A Civilisation in Decline

A few days ago, I got to thinking again about this article from ten years (appearing in HuffPo, of all places, back before they went full redditard) which proposes that human intelligence (at least in the Western world) is lower than it was in the Victorian Era. Looking at modern day America, I can find little that would argue with this proposition – after all, ours is the voting public that gave us such elder statesmen as Joe Biden, John Fetterman, and Jamaal Bowman. That alone ought to be considered as empirical evidence for such a decline (something which is connected to the increased third world immigration into our country, which I’ve written about before). Yet, it strikes me that the declension of modern America (as well as the rest of the West, to be honest) is not related to mere intellect or raw g-power alone. There are many factors that have worked – and still are at work – to reduce the American people, and Westerners in general, to a mere shadow of the greatness of our forefathers who forged nations, explored the far reaches of the globe, built the edifice of modern science and technology, and founded and propagated the most advanced and powerful civilization the world has yet seen.

The decline of the West is systematic and endemic. It involves not just raw intellectual capacities, but also deterioration of our moral character, courage, and good sense. In many ways, these are interrelated – the decline of one means the fall of the others. As I observe the direction in which the West is moving, I can’t help but sense a disturbing demoralization, a loss of drive, initiative, and the will to thrive and grow that seemed to characterize earlier generations in our civilization, the end result of decades of decadence and malfeasance. If I may be permitted a quote from Horace, I believe he spoke to our generation as much as to his own,

“Time corrupts all. What has it not made worse?
Our grandfathers sired feebler children; theirs
Were weaker still – ourselves; and now our curse
Must be to breed even more degenerate heirs.” (Odes, Book III, No. 6)

How did we get to where we’re at?

To begin with, recent generations fundamentally changed the way they viewed the individual person, and in doing so, also altered the way they understood the relationship between the individual and greater society.

If you were to ask people what they believe defines “western civilisation,” most of them would likely answer with something along the lines of our individualism, that “we make it possible for anyone to be whatever they want to be.” Now, this answer is pretty simplistic for obvious reasons. But it does speak to the fact that even in ancient times, the concept of individuality in western cultures such as those of Greece and Rome was generally held in higher esteem than was seen in most other world civilisations. In the West, a balance was struck between the demands of society as a collective and the rights and responsibilities of the individual person and his family – between the res publica and the res privata of Cicero, an ideal expressed in Rome at its height, but never fully realized. While it was recognized that each individual owed legitimate duties to the society in which he lived, there was nevertheless a large portion of his life into which society – and the governments it institutes – had no business intruding.

Therein lies a major part of the problem with the modern West, however. For most of western history, this balance that was struck was maintained by a combination of reasonable communitarianism and the social application of religion in the public realm. However, both of these constraining factors began to erode, beginning with the Renaissance but accelerating with the so-called “Enlightenment.” Because of this, individualism in the West developed into an increasingly metastasised pathology that replaced reasonable, constrained individual agency with atomised individualism, with all the destruction of social cohesion that comes with it. When you remove religion, tradition, and custom as restraining elements in society, they will be replaced with socially destructive hedonism and atomistic selfishness.

The rise of the welfare state, as a result of socialist agitations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, upset the balance completely. Consequently, the individual no longer had to look to himself, his family, his religion for strength, but could throw off his responsibilities and place them on the backs of all his fellow citizens. This is an enfeebling state of affairs. A man who will not take responsibility for himself, who will not sink or swim on his own as a result of the consequences of his actions and decisions, is a man who barely (if at all) rises above the level of a slave whose master feeds and cares for him. An able-bodied man who makes other men in his polity care for him, who picks their pockets because his own laziness or poor decision-making keeps him from filling his own, is a social degenerate. Yet, it is exactly this that Western governments have been encouraging, in many cases for over a century.

The great irony in this is that while most people (especially normiecons) assume that this means that the individual is being subsumed back into “collectivism,” the reality is actually that this socialistic impulse is just another outlet for social atomisation. The aim of communism is to remove the individual from all traditional, cohesion-building social ties (family, religion, nation, etc.) and to reconstruct him as part of an abstract “class system” which is comprised of rootless hyper-individuals orbiting around the ruling Party while they live in their pods, owning nothing and happily consooooming. A consequence of this is the transfer of ever more far-reaching areas of life from the private realm into the public – when traditional social safety nets are destroyed, they are then replaced with reliance on the Regime and its managerial apparatus. As individual atomisation increases, the desire to be controlled does as well. Libertarian types who mistakenly view traditional society as “collectivist” end up stupidly destroying that traditional society and replacing it with actual totalitarianism.

Dynamiting the deeper but intangible truths of traditional society and replacing them with a materialist, economic mindset destroys social unity and replaces it with class envy (which is really just a cover for the individual envy of others). As Hazlitt noted,

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community.”

Every time some blunder-headed fool blames “the rich” for all his woes or demands that somebody “contribute” more than he’s already having taken from him, you see a moral degenerate who hates those who have done more than himself. You see envy and greed talking. Instead of recognizing that each individual should seek to better himself, and thereby better the society he lives in as a natural consequence of this, the socially atomised hyper-individual wants him to be reduced and brought under the power of globalist, transnationalists seeking to destroy the traditional bonds of human society.

Concomitant with this is that the foundational desires of Western man have changed. It used to be that the desire was for liberty. Even if Western man has not always and in all places had the same definition of this term as we have today, it nevertheless has been his desire, one which I tend to believe is a distant holdover from our steppe-riding Indo-European ancestors. Even among those who were not in the ruling castes, the Western man has had a certain nobility and freedom that simply was not shared by the non-westerner in a similar position. This drive for liberty and the sense of nobility drove the western man to explore, colonise, and conquer.

But today’s western man? Too many look to the welfare check to keep them solvent, and the police state to keep them safe. Without a sense of responsibility, there is also no sense of self-respect. It doesn’t end there, though. Too many expect the government to solve their every problem – and government encourages this, while at the same time actively discouraging those who would solve their own problems. Government hates people who would defend themselves from criminals instead of becoming victims in need of police protection. Government despises those who simply want to be left in peace to enjoy their lives and property instead of “needing” to be needled, hectored, and badgered by a host of regulatory minutiae designed to save us from ourselves. We cannot be trusted to simply settle our differences like adults outside of judicial intervention. America is a nation that has to provide printed instructions with a pair of socks, just in case someone decides to sue the manufacturer.

There are consequences to this enfeeblement. We in the West have no more grand dreams, no more bigger-than-life projects that challenge and expand our capabilities and horizons. Just look at what we used to build. Gustav Eiffel built a tower in 1889, just to show off the cultural and technological capabilities of his native France. We built Hoover Dam out of almost 3.5 million cubic meters of concrete and 582 miles of steel cooling pipe. Now we can barely build a tree house in our back yards without going through mountains of red tape to get a permit. The really tall buildings today are being built in Dubai and Shanghai. China’s Three Gorges Dam is the new engineering marvel of the modern age. Meanwhile, our people seem to only dream of being able to fulfill their immediate (and often base) desires. Americans care more about their vacation time and satellite TV than they do about dreaming big dreams. Europeans would rather go to the nudie beaches in the Riviera than plan and build and learn and excel.

Coupled with this is the marked frivolity of Western civilization today. There is little in the way of seriousness – not in thought, not in religion, not in principles. Ours is an age in which Jon Stewart and the Daily Show are taken seriously as sources of information; where Wikipedia is the gold standard for knowledge; where the average person cannot comfortably read more than three paragraphs (congratulations to you if you’ve gotten this far in this essay!) without their attention span giving out. This is a consequence of the other things we’ve seen above. Who needs to think for themselves, when the government and the media (increasingly the same thing) will do it for you? When television is designed to break programs up into five minute segments, who is going to have the mental fortitude to plow through a 500 page book on some historical or philosophical subject? When you have no grand dreams to occupy your thoughts, then any and every little old thing will do so instead.

One result of this is that the public education system, from kindergarten to graduate school, is failing in its duty to actually educate its charges. In many places, schools are just long-term holding pens to keep the kids off the streets until they can no longer legally be held. In many others, schools simply teach political correctness and the social theories du jour. We wonder why kids can’t read well, can barely do math, are woefully ignorant of seemingly obvious facts about science or history. Is it any wonder, when the education establishment is often staffed by people who think math is racist and that history is just the story of crusty old white men that nobody needs to listen to anymore?

What a far cry from where education used to be back when children knew more Greek and Latin than most adults do today. When Western civilization was robust and vigorous, it was also well-educated. It was exceedingly common in the British Parliament of the Victorian Era for an argument to be clenched or an analogy be forcefully drawn by appeal to some obscure passage from Virgil, Ovid, or Thucydides – yet obscure as it was, every man there knew it, and every other man who was following the debate in the papers afterward would also. Back then, education – real education, not merely having a piece of paper that proved your ability to show up to most class periods for four (or more) years – was a key component in the character of a great and good man. Today, this type of education is treated disdainfully as “old-fashioned.” There was a rhyme about Benjamin Jowett, a British scholar and polymath of the 19th century, that went as follows,

“Here come I, my name is Jowett.
All there is to know I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge!”

Surprising to the modern reader, however, is that this ditty composed by his undergraduate students at Balliol was not intended to be insulting, as many moderns would likely interpret it. Indeed, it really and truly was intended as a tribute to Jowett’s tremendous erudition and his ability to work with and create powerful ideas. Can anyone imagine the run of modern Americans or Europeans honoring someone with Jowett’s breadth of knowledge and ability today? Can anyone imagine most modern Americans or Europeans even understanding what Jowett would be talking about on any given subject?

Going right along with this is the willingness of many in our civilization to believe in any fool thing, so long as an “expert” tells them to. This is the reason why, despite there being little to nothing in the way of actual, genuine proof for it, most people if asked would still profess to be absolutely sure that man-made global warming is both reality and a grave, world-threatening danger. People believe all kinds of things just because the news media talking heads tell them to. For instance, many people think violent crime is increasing in America and it’s because we don’t have enough gun control – when actually violent crime is decreasing and the decrease correlates well with the loosening of gun laws. People believe all kinds of things that are frankly untrue. But the problem isn’t just that people believe wrongly, but that they do so because someone simply told them to, and they don’t take the time or use the energy to find out for themselves what really is and isn’t.

This frivolity, this enfeeblement, this loss of nerve and courage – they all come together into a confluence of cultural movements that disable us from even being able to defend ourselves.

I’m sure many people ask themselves, “How can these BLM and antifa terrorists get away with what they do?” Why were they allowed to burn down multiple city centres and cause billions of dollars in damage? Why were people who tried to defend their own property the ones who were prosecuted and jailed? Why is our government allowing millions of illegals, and among them thousands of military-aged males, unrestricted access across our borders? Why would it take the German government 80 years to deport 50,000 hostile foreigners?

How far has a civilization degenerated when large chunks of its people no longer have the will to oppose the mortal enemies who are actively seeking to kill them and who have said as much time and time again? I can’t help but think that if these things were going on even 50 years ago, our Western countries would have been emptying the banlieus and barrios and sending the interlopers and their supporters back home to their countries of origin. Of course, 50 years ago, we would not have been fool enough to let them into our countries in the first place. But now, our nations grant refuge to millions of aliens who do not intend to assimilate, but instead merely want to draw welfare checks paid for by our own people. In many cases (despite the “hard-working immigrant!” gaslighting), their only contribution is to our crime rate.

So what do we do? That is a good question, and it’s one that I’m not sure I can answer satisfactorily. Yet, we can take heart in is the fact that the criticisms leveled above do not apply uniformly to every Westerner. There are many of us who still see something worth saving in our cultures and who have not given ourselves over to civilisational suicide. One thing is certain – those of us who are still willing to fight for our Western heritage are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting in the years and decades to come. From the education of our children to the preservation of our traditions and cultures – by armed force if necessary – we have to be prepared for what lies ahead. We will need to be the torchbearers as the future of the West grows darker and darker.

America’s Age of the Feuilleton

Any thinking American has surely observed that our culture and society are growing more and more immature, childish, and unthinking with each passing year. In previous articles, I’ve noted this immaturity, as well as the tendency (neither coincidental, nor accidental) to make Americans more and more dependent upon the Regime for even the most basic needs of life. There are several interrelated cultural and political agendas at work which have systematically worked to create this state of affairs among the American people – and these are largely the work of social and political “progressivism,” the handiwork of the Left. Let’s face it – it is to the benefit of left-wingers to cause as many people as they possibly can to be dumb, distracted, and therefore destitute of the ability to think for themselves or to successfully reason their way into informed opinions about complex social and economic issues.

One of the major ways in which the Left dumbs down the American population is through the public education system. What people need to understand is that progressives are not genuinely interested in our children receiving a thorough and useful education, no matter how much they may squawk about “funding” and whatnot. For the Left, publik skoolz are merely a means by which to propagandize children to a progressive worldview while simultaneously rendering them unable to question the unreality they have been taught. At the same time, additional funding “for schools” is basically just a way for personnel in the managerial superstructure to divide the spoils. The Left has absolutely no desire for children to grow up into college students, and then into full-fledged adults, who can think for themselves, using logic and reason to assess what they see and hear and to come to their own conclusions.

Along these lines, I was reminded of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s article from 2014 in Forbes magazine about the need to put the liberal arts back into the centre of American educational curricula. By this, he means the restoration of the great books of Western civilization, the accumulated wisdom in the sciences and humanities that our culture has built, and the ideological underpinnings upon which Western notions of citizenship, responsibility, and the rule of law are based. In other words, all of the things that the cultural Marxists have spent the last five decades systematically expunging from the American educational system, from top to bottom. Things like Cicero, Plato, the Church Fathers, Shakespeare, Herodotus, Montesquieu, the Founding Fathers, and so much more that I could not possibly list in full. No – these have been purged, replaced by Heather Has Two Mommies and Why Are the Ice Caps Melting?: The Dangers of Global Warming. Progressives want young people (who will then grow up to be old people) who are in the dark about the whats, hows, and whys of our cultural underpinnings and what they all mean for our heritage and traditions. They want your kids to be more interested in emasculating themselves with hormones than they are in reading dusty old books about their own history and heritage. This explains why progressives are so irate about the proposals such as those which remove diversity and LGBT propaganda from classrooms, just to give a couple of examples.

However, I don’t believe we can place the blame solely on the educational system. It surely has not escaped the attention of intelligent Americans that most of what constitutes our entertainment and media establishment is, shall we say, less than cerebral. In fact, much of what is on television, in the movies, and on the radio waves is downright stupid and distracting. It is literally distracting. The content of these media, as well as the advertising regimen by which television viewers are presented with five minutes of show, then three minutes of ads, then another five minutes of show, then another three minutes of ads…it is all designed to train people toward short attention spans that are easily distracted by shiny baubles and other mindlessness. A person who has their brain trained by modern television programming is going to be someone who will not have the patience to sit down with a book and read it. They’ll literally be uneducable beyond simple repetition and mindless obedience.

The state of American journalism is no better. This is illustrated by Gobry’s article above, in which he addressed the attacks upon Republican congressman (nominee at the time it was written) Dave Brat of Virginia, an economics professor who overturned Eric Cantor in the 2014 GOP primary, and who is a genuine constitutionally-minded intellectual who stands on the fundamental principles of our society and constitutional system (meaning, of course, that he’s still a turbonormie but at least his heart’s in the right place). In the course of some statements he made, Brat remarked that government has “a monopoly on the use of force.” For this, he was attacked by nimrods in the news media as some kind of crazy, wacko extremist. There’s just one problem, as Gobry points out,

“What’s wrong with this picture, America, is that the concept of the state having ‘a monopoly on the [legitimate] use of force’ is a quotation from the highly reputed and important German sociologist Max Weber, and is a concept that is absolutely basic to our modern understanding of the State. Anyone who has taken polisci 101 or sociology 101 or political philosophy 101 or history of ideas 101 ought to have encountered the phrase. It is about as offensive as saying that donuts have holes…”

In other words, journalists – who are supposed to be educated, and who, if they are dealing with the political circuit, should have at least some sort of basic education in political science to go with their typewriting skills – had no clue what Brat was talking about. They didn’t recognize Weber’s (very commonly quoted) dictum; most of them probably don’t even know who Max Weber was. All they saw was what they thought was an opportunity to play the “Tea Party wacko extremist” card because somebody used the words “force” and “government” in the same sentence.

The sad part is that it probably worked with a lot of the low-information voters out there.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Most of the news that people get on a daily basis is both banal and slanted, being filtered through the Cathedral’s information control network. There is very little reporting that actually deals with facts and genuine analysis about the important issues of the day. As an experiment, while I was writing this article, I pulled up Microsoft’s news marquee to see what constituted their rotating headlines. The majority of these stories were, quite frankly, mindless fluff and politically warped garbage: wild-eyed hyperventilation purporting to “uncover the dark truth of ‘white privilege’,” how those flyover states in the Midwest are “boring,” atheists whining about “Christians taking over America,” that black kid in Texas who got suspended because he couldn’t follow simple rules about hairstyles, etc. Even the “real” news stories were written in such a basic, non-explicative way as to be useless to anyone who actually wanted to learn something about the subject of the article. This is the level that journalism is at, and it is the level that said journalism has brought millions of our people down to.

Hermann Hesse’s book, The Glass Bead Game, written in 1931 (but only published in 1943), includes an interesting concept about “the Age of the Feuilleton.” This book is set in a fictional European region called Castalia, roughly 500 years from the present, but existing in a period of technological stasis such that the “feel” of the culture and society is similar to that of the mid-20th century Europe in which Hesse lived. This future and traditional society is exemplified by the eponymous glass bead game, a deep intellectual exercise that operated on the principle of synthesizing all human knowledge and finding parallels between disparate fields of understanding, which was restricted to highly-educated scholars and was treated something like professional sports are today. In contrast to this stable and introspective future, our current age is looked back (and down) upon as “the age of the feuilleton.” The term “feuilleton” refers to inserts that used to be placed in French newspapers and which carried stories about fashion, movies, gossip, celebrities, and other frivolous topics. The term is used by Hesse to describe our current age as one in which rapid change occurs (just look at the fashion world, for example), but in which the intellectual and moral interests were shallow, degraded, and generally pointless. It denoted a society more interested in mindless entertainment than deep consideration. Our current age was looked down upon by many in that future – our shallowness and distraction were the facilitators of so much violence and so many wars and other disturbances.

I can’t think of a better description for American popular culture today. We focus on the “celebrity” of movie and TV stars, professional sports athletes, and demagogic politicians. From 2009-2017 we had a president who epitomizes the “celebrity” mentality, having a huge following for essentially nothing more than making empty promises and being crowned as “cool” by the media. MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central inform more Americans than the great books of Western civilization, and more people learn from nincompoops like Steven Colbert or Trevor Noah than do from Aristotle, Cicero, or Aquinas. And we wonder why the whole tenor of our civilization is one of frivolity, thoughtlessness, and ignorance.

So what do we do about it? Unfortunately, there’s not much that we can do for society at large. People who want to imbibe garbage are going to do so. Ultimately, it comes down to those of us who still care about where Western civilisation (and its constitutent nations) are headed to refuse to participate in it ourselves. Stop going to the movies, watching the TV programs, and everything else that are tearing American intellect and culture down and turning us into mindless zombies. Start reading books, start engaging each other in conversation, let actual face-to-face talking being your primary mode of interaction with other people, instead of texting them on your smartphone. Make learning and study fashionable, if not in society at large, then at least in your own life (i.e. stop caring what the shallowness around you thinks). Learn and come to your own conclusions about things of importance instead of just letting some talking head on the tube tell you what to think. Frankly, I don’t mind if someone disagrees with me, so long as they reasoned their way to their point of disagreement. If their cause for disagreement, on the other hand, amounts to nothing more than, “Hurr durr, Stephen Colbert said so,” then I have no respect for that at all.

I hate to say it, but even many reactionaries and others on the Real Right need to take these steps. I have to say that the most consistent criticism I get for my writings is that they are “too long.” “Nobody will read three pages,” it is said. To this I say, “then they ought to learn to do so.” Back in the day when I was still a normie writing in normie publications, I actually had one website associated with a major conservative print newspaper tell me that they wanted me to write for their op-ed blog, but that I would have to simplify my articles down to around a 9th-grade level. This I refused to do. If we care about restoring our culture and heritage, if we want to revive the traits of “virtue” and “good citizenship” that Gobry wrote about, if we want to have the truly informed electorate upon which a consensual form of government must rest (and let’s be realistic enough to recognise that this is what we’ll have for the foreseeable future, so we might as well try to optimise the results), then we have to resist the spirit of our age with all our might. Sitting down and reading Beowulf or the Iliad may not be as entertaining or fun as vegetating in front of a television for six hours a night, but in the long run, it’ll be a whole lot better for you, for your society, and for the world you and I profess to want to preserve for the next generation.

Patriotism Ain’t What It Used To Be

A couple of days ago I was at my son’s baseball game. They were losing pretty badly (to be fair, they were playing one of those “traveling” teams), so I’ll admit that my mind started to wander after a while. I began observing some of the other families that were there and it struck me that these are exactly the kind of people that The Powers That Be absolutely hate because they ARE America. They are our white working class, our middle Americans, our flyover country residents. They are the heritage of our forefathers who founded this country, who carved it out from raw wilderness and built a technologically advanced civilisation in its place. They are my people and we are the ones to whom this country belongs – not to a disparate aggregation of foreigners and transnational economic mercenaries.

You’ve got the single dad who comes to the games straight from his job at the city water treatment facility because he’d be heartbroken if he missed a single game. There’s the tow truck driver who jokes about hauling off the opposing parents’ cars if they beat our team. You have the retired couple who heckles the umpire with “yo mama” jokes. These folks hunt and fish, they watch football and go to the lake on weekends. They go to church and show up to school board meetings when the gays try to indoctrinate their kids. They’re Americana. Their culture IS American culture, not the made-for-TV hip-hop garbage cranked out by “professional” culture makers.

Now, you may be wondering what my point is? Well, it all boils down to what the real and true definition of patriotism is. There are a lot of different ideas about what constitutes “patriotism” that are floating around out there – most of them wrong. So to rightly understand what patriotism is, we first must understand what it originally meant. “Patriotism” comes from the Latin term patriota, which meant “a fellow countryman.” This, in turn, derived from patris, “fatherland,” and referred to the home of those who share a common descent as an “extended family.” As such, and in the interest of rectifying some names, patriotism therefore involves a love, affection for, and common interest with one’s own people. This “people” should be understood as your ethnos, with whom you share a culture, mores, languages, and common descent.

What we need to understand is that it is natural – and indeed God-intended – for people to love their own people. There is nothing wrong with this. To love one’s own people does not mean that one hates all others – that is merely a false argument used by globalists to justify their arguments for global homogenisation. While the world believes that peace and prosperity come from enforced amalgamation, the continuous testimony of history is that diversity plus proximity equals war.

Above I said that there were a number of wrong ideas about patriotism that find currency today. What are some of these? First, patriotism cannot truly be directed towards an idea. As much as we may like these things, abstract principles like “freedom,” “liberty,” and the like cannot be the objects of patriotism. A constitution cannot even be an object of patriotism rightly so called. Neither can philosophical ideas, be they democratic or monarchic. Patriotism is only rightly directed to the real, tangible patrimony of one’s people.

Likewise, patriotism does not apply to governments. While a government may deserve the support of the people it governs if it acts for their good and protects them, it may just as equally not deserve this support if it does not do these things. There mere accident of one man being born into a family to rule, or of some particular aggregation of individuals being elected to a legislature, does not in and of itself give any of them a right to claim to be objects of patriotism. Merely being in power does not make one a patria.

Patriotism is not even necessarily rightly directed towards some particular geographical area. It is not the land that makes the people, but the people who invest the land with meaning. While longstanding inhabitance may come to connect a people to their land, it is not the land itself that is really important. The spiritual connexion comes through the unity of a people around their common descent and their common culture who then invest that land with a rich history and heritage.

The important thing to understand about the United States of America is that it is not a nation, in the sense of being an united ethnos. Instead, America is a late-stage multiethnic empire. By this, I’m not just referring to all of the various and sundry foreigners that have been imported over the past few decades to form their own ethnic enclaves across the country. Just as much so is the fact that White ethnogenesis has created two White ethnies (or perhaps two closely related groupings of ethnies, depending on how finely one wishes to divide them) which are largely at odds with each other. The one (to which the vast majority reading this probably belong) is more or less the lineal descendants of our pioneering forefathers. The other, numerically smaller but much more politically powerful, essentially rules this country as a cosmopolitan imperial class.

The problem is that this kind of diversity is simply not feasible within a system that purports to be democratic. All you end up doing is creating constellations of political and ethnic pressure groups who support one or the other of the major factions because they think these are their own ticket to advancement. No, if you really want to generate “unity from diversity,” then you have to do it around the person of an Emperor (or something similar), following the model shown by earlier multiethnic empires such as the Roman or Austro-Hungarian, towards which each ethnie’s loyalty may be independently directed. Forcing these groups into direct political competition with each other will only result in exacerbated ethnic loyalties that destroy the overall unity in a polity. Trying to build that kind of unity around an abstract “idea” is going to be a failure. People follow leaders, not abstractions.

Within our American system, Trump has probably come the closest to filling this role, especially given his appeal to Heritage Americans. Conversely, I can’t imagine any of the schlubs in DC drawing that kind of loyalty from anyone who is not part of the intersectionality alliance or on their patronage payroll. This is, of course, why the globalists and America-haters want to get rid of him.

If you want to see patriotism in action at the governmental level, then look for those actions which are done that benefit the people of a nation themselves, not special interests or factions within a political system. One good recent example would be the Polish government’s rather sudden decision to stop throwing more of their money and materiel down the Ukrainian rathole. As you can imagine, the globalists and NAFO types were appalled and, hilariously, one of their arguments was that Poland was “unpatriotic.” What? Towards what was Poland “unpatriotic”? Globohomo? The neoliberal “international consensus”?

Indeed, the Polish government’s decision, late as it was, is a supremely patriotic act because it is finally doing what is good for the Polish people themselves rather than for transnationalist money launderers and arms dealers. It probably didn’t hurt that Ukrainian missiles “accidentally” hit a Polish village and the Ukrainians are stonewalling the investigation. Of course, we can expect Poland to be the next place we see a colour revolution take place. Globohomo has to protect the Poles from their own best interests, after all.

The same arguments apply here at home in the United States, the seat of Regime oligarchic power. We’ve been sending billions to Ukraine and it has been justified by the gung-ho NAFO types as “patriotic.” We’re “PrOtEcTiNg DeMoCrAcY!!1!,” so we’re told. But again, “democracy” is not something you can even be rightly patriotic towards, especially when it’s at the behest of some foreign nation. Even if you actually care about democracy (sham that it is), it’s not “patriotic” to go involving yourself in affairs which don’t concern you (and no, the Russo-Ukrainian War is not our problem). This is especially the case when your doing so is directly and negatively impacting your own people and their own military readiness.

The fact of the matter is that these NAFO types who want to keep sending all our money and weapons to fight their personal proxy war with Russia are supremely unpatriotic. They are willing to sell their own people out to the interests of the globalists. They are impoverishing Americans and getting more Ukrainians killed, all so that transnational oligarchs can keep their money laundering operations in Ukraine in place. If you want to send billions to Ukraine while our own soldiers are on food stamps and otherwise unable to even feed themselves, then you are not a patriotic American. Far from being patriots, these people are globalist worms eating away at the good of every nation, not just our own.

And that’s just it – the NAFOs’ “patriotic impulse” is misplaced, directed toward an abstraction called “the global community” which never can exist in reality. The only real patriotism is that which generates a love for your own people. This means Americans loving the American people, Germans loving the German people, Frenchmen loving the French people, and so forth. True patriotism really serves as a dividing line that separates the patriot from the globalist. Loving your people is what God intended for us to do and this remains the case even when they tell the ump that his mama’s so fat she’s almost as wide as his strike zone.

Restoring the Compact Theory would be Vital to Restoring the Constitution

By now, most regular readers have probably become aware of the fact that I am a monarchist. Because of that, I normally wouldn’t be all that concerned about things like “restoring constitutions” and the like. However, as a neoreactionary who draws an ontological distinction between Mencius Moldbug and Curtis Yarvin, I would also hold to the principle of formalism which Moldbug expressed so long ago. Thus, while I may not think constitutionalism is all that effective and, as a form of democratisation, is prone to being hijacked by bad actors, I also believe that you should operate under the system you have in place until such a time as it can be formally changed via established processes.

Because of this, I would still definitely prefer the American constitutional system as it was originally intended over the sort of progressive, managerial, manipulation of procedural outcomes type of perversion we’ve been seeing since the end of World War II (especially). Indeed, being a “right wing normiecon constitutionalist” was a fairly integral stretch in the evolution of my overall worldview. Also, as I’ve noted previously, while I’d personally like to see any post-collapse American system(s) involve a move toward monarchism, I also realise that our national disposition and our history will make that very unlikely, so trying to roll back the clock to an earlier era in our republican history is a much more realistic goal.

Why the Real Right Should Care about Ethnonationalism

Among neoreactionary circles, as well as other allied groups in the Real Right, it is common to focus on the functionality of power mechanisms as they pertain both to government and to sociopolitical adjuncts such as the media, NGOs, and corporations and other economic entities. Typically this functionality is interpreted largely or solely through the lenses of certain macrohistorical events and trends. Even I tend to fall into this current when I write about cliodynamics, secular cycles, and demographic-structural theory. As such, the focus tends to be institutional and power-political in its approach.

However, we need to understand that history does not exist in a vacuum. If we neglect to consider the characteristics of the “human material” involved in these historical events and trends, then we will miss much of the explanatory power that can be applied to these phenomena. Certainly, there is room for an element of Carlyle’s “Great Man” theory. But even further, we should understand that there must be an understanding and acceptance of the reality of the differences between different people groups, both genetically (i.e. human biodiversity) and culturally and that these differences will have significant, disparate impacts on macrosocial behaviours and civilisational success.

Gods or Garbage – A Literature Review of The Charismatic Charlie Wade

Most of you have probably never heard of the online book called The Charismatic Charlie Wade, by the pseudonymous Chinese writer “Lord Leaf.” To be honest, before a couple of weeks ago, neither had I. Initially, I found the first few chapters of this work on Facebook (I know, I know…) where it seemed like it would be one of those uplifting short stories that make the rounds. However, after I followed up with it and found the whole thing online, it hit me that this was going to be quite a bit more involved. While this kind of fiction isn’t really my bag, after getting a bit into it, I decided that it might be a good subject for a book review.

I want to be up front about this review being done on something only partially read. That’s because this online work is looooooong. I mean, I am currently on chapter 613 out of (at the time of this writing) 5,469 total chapters and counting. Granted, most of the chapters are only a few paragraphs long. But still, “Lord Leaf” started TCCW in 2020 and is still adding to it to this day.

Class Solidarity versus National Solidarity

One of the many things that characterises modern society is its social atomisation. In some way or another, nearly everyone recognises this problem, even if they don’t really know what to do about it. Many folks do have ideas – some good, some not so much – about how to reverse this state of affairs. The problem, however, is that many of these people don’t understand where the atomisation, the destruction of social cohesion, comes from and hence don’t know what is really needed to restore it.

Long-time readers are probably expecting me to reference demographic-structural theory (DST) as propounded by Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone, so I certainly don’t want to disappoint anyone. Indeed, DST explains quite a lot about our loss of social cohesion when it posits that as prosperity and centralisation bring a greater share of the population into the social elite, increasing intraelite competition will then produce social pressures that lead to factional strife. In our modern world, this strife manifests itself primarily as mass political party and economic rivalry, as opposed to the almost purely elite mobilisation that used to define premodern intraelite competition.

Thick and Juicy

I hope this will give you all a little light and enjoyable reading as I once again try my hand at writing a short sci-fi story. Previous attempts here, here, and here.

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The two deep space vessels sat silently in the airless void of space, facing each other discreetly. Neither ship moved as their respective crews sized each other up across the range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the 50,000 kilometers that separated them doing nothing to hide their secrets. First contact was always a little boring, at least in the initial stages, and Captain Lactantius MacReady of the Galactic Confederation of Sentients was treating this instance no differently. He yawned and studied his fingernails.

In truth, while there were always unknown factors in play, in nearly all cases first contacts such as the present one presented little actual danger for vessels of the Confederation. After a few centuries, humanity had the process of meeting new aliens down to a science. For see, the question which the ancients of Earth had always asked themselves – “Are we alone in the galaxy?” – had been answered robustly not long after man had left the cradle of his home star system. Indeed, the galaxy was positively brimming with intelligent alien life. Everywhere they turned, humanity was stumbling upon new sentient species, usually as those beings themselves were just venturing into space. Twice or thrice every year, some far flung deep space sensor array would detect the telltale signature of a primitive FTL drive in some uncharted star system on the edge of Confederation space. A scouting vessel would be dispatched shortly after and yet another race of starry-eyed primitives would be introduced to the wider galaxy, for good or for ill. Captain MacReady had already overseen seven such contacts just during his tenure as commander of the GCSS Darby O’Gill. Today’s events would make the eighth notch on his commbelt.

The Normalisation of Liminality

Many of you have probably heard of “liminal spaces” in recent internet discourse. Much of it revolves around meme topics such as “The Backrooms” and other so-called liminal spaces which are reached by “clipping out of reality” or similar means. Sadly, these memes are not really very accurate as far as describing liminality as it has been traditionally understood. Indeed, traditional societies have had a deep understanding of the liminal that is worth exploring and examining so as to draw some conclusions about what we see taking place in our own “modern” world.

So what is liminality, liminal space, the liminal anywise? The word itself derives from the Latin limen, meaning “a threshold.” In essence, a liminal place (and this can include metaphorical or conceptual interpretations) is that which exists between two discrete regions, modes of existence, ways of being, and so forth. Anthropologically, liminality was first explored by Arnold van Gennep, who explored the concept of the “rite of passage” as it exists in many traditional “primitive” societies in his 1909 work Rites de Passage. After a decades-long period of abeyance, this area of study was picked up and continued by the anthropologist Victor Turner in the 1960s. In van Gennep’s assessment, so-called primitive rites of passage involved three stages:

Democracy as Regime Enforcement Mechanism

If you listen to Regime apologists, you would believe that democracy is both the single most important factor in all of existence as well as facing constant, existential threats from the forces of global evil. However, the astute observer can see that when the Regime talks about “democracy,” it does not at all mean the same thing that the average person understands by that term. Far from being some neutral political decision-making process that allows the body of the citizenry to participate in governance, democracy essentially is a sham, a way to apply a veneer of popular legitimacy to predetermined policies desired by Regime oligarchs. And if the occasion arises where the people get too uppity and start moving in directions the oligarchs don’t want, democratic results can always be…adjusted…to give the right answers. All in all, when the Regime talks about “democracy,” what it means is Regime-approved policies and personnel being implemented, and it’s been this way for decades.

We can see this to be the case with a story that was in the news fairly recently, which was the crackdown on violent criminal gangs by Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele. In a very short period of time, over 40,000 gang members were rounded up and incarcerated and, unsurprisingly, El Salvador’s rates of murder and other violent crimes plummeted. Village life became safe again once the fear of raids and shakedowns by these gangs went away. Salvadorean expatriates even spoke of returning to their country now that it’s safe. So this is a good thing, right?