People come and people go, but unlike the connections that fade with time but otherwise remain pleasant memories, the people of whom I now think and write about have their memory forever tainted by the impetus for their ejection from my social life: They revealed themselves as zealous devotees of the progressive religion. In my professional and familial circles, and in the circle of those loose associates around which individual faces orbit more familiar ones, I am generally forgiving of theological, political, or philosophical diversity. I even maintain a small, but - as I consider it - elite cohort of friends who are decidedly leftist, yet unaffected by the bizarre, social iteration of rabies that is so ubiquitous among my generation. They remind me of a spaceship that uses a black hole's gravity well to perform a slingshot maneuver, as opposed to disappearing into the event horizon. These people, rare though they may be, are the sort of precious social connection you should hunt for, and in the finding, jealously guard a treasure that will serve as an excellent counterbalance to your own eccentricity: the human whetstone, the perfect foil.
Strange though it may seem for a reactionary to pause mid-thought to give praise to his opposite, I do it in juxtaposition of conventional Millennial ultracalvinism. I have become more and more reticent to refer to the political and philosophical proclivities of the passing era by their traditional markers. Perhaps it is simply an exercise in mindfulness as I remember friends who would traditionally be labeled "de la gauche", but are nonetheless the sort of men I would include in my roster were I tasked with the construction of a working model of civilization. But less on the personal side, eschewing the traditional labels of right and left, conservative and progressive, and even some popular colloquialisms like cultural Marxism, makes sense to me because most of these no longer make any taxonomic sense whatsoever. Some of them never made any sense at all. The nationalist vs. globalist divide makes much, much more sense, but even still I find that less precise than I would like. Moldbug is a far greater thinker than I, and so I bow to his ultracalvinism in deference to his rank above me. Furthermore, ultracalvinism is a good 'stealth' descriptor - the sort of word that can phase through social deflector shields long enough to make a fair point that an otherwise sensible person can actually grapple with, as opposed to rejecting out of hand because heresy. I dislike 'cultural Marxism' because it has the opposite effect. I found another excellent term at the Orthosphere blog the other day. Romantic rationalism. If you stare at it long enough, you may just see the shape of a stiletto wedged through some ribs.
But that's less here than there and I've gone all tangential. The reason my girlfriend is important to this essay is because it was through my girlfriend that I became intimately acquainted with provincial American culture. I admit that I am a suburbanite by birth. My parent's choice of home location was certainly a boon in my formative years, as my childhood was beyond happy, but in the suburbs you're always living on the outside of a city while looking forever in. Everything past you really is flyover country. It wasn't that I consciously harbored any ill will to the people beyond the corn field border, I just never thought of them much, and if I ever did - and I know I did - hear of scorn for hicks and hillbillies and rednecks and the like, I didn't think much of it. I knew zero of them, whatever your word for White ruralites may be.
That changed when I found my girlfriend. My introduction to her "hick-ish" family, to use her own words, was illuminating. And despite the cultural gravity well in my immediate vicinity begging me to throw myself in for the cheap social gains (and easy, albeit B or C grade, women), it was in the corn strewn wasteland beyond my hometown that I finally, finally learned to hate. And it wasn't them that I learned to hate. Getting to know the extremely large circle of small town people intimately bound through blood and friendship that eventually begot the woman I love was both beautiful beyond words and sad beyond reckoning. I have never felt such sympathy, and I owe that in no small part to the quality of the people I met, who, despite their material poverty, were endowed spiritually, communally, and otherwise beyond measure. Where the people I met are not what you would call 'educated' - whatever that means nowadays - they make up for it in handiness, craftsmanship, and earthiness. While I have fished for nearly a quarter century, I hadn't picked up a bow or a gun since - I shit you not - Jesus camp.
(My parents, being naive Catholics, sent me, also a naive Catholic, to an Evangelical summer camp. It didn't end well, but that's a story that was only interesting when I was an angry atheist.)
After a short period of the customary sizing-up of a foreign male romantically interested in his daughter, my girlfriend's dad took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew about firearms and bowhunting. He lent me his old bow, somewhat oversized since he is quite tall. Under his tutelage, I took my first deer this year. I am forever grateful to him for that, as I had no one to show me the ins and outs of the ancient art. Someday I will pass that knowledge on to my sons. And while people come in all sorts of flavors, the overall earthiness and communal orientation of the ruralites I encountered puts the spray-tanned, Escalade-driving soccer mom culture of suburbia to shame. I passed out candy maybe once ever 20 minutes this year at Halloween. My girlfriend's parents step out on their door at 4pm and don't step back inside until the procession of kids in costumes ends. And when you go out there, you see the telltale signs of the communal values so many people on the Dissident Right lament the lack of in more populated areas. Everyone knows their neighbors. Families still have large, extended gatherings. Pregnant women are abundant. Etc.
But don't take this uptalk for the idealized vision of a utopian fool. There is a tremendous amount of sadness out there. There's a lot of rust, a lot of poverty, a lot of alcoholism and drug addiction. I had a strange, chance encounter with a young friend of my girlfriend's sister who offhandedly made a comment about her stepfather who used to beat her regularly before her mom dumped him, and was somewhat taken aback by the nonchalant attitude. It wasn't what you would call justification, but it was a sort of shrug at a commonality. The jobs are dwindling, and the town my girlfriend comes from is getting by better than most thanks to a few remaining factories, but for years everyone's been on edge about who will close shop for the penny wages of East Asia next. When I talk to people about their lives out in the sticks, I get a lot of pessimism:
How long have you lived here?
My whole life.
Yeah? Do you like it?
Hell naw, man. It sucks out here.
Why don't you leave?
Everyone I know lives out here. We've always been out here.
And there, right there, is where you get the gold shining behind layers of shuttered factories and rust. People I know from the suburbs pay lip service to not wanting to leave family and friends behind, but given the opportunity to go elsewhere, they cross country on the next flight out. People from where I've been spending my free time know there's better somewhere, and they won't go. That's some blood and soil shit right there, even if they don't know it's blood and soil, nor do they articulate it as you or I might. They just do, and their stoic resignation to their grim fate as the grand losers of globalism reminds me of that Oswald Spengler quote about the Roman soldier who died at his post in Pompeii.
And that's where the hate really sets in. You go out there and you see what I saw, and suddenly the vitriol piled on Heritage America from the coasts becomes intolerable. At first it was annoying, but then you see the rust and the closed factories and hear about the occasional suicide and your blood just boils. Moldbug once made a passing comment about how despite his decidedly brahmin upbringing, he found himself utterly horrified by the sheer and unjustified hate spewed forth from the coasts against middle Americans. I remember reading that when I first encountered UR, and like my previous disposition about the relationship between the city and the country, it went over my head. Now? Every encounter I have with an urbanite is likely to produce some frivolous yet vicious banality, a conversational trope used to juxtapose the backwards, awful, evil faceless hinterlander against the virtuous, enlightened, beneficent urbanite speaking to you.
You know, the sort of people who hate black people and vote against their economic interests.
There was a time where when I'd hear that sort of thing my eyes would roll into the back of my head and I'd sigh and silently here we go AGAIN to myself. I hear that now and I flash back to the first Christmas after I started dating my girlfriend. We'd been together for barely two months and these total strangers took me into their house, belatedly bought me inexpensive but utilitarian gifts, and lavished me with food and company and the sort of cheer you'd think they'd save for an old friend long thought lost who stumbled through the door. I remember her dad explaining to me, in his particular fashion, how to set up the sights on his old compound bow, where to aim. I remember the farmer who not only let us pass through his land but helped us search while we were tracking a wounded buck. I remembered the small but charming interactions I'd have with strangers in a small town. And I remembered every lamentation from some broke, broken middle aged schlub or old timer as they recalled the respectable prosperity lost to the maelstrom of globalism, and the people alcoholism floated down the drain.
Every time I stumble into one of those AKTCHUALLY conversations with some nu-male soyboy, I am reminded of my own peculiar 'wait a minute' moment. Life is a series of lights going off in your head across the perils of time and entropy, and like Moldbug's comment on his upbringing, this light had a herald some time prior but didn't make sense until I got my hands dirtied myself.
The Dissident Right, by virtue being unconstrained by conventional, suppressive morality, has produced a patchwork quilt of explanatory narratives that seek to unravel the mystery of the decline of the West. Some of these are excellent - Anonymous Conservative's r/K selection and Moldbug's formalism for instance. Some are less so - the abyss-staring neuroticism of much of the Alt-Right no longer seems quite as edgy and funny to me as it did previously, as I see no resolution to any of our problems coming from that quarter.
That said, for good or ill I sometimes wonder if we're overthinking much of AKTCHUALLY culture. While what I read from the broad Dissident Right is vastly, vastly superior in quality over basic conservative, libertarian and progressive writers, I suspect that the petty motivations and virtue signalling and desperate desire for social affirmation make up 100% of the fuel that drives 99.9% of wastrel progressives. Sometimes I think we see forests and not trees, or the reverse, or however you want to frame it.
I constantly wonder what it is I am missing - I'm always missing something, somewhere.
And ironically, that is what drives me nuts about most people.
They don't.
You know, the sort of people who hate black people and vote against their economic interests.
There was a time where when I'd hear that sort of thing my eyes would roll into the back of my head and I'd sigh and silently here we go AGAIN to myself. I hear that now and I flash back to the first Christmas after I started dating my girlfriend. We'd been together for barely two months and these total strangers took me into their house, belatedly bought me inexpensive but utilitarian gifts, and lavished me with food and company and the sort of cheer you'd think they'd save for an old friend long thought lost who stumbled through the door. I remember her dad explaining to me, in his particular fashion, how to set up the sights on his old compound bow, where to aim. I remember the farmer who not only let us pass through his land but helped us search while we were tracking a wounded buck. I remembered the small but charming interactions I'd have with strangers in a small town. And I remembered every lamentation from some broke, broken middle aged schlub or old timer as they recalled the respectable prosperity lost to the maelstrom of globalism, and the people alcoholism floated down the drain.
Every time I stumble into one of those AKTCHUALLY conversations with some nu-male soyboy, I am reminded of my own peculiar 'wait a minute' moment. Life is a series of lights going off in your head across the perils of time and entropy, and like Moldbug's comment on his upbringing, this light had a herald some time prior but didn't make sense until I got my hands dirtied myself.
The Dissident Right, by virtue being unconstrained by conventional, suppressive morality, has produced a patchwork quilt of explanatory narratives that seek to unravel the mystery of the decline of the West. Some of these are excellent - Anonymous Conservative's r/K selection and Moldbug's formalism for instance. Some are less so - the abyss-staring neuroticism of much of the Alt-Right no longer seems quite as edgy and funny to me as it did previously, as I see no resolution to any of our problems coming from that quarter.
That said, for good or ill I sometimes wonder if we're overthinking much of AKTCHUALLY culture. While what I read from the broad Dissident Right is vastly, vastly superior in quality over basic conservative, libertarian and progressive writers, I suspect that the petty motivations and virtue signalling and desperate desire for social affirmation make up 100% of the fuel that drives 99.9% of wastrel progressives. Sometimes I think we see forests and not trees, or the reverse, or however you want to frame it.
I constantly wonder what it is I am missing - I'm always missing something, somewhere.
And ironically, that is what drives me nuts about most people.
They don't.
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