Tag Archives: Reaction

Passivism

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.

Owned Markets

We’ve seen the modern market is not made for the average man, but is instead made for the soulless, high-IQ, homo economicus. So what kind of economic system do we replace it with?

We can not replace it with socialism, communism, or the like, for those systems lead to misery. Distributism looks nice, but is light on details and is unlikely to scale to large urban populations. It is undisputable that free markets are the most effective and efficient means of producing goods and services, but modern free markets are based on the abominations of usury and inflation, and destroys traditional communities and leave those humans not suited for inhuman money-grubbing frozen out.

So, where can we get a system that is a combination of efficient, just (in the proper sense, not in the evil ‘social justice’ sense), and human?

****

Before we begin, we first recognize that the market, just like the economy, does not exist in a real, tangible sense. It is an abstraction of billions of trade contracts between millions of people. It is real concept, but not a concrete entity.

****

Everybody knows of the tragedy of the commons. It is a major plank of libertarians and conservative thought on economics and their support for the free markets. Everything must be privatized because people inherently tend to abuse and exploit common property, while they generally tend to care for and tend their own property.

Leftists in turn argue that the tragedy can be avoided by settng up complex social schemes (ie. government regulations) to prevent them. Of course, we all know how rapidly these schemes snowball out of control and how regularly they backfire, leading to self-serving, self-sustaining bureaucracies that tend to perpuate problems rather than solve them. The social schemes themselves are common property subject to pillaging.

The problem with free markets though, is that they are free. Libertarians and conservatives do not take their thoughts as fully forward as they should. We can privatize all the goods and services on the market, but that leaves one question, what of the market itself?

The lib/cons wish to privatize everything but the market itself, leaving the market as its own commons. They than argue the socialist argument that the market, and the contracts that it consists of, should be enforced and controlled by the public through the complex social scheme called the government. Of course, the government tends to snowball out of control, and the lib/cons are suprised when a formerly free market country becomes a socialist state.

The solution then, is to privatize markets themselves. We need not free markets, which are subject to the plundering all commons are subject to, but owned markets, markets which are privately owned and controlled for the profit of the owner.

This is neocameralism as applied to the economy. Somebody should own the market and have control over his own property. By this I mean, that the owner of a market should have absolute control over the rules regarding the usage of his property, the enforcement of the rules of said rules, and the right to extract profit from the market.

Now, you’ll notice that control and enforcement sounds eerily like government and that profits sounds eerily like tax. You’re correct in that assessment.

So what makes this different from our current government or from a lib/con free market? Our current government is not owned by anybody and taxes are ostenibly for the good of the people, which in reality means that the government (or rather the many different institutions and individuals that comprise it) is in competition with itself to suck the economy dry to buy off the people with their own money. The lib/con free market it much the same, but instead the limited government not being owned does nothing to prevent the tragedy of the commons as everybody competitively rapes the common market (ie. millions of humans their trade decisions) for personal exploitation and gain at the expense of others and with no eye towards the long-term health of either the market or the people it consists of.

On the other hand, in an owned market, the market owner is the only one who profits (in the narrow sense of the term) from the the taxes he levies and he has a vested interest in ensuring his cash cow remains healthy for not only his own life, but for his legacy as well. He has to ensure that not only is the market and its laws are healthy, but the people who produce his wealth are as well.

An owned market would (generally) be free with strong contract law because the free market works and the owner would aim to hit the optimal point of the laffer curve to maximize his own revenues. The owner would also recognize that the well-being of his people was necessary for profit maximization and so would (effeciently) invest some of his profits into infrastructure and public welfare programs to ensure profit-maximization. Pork and rent-seeking would simply cease to exist as a problem, as the king can do with his own money and property as he wishes. Finally, the owner, having human judgement, would be able step in if an corporation or individual within his market was abusing it and address the issue on an individual basis, without having to create an unwieldy set of regulations (with many exploitable loopholes) to cover every eventuality and a huge, impersonal, self-serving bureacracy to enforce it.

Naturally, none of this is to say that there is no possibility of the owner abusing or misusing a market. Vested self-interest does not necessarily mean wise or correct decisions, he may himself be foolish, sociopathic, or mad, but they do mean that sociopathy and foolishness are temporary states of the current owner rather rather than inherent and permanent structures at the base of the market.

To make the market more human, more just, and more efficient we need human judgment with skin in the game. We need owned markets.

****

The obvious owner of the market would be he who owns the country the market is found in, the king. Ideally, the king would own the market, he would extract taxes from the market in exchange for enforcing contracts and policing the market.

The owner could also delegate authority over certain areas of the market, either in specific places or in specific markets. The former would be a form of economic fuedalism, while the latter would be a form of the guild system and the chartered corporation system (where corporations were formed by government charter rather than by registration).

I have one more post on economics upcoming, this one with potential practical economic actions that could be implemented by either the future market owner or by the current government.

Natalism and Status

Natalism has been going around lately. TRS has linked the problem to affluence, Yuray has made the fairly obvious observation that minor tax incentives are not enough to raise the baby-making rate, while Spandrell has linked the the fertility crisis to kids costing lots and recommends making it profitable with major tax incentives.

I’m actually rather surprised by Spandrell’s answer. He’s the one who’s been pushing Status Points theory the hardest around here and has noted that any kind of insanity can be accomplished when status is on the line. As we’ve seen, people will go to almost any length for status.

It’s obvious that women want to work rather than procreate, but this is not because (most*) women particularly like working or because they prefer work to marriage and family. It’s not because housework is drudgery, most women who work do something similar to housework in their jobs.

The reason women want to work is because working is high status.** The reason women don’t have children is because having children is low status, and the more children the lower the status.

Examples of this abound: When you read about the Duggars or another large family, you will almost assuredly find criticisms along the line of ‘use a condom’ or ‘brood mare’. Women who stay home to care for their family are ‘stepford wives’. Women who spend their lives on home and family are ‘wasting their lives‘. Relationships show a lack of ambition and too much traditionalism (which is negative). Young marriage is discouraged. Etcetera, etcetera. Feminists have been working very hard to destroy any status attached to motherhood.

You’ve no doubt heard the blatant lie that motherhood is the toughest job in the world? Nobody could honestly believe taking care of a child is tougher than working in a coal mine or as an infantryman in Afghanistan, but everybody spreads that lie because it bolsters the low and declining status of women with children.

Having children is low status, but even beyond that status games pervade all of motherhood. The mommy wars aren’t about whether children are better off being raised by their parents or by daycare workers, it’s about who gets good mother status points: stay-at homes or working mothers.

Before you thinks that good mother status contradicts my thesis, know that low status is still some status, while having no children is no status. Have you ever read an article by childfree women? I can almost guarantee you it was complaining about how others expect them to have kids, think them odd that they don’t, or using the status of having kids to one-up them.  In other words, their primary complaints are about the status hits they are taking for not having children. These status hits gnaw away at them despite having an ‘exciting, meaningful’ life of travel, work, and leisure. (Notice how they will always status signal other areas in their life to make up for this lack of status).

Having children is lower status than eduction, working, travel, or having status-giving interests. Being a stay-at-home mother is low status compared to being a working mother. Having many children is lower status than having one or two children. Having children young is lower status than having them once infertility hits.

This, more than anything, is why he have such low birth rates.

So, the answer to the fertility crisis is not tax changes, natalism benefits, or motherhood welfare. The way to get women to want to reproduce is to make children the ultimate status symbol.

Read the story of Leah and Rachel in Genesis 29 and 30. Having children was high status, so they did everything they could possibly to produce more children so they could win the status competition against each other.

We need to make it so that instead of the culture lauding whorish celebrities and woman CEO’s, mothers are celebrated. We need news reports to make glowing reports on women having their 6th child, rather than shows idolizing women who adopt foreign children or slutty daring dresses. When Mrs. Duggar has more status than Hillary Clinton, that’s when we will turn this ship around.

Sadly, we don’t control the levers of the culture-industry, so there’s not much we can do for society as a whole, but there are things you can do in your own little circles.

Make a point of praising women who have kids and their mothering skills. If a family is thinking of having another kid, make a positive comment. Praise young men and women you know who are thinking of young marriage, and otherwise encourage young people aroudn you to marry early. Let some disappointment slip out if people say ‘two’s enough for us’. Register some thinly concealed disapproval or contempt if someone says, ‘we don’t want children’. If you can smoothly do backhanded compliments or negs for the self-sterilizing, that would work too. And so on.

You’re working against the combined forces of the media, academy, bureaucracy, and culture, but you might be able to have some influence. Status is mainly an abstraction of a multitude of positive and negative social interactions. If you add to the interactions around you, elevating motherhood and deriding self-sterilization, you might indirectly change a few minds in your local communities. If enough people do it, maybe the trend could be reversed.

One warning, try to keep it subtle enough. Push too hard or too blatantly and you it might backfire if they get defensive or if you look like a jerk. You want to subtly influence their general perception of status, not come off as someone pushing a low status opinion.

****

* Before some idiot brings it up: yes, not all women are alike, yes, there are some women that like their jobs, and yes, some women just don’t like children. A generalization is not an absolute, spare me.

** And yes, because they need cash, but the need for cash came after the desire for status. The drive of women into the workplace was due to status, but once women entered, it drove wages down and costs up, forcing more women into the workplace for monetary reasons.

The High-IQ Homo Economicus

You may have read parts of the Kevin D Williamson NRO article attacking the white working class. It’s behind an NRO paywall and I refuse to pay them for anything, so I haven’t read the whole article, but the excerpts I did read lead me to make to Twitter tirades. I have since found an version of the original article here.

The first rant was about how Kevin is an ass for attacking the white working class for being what it is after decades of prolonged government attack, which he partially supports, destroyed it. The second is was a rant on how soulless high-IQ homo economicus, like Kevin and his ilk, set up an inhuman system designed for them, then sneer at how others the system is not designed for fair poorly under it.

This gives me the opportunity to write something I’ve planning to write for a while now, but haven’t got around to yet.

Now, before I begin, because some cucks like Tom Nicholls argue like 14-year-old socialists, I will clarify my personal position. I come from the working class. Through the luck of genetics and the grace of God, I happen to have be born with high intelligence and an impersonal, homo economicus sperginess, so I am now personally comfortably middle-class, but I see second-hand through family the degeneracies of the lower classes. As well, I am not a Kremlin troll (although, if a Russian psy-ops happens to read this and wants to pay me…)

The current socio-economic system is designed by rootless, soulless, high-IQ, low-time preference, money-/status-grubbing homo economicus for benefit of those same homo economicus. It is a system for designed for intelligent sociopaths. Those who are rootless with high-IQ and low-time preference can succeed rather well in this system, but it destroys those who need rootedness or those who are who are low-IQ or high time preference.

Kevin says, “Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster.” But he’s wrong, there was a disaster, but no just one, multiple related disasters all occurring simeltaneously. Ones that would be missed by a rootless cosmopolitan like Williamson. These disasters include the sexual revolution, the long march, feminism, mass immigration, globalization/off-shoring, forced integration, the drug epidemic, mass TV propoganda, governmental growth, and cultural genocide.

Within a span of a few decades working-class whites saw their communities invaded and destroyed by immigrants and integration, the traditional sexual/moral framework destroyed and replaced by degenerate Hollywood mores, the collapse of restraining institutions such as the church and local community, and what forced into competition for what jobs weren’t off-shored to foreign places paying starvation wages with imported illegals willing to work for almost nothing.

Every support the white working class (and for that matter the black working class) had vanished within less than a generation. There was a concerted effort to destroy these supports, and this effort succeeded. Through minimal fault of their own the white working class was left with nothing holding them up.

Now, some people can succeed in this. Low-time preference, high-IQ groups and individuals, like New England puritans and myself can more or less get by without too many supports. Rootless homo economicus, like Williams, New York bankers, and hipsters, can have satisfying(?) lives living in a rat utopia, grubbing for dollars and status, anomie won’y affect them much. Sociopaths (in the colliquial sense), like most politicians, are made to survive in soulless, inhuman system.

For these types of people this is functional, but different people and groups naturally have differing temperment, intelligence, and time preference. Most people are not high-IQ, soulless homo economicus, most people are of average intelligence and have a strong need for communities and community support. Just as with corporal punishment, differing people require different socio-economic structures and controls.

A high-IQ Jew can probably have a dozen sex partners without becoming a single mother, then go on to either economically-productive bitter cat-ladiness or a stable low-sex marriage. A high-time preference Scots-Irish or black with a dozen sex partners is probably a single-mother with multiple baby-daddies and either a Wal-mart job or welfare payments. In a realm of easy divorce, the marriage of a low-time preference post-puritan will probably survive, but that of a low-IQ trailer park resident won’t. In a town with minimal economic prospects and easy access to welfare, the high-achieving, socially-isolated nerd will probably find it easy to ditch town for university and a Silicon Valley career. The low-achieving stoner or the son of a tight-knit farming clan won’t, and will likely choose the path of least resistance. The low-time preference WASP with good job prospects from an intact, single-child household may snort a line or two of coke on occasion and he’ll be fine, the high-time preference Scots-Irish from a broken family with an unemployed father will follow that first hit of meth down to destruction.

Working-class whites (and blacks, and hispanics) are not able to and can not be expected to function in an inhuman, cutthroat, anomic socio-economic system designed by and for upper-middle class WASPS and Jews. They are no more constitutionally endowed to be able to than women are to be marines. Some of the working-class on the right-side of a bell-curve or two may be able to extract themselves from the cultural collapse and some others may be passed by, but most are no more able to escape than a baby is to swim.

People are not equal. Differing people and groups have differing levels of in-born ability to be responsible. You can talk personal responsibility all you want, but most people require cultural and institutional structures to help hold them personally responsible. Those structures are gone, they’ve been destroyed.

You can not expect natural peasants and yeomen to be able to properly hold up the responsibilities of natural aristocrats or priests.

****

Nature-defying leftists think they can remodel men and make them all into perfect new socialist men. All men are blank slates that can be molded by education to become perfect. Man is perfectable. Of course, every attempt at perfecting man has failed.

Modern conservatives, having whole-heartedly adopted liberalism, fall into the tabula rasa trap from a different angle. All men are capable of perfecting themselves, they just need to become rugged individualists and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. While personal responsibility and individual effort are important, to think that all men are capable of self-actualization in anomic isolation is just as nonsensical the New Soviet Man.

Most men need community, cultural, and institutional support to self-actualize.

Now, there it is possible to just say, fuck them, they lost the darwinian struggle and deserve to die. Rootless conservatives like Kevin certainly do, as they propose that the broken white working class just move and gets jobs. Rather than trying to fix a system that was designed to destroy working-class communities, he glorifies a system where men’s only hope is to leave behind their families and the towns where their ancestors lived for generations to move to anomic, demographic-shredding urban centres to simply to be able to provide for themselves. Whatever you might call such inhuman mammon-worship, it is nothing anyone sane would recognize as conservatism.

Real conservativism and reaction recognizes that not all people are equal. You can’t just abandon whole swaths of people to anomie, poverty, and economic misery. Superiors have a duty to protect and care for their inferiors just as the inferiors have a duty to obey and respect their superiors. Conservatives can not abandon the idea of noblesse oblige.

****

None of this is to say that we should adopt socialist or communist policies where everybody gets free government handouts. That’s just another form of anomic, inhuman mammon-worship. There are other options besides anomic socialist mammon-worship and anomic corporatist mammon-worship. I’m planning another post on economics, hopefully soon.

****

Finally, just to make it clear, there is nothing shameful about not being an aristocrat or priest or with being a yeoman, peasant, or even a slave. While our modern status structure prizes the priestly class (ie. the educated, the academic, the high-IQ, the journalist, the bureaucrat, etc.) as having status above all, primarily because the priestly class seized the status hierarchy for themselves through their control of modern mass communications, this is a corrupt and degenerate status hierarchy. (The aristocratic class is all but dead). The denigration of the admirable yeoman or peasant and the loss of the status that used to be given granted to an honest blue-collar family-men is an evil corruption.

Anybody, who knows their proper position in the hierarchy and faithfully renders their duties should receive the proper honour and status. Such is right and noble. The priestly class should and will pay dearly for their destruction of the natural status hierarchy.

Trapped in the Holiness Spiral

The leftist holiness spiral has been increasing as late. One activist explains how he sacrificed everything to win the holiness competition.

Activism is hard. Plain and simple. Being an activist is even harder. It’s long hours, empty bank accounts, angry girlfriends/boyfriends/spouses who are ready to leave you at any moment, family that doesn’t get it, making calls, receiving calls, logging contacts, selling a vision, rejection, empty promises, fulfilled promises, emails, press releases, signatures, counts, validation, databases, vendors, merchandise, rallies, public speaking, volunteers, supporters, haters, naysayers, politics, more politics, and people wishing you would just stop. Especially your doctor.
…
After a year of this, I can say that I’m tired. This stuff consumes you in ways that I can’t even begin to describe. My life revolves around cannabis, reform, legalization.
…
What people often forget, is that I’m a volunteer too. The last campaign took years off of my life, and several others. For at least the past year I’ve neglected myself, my personal life, and all the rest of the things I should be focusing on at this age. The ripe old age of 32.

Throughout the piece you can feel a vague, suppressed sense of disillusionment with the process that ate his life. Not surprising. Yet he continues to support activism. He believes that sacrificing everything in his life for easier access to chemical highs was worth it.

On the other hand, another radical activist is complaining about the holiness spiral of leftism. This activist hails from London in Ontario, not the real one, best known in Canada for confusing people with its name and being somewhere near Toronto. She is best known for her world-changing work of being arrested for spray-painting Pink Floyd references on other people’s property, then complaining that the arrests were political persecution.

Anyway, she points out something everybody knows about leftists, that they claim to care about the poor while shitting all over them, that they try to outholy each other, and that they suppress speech that they don’t like. She states she’s sick of it. Good for her, I guess.

Yet, even as she descries the holiness spiral, she says this:

That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form?—?far from it.

She can not escape holiness signalling even as she decries it. This ignores that the entire piece reads like a holier-than-thou lecture, as she paints other activists as less holy han herself for their holiness signalling. To be fair, it might no be easy to avoid sounding like holiness signalling when calling out the left as a leftist.

She also wrote a follow-up, which included this:

So, humour me for a second and let me tell you a bit about myself: I am a white working class queer female with a history of trauma. I have experienced intimate partner violence in many forms and I have been formally diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I’ve been hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and struggled with drug addiction in the past. I’ve been stalked, harassed and had the shit kicked out of me by police. Until I landed my current job, there were times when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, or if I would be able to make rent that month, or pay off the bills on time. While I’m doing better now in a lot of ways, and I am definitely not claiming to win the “Oppression Olympics” (spoiler: it’s not a competition to begin with), it is not only ignorant, but simply incorrect to assume that I am nothing more than a privileged white girl refusing to check herself.

Notice how she signals herself well in the ‘Oppression Olympics’, but makes sure to signal that it’s not a competition, thus making her more holy. Also notice how shitty her life is; I guess being a citizen journalist doesn’t pay so well and ain’t so good for the mental health. Why are leftists activists almost invariably mentally ill with have a history of abusive relationships?

Onto my point, for individuals, the leftist holiness spiral is almost impossible to exit from once entered. Those whose lives have been chewed up in the signalling continue to support it as only martyrs can. Even those who oppose the signalling, can’t help but keep up their own forms of counter-signalling. They have to show how holy they are by pointing out how they are above signalling it.

The need for status runs deep.

Institutional Capture

I’ve mentioned before that the left has, in the long-term, won almost every political battle of the last century. The one big area where the US (and just the US) has not been moving overly left is gun freedom. The main reason for this is the NRA, but the NRA wasn’t always as powerful or hardline as it is now.

In the second half of the 1970s, the NRA faced a crossroads. Would it remain an Establishment institution, partnering with such mainstream entities as the Ford Foundation and focusing on shooting competitions? Or would it roll up its sleeves and fight hammer and tongs against the gun-control advocates? Or flee to the Mountain West? The latter was appealing, and the NRA leadership decided to move the headquarters to Colorado and also spend $30 million to build a recreational facility in New Mexico called the National Outdoor Center.

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite.

“Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Carter, a longtime NRA board member, had arrived in Washington in 1975 as founding director of a new NRA lobbying unit, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA). His pugnacious approach, which rankled the Old Guard, was captured in a letter he wrote to the entire NRA membership to discuss the fight in Congress over gun control: “We can win it on a simple concept —No compromise. No gun legislation.”

The right is holding its own in this particular battle because hardliners captured the NRA (and then later recaptured it after a moderate pushback). This is how the left has always won, by capturing institutions: the academy, NGO’s, the media, the bureaucracy, etc.

If the right wants to win, it needs to figure out a way to take over pre-existing institutions. Making institutions is also good, but it takes a lot more effort. Conquering pre-existing institutions and their resource base is better.

Drafting Women

It seems that drafting women has come up among the GOP candidates for some reason. So, I’ll give my take on it.

First, women are far too valuable to waste on military activity, with the possible exception of a truly existential threat (such as both the Russians and Germans each faced from the other in WW2). Doug Wilson gets the right of it:

Once you have signed off on the nation/state conscripting your daughters to go serve in combat roles, whatever it was you thought you were conserving — thus allowing you to call yourself a conservative — has had a fork stuck in it and is done. Nothing really to conserve any more.

A nation that conscripts its daughters for its defense is a nation that no longer deserves a defense. We may have to fight later as a practical matter, but this is a matter of rudimentary allegiance.

In a civilized society, anybody proposing sending women to war would be sent to a penal battalion himself to die honourably for the motherland.

On the other hand though, Wilson is right. Our society is no longer civilized and no longer worth defending or supporting. There is nothing to conserve and we should stop acting like there’s anything left.

Most “military age” women voluntarily render themselves infertile, so it’s not like we’re taking them away child creation and rearing. They’ve willingly and enthusiastically removed their own civilizational value and made themselves as expendable as men. There’s no civilizational reason to protect expendable self-sterilized young women.

Rationally we should be drafting women. Women claim to be men’s equals, and equals don’t get defended. Equals have to carry their own weight, and in this case carrying their own weight means being drafted and sent to die in case of war. If we’re going to do this liberalism, we should do it right. Allowing women into the military but not drafting them is one of those unprincipled exceptions that Zippy likes to talk about. If women are allowed in the military like men, then they should drafted like men.

(And no, to unseeing tradcons, this is not men cowering behind women, women enthusiastically pursue equality).

On Wilson’s biblical argument, the case Wilson makes does not support the idea that women at war is objectively sinful, just imprudent. So, I will talk in practical terms, not moral ones.

As for the combat effectiveness, it is obvious to anybody who’s not ideologically blinded that women will lower the military’s combat effectiveness and that’s a positive thing (I hesitate to use the word good). America’s hard military effectiveness doesn’t matter. America has had few just wars, hasn’t had a truly defensive war in a long time, possibly ever (the Pacific front of WW2 and the confederate defence in the War of the States may have been defensive, although, the US did provoke Japan and the CSA was not the USA) and has never fought a necessary war at all as far as I can recall at the moment. There’s certainly not going to be a defensive foreign war any time soon, and definitely not an existential one.

As for foreign conquests, America also has the gear and numbers to utterly destroy any possible foreign enemy that it gets serious on. The only reason America loses wars is because America (purposely?) tries to fail. A loss of combat effectiveness simply doesn’t matter against foreign enemies.

On the other hand, the happening could occur in the next couple of decades, and where the military falls during this times will matter a lot. The red tribe (ie. the tribe I support and the one not wholly given to degeneracy) has the absolute advantage when it comes to capacity for violence, but if the military falls on the side of the blue tribe, things could get rough. So, a less effective military helps neutralize a potential threat to the red tribe.

As for the purpose of women in the military being to destroy masculine virtue and manly pride, that’s also a positive. The military is the enemy. It is a part of USG and is controlled at the top by the same people destroying the rest of our civilization. Even worse, it is an enemy filled with good people who should be the allies of us and civilization. Because of its association with masculine virtue and red tribe values, the red tribe disproportionately volunteers to support the institution controlled by those who hate them. As well, it is the most trusted institution in the US, acting as a bulwark of trust for the otherwise (rightfully) mistrusted fedgov.

We need to disillusion young white men of their allegiance to the military. White men shouldn’t be fighting the wars of those who hate them. The more we can destroy  the (undeserved) trust the military has among young white men and the less we white men think they can get manly pride from joining up, the fewer white men will volunteer to die in a on the other side of the world while forcing liberalism, sodomy, corporate rape, and democracy upon foreigners.

The same argument holds for lowering military standards. It is a foregone conclusion that military standards will be lowered so that women look equal on paper. This is not something to fear, it is a positive as it will further lower combat effectiveness and eat at trust in the military.

Finally, and more morbidly, having CNN and the NYT showing hundreds of body bags from whatever foreign sandpit we’ll lodge ourselves in next beside the pictures of formerly cute (now dead) young women may end up being a wake-up call for the country (or not, it’s hard to tell where our depravity ends). A little bit of accelerationism in this area could lead to awakening.

So, it’s horrific (but not objectively sinful) that we’re wasting valuable women in the military, but those women were wasting their value themselves, so corporately and civilizationally we’re not really losing anything. If we’re going to let them into the military, we should follow through on the base principles and draft them. The practical effects of this will be positive for those concerned with eventual restoration.

What is the Alt-Right?

As there was with NRx a while back, there is now some struggle over control of the alt-right label. The fight seems to be going on between the WN’s and everybody else, with the centrepoint on Roosh. The WN’s claim that alt-right is rightfully theirs and non-WN’s are entryists. I don’t particular agree with everybody shooting allies, so I’ll weigh in.

Depending on how you use the term, the alt-right label is somewhat valuable as per Google Trends. ‘Alt right’ dwarfs ‘neoreaction’ (and, to a lesser degree, Moldbug). Although, ‘Alt-right’ is itself dwarfed by ‘neoreaction’ (and ‘Moldbug’), while ‘altright’ is similar to neoreaction. ‘Alternative right’ springs up even before ‘alt right’ and is even bigger than alt-right.

The lefties at RationalWiki (one of the top hits for alt-right) think the alt-right is part neoreaction, but, as with almost everything, they are wrong. Alternative right started getting searches in 2005, a couple years before Moldbug started writing and well before the NRx boom.

The WN’s do have a decent claim to the name. Richard Spencer, WN and creator of Alternative Right has a claim at owning the label as he created was created in 2010 and his the first hit for the label and is one of the earliest uses I can find, but according to Google Trends, ‘alt right’ sprung into existence in 2007, while ‘alternative right’ came a couple years before that. So Spencer was using a label already in existence.

The alt-right has been hitting mainstream presses in the last few months, which makes searching for it’s origins difficult as their flooding the results. The mainstream articles seem to use neoreactionary, alt-right, and white supremacy interchangeably. So, in practice, to the greater world, we’re all the same, probably to the chagrin of everybody on each side. Although, this Quora post is the second-highest ranked on Google for the term and notices the distinction, so its not completely overlooked.

Despite the search troubles, I found some early stuff. The earliest use of alternative right’ I found was in the name of an address by paleoconservative Paul Gottfried to the HL Mencken Club in 2008. He doesn’t use the term in the speech, but the speech is named “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right”. In the speech he uses it describe post-paleo conservatives who are opposed to/outside of neoconservatism, libertarianism, and movement conservatism. The post-paleos he describes go beyond a single organization or ideology and he specifically includes vDare and Taki’s. He also used it again in 2009, where he uses it to refer to non-authorized dissident rightests. The second use I found was from Taki’s in 2009, in an article by Kevin DeAnna (founder of Youth for Western Civilization) which uses the term as a right-wing movement concerned with identity, virtue, and culture as opposed to the economic movement of mainstream conservatism. He also links it to the Ron Paul movement. DeAnna himself spoke at the HL Mencken Club (as has Spencer).

So, near as I can tell, ‘alternative right’ and therefore ‘alt-right’ most rightly belong to the group creating the HL Mencken Club. Their list of presenters is all over the non-mainstream right, including Buchanan, Derbyshire, and Sailer. The Mencken Club began in 2008, so there’s about a a bit of time prior to the Club that it was in use, but I can not find any earlier usages. I’m not sure what caused the one-off spike in 2005, or the surge in 2006.

By the best evidence I can find, ‘alt-right’ originally referred to rightests who grew out of the paleoconservative tradition and are dissidents against the neoconservative mainstream. The alt-right is inherently a catch-all term for those on the right who are outside mainstream conservatism and are attacking it from the right.

So, while the WN’s are part of the alt-right, do not own the alt-right and being alt-right does not mean being a WN. As well, both the DE and neoreaction are part of the alt-right, but the alt-right is neither.

Nationalism

As I’ve previously written, nationalism, or perhaps more approiately thedism, is good.

On the other hand, I am skeptical of white nationalism. Whites exist genetically as a grouping, although there are many sub-groupings within this that are more salient. There is some shared culture, but that is more an artifact of shared Christiandom than any particular intra-racial affinity.

I am skeptical of white nationalism simply for the fact that if I went and asked my Norse great-great-great-great-grandfather if he was of the same nation as a Spaniard or a Bosnian, he’d likely look at me in bewilderment. Individual European nations are different, with different cultures, different values, different Christianities, and different genetics; to proclaim a white nation, a white nationalism for all of Europe is as insane a project as the EU.

White nationalism is far too universalist a concept for me to accept.

That being said, there is always the old Bedouin saying, “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and my cousin and I against the stranger”. Because of Christendom, proximity, and genetics Europeans have enough shared culture to unite against a common threat of those with fewer shared ties, such as Islamic invasion, but the occasional strategic alliance against outsiders does not a nation make.

On the other hand, there might arguably be a white nation in North America (and possibly South America, but I do not know enough about their racial politics to comment). It’s possible enough intra-European mongrelization and cultural assimilation has occurred to make NA whites a separate independent thede (sort of like NA blacks are a separate thede), but I still doubt it. There are too many separate white thedes in NA who don’t particularly care for each other for white to be a true thede. Even after over 200 years of living together the puritans and cavaliers/reivers still hate each other.

Apart from that, while I say I support nationalism, that is because I do not have a better word. Nationalism grew out of Westphalia and the French Revolution, and is a part of the enlightenment and liberalization.  When it began, nationalism was the ideology of radicals and 1800’s nationalists were often the liberals, until Cthulu swam past them both. Nationalism resulted the destruction of local culture for a more universalist national culture and the end of traditional authorities.

Nationalism, or at least modern nationalism, is too liberal for me to accept as an ideology.

So I support unified communities, nations, and believe that generally each individual nation, whether based on ethnicity, language, religion, ideology, etc., should have self-determination and should govern itself by its own authorities in accordance with its own local culture.

Could that be called nationalism? Possibly, it’s the best existing word I can think of the top of my head. I attempted to use local nationalism on Twitter once, but that it was pointed out that is contradictory. Thedism would probably be more accurate for my views.

So, I’m a thedist. ‘Us’ should govern ‘us’.’Us’ should not govern ‘them’ and ‘them’ should not govern ‘us’.

Alt-right Ethics

Recently, I linked to a TRS post on why the alt-right needs to understand ethics. The writer was a consequentialist who advocated understanding deontological principles. I am not a consequentialist, as I made clear in the debates on Christian genocide I hold to divine command theory, a specific form of deontology, with a smattering of virtue ethics for resolving those areas where multiple goods collide. I linked to the post, not because I consider consequentialism correct but because of the call to understand alternative ethics systems when debating others to be a more effective debater and the posts general anti-nihilism, as nihilism tends to infect some parts of the alt-right.

My philosophical problem with consequentialism is it’s lacking solid base. Why is this particular good that we are pursuing good? Consequentialism generally assigns value to a good (pleasure, pain avoidance, utility, the white race, etc) and makes that value the sole source of morality, without generally given an objective reason for why that particular good is of greater worth than other goods.

In this particular discussion, the good being discussed is the white race (I’ve got a post on WN coming, sometime). But why is securing the existence of the white race and the future for your children such a good that any evil done in its advancement of it is worthwhile? Survival and thriving are good and I certainly support the continuing existence of the white race, but why are they good? Is being a low-melanin gene-controlled meat sack pumping out more low-melanin gene-controlled meat sacks and fending off higher-melanin gene-controlled meat sacks so your particular phenotype becomes dominant among meat sacks really the base good upon which all other good is measured and for which all evil is justified?

What makes your particular geno-/phenotype objectively better than their particular geno-/phenotype?  Would that good that makes your particular geno-/phenotype better not be a greater good then? So why not make that good your consequence? But that new good, why is it good? Then why is that not the good you pursue?

You either run yourself in circles, or you come to the point where there is no answer.

Here Gary argues against nihilism:

Another annoying thing was that Sargon asked that if blacks became majority and took over the US, would it then be morally wrong for blacks to enslave white people? This was not dealt with well. One of the people in the hangout even answered ‘no’ to this question, which is obviously moral nihilism. I’m not a moral nihilist, neither should you be. Of course it would be wrong, but not because it’s discrimination, but because it is slavery, and more specifically because the consequences that would arise from that slavery are negative. Slavery, again, is not immoral inherently. No action is, as we’ve already demonstrated. If the blacks, on the other hand, were to throw whitey out of their country then that would not be morally wrong because it would result in more stability and peace in that country. Of course that’s not really true since blacks are uncivilized savages who actually benefit from white presence, but it is true in the parallel where whites are the majority and Arabs and Latinos are the minorities getting thrown out.

He argues the slavery of whites is wrong, while slavery itself is not, because of the consequences, which he doesn’t spell out. ‘Consequences’ is so amorphous and undefined, that he’s undermining his own point. Also, consequences for who? I’m sure blacks would appreciate having white slaves. Without an objective standard by which to measure ‘consequences’ consequentialism is meaningless.

He speaks positively of stability and peace a little later on in that paragraph, but why are these values inherently better than chaos and war?

What makes these values objective?

You need an absolute to measure morality by or morality is little more than taste preference. It is nihilism gussied up.

It’s God or nihilism. Choose.

And God is a deontologist.

****

As a believer divine command theory my support for nationalism (or more accurately thedism, post coming some time) comes from the word of God:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

(Genesis 1:26-28 ESV)

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

(Genesis 11:1-9 ESV)

“The Rock, his work is perfect,
for all his ways are justice.
A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,
just and upright is he.
They have dealt corruptly with him;
they are no longer his children because they are blemished;
they are a crooked and twisted generation.
Do you thus repay the LORD,
you foolish and senseless people?
Is not he your father, who created you,
who made you and established you?
Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you.
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
But the LORD’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
(Deuteronomy 32:4-9 ESV)

God made man to spread over the world. He divided them so they to accomplish this goal and each nation was made to inhabit it’s own territory. He made them different and those differences are good.

****

Finally, on a tangent, the ‘murdering baby Hitler’ example is a poor poor way to compare consequentialism and deontology, for it adds time travel to the mix. The murder of millions of Slavs and Jews is an obvious moral wrong for which the death penalty would be a justified punishment. So, when you are ask if someone would be justified in murdering baby Hitler, you are not asking the question of whether it is permissible to murder babies if the cause is good enough.

What you are really asking is: is it okay to pre-emptively punish someone for an action they will certainly commit in the future, which is only obfuscated by the inclusion of harm prevention?

While this is an interesting ethical and philosophical question, it doesn’t necessarily draw a line between the two differing ethical systems. One could think of decent arguments for/against preemptive punishment on both sides of that particular divide.