One of the characteristics of the modern world that you can see in people all around us is an intense dissatisfaction. Not just with social systems or with politics or whatever else, but with themselves. At a deep level, there is a profound alienation which these people have from themselves, indeed from human-ness itself. While they love hedonism and perversion, they hate the actual human being himself.
Culturally, this is readily seen in pretty much every culture war position that the Left takes. Pregnancy is a “disease” and a child is an unwanted “clump of cells” that gets in the way of your sex life. Every sexual perversion – adultery, homosexuality, pornography – is celebrated while marriage and procreation are increasingly being cast as low brow and low status. “Medically assisted suicide” is becoming a leading cause of death in many places, such as Canada where even the non-terminally ill are being encouraged by official state organs to end themselves. Every normal, natural human impulse is hated and discouraged, even (or especially) at official levels.
In the previous installment of this series, I covered some of the concepts associated with collapse as they relate to demographic-structural theory (DST), as well as what might be expected after collapse. In this article I’d like to discuss the effect of several external factors as they impinge upon the process of secular cycles and collapse. These factors include migration, invasion, and trade networks – all things that involve “outsiders” or “the other” as they relate to a polity or civilisation.
The western Roman Empire is the prototypical example of collapse and regeneration, to be sure. It is probably the single most well-documented ancient collapse, and the psychological impact that it had on those who followed it was profound.
After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, Ed. G.M. Schwartz, p. 7
It is also one of the best examples of the various types of “diversity” and how they can affect the course of a secular cycle, on both the collapse and regeneration sides. How does the introduction of different ethnies, in many cases some which are radically different from the host society, influence the complex, non-linear responses that characterise collapse and regeneration.
Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play – and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.
Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.
Being a Republican voter has got to be one of the most frustrating things a person could imagine. Having an easily winnable midterm election be stolen from you via vote fraud is bad enough. But then having the large majority of the elected officials who are supposedly on your side just treat it like it’s no big deal while they try to undermine the one person actually trying to contest the fraud and bring it out into the open is even worse. An increasing number of rank-and-file Republicans are starting to get the impression that their own party isn’t really serious about winning – and one can hardly blame them for thinking this.
After all, even aside from their refusing to contest obvious fraudulence in elections, the power brokers within the Party actively try to undermine and fragment their own side. They spent millions against genuinely pro-American candidates during the primaries. In Alaska, the establishment GOP instituted a new ranked-choice voting system designed to allow Democrats to help them suppress non-approved conservatives. A critical mass of elected Republican insiders consistently works to squelch genuinely conservative legislative priorities when the GOP “holds power” (LOL) while helping to advance unpopular and destructive Democratic initiatives (such as the recent, unread $1.7 trillion goodie bag bill) so that they can be given a “bipartisan” veneer in the media.
In the previous installment of this series, I discussed some “groundwork” for a post-processual approach to the study and discussion of societal collapse, one that takes into account complexity theory and the demographic-structural theory championed by scholars such as Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin. Unsurprisingly, the longstanding “progressive” understanding of social development makes a lot of unwarranted – and often just plain wrong – assumptions about societal development while failing to have a really convincing means of addressing social simplification. By synthesising these new approaches, this deficiency can be rectified.
To begin, I’d like to make a couple of points about the concept of collapse. The first is that, at a visceral level, a lot of people don’t really want to think about it, or even contemplate the possibility that it will happen. In a sense, this is natural – people always prefer thinking about the good times rather than the bad,
For the past month the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has been ruffling a lot of feathers, especially for folks on the Left. He’s been doing this by basically gutting the censorship regimen that existed prior to his acquisition of the social media company. For those not familiar with the Twitter experience, beginning with Gamergate in 2014 (which more or less initiated the current “Woke Wars” in American culture), the platform became an increasingly repressive environment for people on the Right. Over the years, a greater and greater number of cultural and political touchstones were enforced to discourage criticism and analysis of progressive Left sacred cows. You could be deplatformed for running afoul of members of the Left’s intersectionality alliance, and eventually anything that contradicted official Regime narrative on issues like covid-19 or election integrity could get someone booted.
So the recent trend towards lifting this systematic censorship is welcome news for the reality-based community on the Right. A lot of boomer types may not recognise the value of Twitter, criticising it because the 280 character per tweet format “dumbs things down” (though my personal experience is that many of these same folks can’t be bothered to read something longer than a couple of paragraphs anywise). However, as a platform, Twitter is very useful for networking with like-minded individuals and for engaging in rapid information dissemination. This makes the current move towards free speech on the platform a much bigger deal than many might think.
Longtime readers know that some of the things I commonly write about are the topics of demographic-structural theory (DST) and the collapse of complex societies. Especially in recent years, these are perennially relevant subjects for discussion due to our currently being in the collapse phase of our present secular cycle. Indeed, the entire planet is essentially in that same position. Thus, I feel that it’s wise to study up on the subject so that we might have an inkling of what to expect moving forward.
With this in mind, I’d like to take the opportunity to do something which I haven’t done on my blogs for quite a while, which is to write a (multi-part) book review – or more appropriately, a chapter review of the introductory chapter of a book that discusses the collapse and regeneration of complex historical social systems. This book is After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, edited by Glenn Schwartz (who also wrote the introduction), which I read about a year and a half ago.
If the reader might bear with me for a moment, I’d like to tell you all a mystery story. There was once a country that was having an election. Going into this election, one party – the party in power – was unpopular, trailing in the polls, and led by a president with abysmal approval ratings and who is widely understood to be senile. This party’s policies had resulted in widespread economic damage to the nation, creating rates of inflation unseen for forty years, doubling gas prices, and harming the broad middle of the country financially. Further, this same party was pursuing social policies that created a widespread backlash against its radicalism and had already been contributing to electoral problems for it in previous local and off-year elections all across the land. Even in swing states, this party’s candidates were behind in the polls and the widespread expectation from all quarters was that it was going to suffer a wideout in the upcoming election.
Yet in a baffling and practically inexplicable turn of events, when the day of the election came, this party became the beneficiary of an astoundingly fortuitous chain of events that rescued it from certain peril! Voting machines curiously broke down or otherwise became inoperable in precincts where the other party made up a majority. Meanwhile, in swing state districts which this party coincidentally happens to control, voting didn’t end on election night, but box after box after box of ballots kept coming in, being counted by officials in secret with no outside oversight. In one state, in a race in which two ladies were running for governour, the one lady who belonged to this party (and who also happened to be in the office that oversees elections), benefited from the mysterious breakdowns and never-ending counting that was carried out in an especially cryptic manner, allowing her to certify herself as the winner. By this same formula, the party in question managed to eke out narrow wins in basically every contested governourship and senate race that they needed to retain their political control.
So it looks like election 2022 is finally over (well, for the most part). Before I get back to posting about the usual things I tend to write about on here, I would like to take a few moments to give my assessment of Tuesday’s election results. For those of us on the broad Right (both dissident and normie), I’m sure the results were disappointing. For weeks, there had been a psychological buildup for a coming “Red Wave” that was going to sweep away the Democrats and finally punish them as they deserved. Sadly, this didn’t really happen, as we all know by now. Instead, what we saw essentially shook out to be a maintaining election – one where not much changes. Certainly, there was not the cataclysmic bloodbath for the Democrats that we hoped to see.
However, as disappointing as this was, we shouldn’t let it mask the fact that the election really wasn’t that bad for the Republicans, when viewed on an absolute scale. They still took back the House of Representatives, even if by a slender margin, which should allow them to monkeywrench a lot of the Democratic agenda for the next two years (assuming the Republicans in Congress show some spine, which I’ll admit is a big ask). A lot of state and local level races all across the country went their way. Control of various state legislatures was taken and/or buffed up and local control in much of the country was consolidated. Red state governours, by and large, retained their seats by wide margins. Really, if you don’t live in an urban area with Democratic vote fraud baked into the local culture, chances are the GOP probably did pretty good in your local elections.
By now, everybody on our side of the aisle knows – or at least ought to know – that pretty much everything you see at “official” informational levels is fake. And keep in mind that by “official,” I don’t just mean governmental sources but also the type of public-private collusion that we’ve all known takes place, at an instinctual level, but is now being revealed as undeniable fact. This fact is the essential basis of Moldbug and neoreaction’s terminology about “the Cathedral,” which specifically refers to the use of directionally channeled information gathering and distribution by various “soft power” institutions such as the media and NGOs with the aim of enforcing “right doctrine” against which there should be no dissent. This is the essential purpose of the across-the-board narrative building that takes place routinely at all levels in the USA and other western nations (especially) whose purpose is often to mask reality, rather than explicating it.
I trust that most readers are familiar with the concept of a “psyop,” a psychological operation designed to sway its targets in certain desired directions. Many of the mechanics of psyops were pioneered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies during the Cold War but have now been turned against civilian populations in the USA and elsewhere in an effort by the Regime to maintain control and minimise opposition to its various agendas. However, I’d like to make the point that psyops qualitatively differ from standard, run-of-the-mill propaganda such as governments have used for millennia.
The difference is primarily that of the time preferences involved. Whether it’s designed to whip up a population against an enemy or to try to obfuscate the truth about some particular event that has occurred, propaganda tends to operate on a shorter timescale and with more limited and simple policy goals in mind. It’s not surprising that modern propaganda techniques share a lot in common with commercial advertising designed to induce an “impulse buy” response in potential customers. Propaganda generally operates the same way – create a monodirectional response to a particular stimulus.
Psyops, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complex and generally involve the building of a narrative memeplex over the course of months, years, or even decades. Psyops are, of course, also fake but theirs is a fakeness that builds upon constant, repetitious narrative-building that lays out a foundational lens through which any individual incident or act can be systematically interpreted, adding them to the overall saga being told.
With conventional propaganda, the aim is to communicate Regime diktat to the average citizen. However, it does not necessarily expect the recipients to believe the propaganda, but merely comply with the goals. The Powers That Be in such cases don’t care why Havel’s greengrocer puts the sign up in his window, but merely that he does so. The primary purpose of psyops, on the other hand, is to ensure compliance by convincing the target to self-comply, rather than it having to be done by outside force or persuasion. It’s always touch and go when you’re making someone outwardly comply but inwardly they’re dissident. When the mark can be convinced to willingly self-police, this makes the government’s job easier since they don’t have to worry about this closet dissidence. The true believer is the best believer.
In essence, propaganda aims for immediate reactive persuasion while psyops seek long-term groundlaying that gives more all-inclusive means of maintaining overarching narrative control.
Now, a lot of people out there like to think they’re immune to psyops because “hurr durr I don’t beleeb da media!!” But they’re not. Indeed, a lot of these boomercon types are just as susceptible to psyops as anyone else when the right buttons are pushed. This is because they’ve been primed for it by the systematic, society-wide preparation of the psychological battle space without their ever realising it. In many cases, the foundations for a psyop are so culturally systematic that people don’t even realise what is happening.
For example, there are a ton of people out there who would pride themselves on being independent thinkers who nevertheless believed everything that was peddled during the covid and vaccine psyops. The reason for this is because they want to think of themselves as smart, knowledgeable about science, etc. Smart People believe the Right Things, after all. That, in turn, is the result of decades of psyops that have ensconced “science” as the arbiter of morality and truth in post-Christian America. So even when the science is fake or wrong, it is still accorded a moral authority that it does not deserve.
Millions of people in this country believe the psyops surrounding Ukraine because they’ve been primed for decades to see “the Roooshians” as the mortal enemy of America. This is despite the facts that (technically) America is not even involved in the current war and that “the Roooshians” are no longer the communists that boomercons still remember from the Cold War. Indeed, Russia is a lot further to the Right than we are, which is why globohomo hates them so much. So while one can certainly question the decision by Russia to invade Ukraine, it’s not as if America’s previous involvement in the area (overthrowing an elected Ukrainian government in 2014, tacitly supporting the Ukrainians as they shelled civilians in the Donbass, etc.) has really been any better. The best thing we could do is stay out of something that is not our business – but the psyop demands that we involve ourselves because we’ve been globohomo’s world policemen for decades.
Most Americans naively believe that “democracy” is holy and sacrosanct because they’ve been taught decades worth of American post-WWII globohomo foundational mythology. This renders them unable to see that “democracy” really amounts to a small cabal conning and dunning the masses into giving the cabal what it wants. Functionally, democracy amounts to little more than a legitimising process for Regime policymaking. What the people actually want rarely, if ever, factors into the equation.
Related to the above, most people believe egalitarian platitudes that deny that there are any substantive differences between different population groups. Yet, there are very real genetic differences that exist between (mostly) discrete ethnic and racial groups – and among other things this is impacting the future of American civilisational competency. Despite the best efforts of critical race theorists to mask the real reason, it cannot honestly be denied that certain ethnic groups are more prone to crime than others. From an historical perspective, republican forms of government in the Middle Ages were only really successfully maintained by high IQ populations that could exercise low time preference and the ability to plan ahead rationally, something that also makes the continuation of popular, representative government in the USA increasingly unlikely in the long term. Yet, many people are simply unable to even consider, much less honestly accept, any of this because of decades of post-civil rights movement brainwashing.
In current news, we’ve been seeing a psyop in action with regards to the Paul Pelosi assault. This obviously scandalous and sketchy story most likely involves a gay tryst between Pelosi and nudist hippie illegal alien David Depape that somehow or another went wrong, though there are other…more esoteric…suggestions that have been made. Yet, the MSM and other lefties are (somehow) trying to spin this into a “MAGA Q-Anon assault on an important Democratic statesman!!!” in a transparent attempt to gin up an October surprise to try and rescue the Democrats’ failing prospects for the current election.
Classic profile of a Trump MAGA voter
Now you might ask yourself whether they really think such an obviously stupid argument would work. The answer would be “Yes.” In fact, there will be millions of people out there who completely buy it because the Left has been laying the groundwork for the “right wingers/white nationalists/radical Republicans are committing all the stochastic terrorisms!!” psyop for years now, all the while studiously ignoring actual violent attacks and threats against Supreme Court justices, sitting Republican congressmen, and congressional baseball teams. What the lefties are doing is trying to pound the round peg of this story into the square hole of the narrative they’ve already crafted for years.
So what might cause a psyop to fail? Generally, this would involve setting two or more Regime narratives against each other (after all, no amount of information control/sanitisation is going to be perfect). An excellent recent example of this was the aborted attempt to create a biomedical scare using monkeypox similar to what was done with covid-19, presumably with the intention of using it to (re)institute and expand social and economic controls that were set in place during the covid plandemic.
First, the groundwork was laid for a couple of months in advance using ominous warnings appearing in broadcast media, acculturating viewers to the existence of this “new” disease that was being spoken of as an existential threat looming on the horizon. Then, monkeypox was psychologically associated with covid-19, linking monkeypox as potential pandemic material that would result in the same sort of worldwide catastrophe created by covid-19. After this, news and social media concern trolling was ramped up about the potential dangers of monkeypox being able to rapidly spread throughout the population in the same way that a respiratory virus like covid-19 could. All of this was fit into the preexisting framework of previous “pandemic reporting” that had already been perfected over the past three years. The framework was even being built for the introduction of a vaccine to combat monkeypox as a remediation of this impending pandemic.
But then word began to get out and around that monkeypox is a disease that basically only affects gays and other “alternative lifestyles” and hence isn’t a threat to the vast majority of the population. The media attempted to combat this as “misinformation,” but it was too late. The truth managed to circumvent the information blockade. And then word got out that some kids and few dogs had gotten monkeypox, and people started to ask some uncomfortable questions about how this had happened with a sexually transmitted gay disease. This ended up substantiating a lot of stereotypes about one of the cardinal groups in the Left’s intersectionality alliance and making them look really bad. After this, top level decision-makers in The Powers That Be apparently judged that a monkeypox-driven rerun of the covid plandemic was not worth the scrutiny being drawn to one of the Left’s core constituencies. The whole thing was scrapped and now you never hear a word about monkeypox from any official sources.
So this is basically how the sausage is made. At the point where we are, it seems like the only way to permanently detox our information culture would be for a severe collapse and subsequent…hollowing out…of our current culturo-media apparatus to take place. However, on a personal level /ourguys/ can get more adept at recognising not just individual deceptions emanating from the Left’s info-apparatus, but the overarching narrative constructs that drive the interpretation of all of these little individual happenings that, when put together, create the framework that “justifies” the Left’s behaviour. In doing so, our side would become proactive in the culture wars instead of merely reactive, and may even be able to break the cognitive hold that the Regime has on many of our friends and neighbours.
The Neo-Ciceronian Times 