Convenient Answers to Stupid Thoughts, II

"Standards of beauty are oppressive."

It goes without saying that the sort of people who constantly harp on this sort of thing are seldom themselves paragons of beauty. lolz feminists are fat and ugly is not a novel observation. It is curious, however, that Leftism, the philosophical parent of anti-beauty resentment, tends to make otherwise beautiful people ugly when it sinks its claws into them. Case in point, this young woman:

It never ceases to horrify me.

It is impossible to apply a concrete standard to an abstraction. Beauty, being a transcendental value, is by it's very nature abstract. We created works of beauty not as a final goal to judge ourselves by, but as an attestation to something greater than ourselves. Beauty is not a standard in the way neurotic females gripe about the models in advertisements or on the cover of lurid grocery store magazines. Beauty is a goal and a purpose simultaneously. The goal itself is unreachable because of entropy. In time all things fail. The great works of art will someday crumble to dust and ashes, and long before then your body will betray you, bowing you to the ground under the weight of your age and weakness, before you return to the earth from whence you came. The tapestry of the stars will one day fade away as their lonely lights go out one by one. But it is the ephemeral nature of the beauty that we behold and manifest that gives it value and wonder and splendor. Without entropy, beauty would be omnipresent, and therefore impossible for us to notice. Ubiquity is the scourge of value.

But because the goal is unreachable we are mistaken in believing that the journey is not worth the undertaking. It is not the goal that makes us better, it is through each step along this great undertaking that we gain, becoming more than we were the day before. To dwell in and strive towards beauty is valorous in the same way that a last stand is valorous, only stretched out over the collective lifetimes of everyone who came before you, and all who will come after you, who worked to keep that candle lit against the eternal power of entropy. To shake your fist in defiance against an unassailable enemy, knowing that you will lose none-the-less: that is glory. That is beautiful, for the same reason Oswald Spengler thought so highly of that Roman soldier who died at his post when Mt. Vesuvius buried Pompeii. I will be better, even though I will someday die. It is not in merely being attractive that we truly are beautiful, it is in dwelling in beauty and creating the beautiful that we stand on the shoulders of giants to perpetuate the manifestation of beauty in our universe, and therefore ourselves becoming Beautiful, the transcendental by proxy.

But we do not dwell in beauty any longer.

Instead we purposefully make of ourselves an ugly spectacle. Is it any wonder that the rise of solipsism in modern Westerners coincides with the disfigurement of our physical bodies? The tortured fashions and whims of modernity are a thin veneer covering the hollowed out shell of our collective soul. An emptiness that pervades, conquers and occupies everything, turning it into nothing. We flatter ourselves with our simplistic and ugly art, the thoughtless and haphazard creations of the lazy, envious, sullen and weak. In reality, we are nothing compared to what we once were. We have become entropy, and in time enough, we will become nothing in the worst sort of way.

And that is a tragedy.

Feedback Loop

Everybody signals. Many signals are small, unconscious, or at least unintentional. For example, I speak unaccented English, which should signal to you that I am from somewhere in the Midwest. I don't mean to speak the way I do, it is simply a byproduct of my upbringing. I used to wear band shirts and ripped jeans and uneven haircuts because I was a drummer in a crappy punk band in high school, and I specifically and intentionally wanted everyone to know what clique I belonged to. One signal was unintentional, one signal clearly was not. One I have to this day, one I have long since abandoned.

Everybody signals.

There isn't anything wrong with signals. Signalling is part of communication, it's how we build and maintain our reputation. Reputations help us socialize. Without signals, and therefore without reputation, there would be no interaction beyond a perpetual series of introductions that would fade into meaninglessness once proximity was lost to time and space.

Sometimes people rail against signalling and it sounds to me a lot like the postmodern tears shed over hierarchy. By that I mean that it is pointless and ineffectual and, frankly, stupid to rail against a permanent and ubiquitous phenomenon that is directly caused by the human aspect of being human. You'll never end signalling any more than fat feminists will ever really end hierarchy.

The postmodernists want to obliterate hierarchical arrangement for one of two reasons: either they are personally dissatisfied with their own rank and wish to cheat around the lie of equality by bringing everyone down to a level below where they currently stand, thus allowing them to leapfrog over their natural superiors - or - they are in such an excruciating state of perpetual mental distress (as VoxDay has claimed on several occasions) that they wish for the sweet embrace of nothingness. Reducing the distinctions between unique points interspersed throughout the universe is the same as reducing everything to nothing. The total erasure of time and meaning in a singularity. They long for the release they instinctually believe oblivion offers but are too cowardly to kill themselves. So far anyways - some have claimed that a great millennial die-off is coming. We shall see. Perhaps thots with no marriage prospects will start throwing themselves of tall buildings en masse, but that time has not yet come - if it ever will.

Sometimes postmodernists rail against hierarchy for both reasons at the same time. Never mind that this doesn't make sense, it doesn't have to if you understand that you should not be approaching this sort of thing in a linear, premise premise conclusion format. They certainly aren't.

Slightly downstream from the postmodern camp is the conventional urbanite cohort. Not quite wayward enough to mutilate themselves or dye their hair garishly, but in enough of a state of dis-ease that they will enthusiastically signal their academic credentials. Most frequently this is done by disparaging Donald Trump, as if their collective groan were somehow enough to undo the dawn of the Trumpenreich.

As if.

That part is important in understanding. Kant placed a premium on intentions. The intention of your friend signalling on Facebook is not to bring down Trump through his words and frantic gesticulations against the God Emperor. He may wish it so, but his intention is internal, and yet paradoxically solipsistic. It is paradoxically solipsistic because while his intention is to gratify himself through likes and pats-on-the-back from other thralls of the zeitgeist, he is ironically dependent on positive reactions from things outside of himself. Others. While he may have succumbed to solipsism, the superlative form of selfishness, gratification and relief must come from outside of himself.

You may say something to the effect of this dumb idiot cannot be fucked to pick himself up by his own bootstraps and you wouldn't exactly be wrong. You just wouldn't be telling either of us something we don't already know.

Keeping with that noble tradition, I too am about to tell you something we both already know, but that to my knowledge has not been fleshed out in exact terms.

The tendency of the millennial urbanite cohort to virtue signal is directly caused by the atomizing effect of city life. Cities are no longer centers of economic activity. Cities are high school 3.0 to the high school 2.0 of college. Lonely and emotionally stunted, this last, worst generation is lured to the city for economic reasons and the promise of frequent socialization. While for some the economic prospects do bear the fruits promised, for almost no one does frequent socialization result in genuine, permanent connections. Cheap, alcohol fueled sex and access to euphoria inducing hard drugs reduces inhibitions and long term planning in exchange for immediate gratification. Unfortunately when the high diminishes the user is left with two choices: hangover or redose? When the money runs out and the hangover sets in the loneliness that never really left comes back into view. Hence the pervasiveness of antidepressants and other prescription mood stabilizing drugs. What is remarkable is how nonchalant many people are in this regard. Everyone is medicated and yet no one takes a whole lot of time to stop and marvel at the implications. When you point out the profound and ubiquitous level of unhappiness the immediate answer has to do with some material or monetary want or dissatisfaction. Jobs, free schooling, higher pay. They screech about installing total communism and people who already failed to allow them to sink or swim chide them sheepishly about communism being impossible or killing one hundred million people in less than a century or a million other tired conservative cliches that mean nothing and solve nothing a do nothing because conservatives are tired and useless and cowardly and cretinous. The signalarity operates well inside conservatives' ooda loop, and the bait of virtuous materialism propels their wayward offspring to screech ever more. Each outburst is a feeble attempt at connection, the longing for the lost pats on the head mummy and daddy never ceased, even for a moment, to lavish upon their children lest they hinder their development.

Pure irony.

The rub of the whole stupid affair is that it isn't about installing full communism over the current late-stage capitalism OS. It's about the socialization points - signals - the speaker acquires for saying this, or that, or fuck Drumpf, or whatever. What is said is meaningless. What it results in means everything to a generation that is addicted to the social affirmation feedback loop.

There is a glaring weakness in this system of demented feedback loops hinted at in a (misattributed) G.K. Chesterton quote I've seen bandied about quite a bit recently:

When people stop believing in God they do not simply believe in nothing; they become capable of believing anything.

Something capable of out-turning trickle-down postmodernism in a dogfight is capable of taking the cultural reins and either bringing this insane spiral down to the ground in one piece, or, as they say, crashing this plane with no survivors.

The Horror of Hubris

A frequent strategy, for example, is to present the delusion as recondite and counterintuitive, and the truth as simplistic and wrong. This "emperor's new clothes" strategy is a proven recipe for defeating Occam's razor. Who, for example, really understand the Trinity? But if you don't understand the Trinity, aren't you just stupid? Through internal competition, this counterintuitive delusion generates a revolutionary elite deeply steeped in Trinitology. The harder it is to understand the delusion, the more dedicated your cadre will be.

- Mencius Moldbug

If I were to somehow remove the crunchy reactionary coating from my psyche, the next layer down in the great chain of my mental being would fall under the 'futurist' subheading. Ironic, no? I have a bit of a fetish for theoretically practical space travel. The credit to my fascination with outer space goes to my dear mother, who bought me a telescope when I was young. We'd spend hours looking at fuzzy images of the planets and gazing at the craters on the moon. Funny enough, there's a crater on our dusty satellite that bears my mother's maiden name.

Few people who gaze on the full breadth and majesty of the Milky Way walk away from the experience feeling anything other than small. It is remarkable then, knowing what we know about just how big the universe is (whatever fraction that we can actually see) that the end of history memeplex has taken root. For instance, it wasn't until the 1920s that we finally realized that the Milky Way wasn't the universe, but only one galaxy in the universe. Perhaps we can be forgiven of that because the technology to produce high quality telescopes that can bring you the stars in a decent resolution is not the sort of thing a civilization without advanced, precision manufacturing has any hope of creating. Then again, back closer to home, it wasn't until well after WWII that plate tectonics gained widespread support among geologists. Nothing about that is to say that civilizations without x y or z technological marvel should be castigated for not knowing a b or c fundamental principle of (modern) science that coincidentally enough requires x y or z technology. But there is a curious, and very serious, incongruity in both knowing that only a few lives of men in the past we were astonishingly less knowledgeable while triumphantly proclaiming your generations political soup du jour as the be all end all of all of history ever. Because that is what progressive idealism is. As triumphalist as it is stupid and vacuous. Behold! We have conquered the wild and uncovered the secrets of the universe, and the purpose of life is... bitching about racism and the virtues of universal healthcare. Blink blink. Blink.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It has become increasingly clear that none of this is going to end well. Perhaps a last, tiny enclave of Wypipo will grumble among themselves that Camp of the Saints was not supposed to be an instruction manual, the way that Libertarians (lol) once tut tutted about 1984. Some dream of a rising tide of Right-Wing violence that will quickly, quietly, and efficiently sweep away the cancer of the modern world. The merits of those thoughts aside (indeed it is hard to resist when you can't get away from the screeching), my nightmare scenario is that the coming conflict, born up to unimaginable heights and tension by the runaway dysgenic effect of modern medicine, modern farming, modern energy and modern comfort, will leave the remnant that survives unable to resume the course of technological progression. It isn't that the oil is all dried up, its that a hard reboot of civilization and technology means that we would be in a catch-22 situation regarding energy: The technology required to reach the oil that remains is paradoxically out of reach because easy access to oil is required to start an industrial revolution which will eventually give you the technological refinement to reach the harder to access oil which you cannot reach because our civilization imploded and no one can reach the information on a hard drive because the power went out one day and never when back on and...

We'd be fucked. And we're serious teetering towards that. The suspicion that this is our last, best and only chance to get off this rock adds a certain sense of urgency to the mission of revitalizing our civilization. The fear is compounded by the aggravation associated with knowing that a deeply unnatural philosophy has come to power and is cheerfully driving us off the edge while it's adherents preach that they are the pinnacle of philosophy, science and the human condition. Blink. Who the hell looks at a handful of billion years of things eating each other and comes to the conclusion that the most sensible method of organization is expending insane amounts of energy and resources coddling those who cant? You are telling me, with a straight face, that doing the exact opposite of the selection method that powered an ecosystem for 3.8 billion years through trillions upon trillions of organisms perishing before they could reproduce and pass on their genes and contribute another generation to the tree of life... will somehow not have serious negative consequences. Oh! The solution to our problems is sooo easy! Just give people stuff! Who the fuck seriously sits down and looks at that and says brilliant! At this point, the answer is either people who are intentionally tricked into a believing something that is degrading in exchange for cheap virtue points - or people who have unintentionally tricked themselves into believing something degrading in exchange for cheap virtue points. The difference between one explanation and the other is the difference between Mike Enoch and Mencius Moldbug. Try this the next time you're at a fashionable party in the city: Tell everyone you know that you hate Trump and count the number of pats on the back that you harvest. For a moment, it feels good, yes? Suddenly people seem very interested in talking to you, yes? Tempted, yes?

And into the abyss we go.

Oil, of course, does not power spacecraft, and human ingenuity is perhaps the only thing comparable to human stupidity in its pervasiveness and tendency to surprise you. The idea that this is the end is probably overwrought, but I cannot help but think, when looking from these heights, that a fall from up here might actually kill us.

Counter-Advice on White Birthrates

Advice From The Abyss, Staring Back

I wasn't really sure whether or not the particular individual PA quotes here is serious, or partially tongue in cheek. For my purposes it doesn't matter as the general sentiment is echoed among the various flavors of Dissident Right, and therefore it is worth addressing briefly.

Our chief concern should not be quantity. Everyone else is playing quantity. Historically, quantity is not our strength. Quantity is not how we got from point A to an improved point B. The ancient regime of Feudalism improved our people by segregating those who could not from those who could. Generally separating wheat from chaff fell under the jurisdiction of a local lord's willingness to enter into a labor contract with a particular individual, or approve his request to marry. Far more often than modern humans would find comfortable, however, the separation was effected by the permanent removal of a "could not" vis-a-vis the gallows. Feudalism had many other benefits, particularly the organization of a serious system of defense in the vacuum left by Rome's collapse, but the story of our people's biologial improvement lasted well past the demise of the Feudal system and propelled us into the dawn of the greatest era of human technological advancement of all time. Contrary to the fashionable screeching from wayward (and incidentally extremely low-quality) White progressives, the systemic exclusion of the worst of our people gave us the physical means to conquer the world.

Sadly, all good things end eventually. The ancient and patriarchal relationship between the nobles, the clergy and the commons vanished under a tidal wave of capital: The post-Vatican II Catholic Church is a joke, our aristocracy spent it's last blood in a horrific World War at the turn of the century, and their replacements - globalist oligarchs - are only matched in their disregard for the tradition of noblesse oblige by their wild incompetence. Far from being explicitly conspiratorial, with a coin-clutching merchant cackling behind every affront to our people, our history, and our tradition, it is far more likely that the general demise of the West coincides with the general decline in the quality of our leaders. That is not to say that certain specific events aren't attributable to what you might call a shocking set of (((coincidences))), but ultimately that is neither here nor there. The waters are rising and we cannot save everyone, and even those endowed with the most vicious malice towards our people may ultimately find that they are hoisted by their own petards.

The gallows, however, remain in function, albeit not so much in form. The great evil of modernity, like all chaos, is ultimately self-consuming. Rampant hook-up culture, cheap and effective birth control, Tinder style "relationships", the bitter resentment of feminism, the genetic dead end of miscegenation, careerism, atomized urbanite individualism and Tumblr/blue-hair activism are all fires burning too hot to sustain themselves. These fires must burn, because we are overbred. Our success has allowed weakness to flourish, and the devil must take his due. He who would defend everything, defends nothing is an ancient aphorism that might steer you in the right direction. Our projected minority status in our own homelands, of all things, is certainly cause for worry. But the best salve for the mess we have gotten ourselves into is careful planning, not the wild neuroticism of day traders watching the market collapse.

Feudalism is not coming back - at least in it's medieval form - but the lessons we learned can help us pull ourselves out of the mess we created. Half of it is literally letting those who should breed continue to not breed, and perhaps encouraging them to do so where possible. We are going to have to accept some losses. Believe me, having recently come out of college I can definitively say that White Liberalism is a political expression of biological unfitness. We are gaining far more, long term, by simply cutting these people loose. I have attempted to express to my parents and other older conservatives with fairly unsatisfactory results how college-tier liberalism isn't just a matter of commie professors brainwashing kids - there is actually something wrong with the people who buy into this stuff, and the more they've been bought in the more wrong there is. And I do mean physically and mentally.

Strive for quality. Almost everyone else is playing the quantity angle, and almost everywhere else is complete garbage. Its time to swim against the grain. Great investors know that the worst thing to do during a market panic is to join the panicked crowd in attempting to sell everything. Hang tight, buy whatever seems like it will gain its value back, and never ever panic. Someday this whole thing will collapse. Civil war will come, the lights will go out and never come back on, boats laden with starving, angry Africans will wash up on our shores like Camp of the Saints, whatever. Make ready to build something new on top of the ruins, something right, something of high quality and worth preserving to pass down forever. Something good, beautiful, and noble.

Find a nice girl - no girl is perfect and she doesn't need to be right wing. Women in the thralls of love (read:convinced their about to marry 'up') have completely malleable political opinions. Get married. Have kids. Raise them right. Be a good man. Be good at being a man. 

Revolt against the modern world.

Signs of the Kali Yuga I

Nazis watch out!

"Communism doesn't work" is a conservative banality. "Communism has never been tried" is a progressive banality. "Communism doesn't work but Marx was spot on in his criticism of Capitalism" is a substantially less banal observation. Despite being less banal than the others, this requires a little bit of unpacking along the same lines as my post about the proto-Indo-Europeans and Urheimat.

It isn't exactly that Marx was particularly prescient about Capitalism. Marx's prescience comes from his observation about the bourgeoisie.

I would encourage you to take an hour or so to re-read Marx's Communist Manifesto. I was never a Communist. I had a brief period - literally 10 weeks, or one semester at my first college - where I subscribed to what you might call "Socialism Lite". I reasoned that if everyone had their basic needs provided for them by the state, then the time they would have otherwise spent acquiring the necessities of existence could be reallocated towards higher level productivity. Imagine how much art we could create if no one had to work to eat. I worked out the flaw in that sort of thinking through the course of one class (much to the chagrin of my professor, whom I still regard as a vapid douche), and moved on. Ever since, academic or social encounters with anything influenced by Marx caused me much eye-rolling.

This wasn't exactly fair on my part, but it wasn't unprecedented. The number of self-described Communists that I met during my undergraduate who recognized Bakunin and Gramsci was exactly zero. With a handful of exceptions among well read and thoughtful friends who reside on the Left end of the political spectrum, I found college commies to be boring, unoriginal, and slightly more annoying than the handful of College Republicans I met.

On a whim, I bought Marx's Communist Manifesto for one dollar, and, reveling in the irony, spent one evening rereading it and taking notes. I gave Marx something better than the old college try by reading him as a reactionary, and had I not already rejected his solution as impossible, I may very well have been swept away from my longing for hierarchy and order and converted into a sort of Orwell-ish communist. By which I mean I would have looked upon the sum total of Leftism and despaired. The connections I made are disturbing, but not unprecedented. There is a particularly humorous exchange between Richard Spencer and some fat idiot where Spencer makes fun of the man's taste for being, as he called it, bourgeois.

The implementation (or attempt at implementation) of Communism is widely regarded as a failure. For those who do not see the raw kill count as evidence of Communism's impossibility, that Communism (or the attempt thereof) was always a revolution of intellectuals as opposed to the proletariat surely tips the scales towards Marx's designs as failed. The unfortunate history of Communism being relatively well known, there is little else to say in that regard. Where Marx curries some serious favor from people who otherwise regard Marx with the same enthusiasm you might hold for finding dog crap smashed in the treads of your boots is his thoughts on the bourgeoisie. You often hear this rephrased as "Communism doesn't work but Marx was correct in his criticism of Capitalism." If they've done their homework and aren't just repeating something they once heard, Capitalism refers to the behavior of the bourgeoisie. Most people leave out that seemingly small but extremely important detail.

Allow me to quote The Communist Manifesto liberally before we substantiate Marx's... correctness:

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

If you look at that the right way, from the right angle, you just might be able to stuff an SJW into Marx's list of crimes committed by the bourgeoisie. This is, of course, something of a stretch, but it certainly coincides with the now almost banal conservative observation that Marxists typically have nothing to do with the working class, and are almost always academics, aspirants of the academic-industrial complex, or white collar workers who have passed through the ivory tower. Still, isn't it the slightest bit peculiar that the Marxism, a colossal failure in implementation, is now championed by people who we could charitably accuse of being bourgeois? What a strange fate.