that accepting power is a vague, almost magical, “something happens” that is undefined. Like Anti-Dem, I’m also highly skeptical we’ll convert the current elites in any significant number, but we don’t need to.
Accepting power is what we must do, and it is necessarily vague because I’m not a wizard, nor is anyone else in NRx. We can make predictions and educated guesses of what might happen in the future, but nobody really knows how any restoration will come about because there is no real model for how this happens.
Society moves by the combination of large, underlying, occult economic, demographic, and social forces, the occasional great man, and pure random chance, a combination that makes a joke of any planning for specifics.
The restoration will be a black swan event: an unpredictable event of highly improbable circumstances.
From the direction of the large, occult forces, we can discern that Western society is degrading before our eyes, but how this disintegration will play out is unknowable. All that is knowable is that institutional legitimacy, social bonds, and social trust are plummeting and a society without them is not a society that can maintain itself. Barring some major, unexpected occurrence at some unforeseeable point in the future, the illusion that is America will shatter and things will disintegrate in some way.
And that is all we can know. You can’t make specific plans because we don’t know what the situation will be. That’s why we do passivism. We build up our support, legitimacy, and strength, so that we are ready when opportunity presents itself.
Did Gorbachev and East German officials think the Berlin Wall would fall and the USSR would collapse because one official misunderstood a note? No. No one had any idea that the communist world would collapse so quickly and what stupid little event would set it off, even though everybody knew the USSR was decaying, hence Gorbachev’s earlier reforms.
After the collapse of the USSR, Harvard, USG, and their many imperial tools were on hand to economically rape Russia and install an American order under Yeltsin. There will be no outside force to install order, even rapacious order, after the US collapses. So somebody internally will need to restore order. That will be whoever has best positioned itself to respond to the black swan.
Social entropy in the US will not be reversed little by little, there is no internal or external power centre or force that can push an incremental reverse, such as the socialist media and the Soviet regime which supported the long march of American communists and liberalization. The introduction of mass propoganda through TV and radio and the introduction of mass education were singular historical events which the communsists took advantage of and we didn’t. We will have not have these advantages which allowed the left to win. The internet doesn’t present us the same opportunity due to its distributed nature and its already completed infiltration by progs.
If entropy is reversed, it will be reversed in one big reset, this will happen when the Cathedral’s legitimacy and authority disappears. What will trigger that and what the circumstances on the ground will be, is unknowable.
Then best strategy in this case is to build: build a power base, build legitimacy, and build authority so that when the black swan occurs, we are ready to move and have a set alternative to chaos. The great man will be whoever finds the right timing and uses what has been built to restore order.
I already quoted this, but I’ll do so again:
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
Those committing activism are seeking fights now and looking for victories afterwards. They wish to squander resources where they can not and will not win.
Passivism is about seeking victory through building and preserving resources and taking battle after victory has been achieved. That is why it is called accepting power. If we become worthy, ie: if we build our power bases, legitimacy, and authority to the extent necessary, then when the time comes, there will be nothing to do but for the great man to accept what is rightfully his. Lord Monck will walk into London unopposed and restore the king to his rightful place.
Alternatively, the more resources we squander now and the less we build, the greater the fight and the lesser the odds of victory will be when the black swan flies.