Lamentations III: There Is No Normal Anymore

The noise never ends. I've noticed the TV is on constantly, and it disturbs me. A decade ago it would have disturbed me because television on that scale was a surefire symptom of sloth. My grandmother has been a thrall of the television since before I was born. She will die a thrall of the television. Her son and daughters took her on a surprise visit to Ireland to visit the home of her ancestors. She stayed in the hotel watching TV the entire trip. This is tragic, but not so tragic that I would move heaven and earth to change it. I cannot. Therefore, it does not matter.

No, here, now, where the television buzzes constantly with the chatter of people saying things, I am disturbed because this is a new pattern of behavior. It is not just the television. Laptops and tablets and sometimes the radio constantly make noise. At first, I thought it was an attempt to relieve the onset of tinnitus. Too many loud concerts.

Then I realized what I was hearing, seeing, swimming in.

Talk radio. The news. Shows with panels of chattering teeth and vocal cords, metaphorically jostling for attention, claiming every microsecond as their own, lest some silence slips by into the void. Lectures and sniveling and talking points that have been hashed over so many times that no hash remains, only a blackened carbonized lump.

Over in our corner, I am quite used to people being jacked up constantly on the politics drug. If you've ever been to a college or university, you have surely become familiar with the constant shrieking of wayward progressives. Even libertarians, such that they remain, are constantly proselytizing. Libertarians are shockingly similar to vegans and cross-fit enthusiasts in their constant need to inform you of their particular identity.

What I am not used to is basic-tier crunchy conservatives being constantly amped up on the politics drug. Sure, I know plenty of weird, obnoxious, or cretinous Republicans. But when it's the guy who quietly reads the Wall Street Journal on his tablet on the train to and from work, when it's the housewife who quietly sighs and rolls her eyes when her siblings bitch about Bush at Thanksgiving, when it's the retired couple who plays tennis on Wednesdays and goes sailing on the weekend...

When you start seeing this from the quiet people who you would otherwise unequivocally describe as normal suburbanites with office jobs and 2.1 kids and a mortgage, you may have your double take moment just like I am constantly having.

Everyone expects this sort of thing out of Millennials. The worst generation of all time must constantly insufflate their own gas while preening incessantly about the virtues of fart-sniffing. More still, they demand that you sniff their farts as well, and they'll demand that your employer fire you should they suspect you of harboring insufficient enthusiasm for fart sniffing. When you see that sort of zeal in crunchy conservative suburbanites, you may pause to wonder.

Some people blame the Crisis of Western Civilization on the Jews. There certainly is no denying that a number of Jews exhibit behavior with regards to their host nations that you might describe as malicious malfeasance if you were the sort of person who tries to be very polite when recounting another's negative traits. Quite frankly, there is enough damning evidence against a handful of them to warrant a serious argument for the sort of wholesale extermination /pol/tards salivate over without twisting yourself inside out trying to square the circle of morality and genocide. Further still, you can't even mention how bad some of them behave without setting off the worst impulses of progressives or Leftists or ultracalvinists - whatever you want to call them. Them. Those people. The other sort of white people.

Still, the counter-Semitic camp is a whole bunch of abyss-gazing by my own reckoning. People seem to readily recognize that Common Filth has stared too long into the void. You may yet come to realize that others on the Dissident Right have as well. This is not criticism, however - I don't blame you if you feel that way. It's almost impossible to not, and only through an intense regimen of isolation from the news and the media and world events have I clawed my way out of that event horizon. I would not definitively say that I am the better for it either.

Still, it lends me some perspective.

Some people blame the Crisis of Western Civilization on other mechanisms. Tied for second best, as far as I'm concerned, is Moldbug's narrative on Ultracalvinism, how the absence of a State religion and a legal prohibition against the establishment of one accidentally created the environment for a particularly hostile and virulent mutation of Puritan Christiantiy to evolve into an anti-religion, or Non-Theistic Christianity, take over our institutions on the sly, and install itself as the defacto State religion. Alongside Moldbug's Puritan Thesis is the narrative in John Glubb's Fate of Empires and the exhaustive work Anonymous Conservative has put into solidifying a biological hypothesis on why our civilization (and, indeed, all successful civilizations) experienced a change in average character before the decline. Professor Bruce Charlton has repeatedly asked if there is a biological answer for our decline and, if you will wait a post or two, I will give you my best shot.

First place is the inward journey. There is something wrong with us. But, again, that ties into Bruce Charlton's question. All of that will be revisited later. While in the interim I can only give you a reasonable guess on why in that regard, I can tell you exactly who to blame for what's coming:

Isaac Newton. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

My general suspicion is that a violent awakening would come from hinterlanders who finally realized the door shut on them and would never open again. Probably the defenestration of Trump (or another Trump-like figure down the road), or a similar political catastrophe. They, of course, are in an actually optimal strategic position even relative to much higher achieving groups like Asians. While not as numerous as the White-Urbanite cohort, they breed faster, are handier and craftier, make up the bulk of our fighting men, own guns, hunt, farm, fish, aren't exceptionally susceptible to postmodern nonsense, etc. They've earned my affection through a slow but thorough assessment of their general characteristics, and despite worrying about them I don't really fret about them. As that one song I've never actually listened to says, country boys can survive.

But now that I consider it, I wouldn't be surprised if the flames of rage reach new heights on the bellows of crunchy conservatives who dutifully paid their taxes and sent their kids to college only to find that their money was wasted on a scheme to exchange votes for handouts to Paco and Jamal and Ahmed and that their kids were somehow transformed into a sick and twisted parody of a human being by Socialist Sociologists and other snot nosed ne'er-do-wells at the ivory tower.

They haven't moved in so long. So long. There's a good screencap floating out there somewhere, where some humble anon ponders the possibility that one day we'll wake up to discover that 60 or 70 million people vanished overnight, lost to the brief but spectacular conflagration of crunchy conservative rage when they finally realize that talking and being civil was just tires spinning in the mud.

Really made me think. I recently came into contact with a progressive I tormented during Trump's ascension. She, and everyone else I gloated at for a few months, are (shockingly) in worse health than before the dawn of the Trumpenreich. Not that I've heard much about Antifa recently, but considering my brief survey of Leftist rank-and-file... Whatever is coming for the Left is going to bring a world of hurt down on their heads.

Lamentations II: AKTCHUALLY

Some time after I began dating my girlfriend I began quietly divorcing myself from a number of friendships.

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.

Lamentations, I

Not everyone is meant to lead, and not everyone sees wisdom in participating in mass movements. Generally I sympathize with the broad aims of the Alt-Right, even if I sometimes cringe at certain aesthetic choices, lack of discipline, poor quality control and questionable leadership. I am naturally very skeptical that rebooting the United States as an explicitly White ethno-state will resolve the issue of quality among our people and the auto-cannibalistic nature of democracy and republicanism. That said, the United States America circa 1780 is vastly preferable to Brazil 2.0 circa 2040, and while most people aren't ready to do more than flirt with truly reactionary ideas, at least a great many of our people (particularly the young) are showing that they retain not just signs of life, but also good instincts.

My desire to participate in the brick and mortar of the Alt-Right has mellowed somewhat with the passing of a few years. Largely this is because I am older, more cautious, and in a relationship with a young woman who hears wedding bells and the cries of newborn babies in the not too distant future. Sometimes when I'm out in public a cute girl in a sundress will smile at me as I pass and I will remember what it was like to be free to chase and seduce and taste from the immaculate cup of female beauty in all of its glory. I'll think of Roissy, he or his doppelganger nudging me in the spirited way men encourage one another to take risks for the greatness and the glory. And tempting though it always is - it never grows any less so! - I decline the invitation. Sorry, you know as well as anyone that I relish the thrill of the hunt, but those days belong to yesterday. It is never, ever, that I am not tempted. If I never grew out of libertarianism, if I never stumbled across Northman's Neoreaction Aggregator, how different things would have been! I would have moved to the city by now, and perhaps I would have mitigated my natural disgust at the emptiness of a place so paradoxically crowded by eternally sipping from the cup of beauty and youth. Alas, Providence has strange designs that though I struggle to make explicit sense of, nonetheless compel me to don the hauberk and mail and take up the banner of a life spent in search of a redoubt of permanence in a growing sea of chaos and decay. The Crusade for Order, an immortal civilization steeped in glory and mystery, a losing battle that will none the less send my fiery soul to the doors of Valhalla when I've drawn my last breath.

I am not outrageously old yet - younger than most Neoreactionaries, but too old to pass on this last mission. It is time, my instincts tell me, and for the most part my instincts do not lie. In an age of unrestrained hedonism and few thoughts beyond tonight's party, I am unlikely to find a woman in the earliest of her twenties so eager to start a family. It is not, ever, that I don't want every beautiful woman that I ever see. What compels me to tap out is a theory of expected value: When the cost of failure is infinite, probabilities no longer matter. I am not so perfect that I can afford to live like a fratboy forever. A desperate call from an aging ex looking to for safe harbor against the raging storm of time is a sobering reminder. Sorry, you'll have to look elsewhere. Then the old arguments come back, tainted with the taste of some sour, sour grapes.

So many of us are lost before we even realize it. None of these people even know what a map looks like, let alone to look for one to see if they're heading in a safe direction. I can't save them. I've barely saved myself from the worst of my impulses. But I would, if I could I would save them all. I can't though. Not to be all sour grapes myself, but it's probably for the best. The garden of my people is wildly, wildly overgrown. I tack to the opposite of the Alt-Right when thinking of White birthrates. Quality is vastly preferable to quantity, and the practically nonexistent birthrate among White progressives is better news than most believe. We are living in a misbegotten age that is the direct result of a wild overbreeding program, and that the worst and weakest of our own kind have abandoned family formation will certainly be a boon for us in the generations yet to come. This is the natural consequence of our own hubris: naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret. The same sort of biologically induced peril will soon come to Africa (and probably Europe, should they never close their borders). Everything has a cost, especially things that cannot be monetized.