Mind Viruses

A common theme in many strands of Western historiography has been the analogizing of cultures and civilizations as organisms. They are born, they grow, they die, they can be sick or healthy, robust or nearing senescence and death. Often these treatments focus on the external, tangible elements within these civilizations, such as their political structures, technology and infrastructure, volumes of trade, and so forth. However, we should understand that any organism – especially the human organism, endowed as it is with a rational faculty to direct its actions for good or for ill – does not merely consist of “body,” but also soul/mind.

As a result, when diagnosing the health of a civilization, we cannot merely look at the body, but must also remain cognizant of the fitness of the intangible elements such as its prevailing social and philosophical trends, traditions and mores, and so forth. The principle of mens sana in corpore sano, “a healthy mind in a healthy body,” reflects the observable tendency towards correlation between physical and mental health in human beings. This same general principle, however, also seems to apply analogically to cultures and civilizations. The decadence and decay that exists in Western civilization is not the product of merely external forces, even of something as drastically alien as Islamic or other Third World immigration. Rather, the root of the West’s unsoundness of body rests in the acceptance by Western nations and their populations of several mentally unsound propositions that have introduced a seeming psychological insanity into the underlying moral and philosophical assumptions which are then acted upon to direct the externals of our civilization. These “mind viruses” have infiltrated the thinking of most Westerners and have led to the weakness and degeneracy of the Western organism seen today.

How I Became a Reactionary

In this article, I would like to take a journey with the reader. This journey will be the one that I took throughout my intellectual life which eventually led to my becoming a reactionary. I hope that it may serve as an example and an encouragement to emulation for those who may find themselves in similar circumstances such as I was.

Pragmatic Conservatism

My “ideological” journey began in my undergraduate years when I started to become politically aware. At this time, I would say that I largely reflected the politics of my parents, which were essentially Midwestern, populist, and pragmatically conservative. In the first election in which I was able to vote (the 1994 midterm) I, of course, voted Republican and was elated when the GOP took control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In 1996, I was a supporter of Pat Buchanan during the primaries because his populism and nationalism appealed to me even then.

However, most of my beliefs were still essentially based upon the habits of my upbringing rather than on any well-grounded philosophical worldview. I was pro-life because my family was, I was against high taxes because my parents were, I supported Republicans because that was who my folks had always voted for. I grew up in a household where “ultra-liberal” was (rightly) a swear word. Yet, none of this was rooted in any type of philosophically consistent weltanschauung.

Chapter Review – After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies (Part 5)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the role which access to resources – and the ability of elites to garner an outsized share of these resources – has on collapse and regeneration. For this final portion of this chapter review, I’ll cover the effects which various miscellaneous factors can have on the process. As we’ve noted previously, collapse and regeneration are complex, non-linear phenomena. Small changes at one point can yield big results on down the line (and also the opposite – events which contemporaries are sure will have huge effects on the future may end up being nothingburgers). The point is that many different factors are involved, so the ensuing discussion (as well as this series as a whole) should not be taken as some kind of definitive listing of everything that plays into the course which secular cycles will follow.

First, I’d like to circle back to what I said previously about how polities which are tied together into world-systems tend to “synch up” in terms of their demographic-structural cycles. I pointed out that this this occurs because of “the ties that bind” due to trade relations which tend to make neighbouring societies more dependent upon each other both for elite prestige goods and for harder to obtain necessities (e.g Mesopotamians needing to import stone and timber into their treeless, mountainless flood plain). But that can’t be all of it, certainly, or at least not directly. However, with trade comes second-order effects such as cultural interchange and so forth. This definitely assists the cyclic processes, especially during regeneration when a recovering society is looking for inspiration moving forward,

After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, Ed. G.M. Schwartz, p. 11

So while a society that is coming out of collapse, enduring its depression phase, and moving towards its next growth cycle, may often think that it is “holding true to our forebearers” or whatever, there are probably going to be significant cultural influences from their neighbours which will put both societies on a closer path. Culture is a powerful thing. The reason for this is because a society’s culture is a lot like its personality. Strong personalities tend to influence those around them, whether we’re talking about popular kids in middle school or influential movie stars and the like. People tend to imitate “what works,” and cultures that successfully transit the collapse phase tend to serve as examples to others, which “catches them up” to each other.

Gun Control is a War on Heritage America

If there’s one issue that is sure to get normiecons revved up, it’s gun control. And generally speaking, they are right to oppose it and their instincts regarding civilian disarmament and the dangers to the people that are involved with it are spot on. I do think, however, that their understanding of what drives the push for gun control is still a bit deficient and will require normiecons to accept some things they won’t want to accept if they’re to fully grasp what is going on.

The problem lies in that we have generations of conservatives who grew up in a post-Civil Rights Act America, one in which it has become increasingly radioactive to even talk about issues of race in any way other than completely in line with the Regime’s prevailing ideology. Any criticism is invariably met with that worst of slurs, that life-destroying six-letter hard “R” word – Racism. At the same time, they’ve been fed the fiction that America is a propositional nation which anyone can join if they take a test and get a piece of paper – indeed, that these folks are better Americans than those whose ancestors have been here for centuries because they CAME FOR FREEDOM (well, more probably, gibmedats and preferential treatment).

Chapter Review – After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies (Part 4)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

In the previous entry in this series, we looked at the effects that forces external to a polity – immigration and trade – have upon the intensity and direction which that society’s secular collapse and recovery may take. As we continue our chapter review, in this installment I would like to discuss the role which access to resources has upon collapse and regeneration. Specifically, the role which the relative distribution of those resources – who has the ability to garner them and how much they are able to do so – plays in demographic-structural cycling.

One of the historical observations that Turchin and others have made about secular cycles is that the growth phases in these cycles are typically characterised by a relatively narrow “wealth gap” between elites and commons. Certainly, such a gap always exists – no society yet has actually managed to eliminate economic disparities (and the ones who say they want to are generally putting us on about it anywise). However, during these periods of secular growth, such gaps are not nearly as pronounced and thus do not tend to create the sort of social friction that extremely wide gaps do. But, these kinds of pronounced economic disparities are what we tend to see as a society passed from its stagnation phase to its collapse phase.

Sex Bots and Self-Alienation

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.

Chapter Review – After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies (Part 3)

Part 1 Part 2

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.

A Primer on Manipulating Procedural Outcomes

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.

If It Seems Like the Republicans Are Trying to Lose…

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.

Chapter Review – After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies (Part 2)

Part 1

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,