Tag Archives: Gnon

Gnon and Elua

Edit 2014/08/04: A number of Christian men whose thoughts I have come to respect have made objections to this post. I have concluded that whatever my original intentions were, they do not matter at this point as, at best, the execution was flawed and deeply confused. I no longer stand behind or support what was written in this post. I’ll leave this here to read for those that may be interested, but if you decide to read it please use discernment as this post was in error. May God forgive me if this led anyone to wrong thinking. For less confused writing by on the issue at hand, see here.

Scott writes of Moloch, the demon god who traps men into sacrificing what they value most for power, and argues:

When the veil is lifted, Gnon-aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you “free”, there is no spontaneous order, any gifts they have given you are an unlikely and contingent output of a blind idiot process whose next iteration will just as happily destroy you.

Instead of obeying Gnon, obeying reality, we should summon forth, Elua:

He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
…
Elua is just like “Love as thou wilt” and “All knowlege is worth having”. He is the patron deity of exactly the kind of sickeningly sweet namby-pamby charitable liberalism that Arthur is complaining about.”

Elua, the god of unreality, the god of progressive liberalism, who will usher forth the utopia of free love and endless pleasure. Kipling called Elua by another name:

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

Scott wishes to create the Gods of the Market, to uplift man with hopes for Elua will make wishes of horses. He hopes that perhaps this time we can have perpetual peace, the Fuller Life, and abundance for all, that this time, prostration before Elua, unlike all prostrations to prior Gods of the Marketplace, will not result in damnation and the return of the terror and slaughter.

This time we can escape to unreality!

What Scott misses is that we are the of Gnon. We were born, evolved, and raised under the rule of Gnon; there is no escape to Elua, for we are not born of Elua, we are born of Gnon. We can not escape Gnon, because we are Gnon and Gnon is us. The only escape is total self-annihilation. He calls Elua a god of humans, but he is not, he is a god of what progressives wish humans were. He is the most inhuman and alien of gods.

Gnon is captured in verse by Kipling, Elua is captured in doggerel by Lennon:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

This is the promised utopia of Elua: a life of peace, a life of hedonism, a terrifying hell devoid of meaning. Elua offers perpetual peace if you only value nothing, he offers eternal life if only you reject the bonds of kinship, he offers limitless pleasure if only you sacrifice your future for the hedonism of today, he offers untold joy if only you renounce meaning itself.

When the veil is lifted, Elua turns out to be Nihil, the limitless void. You can only embrace Elua by giving yourself to nothingness. You offer up not just your child, not just your body, but your very soul on the altar of hedonism. You achieve what you love most, pleasure, by sacrificing yourself, your hope, your purpose, your very being.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

If offered, would Scott attach himself to a device that injected dopamine directly into his brain, eternal bliss if only he does not move or think?

For this is what Elua offers: eternal heroin. The god of the poppy.

Even if Scott accepts Elua’s desolate hell of eternal bliss, others wouldn’t. If it meant escape from Elua, I would help Land free Cthulu. Being eaten first would be infinitely preferable to eternal self-nullifcation. I would plunge the world into holy war if Elua were to incarnate, even the most brutal savagery of Gnon is but a tender ministration compared to the blissful void.

If Nihil is, brutal savagery is the only response. If the god of civilization is also the god of the eternal nothing, I will commit human sacrifice on the altar of the gods of savagery. If the god of bliss is the god of emptiness, I will gladly embrace pain to work to his destruction. Death, war, destruction, genocide, violence, blood, savagery, fire, all are superior to the void.

I am sure I am not alone. We men were born of Gnon, it is what were evolved for, it is what we know, it is what we are. Civilization may hold back Gnon, but if embracing Gnon is the only escape from Elua, we will burn it to the ground. Man was made for struggle, man was not made for the void. Struggle may kill the body, perpetual peace devours the soul. Gnon may be a monstrous horror, but he is our monstrous horror, Elua is a greater terror far more alien.

Do not fear those who can kill only the body; fear him who can destroy the soul.

If Scott and others try to bring forth their progressive god of the blissful void, we will work to bring their dreams to ruin. We will burn civilization to the ground and salt the ruins, for savagery is preferable to the void. We will free Gnon to from his chains if only to escape; we will unleash Cthulu and be devoured first if only he will devour Elua after. We will plunge the universe into eternal war between two superintelligences if only to stop Elua from being the only one. Better a god of infinite paper-clips than Elua. We will destroy the universe itself if only to escape into death. Better the grave than eternal self-annihilation.

Gnon may be a terrible elder god from the outer void but Elua is the void itself.

Cyclical History

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever…
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun…
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after.
(Ecclesiastes 1 ESV, Selected)

History is cyclical. There is nothing new under the sun.

Civilization is in constant war with chaos. Chaos eventually, inevitably, triumphs. The civilizational cycle of growth and death never ends.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Everything man creates turns to ashes, there is no relief from the curse of Adam.

Man endures until he can’t; death his only relief. His children then endure until they can’t.

Moth and rust destroy; thieves break in and steal. All go to the grave.

Everything man builds collapses; every institution man creates falls.

Every institution but one:

The Catholic Church has yet to fall. It has been corrupted, it has been split, it has been broken, but it has always endured.

This is the light in the darkness man constantly wars against.

There is no hope, there is no relief, there is no victory, but one.

The cycle was broken once: a bloody body upon an instrument of torture, an empty pit of death.

A fire descended, a burning illumination among the horrifying darkness.

The cycle of death and entropy never ceases, but that small fire promises hope that it will.

There is a final escape from the entropic cycle for those who have the eyes to see.

For those that keep their eyes closed, the chaos will follow them beyond the grave.

***

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
…
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
(Revelation 21:3-4,8 ESV)

We’ve Lost

How can the left defeat the reactionaries? — They’ve already defeated us. http://t.co/WjbAgwC87h

— Free Northerner (@FreeNortherner) July 20, 2014

Reactionaries have been defeated, we have lost. Neoreaction was defeated before it began.

This is reality.

The left has either captured, killed, or subverted every major institution in the West: the family, the church, the government, the courts, the media, the education system.

The system is dying, we have lost.

In fact, having lost is almost definitional to the term reactionary. If we were winning, we would be called conservatives or centrists. A reactionary is one wanting a return to a previous order, meaning the previous the old order no longer exists. This implies that at some point in the past the reactionaries (and conservatives) were defeated.

I used the term ‘winning’ purposefully. Reactionaries and a conservatives can never win, entropy is eternal and unstoppable. Chaos is always pounding at the gates and there is never any rest nor relief for the watchmen. The barbarians are always encircling the fortress and only leave once the looting and raping is over.

There was far too much pushback on Twitter on this. Some reactionaries don’t seem to get this basic point. This is foundational reaction. Cthulu swims left. To be a reactionary is to suffer defeat after neverending defeat. As long as you are a reactionary, you are defeated.

Our goal then is to advance to the point where we can become conservatives. That is the end point of reaction, to have a society worth conserving. Once we start winning we stop being reactionaries and we become conservatives.

The goal of reaction is ideological self-annihilation.

****

The reason conservatism is wrong is not because there is anything inherently wrong with conservatism, it is because modern conservatives have not yet realized there is nothing left to conserve. They have not yet realized that they have lost. It is over, it is done.

In fact, the conservatives have been so roundly defeated that the best of them are conserving liberalism thinking it to be conservatism.(The worst of them no longer even try to conserve liberalism).

This is the difference between the modern conservative and the reactionary:

The reactionary suffers in endless defeat, the conservative has not only been defeated, but has been so entirely and thoroughly pwned that he does not even understand he has been defeated, so he barely suffers.

My next post will outline how thouroughly we’ve lost, but to tide you over I recommend Derbyshire’s We Are Doomed.

If you are optimistic, if you think there is some hope of a “win”, if you believe it can be turned around, you are wrong and you do not yet understand reaction.

There is only the endless cycle of struggle against chaos, loss to chaos, and rebuilding during chaos so we can continue the struggle. Death and the final winnowing are the only relief from the cycle.

Reaction should not make you happy or hopeful, the only thing it can do is is help your children survive to create more children to survive to create more children.

It’s called the dark enlightenment for a reason.