Owen Benjamin, the exiled comedian turned homesteader, illustrates what happens when a man refuses the “Devil’s bargain” of institutional approval and accepts exile in exchange for authenticity. This essay examines what his story reveals about the principle of yajna, that every true work, every expression of the Self, requires something to be given up. In an age when most trade integrity for access, Benjamin’s descent from fame into relative obscurity becomes a parable of individuation: the necessary crucifixion of the ego for the sake of wholeness.
Welcome back. As a follow up to my two previous posts on how mainstream influencers are controlled (here and here), I wanted to write something about someone who I like: Owen Benjamin. Few public figures today have willingly sacrificed worldly success for psychic wholeness and this guy, for all his flaws, did.
As background, Benjamin is a giant 6’8” pretty handsome fellow who was a mainstream and successful comedian – he had a book deal, a development deal, and was repped by CAA – and who was cancelled from everything in 2017-2019 after he went off the reservation in terms of discussing forbidden topics (race, Jews, Hollywood pedophelia, the child trans agenda, etc). His public opposition to a powerful, connected figure transing his five year old son was apparently the final straw that got him cancelled, discussed by him here. Benjamin was talented – quick on his feet, presentable, great with music, funny – and he could have easily maintained and grew his mainstream success if he had played ball, but he refused. Some of his comedy specials are online for free to watch here, and his 2018 special Huge Pianist was pretty good. He moved to Idaho where he’s married and raising a bunch of kids (4?) while working on his farm, doing free daily comedy streams for his bread, posting on Twitter, and doing event organization with his followers (including a yearly festival at a campground in the Ozarks, which looks great), who he calls “bears”.
First, let’s get what I don’t like about him out of the way before discussing his positive traits. I think Benjamin either intentionally or more likely unintentionally causes a substantial amount of drama with many of those who he interacts with, which he then disclaims wide-eyed as not being his fault (to the point there is a Reddit haters group focused specifically on him1); I think he is prone to schizophrenic spirals, that a lot of his hot takes are wrong (such as his recent take on Erika Kirk, who I find to be, at minimum, acting in poor taste, although his bit on FBI scriptwriting incompetence around the Kirk assassination was strong2), his understanding of male/female dynamics is wildly skewed3, his understanding of elite/mass dynamics isn’t quite right4, there is a bit of a stylistic clash5, he regularly has Vox Day on his show who I think is smugly arrogant and poorly informed, and he deep-dives into stuff like flat earth which I’m not really onboard with. Not that I’m against it, per se; I haven’t looked into it, it isn’t a topic that interests me, but I do not have faith in our institutional experts – and once you lose faith in institutional credibility, unless you have the proper scientific, mathematical, engineering or other background to investigate a topic yourself it’s best to keep an open mind about things, to acknowledge our limitations (see other conspiracy theories like 9/11, dinosaurs being fake, nuclear weapons being fake, etc). Because if you haven’t investigated a topic yourself while possessing the specific knowledge set that lets you competently do so, then you’re always going to be putting your faith in someone or something about it. The most interesting thing about flat earth to me is how enraged the topic makes the spherecucks, suggesting it hits on certain unacknowledged aspects of their personal and collective unconscious. If Flat Earthers were simply wrong then one could ignore them as clown figures and not be emotionally triggered by them.
What I like about Benjamin, primarily, is the clear sacrifice he made to be where he is at: he sacrificed his career for authenticity, to be able to speak his mind in whatever way he wants on his stream. He can say anything about anything, from any angle, no matter how offensive – this is really clear if you watch his stream, that he’s speaking from the heart. As he said in a recent stream (at 1:55:20), “I do [my work] because it’s my gift and if I don’t I feel darkness. Like you gotta do what you are. What you’ve been given [in terms of talents] is your role.” Sure, he rambles and causes drama and his views often are strange, but the authenticity comes through heavily, especially in contrast to others, and some of his ideas are indeed unique (for example, I appreciated his recent criticisms of Jungian therapists, discussed here). Authenticity is a fundamental and non-negotiable prerequisite for the re-sacrilization of language (which I discussed here) necessary to re-enchant the world, and freedom of speech is required for such authenticity; inauthentic language can never be holy.6 Benjamin’s raw, unflattened speech and the subsequent public scorn serve as confirmation that his language, while flawed, still retains the “charge” that is missing from the procedural, soul-dead language of the mainstream.
Because of this, while YouTube is allowing some prior banned “right wing” content creators back on its platform (including Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes), Benjamin is not one of them – he tried to rejoin and was very quickly banned despite keeping content innocuous; this mirrors how he remains persona non grata to most of his well known former “friends” in the comedy scene. This near-immediate ban happened because he does not buy into the right/left dialectic, he sees through much of the elite narrative creation and dissemination, and he is not controlled (although he does have an understandable element of lingering envy and perhaps bitterness towards those of his peers who accepted the Devil’s bargain for continued mainstream success and easy wealth, such as Shane Gillis shilling Bud Light and Bill Burr, and those more famous comedians like Dave Chapelle who he believes stole his work). Because here’s the thing: there is a sacrifice involved in every action, no matter how small or how big. What matters is what is sacrificed and in furtherance of what objective.
Here, now, you are sacrificing a small amount of your time and psychic energy in order to read this; hopefully you gain some small element of information, perspective or wisdom in return, but perhaps the additional cost is some element of estrangement from regular society, or some additional cognitive dissonance. Or let’s say you’re faced with with a big life decision, and you sit there paralyzed; then it will be decided for you with whatever consequences it brings. Or you do nothing on your individuation journey and you pay for it when you’re older with bitterness and regret – as the Bhagavad Gita states (3.4-6), it is absurd to think we have a choice not to act. There is literally no action you can take or not take in life that does not come with a sacrifice associated with it, whatever it is. It would be better if more people thought in these terms because it would make one more mindful of one’s decisions. One of the most important principles of mysticism is the principle of yajna or spiritual sacrifice: in order to reach the highest fulfillment, the human being returns vital energy to the process rather than clinging to it; it is the sacrifice that consecrates, that makes the object holy. Even though I try to think in these terms, it is not fully solidified and I do not default to this frame because society’s influence is so great – I have to force myself to think in this way.
Reading and writing on Substack contains substantial costs for me, too – I have less time to spend with friends and family, I feel utterly disconnected from broader society, my views (gnostic, philosophically pessimistic and blackpilled, individuation focused) cannot monetize into larger social networks even if I wanted to – the only support I’ve received from much bigger players was being linked to twice by Darren Beattie on Revolver News before he came to understand I wasn’t ideologically aligned with him – and the individuation process is walking a tightrope over an abyss where I am constantly fearful both of collapse or of an institutional crackdown, etc. It is a hard way to live, but I feel compelled to do so by the Self – the alternative, a life of psychic “normalcy”, would be akin to death to me.
Comparing Benjamin to others
Let’s compare a cancelled figure like Benjamin to some “mainstream” right-leaning figures like Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, both of whom I dislike. Why do I dislike them? Well, Owens is an easy one – I just think she’s a grifter and she blends truth and falsehood together into a toxic clown stew, much as Alex Jones did before he was compromised into full irrelevance. One cannot retain institutional legitimacy and be allowed on mainstream platforms without being a yes man (or woman) to higher masters, it isn’t possible.7 And she hasn’t paid a price for her views anyway. With Fuentes, other than the stuff about him being a federal asset (which I think is true – he told his followers to storm the capital on 1/6 and they were prosecuted and he wasn’t), he has regularly displayed contempt for his fatherless, young male audience who he tries to groom into incels, gay or trans ( has a lengthy takedown of him here). So I think he is disingenuous and ill-intended; Benjamin routinely mocks him, also here and here.8 Furthermore, it is true that Fuentes has sacrificed something – he had lost some aspects of his mainstream access previously, he was potentially debanked (although I read the funds taken were given back to him), he had been suspended on Youtube and other channels (although he’s being highlighted there now, including on Tucker Carlson’s channel), an assassin even tried to kill him – but the question isn’t if someone sacrifices – because every action we take requires sacrifice – but what is sacrificed and for what purpose. Fuentes, to me, has suffered ostracism not in furtherance of a deeper spiritual journey or freedom like Benjamin has, but to build a personality cult on the fringes of the internet – although even that, too, he appears to be betraying for greater mainstream access (as he is doing around the Kirk assassination by directing attention away from Israel). I will note that he is only 27 years old, young for someone who has become as infamous as he is, he is a mesmerizing public speaker a bit like Celine9, and he does have decent points from time to time.10
Ultimately, whether one or more of these influencers resonate with you comes down to a gut check, intuition and discernment – no one in the mainstream passes my gut check, though. I had hope at various points for mainstream figures like Mike Benz, Stephen Miller, and Darren Beattie, but these guys disappointed me over time as they traded personal integrity for political access and culture war slop. I never followed Charlie Kirk but, after researching him, he seemed to me to be a grifter who was having an authentic change of heart behind the scenes (which is perhaps why he was assassinated); he hired Blake Neff after he was unceremoniously fired by Fox (with Tucker Carlson’s acceptance) for being “racist” which showed that he had some real courage – hiring Neff after his fall was not something anyone in the establishment would have done. Andrew Anglin, despite having some seriously misguided views on stuff like Putin/Russia, a misunderstanding of the structure of the world, along with his mental health issues and drinking problems, is another figure that I think ultimately is pursuing some kind of path toward truth. And other public figures I admire include Charles August Lindbergh, Gareth Jones, Julian Assange (kind of), and Ian Smith. Doing the right thing always requires sacrifice and almost never results in payoff in this world; one does the right thing and fades into obscurity or derision from the public, who simply want to be entertained into oblivion with no personal responsibility.
As Gustave Le Bon stated, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” And the great movie The Lives of Others, previously discussed here, makes the same point. It should be emphasized that the principle that one cannot be mainstream and at the same time authentic, whether or not true (and I think it is) implicitly creates a reverse-status hierarchy where the degree of social ostracization becomes a proxy for spiritual truth, potentially romanticizing paranoia and anti-social behavior, which contains its own dangers. As Ernst Junger stated when he was 100 years old, “The sociological definition of elite is already an indication of the corruption of the concept. A warning, for me, to no longer trust even the elites, but now only the great loners.”
Going back to Benjamin, another thing I appreciate about him is what I perceive as his life goal of wholeness. Most people are not pursuing this as their fundamental motivation; they are chasing fame, or status, or women, or money, or adventure. Jung, too, had wholeness as his fundamental objective. I perceive this about Benjamin because of the way he has structured his life: his marriage, his children, his home, his animals, his friendships and his work and his freedom of expression and his campground – he is trying, and I think (from what I see from the outside) successfully, to create a balanced and full life, although building parallel institutions is an ever-present struggle.11 Wholeness is what I want for myself as well, as I wrote previously. These ties to daily living serve as grounding tethers to objective reality, much as Jung had his wife, children, clinical practice, speeches, and leadership roles; it forces one to be accountable to practical results (farming, family, financial streams) which cannot be excused by pure ideology. The value of this is in forming a high-fidelity model of the world, which is ultimately tested by the individual’s ability to navigate the future successfully.12 And you can easily compare Benjamin’s life to some of the others discussed: Fuentes is a homosexual incel with an extremely imbalanced lifestyle (see the Brunet link above), while Owens was basically a mail-order bride to a British oligarch (i.e. an 18-day long distance courtship).
Benjamin reminds me a bit of the story of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Diocletian had retired to his farm after putting into place a governance system, but it all fell apart and people came to him begging for him to become emperor again. His alleged response is illuminating: “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.” Diocletian, too sacrificed; he sacrificed his power for peace and contentment. What’s interesting is that the Renaissance masters never painted this amazing scene despite how powerful and archetypal it is, so I had ChatGPT generate one. I think it turned out pretty well after some tweaks despite too much of a brown tone:
I may try to paint this myself down the road with a different color scheme.
Or look at Diogenes of Sinope, who I covered previously; he sacrificed all earthly belongings in order to make fun of everyone – which Alexander the Great recognized as an amazing sacrifice, to the point where he allegedly stated that if he were not Alexander he would want to be Diogenes.
Benjamin embodies, however imperfectly, the withdrawn king archetype (Diocletian) or holy fool archetype (Diogenes). The historical analogies are inexact, of course, and they overstate Benjamin’s intentionality. While he has adapted admirably, the initial “sacrifice” was not entirely voluntary, which weakens the archetypal parallel. Diocletian’s choice was a deliberate exit from power; Benjamin’s feels more like a forced exile after cancellation.13 Similarly, Diogenes’ radical asceticism is more extreme than Benjamin’s homesteading, which still involves public engagement. These are merely meant as rough analogies demonstrating the price to be paid for peace of mind or freedom of speech.
I hope that this essay may inspire in you some thought about what you sacrifice in your life, for what purpose, and for those who you read, listen to, watch or follow, what they have sacrificed in furtherance of their own lives.
Thanks for reading.
Subscribe:
Email delivery remains on Substack for now.
1 It appears that the website which had Ghislaine Maxwell as one of its top moderators and the recipient of the 8th largest amount of Reddit gold in site history does not allow a positive Benjamin subreddit.
2 The latest pointing to Israel as the culprit is Kash Patel preventing investigation into foreign influence in the assassination per Daily Mail. Alleged Tyler Robinson lover and roommate “Lance Twiggs” disappearing is also suspicious.
3 Again, he is a handsome tall quasi-famous giant where women threw themselves at him, and he simply does not understand a non-Chad mindset of female scarcity as opposed to abundance – where scarcity is the lived reality for the vast majority of men.
4 Benjamin believes that the upper elites cannot force people to do things, that it requires buy-in by individuals. However, there is no buy-in to the poisoned, flouridated water supply or the ongoing chemtrail spraying, there is no way around the endlessly inflating and bloodsucking monetary system for the vast majority of people, there is no buy-in for those peoples and nations subject to destruction by the upper elites, etc. Yes, the elites generally prefer a Fabian approach with symbol manipulation and public participation but this is because, at least in part, soft power is easier to exercise than hard power; but they can and will exercise hard power when they want to, whether or not you intentionally accept their schemes or not.
5 This is not meant as a knock, but he is an extraverted audio/visual learner and I am an introvert who prefers to learn via reading, which makes for a bit of a stylistic clash – I try to do as little audio/visual learning as I can, although I make an exception for Benjamin and for stuff like physiognomy analysis.
6 To speak authentically is to allow the symbolic forces of the unconscious to manifest in the world. This requires freedom from internal censorship (self-editing based on fear of mainstream reprisal). The existence of figures like Owen Benjamin proves that the system exacts a cost (loss of career, public scorn) for this internal freedom. The demand for “freedom of speech” is a demand for the system to stop imposing this cost, thereby making the act of speaking authentic language possible in the public sphere; this will, of course, not happen.
7 See this post discussing how compromised mainstream figures in the West were highlighted during the Cold War.
8 Benjamin believes that Fuentes is a clown figure who is being strategically used by elites to smear the far right movement in general to normies; he likens it to how the morally correct anti-war movement during Vietnam was smeared by hippy drug musicians, many of whom were astroturfed and were children of the military-industrial complex like Jim Morrison, whose father commanded the U.S. forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. One could point to a similar strategy with Richard Spencer, an FBI clown figure asset who was used to smear the alt-right, or neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, who is on the record stating that he intentionally leaned into a clown image in order to gain media attention. This explains, for example, why Fuentes says, smirking, that he is an “admirer” of Joseph Stalin.
9 Ernst Junger’s World War 2 diaries, Paris, 7 December 1941 entry:
At the German Institute this afternoon. Among those there was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Tall, raw-boned, strong, a bit ungainly, but lively during the discussion – or more accurately, during his monologue. He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. He no longer looks to the right or the left. He seems to be marching toward some unknown goal. “I always have death besides me.” And in saying this, he points to the spot beside his seat, as though a puppy were lying there.
He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews – astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. “If the Bolsheviks were in Paris they would demonstrate it, show how it’s done – how to comb through a population, quarter by quarter, house by house. If I had a bayonet, I would know what to do.”
It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism. People like this hear only a single melody, but they hear it uncommonly powerfully. They resemble machines of iron that follow a single path until they are finally dismantled.
It is remarkable when such minds speak about the sciences, such as biology. They apply them the way Stone Age man did, transforming them only into a means to slay others.
They take no pleasure in having an idea. They have had many – their yearning drives them toward fortresses from which cannons fire upon the masses and spread fear. Once they have achieved this goal, they interrupt their intellectual work, regardless of what arguments have helped them climb to the top. Then they give themselves over to the pleasure of killing. It was this drive to commit mass murder that propelled them forward in such a meaningless and confused way in the first place.
People with such natures could be recognized earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas. These are quite arbitrary, as seen in the fact that when certain goals are achieved, they are discarded like rags.
10 It will be interesting to see what happens to him; he is very eloquent and a great public speaker, but also quite short (5’5”?) which may limit his future in politics. As I have described elsewhere, I believe that increasing anti-semitism levels – while genuine and a result of decreasing material prosperity and neoliberal feudalism, along with the Gaza ethnic cleanse and how in-your-face Jewish power is today – will be used dialectically ultimately to force an ingathering of the Jewish diaspora to Israel in accordance with Old Testament eschatological dictates before destroying Western economies and leaving them smoldering ruins. Perhaps Fuentes will be used as a tool in this unfolding.
11 This is because the internet is heavily centralized and people have been herded like cattle into the top sites; without being highlighted by institutional power, or without the draw of the possibility of future political power, it feels like a Sisyphian struggle against entropic decay to carve out alternative spaces.
12 The importance of tethering one’s views to objective reality is also why I stress the value of making recursive predictions, discussed here.
13 Yet at the same time the exile was a result of sticking to principles, which elevates the withdraw whether or not forced. Compare to someone like Tucker Max, for example, who also withdrew from urban living for a farm, marriage, and four children; his withdraw lacks the career sacrifice for values that elevates the Benjamin story, although I’m sure Tucker Max’s withdrawal carried its own set of costs.